Only the Dead

by Ben Sanders

  ‘About the guy I shot?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I couldn’t get hold of her.’

  Hale said nothing.

  ‘How would you do it?’ Devereaux said.

  Hale thought about it. ‘I probably wouldn’t. But I guess that’s why you have an Ellen, and I don’t.’

  Devereaux said nothing. Hale looked at the ceiling. He said, ‘Would you rather die young and happy at the hand of someone you didn’t know, or old and miserable at the hand of God?’

  ‘I don’t believe in God. You don’t either.’

  ‘I know.’ He held his bottle up and watched the foam tilt back and forth. ‘Still makes me wonder, though.’

  They had another beer. Darkness settling gently, sky quilt-soft behind the glass. Devereaux didn’t depart until after eight. The stereo was off. He left Hale alone in the office. The doorway framed a nice shot of quiet musing: feet on the desk, ankles crossed, toes swaying to some remembered tune.

  He sat in the car and smoked a cigarette, window cracked to vent fumes. To his left a narrow alleyway formed a cut between buildings, restaurant patrons seated at a scatter of outdoor tables. Laughter and the smell of high-priced food. That weird juxtaposition of his own dark dilemmas against the merry good life. He found his cellphone and called Lloyd Bowen.

  ‘Sergeant. Be brief, I’m on a tight schedule.’

  ‘How is he?’

  Bowen caught the meaning: is my victim still alive? ‘He’s still got breath in his lungs, but he’s not in great shape. He’s had surgery to remove the bullets, but he’s still unconscious.’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘Out of the question, sergeant. It’s too apologetic. It’s an admission of liability. We can’t have people thinking you did something wrong.’

  ‘So you think I acted appropriately?’

  He heard a door slam: maybe Bowen dodging eavesdroppers. ‘No, I think this whole thing has been one major fuck-up. But we can’t have the general public knowing that.’

  Devereaux didn’t answer.

  Bowen said, ‘I don’t want you near the guy, so do yourself a favour and stay at home. We’ll be seeing you tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘Have your story straight.’

  SIX

  MONDAY, 13 FEBRUARY, 8.24 P.M.

  The Mitch Duvall bachelor pad was light on comfort: the living room boasted a single chair and a television. The kitchen had a fridge and a lot of vacant cupboard space. Neighbours were a mere wall’s width away. Cheap baffling facilitated easy eavesdropping.

  Mustering affection was a struggle. It was a narrow slice of a long two-storey complex that backed a busy arterial feeding the Northern Motorway. He’d only been in three weeks. The bulk of his possessions were still boxed, relegated to spare room status until he had the time to place them permanently. The master bedroom doubled as sleeping quarters and study. He was trialling an integrated bed/workstation layout: his laptop and paperwork littered across the mattress.

  He downed a pre-dinner beer, then showered. Ten minutes in the ring with McCarthy had left him shaky. He alternated hard doses of hot and cold to shock himself back to even keel.

  The bathroom wasn’t ideal. The low mirror left his six-foot-three figure headless. He leaned on the sink and ducked to eye level with his reflection. It wasn’t what it used to be. Age had chamfered off the hard edges. He preferred his younger version. Time had softened him to a 2XL shadow of his former self.

  He dressed and did a once-over of still-empty cupboards, drifted through to the spare bedroom. A wall to wall span of sealed boxes reached head-high. His no-stove contingency was to resort to canned food. He had peaches, fruit salad, creamed corn, spaghetti, beans, soup, all neatly packaged. He chose peaches. A fork and a can opener from the next box, and dinner was under way.

  He sat in the living room and ate in front of a muted television. His story to The Don had been slightly embellished. He’d done five months with CIB, all of them as a probationary tag-along as opposed to full detective. He’d joined the police in ’eighty-one. It was poor timing. The Springbok tour had kicked off. The decision of whether or not to host a rugby team from a state blighted by apartheid had divided society. Liberals said send them home. Racists and rugby fans said let them stay. Violence and mass protests ensued, and one of the blackest marks on the nation’s modern history served as Mitchell Duvall’s law enforcement induction.

  He was twenty-one years old, five months clear of a rough break-up, wedding plans burned. The tour was a perfect cure for a miserable split. He was dropped straight onto the front lines, posted to Eden Park for the third test on twelve September. Protestors turned out in full force. The politics of it was lost on him, and he couldn’t have cared less. He couldn’t even spell apartheid, and who knew where Soweto was? He left all opinions on the matter unformed, and used his tattered relationship as fuel to lash out uninhibited.

  It was paradise.

  Near-frenzied cops baton-whipped peaceful marchers with manic devotion. He joined in wholeheartedly: a pissed-off twenty-one-year-old in full riot gear versus unarmed protestors. The odds were favourable. He wasn’t worried about consequences. He left two guys prone and bloodied on Sandringham Road. Pulped strangers the corollary of his own repressed frustration. It felt good. He’d needed it. He felt empowered. It purged baggage he’d wanted to ditch for a long time.

  It was a rush, but it didn’t last long. His conscience surfaced and labelled him a disgrace. Sandringham Road flashbacks kept him sleepless. He sank into depression. He felt his thoughts growing increasingly irrational. It was a bizarre experience, an onset he was aware of, but one he could do nothing to prevent. A forced bystander to his own state of mind.

  Paranoia took hold.

  Cancer was the main concern. He began checking his skin for lesions, up to sixty times a day when he wasn’t on patrol, as often as he could when he was. He feared the toilet. Every piss meant a ball-check for lumps. He worried about bowel cancer, started holding in his shits in case he spotted a blood clot.

  He confessed all to a doctor and won himself three months’ stress leave. He was back at work by February ’eighty-three, minus the cancer obsession, still unhappy. He wanted to be a detective, but his applications were rejected. He suspected his forced leave killed his eligibility.

  His parents died in ’ninety-five: father first, his mother eight months later. He organised the funerals: he had no siblings; it was his responsibility by default. He stayed on autopilot that whole year, numbly running through the motions. He couldn’t hold down a relationship. Thoughts of 12 September 1981 pervaded his psyche, told him he wasn’t worthy of other people. Some ingrained self-loathing worked to sabotage anything that matured beyond a casual fling. It didn’t fade with time, either. He entered CIB as a probationary officer in 1997, loveless and unloved. It was a short-lived stay. Psychologically, it was too big a load. His first tag-along case was a woman named Marie Langford, beaten to death by her husband. A traffic patrol pulled the guy over and found the body in the back of his van. She’d been dead two days. Duvall saw the confession. He watched through the one-way glass, ostensibly to glean interrogation techniques. But the triviality of the motive stunned him: I’d just had enough of her lip.

  It was a turning point for him. He took a fiercer approach to his job. Restraint began to ebb away. Innocent until proven guilty began to carry less and less weight. His police career ended five months later, following an assault accusation: a burglary suspect claimed excessive use of force. Facial bruising helped reinforce the claim. Duvall denied it. Except a security camera had captured the moment. The evidence was still marginal. The suspect had been high on heroin at the time, and the footage was grainy monochrome. He offered his resignation in exchange for no criminal prosecution. They bought it, and he was out the door with a vehement ‘good riddance’.

  He went private. The clean record and police experience made h
im a shoo-in. He got his PI’s licence. But work was thin on the ground. He did debt collection and bar security, pseudo-legal muscle work in place of plum investigative jobs. Rental income off his parents’ house kept his nose above the breadline.

  June 2002, he applied for work with a private military corporation headquartered in London. It was worth a shot. He bulked out his CV with falsified Armed Offenders Squad and Special Tactics Group experience. The gamble paid off, and he was posted to Iraq as part of a three-man team protecting a group of BBC journalists operating in Baghdad.

  It was madness: 1981 replayed on a colossal scale. Private military corporations operated unpoliced. Baghdad was full of cowboy operatives doing whatever they wanted. He saw stuff that rendered the Springbok tour bland by comparison. He pulled out in 2005, giddy with the mayhem. Back to repossession work that felt pedestrian by comparison.

  He left his empty tin in the sink, bent lid gaping wide, and went through to the bedroom. Newspaper clippings and handwritten notes swamped the quilt in crisscrossed disarray, laptop tethered to the wall by its power cable. He stood in the doorway and beheld the clutter.

  ‘Let this be my atonement,’ he said.

  SEVEN

  MONDAY, 13 FEBRUARY, 9.12 P.M.

  Repo work.

  Hale had an evening appointment with an Epsom-based company executive a little tight on investor payments.

  The guy’s name was Paul Dryer. He part-owned a finance company, recently insolvent, leaving two thousand creditors one hundred and eighty million dollars out of pocket.

  The client in this case was a highly pissed-off contingent of investors. The brief was simple: they’d financed hard-earned capital, said capital had been squandered, the company was being investigated for fraud, they wanted back the ninety-million-dollar dividend Mr Dryer had paid himself prior to collapse.

  Hale took his Ford Escort. He was groomed for upscale evening work: Ray-Bans, a fresh haircut, a lustrous shoe shine. The address was a two-storey concrete tilt-slab in pearly whitewash, spared from liquidation by virtue of family trust ownership. A sixty-strong party was in full swing. Cars crowded both kerbs, jammed in sans breathing room. He did an idle cruise-past and parked around the corner. An open door had spilled the party into a front courtyard. He strode through calm, straight into the house. Smile in place, ‘Excuse me’s’ in triplicate as he navigated the throng.

  Rembrandt prints and white plaster adorned the entry. He hung a right through a closed door and entered a garage. Motion-triggered halogens draped a liquid gleam across a late-model Range Rover Sport, a Ferrari 360, an Aston Martin DB9.

  He brushed past hallway-dawdlers and checked out the back. More boy’s toys: a MacBook Pro fed music to a thousand-watt stereo system in a leathered living room. Through a ranch slider six people sprawled in a frothing spa pool, brimming wine glasses pinched aloft.

  He found Dryer upstairs in a glass-fronted snooker room overlooking the spa. A game was under way. Dryer was lining up a shot. A handful of tipsy opponents used pool cues as props. Hale recognised some faces: Detective Sergeant Frank Briar, esteemed defence lawyer Ross Margrave QC. Margrave gave him a nod.

  Briar stared, stepped in whisper-close. He was a tall man verging fifty. A rigorous alcohol regime had left his eyes bloodshot for the past ten years. Hale knew his divorce and heart attack count were at two apiece. Briar said, ‘The fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Socialising.’

  ‘You hear Mr Devereaux’s got himself in trouble?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that.’

  ‘He shot a suspect. It’s what I call a shit result.’

  ‘God knows I saw plenty of that, working for you.’

  Briar offered no reaction. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I told you. Socialising.’

  ‘Yeah, and the pope’s a Muslim. I know you. Don’t make a scene. You and Devereaux in the same day would be too much for anyone.’

  ‘I’ll keep things cooled. I don’t want to spark heart attack three.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Hale said, ‘Are you on the clock?’

  Briar raised a half-gone beer. ‘What do you think?’

  Hale nodded. ‘You always seemed more suited to criminal perpetration than investigation.’

  ‘You’re a real hoot.’

  ‘Yeah. Stay out of my way. It always takes a lot of self-control not to punch you in the face. Have a nice night.’

  Briar laughed, and Hale stepped away. Dryer was prepping for another shot. He found his line and paused. His target wasn’t evident: the baize still held a random scatter. He took his eye off the table as Hale moved towards him. He was a tall, fit-looking man in his early forties.

  Dryer said, ‘Have we met?’ Party volume made him shout.

  ‘Must have, if you invited me.’

  Dryer looked confused.

  Hale said, ‘I’m kidding. You’ve never had the pleasure.’

  He gave the room a once-over. Wall-mounted speakers did the downstairs MacBook’s bidding. A side bar held a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s, glass tumblers loaded with dregs-stained ice. Briar was at the window, making a call. Maybe a Devereaux-related shooting update. Margrave was with a trio in the corner.

  Dryer said, ‘You spoke to Frank when you came in; I assumed you work with him.’

  ‘I’ve known Frank a long time. He was my patrol supervisor for a while.’

  ‘You’re a cop?’

  Hale shook his head. ‘Not any more. Right now, I’m kind of a repo man.’

  Something clicked. Dryer laughed and found his line again. He jabbed a couple of short practices, sawed back and forth on the web of his thumb, drove through on his shot. He scored three glancing contacts that did little more than shake up the spacing. He leaned his cue against the side of the table.

  ‘What are you repo-ing?’ He sounded like he could guess if he had to.

  ‘Ninety million dollars,’ Hale said.

  Dryer made a show of pocket-patting. He wasn’t worried. ‘I don’t have it on me.’

  Hale said, ‘I understand your investors managed to claw back two cents in the dollar, so I’m glad you can still afford Dolby.’

  ‘You can either leave now under your own steam, or security will give you a hand.’

  ‘Don’t get any misconceptions about what you can make me do.’

  ‘Are you some sort of tough guy?’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose that’s what you’d call it.’

  Hale turned and poured an inch of the Jack into a clean tumbler. Dryer followed.

  ‘I love that you think you can just help yourself.’

  ‘Could be worse. I could have stolen ninety million dollars.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve got some photos to show you.’

  ‘I’m not really interested.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks for the whisky.’

  ‘What are they?’

  Hale put a hand in a jacket pocket, came out with a flash drive in two fingers. ‘I thought we could go somewhere quiet.’

  Dryer paused a moment. The flash drive triggered something: a suspicion this was real. He jerked his head, signalled Hale to follow. They went through to an adjacent office. A Mac computer waited patiently atop a glass desk. Dryer sat down behind it. Hale put his back to the door. Dense panelling all but blocked out party noise.

  Dryer tried some drawers, found a pack of cigarettes. He lit one. The tip did a seismograph wiggle as he spoke: ‘I’ve got cops in here, lawyers, the whole caboodle. Don’t think you can walk in off the street and scare me.’

  Hale said, ‘You lost a hundred and eighty million dollars. I’m surprised you haven’t scared yourself.’

  Dryer blew some smoke. ‘The market fucked out. Get over it.’

  ‘It’s the nice fat dividend you took that makes me a bit unhappy.’

  ‘It was legal.’

  ‘Legal and fair aren’t necessarily the same thing. And I’m a bit of a stickler for the
latter.’

  He tossed the flash drive across the desk into Dryer’s lap.

  ‘Take a look.’

  Dryer put the cigarette on the desk, plugged the flash drive into the Mac. The tint on his face changed as the pictures loaded. He mouse-clicked through a few images. His expression slackened.

  ‘Fuck you. You had me followed?’ He found the cigarette by touch and returned it to his mouth, kept clicking.

  ‘No. I did it myself.’

  ‘Jesus. There are hundreds of files in here. You piece of shit. Are these all me?’

  ‘You’ll see photographs of yourself in four different motor vehicles, none of which was listed on your Statement of Assets and Liabilities. Neither was the yacht you keep down at the Viaduct. I’ve got shots of that too.’

  Dryer passed a sleeve across his mouth. ‘You’re disgusting. This is invasion of privacy. This is disgraceful.’

  Hale said, ‘It’s the sort of thing that gets liquidators pissed off. Fraudsters being cagey about their possessions. It’s another crime in itself.’

  Dryer looked up. ‘The hearing’s pending, I haven’t been found—’

  ‘Yeah, but they don’t investigate people they think are innocent. You know?’

  Dryer said nothing. He put the cigarette back on the desk.

  ‘So here’s the deal,’ Hale said. ‘Pull your albeit legally acquired ninety-million-dollar dividend out of the trust account by close of business tomorrow, or Wednesday morning I’ll lodge a notice with the Financial Markets Authority that you weren’t entirely honest when it came to asset disclosure.’

  ‘Photos can be doctored.’

  ‘I’m a licensed private investigator and a former police officer. My professionalism is beyond reproach.’

  ‘I can’t move that much money that quickly.’

  ‘Yeah, you can. Pull some favours.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘Check images one ninety-eight and ninety-nine; might give you a hurry-up.’

  Dryer did as directed. The file opened. Dryer paled. His mouth slackened. ‘Oh, fuck. You bastard … you bastard. This is blackmail.’