Silence.
“You know, Steve, it was originally all about the cobra,” said Cait, in a comment that seemed like it belonged to a continuing conversation rather than emerging straight out of the blue. “But now there’s more to it than just that snake tattoo. There’s the kidnapping, and that name Frog that keeps rattling around in my brain like the memory of a bad smell. And now this latest addition—the Harleys.” Cait tapped each part of her mind map in turn with her index finger, tracing the long green spaghetti line that seemingly linked the disparate images. All except the Harleys, which were sitting as lone sentinels off to the side.
“Hey, looks like it’s been a while since you sat on the floor like that, mate. Memories of India, perhaps?” G had just poked his head in the door of Cait’s bedroom, and noticing Steve’s obvious discomfort at sitting on the floor, couldn’t resist having a go at him. They were like that—long-time friends who were always ribbing each other in jest, joking, cajoling.
In fact, Steve was one of G and Jools’s oldest friends, and it was only natural that G suggested to Jools that they ask Steve to be Cait’s godfather, which was a role that even today, some twenty-four years later, Steve took seriously.
Very seriously.
Their friendship went back decades, to a life well before kids, a house in suburbia, and a steady job. It was 1976 and G and Jools were backpacking, following the less traveled path of the ancient Silk Road from Turkey to India and beyond. They had just found themselves stranded for twelve hours in no-man’s-land, a five hundred-meter-wide strip of innocuous red dust that separated the border outposts of Iran to the west, and Afghanistan to the east in the days when it was still possible—well, on most days—to make the crossing. Not a healthy place to be stuck at the best of times, but even worse if you were a vulnerable westerner traveling with an attractive, flaming-haired female. They were just lucky that there was strength in numbers, as G and Jools had hooked up the week before with a few other intrepid travelers, so they were all experiencing the same fate.
Then when they were all finally able to escape the madness of the border crossing they had to put their lives in the hands of a kamikaze bus driver who had an apparent death wish . . . and to add to their frustration, Jools was groped on the bus by an amorous goat herder who was obviously overdue for his yearly bath, while G was promptly pickpocketed and lost all his small-change afghanis.
G and Jools’s final destination—Herat—definitely wasn’t looking like it was going to be placed high on their “must return to one day” list. G was pissed off big-time, and Jools’s sixth sense was like an emergency warning light flashing in her head: “G, I don’t have a good feeling about this place.”
They were dirty, irritable, sore, battered and bruised, plus they reeked of travel smells, goats, and chickens . . . and there was Steve, sitting cross-legged in the shade at a low table under a faded awning with a torn Enjoy Coca-Cola emblem flapping in the light breeze, the curly smoke of a shisha pipe lazily drifting skyward as he puffed on the brightly corded mouthpiece, looking for all the world like he owned the place, laughing at the two dust-covered, disheveled westerners who had just gotten off the bus.
“Hey, looks like we’re the only white-eyes around here. Want to join me?” inquired Steve as they headed toward Steve’s hole-in-the-wall chai shop, automatically presuming that G and Jools spoke English.
“Yeah, after that trip . . . my God, what an ordeal . . . we’d love to.”
And that was the start of their lifelong friendship.
“Is Steve spinning his usual crap again, Cait? Don’t believe a word he says!” G was trying to make light of the moment. He didn’t want to see Cait bogged down in any more deep and meaningfuls than she was already in. Yes, she needed understanding, support, and the knowledge that she had a network around her who cared, but she also had to laugh sometimes. In her current situation G felt that laughter really was the best medicine—easy to say, hard to do, but regardless she had to be given the opportunity to lighten up sometimes and see the joyful side of life again. G felt that was the least he could do, while leaving the secret women’s business to Jools.
The more Steve thought about Cait’s mind map, the more he became aware of an ominous, foreboding darkness that her picture was painting for him. Something about the mind map disturbed him, but he just couldn’t put his finger on it.
The Harleys? They just don’t fit in. Weird. And that cobra—why does it ring a bell? Where’s the damn connection?
Steve didn’t regard himself as a spiritual man, so that side of his feelings weren’t part of it. Well, he certainly wasn’t religious in the traditional sense. Interestingly, Steve never actually denied his Christian upbringing at the Corpus Christi Christian Brothers College where he was schooled, or even openly declared any agnostic leanings. It was just that he couldn’t find any logical reason to believe in the God of Creation, so he replaced this with his own Gods: the Gods of Money, Wine, and Good Fortune.
As far as Steve was concerned the answer always lay in the problem, not in some higher sentient being, and you created your own luck by the life choices you made along the way. Steve delighted in stirring that pot by telling religious hard-liners that it seemed the harder he worked, the luckier he got, so if you judged luck by being successful in business, then his God had given it to him in spades.
Could they say the same for their God?
But Steve was also a very layered person. Even Jools, with her perceptive insight into what made people tick, was never quite able to fully crack the man who was Steve. There was a side to him that, try as she may over the years, she just couldn’t access. He represented a lifelong jigsaw puzzle that she was piecing together agonizingly slowly when he revealed another snippet of information about himself.
Steve wasn’t only Cait’s godfather; he was also Jools’s enigma. He was like one of her patients in her clinic, his “problems” gnawing away at her, year after year: Yes, he has driving ambition and is totally ruthless in business. But why? He wasn’t like that in Asia all those years ago. Or maybe he was? An insecurity complex? Or just plain smart? Or maybe even some hidden trauma in his life that G and I don’t know about? And some of his so-called contacts here—they really are a bit sketchy. People on the wrong side of the law. G even hinted once that he felt Steve was involved in some kind of drug dealing when we knew him in India. Thank God he’s our close friend—I’d hate to have him as our enemy.
Steve finally said his goodbyes and jumped in his car to go back to work, as he had a deal going on that was going to make him a pile of dollars and he had to orchestrate things through.
Just good luck again, huh? Like a chameleon, Steve morphed straight back into full-on business mode again. His Money God was calling him.
Steve had become extremely successful in business by not only being astute and perceptive, but also because he was a strategic thinker who had learned early on that overanalysis kills spontaneity and free thought. As G had told him—lectured to him, as was his gurulike manner—the mind was a marvelous organ if left to sort out the clutter from the factual, so Steve allowed his gray matter to do all the hard lifting; to him there was simply nothing more destructive, or wasteful of time for that matter, than unfocused thought.
“Cait, you can go on the back burner for a while,” said Steve to no one in particular, except maybe “Bitching Betty,” the nickname he had given the monotonous, synthesized voice of his car guidance system. He was currently driving back to work after seeing Cait and now had other pressing matters that required his attention.
Like the next deal.
The end result was that instead of attacking Cait’s problem head-on, Steve let his thoughts and observations about the revelations in her mind map sit there and percolate, midway between his conscious and subconscious. Steve always found that when something like his goddaughter’s problems were nagging away at him like a bad-tempered shrew, that disregarding the thought entirely and letting his mind mull over
things in the background while he got on with what was in front of him worked every time.
So as the Money God took over, Cait’s mind map was relegated to the background. For the present at least.
Steve woke violently from a sleep as deep as a dead man’s dream, the snake tattoo front and center of his consciousness. The cobra was there in his dreams, slithering up the arm of a patched bikie on a Harley, as real as if he could reach out and touch its cold skin.
Yes! I know where I’ve seen it before. It’s the tattoo worn by the Warlocks. I’m positive.
Steve had a dark side to him that was a vestige of his early years in business when he trod a fine line between legal, quasi-legal, and downright against the law. He had rubbed shoulders equally with wealthy property developers, generous benefactors, questionable investors, dodgy politicians, suspect bankers, corrupt union officials, and members of the criminal world. He called them all “friends,” but in reality he viewed them purely as stepping stones to future wealth and power. Nothing more, nothing less. He was the master of spin and always had an angle, but more importantly, an escape route.
Steve had an uncanny ability to read the play and feel the vibe that was happening in a deal, way before other players in the game had any idea what was going on. He may have given G his nickname—The Guru, later shortened to “G” by Jools—but he lived up to his epithet that G had given him: the Teflon Man. No matter what deep doo-doo Steve landed himself in, he always seemed to emerge at the top of the heap, with a pile of cash in his hand and no recriminations.
And now today Steve was rich, influential, and still doing deals, except this time it was on his terms.
“Oh pleeeease, how many times do I have to tell you, Steve? Don’t throw the blankets off the bed like that when you get up. It’s freezing,” muttered Jo, his long-suffering wife, from the warmth of her cocoon.
But it was way too late. Steve was already out the bedroom door and en route to his office. He was on a mission to find a snake. Jo knew what her husband was like. When he had a bee in his bonnet about something, he just became oblivious to everything else around him. It was as if he donned a pair of blinders.
“Found it!” Steve half whispered to himself, as he intently drilled down in Google for information on the Warlocks and their patching. And there it was, plain as day, staring back at him, just as he had envisaged it in his dream—a large coiled snake emblazoned on the back of a biker’s sleeveless leather jacket, gaping mouth, fangs dripping venom, dominating the center of the Warlocks MC club emblem, ready to strike.
“That’s the connection. I knew it was there.”
Steve wasn’t into coincidences—this was real. But he needed more proof before he disclosed his findings to Cait: he had to show her a picture of the actual tattoo, and that would be no easy task, as the Warlocks were one-percenters who moved around constantly, and like all of their brothers in the MC world, didn’t take kindly to people asking questions. In fact, it could be very bad for your health to be caught sniffing around.
“Hey Tangles, your buy, mate.”
Steve was having a quiet little drink over lunch in a bloodbath pub in Broadmeadows with an ex-heavy thug whom he used way back from time to time when he was on the way to making his first few million. He occasionally needed someone to “convince” the occasional recalcitrant debtor to cough up and pay or suffer the unfortunate consequences, and Tangles was his man. It seemed to work every time, because for some reason the ones in debt to Steve were more attached to their fingers and toes than they were to their money.
“So tell me, arsehole, looks like you’re patched now. Right? Warlocks?”
“Fuck off, Steve. I’m not your heavy no more. Find someone else.”
“Hey mate, don’t want nothing from you. No job. Just a bit of intel.”
“Ah, piss off, dickhead. Not fucking interested.”
The next round arrived and Tangles immediately downed half his glass in a single gulp, throwing it down his throat as if he’d just come out of a month in the desert.
“Mate . . .”
“I just told you. I’m not your fucking mate no more.”
As far as Steve was concerned, Tangles had been at the end of the queue when the brains were being handed out at conception, and the drugs over the years had fried his brain, so he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box any more. But Tangles did still have one big asset: he was built like a brick shithouse. And he did what he was told. So he kept him onside, just in case.
“Yeah mate, just want to know about that chick in the paper who was grabbed a while back.”
“Don’t know nothin’, mate.”
“C’mon numbnuts, you know who I mean. Don’t want you to spill the beans here. Just want to find out who’s behind it.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I know the chick’s father. He asked me to see what I could find out.”
“Well you’ll get nothin’ from me, mate.”
“So you do know something?”
“Fuck off.”
“Tangles, you’re so transparent. Just tell me, mate.”
“Listen, dickhead. All I’ll say is that my brothers in the Warlocks are getting mighty pissed off about all the heat that’s being directed our way. Not good for business, you know what I mean? She and that nosy journo of hers just need to back off, or we’ll do it for her.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell her father. That’s cool.”
Steve downed the rest of his beer in a single swig.
“Hey mate, saw your hog outside. Love it. What about a photo of the wheels, eh? Been looking at getting one myself.”
“Hey G, at great risk to life and limb I did a bit of snooping around some lowlifes that I crossed paths with a while back and managed to get a photo of something that I think will interest Cait. You okay if I drop by and show her? I’m actually only about ten minutes away.”
Steve had somehow found an idle thirty minutes or so in his busy schedule between doing deals and having his lunchtime catch-up with Tangles, and he’d managed to photoshop the pictures he took of Tangles and his Harley outside the pub. And he was mighty pleased with the result.
“Yeah, sure. Cait’s still obsessed with all this, so I’m sure she’d appreciate it. What you got?”
G didn’t dare ask Steve anything about the supposed “lowlife” that he had apparently met. After the years of friendship between them he knew there was a line in the sand that you never crossed when it came to Steve, and that was to never, ever, ask him about business or his contacts or whoever it was that he dealt with. Because unless he volunteered the information, there would just be an impenetrable brick wall that would spring up out of nowhere, and that would be it.
End of story.
“Well mate, I’ve managed to get hold of a picture of an arm with a cobra tattoo slithering up it, and that arm’s attached to a body that’s sitting on a Harley.” Steve was speaking on his car’s speakerphone and attempting to negotiate peak rush hour traffic at the same time, so his words were coming in fits and starts.
“Jesus Steve, how’d you get that?”
“No questions, eh. I just managed to get hold of it. But there’s more.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“You dickhead. Win your license in a raffle? Spare me!” Steve was a road rage sort of guy, and some dickhead had just cut him off . . .
“Eh?” said G.
“Sorry mate, the traffic’s crazy tonight. Must be a full moon. Bloody road’s full of idiots.”
“Tell me something I don’t know! Now continue—I’m all ears.”
“That bikie who owns the cobra tattoo rides with an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Warlocks. You heard of them? Bunch of white supremacist crazies on the other side of town. A nasty bunch of blokes at the best of times.
“Hang on, mate.” Steve was stopped at the traffic lights just around the corner from G’s house and grabbed a bottle of mineral water that was sitting in the cup holder on his dash, looked
at the tiny bubbles clinging to the side of the bottle as he unscrewed the cap, took a swig of the sparkling fluid, burped, and then continued.
“So mate, I think there’s a link between the cobra tattoo, the Harleys that Cait seems so obsessed with, and the Warlocks. And it’s a long bow to draw at this early stage, but I think Cait’s mind map and her premonitions are proving correct. In fact, there may even be a link somehow back to her kidnapping. God knows how or why.”
“That’s great news . . . no it’s not, actually. If what you’re saying is true, it’s bad news.”
G became introspective for a moment, searching for a hole in Steve’s story as he tried to find a matching slot to fit the latest piece of information into the jigsaw puzzle of his daughter’s kidnapping.
“Yeah, I’ll give Cait a heads-up that you’ll be calling in. How long will you be?”
“I’m out front.”
“Caitie, Steve’s here. He’s got something to show you. You want to come downstairs?” Cait was upstairs in her room yet again.
“You don’t have to yell, Dad. I’m not in the next suburb. I can hear you,” said Cait as she was walking down the stairs.
“Oh, hi Steve. What’s up?” Cait liked her godfather; he always took the time to catch up with her on a regular basis and didn’t treat her like she was only an obligation.
They adjourned en masse into the kitchen where Jools was currently pouring herself a chardonnay. G was cooking Asian tonight, and Jools was helping out, supposedly chopping vegetables, but she seemed more interested in her chardy than showing off her knife skills.
“Red or white, Steve?” Jools was always up for a chat over a glass of something. She’d had a crazy-busy schedule at her healthcare clinic, with patients heaping their problems on her all day—it was a full moon after all, so that was to be expected—so Jools needed to chill.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 34
