by Iain Ryan
“Who?”
“The family. Brisbane mafia. They own the hotel. They own half the island.” He reached over and turned the radio on, then checked his watch. After a time, he said, “Drop me off up here. You got Bachelard’s notebook?”
“On that seat there. Where’re you headed?”
He shook his head. As soon as she pulled off the road, he grabbed the notebook and got out.
21
Thursday, September 9, 2004
The station house was empty. No Denny, no Chandler. Even the DPU was empty. A pile of faxes sat in her pigeon hole. She flicked through them. They were the crime scene reports she ordered, old news. With the place to herself, she took a beer from the DPU fridge (they kept it stocked with Fourex Gold) and drank it in front of the television in reception, the midday news.
Romano was at something of a loose end. Harris had done much as she’d asked. He’d made the introduction requested. He was working on getting the notebook translated. All he had left was to get hold of Donald and Mary Marr, something that seemed inevitable, seeing they lived on Tunnel. In addition to which, she now had all the paperwork.
What she was running low on was progress. None of it was coming together. She remembered the sensation of a case gaining momentum, and felt none of it here.
Romano took another beer from the fridge and laid herself out on the DPU couch. She closed her eyes and slept, finding herself swimming in the ocean. There were people there, people she knew. Their faces changed each time she lifted her head from the water. O’Shea became Chandler became Harris. She saw her mother and Sophie and Mary Marr and another woman. Further out in the water, Romano could see a life buoy. As she swam towards it, the ocean turned pink, then red and warm. It was blood. She pushed on through. At the point of exhaustion, she reached out through the gore for the buoy and watched as her hand passed through it like a ghost.
She woke.
She sat up and wrote it down:
Swimming.
Changing faces.
Vapour.
Blood.
It didn’t make sense.
Romano gathered her things and drove home. She changed, had another drink, and took herself to the beach at the end of her street just as the light was fading. Hoping that a conscious swim might trigger something new, she swam out into the surf, past the waves, into the calmer water. There was no buoy out there, but the island itself looked different. It was coming into dusk, only a few minutes from night. The dark hills were so much closer than they felt. They towered over The Strip and the house. The place would have been beautiful before development.
Romano swam out further, hoping for a longer view. In the deeper water, she could see all the way to Arthurton. An old rust-coloured barge puttered in around the point, a relic from before the tunnel, from before the rest of it.
Romano closed her eyes and floated. The two victims hadn’t killed themselves. Sophie might have overdosed but Thomas Bachelard had been stone-cold murdered. As she reviewed the interviews in her head, Romano saw that no one was really denying it.
The senator’s kid had been acting up.
Everyone wanted him to stop.
He didn’t.
And he had a history of writing about poker.
Romano treaded water and looked back to the shore. She stared right into the pitiful haze of The Strip, the worst blight on the coastline, the centre of things. That made sense. An idea came. It was high time she hit the casinos.
22
Thursday, September 9, 2004
Harris sat in his office in the dark and waited. At ten, the call came in. He answered it, then walked to the kitchen and took a bundle wrapped in a tea towel out of the pantry. He unwrapped it—a handgun—and checked the clip before sliding the thing down the side of the couch cushions.
A knock at the door sounded.
“It’s open,” he yelled, planting himself on the couch by the piece.
Carl Yates let himself in and climbed the stairs. Gold Point Security by designation. On the inside, he was the hotel’s drug connection. He looked after that.
“Where’s the girl?” he said.
“Having a nap, I hope,” said Harris. “Sit down.”
Yates was a big man, a fighter of some sort back in the day. He’d held onto the physique. Harris had seen him work in the ring. He was fast. Dirty, too.
“Been a while,” said Yates, planting himself in a chair. “Thought for sure your mate was going to come right over in the car park today.”
“She’s still learning the ropes,” said Harris. “What do you want?”
“I’ve got myself in a bit of strife, yeah.”
“Right.”
“Steady on, okay?” he said and very slowly he lifted his shirt. Yates removed a gun from the rear waistband of his gym shorts. With his eyes on Harris, he laid it down flat on the coffee table.
“You’re probably looking for this.”
Harris leaned over and had a look. Right calibre, right make. “You pinch this from the crime scene, Carl?”
“Look, I had to knock a bloke over the weekend, and things have been a bit hairy lately. The bloody Chans have got themselves some sort of forensics shit, apparently, and it’s fucking stressing me out. They can prove things all of a sudden. That’s what they’re saying, anyhow. Zane’s taking it as fucking gospel. She’s listening to them all of a sudden.”
Harris had heard it.
The golden rule on Tunnel was don’t make waves. The Chan family owned bits and pieces of the island—The Pyramid Hotel, a string of brothels, a residential development down the coast—but they played nicely with the other families, with the Agriolis and the Doomriders and O’Shea. Everyone kept the peace but this cooperation only existed at the top, on the management tier. There was never any turf war on Tunnel, but at the street level, where Yates worked, things were a lot looser. People like Yates could do pretty much as they pleased, as long as he didn’t get caught or compromised further up the chain, by another family.
“So are the Chans looking into things on their own now? Or is that just gossip, too?” said Harris.
“Look, a month back, one of my guys took care of, eh, a problem, and the next week they send The Fox over to Bruno with a ballistics report. Bruno didn’t give a fuck, but then Zane called him and then we had to let the bloke go. I really liked the bloke too, it was fucked.” Yates looked more scared than he should have. He kept glancing at the gun. “So I’ve gone and ordered a bunch of clean guns from the Riders, but they’re stretched at the moment because of all this…and I dunno, I guess I…”
“I guess you just what?” said Harris.
“I guess I just borrowed this. I didn’t know it was going to be a big thing.”
“Well, it is now. So why’d you bring this to me?”
“I don’t like where things are headed with it. I’ve been asking around. Talk is, it doesn’t look so great. I liked Sophie. People are saying she OD’d on bad gear, in my hotel. People are saying it’s my fucking stuff, and it’s not, and now I’ve used this gun, as well, somewhere else and…it’s all fucked up.”
“And you think the Chans might trace it all back to…”
“Back to the hotel or someone else in my crew, yeah. I certainly don’t like the way the wind’s blowing.”
“Bad for business?”
“Yeah. And…”
“Just say it.”
“I…I don’t like what happened to the kid before they topped him. Fair enough he had it coming. Christ, we all knew his days were numbered, but fucking a guy in the ass when he’s dead, that’s not on. I don’t want anyone putting me anywhere near this whole thing. I’ve got no interest in that sort of stuff—none—and I want O’Shea to know it. I don’t want that to come back on me.”
“Okay,” said Harris, mainly because Yates seemed to want to hear it. “What are we gonna do here, with this?”
“I’ll leave this here with you, yeah? Like I never had it. No one joins the do
ts, you just let sleeping dogs lie. No matter where the talk comes from, I never had it, right?”
“Okay. I can handle the Chans if they come my way with this thing. But it’s going to cost you.”
Yates reached into the front pocket of his shorts and placed a small grey USB drive on the table beside the gun. “Would this get me clear of it?” he said. “You know what Jeff would do if he found out about this, so keep this to yourself. Deal?”
Harris picked up the drive. “Is this what I think it is?”
Yates nodded. “Deal?”
“That’ll work,” said Harris.
23
Thursday, September 9, 2004
Romano smoothed her dress across her thighs and looked around the room. The dress, the only one she had, was too much. Too tight and too short. It wasn’t working. The Gold Point poker room was a nerd convention. The players were retirees in fishing hats, young guys in grey marl hoodies, overweight guys in discount slacks. There were more t-shirts than collars. And there were no women. None. Romano sat at the bar and wondered how anyone could spend a lifetime in this, writing about it. Their victim must have been half playboy and half loser.
At the bar, she told every guy who tried it on the same thing, I’m supposed to be meeting some writer guy here. The geeks didn’t need much in the way of discouragement. None of them argued the point. She sat there and drank and watched them do their thing. After a good long while, a waitress tipped her off. The writers all hung out in the booths by the high roller’s room. It was down the hall.
Romano went there. Most of the booths were empty, but she came up on one containing a dishevelled older man in a loose-fitting suit. He sat on his own, a pile of papers beside him and a scuffed black laptop plugged into a stray wall socket. Typing away, he barely noticed her as she slid in across from him.
“Excuse me but—”
“Hold on,” he said, and kept typing.
Romano signalled for a drink. A waiter made his way down. She ordered Jameson and ice.
“And for the gentleman?”
“I’ll have the same,” The writer waited until they were alone, then said, “What can I do for you? I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m married and broke so I hope it’s something else.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Romano. She took her ID out and said, “You’re under arrest.”
“What for?”
“Writing about these poker dickheads for a living.”
He laughed. “Oh, dear. Guilty as charged.”
Romano lit a cigarette, dragged deep. “It’s almost as fucking pointless as being a copper. What’s your name?”
“Gordon. Gordon Ramsey.”
“Like the chef?”
“Different spelling.”
“Okay, Gordon Ramsey, I want you to tell me about another writer, a guy called David Marshall, real name Thomas Bachelard.”
“He’s dead,” said Gordon, without hesitation. “I didn’t know he used a pen name.”
“You over here when it happened?”
“Yes.”
“You kill him?”
“No.”
“Okay. That’s progress,” she said. She opened her notebook and jotted Ramsey’s name down. Writing proved a little harder than she expected. Her handwriting had a scratched feel to it that she recognised. When the waiter arrived with her drink, she made a mental note to take this one a bit slower.
“So, you said didn’t kill him right?”
“Correct. Can I see that badge again?”
She showed him. “So, this Marshall guy. Tell me his story.”
“He was a little shit,” said Gordon. “None of us liked him. A trust-fund kid that managed to buy his way into more than a few places the rest of us can’t afford. And he was a hack because of it. All access, no talent—well, none for writing.”
“I haven’t read his stuff,” said Romano. “You see him last week?”
“I’ve seen him. But maybe not last week. He came over last month. Him and that Nancy Spungen character, the local girl, they were around together. He told me he was working on some story about high-stakes prizes in one of the closed rooms. It sounded like nonsense to me. My readers are more interested in the play-by-play. I do that type of thing. David wrote about entertainment. Who was there, how much they won, what they wore, who they fucked, what they drank. That sort of thing. The prizes, the glamour. To his credit, he had his niche. It sold.”
“Had you met him before?”
“A few times. I met him here in fact, maybe a year or so back.”
“So he’d been to the island before then?” said Romano.
Gordon nodded. “I believe he’s been over a few times.”
So much for the theory that Bachelard was some babe in the woods. “You’ve been a big help,” she said. “I’m going to buy you another drink.”
She did. They shared another round, then another, running down other writers she could speak with, people involved in the Gold Point, high rollers, a select few who might be amenable. Gordon seemed all right to Romano. Easily the most helpful person she’d met so far. But there was something else to him as well. As the night progressed, she started to like the guy. He was another observer on Tunnel. “I’m pretty much invisible,” he said at one point. He told her he probably shouldn’t be seen with her, but as the drinks really took hold, he also said he no longer gave a fuck. He was done with the island’s skewed social contract. It all wore at him. He said he was tired.
24
Friday, September 10, 2004
It was a crisp morning as Harris opened the gate to Romano’s place. She’d let the yard go to hell. The lawn was ankle-deep. What survived in the garden—the natives, built for this type of neglect—poured out of their beds. Old Bill Dranger would have been appalled. He hadn’t been the best policeman but he’d kept his house in order. After ringing the bell at the front door, Harris tried the rear kitchen screen. Romano answered, half-asleep in smeared make-up, wearing some sort of black cocktail dress. She was holding a handgun, police issue.
“What the fuck?” she said.
He followed her into the living room where she slumped down, resting her head in her hands, leaving the gun on the chair beside her.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said.
“Oh, God. What is it?”
“Go and have a shower first.”
The hangover must have been bad, because she got up and did it. Harris made tea in her disheveled kitchen and listened to her retch in the bathroom, remembered it clear as day. When she came back out, Romano took one look at the tea and said, Get that shit away from me, before fixing herself a Bloody Mary. In a bath towel, with a cigarette and a cocktail, she seemed to brighten a little.
“Okay. So, let’s see it. And whatever it is. It better be fucking good.”
“It’s good,” said Harris.
He took the printouts from his pocket and unfolded them. These were from Yates’ USB stick. There were four images. He placed them in a row on the kitchen bench. Romano bent over and looked. She spotted it immediately.
“Are these stills from security footage? Where did you get these?”
“Someone needed a favour,” he said.
Each photo showed two men. They walked the hallway of the Gold Point to Bachelard’s room. They stood outside his door. One of them was holding something, a black shape.
“Christ, that’s our gun,” said Romano, pointing at one of the figures.
“See this?” asked Harris. In the third photo, one of the men slid a passkey into the room’s lock.
“What the...”
The final photo was time-stamped twenty-five minutes later. It was taken from the lift security camera. The same two men stood together, eyes fixed forward. Smiling. The photos were clear.
“You recognise them?” Romano asked. She brought her face close to page. “They look pretty rough. Is that blood on his fucking shirt?”
“Yeah,” said Harris. “I kno
w them.” He pointed to the one on the left, a balding, solid-looking man, like a footballer gone feral. He wore shorts and a denim work shirt. His face had an exaggerated quality to it: huge nose, eyes and mouth. “This is Drags. That’s what they call him.” The other one was almost the opposite; he was tall and thin with a crop of wild curly hair. He wore round spectacles, and his clothes looked especially tattered and worn. “And that’s Petey,” Harris said. “Petey and Drags. They’re bad news, but I didn’t think they were in any sort of shape for something like this, not up here.”
“I don’t suppose you know where we can find them?” said Romano. She started to move around, grabbing a pair of socks off the back of a chair.
“I do,” said Harris. “But…”
“But what?” she called from the hallway.
“They're fucking junkies. We're going to have to go down to Drainland and dig them out. You might want to put a call in to the station. We’ll need those other two.”
Harris heard her stop.
“Is it that bad?” she said.
“It’s pretty bad,” he answered.
The camp was forty minutes south. They met the other two down there. Harris hadn't seen Denny and Chandler up close for a while. They seemed about the same. Denny had bulked up a little. There were rumours he was getting a little help with that from Carl Yates. Chandler was the same evergreen deadshit he always was: Ranger Smith with a chevron moustache. Both of them looked angry today. They stood there next to their cruiser and glared as Romano pulled the police cruiser in alongside.
“Look at this,” said Denny, as Harris stepped out.
“Jim,” said Chandler. “Long time no see.”
“Not long enough,” said Harris.
“It might have been Bill’s funeral,” said Denny, smiling through it. “I think that’s the last time we were all together.”
