Quota (30 page)

Level with him across the street was the roof of the Supreme Court, where the sandstone walls met a desolate plain of air-conditioners and sheet metal. Under that roof somewhere they'd all been doing their business these past couple of weeks. Ripping away at each other, he'd heard, trying to get down to the point. The truth. He wasn't sure about that. Was it a whole room full of smart people trying to work out the truth, or was it just one side trying to beat the other? Did it follow that the mob who beat the other mob necessarily had their hands on the truth? There'd probably be something in Latin for that. He'd ask Les one day. But this much he knew for sure: learning trivia did not make you any smarter.

He was too high to pick out an individual on the footpath, an issue he hadn't considered in his planning. He looked briefly at the dog, panting by his foot, and returned to the car.

Sometime later—he wasn't sure how long because he'd been dozing—the lift doors across the floor from him rumbled open and a man emerged, stopped a moment and looked around. When he'd seen the ute he made straight towards it and Barry jumped out to meet him, sending the seatbelt buckle banging on the doorwell in its haste. Of course he'd know the ute—would've seen it a thousand times, a familiar shitbox cruising lazily around Dauphin among the tourists' gleaming wagons. It was common enough to know cars in the township rather than, necessarily, the people who drove them. Barry himself wasn't so confident of recognising the man he was here to meet, so far out of context. For one thing he was wearing a suit—that was a first as far as Barry knew—and it was really only his walk that looked familiar from a distance. Up close, however, the face was just as it had always been.

The parking spaces were almost deserted, and the reflected sun glared brightly off the glossy concrete. Barry kept one hand in his pocket, thrusting the other forwards.

‘Barry Egan.'

The black dog was pissing against the tyre of the ute.

‘Patrick.'

‘I wasn't sure if you'd turn up,' he began. ‘Haven't had a great day, huh?'

Patrick just nodded.

‘You want to h-hop in for a sec, Patrick?'

Barry gestured towards the far side of the cab.

Patrick looked him over once before he complied. For just a moment, Barry wondered how he appeared to someone like Patrick, someone so much younger, who had seen so much. Harmless, he thought. Soft and sleepy and harmless. Barry watched him climb in the passenger side, saw him recoil slightly at the smell of dog and old food. His long limbs were folded awkwardly into the small space like a whacked spider. His elbow automatically found the armrest.

But when Barry had climbed in, he made no attempt to start the ute. Instead, he reached over his head and tugged a heavy black sports bag from behind the headrest. He hefted it onto Patrick's lap.

‘Have a look in there.'

Patrick found the zip and drew it back to reveal a glimpse of yellow. His eyes met those of a smiling Aborigine. Just to the left of that tranquil face was a red rubber band.

The bag was crammed with neat, inch-thick bundles of fifty-dollar notes.

They were straight and flat and new, and the bundles formed neat blocks beside each other. Patrick's hands clutched the sides of the bag like a man in a pub fight clinging to someone's lapels. He looked out the grimy window as though he expected trouble of some kind. Men in suits running flat out towards the ute. Bikies, fishermen, police, or whatever else it was this poor bastard feared. Barry had run through enough of these scenarios, while he waited in the carpark, to have some sympathy. But the concrete world was empty and silent. For a puzzling moment, they both stared out the windscreen.

‘What the hell's this?'

In the course of his long relationship with the barrel, this was a question Barry had been anticipating. There was an answer he had been rehearsing. ‘It's yours. I sold that blue barrel and this is the money I got.'

‘What are you talking about?'

Barry felt his world tilting again in response to the aggressive rise in Patrick's voice, felt himself falling away from the warm dependability of habit, just as he had in Taia's warehouse. This was a return to mayhem. The panic was dancing in his fingertips, feathering his pulse.
Nothing good could come from that barrel.

‘You know more about it than I do. It c-came off the
Open Quest
the night your brother was shot. I don't know h-how. Musta had something to do with why everyone was out there that night, with why they—why they shot him…'

He glanced apologetically at Patrick.

‘I don't think it belongs to them, the Murchisons I mean, so I figure it musta been yours. Really, I s'pose I shoulda given you the actual ba-barrel back, but things took a different turn.'

‘You're not, you're not just
giving
me this?'

‘I am so.'

They stared at each other, locked in an impossible moment.

‘Look, I don't care how much money's in here. You can fucking keep it. I've had enough of all this shit. People don't just hand bags of cash to strangers.'

Patrick pushed it to his right, wedging it against the handbrake as he again searched the carpark for unseen enemies.

‘I thought about it a fair bit and I think it's the right thing to do.'

Patrick sighed loudly and his left hand found the doorhandle. ‘Listen mate,' he said to Barry. ‘I'm sorry, but that sounds like shit. I lied to the court and to the prosecutors, all those lawyers. I fed the police a whole lot of bullshit. My brother and me were selling abs over quota. We were moving drugs in and outta town. How could
this
'
—
he gestured at the bag—‘be the right thing to do?'

He pushed the bag towards Barry, who stopped it with a hand.

‘I know about the Murchisons just like you do. I know about the pub and the boats and the money they're making on the side. I know about the fire. They been screwing Dauphin people for years. I know they did the shootin. I mean, I don't know if it was Skip or Mick that fired the shot, or lit the match or whatever else, but I know it was them out there that night. Don't really give a toss what the jury reckons. Jeez, with the greatest of respect, you did fuck it up though. Not sure it was such a good idea doing that first statement.'

‘How'd you know about that?'

‘Read about it in the paper.'

‘So you know about the Murchisons.' Patrick's hand came off the doorhandle and rested by his thigh. ‘Doesn't explain why you would get involved. Why would you do this?'

‘It, um…' Barry found himself squinting as he picked at one ear. ‘It didn't seem fair. I live in the town, right. I watch what goes on, see all sorts of things. You know, there's plenty to see if you keep your eyes open. Most people, they just go about their lives. Got roughly enough to get by or they got plenty and they don't give a stuff; but you don't just go meddling in other people's affairs for no good reason. And what I saw was you lot with no parents, with them little kids. Seem like nice kids to me. And I thought, I thought you can get all hung up on the rules. I know it's wrong to sell the extra abs, and I know it's wrong to sell drugs an' that. But maybe you had a little more reason than most. The Murchisons didn't. It couldn'ta been anything but greed for them.

‘So on the one hand you were doin something that was wrong, but on the other hand so were they, and you had a reason and they didn't. Then you got the police and the courts, all insisting on everything bein done by the book. That fella they sent down, the lawyer—he couldn't see the forest fer the trees. You were just…what, a piece on his board. He just wanted to get his witness straight. He wanted the trial to work properly. That's all fair enough, but sometimes the rules just don't deal with ordinary life. Sometimes they're miles behind. You have to get in the witness box and explain yourself, and the two bastards who shot your brother don't have to. How's that right? You get accused of being a liar and a cheat, and they sit there in silence. I couldn't cop it.'

‘How did you get it?'

‘Get what?'

‘How'd you get your hands on the barrel?'

Barry hesitated.

‘Let's start from the start. How'd you lose it?'

Patrick smiled ruefully and scratched his head. ‘It was just a, I dunno, a split-second thing. I saw it clamped to the wheelhouse an' I knew. I just
knew
what Mags was up to. Didn't even have to look inside it. His big fucken greedy payday…here it all comes, rollin in. Nice one Mags, fucking idiot. The big sale, the one that was gonna kick us clear of all the shit and we'd be starting again. He talked about how he could do it but I never thought he'd actually try it. The Murchisons talked about getting something special in for him and he could on-sell it. Nothin I could say to talk him out of it. I was uneasy enough about them two anyway without takin the business to a whole nother level. I knew that barrel was it, because I knew the way the Murchisons ran their boat and there was no other reason they'd have that dirty big barrel clamped there.

‘Anyway, split second, like I said. I didn't like the look of what was going on on that boat so I ripped it outta the clamp and screwed the lid down hard as I could. I was at the gunwale, listenin for any sound of Murchison and McVean. I could hear Mags' footsteps down the far gangway, knew it was him. Then real quick, I rolled the barrel across the deck to the diver's entry. Couldn't believe no one had appeared and stopped me, not Mags, no bastard. I watched it tip over the edge and fall through the air into the sea. Just a big fucken splash an' it disappeared. That was me put the mark on the GPS'—he looked at Barry, who appeared not to follow—‘I figured she was on the bottom an' all I'd have to do was come back to the spot an' collect it later. I mean, it wouldn'ta mattered if I couldn't get at that GPS again to, you know, get the mark. I woulda found the spot. I know that reef.'

He had been talking into the crook of his arm, elbow on the sill, looking distractedly out the window. Now he turned and looked at Barry. ‘How the hell did you get hold of it?'

Barry ran a finger through the dust on the dashboard. ‘Just curiosity at first. I get something in me head an' I'm like a dog with a bone. I knew that something had come off the Murchisons' boat that night, because I seen Mick McVean going over it down at the wharf, cursin and carryin on. It was pretty easy to work out that it was another barrel, cos the clamp for the second barrel on the side of the wheelhouse was empty. Had no idea what was in it, but it obviously mattered a fair bit to Mick cos he was crackin the shits somethin fierce down the wharf that night. So I'm thinking, righto Mick, game on.

‘From there, it was a bit of an accident. If it come off out where I seen the boat burning at first, then I figured it'd wander up the northeast on the longshore drift. Cos the wind was blowing across the drift that night, I worked out it'd land on the beach a bit wide of where all the other stuff does, like all the usual timbers an' that, and cos the tide the next morning was so big—it was a full moon that night, did you know that? Anyway, I knew it'd be high up on the beach. Where I think we were all on different trams was, I bet you were looking for it on the bottom out at Gawleys cos you thought it'd sink…eh?'

Patrick smiled. ‘Yep. Dived for it about a dozen times.'

‘And you did that cos you rolled the bastard across the deck an you knew it weighed a shitload. Ninety kilos, as it turns out. So that was a pretty reasonable assumption. I didn't know what was in it, so sometimes I s'pose you're better off bein ignorant. I was looking for something that'd float. The other thing was of course that the two of them silly cunts hadn't told anyone what they were up to on the boat; so they weren't in the hunt. Mighta guessed it like you did anyway and started lookin on the bottom. So they're in remand from two days after the shooting and they can't get word out to start the search. I kind of imagined Del Murchison in there at the visitor windows with her knitting, you know, tryin to look sneaky'—Barry chuckled at the thought—‘an' Mick goin
psst, Missus Murch, the barrel, the barrel
…

‘Anyway, your brother died so you had no clue. You're lookin in the wrong place and the only other way anyone else was gonna find it was if they were out there walkin their dog or surfin or somethin. But there'd been such a big sou'wester blowin for the three days before that—you prob'ly remember the night itself was very calm, but before that the wind had pushed piles and piles of kelp down that end. Tonnes of the stuff. It was actually the dog that found the barrel, not me. Don't reckon I would ever've seen it otherwise. Up in the almost dry sand under mountains of the shit. So that was it. I got the ute round to the spot on the beach through the dunes. Had a prick of a time getting the damn thing into the back of the ute. Then I took it round to me storage shed and it sat there while I worried about it for a couple of months.'

Barry grimaced then burped, tried to puff his breath out the rolled-down window. He looked at Patrick apologetically.

‘Reflux. Sorry. So can you see, it sorta started out as a game. I looked at that big dumb prick McVean an' I thought, I'm gonna outsmart ya. But then when I
did
, when I had the barrel, well then I had to ask meself what on earth I was gonna do with it. Then the trial come up and I was folleren that in the papers, and I had a fair idea from the way things were playin out that the barrel was never goin to come into it. But that's when I started thinking about your situation. Can't really explain why, but I reckon if they'da been found guilty, I woulda hung onto the money myself.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, like I said, it's hard to explain, but in that case, if they'd been found guilty, the legal mob woulda been proved right, wouldn't they? About doin it by the book. Your prosecutor friend woulda said, you been done a wrong and the law has set it right. You'd have your…Well, not revenge. Restitution. As it is, you've got your restitution under the counter. There's enough in that bag to start again, get a new boat.'