by Candice Fox
The killer disappeared through the fire escape. I ran down the stairs, sensing Eden as she fell into step beside me. On the way across the dining hall I knocked over a man standing with a tray in his hands, watching in numb shock as we approached. The alarm whirred overhead, buzzing in my ear canals.
The fire escape opened onto a loading dock. The killer was nowhere. Eden and I split up, taking two different sets of stairs to the bottom of the dock where pallets of frozen french fry boxes were waiting to be lifted up onto the next level.
To the left and right, dozens of similar loading docks stretched into darkness. I jogged uncertainly to my right, sweeping my gun around the next dock, glancing behind me as Eden appeared in the street, working her way down the left, her figure disappearing between the glowing circles of orange streetlights.
Don’t leave her, I thought, an impulse that had no meaning. Don’t let her get away.
I tried to shake the thought out of my head. Eden’s report crackled in my ear as she reached the other end of the building with no success. I opened my mouth to give my own report when all that came out was a howl. I didn’t even know I’d been hit. My mouth didn’t work and then my legs gave out, the oversized bulk of me in my bulletproof vest and flak jacket slumping to the ground.
I blinked away the lights in the corners of my eyes. I tried to move my arms but they were useless. The commands in my brain seemed to fizzle out. Two boots appeared beside my face before a hand seized my collar from behind.
“There’s no gratitude anymore, is there, Detective?” a voice sneered.
The man in the biker jacket rolled me onto my back. He was huge. As the feeling slowly returned to my legs and arms, I lay beneath him, panting. My gun was in his fingers. I could feel warm blood running down the back of my neck.
“You try to do people a service,” the killer smiled, his blue eyes glinting in the orange light, “and all you get is trouble. People don’t understand. This isn’t life. It’s survival. We’re forgetting where we came from.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. The gun was pointed at my face. I drew short hacking breaths as the killer lifted a boot and pressed it against my upper chest, the toe resting on my Adam’s apple.
“Don’t,” I said, trying to think of a way out and coming up blank. “Just don’t. You’ll only make this worse for yourself. Drop the gun and run.”
The killer laughed. The back of my head felt wet on the concrete. When he spoke again, they were practiced words. I could hear him saying them to me, and at the same time I could hear him saying them to men, to women, to children he had strapped to a steel operating table. His voice carried through my ears to the ears of waitresses, university students, council workers, business brokers. A mother. A father. A schoolgirl. His victims, gone and yet present with me at the same time, reliving their last moments as I was living mine.
“My name’s Jason Beck.” The man above me smiled. “I’m the last human being you’re ever going to see.”
Beck levelled the gun between my eyes. It bucked in his fingers, kicking upwards with a flash as the bullet cleaved into the concrete ten centimeters above my skull. I looked up in time to see Beck double in pain, clutching his shoulder. I blinked and he was gone, and the steel beams of the loading dock ceiling receded into the dark green mist of my fading consciousness.
I opened my eyes to a furious pain in my nose. Chester’s chubby fingers were crushing the cartilage in anxiety, his other hand holding my mouth ajar. I bucked wildly as his mouth descended towards mine.
“Holy Jesus!” I yelped, scrambling away from him. “I’m alive, goddamnit!”
Chester breathed a sigh of relief. There was sweat dripping from the line of his round jaw.
“You weren’t breathing,” he panted. “I just finished my certificate IV in first aid. You were in the right hands.”
Men and women appeared around me. Someone lifted me to my feet and my head began to throb. An ambulance buzzed and flashed its way through the street between the loading docks, the paramedics shoving aside cops and security guards to get to me. Eden and Eric stood in silence by the pallets, watching the fray with detached interest. A sickness brought on by their stares, as well as the blow to the head, pounded through my stomach. I retched but there was nothing in me.
“I can see the headlines now,” someone said as Captain James made his way through the crush of bodies. “Deadly Doctor Winged by Rotund Rent-a-Cop.”
There were a few snickers. These cops had jumped in from the airport station and had no investment in the obvious humiliation of losing the killer when we had him right in our hands. I looked around and saw my own people. None of them was smiling. Chester, who looked like he was bordering on a heart attack, was sitting in the back of an ambulance, sucking gratefully on an oxygen mask.
“I’ve never used my weapon before,” he was blubbering, his voice muffled by the mask. “I . . . I . . . I’ve never used my weapon before.”
“Hey, hey, hey, be careful,” someone else laughed. “He takes jokes about airport security very seriously.”
Jason Beck was long gone but the general consensus was that he had taken a bullet. There was blood on the concrete, not all of it mine. The press were arriving at the end of the street where more guards were setting up barricades. A couple of reporters slipped through and began to jog towards us through the spots of lights. One of the paramedics had walked up to where I sat perched on a milk crate and was unclipping my bulletproof vest. In my daze, I hadn’t realized she had worked my jacket off my shoulders.
“Hang on,” I said, coming to my senses. “Hang on a sec.”
“You’ve been clubbed with a crowbar, sir. You’re going to need to come with me.”
The woman pressed a sterile pad against the back of my head. The contact stung. I stood up too fast and tried to push her away. Eden and Eric looked at each other. It seemed that in slow motion they moved, turning at the same time, wandering through the fire door.
“Someone get a photo,” one of the street cops yelled. “I want Frank and the rent-a-cop arm in arm with a caption: My Hero, the Kiss of Life Saves Sydney Detective.”
I groaned and let the paramedic lead me to the ambulance.
22
The crowbar to the head afforded me the rest of the night off, despite my wishes. We had a name and that was enough to light a fire in me, one that drowned out the low-level mockery about Chester trying to give me mouth-to-mouth and the double black eyes that were emerging on my face. I was dropped home to pace my apartment in a near fury. I took a shower and tried to stave off all thoughts about Beck and what approach we should take now that we had a name to put to his face. Sucking on a beer as the sun rose, the circuit of names pounding in my head brought me around to Jake DeLaney.
I still had the newspaper I’d taken from the restaurant with Martina. The nagging sensation that Jake DeLaney meant something to me crawled beneath my skin. At 5AM I had rifled back through all my previous cases—I filed the cover sheets under my desk—but found nothing to hint at him. The newspaper reported that Jake, a divorced father of two and casual labor-for-hire man, had gone missing after leaving a bar in Coogee. He had been gone three days, with only his wallet, keys and phone, the clothes on his body and a box of Tic Tacs. Three days wasn’t long by any means, but his lack of activity since the point of disappearance was worrying people. He had placed two bets on a football game and won a total of $63.23 but had never claimed his winnings. His phone and bank accounts had not been activated in the time he’d been gone. He had not been spotted at train stations, bus stops, airports or rental-car lots. No taxis reported picking him up from the bar. The tides were calculated and water searched to no avail. By all accounts Jake DeLaney had waved good-bye to the usual Sunday afternoon crowd on the ground-floor sports bar of the Palace Hotel, walked out the side door onto the street by Coogee beach and disappeared into thin air.
It took me until 7AM, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling and wonde
ring how many minutes I had before Eden called me, to realize where I had seen the name.
In Eden’s wallet.
I grabbed a sheet of paper from the notebook beside my bed and a pen from the water glass behind it and wrote down the name Jake DeLaney. I remembered another name, the only other one that hadn’t been crossed off the list, because the man’s last name was the same as a girl I’d dated for two weeks in high school.
Benjamin Annous.
I don’t keep a computer at home. Never have. Aside from reporting or looking up databases on inmates or probationaries, which I only do at work, I don’t have much use for one. A short walk from my apartment brought me to the Biz-zip Internet Café, which for two dollars an hour offered me Internet access, free cups of chilled water and a view to the busy highway. Schoolchildren dawdled on their way to the bus stop and construction workers were marking out sections of road to tear up. I took a computer against the window and ordered a double-shot coffee from the lady behind the counter. She looked like she knew as much about making coffee as I did about computers.
As I sat down my phone began to chirp. Eden’s name flashed up on the blue screen. I ignored the call. The sound of the phone had made me jump, like I’d been caught doing something perverse. It felt wrong to be questioning my partner as my mind inevitably began to do, picking around my memories of her that night in search of something about her words or behavior that explained a missing man’s name in her wallet days before he had gone missing. I remembered the furry feel of the edge of the paper, worn soft from months, maybe years, of rubbing and scraping against her jeans. If she had kept his name on some kind of list for so long, why had he only disappeared now? I tried to remember the names before him, those crossed and recrossed by the ink of different pens, but they’d never been fully snapshotted into my mind.
Jake DeLaney had slowly evolved into a working-class hero from days wallowing in the primordial ooze of petty crime. I pulled up his criminal record from the police database and scrolled through a list of assaults that had been recorded—from a mass that probably hadn’t. The man had a short fuse and a shorter reserve of willpower. He had been ordered to undertake six weeks of rehabilitation as a part of his parole for smashing a car into a dress shop window on a coke binge. The more serious of his convictions included attempting to hijack an armored vehicle with two other men outside a Westpac bank in Bankstown, an underestimation of police resources that cost him five years of his freedom.
I wrote down the names of the two other men convicted of the failed hijacking. Richard Mars and Geoff Gould. I put these names into the criminal file search engine and found similar records of low-level mischievousness leading to a catalyst crime. I decided it was possible Eden had worked on their cases at some point, but when I dug deeper into the case files I found that she was not listed anywhere, probably because she had been a baby at the time of their prime achievements. When DeLaney, Mars and Gould were released from Long Bay, Eden would have been four. I sipped my sour coffee and licked it off my teeth, staring at the image of DeLaney’s plump face filling most of the mug shot on the screen.
Mars and Gould. I couldn’t remember whether or not their names had been on Eden’s list. I looked at my watch and realized I had thirty-five minutes before we were due to meet to prepare for the briefing. With a growing sense of guilt, I put Mars’s name into a public search engine.
I knocked over my empty coffee cup when the first article appeared. Mars had gone missing two years earlier in Thailand, the case put down to a murder-robbery or a purposeful disappearing act to escape conviction for a crime the cops had not yet discovered. He had last been seen at the Indigo Pearl Resort in Phuket, walking down the beachfront on his way to the taxi rank. He was reported missing by his girlfriend, who had flown there with him to enjoy some cheap shopping. His loss was lamented by few others. With nervous, aching fingers I minimized the articles I had been reading and renewed the search engine, ready to type Gould’s name.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The counter attendant looked up as I answered.
“Yeah?”
“You’re late,” Eden said.
“I know,” I rose from the desk. “I just, uh . . . lost track of time.”
“You want me to pick you up?”
“No.” I plonked some coins on the counter and pulled open the sliding door of the café. “I won’t miss the start of the meeting, I promise.”
When she was a child, Eden liked to stand in the hallway and watch Hades sitting at the kitchen table reading novels and newspapers by the light of a dusty antique lamp. She liked to watch his hooded grey eyes moving over the printed words and remember the night she’d first met him, the way his eyes had scanned her bloodied face and hands with a fatherly pain she had thought gone from her life. She liked to stand just beyond the reach of the light and close her eyes and feel the old man’s presence before her, dream about letting him put his arms around her and hold her as he did sometimes. She hoped that one day the feeling of being held by him wouldn’t make her feel itchy and frightened and small. The frantic moments when her real father had held her while the kidnappers burst through the cabin doors had ruined all physical contact for her.
It was seven years since she’d laid eyes on Hades and he had not changed. She hadn’t wanted to come back until she could show him somehow that his work had been worth the effort, that she was becoming someone powerful, someone meaningful, that she had taken what he had given her and used it to grow. Oh, they’d spoken on the phone. She’d sent him things. Letters. Books. Trinkets that reminded her of him. But she’d never gone back, not until she was ready to show him her new self. Full of justice. Full of strength. Ready to begin her real work.
As she stood in the dark before the screen door, she felt as though she were looking in on the past, the perfect stillness interrupted only when Hades lifted and turned the thin paper, rested his stubbled cheek on his thick hand. Eden raised her fist and knocked on the edge of the door. Hades’ eyes lifted, picked out her silhouette.
He said nothing. The screen door gave a loud creak as she opened it. The thud of her boots was out of place on the unpolished boards. She sat down beside him. She was wearing the fitted coveralls of the street, navy blue and pinched at the waist by her huge gun belt. A black police baseball cap shaded her face. He let his eyes wander over the uniform, the badge, the rank slides on her shoulders. It was the first time he had seen her wearing the uniform and the last time she would. From then on, it would be the suits and plain clothes of the homicide department. The old man and the young woman examined each other silently. In time she placed a hand on his hand where it lay by the edge of the paper, curling her fingers into the warmth of his palm.
“You look tired,” Hades said. Eden felt a smile creep over her lips and she nodded, her eyes set on the paper. The old man, wary of how much she hated being touched, lifted his hand and tucked a strand of her fine black hair carefully behind her ear.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “But you were always beautiful.”
There was sadness in his voice. Eden closed her eyes. She could feel his eyes moving over her hands, wondering what agonies they had wrought.
“I’ve missed you,” she said. “In every street. On every corner. In every room. I never stopped missing you.”
A silence stretched between them. The night birds, who were so familiar to her, did not call tonight.
“Where’s Eric?”
“In the car. I wanted to have you first.”
Hades nodded. He closed the newspaper absentmindedly. He seemed afraid to look at her. She squeezed his fingers but he didn’t turn.
“I’ve been afraid all these years that you might have regretted what you did that night,” she said. “I’ve worried that you might be here thinking that if you’d known what we would become you would have just . . . you’d have taken the money and just . . .”
“I knew what you were and I never stopped loving you,” Hades said. “I knew th
at first night.”
Eden licked her lips.
“It’s not your fault you are what you are,” the old man said. “I didn’t do it to you either. One of the men who made you this way is dead. I buried him the night that I was supposed to bury you. The five others, well, they’re still out there. I always planned to wait until you were ready and then tell you who they are. I think you’re ready. I think that’s why you’re here.”
The old man stood and Eden began to see now that, though his appearance hadn’t changed, the way he moved had. She watched him shuffle to the cupboard above the sink and retrieve a small envelope from where it stood against the inside wall of the shelf. He extracted from this envelope a piece of notebook paper. Eden felt a tremor rush through her body as Hades slid the piece of paper across the table to her. She moved her hand away to avoid touching it, her eyes frantically scanning the names.
“The one who brought you here told me it had been a mistake, all of it. I was merciful with him. I hope you’ll treat the others the same way.”
“We’re always merciful,” Eden said. She let the paper rest on top of the table for a long time, unable somehow to find the strength to take it. Eventually she took out her wallet and tucked it into the notes sleeve. A little of the paper poked out, as though trying to escape.
“Some of those others,” Hades said, pausing with the difficulty it caused him, “I’ve watched them over the years. They have children.”
Eden felt tears spill finally from the edge of her long lashes. She forced herself into the old man’s arms and gripped at the back of his shirt. When Eric arrived at the screen door he found Hades holding Eden tightly as she cried.
23
