Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing

by Lord, Gabrielle

  ‘He’d be toey as hell,’ she said. ‘And paranoid about security. Angie told me he’s got his own counter-surveillance team.’

  She thought about the bodies of two dealers, rumoured to have tried to brass Fayed, who’d been found in abandoned scrubland recently, dead from heroin overdoses. She took his hands and held them tightly. ‘I wish you weren’t doing this job,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t they get one of the young cowboys to do it?’

  ‘Listen here, woman. I know how to handle myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t need you to be worrying about me.’

  She considered further. ‘If I knew where you were going to be each day,’ she said, ‘I could get Spinner or Mike to hang around where you are. That way, you’ve always got some sort of back-up if something goes wrong.’

  ‘Gems, it’s a crazy idea. And it wouldn’t work. I’m all over the place. I have to move fast sometimes and the people I’m dealing with don’t give much warning of a meeting. And I certainly don’t want you hanging around. You know how that could compromise things for me.’

  ‘Well,’ she said a moment later, ‘maybe I could keep an eye on Fayed for you. Keep you posted.’

  Steve squeezed her hands gently. ‘Gemma, get real. Physical surveillance is useless with someone like him anyway.’ He kissed her again. ‘After those Royal Commission tapes men like Fayed are paranoid.’ This was the first time he’d mentioned Fayed’s name, Gemma noted. He put one of her hands to his lips and kissed it. ‘Now go to sleep,’ he said. ‘Stop asking questions.’

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this job,’ she said. ‘Something’s been hanging over me for the last few weeks. A premonition or something . . .’

  ‘You’re sounding like a copper’s wife,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘And I get the feeling,’ she said, ‘that you don’t want me anywhere near you.’

  ‘Too right I don’t,’ he said. ‘You know my rule.’

  ‘Yes, I do. The less I know, the safer you are,’ she quoted like a good girl.

  ‘And the safer you are,’ he said, leaning up on his elbow, looking down at her sternly.

  •

  Steve’s side of the bed was empty when she woke an hour later than usual. She lay there, sure she’d been woken by someone who had just that second left the room.

  ‘Steve?’ she called. There was no answer. She was alone in the apartment. An awful sense of dread immobilised her; the smoky aftershock of a nightmare still fogged her mind. She pulled the blankets tighter around her naked body, remembering the tail end of the dream. A huge meteorite, its jewel-like facets gleaming in the anti-light of deep space, was rushing at her. Then she was standing in some windy place, an avenue of lions stretching behind her, looking to the heavens through the immensity of light years of distance, sensing the meteorite’s presence as it raced through time and space in her direction. Ahead lay a dark lake in which the moon swam. She recalled the lions from the dream, their bleached features blunted by aeons of erosion.

  Finally, she got up and as she made coffee, she pulled out her book on the isles of Greece and flicked through it until she found the subject of her dream, Delos and the Avenue of Lions, beside the Sacred Lake. A series of lions like the one sitting on the bench in the boatshed, stretched away into the distance. I must have seen this picture and forgotten it, she thought to herself. She recalled another lake somewhere, renowned for the huge meteor that had plunged into it. Feeling she’d explained the dream to herself, she closed the book.

  When she was making the bed, she trod on something. Bending down, she saw the heavy gold zodiac charm on the floor. In the bright light of day, the curled stylised scorpion merely looked gaudy. Lions and a scorpion, she thought, all before breakfast. She picked it up and put it away in a drawer. I’d better let Steve know it’s here, she thought. His ‘girlfriend’ will be cranky that he’s lost her gift to him. And, despite herself, she couldn’t help smiling in satisfaction.

  She had breakfast inside because, although the rain had stopped, the wind had swung into a gusty south-easter, churning the ocean into white tips. Out to sea, she could see several rain showers and a long container ship sliding along the murky horizon. She put the gas heater on, loving to see the red-gold filigree it formed on its ceramic grid, and munched on Kit’s cumquat marmalade with her toast and coffee. She looked around her living area: a large, open space with lounge, dining table and chairs, the cedar sideboard—the only piece of furniture from her childhood home—polished floorboards partly covered in a Persian rug and, opening out from that, the long timber deck where she often sat in good weather with her laptop under a striped beach umbrella, overlooking the sea. Her bedroom, once the formal dining room of the original house, from the days when people had family dinners, was tucked away with the bathroom, behind another door to the right of the long blue lounge. She had everything necessary for contentment, she told herself in an effort to dislodge the last of the nightmare’s influence, but she jumped as Spinner’s voice crackled on the two-way down the hall, past the door that signalled her private domain.

  She took the last of her toast into her office.

  ‘Tracker Three,’ Spinner’s voice filled her office. ‘Tracker Three,’ he repeated. ‘Copy please, Base.’ From time to time Gemma still liked to get out on the road herself. She unhoused the radio. ‘Good morning, Spinner. What’s happening?’

  ‘The target is still with his girlfriend,’ said Spinner. ‘I’ve been sitting off her place now for two hours. He arrived here a couple of hours ago, she came out to greet him, he pulled her into the car and they couldn’t wait. I can wrap this one up. You should see what I got on video!’

  Gemma thought of the target’s wife who would also receive a copy of the action tomorrow.

  ‘I won’t bother taking it to her workplace today,’ said Spinner. ‘I’ll drop in on the Rock Breaker instead and see what’s cooking there. Then maybe the Big Limp this arvo.’

  These were insurance company jobs. Both the Rock Breaker and the Big Limp were collecting compo payments because, according to their medical reports, they couldn’t get out of bed without help. Over the last two days, Spinner had obtained excellent footage of the Rock Breaker building an elaborate fishpond and waterfall in his backyard. Spinner had also followed him up to the Blue Mountains—despite the fact that the Rock Breaker maintained that driving a car was impossible—where he’d obtained clear evidence on video of the Rock Breaker pilfering large slabs of bush rock as well. National Parks and Wildlife might have something to say about that, Gemma thought. They had him cold, lifting and arranging rocks that must have weighed nearly as much as he did. Spinner also by now had good film of the Big Limp doing endless laps of his swimming pool and bench presses in his timber and glass living room. But when anyone knocked, the Big Limp could only hobble painfully to open the door, limping and lurching as if one leg was inches shorter than the other. Insurance work was the bread and butter of her business.

  ‘Spinner, you’re a legend,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ was his modest reply. ‘Are you coming to Mike’s party tonight?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to introduce Rose to you.’ Spinner had been cautiously dating a woman whose Greek Orthodox practice was a challenge to his fundamentalist position. For Spinner, coffee with full cream milk was decadent.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I want an early night tonight. I’ll be late up tomorrow.’ There was a silence and Gemma could feel Spinner’s disapproval over the ether.

  ‘Look, Boss,’ he said, his voice revealing concern. ‘It’s not my business, but you should tell Steve about that job you’re doing for Shelly. He’d hit the roof if he knew. You can’t have a relationship that’s based in dishonesty.’ Spinner had a righteous edge to him, honed, Gemma felt sure, by his adherence to the charismatic church he attended far too often in her estimation. She wished now she hadn’t told him about her friend
Shelly’s approach to her on behalf of the street girls to investigate the recent spate of violent attacks.

  ‘It’s not dishonesty,’ she said, feeling defensive. ‘It’s discretion. I don’t have to tell him everything I do. He doesn’t tell me everything.’

  ‘No,’ Spinner agreed. ‘But what you’re planning tomorrow night is dangerous, ma’am.’ Spinner only called her ‘ma’am’ when he was pissed off with her.

  ‘I’ve spent years working with dangerous,’ she said. ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Was your job. You turned in your badge and your gun years ago. What if he attacks you?’

  ‘We want him to do that,’ she said. ‘Then we’ve got him. We’ll match him to the physical evidence—’

  ‘What physical evidence?’

  ‘The Analytical Laboratory’s got a nice little amp of seminal protein and a DNA profile of this particular brute. All they need is something to match it against and snap! We take another nasty piece of work off the streets for a while.’

  ‘And just who’s this “we”?’ said Spinner in a lofty tone. ‘I’m not licensed to take on an armed man and neither are you.’ Spinner was barely five feet tall. ‘You could be dead before I get to you. I could lose you in traffic. Anything could go wrong. That’s why you really shouldn’t do this. What if you get in the car and he pulls a knife?’

  ‘He’s a basher, not a slicer,’ she said, trying to laugh over the chill she felt. ‘He doesn’t use a knife.’

  ‘Yet,’ said Spinner. ‘But like you say, it’s not my business.’

  Gemma was trying not to remember a time on the street years back when a man struck out at her with a knife and how terrifying it was despite her uniform and handy service pistol.

  ‘Once you get in a car with a stranger,’ Spinner was saying ‘you’ve lost control of the situation. I don’t have to tell you that. It’s crazy.’

  ‘I’ll have Mike,’ she said.

  ‘What’s he supposed to do? Wave goodbye? Once you get into that vehicle you could have the SAS surrounding the area and still get into trouble.’

  ‘Speaking of Mike,’ she asked, wanting to change the subject ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said, signing off, not wanting to say too much over the radio. Gemma rehoused her receiver.

  Mike Moody, the new operative she’d hired not long ago, until recently an agent with the Australian Federal Police and broodily good-looking, seemed to be shaping up well. His reports, although never a match for Spinner’s clear and succinct contemporaneous notes, were intelligent and well observed. Mike had worked on computer crime and was up to date with the latest in electronic surveillance and counter-surveillance. As a rule, Gemma was very wary about employing ex-police, knowing from her own experience of eleven years in the job how slack they could be, golfing instead of sitting in hot cars all day, watching some small-time fraudster’s house. But Mike had been personally recommended. Just like the crims, Gemma thought with a smile. Everyone wants personal introductions these days. It’s the only way in anywhere—and that goes for any milieu, she knew. Her phone rang.

  ‘Mike’s good.’ Spinner’s voice brought her back to the present, picking up where their radio conversation had left off. And alerted her. After working with him for years, Gemma had a sixth sense for what Spinner was thinking.

  ‘I can hear a qualification in your voice,’ she said. ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘Maybe I’m too suspicious,’ said Spinner, ‘but I can’t help wondering why an ex-federal cop with his experience would want to do this sort of work.’

  Spinner’s words mirrored her own thoughts exactly. She’d asked Mike Moody this very question during the initial interview.

  ‘Why did he leave the job?’ Spinner asked.

  ‘Personal reasons. His marriage was in trouble.’

  ‘So it helps a marriage to leave your job?’ Spinner’s voice was dry with disbelief.

  ‘Apparently,’ said Gemma, ‘the missus wasn’t happy about being married to a mere federal agent. She felt he should be grander by now—at least an inspector or a chief.’

  ‘She’s going to be even less happy married to a sneaky private eye. Did you check him out good?’ said Spinner whose grasp of grammar had been curtailed by becoming apprenticed as a jockey when he was under fifteen.

  ‘Of course I did,’ returned Gemma, a trifle peeved. ‘I checked him out real good. I know his ex-boss in Canberra.’

  Working on the road as a surveillance operative is a very special calling, she knew, and although Spinner was a natural and she was blessed to have him, she was realistic enough to know that only a few people were really suited to it. Mike Moody, despite his good references and solid work so far, still had to prove himself. He’d done some routine jobs with insurance frauds for her but Spinner was still the man for anything delicate. Or difficult. Or Gemma did it herself. She was hoping both Mike and her other new operative, Louise Chapple would train up to be as good as the little ex-jock. It was the sort of work that required affability, ease with people of every sort, an understanding of human nature, a sharp flexibility for when things went arse-up, as well as the capacity to remain unseen day after day if need be, while the target is tracked.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Spinner. ‘We’ll see how he goes with the Wicked Black Swan.’

  Fourteen-year-old Belinda Swann was neither wicked nor black, but Spinner’s penchant for interesting nicknames for his targets overrode the facts of the matter. In this case the girl’s ex-boyfriend, now an ex-police officer as well, was facing charges of sexual intercourse with an underage person. He had requested Gemma’s aid.

  ‘She told me she was twenty,’ he’d said. ‘And I believed her. Why the hell wouldn’t I? She told me she worked for Qantas. She’s nearly as tall as me and takes a C cup. Now I find out she’s fucking fourteen! Her father’s a superintendent and he wants my balls. You know what they’ll do in court. Dress her in short socks and pigtails. And I’ll look like a bloody child molester.’

  Gemma had given Mike Moody the Belinda Swann brief to see what he could find and Mike had sat off the Swann household every night for the last week, waiting to get something—anything—on Belinda that might help the defence. But either the girl had found renewed interest in schoolwork or, as was more likely, she’d been ‘gated’ by her overbearing father, because all he’d got so far was Belinda doing her homework, watching television and throwing leaves, sticks and dirt into her father’s swimming pool.

  ‘Mike Moody’s references are the best,’ she told Spinner.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said again. ‘I’m only wondering. Now tell me. What’s on your mind lately?’

  ‘Lions and scorpions and outer space calamities,’ she joked. ‘I dreamed of a black meteorite heading my way.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Spinner?’ She was sometimes irritated by his tendency towards the gnomic or scriptural or both.

  ‘Something’s troubling you. Something’s going on.’

  ‘You know I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment,’ she said, as if he was merely stating the obvious.

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How long have I been working for you now?’

  ‘Spinner. I don’t need this discovery learning crap. Tell me straight.’

  ‘You can’t hide it from me. Something’s haunting you.’

  A long time later, she remembered those words and wondered if things might have gone differently if she’d told Spinner and investigated earlier.

  ‘You are,’ she said, ‘with your fundo bullshit.’ That phrase usually stopped him in his tracks. ‘We were discussing Mike Moody.’

  ‘Like I said,’ he said after a pause, ‘maybe I’m too
suspicious.’

  ‘Stay too suspicious, Spinner,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s what makes you a great operative.’ She was about to ring off but thought of something else. ‘What about Louise? How’s she shaping up?’ Louise had joined the business a few months before Mike.

  ‘She’s good,’ he said. ‘She’s persistent. And she doesn’t stick out in a crowd. That’s a good quality to have in our game. Only time will tell if she’s suited in the long term.’

  Spinner rang off and Gemma put more coffee to perk, setting up the cups, the milk and sugar, and poured herself a big mug before switching on the computer. For a while, she couldn’t shake Spinner’s words about haunting out of her mind. It was good, she thought, to have work to take her mind off nightmares and electronic pests.

  She rang Minkie Montreau and made an appointment to visit her at her house next morning. Then she walked into her office and logged on. She typed in her password. Her heart sank—she had eighty-nine new emails. ‘Shit!’ she said out loud. No wonder Spinner reckons I’m haunted. He’s right on the money there. This hostile electronic assault, combined with her concern for Steve, was too much. She needed to work off the resulting unease with a good sweat.

  Back in her bedroom, she put on her joggers, deciding on a quick run around the cliffs to work off the emotions she could feel tightening her body. She trotted outside, stretching her arms and doing lateral bends to each side, warming up, then started jogging up the steps to the roadway. Something moved at the very edges of her peripheral vision and she thought she heard a faint sound, making her stop and frown. Mid-step she’d turned, looking back down to the front garden. It was damply innocent. Just the trees dripping and the lawn sodden after the rain, a long rose cane that needed pruning moving slightly against the window of her office. Maybe it had only been that. The suspect cane grew in front of the dense, polished greenery of the coprosma or looking-glass bush that covered the lower half of the window in her office. She waited a few moments more, but the garden remained exactly as it had been, cold and still. She turned back to the steps and continued on her way, looking up at a grey and featureless sky. The nightmare was still haunting her.