Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1) Read online

  The barman gave her a vacant pissed-off stare.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “It’s my job, apparently,” she said. She put the photo down. “Same again.”

  He fixed the drink and brought it back.

  “You can’t do that in here,” he said, nodding at the file. “Take it outside.”

  “Bad for business, huh?”

  The place was empty. Two old diggers sat down the far end of the room by the Kino screen. That was it. The barman leaned across and said, “Bad for you. Just take it somewhere else.”

  “I’m too drunk to drive, so this is it. I guess you’re all under arrest, this is a fucking…crime scene now.”

  She could tell by the look on his face that it came out a lot louder than she’d hoped. The diggers looked over from their game.

  “Okay, last drink,” he said, knocking on the bar. “Then I’m calling you a cab.”

  “You ain’t calling me shit,” said Romano.

  The barman ignored it.

  He went and picked up a phone. As he spoke into it, he looked right at her and nodded. He did not look happy.

  —

  In the morning, Denny—who was devoutly teetotal—refused to drive her back to the pub for the cruiser. Chandler saw it more as an opportunity. In the pub car park, he walked around the police Land Rover and whistled. “To be honest, Romano, I didn’t think you’d work out over here, but now I’m starting to think otherwise.” Leaving the police cruiser there was a serious policy infraction and Romano had no real idea how it had happened.

  She was at the pub.

  She woke up on the living room floor.

  There was nothing in between.

  The morning sun beat down on her as Chandler tsked-tsked. “I’ve done a lot of dumb shit, but I’ve never left the car out,” he said.

  Romano took a mouthful of coffee. “Thanks. You’ve been a real big help, dickhead. A real comfort.”

  “You know, they’ve got AA over here.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nah. We won’t bother writing it up,” he said. “I’m sure it’s fine. It’s not like anyone wants to be seen in one of these things over here.”

  Romano waited for him to go before getting in. The morning heat had baked the cruiser’s interior and it raised hell in her gut. Swallowing fast, she turned the key in the ignition. The engine fired. She was so dazed and queasy that it took a while, a few minutes of driving along the esplanade, before she noticed the yellow flyer flapping under the wiper. Romano pulled over and unpinned it: Angel City Bar And Show. Two women in tight-fitting police uniforms lay draped over each other, Photoshopped halos around their heads.

  New Girls Every Month. $10 Buffet. Ladies In For Free!

  It was down in Domino.

  She turned it over.

  Job Opportunity marked in felt tip.

  She couldn’t be sure this was a message. Romano did not trust herself when hungover. She turned the cruiser around and headed back to the pub. There, she walked the car park and searched around. Another half-dozen cars sat abandoned over night; none of them had flyers pinned to their windshields. She checked the gutters and the bins, turning up food wrappers, a muddy sand shoe, and a half-eaten cheese platter.

  No other flyers.

  She checked her watch. Twelve-forty.

  It’d do.

  Angel City was a weird looking black box of a building. It sat on a vacant block not far from Domino’s lone high street. It looked like a dump. The whole suburb was a shit pile: tall grass swaying in the yards, doors splayed open, bearded men standing around shirtless, lots of drinking on the sidewalk. Everyone saw her. No one reacted. Now, in the rearview, there were five kids pulling a street sign out of the ground.

  She sat there and waited for something to happen. It was a good half-hour before someone stepped out: a woman in a denim cut-offs and busted sneakers. The woman lit a smoke and stared intently into her phone.

  Romano went over. She noticed the details as she approached. The woman’s shirt (I Love Cairns) was threadbare, showing two large pink nipples and a patchwork of tattoos and scars.

  “How you doing?”

  The woman let out a small chuckle when she saw the uniform. “You lost, baby?”

  “I’m looking for this girl.” Romano held the photo up at eye level. “You know her? Ever seen her before?”

  “Sorry. No idea.”

  “I want to talk to some of the girls inside.”

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  “I’ve been around places like this. Is there anything happening out back? Anything likely to get me shot?”

  “Probably.” The woman looked up the street. “No one’s gonna help you.”

  The door opened. A man with a shaved head and a long grey beard—the classic violent douche-bag look—hung his torso out and said:

  “Sal, you okay out here?”

  Romano instinctually turned face-on, rested a hand on her side near the gun.

  “Sir, I’m Constable Romano, down from Point Hallahan Police. I’m looking for a girl. I want to show a photo around. Mind if I step inside?”

  “That depends,” said the man. He kept his gaze fixed on the woman.

  “Yes?” said Romano. “On what?”

  The man looked at her then back to the girl. “You know the rules? Gotta obey the rules, bitch. Rule one, you touch the girls, you pay for a full dance. Rule two, you talk shit, you get punched. Rule three, you punch someone else, no matter what, you get punched. Can you handle that?” He smiled, half his teeth missing. “Now Sal, back to work, hey. Smoke break’s over.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Romano.

  She went to the door, and the man stood his ground. He smelled like armpit and had a mean amphetamine twitch on. He wasn’t happy about it, but he let her past.

  The place was darker than hell inside. It got worse when the door sealed shut behind them. There was a bar down one wall, booths across. A stage with a catwalk divided the rest. A handful of punters sat around the stage taking in the early afternoon show: a plump girl in fishnets grinding away on what looked like a carpenter’s sawhorse. Music played, painfully quiet, giving the whole place an eerie vibe it didn’t need.

  Romano went to the bar and ordered a beer.

  The bartender was a huge biker. Patched up. Hair halfway down his chest. He took her money and said, “Tryouts for the policewoman show are next week.”

  “Uh-huh.” She took the photo out. He didn’t look at it.

  “Pretty dark in here,” he said. “Don’t really get to know the girls. Bad for business. Bad for my health, too.”

  Romano looked around. An ancient bain-marie sat in the corner under a single exposed light bulb. “Is that the ten-dollar buffet?”

  He nodded.

  “How is it?”

  He sniggered. “Cleaner than the pussy.”

  “I want to talk to the girls. If I go out back, I’m not going to step on anyone’s toes, am I? I just want to talk to them. I’m not here for anything else.”

  “Nah. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “This another one of the house rules?” She drained her glass. The beer helped.

  “We got all sorts of rules,” said the barman.

  “I actually knew a few Doomriders down in Melbourne. You guys run a tight ship down there.”

  He came close, too close, leaning over the bar. He put his giant head down beside her. “You ain’t in Melbourne now, cunt. Take my advice and walk your ass out of here before I show you how things are up here.”

  Her skin flushed. “Really?” she said.

  “I’m getting hard just thinking about it,” he said.

  Flashes of memory.

  The air seemed to throb around her.

  Romano hurled her glass across the bar. Bottles exploded, a light flickered. She drew her gun. “Oh, right,” she said, her voice carrying loud in the room. “I could kill you, kill everyone, right here i
n this room and the people I know, they’d burn this fucking dump to ground just to earn out a favour. So maybe you want to watch your mouth, asshole. Jesus! Fuck!” She could feel the unsteadiness in her hands, the sweats coming through, and something else. She desperately wanted to pull the trigger, could even feel her hand slowly tightening around it. “This place…you fucking…” she said, to no one.

  The barman looked startled. As he started to catch his breath, he kept his eyes on the gun but began to give up a nervous laugh. Accompanying the laugh came the sound of clapping.

  Romano glanced around. A thin old man in a grey suit stepped out of a dark corner. His skin hung loose from his face, dotted by two black eyes.

  “Ho-lee shit. This is great,” he said. “Ho-lee shit little girl, that’s one nasty disposition you got on you. Never in my life, never, have I heard no pig bitch threaten to kill everyone before. Damn. Came outta damn near nowhere, too. That just made my day. Now don’t go taking Little Bob to heart, now don’t go down—”

  “I want to talk to the girls,” screamed Romano.

  “You think we’re gonna help you after all this?” said the old man.

  She kept the gun up.

  The old man said, “Get the door, Zac.”

  It opened. Light flooded in.

  “Go on,” said the old man. “Go on, now”

  Something about him cut through.

  Romano moved. She slowly backed out.

  On the sidewalk, she stared back into the club through the door. The old man spoke from the dark:

  “Don’t come back or we’ll come find you.”

  The door swung shut.

  Romano punched the steering wheel as she drove. She cried. It helped. It pushed the tension out. With shaky hands, she lit a series of cigarettes and smoked them down to the filter.

  Back at the station, she went out back and called around.

  None of the crime scene reports were back.

  Backlogs.

  Busy periods.

  Priorities.

  The usual.

  She took a late afternoon ride up to the Gold Point and made further enquiries, hoping to turn up a staff member with a conscience or a functioning memory. It didn’t work, either.

  She went back to the station, running on fumes now. She searched the local database for narcotics possession. Five female names in a year. The records showed five women who did not match the victim.

  She made another set of searches.

  Homicides on Tunnel: three in ten years.

  Missing persons: twenty, same period.

  B&Es: seven.

  Sexual assault: fifteen.

  DUI: forty.

  Public nuisance: twenty-four.

  Domestic disturbance: two.

  Vehicular incidents: eighty-two.

  Bullshit stats. More Torak or Middle Park than what was happening in this modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Romano lit her last cigarette there at the desk.

  Her heard pounded.

  She looked at a final search return.

  Ruled Suicide:

  Thirty-two cases in the last year alone.

  Thirty-two.

  She searched again: Every murder ruled suicide. Over the last decade, there were hundreds. The man she’d replaced was the last one. Found dead in the house which she now called home. William Dranger, Detective Sergeant. He signed off on every scrap of this since the start of the database. Every lie had his name on it.

  Romano went to the file store and packed up all the suicide casework that involved guns, drugs or The Gold Point hotel and took it home with her. She spread the paperwork out on the living room floor and stood on a kitchen chair to look at it. A mess of bodies and crime scenes and paperwork. It was needle in a haystack stuff, but it was safer than field work.

  Safer for everyone.

  13

  Monday, September 6, 2004

  Jim Harris picked the binoculars up off the seat beside him and peered through. Romano paced back and forth in the living room of Bill’s old house, drink in hand. She’d been in there for most of the day, apparently. The woman could drink. Harris had the card exchange send over her records: she consumed enough Irish whisky to embalm a body.

  He looked down the street and saw Dave Benchley sitting on his front verandah. Harris dialled his home line. The old man stood up and went inside.

  “Still move pretty fast for an old bloke, Dave.”

  “Who’s this? That you, Jim?”

  “Yeah, I’m parked up the street. Just keeping an eye on this new copper of ours. You see her this morning?”

  “Yeah, not much. She loaded some boxes in from Bill’s Land Rover yesterday. That’s it.”

  “What colour were these boxes?”

  The old man thought on it. “Tan-coloured. She had a bunch of stuff with her. You want me to keep an eye out?”

  “Only if you’re around. Nothing to worry about.”

  Harris rang off and waited.

  An hour after dark, she came out on foot. According to the paperwork, she grabbed her supplies (ginger ale, smokes, aspirin) from a place up on the main drag. When she was out of sight, he took the path down the side of the house and into the backyard. He used Bill’s spare key in the back door. It worked. She hadn’t changed the locks.

  The house was a sight. Rotting food by the sink. Pantry supplies—there wasn’t much—in a pile on the table, half the boxes ripped open. The fridge was completely empty bar for a single plastic container of takeout and an empty wine bottle. He checked the bedrooms. One was stocked floor-to-ceiling with boxes. The other room looked lived in. Most of her clothes and things sat clumped around an open suitcase on the floor. The only ordered part of the house was her uniforms. They sat in itemised rows on their own daily hangers in the closet.

  Harris moved back out to the living room. He snapped photographs of her work. She had a lot of files, some of them going back years. They all pointed the same way.

  It wasn’t good.

  There was a quiet spot on the Sienna Beach headland, away from the paths, where a small grass field sat between the rock and sand. It faced the ocean. It was one of Dev’s haunts, and Harris found him there, cross-legged in the field’s centre. He was alone. Harris came up on him quietly. The moon was huge in the sky, a beacon.

  “You busy?”

  Dev opened his eyes. He looked confused. “I think I was asleep,” he said. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here.”

  Harris sat down beside him.

  “You look worried,” said Dev.

  “Just the usual. Remember the woman, from the meeting? She’s a bit more of a go-getter than they said. She’s all over this Gold Point thing. She’s not getting anywhere but…”

  “But?”

  “She’s started pulling at the wrong threads. She’s got a pretty good head on her, for a bad copper, anyway. I’ve got a friend sending over her file. There’s something off with her.”

  “Jim?”

  “It’s not that,” he said.

  “But maybe it’s part of it?”

  “No. She’s not getting under my skin that way. It’s the…” He smiled, rubbed a clump of sand off his knee “It’s the police work that worries me. I’ve seen all this before. Remember the kid from Toowoomba, Brody? I’m getting a whiff of that kind of drama. She’s good enough to get herself in real trouble.”

  “With us?”

  “With everyone. O’Shea, mainly.”

  Dev took a moment. He closed his eyes, put his face up to the sky. “Where are you at with the Gold Point thing?”

  “Nowhere. The kid was a mess. I pinched his diary at the scene and it’s scrambled. Half of it is in some other language, Cantonese maybe. He switches page to page, like he doesn’t know what language he’s thinking in. I’ve got to get that translated. And Sophie…she nearly ended up in Drainland last year, turned it around at the last minute. Remember she came to a few meetings? Short, pale thing. Peroxide hair.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t remember her,” said Dev. “So you think—”

  “The kid fucked up. Got mixed up with the wrong girl, who wanted to look under the wrong rocks. I don’t know what they were doing together, but we all knew where it was headed. Just sounds like they beat the Agriolis to it. Or…”

  “Say it.”

  “I’m not a hundred percent O’Shea didn’t knock them. Remember, he had me looking at it. I had to turn it in. Sophie was out of her mind. She told me I had something to do with her sister’s death. I don’t even know what she meant.”

  “But the paperwork’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “All the lab work would have been filed via our usual arrangement, except our new police constable made her own enquiries. I know the type, Dev. I don’t think she’s right for this. She’s pulling old files at the moment. She might not fall into line.”

  “She’s in Bill’s old place, yeah?”

  “She is.”

  “What else, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Jim.”

  “I dreamed about dead people the other night. I’m worried.”

  “Sit up,” said Dev. “Up. Now, breath. In through the nose. Now, out. Breath out longer this time. In for four, out for five. In…Out…”

  They worked their way through the relaxation exercise. Harris felt his mind start to wind down. He pushed Gold Point aside. He pushed Laura Romano back even further. He buried his feelings down inside the rhythm of his own heartbeat. The ocean droned below, and the breeze felt warm and salty on his skin. He sat there until Dev led them both back out of the trance.

  “You know what to do, Jim,” Dev said. “You always do. You’ve just got to trust yourself.”

  “It’s not always me. And I’m trying to stay retired here.”

  “Lachlan, the ghosts, they’re all a part of you, Jim. And you can’t retire yourself,” said Dev. “If they’re coming back, they’re coming back for a reason. You’ve got to listen, because you can only fight things so much.”

  14

  Monday, September 6, 2004