Headland, page 8
Watson, seeing that the man’s eyes had started to glisten, gave him a moment before he said, ‘Obviously it hasn’t worked.’
‘Hasn’t worked?’ Banks looked up, a shattered man. ‘It would’ve fucking worked, if it was ever fucking finished.’
Banks took Watson through the main points of the paperwork. He showed him well-thumbed, notated sheets of correspondence, pointing out where changes had been made to the project throughout the course of construction. They were subtle but they were constant. Over the course of five years, the original scope of works had been altered almost beyond recognition from what was originally envisioned, costed and agreed upon.
‘We had no say,’ Banks said. ‘These things would just turn up in the mail. They wouldn’t discuss any changes. If you didn’t look closely yourself, you’d never even know the changes were happening, but bit by bit we got less and less, and by the end of it … well, you can see the result of it.’
‘Yes,’ Watson said, ‘you sure can,’ and he grimaced as Banks cracked the knuckles on his massive scarred fists.
‘So, about the other day then?’ Banks asked, as Watson pushed his chair back.
‘What about it?’ Watson said, gathering his things and heading for the door.
Banks looked relieved.
‘Oh, there is one other thing,’ Watson said as he reached the front door. ‘I didn’t see a car in your garage. How do you get around?’
He caught a flash of something in the other man’s eyes.
‘It’s, ah, in for repairs,’ Banks said.
‘Oh yeah? Have an accident?’
‘Yeah, just a small one.’ The man’s tone had changed.
‘What sort of car is it?’
‘It’s a Camry, Toyota Camry.’
‘Colour?’
‘Red.’
13
The drive back to the highway was a blur. A couple of times Watson had to use the wipers to wash mud off the windscreen when he hit water in the dips of the road, but his mind was elsewhere.
Anthony Sweeney must have been rorting the council’s flood mitigation works; there was no other logical explanation. There was the half-built palace on the hill, the new Jaguar, the accident that could be a murder. The motive? Banks had motive in spades and he had a red Toyota. Watson had asked for details of the smash repairer before he left, citing ‘routine enquiries’, and Banks had looked like he was going to shit himself.
Ellen Sweeney—he had to talk to Ellen Sweeney. Something stinks! Someone had kidnapped Tayla, and her best friend was murdered. Something stinks!
His phone buzzed with an incoming text and he glanced at it, lying on the passenger seat beside him: Not long now faggot!
What the fuck?
Seething, Watson stopped the car and reached for the phone, started to key in a reply: I know who you are. I know where you live … Fuck it—he didn’t send it.
He was doing one-sixty when he passed the Gloster turn-off. He kept driving towards Sydney.
An hour down the highway, he pulled in at a well-patronised truck stop and cruised around the back to where the big rigs were parked. He needed sustenance; his head was on fire. It was never hard to find it if you knew what you were looking for, and sometimes it was easier than others.
A shiny new SS ute with all the trimmings and the silhouettes of two heads inside was sitting in the back row, trying to look inconspicuous. He parked his car well away from the ute and watched it through his rear-view mirror. Five minutes later, a sagging, crook-backed truck driver approached the passenger side of the ute and had a quick conversation. They went through the time-honoured ritual. The truckie and the passenger shook hands once as the money changed hands, and then they did it again to exchange the drugs. All the while the truckie looked innocently out into the car park. They couldn’t have made it more obvious if they tried.
Watson gave it five more minutes and watched one more deal just to be sure, then he got out and approached the ute himself. He could see the two occupants stiffen in their seats as he walked straight up to the front of the vehicle. They clearly didn’t get too many customers in suits.
He walked around and tapped on the driver’s-side window, pulling his coat back so that his gun and handcuffs were clearly visible on his belt. The window came down slowly, about halfway.
‘How can we help you, officer?’ The voice came with a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘I think it’s fairly fucking obvious how you can help me, fellas,’ Watson said, leaning down to look inside the car. As expected, there were masses of tattoos, goatees and tombstone stares.
There was a plastic shopping bag sitting at the passenger’s feet that he was doing his best to cover with his legs.
‘The bag,’ he said. ‘Give it here.’
Neither man moved.
Watson pulled his right hand back to rest on the butt of his pistol. ‘Are you sure you want it to go this way, boys?’ he said.
The passenger leant forward and reached towards the bag.
‘Uh-uh,’ Watson said. ‘You’—looking at the driver—‘reach over with your left hand, pick up the bag and pass it to me. You’—motioning to the passenger—‘keep your fucking hands where I can see them.’
The driver did as instructed while Watson watched on carefully.
When the bag was in his hands he peered into it greedily. ‘Right, what have we got here?’
There were twenty or so little deal bags of speed, probably about the same amount of pot, about ten deal bags of ice and a small automatic pistol. Watson picked up the pistol with two fingers, then he looked at the two men in the ute.
‘Fellas, really?’ he said.
The driver gave him a well, what’s a guy supposed to do? look before Watson tossed the pistol into the trash-filled garden behind the ute. Then he took a big handful of everything, had a quick look at his haul, and dumped three deals of pot back into the bag. He then stuffed the remainder into his pocket and dumped the bag back onto the driver’s lap.
‘Now, fellas, that’ll do you for this afternoon. Take off and don’t let me catch you around here again.’
The driver gave him a practised death stare and said, ‘We’ll see you round, pig,’ as he reached for the key. The ute rumbled into life and Watson let it get well clear before he made a move back to his own car. His heart was racing.
He hit the outskirts of Sydney just on dark. It was drizzling, he was sizzling. He’d chopped up and snorted two of the bindles of speed. It was jaw-clenching, heart-poundingly powerful stuff. He sat fidgeting and mumbling to himself in the peak hour bumper-to-bumper traffic. His GPS blinked away at Jeremy Landers’ Bondi address.
It took more than an hour to cross Sydney from north to east. Another fifteen minutes of cruising around the block before he found a parking space with a view of the property his mate from the Drug Squad had texted him. It was half a red-brick semidetached Federation-style home. The letterbox was hanging lopsided off the collapsing front fence. The small patch of lawn had probably died before the Depression. All of the lights were off. He sat and watched and waited.
It was another two and a half hours before a taxi pulled up in front of the house and Jeremy Landers and a young woman jumped out. They put their arms around each other and went laughing up to the front door and into the house. Watson had been grinding his teeth and sweating for hours. He pulled out the last of the bindles of speed, stuck a rolled-up twenty-dollar note straight into the bag and snorted it. He saw colours. He lost his mind.
He jumped out of the car. Jogged across the road. Banged on the front door.
It wasn’t answered quickly enough so he banged again harder, faster.
‘Hang on, hang on,’ an angry voice yelled from inside. ‘Who the fuck is it?’
‘It’s the police—open the fucking door!’ Watson raged.
The door didn’t open immediately, so Watson stood back and smashed his fist through the opaque glass feature in the wood. There was a scream from inside. He heard running feet on hardwood floors. He kicked at the door once and it cracked. Twice, and it cracked some more. He heaved himself at the door and it smashed wide open.
He lost his balance and went sprawling down the hallway. A woman was screaming hysterically from a room at the end of the hall. Landers was crouching down in a corner with his hands up, utterly terrified.
Watson’s phone had been flung from his pocket when he flew through the door. When he stooped to pick it up, he saw it was buzzing.
There was a message.
You can run but you can’t hide.
His heart spasmed. He coughed. His vision was blurred, but he could see that Landers didn’t have a phone in his hand. Landers was crying. The girl was screaming. He ran blindly out of the house.
14
He pulled into the same truck stop he had stopped at on the way down. The digital clock on his dashboard read 10.30 p.m.
It can’t be!
He checked his phone. Only three missed calls, two voicemail messages. The time on the most recent text message, the one that had seared his brain in Jeremy Landers’ hallway, was 9.25.
The drive from the city to the truck stop normally took two hours. He had done it in just over one. He had no memory of the trip and he was coming down hard.
His jaw ached; he was completely dry. Both eyes had a pulse, a thumping, red pulse. Rain was coming down heavy in the bright lights shining down into the almost-empty car park. He didn’t venture out the back.
In the roadhouse they had Visine and fast-acting Panadol. He applied the meds while he ordered a quarter chicken and chips. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d eaten.
He listened to the two messages. Larissa: Are you okay? Where are you? Philby: Where the fuck are you? Get your arse in here—it’s an emergency. Ellie: hang-up.
He got a quarter of the quarter down with a few chips, then he hit the road.
He was stopped by a glowing orange traffic torch waving in the rain at the Gloster turn-off. He pulled up short and opened his window a crack. It was hammering down. The face under the bright yellow hood didn’t belong to Larissa or Ellie.
‘The road’s closed,’ the young constable shouted through the rain.
‘Detective Senior Constable Watson,’ he said. ‘What’s the situation?’
‘Oh right, we’re evacuating. It came up much faster than everyone expected. There’s an incident van down at the bridge.’
Watson headed slowly down to the mass of flashing blue and red lights.
There were a dozen police vehicles pulled up on each side of the road at the highway end of the bridge. There was a team of three blocking the road into town, and taking names and details from the residents as they crossed the bridge towards the highway.
He added to the pile of cars and ran the thirty metres to a large bus that was the local area incident van. He pulled up short under a tarpaulin that had been erected just outside the door of the bus and shook off the freezing rainwater.
There were four men in the harsh white light in the bus, all of them senior to Watson. Three of them ignored him completely and continued with their rushed conversations on mobile phones and police radio. Philby turned and glared. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’
‘I got bogged out on the Yulong Road,’ he lied. ‘There was no reception,’ he added before he was asked.
‘What were you doing out there?’
‘Following up an assault complaint from the council yesterday. A bloke called Jim Banks.’
Philby looked sceptical. ‘Well, there’re more important things to be going on with,’ he said. ‘We’re evacuating. The river came up faster than it should have.’
‘Yeah, so I heard,’ Watson said.
‘It’s only just over eighteen metres, but it’s broken its banks the entire length. We’ve got blackouts, we’ve had a few small fires, the grid is shorting out all over the place. There are boats lost out at sea. We’ve only got all these blokes until midnight, then they have to head back to their own areas. Cameron and Brookes are going house to house. We have to get everybody out—the town is about to be cut off.’
‘Righto, where do you want me to start?’
‘Cameron and Brookes are here, Marsden Street,’ Philby said, pointing to a spot on a large situation map of the town pinned to the wall. ‘Get over there now and coordinate with them. We have to make sure everyone is out and then we have to get out ourselves before this bridge goes under. You got me?’
‘Got ya. I’ll get going right now.’
‘Good man,’ Philby said, and Watson could see the fear in his eyes.
The municipal park on the town side of the bridge was underwater and most of the main street was a rapidly expanding puddle. The drains were gone, filled to capacity; there was more water spurting out of them than flowing into them. The main street of Gloster ran parallel to the river, the main residential areas were behind the centre of town and slightly more elevated. The flooding would hit the main street and the shopping precinct first before flowing out into the houses.
He followed the flashing lights to Ellie and Larissa’s patrol car two streets back from the centre of town. They were helping an elderly couple, rugged up in blankets, into a police van. As he approached, Watson heard the driver of the van say, ‘Okay, that’s it for us, we have to make a move.’ When it pulled away, he stood facing Ellie and Larissa, deep under the hoods of their soaking rain jackets.
‘Where have you been?’ Larissa asked. ‘We’ve been worried!’ Ellie looked unconvinced.
‘I got bogged,’ he said.
The women looked at each other.
‘I told you that would happen,’ Larissa said.
Ellie still looked unconvinced.
‘Well, you know men—we never listen,’ Watson said.
Ellie might just have smiled.
‘So where are we up to?’ he asked.
‘We think we’ve got everyone,’ Ellie said, ‘but we don’t know who left before we started taking names at the bridge, so we’re checking all the at-risk people, mostly the elderly. We’ve got’—she stopped and pulled a soaked piece of paper from her pocket—‘five more to do. There’s two in the caravan park. Why don’t you go and do those, and we’ll look after the other three.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What numbers are they, and where will we meet after I’m done?’
‘Eleven and thirty-three,’ Ellie replied. ‘Just catch us on the radio—the phones are patchy because the towers are down.’
He drove through darkened, waterlogged streets to the caravan park, closer to the beach end of town. A police cruiser passed him going back towards the bridge and the occupants gave him a farewell wave and flashed their high beams.
The Panadol had had only minimal effect; his head was fragile, his mind was numb, he was working on autopilot.
He turned in through the main gates of the caravan park and idled in front of the manager’s residence. The park was in complete darkness; none of the cabins appeared to have any lights on. He could see wind-rippled puddles of black water across the surface of the rough roadway through his rain-spattered windscreen. He hit the high beams and rolled forward.
His headlights carved a cone out of the blackness and the falling rain. Number eleven was only four cabins further on from the manager’s cabin; he stopped outside it and shone a torch up through the rain at the front door and windows. Nothing. He sounded his horn. Nothing. He started to drive on. Then he stopped.
Bloody old people.
He got out and immediately went down, ankle-deep into a puddle of freezing rainwater.
Fuck.
He slammed the car door closed and hunched under his hood as the wind and the slanting rain did its best to rip it off his head. He leapt the four stairs to the front porch in two steps and hammered his torch against the door and then the front window. He shone his torch in through the window. It was dark, no movement; the place was definitely empty.
He jumped back into the car, managing to avoid the puddle outside his door this time, and moved on, headlights blazing into the dark, counting the numbers aloud as he went. Number thirty-three must be at the end of the line, he realised.
The car thumped into a particularly deep pothole hidden under the floodwater and the left side of the car went down; there was a scraping sound under the car.
Fuck this.
He reversed back, attempted to drive around the invisible pothole.
The right wheel went down.
He was still a good ten cabins from number thirty-three. He stared hard down into the cone of light penetrating the darkness. The windscreen wipers were barely keeping pace with the rain. Small shrubs and trees were whipping furiously around on the edge of his vision, just beyond the reach of the light.
But there …
A flicker of something near the edge of the light. The car wouldn’t move further forward without grinding against the edge of a major deformation in the road under the water.
There! A face?
He shook his head. He must be seeing things.
Right then, he saw a person come running out of the darkness, flash across the roadway between the cabins at the end of the park and disappear into the darkness on the other side.
He threw open the car door, jumped out, and was immediately submerged to mid-calves.
‘Hey!’ he screamed. ‘Police! Stop!’
He shone his torch in the direction the person had run. He saw a flash of eyes in his torch beam, and then the figure bolted away.
‘Hey!’ he yelled again uselessly into the howling wind.
He tried to follow, but the water deepened steadily the further he went, splashing up under his waterproof jacket and into his face.
It was pointless anyway; whoever it was had gone. He stood at the edge of the limits of his headlights and shone his torch into all of the dark places between the cabins. Nothing. He was soaked. He was freezing.
