The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d better check.’

  ‘He’s been and gone. Stay with me, son. Till the ambulance gets here.’

  Charlie crouched. ‘What’s he armed with?’

  ‘Target pistol. Silenced.’

  ‘I found Lambert by the back door.’

  ‘Dead? He was making a run for it.’

  Charlie stood. ‘I’ll get you a towel, help stop the bleeding.’

  Valente grabbed him weakly. ‘Stay. Just stay. Please?’

  Charlie crouched again, feeling useless. ‘Mark, I’ve been hearing things, you and Dad robbing a Medicare office. Was there a whole gang of you? Is that what this is about?’

  Out of a long silence and shallow, panting breaths, Valente said, ‘I broke bread with the godless.’

  ‘Knock it off, Mark. Just tell me.’

  Valente lifted his bloodied hand as if the seeping wounds were all the information or evidence that Charlie needed. ‘Requiem for a fool.’

  ‘I said knock it off.’

  Valente struggled and said, ‘Noel killed your mother and I helped him get away with it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’

  Valente shook his head. ‘I wasn’t there. They called me in a panic.’

  ‘Noel and Lambert?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not Dad?’

  ‘Your dad had nothing to do with it,’ Valente said, and he coughed. Recovered and said, ‘Noel all the way. Not a nice guy.’

  Movement outside. Charlie tensed: then was astonished to see an old woman dump garbage in Valente’s bin.

  ‘That’s Mrs Oliphant,’ Valente murmured. ‘Her bin’s got a broken wheel.’

  The pulse of side-street life, thought Charlie. ‘Mum walked in on them, right? Retrieving the money from the security-van hijack?’

  Valente scoffed weakly. ‘Us? Rob a security van? Hardly. Brothel in Cranbourne that time. Seventy thousand.’

  The effort of speaking cost him; he slumped onto Charlie. Charlie straightened him again. ‘Was Dad in on the robberies?’

  Valente nodded. He coughed. His wet hand flopped to the floor, and he looked at it as if to make it levitate back onto the slickness of his mid-section.

  ‘I’ll get a towel.’

  ‘No,’ Valente croaked. ‘Stay here.’

  Fetching a towel would have helped Charlie to avoid the pictures in his head. The moment it all went wrong for his mother.

  She enters Longstaff Street, pulls up at the kerb, recognises Lambert’s Ducati, maybe recognises Saltash’s car, and barges into the house demanding to know what they’re doing there.

  ‘Where was the money?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Valente whispered.

  Liam and I had simply gathered Lambert’s gear, Charlie thought; we hadn’t looked for hiding places. In the ceiling? Under a floorboard? Behind the bathtub panel? In the tool shed?

  ‘Why was Billy Saul there?’

  Valente winced—from his own pain or from what he went on to say, Charlie couldn’t tell. ‘Wrong place, wrong time. Noel said they chased your mum into the street and there he was.’

  Billy Saul, fleeing from bullies—or, more likely by that stage, trudging along feeling miserable and thirsty—and Rose Deravin streaking out of her house in fear. Charlie visualised both attacks and swayed, one hand going to the crown of his head unconsciously.

  ‘They panicked and called you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was your idea to bury them, stage the drowning, et cetera?’

  ‘Yes,’ Valente said.

  He struggled to elaborate, thought better of it, his head slumping—then rallied weakly. ‘Couldn’t just leave two bodies lying around, and Lambert would be the first person the police would look at.’

  My fault, thought Charlie. Mine and Liam’s. If we hadn’t kicked Lambert out, he wouldn’t have needed to go back for the money. Dr Fiske would say, ‘Not your fault, Charlie, you didn’t kill anyone.’ Or she’d say, ‘If your mother had her suspicions, they’d have found another way to kill her. Not your fault.’

  Yeah, Doc, you go on telling me that.

  ‘Why the slab house?’

  Valente rallied weakly, and in his dying state was derisive. ‘How do you think Ken Wilson could afford to buy a vacant block in Swanage? He was in it too. Then he got killed and his family cleared out and…the foundations had already been dug. Better than hauling a couple of bodies out into the bush.’ Pause. ‘Didn’t occur to me they’d extend the slab.’

  A long speech for a dying cop. He swayed again. Charlie sat him up. ‘Did you tell Dad any of this?’

  ‘None of it.’

  ‘He said something to me earlier: “Look what they did to your mother”. Why would he say that?’

  Valente looked away and there was shame in him. ‘We let him think it was a warning.’

  Charlie saw the scope of it: Valente’s stranglehold on all of them. ‘Did you arrange for Lambert to rent a room in Mum’s place?’

  Valente nodded.

  None of this lets my father off the hook, Charlie thought. I have seen his feet of clay—as Mark Valente might have put it.

  ‘That ambulance is taking a while,’ he muttered.

  No reply—and Charlie felt uneasy then. He picked up Valente’s phone and checked the call history. None to triple zero; only two calls in the past half-day. One from Cabrini Hospital, the other from Noel Saltash.

  ‘You didn’t call the ambulance.’

  Valente’s eyes were damp, his skin loose, everything in him dwindling. ‘Charlie, he’s got a gun, he’s running, and I’m a goner.’

  Charlie didn’t listen. He switched to the keypad to call triple zero. Three bars of reception. But he’d barely pressed the first ‘0’ when the phone was swiped from his hands and smashed against the bulky base of the shattered vase.

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘Mark, you need an ambulance.’

  ‘I’m dying, son,’ Valente whispered. ‘Stay with me, that’s all I ask, there’s no one else.’

  I’ll stay until he dies, thought Charlie with a cold clarity that he’d lost along the way. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ve always looked out for you,’ Valente said.

  This isn’t quid pro quo, Charlie thought. ‘You telling me you ran over Jake Allardyce?’

  ‘I did. I have led a worthless life but not always have I bent it to the wills and ways of evil.’

  Charlie wondered what kind of upbringing the old cop had had. Evening light was drawing in outside, blurring the little streets and the mansions and the shacks and Noel Saltash, running.

  Charlie’s phone buzzed but he ignored it, realising that his hands were sticky. He wiped them on his pants, and that, more than anything, curdled his soul. ‘Tell me what happened tonight.’

  Valente gave a little headshake. ‘Your dad…two and two together…things said in his interrogation. He knew that DNA wasn’t mine. Had a case together where our DNA was taken for elimination.’

  ‘He rang Noel?’

  ‘Noel brought Shane here for…powwow, but things went south, and…punches thrown…he started shooting. In a panic or he might have stuck around to finish me off.’ ‘I feel panicky myself,’ Charlie said, scrambling to his feet. ‘He’s not heading for the hospital is he? I need to warn—’

  Valente grabbed his arm. ‘He’s running.’

  Charlie resettled reluctantly. ‘He drove Mum’s car to where it was dumped?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He injured himself when he hurt my mother, Charlie thought. Their blood mingled and he transferred it to the car keys. ‘Lambert followed on his bike?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charlie was itching to go. He needed a phone. But Valente seemed to sense it, and fingers manacled his wrist. ‘Stay.’

  ‘What did you tell the podcast people?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did you know Karen Wagoner’s the girl’s grandmother?’

  Valente slip
ped neatly onto his left side and his pants broke free of the blood with a little slurp.

  Charlie scrabbled around until he was on his hands and knees. He slapped Valente’s cheek.

  ‘Mark!’

  ‘She had a thing for us,’ Valente slurred. He coughed blood. ‘A thing for bad boys.’

  ‘Including Lambert?’

  ‘He bought her a Rolex…the moron.’

  And you threw a scare into her, thought Charlie, which simmered for twenty years. He sat, checked the time, wondered if Valente had a landline.

  ‘Mark?’ he said, but the word amounted to nothing.

  52

  THE STREETLIGHTS HAD come on, but the sky was still spread with the last traces of the day’s sun as Charlie grabbed Valente’s bike and pedalled madly down the slope to Tide-pool Street. Skidding into his driveway, he dumped the bike on the lawn and ran in to grab his car keys and call 000.

  Then dithered for a couple of seconds. If he turned up in the Skoda it would alert Saltash. And did he need to call an ambulance? Valente was dead.

  Did he need to call the police? Probably. Sometime. If he was a good citizen. Right now that coat didn’t fit.

  The phone was in his hand. His agitation had awoken the screen. Four missed calls from Fay, and a text. He read, Charlie dear things have changed and the doctor says it’s a matter of time so you might like to—

  Charlie didn’t read on. Instead, he pocketed the phone and raced out of the house and mounted the bike again and pelted along the potholed streets behind the clifftop mansions and down into Balinoe Beach.

  Noel Saltash lived in the head ranger’s cottage at the edge of a campground, a few metres from the creek and across the road from the store. Charlie tore into a clearing where children had built tepees from sticks and bark and plastic bags and other scraps of modern life, and dumped the bike. Evening shadows protected him now, as he stepped deeper into the trees and shrubbery that divided campsite from campsite, and campsite from ablution block. No one was camping this late in the season: he was relieved; hadn’t wanted to go knocking on tents, asking people to evacuate.

  He began to close in on the hedge surrounding the ranger’s residence, yard and maintenance shed. Stood concealed by tea-trees and took stock: a high-end Mercedes sat in the carport, a twin-cab ute with shire markings and the beach patrol buggy nearby. Lights on in the house.

  As he’d done at Valente’s, Charlie slipped through shadows to the side wall and went from window to window, peering in, and saw, on a forlorn double bed, heaped clothing and two suitcases with their lids open. Reaching the rear corner, he edged around to the kitchen window and Saltash stepped out of the cottage and shot him.

  Armed engagement training says to take a body-mass shot, not a leg or a head shot, and that’s what Saltash did—except that Charlie ducked and turned as he registered the flicker of a shadow at the back door, and the bullet tore some of his ear away. He fell onto his hip. Rolled away from the spill of light, seeking the moon shadows, their play of tricks and false targets.

  But he was making a racket in the undergrowth and Saltash came after him, and the pistol spat again; and the pain was in Charlie, and blood streamed down his neck and under his shirt, thick, warm and wet. He scooted further into the trap he’d made for himself, whipped by twigs and leaves, then stopped to listen. Nothing. He wasn’t fooled: Saltash was listening, too.

  Saltash’s labrador began a low, weary barking and Charlie fished for his phone. It was no longer in his pocket. Christ, his ear hurt. Try a run to one of the nearby houses, pound on someone’s door? Putting innocent lives in danger…

  He had no plan in mind, only jangled thoughts and nonsense, and then a small motor coughed into life. He shrank instinctively and peered through the foliage: Saltash, in his beach buggy, was trundling out of the maintenance yard and across the road to the beach.

  Then he was gone, and Charlie stumbled onto a path that took him back to the clearing and Valente’s bike. A low-speed chase, he thought—except that wasn’t very funny and he was sore, sodden, dazed and unarmed. He pedalled to the access track, dismounted to wheel the bike over the churned sand, and broke through the fringe of tea-trees to the edge of the water. If the past few minutes had been crazy hectic, the beach didn’t know about it. A benign stillness; the sleepy pinks and greys of evening; a handful of people, lover murmuring to lover, grandmother to granddaughter, father to son, letting peace settle around them.

  He wheeled the bike down to firmer sand and prepared to mount it again. Looked left through the indistinct light. Three figures, one walking slowly towards Swanage, the others shoulder-to-shoulder on a low ridge of sand, eating fish and chips. Looked right: five people, a clump of three and, further along, an adult and a toddler. A hundred metres ahead of them, Saltash. The buggy headlights dimly probing, the motor sounding a clear protest in the still air. The tide was out so he’d have a clear run beyond Point Leo if that’s what he wanted. And a beach escape made a certain kind of sense. A way of skirting around police roadblocks.

  Charlie started slowly, wobbled, gained pace, but kept clapping one hand to his ear for comfort. So much blood. It hurt like buggery. And however would he be restored to his whole self with a part of him shredded? Mad thoughts like that.

  Pumping his legs now, he gained on the ridiculous figure in his ridiculous vehicle. He passed on hissing tyres the people strolling along the beach, bumped over the sand heaped against the breakwater, then sped around the point that opened onto the half-moon stretch of sand leading to Menlo Beach. Moon shimmers on a glassy sea, and the air, still warm from the day, wrapped around him. Saltash was not far ahead now, the buggy motor still screaming—and he was bearing down on a man with a spaniel, chatting to Pat and her trio of clapped-out dogs.

  Saltash jerked on the steering wheel, veering left to pass between them and the edge of the sea, then straightened for a run along the open sand ahead—only for Pat to step into his path, waving her arms and shouting, loud enough for Charlie to hear, ‘Slow down, you maniac!’

  Brake lights. Saltash stopped. He climbed out.

  Charlie felt panic surge in him. He raced along the sand. And Pat wasn’t finished. ‘I’m allowed to walk my dogs at this time of the day. No need to come over all heavy with me.’

  A moment later Saltash was advancing on her, waving the gun and she was backing away from him, both hands raised, saying, ‘Whoa, that’s really not necess—’

  Charlie charged at them. ‘Pat, get away!’ he shouted. ‘Noel, come on. No one has to get hurt.’

  Saltash turned, snapped off a shot at Charlie; turned back to threaten Pat again and climbed into the buggy. A cough of dirty exhaust, then slow acceleration towards the other dog walker, who scrambled away, up onto the foredune at the base of the cliffs, leaving a bewildered spaniel.

  The dog ran at the buggy. Saltash slowed and shot it.

  It dropped, kicking, and the man wailed and Pat screamed.

  Charlie hadn’t decided what he’d do when he caught up to Saltash—draw alongside and leap onto a moving vehicle driven by a man with a gun? All he could do was keep chasing—and was saved from making a better decision by Pat, who ran up on Saltash’s blind side and smacked a plastic bag full of dog shit into his face. It burst.

  Saltash decelerated, clawing at his eyes. The buggy rolled into the water, spluttered, died, and they had him.

  Out of his seat and onto his belly on the sand as the owner of the dead dog shouted, ‘I’m calling the police,’ and a wait began. It seemed long to Charlie. He was no longer bleeding but felt dazed with pain and grateful for Pat, who sat on Saltash’s legs, looking stunned.

  ‘I’m not talking,’ Saltash said at one point, spitting sand from his mouth.

  ‘Good,’ said Charlie, dropping his knees into Saltash’s back.

  Their exchange seemed to animate Pat; her shock ebbed. She spat out a string of fluent accusations: Saltash was a tinpot dictator, a bully, a loser who would shoot a harmless ani
mal. Gathering her dogs beside her, she just kept going—the government, holiday-makers, shire regulations—delivered with an air of having suffered on behalf of others and knowing she’d never be thanked for it.

  Charlie tuned her out. She paused long enough to ask him about all the blood on his neck and shoulder, but he shook his head and thought about his father, dying in a hospital bed. Looked at the moon ripples between the shoreline and Phillip Island. His old beat. The way things will be now, he thought. You make an accommodation with each new bit of knowledge that comes your way, or you die. And you always die a little.

  A moon gleam caught his eye: the target pistol. He reached out, grabbed the barrel and almost tossed it into the sea, badly wanting to see it break the surface of the water, fracture the moon, but stopped himself.

  Time slowed. He sighed, shoved the pistol into his waistband.

  ‘Are we supposed to just wait?’ Pat said. ‘God he stinks.’

  Charlie cut across that. ‘Can I use your phone?’

  He was hopeless at remembering numbers, but Anna’s was there in his head. It began with 0406. Same as his.

  Garry Disher titles available from Text Publishing

  THE PENINSULA MYSTERIES:

  The Dragon Man

  Kittyhawk Down

  Snapshot

  Chain of Evidence

  Blood Moon

  Whispering Death

  Signal Loss

  THE HIRSCH NOVELS:

  Bitter Wash Road

  Peace

  Consolation

  THE WYATT THRILLERS:

  The Wyatt Butterfly

  comprising Port Vila Blues

  and Fallout

  Wyatt

  The Heat

  Kill Shot

  ____________________

  Under the Cold Bright Lights

  The Sunken Road

  The Way It Is Now

  Garry Disher has published over fifty titles across multiple genres. With a growing international reputation for his bestselling crime novels, he has won four German and three Australian awards for best crime novel of the year, and been longlisted twice for a British CWA Dagger award. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award. garrydisher.com