Animal Kingdom (11 page)

After dinner they went back to her room for a while and listened to some music.

Nicky hadn't really been in detention; she'd just gone down to the mall to smoke some cigarettes. If she'd known he was there, she would have come home instead.

‘How come Gus said he signed the form for you?' J asked.

‘I just gave him an old detention form, and he was too dumb to notice it had already been signed,' she said.

‘Why are you so mean to them?' he asked her.

She looked at him, hurt. ‘I'm not mean,' she said.

‘Yes, you are,' J replied. ‘They all love you and you just treat them like shit all the time.'

‘That's the way kids are supposed to treat their parents, isn't it?' she said meekly. ‘You gave your mum shit.'

‘No, I didn't,' he said, ‘and anyhow, she's dead.'

‘So what?' Nicky asked, looking at him.

‘Well, what if your mum was dead? What would you think then?'

‘If my mum was dead?' Nicky repeated.

‘Yeah. Then you'd be sorry for all the times you talked back to her.'

‘My mum's not going to die,' Nicky said, looking away.

‘How do you know?' J said. ‘One day she will. What will you say then?'

‘What did
you
say?'

‘Me?' J asked, remembering he'd hardly said a thing.

‘Yes, you,' Nick said. ‘If you could speak to your mum now, what would you say?'

J didn't know what she'd done, but she'd done something, turned some key inside him, and he said, ‘I'd say that I loved her, and I miss her, and I'm sorry that I was such a hassle to look after when I was a little kid, and that if there was anything I could have done to save her, I would have, but I didn't know what to do, I just didn't.' He wasn't crying, but there was something inside him making its way up.

Nicky took his hand and pressed it against her face. She didn't say anything, but he thought she understood.

He hadn't meant to go to sleep, but he did, and the next thing was Nicky's mum was knocking on the door, saying, ‘J, are you in there?'

Rousing, he saw that it was already morning, and Nicky was asleep in her jammies beside him.

‘Yep,' he said sheepishly, rubbing his eyes.

‘Your uncle's at the door.'

Shit, which one? What did he want? J had no idea how they'd found him. It wasn't that he'd kept her address secret, just that he'd never told them it.

‘Coming,' he said, standing quickly. ‘What did you let me fall asleep for, Nick?' he hissed at her. It was Romeo and Juliet all over again, though maybe they didn't know it. It was every young couple there's ever been since Adam and Eve.

‘
I
fell asleep,' she said, stretching and yawning.

Darren was standing at the front door, with Alicia instinctively blocking the way inside, protecting her home from someone she knew in her bones she didn't want to let in.

Stepping into view, J glanced at the floor as he passed her.

Darren said, ‘Hey, we gotta go.'

‘All right,' J said, guiltily glancing at Alicia.

Putting his hand out to shake Alicia's, Darren tried to be civil, saying, ‘It was nice to meet you. See ya.'

It was such a dumb thing to do. J couldn't believe it even as he was doing it. Here he was, one of the murderers, one of the killers who had shot those coppers pretending to be just another friendly Joe who's pleased to meet you.

Was he still wearing the same shoes? J looked, and saw he was. All bright and shiny, from where he'd washed all the blood off.

J was amazed at the nerve. Was it nerve or indifference? Indifference to what people thought? Or just plain stupidity? Was that what had happened to them? They'd gotten so hardened to their own crimes, they didn't care what people thought any more, didn't even notice, because everyone in the world was a fool except them.
Yeah, these are the shoes I killed those dumb pricks in. It actually washes off pretty easily. Have a nice day.

But underneath, Darren was shitting himself. And it wasn't just that they'd get caught. He knew they would, of course they would. It was the memory of what they'd done, killing those two men, the blood, the horror in their eyes, the diabolical—Darren didn't even know the word, but he knew that was the word—the diabolical look on Pope's face as he took aim at their cowering figures. Darren had never even
imagined
anything as ghastly as what he'd done. It wasn't easy to kill a man: you had to turn yourself into something else, and they had. The three of them. They'd turned themselves into something else. Only Darren didn't know what, exactly.

‘I do a lot for you, Nick,' Alicia said as she closed the door on them. She was looking at her, her own daughter, still wondering how to talk to her. ‘You're still at school and you're allowed to have your boyfriend sleep over. That's a big thing for me.'

And it was, and you'd have to have been a total moron not to see it, and, for the moment, Nicky dropped the attitude and hugged her mother. She knew it was a big thing, and somehow the talk she'd had the previous night had mellowed her. Putting her arms around her mother, she hugged her. ‘I love you, Mum,' she said.

And Alicia knew it was true.

Following Darren out through the oleander bushes and across the front yard, J's pace slowed as he saw Pope. There he was, sitting with his arm resting on the window in the parked car out on the street. Seeing him was like being punched in the solar plexus. It was Pope, as large as life, sitting on the passenger side of Darren's car. He was the one behind the murders—he had to be, because the others were too stupid to do it by themselves. And there he was, sitting, waiting in the car for J, grim and unsmiling.

And that wasn't the worst of it: now, Pope knew where Nicky lived. That was something J was definitely not happy about.

‘Where are we going?' J asked quietly as he got in the back seat.

‘See our lawyer,' Darren answered nervously, starting the car.

From the way he said it, it sounded like trouble.

As they drove off, Pope made sure that J saw him give Nicky's place the once-over.

The trip to the lawyer's only took about half an hour, cross ing the city, but was further than a lot of people went in a life time. Going in a diagonal that took them from the weather board dumps that used to service the port and the refinery up across the bridge and over to the leafier part of town where the 7-Elevens were replaced by the fashion stores and the girls in cardigans were replaced by the supermodels in Gucci, Darren drove like he was on autopilot, hardly saying a word.

But, as the scenery changed, J started to sit up and pay attention. He'd never been over this side before, so it was a bit of a surprise to see so much money parading itself around when the rest of the country was going to shit. This was different. The cars, the clothes, the look of people. They didn't look sick; they weren't fat. When you looked them in the eye, they didn't look away because they were frightened you were going to hit them; they looked straight back, like they had a right to.

J was impressed.

‘This is really fucking important, mate,' the bloat in the polo top leaning on the kitchen bench said when they finally arrived. ‘I need to know word-for-word. You know?'

They were in the lawyer's smart, upmarket, two-storey house, all marble and stainless steel, set back on a block behind a high security fence with its own cameras. Who said crime didn't pay? Pope, Darren and Smurf were sitting at a big mahogany dining table, with Pope sprawled out across it like he'd collapsed, as the prick in the Lacoste gave J the third degree about what he'd told the cops.

J knew the lawyer was a prick because he'd now realised anyone associated with his family was. Baz hadn't been, but, the more he thought about it, the less he understood what Baz had been doing with them at all.

Maybe they'd had something on him, or maybe they'd gone back to the time when they weren't pricks themselves. J wondered whether there ever was a time like that, when they were ordinary people.

‘They just kept asking me a couple of questions,' J answered, feeling hemmed in and even more vulnerable than he had with the police. ‘I said
I don't know
, and then they let me go.'

‘Did you tell 'em we were with you the whole night, like I said?' Pope suddenly demanded.

‘Yeah,' J lied.

‘What were you doing in there so long?' Darren asked, not even bothering to conceal the accusation in the question.

‘Nothing,' J said. ‘They just sat me in there with no-one coming in or nothing.'

Smurf was listening extra closely to what he had to say, her gaze never shifting from him; he was trying to make her believe him, but he wasn't sure if she did.

‘That's good, that's okay,' the lawyer said finally, taking charge again. ‘Now, I want you to listen very carefully. From now on, mate, you don't say anything. And that means nothing at all. You don't say
I don't know
; you don't say
I was sleepy
. You just refuse to answer any of their questions. Okay? By law, these cunts can't make you say anything. You don't even have to give your name. Okay?'

Okay, J got it. He wasn't to say anything.

All of a sudden he felt like it was all his fault. But what did any of it have to do with him? Nobody had asked him if he thought it was a good idea to shoot two policemen.
But what if they had?
J wondered. What if Pope had sat him down and said,
What do you think, matey? You liked Baz. What do you think?
What would he have done then?

The thought made J uncomfortable, because he knew what he'd done when Pope had told him to get the car: he'd gotten it, no questions asked, or no questions answered, at least. And if he'd been told they were going to kill some policemen, would he have done any different? He was scared of Pope—they all were—but it was something else. J didn't know how to stand up to him.

That was the thought that made him uncomfortable. He was too weak to say no.

‘Now this is very important,' Ezra was saying—because that was his name: Ezra. ‘Don't let them push you around. You just sit there in silence. At least, you know, till I get there. This goes for your girlfriend, too. What's her name?'

This was getting worse. J didn't want Nicky caught up in any of this. Why was he trying to drag her into it?

‘N'cole,' he answered sourly, like he had a bad taste in his mouth, and he did.

‘Cole?' the lawyer asked.

‘Ni-cole,' J repeated, pronouncing it extra slowly.

‘Nicole,' the guy said, just so he could remember it for later.

This was bad, and J was angry at himself for letting it go so far.

‘This goes for you with Nicole, too. There's just certain things you don't talk to girls about, you know?'

J couldn't believe he was being talked to like this, like a ten year old who had to have the difference between boys and girls explained to him. By someone whose specialty was back-alley hookers and strip-o-grams.

‘It doesn't matter how special they are or what you have or haven't done,' he continued, really laying it on. ‘Girls, they get frightened. They natter.'

Jesus, when would this guy shut up?

‘They can't help it. It's just the way the world is.'

Smurf didn't care much for Ezra's ramblings, but was following his line of questioning closely.

‘There's not much to understand about this,' the lawyer finished up, catching sight of Smurf 's sneer, ‘except you shut up.'

‘Are you clear about that, honey?' Smurf said, soft and fuzzy, like a grandmother should sound.

‘Yep,' J answered, trying to work out a way to get out of there as fast as he could.

After all that, J didn't bother to tell them about spinning the cops the yarn he'd been smoking marijuana on the night in question. He didn't think it would go down in quite the way he intended it.

‘There's nothing to worry about,' Ezra said, trying to be nice. ‘Hey, do you want a cold drink? I got lots of different kinds of drinks.'

Pope had hardly said a thing the whole time. He'd been sitting hunched over the table, taking it all in, making his calculations. Pope was often quiet—maybe that was why they called him
Pope
—but today he was even quieter than usual, quiet and giving J the death stare. And J didn't like it one little bit.

‘Just shut the fuck up,' Pope snarled as they left Ezra's and got back in the car. He didn't have to say anything else—that was enough—but, glancing at J, Smurf wondered if he understood.

Nobody had said anything about Craig, but he hadn't been with the others because he'd been out doing his own shit, which basically meant fanging around in circles, working himself up into a lather.

By the time he pulled in to the petrol station later that night, he was already pretty wound up. So when he saw the cop car pull in right after him, he was packing it.

They glanced casually in his direction as they strode past and then stood propped at the magazine counter, flicking through the men's mags as he scuttled by. Paying for the petrol, he couldn't help but shoot nervous glances over his shoulder. He was scared.

And he had every reason to be. They'd already shown what they could get away with. They could take him outside, make him get on his knees, and blow his brains out with the press cameras popping. And then say he was threatening them. No-one would say a thing because that's what the coppers were able to do in this place. If you thought the crims were the only ones out of control, you weren't reading the papers.

So Craig was right to be scared.

The only problem is, when you let yourself get rattled like that, you start making the wrong decisions, and Craig was just about to make a beauty.