Signal Loss

by Garry Disher

  ‘Why use heavy hitters from Sydney?’

  Challis shrugged. ‘Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, didn’t know the right people here.’

  ‘Or didn’t want tongues wagging if he used a local,’ Murphy added.

  Coolidge didn’t like any of this. Challis leaned forward again. ‘Think about it: we arrest Carl right now. Not only does his little empire crumble even further—and we have to assume he might be about to do a runner—but we clear the murders and stop more from happening. Meanwhile, he might look to do a deal. My team puts him away for murder, you get to mop up a big operation here and feed information to your Sydney colleagues.’

  He watched her, the peculiar intensity of her frown and lowered eyes. Then her expression cleared and she looked up.

  ‘I have people watching him, so I’ll know if he does do a runner. Meanwhile—’

  Challis interrupted: ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At home. Meanwhile, this is what I want. One, a quiet arrest. Two, I want to be there. Three, in addition to the arrest warrant we secure warrants to search his house, all vehicles and all business premises. Four, simultaneous with the arrest, we shut down his wife and kids and all employees, in case they’re involved and try to send word to each other. Five, I tell Sydney right now where we’re at.’

  Challis grinned. ‘Done.’

  She left. Murphy stayed to start the paperwork, and Challis organised the uniformed backup.

  They were interrupted a few minutes later: Coolidge returning, her expression tense. ‘We might have a problem. Apparently Bowie’s fallen out of favour. There’s a price on his head.’

  GRIPPED BY A KIND of paralysis, Carl Bowie spent most of Monday morning in his armchair.

  Last week and all weekend he’d been charging around like a man possessed, putting his affairs in order. Thursday he’d contacted a real estate agent to find buyers for all but one of the bakehouses—one as a kind of fallback in case everything turned out all right. After that, he’d let most of the staff go, knowing not to call it ‘sacking’ or ‘retrenching’ or ‘terminating’ or ‘downsizing’ but ‘rightsizing,’ as Grow Your Own Prosperity advised. And he’d been careful not to be a prick about it. No e-mails, no texts, but face to face. Telling each of them, gently gruff: ‘You will bounce back bigger and better, and that is a positive for you.’ But were they grateful? Like fuck. He just didn’t get the workings of the casual-staff mind.

  Friday and Saturday he’d gone on-line to liquidate the rest of his assets. Which turned out to be a fucking fire sale. Most of his spare cash was tied up in bitcoins, currently trading at five hundred dollars, down from his 2013 purchase price of eleven hundred. Sacrilege, getting rid of them at that price. He tried auctioning small parcels at a time on US and European wholesale markets, to soften the blow, but it didn’t work.

  Then Sunday he sent the wife and kids to his mother-in-law’s. Lois wanted to know what he was up to, her hands planted firmly on her skinny hips: ‘Are you in trouble?’

  Trouble? You dozy cow. He’d snarled at her, she’d snarled back, feet were stamped and doors slammed.

  Now, Monday, he still hadn’t finished liquidating. All he wanted to do was run, but he felt too tense for that. Tense and curiously sluggish. It was as if he was waiting for the knock on the door. Fucking mad. The hours passed, he checked the auctions, he sat, he paced, he sat again…

  He had a little Beretta pistol, licensed, and took it out, held it in his lap as he thought, or tried to think. He stalked through the house now and then, glancing at his image in the mirrors. Tanned, slim—with the pistol, he had a certain aura. Sleeves casually rolled, the Rolex gleaming on his left wrist, the crispness of his shirt. A striking portrait; a frisson of danger around him. That aura must have been present when those detectives visited the bakehouse to tell him about Owen. They didn’t seem to notice, but then they were cops. Occasionally the phone rang. He let the answering machine monitor the messages. Lois rang, several times. His father-in-law. The respective managers of the bakehouses.

  ‘Just deal with it,’ he’d shout at the machine. ‘I am.’

  Then Tiffany, with her whining up-talk: ‘Mr Bowie? Andrew called in sick and we have a big Red Hill Pantry order?’

  A blinding red rage ejected him from the chair. He screamed down the line, ‘Tell them sorry, tell them fuck off, and why don’t you fuck off while you’re about it?’

  He should have sacked her, too.

  He waited for the red veil to fade from his eyes and Lois was on the answering machine again, saying, ‘Carl, we need to talk about the kids’ Christmas presents. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I want you to put it to one side and consider your kids. Bree needs a new bike and I think it’s time we got Yazzie an iPhone.’

  Carl thought about his daughters, tears pricking his eyes.

  He’d worked bloody hard to bring the Bowie bakery empire back from the brink. Meanwhile his loser half-brother smoked a lot of dope, left school early and shacked up with the high-school slag. Christine Penford. Carl was surprised they’d stayed together.

  Then a few weeks ago, high on ice (ironic if it was my ice, Carl thought), the idiot smacked some guy—hard enough that he’d be charged and maybe do jail time. And Carl wouldn’t have known about it if Owen hadn’t come crawling to him after a gap of years, twitching and paranoid, wanting to borrow five grand.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Pay this guy off,’ Owen said, his breath giving off waves of chemical rot.

  ‘What guy? Why?’

  Owen’s gaze slid away. ‘I might have, you know, given him a belting.’

  ‘You mean he’s pressing charges and you want him to shut up.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What the hell happened to you, Owen?’

  ‘Fuck off, Carl. You going to help me or not?’

  Owen was family, so Carl gave him five grand. Of course the prick spent it on drugs or whatever and was back the next day, wanting another five.

  ‘Mate, the guy laughed in my face.’

  ‘So you want to offer him more money.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘You showed him the five?’

  Owen’s gaze slid away. ‘Yeah. Course.’

  Carl told him to fuck off.

  And the very next day, when watching one of those dumb CSI shows, Carl learned about mitochondrial DNA. It didn’t matter that he and Owen had different fathers: they had the same mother, and their DNA would show that.

  And if the police ran Owen’s DNA…

  So Carl called Hector. Asked if he could do a mate a favour.

  MEANWHILE, IN WATERLOO, Serena Coolidge looked up from her iPad. ‘Bowie is licensed to own a pistol.’

  Challis nodded. He’d already checked. ‘Beretta nine mil.’

  ‘What was your impression of him? Is he the type to use a gun against police?’

  Challis shrugged. ‘His empire’s collapsing. He’s facing arrest. I called for an armed response team.’

  Coolidge’s face tightened. ‘Without consulting?’

  Challis said flatly, ‘Serena, there are houses all around him. He’s armed. We have no choice.’

  ‘How long’s it going to take armed response to get down here? Couple of hours? And that’s after we jump through all the bureaucratic hoops.’

  Challis felt his temper rise. He stared at her expressionlessly, about to retort. Then Pam Murphy touched his arm. ‘Boss? She’s right.’

  All of his tension vanished. Serena Coolidge was right. Clearly the situation warranted an armed presence, but there was no time for a risk assessment briefing that could take three or four hours to complete. Everything would be measured in ‘parameters’, with reference to a psychological profile. Was the subject armed? Did he or she have a record for violence or armed violence? How should the ‘solution’ be structured (the type and placement of strike corridors; the possible evacuation of neighbouring houses; the dangers and benefits of a rapid entry; the
deployment of flash-bang grenades)? What was the likelihood of third-party complications (the presence, or arrival, of friend, family member, neighbour, domestic servant or henchman)?

  And on top of that, the operation had to pass several levels of permission, from an assistant commissioner to the area commander to the superintendent down to lowly Inspector Challis.

  He nodded finally.

  ‘We go in now, but we take what armed backup we can muster to breach Bowie’s house, block the street, manage traffic and warn the neighbours.’

  He paused. ‘We all wear vests.’

  They rolled shortly after that. They were two minutes from their destination when the radio chatter reported shots fired.

  CARL HEARD GLASS BREAKING somewhere at the rear of the house, a sharply perilous noise, as if the entire picture window had been breached. He sat incredulous for a couple of beats. He hadn’t really thought it would happen. Didn’t the police at least knock first? Didn’t they come through the front door?

  In that short delay a man clearly not police came swarming at him from the hallway and Carl shot him. A gut shot. Carl stared at his hand as if it, not he, controlled events. The wounded man, meanwhile, was clichéd muscle: bald, tattooed, enormous. But piteous in the way he tossed and squealed, reeling off invective amid pleas for an ambulance.

  Carl stepped over him and into the hallway. A flicker of movement down at the end where the light poured in from the back garden. A second man, ducking out into the yard.

  ‘Come in and get me,’ Carl screamed.

  He didn’t move and the second man didn’t move and Carl wondered how something like this might play out.

  For something to do, he dragged the wounded man down the hallway and dumped him onto the broken glass. Then, as fire was returned—from the yard this time—he let off three rapid shots into the lawn and raced back to the sitting room and behind the main sofa.

  41

  WOORALLA DRIVE WAS FLAT for the first couple of kilometres, passing a sports ground, then crossing the little tourist railway line with its Hogwarts train, dipping for Balcombe Creek and finally climbing steeply to one of the highest points on the Peninsula. Stunning south-easterly views over farmland and westerly views over the bay, Challis noted, before assessing the location for a siege situation or shootout. The road was narrow where it passed Bowie’s house, before broadening for the downslope to the Nepean Highway and the Mt Eliza shops.

  Bowie lived on the upslope a short distance before the Mountain View Road roundabout, his house set back from the road and amid trees, a low fence on either side separating him from his neighbours. Challis counted a dozen cars nearby, in driveways and carports and two wheels up on the grassy strips on either side of the road. He didn’t like it: through traffic from the highway to the shops, neighbours, trees, the narrowness of the road here, and no clear line of sight. And the neighbours were starting to gather and point.

  Pam Murphy was driving, hard on Coolidge’s tail, with uniformed officers in two cars close behind them. Then Coolidge was slowing to a crawl and pulling in behind the drug squad’s surveillance car, its passenger side wheels up on the street’s narrow grass verge. Coolidge parked, but there was no room for the Challis and Murphy unmarked car or the police cars.

  ‘Go past,’ Challis said, ‘into Manna Court.’

  She complied, the police car following. They all piled out and Challis gave a series of terse commands to the uniforms: block traffic in both directions, usher the neighbours back inside and tell them to lock their doors. Then he ran with Murphy back onto Wooralla Drive and joined Coolidge at the drug-squad car. She gestured tensely at Bowie’s house. ‘Two men, two minutes ago.’

  Challis gazed across at Bowie’s house, a split-level glass and white-painted concrete nightmare. All quiet now. ‘How many shots?’

  ‘Two, a couple of minutes apart,’ a drug-squad detective said. ‘I’ve notified armed response and asked Mornington and Frankston to attend.’

  ‘Good. These men: did Bowie let them in?’

  ‘Not that we could see. They split up and headed down each side of the house to the rear.’

  ‘Didn’t knock on the front door first?’

  ‘No.’

  Coolidge felt she was being left out. ‘Car?’

  ‘They came in that,’ the detective said, pointing to a Toyota Camry parked twenty metres downhill from Bowie’s house. Hertz sticker, noted Challis. He said, ‘Can we disable it?’

  Coolidge stiffened. Challis was talking to her officer. ‘Dave, you carry a pocketknife.’

  The man grinned. ‘Done,’ he said. He ran at a crouch to the Camry and punctured the two driver’s side tyres. Then stiffened. Crouched closer to the road. There was another shot.

  THREE MORE SHOTS, MUFFLED. Two guns, Challis thought, noting the differences in tone.

  But mostly, like the others, he was frozen in a half-crouch, shoulders hunched, a natural first instinct. No one knew what movement to make. Much of their training had faded in the years of paperwork and drudgery so that, right now, they were motionless for a moment, hands on the butts of their service pistols.

  Then they flew into movement, ducking behind the drug-squad car and Coolidge’s unmarked Holden. Further up the hill, the uniforms were going door to door; one constable stood exposed in the roadway to stop traffic. Another stood exposed downhill from Bowie’s house, also to stop traffic. They looked vulnerable to Challis, but were some distance away, risky pistol shots away, and they were needed to stop drivers who would otherwise sail blithely through and maybe collect a stray bullet.

  Their sergeant came running down the footpath from the direction of the roundabout. Puffing, he crouched with Challis. ‘My men are exposed.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ Challis said, ‘but there would be hell to pay if a civilian got shot.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ the sergeant said, and readied himself to run back uphill when Pam Murphy shouted, ‘Someone’s coming out.’

  NOT BOWIE. THE TWO GUNMEN.

  Serena Coolidge stepped instinctively out onto the road as they came bursting from the shadowy side garden, a narrow space between the downhill wall of Bowie’s house and the fence dividing it from the neighbour’s. One man supported the other, who was clawing at his bloodied waist. The first man seemed astonished to see police there—but he was less dithery than the police. Raising his pistol, he snapped off three shots, the sounds sharp and waspish now, no longer muffled by walls and windows.

  Coolidge was his first target simply because she was the closest. She said, ‘Oh,’ softly, and fell without grace onto the hard road surface. One of the uniforms was hit then, spotted by the gunman stepping out of one driveway to enter another. He spun around, holding his thigh. He tottered a couple of steps and went down on one knee, then onto his hip and finally onto his back.

  Everyone was screaming now, at each other and into their radios. Challis sent one of the drug-squad detectives to pull the wounded constable back behind the nearest car and the others to vantage points up- and downhill from Bowie. That left Coolidge exposed, out on the edge of the road and between her car and the drug-squad car. The gunman fired again, aiming at Coolidge, and Challis saw her pants dimple and flex, her leg jerk, and there was a hole, blood seeping. He couldn’t see where the first bullet had struck, but guessed her waist or hip. Seeing the gunman duck behind a car, he darted across to Coolidge and stretched out on the road to shield her.

  She turned her head, registered him, and in a creaky voice said, ‘One way to get intimate.’

  He barked an uncomfortable laugh. ‘Save your strength.’

  Pam Murphy, where was Pam? Challis risked lifting his head from the road and saw her, on the grass and mostly shielded by the drug-squad car, white faced, holding her shoulder.

  His head still raised, Challis swung his gaze up and down the sloping road. The uniformed sergeant and the drug-squad detective were attending to the wounded man, the other officers were waving people back into thei
r houses, taking cover, speaking wildly into their radios. He was dimly aware of distressed cries all around him, then wondered if he’d been contributing to it, a frightened kind of keening.

  He rolled onto his left shoulder, feeling chips of pot-hole asphalt dig into his hip, and faced Bowie’s house, his body still shielding Coolidge. His pistol was heavy in his hand. He’d barely passed his last firing-range test.

  Sirens, there should be sirens by now. Or not. Frankston police, Mornington police, they were both ten minutes away. How long had it been, this shootout in the suburbs? Two minutes?

  The gunman came out from cover, streaking down to the rental car, firing at Challis. One bullet punched him in the chest, the vest barely absorbing the impact, and another ricocheted near his head. He snapped a shot at the blurred figure, hit an ankle. Blind luck. The man stumbled full tilt onto the road, losing his gun.

  He got to his hands and knees, head swivelling to locate the weapon. Challis couldn’t risk another shot: downhill of the gunman was a uniformed constable controlling the uphill traffic and, beyond him, half-a-dozen cars.

  The uniform saw what was happening. He stood frozen in the middle of the road, one hand out to hold the motorists, the other up to stop the gunman. Then he remembered his pistol. He took it out, shouted at the gunman: ‘Flat on the ground!’

  The gunman had found his gun. He tried to stand, rocky now, aiming wildly, prompting Challis to make a crouched dash across the road and onto the gunman. They fell together, the pistol firing uselessly into the sky above the marooned cars, Challis punching, wrenching. Spotting the uniform, he said, ‘Help me, for fuck’s sake.’

  The uniform seemed to come out of a trance. He ran to Challis, helped him wrestle the gunman to the road.

  ‘Cuff him,’ Challis said, ‘then sit on him and don’t be afraid to use your capsicum spray.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Pocketing the gunman’s pistol, and feeling full of pounding pain now, all of his adrenaline drained away, Challis stumbled uphill to Bowie’s house. Into the yard, down along the side wall, watching for the second gunman, every shrub and tree a potential trap.