by Tina Clough
‘I have no idea what you are talking about. I have nothing that is for sale.’
He chuckles, as if he is genuinely amused. ‘Ah, but you do. You have a blue barrel that you don’t know what to do with.’
‘Are you connected to that maniac who came around here a few days ago? I tricked him into believing I had the barrel and said I would provide a sample, but that was just so he would come back here. I told the cops all about it, so they could come and get him when he returned, but it was a wasted effort. They got him anyway – they knew where he was. I never had the barrel in the first place.’
‘We know you have it, you and your mate with the chopper. You picked it up from Bram’s place on the coast when he ran off. And you’ve been holding on to it all this time because you don’t know how to sell it.’
Now I am getting angry. ‘I’ll tell you something that you obviously haven’t heard. The cops have CCTV footage of that barrel on the back of Bram’s truck from when he left his place. He was caught on camera at a supermarket in Whangarei, but a couple of days later he was filmed somewhere in the city and the barrel was gone. He either sold it or he hid it. Ask a cop called Benson. He was the one who told me how they know that I didn’t take it.’ I end the call.
A couple of hours later we are sitting on the balcony having lunch and watching Scruff investigate his new doghouse in the garden. ‘He loves it. Look, he’s gone inside it again. Do you know what he’s doing?’ Dao looks at me, hoping I’ll say no.
‘I have no idea. Maybe he’s trying to work out what it’s for?’
‘He’s making his bed! He’s moving the blanket and the old towels around to get it just the way he wants it. He’s so busy.’
The doorbell goes, and I check on my phone. There’s a tall, fat guy in a suit outside, not someone I recognise. A black SUV is parked behind him. ‘Stay here, I’ll go down,’ I say.
‘Hunter,’ he says jovially and holds out his hand. ‘I’m Will. I thought we should have a chat.’
I don’t take his hand and neither do I let go of the door handle. ‘You’re wasting your time, Will. We have nothing to talk about.’
I close the door and go back upstairs.
‘Who was it? Was it the man who called?’
‘He doesn’t believe me when I say I haven’t got the barrel. I’m getting really fed up with this bloody barrel saga.’
‘Did you get angry?’
‘I tried to keep it civilised. Did you expect me to get angry?’
‘Of course,’ she says, as if I should have figured it out for myself. ‘When you’re angry you look really scary – dangerous. That night when John came, and you got so angry – wow! No wonder he got a twitch in his face.’
She laughs; apparently this is either hilarious or deeply satisfying.
‘OK, next time he comes I’ll show him I’m angry.’
Chapter twenty-seven
We go to the Depot for dinner with Charlie and Kristen, and a dozen of their friends, to celebrate Kristen’s promotion to head paralegal at her firm. One of the women in the group turns out to be a fame vulture and corners Dao before the meal. I can see Dao getting uncomfortable, but before I can intervene Kristen moves sideways and says something, and the woman moves away.
Dao sidles between two men and comes to stand beside me. ‘I got a text from Tama a little while ago. I went to the toilet, so I could reply and ask him a couple of things. It’s really weird. He and Tyler are visiting Tyler’s uncle in Forrest Hill and he said he’s got the tracker he put on Stuart’s black car! He’s going to put it in our letterbox on their way home. He got it back – isn’t that funny?’
‘I wonder why he did that. And how did he get access to the car? That property must be behind police tape.’
‘I texted back and asked how he got it. He went to Stuart’s house as soon as I called him – you know, when we were on the way home from the Hunuas. He said he thought it was better to remove it. The car was parked on the driveway, so he just took it off and put it in his car and then he forgot to give it to us when they came the other night.’
It’s a pleasant evening, but groups of new people make Dao uneasy and I prefer smaller parties. We are the first to leave and I ask Dao what that woman had said.
‘She said she wanted to know what it was like living on the island, but it wasn’t true. She was asking all sorts of questions about what Bram was like and I didn’t want to answer.’
‘Did she ask what he did to you?’
‘I think that’s what she wanted to know, but she didn’t ask directly. She was hoping I would tell her. I didn’t like it.’
‘I was just coming over to rescue you when Kristen noticed. When you meet people like her you don’t have to say anything. Just say that you prefer not to talk about it and walk away. It’s not rude to walk away from people if they ask rude questions.’
‘Two rudes make a right,’ says Dao, who is developing a disturbing talent for bad puns.
I press the remote to deactivate the alarm and wait for the garage door to open. Dao jumps out. ‘I’ll check the letterbox.’
Just as the door opens, I hear her shout. I look towards the letterbox and there is a large man beside her. I reach hurriedly under the seat for the Glock and feel it sliding further in, so I leap out of the car without it. Will, the fat man, still wearing a dark suit and looking as if he is off to a formal meeting, has Dao by the upper arm. They are on the sidewalk now and his SUV is just beside him with the engine running; both doors on the driver’s side are open.
‘Now then,’ he says in that irritatingly reasonable voice, ‘let’s stop playing games. I’ll take this little girl with me and give you a day or two to think about my proposal.’
‘What the hell will it take to make you realise you’re wrong? It doesn’t matter what you do, it won’t change the fact that I never had the barrel. Did you talk to Benson?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he says, still jovial and friendly. ‘Of course not. He would never tell me anything and you knew I wouldn’t call a cop and ask questions. We’ll do it this way instead. I’ll look after your little friend and you can call me on the number you have on your phone when you want her back.’
Dao’s face is hard to read. She is frightened, but she doesn’t look as scared as I would expect. Perhaps Will’s calm and reasonable manner makes her feel that she won’t be harmed. I curse the fact that the Glock was out of reach. I am ready to rush at him, force him to let go of Dao. As if he can read my mind Will lifts his other hand. He has a gun.
‘Don’t do anything dramatic, Hunter. We’ll leave now. You just call me when you want your girl back. OK?’
There is nothing I can do, apart from get a bullet through my foot or wherever he is planning to shoot me to enforce the lesson and stop me grappling with him. Dao is silently mouthing something I can’t understand. Will shifts his grip on her in one swift move. He lifts her one-handed and lets go; snake fast his arm catches her around the waist and swings her into a horizontal position. Now she is tucked under his arm like a parcel. Her head is hanging down beside his thigh and I can no longer see her face. She is trying to kick him and punches his leg as hard as she can. He laughs and shakes her and her phone falls out of her pocket.
‘Behave yourself, little girl.’ He sounds like a kind uncle. ‘If you’re naughty you’ll get no cake.’
Fast on his feet for such a bulky man, he runs around the back of the car, throws Dao into the back seat, slams the door and they are away in a matter of seconds. I leap into my car and reverse across the sidewalk, press the garage-door button on the remote and drive away without looking to see if the door is coming down. There are two sets of rear lights further down the street, but I can’t see what kind of vehicles they are. If he turned at the first corner, he is already out of sight.
I follow the cars I originally saw, closing in fast. One turns left and I see by the profile that it is a sedan; now the other one is fifty
metres ahead of me. At the T-junction I get held up by traffic and wait, impotent and impatient, my eyes going back and forth between the red tail lights disappearing and the crossing cars.
I slip into a gap between two cars and speed up. Now there are four cars between me and the vehicle I am following. I am still not sure that it is Will’s car. I catch up and overtake two by using the turning lane where a side street branches off. Against the lights coming towards me I can see that the car two places in front of me is big enough to be an SUV. The car between us turns left and now I am directly behind the SUV. It is impossible to tell if it is the same car; it has a spare wheel mounted on the back and I can’t see enough of the interior to count heads. I pull back a bit and follow at a distance. I want to find out where he is going without alerting him. He indicates right and turns into East Coast Road without slowing down. At the apex of the turn the left rear door opens and Dao literally rolls out and hits the road. His brake lights come on for a second, then he accelerates away.
Braking hard I flick the hazard lights on and jump out as soon as the car stops. A driver coming the other way only just manages to stop. I run forward and get down on my knees beside her. More cars arrive; we are surrounded by headlights and brake lights. Questions and suggestions come from all directions. I hear a man calling the emergency services. A woman kneels beside me and together we turn Dao over; she is unconscious. The woman carefully straightens Dao’s legs.
‘I’m a nurse,’ she says. ‘We’d better not move her – we don’t know what might be broken.’
I pull my sweatshirt off and put it under her head and my hand comes away with blood on it. Someone hands the nurse a rug and she tucks it in around Dao. She turns to the crowd, raises her voice. ‘Can someone sort out the traffic? Get the cars on that side to move on and ask the ones on this side to put their hazard lights on.’
Out of the corner of my eye I see feet moving away and hear cars starting up. The nurse bends down and checks Dao’s pulse. ‘Did someone hit her and take off?’
I realise she has no idea what happened, that possibly nobody apart from me saw her falling. ‘She jumped from a car that turned into East Coast Road. I was immediately behind it.’
A man’s voice says, ‘I saw it too. I was coming towards you. An SUV turned right and she kind of fell out to the left. Lucky I wasn’t going faster, or I would have run her over.’
Sirens are coming towards us and I must make a quick decision about what I am going to say and when. Starting in on the complex story about the barrel and Dao being taken hostage will take up too much time and might result in having to go to a police station to make a statement.
Two police cars and an ambulance arrive, and the situation resolves into a state of orderly chaos. Paramedics tend to Dao; the nurse stays beside her. I don’t tell anyone that I know who she is. A policeman asks those who witnessed the accident to come over to the side of the road and another tells the rest to move on. One sets out road cones and directs traffic past the scene.
I stand on the sidewalk with two others and we tell the cop what we saw. He takes our names and contact details then he asks if anyone noticed the make or number plate of the SUV. I curse myself for not memorising the number.
‘Black, Isuzu Rodeo,’ says the man beside me. ‘Definitely.’
While we talk to the cop, my eyes are on the group surrounding Dao. The nurse is still there, talking to the paramedics as they slide the gurney into the ambulance. I walk forward to pick up my sweatshirt and the nurse turns to me. ‘Poor little thing. Head injuries are always tricky – you don’t know how they’ll turn out.’ She has no idea I am connected to Dao; she thinks I am a concerned first-on-the-scene bystander.
As soon as the cars behind me have moved, I head for the North Shore hospital, which is only ten minutes away. I sit in the car in the ED car park for a few minutes and work out how to handle this. They need to find out who she is, and I must somehow cut through the red tape with the cops, who will surely turn up shortly.
Benson is the only one who can help me now. The poor man, we are using him as a personal emergency assistant, but I know he feels connected to us. As luck would have it he is on his way home after working late. I tell him the whole story and add that I have not told anyone who she is.
‘OK, you go in and tell them who you are and who she is.’ His voice is very calm, and he sounds as if this is nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Just say you were told she had been in an accident. No need for them to know you were behind the car she fell out of. I’ll be with you shortly, twenty minutes or so. If any of our guys turn up, stall them till I get there.’
Benson arrives before the police and sits with me in the waiting area. Dao has been taken away to have her head scanned and her arm X-rayed.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing apart from her name and her date of birth so far, and that she is my partner. They didn’t ask how I heard about it or got here so fast. The police haven’t arrived yet, but I’ve got to tell them something. If it’s the same guy who talked to me at the scene, he’ll recognise me. It would be difficult to explain why I didn’t say anything then, but how could I? They would have asked why I was just behind the car she jumped out of and did I know who the driver was and why she jumped. Too complicated.’
‘OK, I get it.’ Benson’s phone buzzes. ‘After you called, I talked to Chilton, the Organised Crimes guy who’s now in charge of the drug-barrel issue – and he’s just sent a text.’
He reads the message out: I have a couple of ideas. You sort out the immediate situation and I will meet with Hunter tomorrow. Please send his phone number. Might be useful to have you there.
‘I’ll hang around until the local guys arrive and sort it out.’
‘Thank you. I can’t say how grateful I am.’
I know I am getting special treatment thanks to Benson. Not that I can imagine what Chilton can do, but it’s a kind offer.
‘I’m as concerned as you are, Hunter. I feel I have a stake in this too.’
He asks me to look after his briefcase and heads for the men’s room. Two policemen come in and talk to a nurse at the reception desk; she points and they both turn to look at me. Benson appears from the other side of the waiting room and they all converge on me; thankfully Benson takes charge before I have to say anything.
Halfway through his explanation of the background, a nurse appears and asks me to follow her.
Dao is lying on a bed with a blue blanket over her. She is wired up to machinery with computer displays. Her eyes are closed; she looks very small. The nurse pulls the curtain behind us and checks the equipment.
‘She will be taken to the Assessment ward, but they won’t let you in tonight. They’ll contact you if anything changes and you can come back tomorrow. Would you wait here, please. Doctor Carlyle wants a word with you.’
She gestures to a chair in the corner and I pull it closer to the bed. Dao’s breathing is barely noticeable. I study the monitors and begin to make sense of them. I take her hand and say her name; her heart beat goes up a bit and then drops back. I put my face right next to hers and say her name again, still holding her hand, keep my eyes on the monitor; the same thing happens again. When I straighten up I notice a chubby middle-aged woman standing just inside the curtain watching us.
‘I saw that,’ she says. ‘That’s encouraging – she’s waking up. I’m Doctor Carlyle, Maria. Are you her partner?’
Her voice reveals nothing, but her eyes move from me to Dao and back again. It is a familiar reaction.
‘Yes. What did the scan show?’
‘She’s concussed, but no haematoma, no skull fractures. She woke up when she first came in. She went straight to radiology for a scan and fell asleep while she waited. They sedated her, so she wouldn’t wake up inside the machine and panic. It looks promising, but we’ll keep her in the Assessment Unit overnight until she wakes up properly, so we can do some tests. We have to m
ake sure there is no risk of the intercranial pressure rising. But she has no broken bones, which is a bit of a miracle from what I hear about her fall. Her arm is OK. Scratched and bruised, but it’s not broken. She has a pre-existing cut that is healing well.’
Benson pushes through the curtain behind her and introduces himself before he walks up to the bed. He takes Dao’s hand and stands there holding it and looking down at her. ‘Poor little Dao,’ he says. My eyes move to the monitor. Once again, she reacts, but her eyes remain closed.
Chapter twenty-eight
Benson uses his rank and commandeers a room they use for doctors to talk to families. The two cops don’t question his right to be in charge. He outlines the background and says he will talk to their boss in the morning and then he turns to me.
‘Hunter, tell us what happened, right from the start. I mean from the first time this man contacted you. You said something about a phone call earlier.’
I tell them everything I can remember about Will and his car and promise to send them a CCTV image of him when I get home. I know there is a very clear image of him standing outside when he came for a chat, as he called it. ‘I’m staying here now, so it won’t happen directly.’
One of them gives me a card with an email address and says to send the image with Dao’s name on the subject line. They thank me and leave, and Benson picks up his briefcase.
‘Are you going to just sit here? They won’t let you into the ward tonight. Why don’t you go home and have a sleep?’
‘I don’t want to sleep. I’ll go home and feed Scruff and turn the alarms back on and then I’ll come straight back here.’
He nods, his hand lifts a fraction and then it drops back.
‘OK. Let me know if anything changes, please. I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, by the way, Sinclair called and said it will be in the papers tomorrow that they found a body in that offal pit. Not formally identified yet, but it’s Browning. So at least Dao won’t have to face appearing at another trial.’