Black Ice (13 page)

Monday 8 April, 1 pm

'Hey, chemical brothers!' said Byron when Damien opened the front door. He flopped down onto the lounge. It was back to the real world: Merrylands and the stench of their rented house. Damien moved back to the sink where Whitey was, trying to keep hold of the feeling from the hotel last night.

'Ah, we might have a problem,' said Byron.

'What?' Whitey and Damien spun around.

'Nah, man. It's all good. Nothing like that!' Byron laughed. 'Shit, you guys are tense,' he said. 'It's not the law.'

'What, then?' Damien turned back to the stove. He couldn't afford for this batch to get too hot. He'd had to start again once already this week, and it had cost a lot of time. He had two essays due on Friday.

'Well, it's not really a problem. We should think of it more as an opportunity,' said Byron.

Damien and Whitey continued to work.

'A business opportunity. A chance to expand, widen our networks.'

'We don't want to expand,' said Whitey.

'We're happy with our networks,' confirmed Damien. He smiled. Erin had called him three times today. He got a hard on every time his mobile sounded.

'That's probably where the problem part comes in,' said Byron.

'What are you talking about, Byron?' asked Whitey. 'Are you on the goey? You're making no fucking sense.'

'Well, you see, I've got a friend who wants to meet you guys. He wants to talk to us about collaborating.'

'Not interested,' said Damien.

'Forget it,' said Whitey.

'Yeah, but he's not going to just let it go at that,' said Byron. 'I think if you meet him and listen to what he's got to say it would be better for everyone.'

Damien ran some more water over the sides of the container to cool the liquid a little more. He added sixty-five grams of 3,4-methylenedioxyphenylacetone to the formahide and checked the temperature again. One-ninety degrees. Another five hours to go. He rubbed at his face and leaned back against the counter. 'Better for who?' he said. 'You? We told you, Byron. We don't want this any bigger. Haven't you got enough money? It's getting hard to spend all this cash.'

'I don't think you're listening,' said Byron. He stood up from the couch and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. 'We don't have a choice.'

'The fuck we don't have a choice,' said Whitey. 'Who are you talking about, anyway? Who is this prick you want us to meet?'

'Kasem Nader,' said Byron.

Lying in bed that night, trying to punch his pillow into some sort of shape he could settle into, Damien could not sleep.

This is not good, he thought. This is bad. He should never have let Whitey bring Byron Barnes in on any of this.

When Damien had realised he had the know-how and access to the ingredients required to make good quality MDMA – ecstasy – he had at first kept it from Whitey. He knew Whitey would put it on him hard and not give up until they'd at least tried to cook up a batch. Damien knew this, because Whitey had been on about it since Year 11, when Damien had told him he was going to go for a degree in Medical Chemistry.

Damien didn't want to get involved in anything that hurt people, but he'd read up on the drug and been pretty surprised to learn that MDMA had only been made illegal in 1985, and that psychiatrists had actually used it therapeutically before then. He had downloaded the articles for two current studies being conducted in Spain and Israel using MDMA in an attempt to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

The main danger, he learned, was when people used too much – chewed through all of their serotonin stores – which left them suffering chronic depression. And the other major problem lay with bad cooks: people who didn't know what they were doing, or who used dangerous substitutes for the chemicals that were hard to come by. That wouldn't be a problem for a properly trained chemist, he'd thought. And if people were going to be using it anyway – more than a hundred thousand ecstasy tablets every weekend in Australia – maybe it would be doing the right thing to make it properly.

Whitey had brushed aside the rest of Damien's concerns – like some recent findings about brain damage in animals – and within a month, they'd made their first press of pills. Whitey swallowed their first-ever tablet, washed down with a glass of six-dollar-a-bottle sparkling wine. Now, Whitey only drank Veuve Clicquot, but said that not even Veuve could improve on Damien's E.

But then Whitey had pushed the envelope. And Damien had been too much of a blow-arse to knock him back. It had begun as an intellectual exercise. Would he know how to cook meth, Whitey had wanted to know.

Damien knew that his weakness lay in his limitless curiosity for testing and chemical experimentation. He could admit to that flaw. He was also beginning to realise that he was easily seduced by flattery, especially when his ego relating to his intellect was stroked. He knew that Whitey could sometimes play him like a violin, and so, three months ago, Damien had cooked their first batch of ice.

And now this.

Damien had always known that the ice would be trouble. He'd figured on making just boutique quantities for a few very loyal and lucrative customers who wanted some product they could trust. Whitey hadn't pushed the matter. Very good of him, given that there was nothing that they could do to increase supply anyway. Sourcing enough pseudoephedrine to create what they made now flew them just under the radar of the law.

He had thought that the trouble would come in the form of one of the customers suffering a psychotic breakdown and coming to find him. Although Byron was their distributor, he was only one step removed, and hardly to be relied upon to protect them should some mad motherfucker or his family put the heavy on him.

Damien also worried about a possible explosion. He used the Nazi method to cook the ice, which involved reducing the pseudoephedrine using lithium and anhydrous ammonia – an air conditioner refrigerant – and the chemicals were highly unstable, even just in contact with water. He had nightmares about Whitey getting greedy and playing chef on his own one day while Damien was at uni.

And then there were Byron's current drugs charges. Although they were only for possession of pot – a pissy little charge that ordinary citizen could have thrown into a drawer with the parking fines – with Byron's history it meant automatic lockup if he was convicted. Last time he'd faced court he'd copped a suspended sentence – free to leave provided that he did not break any law during a two-year period. He seemed pretty positive that he was going to be able to get off his current charges with the help of some VIP lawyer. Still, Damien knew the cops could follow Byron here at any time. He knew everything he was involved with right now was risky.

But Damien had never considered that the threat facing him might come in the form of Kasem Nader. Had someone told him, on day one, that this would be the case, he would have lost his recipes and told Whitey that he needed to find someone else to live with.

Kasem Nader. Damien had always been grateful for the cred he got just growing up on the same block as the Nader brothers. His stories in Year 10 at lunchtime had helped him finally shrug off the 'godboy' and 'churchie' labels. He'd watched, relieved, as the school bullies had turned their consideration to the fat Asian kid who always smelled like rice.

No one ever got sick of hearing about the police busts at the Nader residence. They happened weekly for a while when Damien was in Year 10. He found he had a gift for setting the scene – describing Mrs Siham Nader running into the street in her nightgown, screaming at the cops who dragged her sons away.

And her boys never went without a fight. From his street-facing window, Damien watched the brothers being slammed by at least four coppers every time. The streetlights spotlit the faces of the arresting officers, orgiastic in their chance to bash a Nader. The boys were invariably thrown limp into the paddy wagon.

Except for Kasem. Brother number two. Loved or feared, often both, by everyone in this suburb, and many beyond.

Damien had perfected the art of watching. To have been spotted watching a Nader brother takedown and doing nothing to assist would have been suicide. He would turn off all lights in his bedroom and shove a towel in the crack under the door. He'd then create the tiniest chink in his aluminium venetian blinds, and stand up against the wall, still. Focus on the gap, peer through. With the lighting in his street, upgraded by the council when the Nader boys moved in, he could see just as well as if he'd sat on his porch with a Coke, watching the show.

And one night he'd seen Kasem in full flight. The problem, as far as he could tell, was that the bald probationary constable had shoulder-charged Mrs Nader when she clutched at Kasem as they'd dragged him across the lawn. Damien had stood, transfixed, as she'd tottered with the shove. She had reached out for her son, who couldn't get an arm free, and had then fallen onto the road, landing heavily on her backside, her hijab dislodging. She'd sat there, sobbing. Her other sons howled from their home, restrained, as usual, by the rest of the Merrylands cops on duty.

Damien hadn't bothered looking at the house. He watched Kasem.

Nader had seemed to go limp. Damien saw him have a word with one of his captors, perhaps a reasonable request – do you mind if I help my mum? Damien would never know whether the cops had briefly let him go to help his mother up off the road, or whether Kasem had broken away by brute force, but either way, when he moved, Kasem went nowhere near his mother. He exploded away from the officers holding him and sprinted towards the bald probationary constable. Although they stood at around the same height, Nader's king hit drove the cop's feet out from under him, and he smacked onto the road, the back of his head first, without even trying to break his fall. Damien thought he'd heard the crack from his room; he would always tell it that way, regardless.

Everyone in Merrylands knew that the cop never came back on the job. Some said it was stress leave, some said his parents had to shave and shower him now; shit, some said the prick died that night, right there on the road, and was buried at Rookwood. Damien had needed to know. He'd eventually learned that the cop was pensioned out hurt-on-duty and he now drove trucks interstate. His brothers in blue had a permanent hard-on for Nader, especially because he'd done only three months for the assault.

Damien swung his legs over the side of his bed and put his head in his hands.

He decided he wanted out.

Monday 8 April, 1 pm

The gutting supervisor signed on at twelve, and Seren knew that he was her best chance. She held herself together through the morning shift, somehow sickened that she actually was starting to get used to the killing. She had to get out of here. At eight this morning she'd almost thrown the job in again when two young blokes on the line had used as a handball an oversized tumour they'd found inside one of the birds.

She did not want to become accustomed to this.

She'd never melt her own supervisor, Maryanne. When the neck-snapping equipment failed or missed for some reason, and the line operator was struggling with a mutilated, terrified bird, Maryanne would approach and without a word kill the chicken with her bare hands, before moving on again.

But Zeko Slavonic, the gutting supervisor, was another matter entirely. Seren had seen the girls he presided over on his morning supervision shift; in the main younger than average, long, painted fingernails, dangly earrings. She'd seen the way Zeko watched her when she walked through his section on the way to the lunchroom. She knew men like him. Too easy.

It had at first seemed incredible to Seren that she would consider that pulling the innards from a dead chicken would be a great step up in the world, but after a week at the front line, with the live creatures, she couldn't wait to join Zeko's team.

There was not a lot she could do with the uniform – shapeless paper overalls – but she'd applied mascara this morning, and she slicked on a deep-berry lip tint in the washrooms before slinking through Zeko's turf on the way to lunch. This time when he tracked her sashaying across the floor, she waited until she reached the lunchroom entry and peeked back at him over her shoulder. Small smile.

He put his gloves down immediately and crossed the floor behind her. Hooked.

She reeled him in and, by two pm, she was learning the intricacies of disembowelling a fowl. Not the most pleasant way to spend an afternoon, but at least none of these chickens shrieked or begged.

Seren knew she'd made a new friend and a whole lot of enemies today. Zeko watched her with lust, his girls with hate, and when she walked into the locker room at knock-off time, she was unsurprised when the buzz of conversation ceased. The gift left in her locker was unexpected, though – the tumour-handball from this morning, wrapped up in her clothes.

A little parting pressie from Maryanne's team.

Standing barefoot in her bathroom that night, Seren smeared charcoal shadow across her eyelids, also smudging the smoky pigment under her lower lashes. Her clear blue eyes mocked her. In her mind, her face was always a contradiction: innocent, slut.

She planned her next move. Her job was bearable now. Just. But that was all right, she wasn't planning on building up a lot of superannuation benefits in that place. Moving forward with the plan was the only thing to do; she would worry about the computer later. Last week's pay had covered rent, shopping, and the small loan repayment back to the department; she had pretty much nothing left.

At least she had the outfit.

'You're going to go see him, aren't you?' Marco's voice came from behind her.

Seren spoke to her son's reflection in the mirror. 'Who, darling?'

'Why do you treat me like I'm stupid?' said Marco. 'I think you're going to see Christian. You told me they were his drugs that got you into trouble. Why would you go see him?'

Seren turned around. What could she tell her beautiful boy? Should she tell him the truth? He knew too much about the world already. She should just stick with the story.

'Marco, I told you,' she said. 'I'm going to be working most nights so that we can try to get ahead. Waitressing. Remember?'

'Yeah, Mum. I remember. Waitressing. Dressed like that.'

'It's a big hotel –'

'In the city, I know. You said that before.'

'Come on, darling. I'm sorry I have to go out, but Angel should be here any minute. She'll look after you. I'll get you ready for school when I see you in the morning.' She squatted down to his height, trying to get him to meet her eyes. 'I'm doing this for you, Marco.'

'Whatever,' he said.

There was a knock at the door and she moved to open it, relieved when she saw Angel standing there, carrying . . .

'What's that?' Seren asked.

'My laptop,' said Angel. 'Well, actually, it was Danny's. He won it in a card game. I don't know the first thing about how to use it, but I was hoping – ' she peered around Seren into the room, ' – that Marco could teach me some stuff. There are supposed to be some games on here.'

Huh.

'I thought,' continued Angel, 'that I could leave it here for a while, and Marco could practise and show me what he learned when I come over to babysit.'

Marco stood transfixed, still wearing his frown, but he hadn't taken his eyes off the computer.

'We've got them at school,' he said. Seren smiled – Marco used this careful nonchalance when he was at his most excited. 'I can show you a few things.' He kept his hands by his side, spoke again, 'But I'm not a baby. I don't need babysitting.'

'Oh, of course not,' said Angel. 'Just a figure of speech. We'll be hanging out while Mum's working. Is that better?'

Marco grinned, eyes on the computer.

Well, well. Seren's shoulders dropped a little. She watched her son closely; she always felt a rare sense of worth when she saw any indication of his happiness. Today hadn't been such a bad day. Maybe she was finally living up to her name a little.

She walked into her bedroom to finish dressing. Well, actually just to dab perfume at the base of her spine and to slip on The Shoes.

'Oh my God,' said Angel, when Seren came back to the living room. 'Are you sure you're going to be okay walking out of here like that?'

'I'll be fine,' said Seren. Tready would be in hospital for at least another couple of nights, surely. Her brow wrinkled and she turned around.

'What'dya forget?' said Angel.

Seren returned carrying a bigger handbag and standing a little shorter. 'You're right,' she said. 'I'll carry the shoes. A girl's gotta be able to run around here.'

Monday night happy hour at System. Christian hadn't missed one Monday at this club in the six months Seren had been with him. The idea was that you needed Mondays here to get over the first day of the working week, or to extend the weekend just a little more. A lot of Christian's friends considered that the weekend began on Wednesday night. Seren had discovered that although they still showed up at work Thursday and Friday, for these people, play nights began mid-week.

Christian had never pressured her to try anything, and he'd never used around her, but she'd been aware that he liked cocaine. He'd told her she could join him any time, but she had declined. She figured that if she'd gone almost ten years without a taste of anything, she'd be stupid to start again now. If she'd been honest with herself, she would have admitted that she found this part of Christian's life childish. She associated drug use with adolescent rebellion, and to see these affluent, educated adults out taking drugs every night seemed pretty pathetic to her. But Christian had been so great in every other way, and he never seemed to be terribly affected. In fact, she'd never really been certain when he'd taken anything.

After their first few dates, she had tended to avoid going to these clubs with him. She'd never grown used to the people who attached themselves to him, particularly the girls. And it was a lot easier to love him, to think of him as a father for Marco, when she didn't have to watch him dipping again and again into his jacket pocket.

'Look, it's no big thing,' he'd told her in the beginning. 'I have access to a safe source, and my friends know that. We're not the kind of people who are desperate enough to just hang out on a street corner trying to score. Everyone knows that I can get the best and I'd rather they came through me than get caught up in any trouble out there.'

Seren realised that she might not find him tonight. She was not particularly concerned. The best thing about her godawful job was the early starts – it gave her the afternoons before Marco got home to track Christian's movements; she would find him eventually. In the meantime, she would try his old haunts and see what she came up with.

She had her opening line down pat. He would not want to see her. Obviously. She imagined that he would have expected her to sink back into the quagmire in which he'd found her, too humiliated to re-enter his world. Or that if she did show up, she'd be hostile, aggressive, and he could pass her off as a jilted ex.

When she'd called him from the police station, hysterical, on her twenty-third birthday, he'd been there in twenty minutes. Told her he was so sorry, that it was all his fault, that it had just been a little extra birthday gift he had thought they could enjoy together. It will be fine, he'd told her. There won't be a problem. I'll be at court, and we'll sort it all out. She had believed him, every word. Of course, he would make it all better. That's what he did every day. He was Christian Worthington, after all.

The social worker in the gaol had been called in when Seren had been told that Christian would not accept her calls. The social worker had called the psychiatrist, who had ordered intravenous sedation.