Animal Kingdom (19 page)

‘Well, good luck to you,' Ezra answered. Turning, he moved off towards the exit.

‘And you, too,' Smurf said.

But as she watched him go, she saw the ghostly figures of people passing behind the water wall and then with a chill noticed the people moving past and around her, none of them smiling, none of them even recognising her, all of them ghosts.

Or perhaps she was the ghost.

She'd never thought that before, and wondered what it would be like. To be dead, but not know it. Maybe the way she felt now was how ghosts felt. Maybe she was the ghost.

Going back to the so-called safe house was one of the scariest things J had ever done. He'd seen the look in Roache's eyes and there wasn't the slightest doubt in his head that the man'd had every intention of killing him.

So to step past the cop cars parked in the driveway and enter a roomful of policemen who all looked up when he entered was something he wasn't sure he'd be able to do.

But if you have to, you do.

Leckie was there, planning the search party, when J walked through the door. Startled and relieved, he stepped forwards, taking him by the elbow and leading him into another room.

‘Come with me,' he said. ‘Where have you been?'

‘Where do you think? Thanks for the protection,' J said.

Leckie wasn't sure how to handle this. ‘Look, this was a terrible stuff-up, I admit, and it's all my fault. From now on, I promise I won't leave your side, and we'll get another squad to look after your security. Special Ops.'

‘How can I trust you?' J asked. And it was a real question, coming from someone whose trust had been betrayed by everyone he'd ever known.

‘I'm trying to do the best I can. Haven't I always played it straight with you? What do you want me to do?'

J considered him. He'd never felt sorry before for anyone in his life. Not really sorry. Sorry for kids getting bashed up by their parents, sure, sorry for animals getting hurt, and for the unfairness and the pain in the world. But it wasn't like looking at a man, an adult, and realising how fucked he was, how compromised. And not because someone was out to get him or had the goods on him; just because he was part of something much bigger than him that he'd never be able to escape, and that would fuck him up just as effectively as it had fucked up everybody else. Actually, even more so. Because Leckie believed in the system.

That's what J realised, seeing Leckie squirm. A copper like Roache wouldn't have squirmed; he just would have lied. But Leckie couldn't lie, not straightforwardly.

Leckie believed all the crap about trees and bugs—it wasn't a line, it was a philosophy—believed all the stuff he'd been telling J, even when some prick was there holding a gun to J's head, still saying,
No, no, you've got it wrong
, because to say
You've got it right
would mean the thing he loved wasn't what he thought at all. It was much darker than anything Leckie had ever imagined. And J saw that Leckie didn't want to believe that, because he was a good man. But good men aren't what this world needs.

‘Okay,' J said at last.

Leckie looked at him. Did he mean it? ‘You sure?' he asked. ‘We're square?'

‘We're square,' J answered.

‘Did anybody see you out there today?' Leckie asked, feeling his way onto firmer ground.

‘No,' J said. He didn't feel guilty about lying, not to Leckie. Not now. He had only one priority now and he was going to get that, no matter what.

‘I'll make sure Roache doesn't get anywhere near you again, okay?'

‘Okay,' J answered, sure he was telling the truth this time.

‘You all right?' Leckie said.

‘Fine,' J answered.

Not that Leckie cared. Not really. He might have thought he did, but if he really did, he would have listened. Leckie didn't care, thought J. Leckie didn't give a shit.

But Leckie did care; he even liked Josh, or J, or whatever he wanted to call himself. He was a handful, that was for sure, but most kids that age are. Always demanding, always alert to what they think are the injustices of the system.

Leckie remembered what he'd been like himself at that age, always challenging his father, his teachers, giving every one hell. But sooner or later you grow up; you learn to choose your battles, the ones you can win. He knew there were corrupt cops—of course he knew: everyone did. And you tried to put in place the institutions and the culture to combat it. Police Integrity, proper training, that sort of thing. It wasn't heroic; it was just the normal slog of trying to keep things on the rails.

But that doesn't mean anything to a young person with an axe to grind. They want everything sorted out
now
. And if it's not sorted out
now
, it's because the
whole thing
is corrupt.

But there are plenty of good, honest police trying to do the right thing by the community and prevent crime, and they're the
real
police force, not the few bad apples who give everyone a bad name. That was what Leckie thought, anyhow. And if it ever started to get to him, the sense of the rising tide of corruption that might overwhelm them all, what he thought was that it's not just the police who are corrupt—it's the world.

He didn't think that often. But when he looked at his son, he hoped it would be better for him. That the rot of this world would never touch him.

‘When does it start?' he had asked his wife one night as they sat over a bottle of wine.

‘What?' she asked, coming out of her own reverie as the music and wine wove their magic.

‘The corruption,' he had said. ‘When do we start becoming corrupt?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' she answered, thinking they'd both had enough to drink.

‘Has it already started with him?' he continued, looking at his sleeping son. ‘Has the sickness already started growing in him, the needs and weaknesses that will one day undo his life and sense of self-respect?'

‘Is that what's happened to you?' she asked. ‘How could you even think that?' she'd said, shocked, and he didn't know how.

But he did think it, and it hurt him every time.

And thinking about J now, he felt it all over again. His sense of dismay at his own weakness in the world. He hated it, and hated the thought that he'd let down someone who'd trusted him, especially when it was a young person like that, whose whole future depended on people in positions of authority like him. But maybe one day, when he was older, Josh would understand why these things happen, and how even people of good will can become mixed up in them. Leckie hoped so. And hoped one day they might be friends.

But J didn't care any more. He was on his own path, which no-one, maybe not even his mother, could have foreseen.
I don't want you to be like them
, she'd said one time when he'd asked her why they didn't see Gran any more.
And you don't have to be. None of us has to be what other people expect us to be. And you don't have to, either.

Leckie stuck by his word, and kept Roache and anyone else who might hurt J away from him. He was now being guarded by the heavily armed Special Ops people, Leckie's SOGies, and, while J never felt completely at ease, he at least felt safer than he would have in Smurf 's tender care.

Standing in the swish city hotel room Leckie had organised for him on the night before his evidence at the trial, J looked out across the city. Such a prosperous city, alive with power and opportunity. Not for everyone, J knew, not for people like him. He'd never stand in a room like this again or eat from plates with cutlery like that again. He was here as a guest for only one reason: to send two men he now knew intimately to prison for as long as they could keep them there. And after that, he'd be sent back into the hole he'd been pulled out of and told to stay out of trouble.

But he'd been born into trouble. They all had.

‘You ready?' Leckie asked as he stepped into the room.

J nodded sadly. He almost said
sorry
, but he stopped himself. He wasn't sorry. He hadn't made this world; if Leckie had made his compromise with it, maybe so had J. What he knew now was that no-one said what they meant or revealed what they knew. What he understood was that everyone was trying to cut their own little deal, just like Baz had, and Leckie, too, and maybe even Roache.

But not Pope. Pope wasn't looking for compromise; he was looking for war. Maybe that was just a sickness, though, something that could be cured with the right sort of medicine. Was that right? J wondered. No, it wasn't. It wasn't that we're all so alive to what was going on that we need something to knock us out; it's that we're all so dead. Looking back, J could see he'd been as dead as his mother. And now he'd just started to wake up.

J gave his evidence, and fucked it up the way they'd rehearsed it in the art gallery.

It wasn't a straightforward denial that might have left him open to perjury charges; Ezra and the spunky barrister had found a way of making him look like a liar, and he'd gone along with it.

Well, he was a liar, wasn't he? They all were.

He could see the shock on Leckie's face as his whole case fell apart, and the smug satisfaction on Smurf 's. Ezra was harder to fathom. The thought had begun to dawn on the lawyer that knowing quite as much as he did about the intimate secrets of some of the most violent people he'd ever met in his life might not be such a good idea. But that was a burden he might just have to live with, unless he wanted to share it with the police, who were bound to lend a sympathetic ear after all his good work in the pursuit of honesty and fairness.

Everyone—the media, community leaders, the public at large—met J's evidence with either outrage or grim, knowing satisfaction, but so what? They weren't fighting for their lives. J was. And he had been since the day he was born.

‘Have you worked out where you fit?' Leckie said to him after the trial, when he'd gone back to the hotel room to collect his things. It was kind of sad and resigned, not angry. He'd closed the door into the room, like he wanted to say something private to J, but he didn't say anything at all after that; he just looked at him, with those big, sad eyes of his. He was finished. Maybe not officially, but this was the end of the road as far as anything significant was concerned. They both knew that. The cop that let the Codys get away.

J didn't feel sorry for him; he'd made his own decisions and, as far as J was concerned, he was as rotten as the rest of them.

Because Leckie didn't understand. Justice isn't something you believe in; it's something you do. If Roache had plugged J, like he'd wanted to, Leckie might have gone to the funeral, but only to pick up another lead. Leckie and Norris were the same, and not that much different from Baz or Craig.

Baz hadn't crapped on about wanting to make the world a better place; he'd just known what it was and tried to get his cut. It had worked for him for a while, till it finally caught up with him and blew his head off. But, like the saying goes, some people are here for a good time, not a long time.

What would Baz have made of this whole mess?
Shit happens
, probably. That was about as philosophical as people like Baz ever got.

And what about Nicky? What would she have said?

Every time J thought about Nicky, his world caved in again, opening into a subterranean grief that would never be filled as long as he lived. That wasn't the way it was supposed to have ended. For her, for him, for anyone.

The jury's verdict caused a sensation. The cops had fucked up big-time, and the killers—because everyone was sure they were the killers—had walked free: Smurf, proud and defiant; Pope, angry and giving the cameramen shit; Darren, looking at the ground, round-shouldered and broken.

Nobody could quite get it, but everybody grabbed at it as another example of God knows what—the incompetence of the police, the deviousness of defence lawyers, the bastardry of the world. Who really knew? The violence that was flooding through the world had risen one notch further; if people had known any more than that, they would have been more frightened than they were.

But, if truth be known, most people weren't frightened; they were indifferent. It was tabloid fare, that's all: something to fuel the cynicism and to talk about at barbecues on warm Saturday afternoons, but not something that really affected them.

The world of cops and crims seemed self-enclosed and distant to most people, occasionally leaking out into a suburban cafe or parking lot, but really just another game the bad boys played. Only instead of everyone getting up at the end, some people stayed dead.

The dust settled, as dust does, and, after the blaring of the talkback radio shows died down into the normal buzz of suburban static, life returned to normal.

Leckie was given some time off and spent it peacefully enough with his wife and kid. He did some gardening, considered his future. There were still plenty of things to do. Write a book. His interest in crime prevention remained. After the intensity of the last few months, he needed the break to reorientate.

It was true, what his wife said. He'd allowed his personal feelings to get in the way of his professional conduct. The fact was, he'd liked J too much, when the truth was that J was, by his own admission, a criminal. A
young
criminal, maybe, but a criminal nevertheless, and you just can't trust criminals. Simple. But somehow he'd allowed himself to be swayed, let J get the upper hand.

Norris hadn't been fooled for a minute. He'd known J was lying from the very beginning; so, of course, had Leckie himself, but he'd wanted to believe the best. That was his downfall. He'd wanted to believe that J could be saved.

But some people can't be saved. And it's not just their background or lack of opportunities or education; it's their refusal to participate in society. J had been given plenty of chances to join in. Leckie had seen his file, seen the many interventions Human Resources had made—the foster care, the almost weekly visits by department officers to check up on him—but in the end J had chosen his family instead.