by Candice Fox
“No pedophile’s going to buy two kids of a dead millionaire. No one in the world’s that fucking dumb.”
There was silence. Eden tried to snuggle into the safety of Eric’s body but her bound wrists and ankles wouldn’t allow the movement. Her dress was soaked, she didn’t know what from. The silence pressed on and on as the two children knelt in the dark.
“Who’s going to do it?”
“Oh come on, man!”
“Listen, you try to drop these brats off on a street corner and someone will see you. Someone’s probably seen us already. This whole thing is a huge fucking mess and we need to clean it up now, man. Kids die every day. Don’t be such a fucking baby.”
“I don’t want any part in this.”
“I know a place we can get rid of them.”
A pause. Panting breaths, curling mist in the dark.
“My mate told me about this guy who runs a dump down at Utulla. Twenty grand, he’ll take them and we can forget this ever happened. We need to move fast, cover our tracks. We’re looking at life here, fellas, and I don’t know about you but I’m not going back to the fucking Bay.”
More silence. Eric was crying. The sound of his crying brought on the hacking sobs the child Eden had only just managed to control.
“Will this guy . . . will he do it all?”
“Nuh, he only takes stiffs. We gotta do it.”
“Well, I’m not fucking doing it.”
“I’ll do it,” someone said.
“You can’t shoot them.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“You want to do it?”
“Don’t shoot them. It won’t take much. They’re little. You shoot them and you’ll get them everywhere. I don’t want any part of them in the car.”
With her untaped eye, Eden saw one man walk into the line of trees, grabbing at a thick branch hanging low to the ground. From nowhere, a hand tossed two folded blue sheets and a roll of duct tape onto the gravel in front of her.
Now, in the bathroom of her apartment, Eden looked in the mirror, stared into her own eyes as the intercom in her living room announced the presence of her brother on the street.
The last man. She would finally be free.
27
One of my ex-wives, I can’t remember which, used to tell me that if I was going to bring her something it should be something she could eat or wear or she didn’t want it. So when I arrived at Martina’s that night I was carrying a plastic bag with two containers of Harthi’s best Indian and a couple of big naan breads. Women love food. You can’t go wrong. You can buy them the wrong ring or a tacky necklace or last season’s handbag but when you bring a woman food and she’s hungry, well, you might as well be Prince Charming.
Martina unlocked the door. She looked at me, then at the bag hanging off my index finger.
“You got a thing about chunky women or something?”
“No,” I said. “But you’ve got free rein up to five hundred kilos. Then I might need to reconsider things.”
She took the bag from me and kissed my lips. She was wearing studded earrings in the shape of red ladybirds that were anatomically correct, as though two of the insects had decided to curl up there for the night. I smiled and felt one of them with my fingers. She held my hand as we went to the table. It had been years since a woman wanted to hold my hand.
All her cutlery and plates and cups were mismatched, as if she’d just bought singular pieces she liked the look of in secondhand shops. Each was beautiful in its own way. I went through her cupboards and gathered everything. She stood by the balcony doors, lost to me, her fingers wandering in the lace hanging beside her. I stopped and watched her, knew she was watching the two patrol officers in the squad car on the street. I remembered my second wife telling me that there were times that I would come home and I would be away at the same time, a shell of myself, inaccessible to her. How unfair it was, she would tell me, how teasing to have my body and not my mind. I knew what that loneliness felt like then. Martina was a ghost. The loss of her stung.
I went to the window and put my hand on her arm, and some warm and bright flicker of herself returned. We wouldn’t eat. We put the food in the fridge, stripped off and climbed into her bed together, and she fit the curves of her body to mine, her hands folded under my chin. We were still strangers and I was glad for it. There was so much to learn. The scent of her hair under my nose was new and welcoming.
“When I was little,” she whispered, “I’d fight with my brothers. Play fights. There was never any competition in it but they enjoyed how worked up I could get. I used to like it until that moment came when I would be pinned and I would test each limb, each muscle, to try to find an escape. When there was none, there was always fear. I knew we were playing. I knew they loved me, sort of. I’d come to realize though, at that time, that my power meant nothing. All my power meant nothing. It was a game but . . . it wasn’t a game. That’s what it was like in those days in the cage. That’s what it’s like now. I’m pinned, Frank. I’m pinned just by knowing he’s alive.”
It was utterly dark and her voice sounded small, like it didn’t matter if I heard her words or not. She was asleep almost instantly, as though she had been waiting years for a safe time.
The night has many shades. For Eden they came on like a blessed heat—the warmth of a job begun, the intense blaze of time as it ticked away. She was sweating as she pinned the black plastic sheet over the large wooden table, folding the edges into perfect forty-five-degree angles to form hospital corners, which she taped tightly. Eric stood by the door to the fish-gutting room, staring out at the stillness of the marina.
All about them the stink of fish was thick, a sour and salty smell, and the only sound was the familiar roar of the duct tape and the sloshing of water against the pillars beneath the boathouse. The licking of the waves sounded, to her, like the clunking of approaching boots. Eden trembled. She fancied she could hear, with her heightened senses, the sucking and gaping of barnacles and other sea creatures when the water receded. She laid out the cable ties, one at each corner, for Benjamin Annous’s wrists and ankles. From a black leather pouch Eden extracted three long, spotless blades: a serrated hunting knife, a narrow filleting knife, a pointed chef’s knife.
At the screech of the blades against their sheaths Eric walked back into the room and closed the door quietly. Along the wall hung less precise instruments, the weapons of the fishermen—hooks and picks and cleavers and scrapers. In the corner was a large and menacing machine, its munching teeth ajar and welcoming, rows of unlabelled cans lined along its shelves. This was Benjamin’s workplace. He spent his days and nights here, snuffing out small, dumb lives hour upon hour, pulling innards from pulsing bellies, stripping vitality from wet flesh.
Benjamin Annous. The one who had begun the shooting.
Eden stood at the table, her gloved palms spread on its surface before her, leaning on their weight. Eric came up beside her and picked up the nearest blade. He smiled. He was remembering now, part of his ritual. Eden reached up and pressed his hand down, sinking the blade back onto the table.
“No,” she said. “This time it’s my turn.”
28
The night has many shades. I felt them coming on like acts in a play as Martina lay beside me, moving restlessly through layers of dream. A cop’s favorite hours are those first ones, when no one is drunk yet, fathers home late from work are falling asleep in front of television sets, children are whispering and giggling in the dark. At midnight, bars thrive and waitresses sigh at their watches, night cleaners vacuum vast meadows of empty carpet and the elderly, unable to sleep, read newspapers by lamplight. The witching hours come, cold and still. Drunks abuse taxi drivers. Bottles shatter in the street and bins are tipped over. Renegade teens stamp out fires on the black beaches and wander home, tight-lipped. My phone sprayed blue light against the ceiling. I thought it was lightning at first. Slipping my arm out from under Martina, I took the call at the balcony doors.
I looked out and noticed that the patrol car was still there.
“You said it was urgent,” Anthony said.
“It is.”
“Yeah, well, I got everything you asked for. The house in Mortdale belongs to a BT Annous. The same Annous shared a cell with a Stanley J. Harwich and a Michael A. Nattier in Silverwater back in ’91. Harwich and Nattier are missing.”
I exhaled sharply, staring around me in the dark. Martina’s cat came and rubbed its thin body against my leg. I nudged it away.
“A lot of people have received late-night phone calls to chase this stuff down. You might want to come round the station with a slab sometime soon.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”
I hung up and the phone slipped out of my fingers, hitting the floor with a dull thud. Six names. Five of them missing, extracted from the living world cleanly like cancers cut from flesh. Why were they doing this? What were they doing to these men? Immediately, a flood of poisonous thoughts entered my brain in retaliation to the wild fear that was infecting my body. You can’t prove anything. No bodies, no crime. They’re cops, Frank. There’s a proper explanation. There’s an innocent story behind all of this.
Pushing aside the thin lace over her windows, I saw the plainclothes cops sitting in a car across the street, one texting on his mobile phone, the other staring idly through the windscreen. I went to the bedroom door and looked back at Martina. Her hair had fanned out on the pillow in one short peak like a parrot’s crest at the back of her head, jagged and feathery at its ends. Her hand was curled in the place where I had lain. The cat sauntered past me into the room and curled in the crook of her left knee, its upper body resting on her thigh.
I left.
Annous’s house was dark. I approached from a street away, jogging on my toes along a curving concrete path, ducking under wet frangipani trees that hung over back fences. The scent of flowers followed me into the street where I crouched, looking for a car I recognized. There wasn’t one. The truck that Annous owned was still in his driveway, the back shutter rolled down revealing a cartoon of a large sapphire blue fish. I waited ten minutes, then dashed across the street to the uncertain yips of a small dog wandering one of the yards.
I couldn’t remember the nights being as cold as this on my police beat. My eyes stung as a gentle rain fell, beading in the hair on my forearms. The night felt trapped in the kind of stillness that made me wonder if I was alone on the earth, the only creature left in existence to move and creep and wander. End of the world. No crickets chirped in the grass. No bats flew overhead. No moon. I crept down the side of the Annous house and tried to stave off a slowly intensifying fear, the kind I had not experienced since I was a child, the kind that twisted shadows into figures and gave weight to empty air. I stood at the corner of the house and listened. Nothing. Benjamin Annous’s back door was unlocked and slightly ajar. I eased it open and stepped inside.
When I was a little kid, maybe five or six, my grandmother used to come to our house regularly and sleep in a renovated garage at the back of our property that usually served as a kind of rumpus room. My father, a short-tempered workaholic, had forbidden me to sleep in bed with my parents no matter the terror that infected me at night, so my grandmother’s visits were an opportunity to seek adult protection from my fear of the dark. The trek through the house, across the yard and into the garage, however, was horrific, laden with long stretches of impenetrable blackness. One night, trembling and sobbing, I made the journey through the house, out the back door, across the yard and into the depths of the long, cluttered garage, whispering Nanna’s name with relief when I finally made it to safety. I found an empty bed, neatly made under my hands. She had left that evening on the late-night bus, long after I was put to bed. So there I was, in the dark, miles it seemed from my bed, having expected the company and security of another only to find that I was alone.
I remembered that night as I walked through the Annous house and found it empty. Strangely, I had expected someone, even if it were Eden and Eric, even if that would mean I had been right about them all along, that I was in danger. To find no one there was even more chilling. I stood in the kitchen and struggled to breathe, paralyzed by the emptiness around me. I looked down at the gold and orange tiles and noticed a drop of blood, the size of a coin and perfectly round, ink black in the minimal light.
The new morning was aglow. Jason stood in the garden with his face uplifted, watching the heat of his breath billow towards an untouchable sky. His skin was shivering cold, yet a fire roared against the curved and rolling insides of his flesh, a power that defied muscle, bone, veins. He felt it glowing behind his eyes and sizzling in his fingertips. The wet garden alone contained him, ropes of hanging flowers and mesh of leaves, a fragrant cage in which to settle, collect himself, before moving on.
He set down his bag and turned on the rusty iron tap on the side of the building, using the water to rinse his arms and hands. As he was running it over the toes of his shoes he noticed the orange light blinking against the bricks where he leaned. He turned. A man stood there in a high-resolution vest, a hand on the first of the garbage bins lined up at the edge of the street. The young man looked at Jason’s hands, the pink film of rinsed blood dripping from his fingers. Jason reached up and straightened his hair.
“Morning,” he said, a statement of fact. The garbageman backed towards his truck.
I couldn’t control myself. When Eden and Eric arrived outside her apartment building at half past four, a twitching, shivering rage whipped through me. I was covered in sweat. When they exited the car, neither of them spoke. It seemed strange, their silence. Eric’s eyes moved to me a little lazily as I approached, as though he had always expected me to be there, and his hands remained by his sides as I took hold of his jacket and slammed him into the car.
“What did you do?” I snarled, feeling my knuckles crack under my grip. “What the fuck did you do?”
“Frank—” Eden gripped my shoulder. I shoved her off.
“My, my. It’s way past your bedtime, Frank.” Eric grinned. “Come on upstairs and you can sleep off the morning in the guest room. I’ll even make you a nice tuna sandwich.”
Eden covered her mouth with her hand.
“I know about Annous,” I panted. “I know about all of them. I saw the list in Eden’s wallet. I know they’re all missing.”
The air in Eden’s lungs seemed to leave her at once. She crumpled in the middle like a paper bag. Eric, however, remained unchanged. He stared down at me with a kind of pity in his eyes, as though I were mad. It was the kind of look I had expected from him.
“Whatever you think you know, Frank, it’s wrong,” Eden murmured. “You need to back right off this, right now.”
“Just like Doyle, huh?” Eric asked her, his eyes still fixed on mine. “I told you from the moment he laid eyes on you that he was going to be a problem. It’s you, Eden. You’re the problem. They just can’t get enough.”
His hand seemed to close on all of the front of my shirt at once. He used the fabric like a handle to just about lift me off my feet, the way a man might pick up a doll. His strength was unnatural, impossible given his size. My weight, the bulk of my shoulders and chest and belly, meant nothing. He spun me and shoved me into the car.
“Didn’t I tell you, Eden? I’m always right, aren’t I?”
“Put him down.”
“What did they do to you?” I asked. “What did they do to you?”
Eric’s phone began ringing. I used the distraction to scrape my shoe down his shin. His hands loosened. I punched him in the stomach and pushed him away, giving it all my strength, everything I had. He barely moved. His hand forced my jaw up, the night sky collecting in my vision as he punched me in the sternum, a body-bending blow.
I sunk to the ground, my breath gone and my lungs unable to draw more. His boot slammed into my stomach, cracking ribs. I couldn’t make a sound. The pain was something in the very air. I was drowning in it. I
was drowning in a hot, red sea.
My phone began ringing. Followed by Eden’s phone. A calling of all agents. Nothing less could have stopped Eric’s hands as they grabbed hold of my arms and hurled me into the road.
“Jason Beck, confirmed in Randwick. We got to go, Eric. We got to go!”
Eden was almost screaming. I used the hood of my car to drag my body upright. Sickness pulsed through me but I refused to succumb to it. I staggered to the door and fell into my car as Eden and Eric screeched away from the curb.
Randwick. Martina lived in Randwick.
As soon as I started to drive, everything I knew about Eden and Eric, everything I suspected they had done, was washed away by my desire to get to Randwick by any means possible. I gunned the car through stop signs, intersections, over roundabouts and through oncoming traffic lanes. The road was wet, the rain steadily increasing, driven sideways into the car by a growing wind. All across the city people were waking to an ominous day, a storm of brooding tension, the clouds low and purple. There was no sun. I swallowed my heart over and over, feeling the power of the vehicle surge through the steering wheel in my hands. My shoulders began to ache. Hills of uniform darkened apartment blocks rose and fell beneath me.
I left her. I left her. I gave him what he wanted. He was waiting for me to leave.
Eden and Eric careered into my path from a side street. They were upright, rigid in their seats like an elderly couple on a morning drive. I followed. On Avoca Street, I began to notice people running—not from the rain, there was more of an urgency in their stride. Umbrellas abandoned, pulling children by the wrist, teenagers fighting in the opposite direction, coming up against the spread palms of nervous cops. Blue and red lights flashed and sparkled in the rain. I shoved the car into an awkward park on the footpath outside a wedding photography shop, almost taking the painted front window with me.
