Black Ice (14 page)

Monday 8 April, 4 pm

Best thing she could do, Jill had decided after the disaster at her sister's the day before, would be to go back to work.

And she had. As soon as she'd arrived back at her apartment.

She had let herself in, dumped her handbag, added a few rings to her fingers, and left again. She went straight over to Ingrid's – who, thank God, had been at home. Jill had not wanted to be alone in her unit with nothing to do after the scene at Cassie's.

Ingrid had some mates over, as usual, and Jill had been quietly excited. She had wanted to grill these two for information for some time. Skye and CK were lovers, local meth smokers and small-time dealers. She'd never sent them up for dealing because they sold only to make enough money to use themselves. But word was that they had contact with some heavy suppliers and it was these men she wanted.

She'd gone easy on the wine, sipping very slowly, doing the refills for everyone and skipping her own glass whenever possible. People like these noticed when you took more than your share of anything, but under-serve yourself and that was sweet. As long as you drank something. Jill remembered an Aboriginal mother connected to a past case, trying to get her kids out of care, who'd been told that it would never happen unless she stopped drinking altogether. She'd told Jill that once her neighbours knew that she had quit, they'd shown up every day, free beer on offer, pressuring her to drink with them.

The headache this morning had been worth it. Jill had the names of two men she believed were up several levels on the meth supply ladder. Agassi and Urgill.

She had called Superintendent Last, and they had arranged to meet.

North Parramatta. McDonald's carpark. Four pm.

Jill caught a taxi from the station and now she sat, waiting, on the McDonald's car park railing, the wooden barrier hard on her backside, putting her legs to sleep. She stood and stretched.

'Krystal!'

At the sound of her undercover name, Jill glanced around. A man in a car just ahead in the car park. Oh my God! Is that . . . What the
hell
is he driving?

Grinning, she sauntered over to the 1990 Magna sedan; once red, the paintwork had washed out to an almost salmon pink, blasted by close to two decades of Australian sun and wind. She hooked an elbow over the driver's side door, facing the occupant, and kicked the hubcap-free front tyre. 'Sweet ride, boss,' she said.

Lawrence Last stooped over the steering wheel, his expression more morose than ever.

'Detective Jackson,' he greeted her. 'Should you not get in, Jill? I don't think I'd be recognised in this vehicle, but nevertheless . . .'

She strolled around to the passenger side, trailing a fingertip over the bonnet, eyes full of mock admiration, as though she surveyed a Ferrari. She yanked the door open and took a seat. As distinctive as the new car smell, the Magna reeked like a taxi close to retirement – cigarette-ash, sweat, farts and unwashed arses.

'Perhaps you will not be as amused, Jill,' said Last, 'when you learn that this is your new company car.' The corners of his mouth rose a little when Jill's face fell. 'Yes, as you can see, you have been richly rewarded for your service with the New South Wales police.'

'You're serious,' she said.

Last produced an A4-sized, yellow envelope, handed it over. 'Always,' he said.

Jill sniffed and grimaced. First thing she'd do would be empty a can of Glen 20 into this thing. She opened the envelope and flicked through its contents. Last had run the names and provided her with A4 photos of Agassi and Urgill, their sheets, names of known associates and last known addresses.

'So what's with the car?' she said. 'Why am I so lucky?'

'You told me that these men frequent a hotel in this neighbourhood. Now that your area of operation is expanding, I would prefer that you have some form of transportation other than trains and taxis,' he said. 'You may also find it useful for surveillance.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Jill. 'I promise I will ensure that no harm comes to it. You will get it back in the same pristine condition.' She glanced over at the back seat, its yellow rubber innards bursting forth in places, pushing through several splits in its velour skin.

'So what now?' she asked. 'Can I drop you somewhere, sir?'

'No need.' He peered through the windscreen and nodded his head. She followed the direction of his gaze and spotted a vehicle parked in a side street close by, recognising an unmarked police car. 'I'll just make my way over there.' He paused, and then searched her face. 'Is there anything else you need, Jill?'

'No thanks, Commander,' she said. 'This is great.'

'And you will call me at any time if you need anything at all.'

'Yes, sir.'

'You are doing a great job, Jill. But it's far more important to me that you are safe and you're coping emotionally.'

'Thank you, sir. I'm fine.' Well, she believed
his
words were true, anyway.

The engine turned over perfectly. That was the thing with a Department car. It might look like a junker, but mechanically the car would be sound. She knew that the Department would consider this car a 'paddock basher', at their disposal from the impound lot. When you had Lawrence Last's rank, the impound lot was a supermarket, although it did have its limitations. Full of confiscated goods that were the proceeds of crime, there was not always a use for much of the merchandise. There wasn't, for instance, a lot that a serving officer could do with a jet ski or a speedboat, undercover operative or not. Jill would have preferred one of the beamers she'd seen impounded, but 'Krystal Peters' couldn't exactly roll around Fairfield in a BMW.

She steered the car carefully out of the car park. As she drove down the side street adjacent to the restaurant, she noticed that Superintendent Last had waited to make sure she got away okay. Passing his vehicle, she shook her head and laughed. Adam Clarkson, the uniformed cop who'd 'arrested' her the other night in Fairfield, was Last's driver. He grinned at her through his windscreen, his thumb and forefinger forming a circle, indicating that her car was spot-on, perfect. Jill felt inclined to offer him a different finger gesture, but didn't consider it appropriate to direct that kind of message to a car containing her commanding officer.

She pulled out into the traffic on Church Street, and made her way to the other side of the suburb. I am definitely going to have to get this car detailed, she thought, when she pulled over adjacent to the Station Hotel. She cracked open the window. There was no way she was going to sit in this thing for hours on end when it smelled this way.

Jill opened the map book next to her; she would use it to cover her face if she was too closely observed. She'd parked just outside the cemetery, with a clear view of the entrance of the pub. This place was working class all the way. She didn't imagine the owners would bother spending anything on it to turn it into a yuppie establishment. She couldn't see the cocktail-set dining alfresco on a warm summer evening with this view over the graveyard.

If Agassi and Urgill were only mid-level crooks, they wouldn't advance a lot further with Skye and CK as friends, she thought. All she'd had to do the night before was mention that her ex was interested in buying five grand's worth of ice and they'd been so impressed that they'd even offered phone numbers. They'd told her all about these good friends: where they met them, their going rate. She'd learned that Mondays and Wednesdays were their business nights, out here at this hotel.

Ingrid had been more interested in her mentioning her supposed ex-partner. 'I thought you said he'd bashed you,' she'd commented.

'Well, not bashed, exactly . . .'

Ingrid was drinking wine from a lime-green coffee mug that could also have doubled as a soup bowl. Micro-fine spider veins rambled across her nose and chin; the rosacea of the alcoholic. The veins engorged when she had something to drink. Last night her whole face had glowed crimson.

'Krystal!' she began. 'That's denial talking, that is. And that shit can get you killed. I see it all the time around here. Girls leave their bloke because he flogs 'em and two weeks later he's been forgiven and it's all lovey-dovey again.'

'Well, he was good to me a lot of the time,' Jill had tried.

'Oh, you've got it bad, Krystal,' Ingrid had said. 'He'll be back on the scene soon,' she turned to Skye, 'you mark my words.'

'Enough of this bullshit,' said CK. 'Are we going to have another drink, or what?'

Jill had held up the empty cask bladder, a flaccid, silver sack.

'Time we was goin' anyway, love,' said Skye. 'People to see, places to go.' She had stood and swayed, held onto the back of the chair.

Now, out the front of the Station Hotel, in her salmon-coloured Magna, Jill thought about Ingrid's comments about boyfriends. 'Oh shit!' she suddenly exclaimed aloud. 'Scotty!'

She grabbed her mobile from the passenger's seat. She had told him she'd give him a call after she'd had lunch with Cassie, proposing that they meet up to work out. After the fight with her sister she had completely forgotten him. She opened the phone and scrolled for his number. She groaned in frustration and slammed her hand against the wheel. She
hated
these calls. The I'm Sorry call. The guilty feeling made her angry. Maybe she could just put it off. She was at work right now, after all. She felt a brief flash of relief at the thought of avoiding the call.

But she knew from experience that the longer she put this off, the bigger the problem would become for her. She had completely lost contact with almost all of her friends this way. She owed them a call, meant to call back, but had put it off, and then felt guilty. She couldn't bear it when people tried to rub in the fact that she'd been slack. The
very
few people she was close to never tried to guilt her when she contacted them unexpectedly after an absence of months or even years.

She couldn't lose touch with Scotty.

She hit the call button.

'Sorry,' she said, as soon as he answered. Got that out of the way.

'Yo, J,' he said. 'What? You didn't want to be humiliated again?' He thought he could beat her in every sport; they'd yet to find one where that wasn't the case, but she wasn't done trying.

'Lunch was horrible,' she said.

'Yeah?'

Jill leaned her head back into the headrest. 'Are you busy right now, Scott?'

'Good to go,' he said. 'So it wasn't the sister bonding session you'd hoped for?'

She groaned. 'I was awful. I pretty much called her a crack-head. Said her friends were all drug-fucked.'

'Whoa. What got into you?'

'Almost a bottle of wine.'

'For lunch?'

'It was Cassie's house, Scotty, what can I say?'

'Yeah, I get that with her, but that's not like you.'

'It's something I'm having to learn at the moment,' she said. 'When in Rome . . .'

'That's a worry, given the way you're earning a living at the moment, the people you're hanging around.'

'I've got it covered, Scotty,' she said. 'Anyway, I'm really sorry. I completely forgot I was going to call you. I just felt shocking, and I went straight home.'

'That's okay,' he said. 'What about a game of squash and a swim on Wednesday night?'

She'd be right here at the pub on Wednesday night.

'No good,' she said, 'working. Thursday?'

'I'm off to Goulburn Thursday morning,' he said. 'Gonna do some training down there for the recruits.'