Black Ice

by Leah Giarratano

  Jill opened the map book next to her; she would use it to cover her face if she was too closely observed. She'd parked just outside the cemetery, with a clear view of the entrance of the pub. This place was working class all the way. She didn't imagine the owners would bother spending anything on it to turn it into a yuppie establishment. She couldn't see the cocktail-set dining alfresco on a warm summer evening with this view over the graveyard.

  If Agassi and Urgill were only mid-level crooks, they wouldn't advance a lot further with Skye and CK as friends, she thought. All she'd had to do the night before was mention that her ex was interested in buying five grand's worth of ice and they'd been so impressed that they'd even offered phone numbers. They'd told her all about these good friends: where they met them, their going rate. She'd learned that Mondays and Wednesdays were their business nights, out here at this hotel.

  Ingrid had been more interested in her mentioning her supposed ex-partner. 'I thought you said he'd bashed you,' she'd commented.

  'Well, not bashed, exactly . . .'

  Ingrid was drinking wine from a lime-green coffee mug that could also have doubled as a soup bowl. Micro-fine spider veins rambled across her nose and chin; the rosacea of the alcoholic. The veins engorged when she had something to drink. Last night her whole face had glowed crimson.

  'Krystal!' she began. 'That's denial talking, that is. And that shit can get you killed. I see it all the time around here. Girls leave their bloke because he flogs 'em and two weeks later he's been forgiven and it's all lovey-dovey again.'

  'Well, he was good to me a lot of the time,' Jill had tried.

  'Oh, you've got it bad, Krystal,' Ingrid had said. 'He'll be back on the scene soon,' she turned to Skye, 'you mark my words.'

  'Enough of this bullshit,' said CK. 'Are we going to have another drink, or what?'

  Jill had held up the empty cask bladder, a flaccid, silver sack.

  'Time we was goin' anyway, love,' said Skye. 'People to see, places to go.' She had stood and swayed, held onto the back of the chair.

  Now, out the front of the Station Hotel, in her salmon-coloured Magna, Jill thought about Ingrid's comments about boyfriends. 'Oh shit!' she suddenly exclaimed aloud. 'Scotty!'

  She grabbed her mobile from the passenger's seat. She had told him she'd give him a call after she'd had lunch with Cassie, proposing that they meet up to work out. After the fight with her sister she had completely forgotten him. She opened the phone and scrolled for his number. She groaned in frustration and slammed her hand against the wheel. She hated these calls. The I'm Sorry call. The guilty feeling made her angry. Maybe she could just put it off. She was at work right now, after all. She felt a brief flash of relief at the thought of avoiding the call.

  But she knew from experience that the longer she put this off, the bigger the problem would become for her. She had completely lost contact with almost all of her friends this way. She owed them a call, meant to call back, but had put it off, and then felt guilty. She couldn't bear it when people tried to rub in the fact that she'd been slack. The very few people she was close to never tried to guilt her when she contacted them unexpectedly after an absence of months or even years.

  She couldn't lose touch with Scotty.

  She hit the call button.

  'Sorry,' she said, as soon as he answered. Got that out of the way.

  'Yo, J,' he said. 'What? You didn't want to be humiliated again?' He thought he could beat her in every sport; they'd yet to find one where that wasn't the case, but she wasn't done trying.

  'Lunch was horrible,' she said.

  'Yeah?'

  Jill leaned her head back into the headrest. 'Are you busy right now, Scott?'

  'Good to go,' he said. 'So it wasn't the sister bonding session you'd hoped for?'

  She groaned. 'I was awful. I pretty much called her a crack-head. Said her friends were all drug-fucked.'

  'Whoa. What got into you?'

  'Almost a bottle of wine.'

  'For lunch?'

  'It was Cassie's house, Scotty, what can I say?'

  'Yeah, I get that with her, but that's not like you.'

  'It's something I'm having to learn at the moment,' she said. 'When in Rome . . .'

  'That's a worry, given the way you're earning a living at the moment, the people you're hanging around.'

  'I've got it covered, Scotty,' she said. 'Anyway, I'm really sorry. I completely forgot I was going to call you. I just felt shocking, and I went straight home.'

  'That's okay,' he said. 'What about a game of squash and a swim on Wednesday night?'

  She'd be right here at the pub on Wednesday night.

  'No good,' she said, 'working. Thursday?'

  'I'm off to Goulburn Thursday morning,' he said. 'Gonna do some training down there for the recruits.'

  'This is new,' she said.

  'Gotta do something exciting,' he said. 'It's boring around here without you.'

  'Should be fun,' she said. 'How long will you be gone?'

  'Andreessen wouldn't let us stay the whole semester, so we're just doing a two-week course. Ethics in Practice. Can you believe it?'

  Jill had a sudden premonition. 'Us?' she said.

  'Yeah, me and Emma Gibson.'

  'Well, isn't she industrious?'

  Emma Gibson. Long raven hair, clear grey eyes. A man killer. And she'd wanted this man for as long as Jill had known him.

  'Are you jealous?' he said.

  'Are you crazy?' she replied.

  'It's going to be like camp down there, you know.'

  'And?'

  'Well, you know, you get really close to your bunk buddies, that sort of thing.'

  'Well, you have fun with your bunk buddy, Hutchinson. I've gotta go.'

  'Wait! Jill. Don't hang up. I'm just teasing. I like it when you worry about other girls.'

  'Emma Gibson is not another girl, Scotty. She's . . . oh, don't worry.' Jill felt stupid; she didn't know what she wanted to say.

  'Don't you worry, Jackson. I'm gonna come home and we're going back to that beach.'

  The beach where she'd tried to kiss him a couple of months ago. He'd stopped her, worried she would freeze him out the next day, blame her actions on the two glasses of wine she'd had that night.

  'We'll see,' she said, 'and now I really do have to go.' She'd spotted the targets walking into the pub. She rang off.

  Well, well. Jill pulled the map book up to her face and peered over the top. There, shaking hands with her suspects, was a new contestant in tonight's festivities.

  Kasem Nader.

  28

  Monday 8 April, 9 pm

  'Hey baby,' a whisper, 'got any blow?'

  Seren had gone over a thousand possible ways to approach Christian and finally she'd gone with this. She figured that an addict like Christian would know that anything could be forgiven when you have to score. It was the only opening he would understand. He'd figure she was desperate, that she'd picked up some bad habits in gaol. He'd have control.

  It worked beautifully.

  Well, it was either that or the shirt.

  'Close your mouth, sweetie.' She touched his face. 'People are staring.'

  He drew her close and nuzzled her neck. 'Now, when are you going to get used to people staring at you, Seren?' he said, his lips barely touching her ear.

  'I really thought you'd never talk to me again,' said Christian, an hour later.

  The music was more mellow in the dining area of the club. Deep, velvet armchairs and retro lamps suspended just above the low tables aimed for the illusion that you were eating in a friend's lounge room. The table was spread with tapas, and a silver ice bucket at the side held a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

  'Well, you know that I do despise you, darling, and if I were you, I wouldn't turn my back while I'm holding any cutlery,' Seren said, 'but I figure, how long is a girl supposed to hold a grudge?'

  'I'm so sorry, Seren. I just panicked at the last minute. The advice I got is t
hat if I represented you and got caught, I would have lost my job. I wouldn't have been able to practise law again.'

  'And it's not as if you could have got me off the hook, anyway, Christian. There's a mandatory sentence for that much ice.'

  'Exactly, so we would both have gone down.'

  'And what would have been the point of that?' she said. Fluttered her eyelids.

  'I'm so pleased you're being reasonable about this, darling.' Christian covered her hand with his own. He turned on his megawatt smile.

  She gave him hers. 'Oh, I'll be reasonable, darling,' she said, 'but we'll be taking up where we left off. Starting with dinner, at Altitude I think it was.'

  He leaned back into the cushions and laughed.

  'And next time, sweetie,' she continued, 'when you have a little gift like that for me,' she leaned forwards across the table, giving him something to think about when she left him tonight, 'do make certain that you tell me first.'

  29

  Monday 8 April, 9 pm

  Damien typed a couple of words into his essay, highlighted them and hit delete. Fuck – he had to spend more time on this shit. You couldn't just fake your way through a paper titled Synthesis of Biologically Active Cyclic Peptides. He saved the document, closed the file and opened another Free Cell card game. With two fingers, he searched mindlessly for an easy game; his other hand raked through his blond hair. He exhaled noisily. The place stank of cat piss, an after-effect of the last meth cook.

  He could just pack up and leave here any time; God knew he had the money now to rent somewhere else. When he'd told Byron earlier that he was having trouble burning through all the cash, he hadn't been joking. He had more than a hundred grand right now sitting in a safe deposit box in Martin Place. What the hell could you do with that sort of money? Plenty if it was legal. It would be a good deposit on a house.

  But unlaundered drug money? Good luck with that. Damien wasn't stupid. He wasn't going to create any kind of goods or paper trail that could link him to this enterprise should it all go south. And that meant no cars, boats or Rolex watches. He could spend it on holidays – yeah, when? Between the drug shop and uni, he didn't have time to shit unless he took the trip with a textbook and a highlighter pen.

  Whitey was churning through a bit on hotels and whores, but Damien couldn't get into it. A couple of times he'd been to Whitey's favourite massage parlour, but on both occasions he'd found himself speaking to the girls about how they'd ended up doing work like that. He couldn't force a girl to have sex with him, and, paid or not, it didn't seem like the staff at Sultan's Court had really had a lot of choice in how they ended up in their so-called chosen profession.

  No doubt about it, life was becoming seedier by the day, and he was over it. What had started as an experiment to make some high quality happy pills had become nothing more than an immoral way to make too much money. Damien was a scientist. This wasn't the way he saw the rest of his life going.

  His mouth twisted. It felt as though a hand had grown inside his gut and was squeezing it periodically; he just knew – this thing was going to end badly.

  And it seemed like this was the beginning of the end. He didn't want Kasem Nader to have any idea who he was. And now this guy wanted to go into some sort of business with them? Nope, not going to happen. Damien would speak to Whitey tonight about shutting up shop. And if Whitey didn't like it, fine. He had plenty of cash, knew the recipes; he could get a new cook and move on with his life. Just not in this house.

  Damien closed the card game and tried to get back into his essay.

  30

  Tuesday 9 April, 12 pm

  Having the car was great, except that Jill woke up to find that everyone in the houso block suddenly needed a ride; had an errand they had to do today that couldn't wait. She needn't have worried about them not buying her story that her ex had given it to her, trying to win her back; apparently crap cars were an acceptable make-up present around here. Frankly, she didn't think they gave a toss where she got the car – a car was a car. She fobbed off half of the requests, but was happy to pick Jelly up from his unit in Merrylands and then drop him, Ingrid and Mrs Dang off at Westfield Parramatta, promising to pick them all up again in an hour.

  She needed fresh air. She headed over to Parramatta Park, pulled in under a tree and hit the bike track. She ran for thirty minutes and got back to the car, winded. As she bent over the bonnet, she felt as though she was going to heave. You're out of condition, she told herself. The late nights and smoke-choked rooms were taking a toll. At two this morning, sitting on the side of her bed, waiting for it to stop moving, she'd looked down and found a roll of fat creased above her underpants. That had never been there before. But then, she'd never drunk sugar-soaked cask wine every night before either.

  At least with the car it would be easier to get away to exercise, she thought. In this world, that was another behaviour that could put a target over your head. Exercise wasn't a high priority for most people around here, although Jill thought it should have been for most of her neighbours.

  She took her mobile from the glove box and re-locked the car. She spotted a seat in the sun and made her way over. Although her body still thrummed with heat from the run, the days were shortening, and the shadows held their chill around the clock.

  She scrolled through her stored numbers, wondered whether he'd answer. She hit the call button and waited to find out.

  'Yep.' He picked up on the first ring.

  'Gabriel?'

  'Jill?'

  'Hi, Gabe. Ah, how've you been?'

  'Is that why you called?' Gabriel. Straight to the point.

  'No, not really,' she said. 'Are you busy?'

  'Designing a website,' he said.

  'Is that for work?'

  'Nope. I'm between assignments.'

  'So what's the website for?' she asked.

  A pause. 'Well, I don't know. Just thought I should see whether I could do it.'

  As you do. 'Oh, okay,' she said. 'Listen, Gabriel, I wondered whether I could maybe get a little help with something I'm working on now. I wanted to get some advice.'

  'Cool. I just put the lamb on. It will be ready about seven-thirty.'

  What? She wasn't asking to come to dinner. 'Gabriel, it's twelve o'clock. How long are you going to cook the meat?'

  'Seven hours.'

  'What?'

  'Seven hours. It's seven-hour lamb.'

  Jill had forgotten their conversations had mostly been like this. She smiled and shook her head. 'Well, I guess I could come over if that's all right with you. It's probably better than talking over the phone. Thanks,' she said. A thought occurred to her. 'Actually, Gabe, that would be great. I know you've got access to a lot of databases. Would it be all right if I use your computers?'