“Not too tired then,” he said, against the side of her neck.
She wasn’t, not then and not a few hours later when they drove to the vet clinic, found Blue made it through the night and was fit to travel, and not when she boarded a small jet with Sean and Blue, bound for Adelaide. But she did doze during the hour and a half flight. Then again on the flight to Sydney, she lay her head on Sean’s shoulder awash in the knowledge she’d found the deepest truths.
44: Fishing
They’d been pouring over the two ledgers Caitlyn had taken from the safe for the whole morning and it was still a meaningless spread of numbers and hieroglyphics. This was the third day she’d worked with the crime squad’s forensic accountant, Maria Cosovich. So far for her food, accommodation and around the clock protection she’d delivered a big fat zero in return.
Maria was too nice to say anything. She brought homemade shortbread biscuits when she arrived the second day. Stud said outright it was okay. It didn’t feel okay, and she didn’t know Stud well enough to know if his pacing, and the rate at which he accepted another cup of tea and gulped it down without waiting for it to cool, was his usual approach to life or not.
Sean was no help. At least not on this. He had other work to do that kept him away from the house during the day and once Stud and Maria left, she was alone, rambling around the three bedroom suburban house with her doubts for company.
Stud had been more specific about her ‘deal’. She did need a lawyer, but there was no hurry. Sean’s sister Bridie was tracking a recommendation. It was unlikely she’d need to worry about a prison sentence, but she did need to worry about demonstrating her value in the quest to bring Justin undone. So far that’d been limited to turning the jug on, jiggling tea bags, pouring milk and washing mugs.
Like Carolyn Martin, Justin had gone to ground. He was off the grid: not seeking medical treatment, accessing a bank or using credit cards, or his passport, and not returning to the apartment or the business. There was deliberately no arrest warrant out for him and so no ostensible reason for him to be missing in action. Cait knew he’d be running scared. Justin liked order and control in his life. Getting beaten up in a police sting would not have been his idea of a good time. Stud had activated an informer network to get a bead on him. He was pretty sure a cash incentive would eventually reveal the GPS co-ordinates for the last place Justin sneezed. Bidwell meanwhile traded on in the hope that he might surface again once he felt the heat was off.
Unlike Justin, Wacker was back in business, he’d even done an interview with The Telegraph on police brutality, as if he was primping for businessman of the year, and Stud said he was waiting for a legal suit to follow. It sent Sean spare.
The bright spot was Blue. And since the safe house was a suburban red brick with a backyard and the Sydney vet had cleared her to leave the clinic, Blue would be coming home tomorrow.
If Blue was the bright, Sean was the deep warm glow. He came back to the house each night bringing groceries and news of the day. They ate a meal together and hung out in front of the TV or listening to music as though they were a normal couple. A normal couple who were potential targets of gang violence.
Inside the house it was easy to forget that. Inside the curl of Sean’s arms even more so. When they’d arrived he’d surveyed the house, checking every window, every vantage point, then asked if he could move in with her—but not as part of her protection detail. He wanted to move in as her boyfriend. He’d laughed when he said the word and it was almost the occasion of a fight, until he explained he thought the description was inadequate, but since there was nowhere on the official paperwork to declare himself her fully fledged white knight, she’d have to make do.
Making do with Sean meant opening herself up to a world she’d never experienced. For a start, he talked. He grumbled, he griped, he bitched, he repeated bits of conversation from his day, he asked her opinion, he expected her interest. He sang. He made her laugh. And he wanted her time, even if it was only to have her beside him while he chopped vegetables. His attention was heady. She was essentially under house arrest, her movement restricted to an eight hundred square metre block, but she walked around with an idiot grin on her face because he was showing her a different way to live. One where she counted as more than a colleague you slept with or a business partner you duped.
She stopped thinking about the fact this was playing house and set aside the worry of how she was going to pay for a lawyer, find a job and earn enough to pay rent on another flat, because hearing Sean come in the front door was the best sound even when he was cursing about ‘frigging paper cuts’ being the only bit of police action he was seeing.
“More tea?” she said to Stud, as he came in from the backyard, juggling his phone and an empty mug.
Stud focused on Maria—a flick of his chin that got her to say, “Nothing new.”
Then he said, “Let’s look at it again tomorrow. See if Sean’s idea of ranking Fetch’s delivery instructions against the notations leads anywhere.”
Maria said, “Got it,” and powered down her laptop. She left the ledgers and a pile of subpoenaed bank records stacked neatly on the table.
Stud held his mug out and Cait poured. She thought he’d leave with Maria but he sat after they waved her off.
He sipped. He sat back in the kitchen chair as though this was going to be a casual chat, but though he exuded laid-back in his jeans, t-shirt and every which way thick grey hair, he was anything but.
“I’ve got a proposition for you. Our boy’s not going to like it. So I’m going to ask you not to tell him.”
Cait dropped her head; she traced her finger over a whorl in the pine table. That wasn’t fair, but it’s not like she had much choice. “Why wouldn’t he like it?”
Stud snorted. She got a whiff of his tea breath. “Last time we put you in the field he assaulted a superior officer. This time he might put me in hospital. I’ve got a thing against hospitals, just so you know.”
What was it with these tough guys and hospitals? “You want to put me in the field? What does that mean?”
“Ever been fishing, Cait?”
“No.” She said it like she hoped it would prompt a shortcut in the conversation.
“Right, well, stick with me anyway.” No such luck.
“If you want to catch a big fish, first you have to go where the fish is. Then you have to show him something he wants more than he wants to stay hidden. When he sticks his head up, you clobber him.”
“That doesn’t sound like a fishing story.”
“So I mix my metaphors. It’s a strategy. We think Justin is a weak link in Wacker’s organisation. We think if we can get to Justin, we can get to Wacker and if we can get to Wacker, we can get to the rest of them and we can clean up bikie gang crime.”
“You make that sound easy.”
“It’s fucking harder than fishing.”
“I’m not the rod in the story am I?”
“Nope.”
“I’m the bait.”
“Smart girl.”
“God!”
“So you see why I don’t want Sean knowing.”
“I have to tell him, and even if I don’t he’s going to know. He sees through me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re going to have to work on making yourself less transparent.”
She sighed. “I don’t know if I can do that. If I want to.”
Stud leaned forward, his casual shifted to caustic. She had a flashback to the interrogation room in Perth. “Tell me what the advantage of our boy jumping all over this with his objections about your safety would be?”
“Maybe he should. How unsafe will it be?”
“Unsafe enough for you to be free and clear of this mess when it’s all over.”
“What do you mean?”
“You do what I’m asking and you walk away with no charges, no record, no repercussions. You don’t get the licence back but you can have the Statesman and start again.”
&nb
sp; Free and clear. No record. A chance to start again. Where was the fine print? “You’re asking me to do something dangerous.”
“I’m asking you to put yourself at risk for a short period of time so we can fix a larger problem for the long haul.”
“And Sean can’t know.”
“You got it, hook, line and sinker. You need to think about it?”
“Can I have the details?”
“Not yet. Need to know. It won’t happen for a little while yet.”
There was only so much mystery she could live with. “I do need to know if I have to see Justin.”
“He’ll have to see you. That’s all. It’ll be a controlled environment—heavily controlled. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t think you could pull it off.”
“What if I can’t?” She’d managed to get through the Bold Park sting because she’d had Sean with her, because he’d needed her as cover. Doing something like that again, facing Justin alone, it was a much bigger deal and she didn’t have Sean’s talent for role-playing.
“Ever wanted something badly, Cait?”
Stud would’ve made a great used car salesman. “That’s a trick question.”
“But not hard to answer.”
“Yes.” She’d wanted Sean inexplicably when she thought he was a bad cop and utterly when she learned he wasn’t.
“What?”
She picked at random. “I wanted to be able to run this circuit in the park in under thirty minutes.”
“How far off were you?”
“Six minutes. I didn’t think I’d ever get a whole six minutes off my time.”
“What did you do?”
“A bunch of stuff. What does it matter?”
“It matters.”
“I did sprints. I met a male friend who was much faster than me and I ran against him. I worked at it. I changed my shoes. I adapted my stride.”
“You did it.”
She smiled. “I did. But what does it prove?”
“What it proves is what I already know and you apparently don’t.”
She sighed and put her forehead on the table. The fishing analogy was bad enough, this was torture.
“You don’t give up.”
She shot upright. “It was a run in the park, Stud.”
“It was something you wanted badly enough to work hard for. It was something that made you dig down and find reserves, rethink your patterns, and slog at the problem till you licked it. It proves you’re tenacious. You proved that to me in Perth. You were scared witless, but you knew you could help. You dug down, you thought about it creatively, you didn’t hide from the reality of it, and you did it with opposition from Sean.”
Maybe this was less torture and more being taught.
“You can do this too, Cait. Exactly the same way—but let’s skip the opposition bit for the sake of our collective health.”
“I’d be free?”
“As a sulphur-crested cockatoo.”
“What happens if I rat myself out to Sean?” This was a big problem. Not only did she not want to lie to him, she didn’t think she’d be able to get away with it. He’d always known when she was withholding things from him. The impossible part of this mission wasn’t being the bait, it was keeping the secret.
Stud gave a rough laugh. “Things will get overly complicated, because he’s a protective bastard and he’ll make life difficult.”
“Can’t you order him to…I don’t know, behave?”
“Do you know why Sean works best undercover?”
She shook her head.
“Because he was a lousy beat cop. Not good with authority and he gets bored when life is too easy. I took him on when it was starting to become obvious he’d need a new profession. I took a risk on him and it paid off. He’s happiest when he can control his environment, no matter how warped that situation is. He’s a fucking nightmare when he can’t. So there’s not a lot I can do to make him behave.”
What Stud said rang the sound of true. She remembered how angry Sean was when he’d burned Fetch’s clothes. Getting sacked, not being knifed or set-up, or the threat of being chased, was the moment he’d lost control and had to fight himself to get it back. Thinking he’d lost her was another. “But isn’t that inconsistent with undercover work? He was a lowly messenger boy.”
“Ah, Cait. Don’t mistake control for having authority, or needing to be the big man. Don’t let his chatterbox shtick, or his genial nice guy act lead you astray. He’s not some stuffed teddy bear, but he doesn’t need to act the growling alpha dog either. If he was locked in a metal box, he would still be in control. Except.” Stud stopped and shook his head as though he need to hack his way through the rest of the thought with something sharper than another cup of tea.
“Except what?”
“Except where it comes to you. He’s a ten car smash-up where it comes to you.”
“Oh.” She flushed and it was embarrassing. But hearing she affected Sean like that was thrilling. It hit her with a deeper shock of pleasure than all Stud’s sharp-eyed assessment of her own tenacity did. She couldn’t look at him, least he suss out her stupid pride.
“Mostly it’s good. A guy can get too cocky without someone who can shake him up.”
“You think I shake him up?” She heard the greed in her voice to hear more about what she meant to Sean.
“Like a cyclone. But Sean in protective bastard mode over this will give us grief. So you need to work on being opaque if this is going to work the way we want it to.”
“Which is why you’re not going to give me any details.”
Stud pushed away from the table and stood. She wondered how much his knowledge of Sean was based on being a similar man. He picked up his phone and workbag and was halfway across the room when he said, “When this is over I’ll take you fishing.”
She turned in her chair to look at him. She couldn’t help herself. “Assuming you still have the use of your arms.”
His laughter ricocheted off walls all the way out the front door.
45: Crack
Sean stood in the backyard watching Blue gnaw on a dried pig’s ear. The dog was making high-pitched whines of contentment. Three things were clear. Blue was a great dog. The hieroglyphics in the ledger were linked to the notations in the instructions Fetch carried on his delivery runs, and Cait was keeping something from him.
He’d given Maria everything he had to help crack the code. Her forensic team would take it from here. Cait was another puzzle, but he had a plan to crack her too. It involved dinner, a warm bath, a head massage and making her forget her own name. If that didn’t work, he was going to explain in fine detail how messing with his woman would severely compromise Stud’s personal health and muck up Mrs Stud’s social life, because feeding Stud through a tube was going to get bloody wearing.
He left Blue to the pig’s ear and went inside to run the bath. He didn’t have any scented bubbly stuff but that was only a minor disadvantage. Cait was wiping down the sink. He’d retrieved her stuff from her old flat above the dry-cleaners and she wore a navy singlet dress, simple, short, fitted to her body. He leaned on the kitchen bench and watched her put their plates away.
“What are you doing?” she said, her back to him.
“Watching you.”
She fumbled with a cupboard handle.
“Oh come on, you love it.”
She turned, couldn’t hide her grin. She’d been on edge since he walked in the door, but nothing she said about her day had given him anything to work with. It was too easy to blame in on Stud. He needed to sure before he knocked the man’s teeth out.
She was on a different kind of edge now. She backed up against the sink, arms open, resting on the countertop either side of her. All her weight was on one leg, that hip and one shoulder hiked, her other knee bent. It made her body all curves and angles.
“Are you running a bath?”
He wanted to trace those curves and smooth those angles, but if he st
arted there’d be a flood in the bathroom. “I am.”
“Who for?”
“Me.”
She laughed and abandoned the deliberately seductive stance. “Yell when you’ve finished soaking and I’ll make you coffee.”
“And you.”
She hiked the hip again, her eyes widening. “Oh.”
He took her hand, leading her to the bathroom. She eyed the tub. “Are you sure we’re both going to fit in there?”
It was an average-sized bath, not ideal for two adults, and getting nice and full. He tested the temperature and swapped to the cold tap. “You’re getting in. I’m sitting up there.” He pointed to the tiled ledge behind the curved backrest of the bath. “Strip.”
“I have no idea what we’re doing.”
“If I tell you it’ll spoil the surprise. If I put you in the bath it will get your dress all wet.”
“I see I’m getting plenty of choice about this.”
He flicked water on her then pointed at her hair, bundled up in a clip. “Take that thing out.”
“Yes sir.”
He grinned at her. There were certain times he could get away with dishing out instructions. “That’s more like it.”
She took out the clip and shook her hair out, then pulled the dress over her head. She got embarrassed when he watched her undress. He loved the way it coloured her face. She had mismatched underwear, cheap stuff. Maybe he should get her something pretty. Hell no. What did he know about women’s underwear and he liked her out of it better anyway. He flicked more water at her.
She turned her back to him and unhooked her bra, slid her pants off. “I have to be naked and you don’t.”
“I see your point.” He pulled his shirt off. He was already barefoot. She gave him a look and he laughed and shucked his jeans and underwear. Then he shifted to the tiled ledge, sat and put his legs in the water. He gestured to the space in the bath between his knees. “Come here.”
She climbed in, sighing as the effect of the warm water hit her. He’d cleaned out a mug they’d had their toothbrushes in. He filled in with water and poured it over her hair, being careful not to let it get in her face.
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