Nader got out of the car. Jill held her lower lip between her teeth, watching him uncurl himself from the driver's seat and step into the street.
Gabriel watched her. 'Well, this is fun,' he said.
'We gonna leave this guy in there with the three of them?'
'Your call.'
Jill screwed up her nose. Trust Gabriel not to go all Rambo and decide to storm the house, rescue the victim. She'd have to make the decision, live with the results. She thought through Kasem's record. No murders she knew of.
Blondie, you're on your own for the moment. 'We'll wait,' she said.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Damien couldn't stop thinking it, over and over. He'd actually tried praying to Jehovah, but he couldn't get his thoughts straight, and had ended up just mindlessly repeating the mantra.
His gut ached. Even with all the bullying he'd copped at school, he didn't think he'd ever actually been punched. He'd definitely never been punched like that. Who were these guys? What did they call themselves? He forced himself to try to think what the fat one had said outside the pub. It was a tennis player's name – Agassi, that was it. The other one, who knew? Damien just wanted to stay away from his fists.
From the chair into which they'd pushed him, his eyes shot around his lounge room. Oh shit. They were moving over to the chemicals. Don't touch that, you idiot, he thought, trying not to panic.
He tried to find his voice. 'Ah . . .' Nothing. A beaker clattered to the floor. Oh my God. He tried again. 'Um?'
'WHAT?'
Shit. Agassi. Coming over.
Agassi stood over him, his bulbous gut at eye height. Damien focused on the man's shirt: black with red hibiscus. It seriously did not match the brown leather jacket and grey suit pants. Concentrate, you dickhead, he told himself. He forced himself to look up at the unshaven jowls above him. Agassi exhaled; a waft of sewer air buffeted Damien's face. He coughed, dropped his eyes back to the hibiscus and spoke.
'Ah, the anhydrous ammonia is really unstable at this stage,' he said. 'The reactivity point is pretty low.'
'What?'
'Um, the chemicals,' he tried, 'that your friend is fucking around with. They're pretty volatile.' He looked up. Agassi gave him a watery, red-rimmed stare. 'They could blow the house up.'
Agassi bawled, 'Urgill! You dumb fuck. Stop touching shit!' He turned back to Damien. 'Good little set-up you got here,' he said, and smiled. Some sort of cheese coated his lower teeth.
'You can have it,' said Damien.
'Why would you want to walk away from all this?' Agassi asked. 'Anyway, much as I'd like to, I can't take anything off your hands. You're going to need all your stuff.'
'Look,' said Damien, 'I don't understand what you want from me. If it's cash, I already told you, I can get it for you. If you want E, I've got a hundred tabs you can have right now. There's no ice cooked yet, so I can't help you with that.'
'You know,' Agassi said, looking around the room, 'even though you got all this shit in here, you got no fucking security. Anyone could get in here, man! I've never seen a shop like it. Damn, usually you got at least a couple of motherfuckers with guns on the door. I mean, look at your fucken door. You're going to have to get something that can take a bit of hammering. This is a dangerous business you're in, Damien.'
'I have to go to the toilet,' said Damien.
Agassi gave him a sidelong look. 'I'm trying to give you some business advice here, Damo, and all you can tell me is you gotta take a piss?'
'Number two, actually.'
'Yeah? See, here's the thing. I don't believe you. You're gonna try and run or maybe become a hero all of a sudden and bring some kind of weapon out here.'
Damien spoke in a small voice, to his lap, 'I always have to go when I get nervous.'
Urgill crossed the floor. 'Don't know what you're nervous for, son. We haven't done anything to you, yet,' he said.
Damien put his head in his hands. How the hell had he ended up here? He'd skipped a lecture to meet Byron at that pub. Fucking Byron! What was going on? Had he set him up? Damien should be studying. His half-yearly exams would be on him soon. He'd never failed an exam in his life. He was certain that he couldn't feel any more dejected.
And then his front door opened and Kasem Nader walked in.
Damien had been neighbours with this man all his life but they had never spoken. The schoolyard anxiety he'd experienced every time Nader or one of his brothers was nearby was magnified a hundred times. He thought he might cry.
Nader beamed at him and stretched out a hand. 'Stand up, Damien. I don't think we've properly met.'
Damien struggled to his feet. He had to reach out a hand to steady himself when his legs didn't quite agree with the standing up idea. 'Hello,' he said.
Nader looked around the room, taking in the cooking equipment in the corner. 'You know what's great?' he said. 'To see a local boy come good. You're doing real well, I'm told, Damien.'
'Who told you?'
'Well, Damien, you see, I make it my business to always know my competitive environment.' He smiled, reached out a hand and rested it on Damien's shoulder; he stood almost a head taller. 'I've got a running SWOT analysis. I daresay you've heard of SWOT, given you're a uni boy and all. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. SWOT. It's a business concept.'
'What's that got to do with me?'
'Well, everything, Damien. We'll start with Threat, shall we? I always think it's best to start there myself. You're selling ice and E on my turf, cutting into my profits. That's a threat to my business, you see,' he said, gestering to the cooking equipment. 'And that would be a Weakness for me. And I hate weakness.' Nader gave Damien's shoulder a squeeze so hard that his knees buckled again. He raised his hand to the shoulder being gripped and moaned.
'Sorry, brother.' Nader released his grip and gave Damien a cuff on the arm. 'Just back from the gym. I'm a little pumped up. Do you work out?' He clutched Damien's bicep, giving it a press. Frowned. 'Never mind. You're a uni boy. You exercise that brain of yours.'
Damien felt a little faint. His mother had never really been a touchy-feely kind of person, and to date he'd not had a lot of physical contact with anyone at all. Nader handled him almost intimately, as though he really was his brother. Big problem there. Since they were old enough to walk, Damien had been watching the Nader brothers nearly kill each other in knockdown brawls in the street.
'Anyway,' said Nader, 'that brings us to the Opportunity part of the SWOT. You, Damien, are apparently an excellent cook. I like excellence in my business, and I propose a merger.' He grinned widely.
Damien stared at the pockmarked carpet. What with Whitey traipsing in with grotty feet all the time, and Byron dropping cigarette ash, the floor coverings were filthy, and he doubted he'd get his bond back on this place. This was his chance to get out of all of this.
'Look, Kasem,' he said, 'thanks for your offer, but I'd already made up my mind that I was getting out of this business completely. I never wanted it to get this far at all. I'm really serious about my studies. I'm thinking about going into medical research.' He lifted his eyes from the ground. 'So you see, I'm no threat at all. Byron told me that you were interested in joining us, but you can actually have it. The whole thing. As is, move in and take the lot.'
Kasem smiled and appeared to think it over. He spoke in a considered tone. 'You see, Damien, that's where we go back to the SWOT. You've forgotten all about the first category. Strength. This thing here,' – he swept his hand around, past Agassi and Urgill – 'this is what you call a hostile takeover. Now, we can do this real friendly; we can actually be best mates. Or we can do it another way. Any way you like it, Damo, but you're now my cook. You work for me. And I'm the boss.' He gave Damien's arm another cuff. 'You'll be right, brother,' he said. 'I'm a pretty good employer. Shit, you'll get good wages, and I'll even give you study leave.'
He put his hand back on Damien's shoulder, looked him in the eye. 'I like having educated staff,' he sai
d. 'We're going to get on fine, uni boy.'
'Well, I don't see any blood,' said Gabriel.
Jill gave him a hard glance, and turned back quickly to watch Nader, Agassi and Urgill stroll from the blonde youth's house. She kept the rim of her cap angled low.
'What do you reckon they did to him?' she said.
'Whatever they wanted,' he replied. 'Those fuckers could've been playing one-handed strip poker and still have given that kid the flogging of his life without getting up from the game.'
Jill rubbed balled fists up and down her jeans. Part of her wanted to go inside and make sure the kid was okay. The other part thought it would be better to leave and get some intel before they approached him. He could prove to be a very useful link to Nader if they went in with their eyes open. The dolphin–shark thing again, she thought. As a cop, it probably wasn't a bad thing to be a bit of each.
She stared at Gabriel. He raised his eyebrows.
She cracked the car door. 'Let's go, then,' she said.
They walked quickly and quietly up the street, and approached the home by crossing the lawn, hugging close to the house so as not to be seen from inside. It was difficult to know what they'd find in there. Jill saw Gabriel reflexively check the firearm in the holster under his arm. She'd done the same thing with the .45 at her ankle before leaving the car.
He stopped, and she saw him peek through the window. He flattened himself against the siding, and whispered, 'He's in there. He looks okay. But be very careful, Jill. Don't touch anything and be ready to leave fast if we need to.' He paused. 'It's a clan lab.'
She could smell it now. Meth had been cooked here. She gave Gabriel a worried look. They should definitely call for back-up. They needed a Hazmat team out here. Plenty of cops had been injured by toxic fumes or explosions in these places.
Gabriel shrugged. 'On your go,' he said.
Jill took a deep breath and moved around Gabriel to enter the house ahead of him. She tried the door. And walked in.
36
Wednesday 10 April, night
The rain thrummed against the balcony doors; Darling Harbour showered at the same time as Christian. Seren stared through the juicy colours of the wet twilight; with her eyes unfocused, the scene ran together like water drizzled into a paintbox.
She leaned her forehead against the glass, peering down at her reflection, at the gorgeous new underwear purchased this afternoon by her lover. Three years ago, this moment would have been perfect. Today, she knew that it was as flimsy as the French lace of her knickers. At any time, all of this could evaporate and she could be sharing a cell with semi-naked women looking to kill each other. Or worse, she might be finally beaten into submission by a man who had decided that she was his bitch, and that she'd better get used to it. Like her mother.
But much worse than all of that would be Marco living through it. When Marco was laughing, when he'd just woken up, when he ate cereal, Seren saw the light. It kept her going. It was light she'd seen in his eyes when they put him on her chest as a tiny baby; when he'd first tasted a strawberry; when he'd found that he could talk and stand up by himself. She'd seen the light in other children fade to a glimmer, a dull pulse, and finally, a staggering flicker, before blinking out forever. She'd seen kids with eyes as old as a digger. Seen much too much; their eyes told you that there was nothing they were going to live to see that would make all right what had already come to pass.
Every day since she'd got out, she'd searched her son's eyes for the light. It hid, crouched, waiting, marking time, trusting that she would pull them through. And she would pull them through.
Seren snapped the garter of her suspenders and straightened at the window. She sauntered towards the master bedroom, steam leaking from the ensuite. She began to dress in the clothes purchased this afternoon by Christian. The man who had taken her away from Marco for three hundred and forty-eight days.
She dressed with particular care.
Seren watched the writhing press on the dance floor. Maybe she'd stayed away from these places because she'd never learned to dance like that, she considered. She'd been partying since twelve, but never in places like this.
Without any particular pride or happiness, she knew that she looked better than any other girl in System. Every man told her that, without speaking, as soon as she'd walked in. But it was the women who confirmed it. She copped three types of looks from the other girls; the most common, hate. The message? Come near my man tonight and I'll tear your eyes from your head. Usually, these women had had a few; they'd have wanted to if they'd known where Seren had spent the last year. The next most common stare was neutral. A kind of I-don't-even-notice-you-there Teflon glance that slid across her body as though she were nothing. She knew that the studied nonchalance was well-rehearsed, and it had probably always stabbed deeply at the other girls in high school. The third look was from the desperate, or particularly enterprising. They knew they had been beaten, and figured that maybe if they could hook their claws into her coattails they could soar up with her into the heavens they thought she occupied.
As she watched the beautiful people of Sydney throb to the beat of the DJ du jour, the irony of her situation shuddered to life with an image: Tready masturbating into her bra in the elevator of her unit block. The picture quickly evaporated in the lights.
Where the hell had Christian gone? She manoeuvred through the crush to find him holding court in a dim corner booth. The low table in front of the group was covered in glasses holding multicoloured drinks. All of the seats were taken. Two men made out on one side of the nook. Seren had seen the couple here before with Christian. Two near-naked girls sitting next to Christian spotted her crossing the floor towards them, and with their eyes clearly told her to piss off. Instead, when she reached them, she wriggled between them and the table to plonk herself onto Christian's lap. The hem of her teensy black dress rose up and she left it there, suspenders and long legs on show.
'God! Make yourself comfortable!' growled one of the girls.
'How rude!' muttered the other.
Christian laughed and kissed her. His eyes glittered. 'You want to dance?' he asked.
'No, I want to party. I'll have whatever you're having,' she told him.
He raised his hand and within moments, a uniformed boy materialised.
'We'll have a bottle of tequila,' he said. 'Some lemon, salt, shot glasses. And can you clear some of this shit away?' He gestured to the table.
With her arm hooked around Christian's neck, Seren leaned backwards, and bent her head down to the face of the redhead next to them. She whispered, 'I think he means you, sweetie.' She gave the woman her back again and snuggled into Christian. 'What else have you got for me, baby?'
He locked eyes with her and reached into his jacket pocket. The left pocket, Seren, she mentally noted.
'Open wide,' he said, something small between his fingers.
Oh fuck. She had just wanted to know what he was carrying tonight. She didn't want to take it! She couldn't take it – she had a urine test at P&P after work tomorrow. Christian's eyes had not left hers.
'Not a whole one, darling,' she said. 'You know I'm not used to it.' She prised her fingers between his thumb and forefinger and removed the little white tablet. 'Ooh, lovely,' she said, checking out the little tiara figure stamped on the front. Her heart thudded.
Still curled into Christian's body, she snapped the tablet between her fingers, and made a show of dropping half into the little clutch purse at her feet; instead, she deliberately missed the purse and ground the pill fragment to dust under her stiletto. She swivelled on his lap to find him staring at her.
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