She couldn't help smiling back. Door job: cyclists collected when a motorist opens the car door without looking. Same principle, I suppose, she thought, and shook her head.
Standing out the front of the Liverpool police complex with the two other lackey journalists, Chloe Farrell had held her breath when she'd seen the man and woman come out of the building. She'd seen these two yesterday out at Capitol Hill, arriving in an unmarked car behind the taskforce commander, Lawrence Last. Slinging a camera around her neck, she'd taken coffee orders from the others and headed off to follow the cops. She did not want passengers.
She kept a reasonable distance behind them. They were easy to tail. Headed to the hospital, she guessed, as they made their way down George Street. She knew the victim's daughter was in there.
Chloe had waited outside the main doors of Liverpool Hospital, wondering whether she should go in and try to find them. They could be in there for ages. Well, one thing's for sure, she promised herself, I am not standing out here any longer than five minutes. Although she was outdoors, she thought she might as well have been in a pub – so many patients and their visitors had come out here to smoke that her eyes were watering.
When the tracksuited drug dealer who'd been staring at her finally walked over to chat, Chloe decided to leave. As she turned to go, she spotted the detectives coming back out of the front doors.
'Hey, princess,' the man in the tracksuit stood in her path, his voice a nasal drawl. 'Do you want to go for a drink or something?'
'Actually,' she said, 'I've just got to catch up with my colleagues over there.' She saw the man clock the detectives. His eyes widened and he began to slink away. 'Maybe later,' she called after him. 'Could I get your name?'
Her would-be suitor broke into a jog, heading back down towards Speed Street.
Chloe smiled to herself and hurried to catch the cops ahead of her. She made a sudden decision that she'd approach them, identify herself and try to get some intel on the case. The worst they can do is brush me off, she thought. I've got to take risks if I'm going to get anywhere in this job.
She'd almost closed the distance between them when she noticed the male stop. The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she took the lens cap off her camera.
It all happened so quickly. Chloe had taken a dozen shots before she even knew what was happening. She got everything. The lot. This would run with the lead story tonight – she knew it. When she tied the two detectives to the taskforce and the murder in Capitol Hill, they'd link it all into one sensational story, with pictures.
I'm gonna get a lead reporter's job out of this home invasion story, thought Chloe, trying to run back to the news truck in her stupid new shoes. Hang in there, Mum and Dad.
14
ISOBEL FIGURED THAT if she could give Cutter to the police on a plate, Joss might be able to avoid having to tell his story to them. He'd always shied away from telling her much about his childhood, but she had known that he'd run with a gang until his grandparents had intervened. His account this morning of a robbery in which a boy called Fuzzy had been killed had been vaguely familiar to Isobel. However, the story she remembered hearing as a kid did not match what Joss had told her.
She remembered her parents talking about it after the evening news bulletin. It'd been a big story, back then. Late one night in 1984, fourteen-year-old Carl Waterman – affectionately known to all his classmates as 'Fuzzy' because of his blond afro – had investigated a noise in his father's bike shop. The shop sat underneath the two-bedroom apartment in North Parramatta that Carl shared with his father. Mr Waterman, waking to a crash, had found his son speared through the throat by a shard of glass from his shattered front window. He'd been unable to save his son. The man's desolate face on the news, pleading for the offenders to come forward, had brought Isobel's mother to tears. Her father had sworn that they should hang the bloody mongrels.
Actually, Joss had told her, what had really happened was that Fuzzy had let him, Cutter and Esterhase into the shop to steal the bikes. They figured insurance would pay for the robbery, and Mr Waterman would be no worse off. The plan was that they'd wheel a bike out each, and hide one for Fuzzy in the flats around the corner. It had gone perfectly until they shattered the window of the shop to make it look like a smash and grab. They knew Fuzzy's dad would sleep till the cops got there – he went to bed with Jack Daniels and nothing could wake him.
They were right. Mr Waterman didn't wake when the huge front window broke inwards and impaled his son. He didn't even wake when Cutter and Esterhase bolted from the shop, knocking over a rack of bike wheels.
Only Joss's screams had woken Fuzzy's dad from his drunken sleep. Joss had done his best to hold Fuzzy's throat together, but his best friend had drowned in his own blood right there in Joss's lap.
By the time he got downstairs carrying a baseball bat, Mr Waterman's son was dead, and Joss was gone.
15
THE CONDENSATION CAUSED by the spring rain combined with the steam of rice and soup cooking in the kitchen. Sweating, Cutter could imagine himself in the Vietnam of his grandfather's era. He rolled onto his side and reached for another tissue, coughed. The routines and rituals of the room comforted him back to his pillow. His aunt fed his cousin's baby on the floor next to him. His grandma sat in her favourite chair rolling sticky rice balls, just as she had every day of his life. He coughed again and groaned quietly, and his grandma glanced up, giving a cluck of alarm. His ma poked her head out from the doorway of the small kitchen and instructed him to drink more of the fish soup that was sitting in a bowl next to his mattress on the floor.
Cutter always came home when he was sick. He'd grown up in this humble house in Cabramatta, as had nine of his cousins and most of their children since. At times, there were up to twenty people sleeping in the house, and it had always been full of delicious smells, laughter and babies.
Because his father and grandfather had purchased the house together, young Henry was the only child to have a bedroom of his own. He would have preferred to sleep in this room with everyone else, on the mattresses that were rolled out each evening; but his grandfather had insisted that Henry occupy his own bed, telling him that he would one day inherit the home and should be aware of his place in the family.
Cutter had had great respect for his grandfather, who'd died when he was only eight, less than twelve months after Cutter's father had been hit by a car and killed instantly.
Cutter's grandfather had been a hero of the war in Vietnam, a general in the South Vietnamese army, fighting for the allies. At night, he had sat with Henry by the hour and verbally recreated epic battles, his role in fighting for the South. He'd prevented the deaths of hundreds of Australian and American troops, teaching them how to recognise and survive the perils of the steaming jungle. There were the panji pits: sticks and branches concealing a ditch studded with protruding spikes that had been poisoned with rotting meat. There were mines suspended from trees, created from discarded Western supplies, set at heights designed to pulverise half the face. He taught them to recognise signs in the bush that the enemy had passed or were waiting – bent leaves, a broken branch. He told Henry of the elaborate Cu Chi Tunnels, designed to house whole families as well as munitions, with deadly snakes kept ready to be released upon enemies brave enough to venture inside. The landmines in the hills of Long Hai; the perils of R&R in the streets of Saigon. Young Cutter, wide-eyed, sat on his bed with his chin on his knees, rapt, as his grandfather conjured up the tastes, smells and sounds of a country he had never visited.
Of course, the history lessons were not without pain. Henry understood that. One terrible night, betrayed by some of his own villagers, his grandfather had been captured by the Vietcong. Before he was rescued a week later when the Australians overran the camp, he had been tortured almost to death. Grandfather had watched each of his loyal troops beheaded one by one, their heads used as footballs by the enemy. When he'd closed his eyes, unable to watch, his eyelids were cut from
his face. Grandpa told Henry that he knew his time would soon come when he had watched his lieutenant's manhood being cut from his loins and forced into his mouth, his lips then sewn crudely shut. He had watched his best friend's eyes pleading with him, the blood from his balls running from his mouth, before he too had been decapitated.
Grandpa told Henry that the experience had made him more than a man; he felt immortal. Death had no power over him. Pain held no fear. But the most powerful lesson, he told the boy almost every night, he had learned from the needles. It was his responsibility, he explained to his grandson, to teach him, to impart to him the same power.
Grandfather told him that the needles were inserted by his captors under the foreskin of his penis. Any sound made caused another needle to be inserted. This continued until the man made no murmur, no sound. The lesson would then be over until the next day.
Cutter learned the lesson in one night when he was four years of age. He'd had the flu and his grandfather had stayed home with him while his family was out celebrating Tet. Most nights thereafter, until his grandfather's death, Henry was instructed in his heritage by the war hero.
As a boy, Henry had loved Saturdays. Once a week on this day, he had the honour of accompanying his grandfather to the local market. There, neighbours and stallholders would pay their respects to Grandpa. Small children would stare at Henry in awe or curiosity as he led the war hero through the bakeries and vegetable stands. Grandpa's eyesight was very poor and he wore his usual huge dark glasses to protect his scarred eyes. He walked slowly; Henry knew his grandfather had terrible arthritis in multiple old injury sites on his arms and legs. Yet his bearing was regal – stallholders would crow to their neighbours with pride when he had purchased from their store.
And then the accident had happened.
It was a wet day, much like this one, Cutter thought now, as he patted at his nose, already sore from blowing it too much. It was a well-worn memory, and he leaned back against his pillow to think it through. His grandma had required medication for one of the babies, he recalled, Chinese medicine from Thanh Kha's store above Dutton Lane. Henry had led his grandfather through the marketplace and into the narrow side street. Slowly, they climbed the stairs to the apothecary's small shop – the living room of an apartment above the market.
At times, at night, the musty smells of the medicinal powders and roots still came to Cutter before he dropped into dreamless sleep.
That morning, Dr Kha's family was eating a late breakfast in the room behind the shop. Cutter remembered that on that day he had been walking as carefully as his grandfather, his groin aching deeply from an extended lesson the night before. As they were leaving, Mrs Pham came out of the gloom of the narrow stairway and greeted them with a bow.
'Please be careful,' she had warned, looking down at young Henry. 'The stairs are wet with the rain this morning.'
Cutter's grandfather had been wrong about being immortal.
You had to give it to him though – he had made no sound as Henry had shoved him hard in the back as he was shuffling down the steep stairway. In fact, the only sound Cutter heard before the stallholders came running was the dull splat when Grandpa's head had split open like a melon on the concrete below.
Cutter thought he could hear the sound now; it caused his penis to harden under the thin bedsheet and set him to coughing again. His grandma stood slowly and came to his side, bending down to feel his forehead with her soft, papery hands.
Cutter always came home when he was sick. He loved the memories.
16
JOSS CARRIED HIS old schoolbag with him when he left his mother's house. He sat directly behind the driver on the bus, shifting from time to time to adjust the position of the knife in his pocket. It seemed to prod for his attention; he couldn't stop thinking about it. He'd have to fashion some kind of holster; it wasn't as though he could just wear it in his belt as he had overseas.
He looked down at his schoolbag – just like any sports backpack, really. It seemed hot in his lap, and he wondered whether any of the other passengers could tell that it had travelled from the past, from another world.
Inside the bag, the boy from the streets waited to get out.
Joss changed buses again at Wynyard, but this time he crossed the road to catch a train to Cabramatta. He swung his backpack over his shoulder and jogged to the platform. The knife thumped against his thigh as he ran.
How does one go about making an anonymous call to the police, Isobel wondered. Can't send a fax or email, of course. Traceable. Her mobile? She always used a prepaid mobile phone because she knew how easy it was to find out someone's identity when they subscribed to a plan. Still, she'd heard that even though a prepaid number wasn't registered, the phone still acted as a satellite tracking system when it was switched on. If police had a number that was of interest, they could find the phone, even if they didn't know whose it was.
How ridiculous, she thought, and snorted as she sipped her coffee. She felt like she was in a spy movie or something. The woman from the next table looked up from her novel and stared.
Isobel got the file out of her shoulder bag and read it through again briefly. She'd found Henry Nguyen and had done a work-up on the Donatio file for Shields as well, and all before two o'clock. I am pretty good at this stuff, she reminded herself.
Nguyen had no Centrelink file that she could find, but she'd been able to find his Medicare record. There was also no hiding his criminal past. From age eighteen – it would take a bit longer to get any juvenile files – it seemed he had spent more time in than out of gaol. Violent crime and robbery. She chewed at her lip, worried Joss could be right – that this man could have been the one who'd attacked them at Andy Wu's. Still, she figured, maybe Joss would have a record, too, if he'd not been rescued from that life.
But that was crazy. It can't be him, she told herself. Joss was just shaken up by the robbery. God knows, she still was. And Joss also had his memories of Africa, of the massacre, to contend with. She could easily see how Andy Wu's blood could've triggered memories of his friend Fuzzy's death. Fuzzy made him think about Cutter, and he had just projected Nguyen underneath the mask of the devil at the home invasion.
There was no way Joss could recognise someone underneath that balaclava – there just wasn't any face to see.
The memory of Joss's panic at the movies yesterday surfaced briefly. It did seem a coincidence that they had run into this guy just after the home invasion, but it must just have been spooky chance. She pushed her doubts aside with the remainder of her coffee, not allowing them to fully register. She could not let herself believe that Joss was right about this guy. She'd collected this information just to placate her husband – to give Nguyen's details to the police and let them rule him in or out of this thing.
Isobel left the last bite of her toasted sandwich and stood up. She waited at the lights outside the café with a couple of dozen other people and crossed the street when they got the 'walk' signal. Then she stepped into one of the payphones opposite her work for the first time ever.
'Honey, I really don't think all this is necessary,' Isobel said to her husband in their bedroom that evening. She used her reasoning voice, trying to speak calmly, holding at her side the baseball bat Joss had given her. 'The police have his details now, and if he's implicated in any way, they'll pick him up.' She sighed, looking at his face. Nothing she said made any difference, she thought. He was just waiting for her to finish.
She was right.
'Show me again,' he said.
She gripped the very end of the bat with one hand as he had demonstrated, her other hand in the middle, as though she were holding a javelin. She lunged forward at an imaginary attacker, holding the bat at face-height.
'Remember,' he said, 'You can go for the face, throat, or the balls. Don't go for the chest. Winding him is no good. An eye socket will do.'
He looked her straight in the face, but she felt he wasn't really seeing her.
'Don't forget,' he continued, 'you don't want to hesitate. You don't want to listen to anything anyone's got to say. You'll have one chance only and you've gotta put every bit of strength you have behind it. And don't miss.' He paused, then held his fingers up to emphasise each point. 'One, use all your force; two, don't hesitate; and three, don't miss. Now, show me again.'
Five minutes later, Isobel finally threw the bat on the bed. 'Where are you going to be while I'm hitting this home run?' she asked.
'Don't worry about me. Hopefully, it won't come to this. If they come, with any luck, you, me and Charlie will be on the roof.'
As soon as she'd arrived home from work, Joss had again tried to persuade her to take Charlie to her mother's home in Cairns. She'd turned him down without waiting to listen to his argument. As though he'd known that would be her response, he'd insisted she come up to their bedroom and practise climbing out of the window and onto their roof.
'Can we at least wait till it's dark?' she'd wanted to know. 'And I'm not teaching Charlie to climb out a window onto the roof!'
'Fine,' he'd capitulated. 'We take her only if necessary.'
So, when evening had fallen, Isobel had climbed out of the low bedroom window onto their tiled roof. Joss had followed her out.
'Move around to the side a bit.'
He'd spoken softly, thank God. Isobel couldn't imagine trying to explain this to Mrs Wilkinson next door.
Isobel had inched her way around on the tiles; the slope here was gentle, and it was not difficult to move along. Fortunately, the rain had cleared up just after lunch, and the tiles had been dry and still quite warm.
'What the hell's this?' she whispered when she'd come across a dark shape wedged into a corner on the roof.
'The ladder, of course. How did you think we were going to get Charlie down?'
Voodoo Doll Page 9
