We fell silent. I screwed up my nose. Tried to fit the pieces together.
“That’s not it.”
“It’s not?” Whitt asked.
“You heard him at the end there. I don’t hurt girls. That’s a bit of an odd thing to say.”
“He wasn’t thinking straight,” Tox said. “The guy had just got through trying to paint the road with your face. Of course he hurts girls.”
“I’m not a girl.” I put my hands out.
“This isn’t the time for a feminism lecture, Harry,” Tox said.
The waitress came and took our order, set a plate of oily, flaky baklava on the table that we hadn’t asked for. She winked at Whitt as she turned to go back to the kitchen. I grabbed a baklava and started munching it.
“Think about it,” I said. “Tonya’s, what—twenty-two? Her kid’s a toddler. They’re girls. I’m not a girl. I’m a woman. He’s not going to think of me as a girl, first because of my age, and second because I just made a human pretzel out of him in front of fifty witnesses. I don’t see it.”
“Bernadette Goldman isn’t a girl, either,” Whitt said. “She was older than you, Harry. I get what you’re saying. But the whole response doesn’t make sense. You said Is this about Bernadette Goldman? and he said I don’t hurt girls.”
“He was dazed. You’d beaned the guy with your kneecap,” Tox said. “I don’t think we should lean too heavily on what he said. Let’s focus on what he did. He tailed you from Pops’s house. He knew you were there because someone told him. I’ll jump on him when we get the chance and find out what he knows. But for now, we need to talk about this.”
Tox put a baggie of brown tar on the table.
Chapter 43
“THIS LITTLE BAGGIE of smack was found on a guy who came into the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital a month ago,” Tox said. He tapped the bag with his finger. “It’s a hot shot, loaded with arsenic.”
“So?”
“So the same type of hot shot was found in Tonya’s motel room yesterday, hidden under the sink,” he said.
“Where are you getting this information? Who gave you this baggie?”
“I have a source at the hospital who let me see the file, take the sample. It hadn’t been picked up for the police lab yet. My contact saw the guy die,” Tox said. “Pretty bad way to go, apparently. All your organs shut down one by one.”
“A contact, huh?” Whitt gave a wry smile. “That’s what she is now?”
“Who are we talking about?” I asked.
“Chloe Bozer.” Tox rolled his eyes. “She’s a quack at St. Vincent’s. She’s the one who saved my life when Regan Banks tried to punch my card in your apartment.”
“Wooo-ooooh!” I made a sound like a little kid finding out about a crush. Whitt tried to make it too but broke into laughter.
“Please.” Tox looked strained. “She’s a doctor. She’d know my sexual history just by looking at me. I’ve probably got varieties of the clap they haven’t even documented in medical journals yet.”
“That didn’t stop the entire nursing staff at St. Vincent’s jumping your bones every twenty minutes for the duration of your stay,” Whitt said.
“This is probably the first and last time I’m ever going to say this.” Tox put his hands on the table. “But can we please stop talking about my dick?”
I nearly choked on my baklava.
“Let’s talk about murder,” Tox continued. He tapped the baggie of heroin again. “I’m trying to brief you idiots on some very important shit. I think I was wrong about the motel room being a staged abduction. I think it was a desperate search. They trashed the room looking for this. I had a friend of mine at the lab put it through the wringer this morning. It has the same chemical composition as the one found in Tonya’s apartment. Whoever made that one, made this one.”
We all looked at the baggie.
“This dead guy was Wendell Hamm,” Tox continued. “He had a Silver Aces patch on him when he came in. He was a badged bikie who’d just got out of the can. Guess who put him there?”
“Joe Woods,” I said. Tox nodded and leaned back in the booth.
“Woods led the task force that put Hamm and a couple of other guys away for ten years,” Tox said. “He’d just got out after five with good behavior. The other guys were already out.”
“I think we just found motive,” Whitt said.
Chapter 44
WE TOOK POPS’S car, but Whitt drove. We had decided to leave Tox behind to chase Travis Blenk rather than have him burn his identity with members of the Silver Aces motorcycle gang. As someone who rubbed shoulders with Sydney’s underworld, Tox had a checkered history with bikies. He wasn’t loyal to any club, so bikies tended to use him to spread rumors and misinformation to other clubs or to drop hints about the criminal activities of rival organizations. He was also a cop, but he regularly looked the other way on their underhanded deeds in order to take down bigger fish in the worlds of drugs, prostitution, and extortion. He was a friend, but not a friend. An enemy, but not an enemy.
I examined my face in the car mirror as we turned onto the M4 motorway, heading west. The bruises from my last prison fight were fading, and Travis Blenk grinding my face into the road had left only minor grazes, the worst of which was a patch on my chin.
“You all right?” Whitt asked.
“Fine.” I flipped the visor up.
“There’s something going on with Tox and that doctor.”
“How strange.” I laughed. “You think he likes her? Like likes her?”
“Does Tox Barnes really like anyone?” Whitt asked.
“I don’t know!” I slapped the dashboard. “It’s exciting, and I don’t know why. I guess I like the idea of him having a girlfriend. He deserves to be loved.”
Tox Barnes was my friend. He’d saved my life, and Whitt’s, on more than one occasion, and though he was emotionally arid, infuriatingly stubborn and he blanketed cigarette smoke over everything that came within ten meters of him, I wanted to see him happy.
As a child, Tox had accidentally destroyed his chances of leading any kind of normal life. He and a group of other boys had been tossing rocks off a highway overpass onto traffic, giggling as the stones tinked and clinked off the tops of cars and windscreens, and the drivers honked in anger. The boys had no conception of how dangerous their game was until it was too late. A woman driving home with her young son in the car had been startled by a pebble on her windscreen, swerved, and had collided with an oncoming truck. She and the boy had been killed instantly.
Tox had been a double murderer before he was ten years old.
Though his record was sealed due to his youth and no charges were pressed against the boys, I knew Tox did all that he could to punish himself in his everyday life for his crime. He let his colleagues believe rumors about his past that caused them to despise him. He wandered through the world unable to fit in anywhere—not a cop or a criminal, an ally or a foe. He pushed people away, sabotaged relationships and flaunted the rules of his job, almost daring the brass to fire him and leave him without the only thing that gave him purpose.
Tox lived his life almost exactly the same way I did, and for almost the same reasons. As a foster kid, I’d never fit anywhere. Circumstances in both our childhoods had made a normal life impossible.
But if Tox Barnes could find love, maybe that meant he was overcoming who and what he was. And maybe the same was possible for me.
“Get this,” Whitt said, smiling as he remembered. “When Tox was telling me about the bikie who died of arsenic poisoning, I made fun of him for going back and talking to Chloe Bozer again, just like you did. He said she’d seen his heart.”
“What?”
“Not like, Oh, she’s seen inside my heart and soul, or whatever. Tox would never talk like that. He meant she’s seen his heart.” Whitt tapped his chest. “Chloe Bozer had to jack his ribs open in the emergency room and check that his heart hadn’t been nicked by the tip of the
blade when Banks stabbed him. She’s laid eyes on his actual heart.”
We fell silent. Whitt looked over at me.
“Why did he tell you that?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Whitt laughed, shrugged. “He just said it.”
“I guess you never get to see your own heart,” I mused. “Or if you do, you’re in deep shit.”
“It was kind of…romantic,” Whitt said. “I guess.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I guess.”
The highway stretched before us, baking in the midday heat. Suburbs thinned as the city shrank behind us.
“I wonder what my heart looks like,” I said.
“It’s big, we know that,” Whitt said. The silence grew heavy. Whitt shifted in his seat. A rose color grew around his neck, near his collar, then faded.
“That was kind of romantic,” I blurted, unsure how to respond.
“I guess.” He laughed.
Chapter 45
YOU CAN’T JUST walk in to a bikie clubhouse. If you call ahead, no one will be there. The place will be locked up tight like a fortress, and snooping around could get you killed. Police in New South Wales had in the past been deterred from arriving unexpectedly on bikie properties by the use of bear traps, punji pits, trip-wire explosives, tear-gas bombs and good old-fashioned warning shots fired from hidden lookouts.
Whitt and I arrived outside the Silver Aces clubhouse on a sparse property in Panuara in the afternoon. There were no buildings visible from the roadside, and much of what lay beyond the wooden boundary fence was disguised by tall yellow grass and harsh scrubland. I got out and stood leaning against the hot bonnet of the car, watching grasshoppers fluttering and frolicking near the fence line. Cicadas were screaming in the trees at the roadside. Whitt stood with me and waited. We knew hidden cameras or lookouts would pick us up and alert the men on the property to our presence.
It was twenty minutes before someone arrived. Long enough for the lieutenants to question everyone inside to see if they recognized us. To discuss among themselves what we might want, hide any evidence of nefarious activities. A man with a bulbous nose, shaved head and a blond beard parked by the gate and emerged from a ute. He walked over to us, not attempting to disguise the almost certainly unlicensed handgun in the front of his jeans.
Whitt put his arms out and so did I, and the guy patted us down roughly, shoving Whitt against the car to do it, trying to send a message to the big guy. I braced to be grabbed on the crotch or breasts but wasn’t. Some male criminals think female cops are hero-making sexual conquests, and some think we’re poisoned meat.
When the guy spoke it was to Whitt, like I wasn’t standing there.
“Wallets, phones,” he said. We handed them over. He took the wallets but opened our car door and tossed the phones in, not caring where they landed.
“What’s this about?”
“We want to join,” Whitt said. He jerked his thumb at me. “This one’s been watching Easy Rider and now she’s hooked, and police salaries are for losers.”
The guy didn’t even smirk. He walked back to the ute and we followed, slid inside. No one spoke as we were driven to the clubhouse, a sprawling brick-and-concrete compound squatting in the middle of an overgrown field.
Whitt leaned over and stared hard at the man’s forearm for a moment as we rode. When we slipped from the car again I leaned close to him.
“What’d you see?” I asked.
“Guy’s got a tattoo of Mitsuko Uchida on his arm.”
“Who?”
“A Japanese pianist.”
“Would you get in the fucking game, Whitt? You’re thinking about Japanese piano players and I’m trying to stop us getting murdered here.”
“Sorry,” he said.
There was a hundred meters of gravel spread around the cluster of buildings, peppered with shell casings and broken beer bottles. Approaching this place on foot at night would be impossible for the noise of one’s footsteps, and then there were the dogs. A dozen of them rushed at us as we exited the car, a collection of tan and black mongrels barking and howling. They were all mixed breed, but I recognized the shapes of skulls and snouts: rottweilers, ridgebacks, and pit bulls. Older dogs rose slowly from dirty blankets and towels spread around the concrete outside the buildings and barked from where they stood, too tired and frail to cross the gravel and glass divide.
The front of the main building was a parking lot for Harleys, some of them meticulously restored antiques. Beautiful airbrushed designs, big, leather-bound handles. Hogs and flame-emblazoned choppers gleamed in the sun.
Inside the compound, out of sight of any cameras or telescopic lenses that might be positioned at the roadside, the guns came out. As we walked into the building, I spotted at least ten guns—some lying casually on tables, some gripped in the hands of the men around us, some pointed directly toward us.
The room was set up like a bar. No natural light. Billiard tables, dartboards, stools, low leather couches. The smell of beer and vomit was like a wave crashing over us. There was a huge mural of the Silver Aces badge spray-painted on one wall.
The only person not looking at us was a man standing behind the bar, pouring frozen chips into the basket of a huge deep fryer.
“You,” the bearded guy said, pointing at Whitt. “You go through to the back. The bitch stays out here.”
“Forget it,” I said. “You’re not separating us. We meet with the boss together or we don’t meet at all.”
“This is a courtesy, us coming all the way out here to this shithole,” Whitt said. “We can do this in the city, if you’d like.”
I felt a presence behind me, a cloud of human heat. A man sniffed loudly in my ear. He didn’t touch me with his hands, but the tip of his nose ran up the side of my neck.
Every instinct told me to twist, clamp onto his face with my fingers, squeeze and bite in with my fingernails until I drew blood, gouged eyes, a one-handed claw attack. I pictured him bending back in pain, screaming, trying to wrench me off. Instead I remained frozen, my jaw locked.
“She smells good,” the guy reported to his friends. “Sweaty. It must be hot out there. Or are you just scared?”
I wasn’t scared. I should have been, but my well-practiced numbness was preventing it. There was absolutely nothing stopping these men from overpowering us, holding me down on one of the billiard tables, maybe making Whitt watch, maybe filming it for the enjoyment of other chapters of their club. Whitt and I would end up somewhere on the property, buried deep. They’d dump our car with our phones in it in the desert and be all wrapped up in twenty-four hours, the whole caper a booze-blurred memory.
Was this what had happened to Tonya and her child? Had she asked for a hot shot from a bikie pal to take care of a troublesome dealer or boyfriend, only to find herself in debt to a dangerous crew? Had they come for her at the Oceanside, brought her out here, buried her somewhere on the plains?
Our escort went through to a room at the back of the bar. When he returned we were beckoned forwards.
I glanced back at the men standing around the room as I left them behind. Their eyes were hollow in the dim light.
Chapter 46
IN A SMALL, cluttered office, Whitt and I were seated on two wooden chairs before a desk that had been turned sideways and pushed against a wall. As I took my place I noticed duct-tape marks on the legs of my chair. Someone had met their fate in this chair, sitting as I was sitting before the Silver Aces boss in his private chambers.
Jax Gotten was slumped in a battered leather chair, pricking the surface of the desk with a push pin obviously fallen from the wall behind him. There was a huge corkboard that had probably been covered in maps, photographs, and other secret paraphernalia that had been ripped down and stuffed away somewhere when Whitt and I appeared out front. There were more pins on the floor. Framed photographs hung on the wall, of big men with tattoos, gang leaders of times past, some of the frames obviously memorials to those fallen in wars or in prison.
The computer beside Jax was humming quietly, an ancient thing I knew Drug Squad detectives would be drooling to get their hands on. Bikie gangs are malignant gatherings of vile criminals pooling their collective aggression toward society, but they’re also incredibly lucrative businesses. That Jax had seen us in his office likely meant that the rest of the compound’s rooms were filled with far more intriguing material these guys wanted to keep hidden.
“Mr. Gotten,” Whitt began. “I’m Edward Whittacker, and this is Harriet Blue.”
“What?” Jax snorted. “No Detective Senior whatever-the-fuck? The boys out front said you chumps were cops.”
Jax was one of those people who looked dumber than he was. His face was broad and scarred, and his long, thick arms sported faded blue tattoos of the usual criminal fare—naked girls, skulls, knives, spiders. But he’d identified our weakness already, probably before we’d entered the room, and was hitting us with it before we’d even settled into our chairs.
“We’re pursuing a police-sanctioned inquiry right now,” I said.
“Police-sanctioned but not police?” Jax said. “What does that mean? The cops are so hard up for recruits these days they’re asking civilians to do their dirty work? What kind of training do you have to—”
“We’re suspended,” I said lazily. “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it, Jax? Whitt and I are suspended for a variety of professional misdeeds.”
He smiled, a small and petty win. I leaned forward, put my forearms on my knees.
“Tell us about Wendell Hamm,” I said.
“We’ve already been questioned about Hammy by real cops,” Jax said. “They hauled us in when he kicked the can, maybe a month ago.” He jutted his chin at a framed photograph on the wall of a portly man in a Silver Aces jacket.
“When did—”
“They stood all around watching us from the tree line at the funeral and the wake,” Jax said, talking right over the top of Whitt’s words, like a train mowing down a kangaroo on the tracks. “Binoculars and cameras. Got no respect, coppers. Stand there making observations in their notebooks at a fucking funeral. Who does that?”
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