Bright City Deep Shadows

by Graham Storrs

  I meandered through various ways they might exploit cryptocurrencies – embedding bitcoin mining apps with their games, for example, so that all their customers were haplessly generating money for them every time they played – but I didn’t know enough about how it all worked and I quickly ran out of ideas. Besides, it would only take a single customer to notice and the whole scam would be exposed. But if it wasn’t money laundering and it wasn’t cryptocurrencies, what on earth could it be? Skimming credit cards? Identity theft?

  I was like an engine running on fumes. I needed to go back to the evidence. That was what got Chelsea killed and it was what would expose her killer. Anning’s company was doing something odd with its database. Something to do with online gambling. So how did a crook make money through gambling?

  I sat bolt upright. The answer was so obvious! You fix the match. You put all your money on an outsider at good odds, and then you make sure they win. And the only sporting fixture that Anning had total control over was the Fifth Annual East Coast Gamefest. And the big game there was going to be the Silent Empire World eSports Final. That’s the game they planned to rig. I had no idea how, but that was it for sure.

  I bounced off the bed and ran to the hallway. I grabbed the handle of the door to Ronnie’s room. I had to tell him. It was a new lead, maybe the big breakthrough we needed.

  On the other hand… What the hell was I doing? Did I want to start it all up again? I had my trip planned. I was getting out, lying low, getting clear of this nightmare. Anning was dead. Justice had been served. Bikie gangs and organised crime were the cops’ problem, not mine.

  I hesitated, hand still on the knob. Ronnie wouldn’t stop. He was the bloody Terminator. He’d go on working the case till he put Mr. Big away, or – much more likely – ended up dead. If I didn’t tell him about what I’d just worked out, he might not make the connection himself. He might miss the vital clues or whatever and it would all be my fault. I should tell him. It wasn’t fair not to.

  But right now? At three in the morning? Well, I was wide awake and I couldn’t see myself going to sleep again that night. So I’d probably take advantage of that and get an early start. If I didn’t tell Ronnie now, when was I going to do it?

  I turned the handle and pushed open the door. His room was at the front of the house and, in the light from the street lamps outside, I could see him lying peacefully asleep. I felt a sudden affection for the old bastard. Sure, he was bad tempered, rude, obsessive and not a little bit morally suspect but, in his strange, aggressive way, he had actually been very good to me. Even so, I wasn’t going to hang around to be part of his pointless suicide mission.

  “Ronnie?” I said, softly. “Shit!”

  He moved incredibly fast. One moment he was the picture of quiet repose, the next, he had swung round into a half sitting position, both arms straight out in front of him and a big, scary handgun in both hands pointing straight at me. I sort of screamed and tried to hide behind my arms and legs.

  “You fucking dill!” Ronnie bellowed. He threw the gun down on the bed and clutched his ribs. “Fuck!”

  I straightened up, slowly, making sure the danger was over. “I just wanted—”

  “I nearly shot you, you boofhead. And I’ve fucking pulled a muscle. Damn! I hate getting old. What’s the bloody idea, sneaking around in the night?”

  “I was just going to—”

  “Shee -it!” This as he swung his feet out of the bed and sat up, still clutching his side. “I should fucking shoot you just so you never have the chance to breed.” He put on his hideous tartan slippers and walked past me, apparently not caring whether he bulldozed me into the wall or not. “Well?”

  I followed him down the hall to the kitchen.

  My shock and embarrassment were starting to wear off and I found myself cataloguing a few interesting facts. One, Ronnie slept like a cat. Two, he slept with a bloody great big gun in bed with him. Three, in the face of imminent death, my reaction was to turn into a squealing, cringing wuss. All of which were very unsettling.

  I watched Ronnie from the doorway as he made two cups of coffee and carried them to the table. He sat down heavily, wincing as he did so.

  “Well?” he asked, not looking at me. “What was so bloody important it was worth getting shot for?”

  I walked over to the table and sat down. There seemed to be no point sulking about my harsh usage at his hands. And, in hindsight, maybe I had been a bit of a dill.

  “I worked out the scam Anning was running.” Ronnie didn’t react, just watched me as he sipped his coffee. “It’s the big e-sports thing at Gamefest. He’d planned to fix the match.”

  Ronnie nodded. “Go on.”

  I was confused. “Er… That’s it. That’s how they were going to make their money.”

  Ronnie shook his head, sadly. “Congratulations, you cracked the case. Where would I be without you?”

  “What? What do you mean? You already knew?”

  “Of course I already knew. And I know two other things as well. One is that the Gamefest starts in ten days’ time.”

  How did he…? But he could have just looked it up online. I felt acutely embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to do that. Then I remembered the big, floor-to-ceiling posters in the Brisvegas Games Factory, they would have had the dates all over them but it just hadn’t sunk in at the time. And that made me feel even more embarrassed.

  “The other is that Debra Heinzer is in on it.”

  “What?” How could he possibly know that? And why would he even think it? If there was anyone we’d met lately who didn’t look the part of a crook engaged in a major fraud, it was Debra Heinzer. She was practically the epitome of the innocent bystander. “How…? Why?”

  He squinted at me, as if looking for signs of intelligent life. “Because the racket they were all engaged in starts in ten days’ time. Don’t you remember the reason you gave for why Mr. Big wouldn’t try to recruit Debra for the sting?”

  “I – I said it would be too risky.”

  “And it would have been if they’d had all the time in the world to set up something else. But they don’t. The scam is already in progress. They’ve probably already laid their bets, told other dangerous people to lay bets, invested too much money in it to be able to back out, put their reputation on the line with the kind of people who wouldn’t forgive or forget if it all went wrong.”

  “So they had to recruit Debra. But...”

  “But she’d be too scared? Too honest?” He shrugged. “Maybe she’s got relatives they can get to. A mother. A child… Maybe she’s got her own money troubles. Maybe they’ve got some leverage on her. She’s a closet dominatrix. She turned tricks to get through uni. Could be anything. Maybe they just threatened to kill her and move on to the next in line. You know how gangsters work. They make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

  My stomach turned. Maybe I should call my own parents, check that they were OK.

  “So, when we talked to her...” I was slowly catching up.

  “She’d already had a visit from Kurt Opperman.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Big. That’s his name. I made some calls. He’s a very nasty piece of work. Suspected of involvement in three murders. He’s done time for aggravated assault and assault with a deadly weapon. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Do not find yourself alone in an alley with this bloke.”

  It all seemed so much more real now that our mystery villain had a name, was an actual person who hurt people, had visited someone I’d met and scared her into helping him. That this monster was the man who ordered the deaths of Chelsea and Anning was suddenly horrifying. This was the man I’d been chasing. This was the man I had been trying to confront. And what if I’d found him? What could someone like me have done? A big tough guy like Reid might have been capable of bringing a man like that to justice. And Reid had the full authority of the cops behind him. People like Kurt Opperman were the reason we had cops – to counterbalance his unfathom
able willingness to hurt people with their own unfathomable willingness to oppose him.

  I had a quick flash of memory – Alexandra Bertolissio when she visited me in my unit, small, pretty, petite… It was confusing and uncomfortable to think she too was on the front line in this subterranean war of monstrous forces.

  “Why didn’t Debra just go to the cops?” I asked, weakly. But I knew the answer. No, I had a better question. “Why did she set the cops on us? We were offering to help.”

  “We were offering to set her up as a Judas goat to get a confession out of Opperman.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. It’s no wonder she was so scared.”

  “I think, after our visit, she called Opperman – probably to tell him she couldn’t be part of it any more, that people were starting to work it out. He would have told her what to do. He probably gave her the name of a high-ranking cop she could drop to get DI Reid all hot and bothered.”

  I tried to think, to follow through the implications, but my stomach was in a knot and my thoughts were all over the place. “So that’s why you said we could expect Opperman’s people to attack soon. Once he heard we were still on his tail, he would have been furious, right? He’d have issued orders. Oh shit.” I could feel panic rising up to choke me. “I should go now. Right now. You should go too. We should get out of here. Come on.” I stood up, ready to go. Ronnie didn’t move. He just sat there like a rock, like a heavy anchor I was tethered to.

  “Come on,” I said, raising my voice. “They’re coming for us.” It was infuriating that I couldn’t just turn away and go.

  “You’ve got it all arse about face, mate,” he said, quite calmly. “They’re not coming for us. We’re coming for them.”

  I don’t know why I stayed to argue with him. “You’re going bloody senile, mate. There’s, what, fifty of them? A hundred? All armed bloody psychopaths. And we’ve got what? Me? An old man with a gun and his memories of his glory days in the Navy Seals?”

  “It was the SBS.”

  “Yeah, well, to me, all the SBS means is a TV channel that shows foreign films and the news in Chinese. What the hell have we got to go up against that lot with? Nothing. That’s what.”

  “We’ve got what we know. We’ve got Debra. And we’ve got the police.”

  “You’re joking, right? We know bugger all. It’s some kind of gambling scam at Gamefest. It’s being done with Brisvegas Game Factory software. Debra Heinzer knows about it. Kurt Opperman is organising it. Archerfield is probably in the mix somehow.” Now that I said it out loud, maybe we did know quite a lot. We certainly knew all the major players, even some of the mechanics of how it would be done. We knew it was all being run out of the Brisvegas offices and we knew exactly when it would all be going down. “All right, maybe we do know some stuff but Debra’s not going to help us and neither are the cops.”

  “We’ll see,” he said and something about the look he gave me made me stop panicking for a moment.

  “You’ve got some kind of half-arsed plan, haven’t you?”

  “Maybe. Why do you care?”

  I ignored his jab. “You’ve been talking to...” Not Debra. Not Reid. “...Bertolissio. You’ve cooked up something between you. What? Why would a cop risk her job to help you? And why do you think Debra’s going to risk whatever she’s got on the line?”

  He stood up, his pale eyes fixed on mine. “Yeah, dumb, hey? Why would all of us do something so stupid, when the only person who has a real motive to put Opperman behind bars is running away like a scared chook.”

  I was getting angry. “Don’t you try to guilt trip me. All I care about is Chelsea and we got the bloke who killed her. That is, Opperman got him and saved us the trouble.”

  He took a step towards me. “Just be bloody honest with yourself for once. You know as well as I do that the man who really killed Chelsea is Kurt Opperman and the only reason you’re not going after him is because you’re scared shitless.”

  “Of course I’m scared shitless. Anybody in their right mind would be. If you’re so keen on honesty, maybe you could try explaining what the hell you think you’re doing chasing these crooks around Brisbane. None of these people are anything to you. I’m nothing to you. Yet there you are putting your life on the line. Why? You’ve got a nice home. You’ve got your dog club. You’ve got your mates, your beers on the verandah. There are plenty of people who’d give their right arm for what you’ve got here. Why would you throw that away to take down some evil scumbag whose name you didn’t even know yesterday?”

  He looked like he was ready to knock my teeth out but I saw a tiny waver in his eyes, a minute hint that he was actually thinking about my question. So I stood my ground and waited. I waited so long it became awkward. Eventually, he turned away.

  “Go on then, bugger off,” he said with his back to me.

  I should have, I suppose. Right then. I should have grabbed my bag and hit the road. But I didn’t. For some crazy reason, I didn’t want to leave it like that. And there was something in his tone, when he told me to go. Somewhere beneath the belligerence, he sounded hurt.

  Hesitantly, I said, “I appreciate that you’ve been helping me. I really do. Mate, I’d probably be in jail now on some bullshit charge and Anning would be dead but I’d never know who he was or what he’d done. But, shit, don’t you think that’s enough? What’s the point of going on? I know you and Bertolissio have got some kind of co-operation going but, for Christ’s sake, you’re going to get killed, your house is going to get burned down and she’s going to get sacked. And, if you drag Debra into it, she’s going to suffer too. Just tell me what the point is.”

  He kept his back to me. In a low angry voice, he said, “So we just give up? It’s all too hard so we just let bastards like Opperman get away with murder?” He turned to face me, angry but controlled. “Do you know what life is? You’re the fucking philosopher. Do you know what life is worth? Is it so cheap that anyone who feels like it can just fuck up someone’s life, or, if it becomes convenient, take it away?”

  He seemed to be waiting for an answer so I started talking about ideas I’d read about why we think life has intrinsic value, why we each might consider our own lives the most valuable, why the only true value you can place on a life is the value the living creature gives to its own life, and so on. He cut me off with, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t say another fucking word!”

  “I – I thought you wanted—”

  “I wanted to know if you, personally, had any comprehension at all of what the issues are here. I think I got my answer loud and clear. I don’t need to listen to any more of that drivel to know you’ve never really asked yourself the question at all. And you know why? Because you’ve never had to look into the eyes of someone you’re about to kill and ask whether there could be a good enough reason in the whole fucking universe to do what you’re about to do.”

  He turned away again, abruptly, leaving me staring in shock at his broad shoulders. It was like he’d pulled the curtain away for the briefest moment and given me a glimpse into the awful depths of his soul. Compared to what he’d just shown me, everything I’d said was, indeed, complete drivel, abstract word-play, a house of sticks and straw, built by a child, blown away by the first winds of raw emotion and terrible experience.

  “I’m sorry,” I began.

  But he snapped back, “Are you still here?”

  I had no answer. I found I had nothing to say. I’d prodded him to tell me. I’d pushed. And, when he gave me just the slightest clue as to what his motives were, I was overcome with embarrassment and shame. I left him without another word and went back to my room. I sat on the edge of the bed with the light off, staring at the floor. The first grey light of dawn was already giving the room some form and, as my eyes adjusted, I could see the tufts of the carpet and a small, black spider moving against the skirting board in short, anxious spurts.

  Chelsea would never let me throw spiders out of the house. They were “spider friends” to he
r – just little creatures she shared her life with, fellow travellers on our incredible journey. She should have been a Buddhist. She knew the value of life, not because she’d calculated it like an insurance company, not because she’d stared down the barrel of a gun at a pleading victim, but by simple empathy. By fellow feeling. By love, you might say.

  I found myself crying again. Big, fat tears rolled down my cheeks and dropped onto my thighs. Hers was a life that was worth something. Mine, not so much. And Ronnie was right. Some random bloke, working his little scams, running his little gang of thugs, had given the order that had stopped Chelsea’s precious, precious life. And had all but destroyed mine, too – for what that was worth. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that such a thing should be tolerated. It wasn’t right that he be allowed ever to do such a thing again.

  I had no idea what a life was worth. I knew mine was a complete waste of oxygen. So what was the price of avenging one and saving more? Pretty damned little. So why was I running away? Why was I hiding? To protect a life even I didn’t value?

  I got to my feet, marched over to the kitchen to tell Ronnie I was with him. He wasn’t there. I marched to his bedroom and found the door closed. I tapped on it. “It’s me. Don’t shoot.”

  “Why not?”

  I opened the door and went in. He was sitting up in bed, reading, a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose. He didn’t look up. “Because I want to tell you something.”

  “Another earth-shattering revelation about the case?”

  “Not quite. More about myself, really.”

  He laid the book down and took off his glasses. “Christ, mate, I’m not your shrink.”

  “I just wanted to say—”