Get Even

by Peter Corris

  'Jesus, Edgar,' Trish said. 'What the hell're you playing at?'

  'Nobody's playing, Trish. Move.'

  'Edgar . . .'

  The shotgun moved fractionally and Trish obeyed the movement, stepping sideways, arms and shoulders rigid, eyes fixed on the weapon.

  'You knew we were coming,' she said.

  'That's right. I just knew about you, actually. Not your friend. But it comes to the same thing. You watch yourself too, sunshine.'

  Phillip's legs refused to obey him. He stood, riveted to the spot. His stomach churned and a sourness rose in his throat and threatened to choke him. 'Don't,' he said.

  'Move!'

  Phillip took two steps, moving jerkily like a badly manipulated marionette. He found himself beside Trish at the top of a set of steps that led down to the water. His head jerked up when he heard the engine of a powerboat churning the water. A sleek red cruiser slid through the choppy waves towards the jetty.

  'Down!'

  Trish stood on the first step and looked up at Phillip. 'I'm sorry, lover,' she said.

  The boat drew closer. There were two men in it. One held a pistol casually, pointing it vaguely in the direction of the jetty.

  'What . . . what d . . . do you mean?'

  'Get your shoes wet, Trish,' Georges said.

  Trish went down two steps. The water splashed up around her feet.

  Georges spat out his cigar stub. 'You too, lover.'

  Phillip stumbled down the steps. Trish gripped his arm and they waited, lapped by the waterline. The cruiser engine died and it drifted in towards the jetty. The man with the pistol levelled it at Trish and Phillip, untroubled by the rise and fall, while the driver jockeyed the boat close to the steps. It bumped. The boatman threw a rope around a pylon.

  'Pretty dumb moves for you, Trish,' Georges said. 'I never knew you to be cock-struck before. Take the gun out of your pocket and drop it into the water. Slowly. I've got a clear shot at you and lover boy, but it might not be too clean.'

  Trish's hand moved to her pocket. Slowly, she lifted the automatic free and let it fall. It bounced on a submerged step and Trish watched it slip sideways and disappear. 'Any chance of a deal, Edgar? For old times' sake?'

  'No chance. Sorry, Trish. You lose this one. You had a good run. Get in the boat.'

  Phillip was sobbing and would have fallen if Trish hadn't supported him. They stepped into the boat. Phillip looked up through eyes blurred by tears at the fat man with the shotgun 'Listen, Mr Georges, I'm Phillip Krabbe. My father . . .'

  'A good mate of mine. You should have listened to him. Sorry, son. Okay, take it away.'

  Trish said, 'He'll get you too, Edgar. Call this off now and we can squeeze him dry.'

  Georges shook his head. 'He's too big and I've got all I need.'

  The boatman unlooped the line, pushed off from the jetty and started the engine. He transferred his weapon to his left hand, held it steady, picked up a length of pipe wrapped in insulating tape and used it to prod first Phillip, then Trish in the small of the back.

  'Lie down!'

  At the touch of the pipe, Trish slipped her shoulder-bag down, grasped the strap, crouched, turned and swung. Although she was quick, she was off-balance and the gunman seemed to have seconds to spare. He avoided the swinging bag, swept the pipe up and crashed it against her temple. She collapsed. The bag skidded across the boat's engine canopy and fell into the sea.

  'Said she had guts,' the gunman grunted. 'Lie down, you!'

  Phillip's knees buckled and he lay weeping beside Trish in the bottom of the boat. The gunman swung the pipe in a short arc and shattered his skull. He changed his grip and swung again, bringing the pipe down on Trish's head with colossal force. Bone fragments, blood and brain matter spattered the boatman, who swore.

  Edgar Georges waddled across the jetty and slid the shotgun into the hessian sack. He bent with an effort and took a small crab from his plastic bag. Then he baited his hook, checked the tackle and cast expertly out into the grey-green water.

  20

  Dunlop became aware of the car following him after his dawn visit to Trish Tillotson's flat He'd gone there the day after his call on Lucy Scanlon and waited through the evening until midnight. Then he went home and tried to sleep. He managed a restless two hours of dozing before coming back as light appeared in the sky. He'd opened the security door and rung the bell at Flat 4.

  Nothing. He knew she wasn't at the trainees' hostel where she was, nominally, a warden. He knew she hadn't been at her desk for the past twenty-four hours. The team studying criminal profiling seemed to be getting along fine without her. It seemed to Dunlop that everybody was getting along fine without Dave and Mirabelle Scanlon too, except him. He and Tillotson and her tall, fair friend were the only people who knew the girl was dead. It mattered to him. He couldn't let it rest.

  He was frustrated and he knew he was disoriented from lack of sleep. Good sense said take Burton's offer. Retire on medical grounds with a pension. Go to Queensland. Work on his putting. Get a single-figure handicap. Find a nice woman who'd never twisted an arm, never pulled a body from a car wreck, never fired a gun. A woman who'd go fishing with him and read Le Carré novels and grow vegetables. He couldn't do it. At least, not yet. He watched the blue Commodore in his rear-vision mirror as it did a fair job of avoiding being spotted. The driver hung back, changed lanes, made the turns late. But if you knew how to do it, you knew how to spot it. That was one of the problems. Dunlop felt the adrenalin pumping into his already overcharged, under-nourished system. He liked the feeling. Follow me, would you, you fucker? I'll show you a thing or two.

  He drove towards Marrickville, taking no evasive action, using the obvious route. The street he turned into off Stanmore Road ended abruptly at a fence that enclosed part of a school ground. The No Through Road sign was obscured by the branches of a plane tree that the council workers habitually failed to prune. The short street—occupied for most of its length by a factory on one side and a nursing home on the other, rose sharply and looked as if it would continue through beyond the hill. Dunlop went over the rise and whipped the Laser into a sharp turn. He mounted the nature strip with his offside wheels and was around, heading back, when the Commodore came cautiously forward. Dunlop gunned the motor, spun the wheel and pulled up behind the Commodore, which braked sharply and stalled when it met the cul-de-sac gutter.

  Dunlop leapt out, ran forward and had his pistol at the temple of the driver before he could touch the gearshift. The man in the passenger seat raised his hands.

  'Good,' Dunlop said. 'That's very good. Hands nicely up without even asking. Why're you two clowns following me?'

  Neither man spoke. The driver's hands stayed on the wheel. The other man turned his head slowly and looked at Dunlop. He saw a wild-eyed pistol-holder with two days' growth, wearing a shirt that looked like a rag. The street was quiet and still. It was barely light. The asphalt-coated schoolyard was misty and the rubbish tins looked like gravestones. He tried to speak but his throat and mouth had dried and no sound emerged.

  Dunlop jabbed the pistol into the driver's ear. The man screeched and Dunlop dug the metal in again. 'You heard the question. I can do you both and drive away. I'm in the mood for it. Tell me!'

  The driver gulped and found speech. 'Hell, man. A job. Nothing personal.'

  Dunlop was on the edge and the American accent threatened to tip him over. Dave Scanlon was dead, Mirabelle was dead. Why not these two? 'You've got two seconds to tell me who you're working for. Or you can die. The way I'm feeling it makes no bloody difference to me either way.'

  'Okay, okay, man. I believe you. But we don't know. Honest.'

  Dunlop touched the pistol to the battered ear. 'Not good enough, Yank. So long.'

  'Wait on, wait on. We got a number to call. That's all we got. I swear it.'

  'Tell me the number. Speak clearly. Come on, don't think, say it!'

  The driver's hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel. '
I . . . we . . .'

  'Come on!'

  The other man stared at Dunlop and lowered his hands. 'The fucking phone's on redial. That's it. We were just supposed to call in. See where you went, who you met. Shit like that. Nothing heavy.'

  Dunlop looked into the back of the car and saw two cameras and surveillance equipment. His racing pulse slowed a few beats and he took the trouble to examine the men. Neither looked like an enforcer and yet, just for a couple of minutes, he'd seen them as assassins. 'I get it,' he said. 'You need to brush up on your technique. Okay, release the phone and hand it to me slowly. When I've got it, you're free to go.'

  The driver brushed away blood from his neck and took the mobile phone from its cradle. He passed it through the window. Dunlop gripped the sticky plastic surface and stepped back from the car.

  'Piss off.'

  The driver shoved the Commodore into reverse, revved and let the big car plough back into the front of the Laser. Even at that short distance, the impact was considerable, crumpling the Laser's front bumper, radiator and left headlight. Dunlop swore but had to move away quickly as the driver wrenched the wheel and accelerated, hitting Dunlop's car a glancing blow and narrowly missing Dunlop himself as it roared back up the street. Dogs barked and there was movement in the front of the nursing home. Dunlop swore as he inspected the car. It looked to be driveable. He put his pistol in the glove box and laid the mobile phone on the passenger seat. The engine fired and there was only a slight pinging of metal and rubber brushing together as he U-turned and drove away.

  Tiredness hit him as he defused the garage alarm and walked through the overgrown backyard into his house. For a time he had maintained the grass and shrubs in the yard and made serious attempts at growing vegetables. But increasing case loads and growing disenchantment with the work had caused him to neglect the property. The grass was knee high in places; the vegetable bed was a tangle of thistle and weeds. Neighbourhood cats took advantage of the fact that he had no pets of his own to use the backyard as a place to piss and shit. A broken window and several roof tiles, displaced in a winter storm, still awaited repair. The sight of the run-down place depressed him. The large garbage bin was overflowing and the stacks of yellowed newspaper—supposed to be put out for recycling but regularly forgotten—were escaping from their string bindings.

  'You're becoming a slob,' he said. 'And you're talking to yourself like a loony.'

  He made instant coffee and grimaced when the milk he added left flecks on the surface. He spooned in sugar and undertook to drink it anyway. He took the mobile phone through to his workroom, sipped some of the half-sour, half-sweet coffee and pressed the redial button. The number came up big and clear on the phone's digital display. He copied it down and hung up.

  'Got you, you bastard.'

  It was six-thirty a.m. and he was suddenly tired to the bone, but he had a purpose. He finished the coffee, showered, washed his hair, shaved and changed into clean clothes. He cleaned his teeth and flossed them, scraped the dirt from his fingernails. He went to the shop at the corner of Addison Road and bought ground coffee, milk, two croissants and the morning paper, exchanging smiles and nods with the Vietnamese and Greek and Turkish neighbours who were starting their reluctant cars, watering their front gardens, seeing their neatly attired children off to school. The normalcy of it all gave him energy and enthusiasm. The morning had dawned bright and clear. High clouds had gathered in the west but would probably pass over. He poured the sour milk down the sink and ran the tap on it. He heated his croissants without burning them, buttered them and made coffee that gave off an aroma that seemed to clear his head. He forced himself to eat and drink slowly, to taste the food and drink, to keep his brain in neutral. He rinsed the plate and knife, poured another cup of coffee and took it into the workroom.

  Dunlop's computer was still hooked up to the Federal police, New South Wales police, WPU and SCCA data banks. He could access a wide span of other material as well—government employees, permanent and contractual, company registers, credit card records, motor vehicle and licence entries, medical files and telephone information, including number and subscriber cross listings. He switched on the computer, logged up the relevant software, and entered the number he'd taken from the mobile phone. The computer confirmed that it was a valid entry and Dunlop's request for information on the subscriber resulted in the words KRABBE CONSULTANCY LTD appearing on the screen.

  'Krabbe,' Dunlop said. 'Jesus Christ, how many more cops do I have to run into on this bloody thing?'

  He accessed the company files and entered the name. Krabbe Consultancy was listed as a private company with an address in Woolloomooloo. The managing director was Phillip Arnold Krabbe, LLB, MBA, aged thirty, single, address in Rose Bay; father Keith Krabbe, police officer, mother Sylvia, nee Anderson. He worked for an hour, pursuing Krabbe through a variety of channels, picking up Snippets of information and collecting them in a single file. When he'd finished he had a comprehensive word portrait of the young executive. Among other vehicles, Krabbe Consultancy leased a royal blue Saab sedan. Dunlop saved what he thought of as the best for last, entering a request for a facsimile copy of Krabbe's driver's licence. He made more coffee and was holding a mug of the fresh brew diluted by the fresh milk when the fax came through. Even making allowances for the poor quality of the photograph and the distortions of facsimile transmission, there could be no doubt: Phillip Arnold Krabbe was the man he had seen with Detective Sergeant Patricia Tillotson leaving the garage in Bellevue Hill that had contained the body of Mirabelle Scanlon.

  Dunlop sipped the milky coffee and considered whether it was worthwhile approaching Burton and the police with this discovery. He decided against doing so. Krabbe was a lawyer, no doubt safeguarded by all the defences lawyers had built into the system to protect themselves. Nevertheless, he assembled the material into a coherent file and printed out a hard copy. Weariness that the coffee had only just held at bay was threatening to overwhelm him. He produced three more dossiers before he abandoned the computer—on Thomas Kippax, Trish Tillotson and Keith Krabbe. None contained anything immediately significant but the routine act of assembling them was oddly satisfying. He felt the settling down of his jangled nerves. His mental pictures of Dave and Mirabelle, sharp-edged by death, began to blur. As he tapped the keys he saw that the knuckles he'd scraped at some time in the last few days—when boarding the Mirabelle, getting Scanlon to hospital, or in subduing Geoff and Russell—had begun to heal. He took off his clothes as the files printed out and stumbled towards his unmade bed.

  'So, now you can marry me, Thomas,' Lucy Scanlon said. 'And we can live happily ever after.'

  Kippax's waxy skin paled still further as he sipped his drink. They were sitting on the balcony of his apartment in the Connaught. He had not wanted the meeting, not so soon after Scanlon's death and the flurry of activity that had followed it, but Lucy had insisted. Now she laughed at his evident distress.

  'Only joking, darling. I know you're married to your work. And things will proceed . . . more smoothly now, I trust.'

  Kippax struggled not to show his relief. 'I trust so. But I still feel that this meeting was indiscreet.'

  Lucy rearranged the folds of her dark dress. Proud of her legs and aware of her lack of height, she had avoided the currently fashionable low-topped, long-skirted look for some time but was pleased with her first venture into the new style. Reasonably widow-like, she thought, but she'd also noticed Kippax's surreptitious attempts to see more than the skirt revealed. 'I'm in a mood for indiscretion. You're a cold fish, Thomas Kippax, but I admire you. You know what you want and you go after it. I'm much the same.'

  Kippax thought he could see where the conversation was tending. He found her intensely attractive and especially appreciated the stimulating effects of some of the practices she had introduced him to. Since receiving a cryptic, but clear to him, message from Edgar Georges, he had felt safer. He hoped that Lucy was not going to pose a new threat in her turn.
He'd had enough of threats. It was time to draw back from the cut-and-thrust, consolidate, and even indulge himself. The SCCA inquiry would fizzle to nothing without Scanlon. He was safe on that front.

  Kippax stared out over the dark green expanse of Hyde Park. His view of the harbour was slightly impeded by several buildings, something he hadn't appreciated when he bought the apartment. He needed to be several floors higher. It was irritating. His intention had only ever been to secure a dominance in a lucrative market. An unassailable position, and he had never been quite able to grasp why he'd met with resistance and had had to resort to unorthodox tactics to secure his ends. As he became older he'd found that thoughts of this kind had increasingly come to distract him from the business at hand. It required an effort to shake them off.

  'You're talking about the woman in Hong Kong, I assume?' he barked.

  'My daughter, yes.'

  Kippax had several children, daughters included, from an early, unwise marriage. He had not seen them for a great many years and was unsure of their names, following the changes flowing from his ex-wife's remarriages. He seldom thought about them and considered that the trust fund arrangements he had made discharged his responsibility. Lucy's concern for this by-blow puzzled him. He finished his drink, a strong one for him, and felt the juices flow. He wanted to see her naked and watch her urinate and defecate. The sight of her functions excited him and produced intense if short-lived erections. Lucy was an expert in putting that momentary blood rush to good use. He wanted it all to happen now.

  'I'll have her here as soon as it's humanly possible,' he said throatily.

  Got him, Lucy thought triumphantly. But he's still too smug and sure of himself. I need more than just this to hold him. She unbuttoned her dress and slipped out of it to stand in front of him in her brassiere and panties, gartered stockings and high-heeled shoes. She allowed a little urine to flow, took off the damp panties and handed them to him.