Dark Country (13 page)

He was focused on the food, and made short work of his burger. With his large hands, he didn’t have as much trouble keeping
the bun and its contents under control, whereas she battled to keep shredded lettuce and the sauce-slathered rissole from
escaping.

Sucking sauce from her finger, she glanced up and caught him looking at her, the flare of heat unmistakeable. And just as
unmistakeable, her own body’s immediate reaction: her pulse audible in her head, her breath suddenly shallow, her acute awareness
of his strong, male physicality. Her long-missing libido flung the door open and flounced back in, all dressed up and raring
to party.

Shit
.

He scrunched the empty paper bag tight in his hand, and shoved his chair away from the table to walk over and toss it in the
kitchen bin. His back still to her, he broke the silence abruptly.

‘Jeanie’s new security system – there’s a camera that might have picked up something last night. She said Adam knows how to
access the footage.’

It took a moment for her brain to change gear.
Security system. Last night
.

‘The camera on the pumps at the side? Shit, why didn’t I think of that?’ She dropped the remains of her burger on the plate,
self-reproach killing her hunger. She should have remembered the security system. It might not have caught anything, but she
should have thought about it this morning, and checked it then. Tiredness and shock weren’t any damn excuse.

‘The images probably won’t be any good.’

‘We’ll find out,’ Kris said.

Glad of something practical to focus on, she wiped her hands on a paper towel and found her phone among the stuff cluttering
the table. Adam answered on the first ring. He’d called in at Jeanie’s, who had already asked him to check the security footage.

‘If there’s anything useful, I’ll make a copy and bring it over. Might take me an hour or so,’ he added, before he disconnected.

She glanced at her watch, slightly surprised it was only eight o’clock. What else did she have to do tonight? Text Steve to
let him know she’d arrived home. Report the incident. Get Gil’s witness statement. Then go out and knock on a few doors,
find out who might have seen or heard something last night. There’d be no long relaxing bath this evening to soothe her aching
body, no early night to catch up on her sleep. Just the work she was honour-bound to do.

Her thoughts were scattered, racing around in her brain, too slippery to catch and hold on to them all.

She made herself concentrate. As she lifted her phone again, its light bell tones announced a text message, the phone vibrating
gently in her hand. Her mental list still forming in her mind, she distractedly thumbed the keys to access the message.

She had to stare at the letters on the screen for several seconds before they made any sense.

GilSP is ded. If U hlp him U wll B 2
.

He shouldn’t have brought the food. Sharing a meal with her again in her kitchen was just too damned …
personal
. Friends shared meals, and lovers, and he’d better bloody well remember that they were neither.

The sooner he got out of here, the better. He’d made a mistake in the car asking her about tracking phone calls. It had raised
her curiosity and suspicions. She’d start on the questions again, just as soon as she’d finished with her phone. He’d have
to think of some way to answer them that would discourage her, keep her uninvolved.

Discouraging a dedicated cop who genuinely worried about people, and about justice, wouldn’t be easy. He could lie convincingly
if he had to – and he’d had to, more than once in his life – but he preferred the truth. And in this case a brief
version of the truth would probably be enough to convince her that she didn’t need to be involved, that the action was in
Sydney, not here, and that once he’d left tomorrow she and Dungirri could forget about him for good.

She was frowning at her phone, the text she’d just received obviously not to her liking. He saw the anger rise: her narrowed
eyes, the hiss of an in-drawn breath, the slight colour darkening her cheeks. She pushed the remains of her burger away and
stood up, sliding the phone across the table towards him.

‘I am going to make a pot of strong coffee,’ she said, her voice cold and deliberate, ‘and then you are going to explain to
me exactly what is going on.’

If the coolness of her order didn’t quite chill him, the text on the screen did.

‘I should go, Blue.’

‘No.’ She dumped four heaped spoons of coffee in the plunger, and turned on the kettle.

‘You’ll be safer …’

‘I’ll be safer when I know what’s happening and whether this is just someone playing silly buggers or something I really need
to worry about.’

As she moved past him to retrieve the coffee mugs they’d left in the drainer that morning, she met his eyes, honest and direct,
and he wished for a moment that she was a weaker person, that she would go running scared from him, call in her colleagues
for protection. But even out of uniform, in that soft cardigan, there was still the strong core of determination and commitment,
and he sensed that she would never run from anything she considered to be her duty.

That knowledge made him all the more worried for her. ‘I’ll tell you what you need to know, Blue. But then I’m leaving. Being
with me puts you in danger, and I won’t let you risk that.’

‘I decide what risks I take,’ she said, too calm for his peace of mind.

Reaching for her phone again, she dialled a number and reported the text message. Gil didn’t know the abbreviations she used,
but he understood enough to know that she’d requested a trace on the message.

‘How long before you get an answer?’ he asked as she dropped the phone back on the table.

‘Depends. An hour or two. Maybe longer.’

The kettle came to a rolling boil and she turned to flick it off. A grimace of pain crossed her face as she lifted it, her
arm shaking and water splashing unevenly into the plunger.

He closed his hand over hers to steady it.

‘I’ll finish this. Go and sit down.’

‘I think I’ll get some painkillers.’ Cradling her arm against her body, she headed to the bathroom.

He stayed where he was while the coffee brewed, leaning against the bench, relieved by the few moments alone. From outside,
he heard a couple of car doors slam, the sounds of engines starting, vehicles turning on gravel. The working bee next door
finishing up, he guessed, and hoped none of them had seen him come in here. It could make things more difficult for Kris than
they already were.

If she wasn’t too sore, she’d likely start with her questions soon, and he had no doubts that by the time he finished answering
them, she’d be more than glad to see the back of
him. If he could just explain in a way that didn’t … No, he was who he was, not the kind of man who had any business being
kitchen-table friends with a decent cop.

He poured the coffee and placed her mug on the table when she returned, still holding her arm. She hooked a chair out with
her foot and sat, stirring sugar into her coffee for a few moments before she tossed her first question at him, direct and
to the point.

‘Do you know who murdered Marci?’

He might not have been forthcoming in his answers during the day, with Petric and Macklin playing their smart-arse games,
but he owed
her
straight honesty now.

‘No. I’ve got suspicions, but they’re just guesswork. I don’t know anything for sure. There are too many possibilities.’

‘Marci had a lot of enemies?’

‘She was in with some rough folk, Blue. She drifted from one man to another and they used her. She didn’t have enough sense
to take charge of her own life.’

Not like you
. The thought came unbidden. Marci, with her overdone make-up and tight clothes and all the artifice she’d learned in the
sex trade couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the woman in front of him, natural and beautiful without make-up, comfortable
and confident in her self and her profession.

‘Until the last year or so, she kept control of the booze, and didn’t do much in the way of drugs. But her latest boyfriend’s
a dealer, and he got her hooked, pimped her to pay for it. He was connected to scum, and she was sliding down, way out of
her depth. She’s not young any more, not as attractive, so
he was pushing her into the BDSM scene. She thought …’ He had to word this part carefully. ‘She thought she could sell some
information she had, to pay off her debt. I warned her that was dangerous, for her.’

He met Kris’s long, appraising look without blinking. But if she guessed that the information Marci had involved him in some
way, she didn’t pursue it directly.

‘You paid her debts, tried to get her out of Sydney. What was Marci to you, Gil? And what are the two of you caught up in?’

He hesitated, wondering how he could explain it all, where to start. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.

She curled her hands around her coffee mug and lifted it to her mouth. ‘Then start at the beginning.’

The beginning. It seemed so long ago, the beginning of that part of his life, but it was where he and Digger and Marci and
the Russos had first crossed paths.

He took a mouthful of coffee. ‘Marci was married to Digger Doonan, back fifteen years ago. Digger gave me a job as a bouncer
and general dogsbody in his pub, when I’d been sleeping rough in Sydney for weeks after I got out of prison. The pay was a
joke but I got food to eat and a cockroach-infested room to sleep in on the premises.’

She listened without commenting, and he had another drink of coffee before continuing, ‘Digger was a Vietnam vet, but he never
really got his head back together afterwards, and with the booze he was easy pickings. He held the deeds to the pub, but he’d
got himself in too deep with the Russo family. They’re big in the ‘Ndrangheta in Sydney.’

She leaned forward. ‘The ‘Ndrangheta? The Calabrian
mafia?’
Her short laugh held no humour at all. ‘Oh, Jesus, my day just keeps getting better.’

So, Petric hadn’t tried to discredit him by telling her the seedier aspects of his connections. That made him wonder whether
Petric was game-playing with his country colleagues, too. Or whether he just didn’t regard them as important enough to warrant
sharing with them significant information.

‘The Russo family made their money from marijuana and cocaine in the 1970s and ’80s,’ he explained. ‘Vince, the one who died
today, pursued mostly legal interests after that – imports, investments, property development – and left most of the running
of the illegal business to his brother, Gianni. At least, that’s how Vince wanted it to appear. In reality, he exercised authority
when Gianni crossed over what Vince considered a line. Gianni ran a tight territory, keeping control of drugs, brothels and
pubs in his part of the inner south. Vince’s son, Tony, preferred Gianni’s style of business, and worked with him for years.
It was Tony who oversaw Russo’s interests at Digger’s pub – drugs, girls, extortion.’

Kris didn’t say anything, her mouth tight and disapproving.

‘Digger owed Tony, and Tony sent his thugs after him one night, just to put the frighteners on him, but Digger had a heart
condition, and that’s how he died.’

‘Was Tony charged?’ she asked sharply. ‘Or his accomplices?’

‘No. They didn’t leave much evidence of anything but natural causes, and Tony cleaned up any messy questions by calling compliant
cops to the scene, and a coke-addict doctor
who certified that Digger had a heart condition and sky-high blood pressure.’

Her frown deepened, but she merely said, ‘Go on.’

‘I’d been at the pub more than a year by then. I knew Vince a little. Thing was, he’d known Marci since she was a kid, had
a soft spot for her, and he used to come and visit the pub sometimes. He had some control over Tony and kept him from squeezing
Digger dry. In return, Digger lent me to Vince a few times when he needed a driver or an extra bodyguard.’

That
didn’t go down well, judging by the hard look she shot him.

‘One of the things I’d learned was that information could be more powerful than knives or fists. So I kept my eyes open, and
watched and waited. When Digger died, it turned out he’d left the pub to Marci and me, a fifty–fifty split. Maybe he had the
guilts because I’d been running the place for him for all of a few bucks every now and then. Maybe he figured if he left it
all to Marci she’d lose it within a month. I don’t know. The pub had been in his family for almost eighty years, and he was
proud of that. But he didn’t have any family of his own.’

‘Let me guess.’ Her tone was dry and cold. ‘Tony wasn’t happy?’

‘Tony was enraged. He wanted control of the pub, made all sorts of threats. But I wanted to run the business on my terms,
not Tony’s. Turn it into something decent if I could.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I made a deal with the devil. With Vince. I met with him, and let him know about the contents of a package locked up in a
safety deposit box, and that it would stay there as long
as Gianni and Tony and their dirty business stayed out of my pub, but if anything happened to me or the pub, the contents
would be copied and sent to some senior police officers, the anti-corruption commission, and a few top journalists.’