Roll With It (2 page)

Flying would have been a lot easier, but it was safer this way. A leading drug baron like Karl Jenssen had ways of finding out if people had flown the state. Especially in Queensland, where there is a general understanding that most things are for sale. Even though the Wild Man and Stig were convincingly dead in the tangled wreck of a car down a deep ravine in the hills behind Byron Bay, not far from Nimbin, the drug capital of Australia, they couldn’t be too safe. Hopefully the fact that two South African drug mules hadn’t returned to J-burg would take months to filter back – and by then Stig and the Wild Man should be long gone, and rich.

Wildie seemed to know what he was doing, even saying he’d left a couple of bags of weed scattered near the wreck to help sell the accident. But not all of it. And not the bigger bag of white powder. The police would sigh at the loss of another couple of wastoids who shouldn’t have driven after so heartily enjoying the local produce. The bodies were banged up and burned beyond recognition – what were the odds that both the victims’ mouths would be smashed in the wreck, making dental identification impossible? – but they were the right size and weight, and there was Stig’s wallet lying just to the left of a disconnected tyre. It was open and shut.

And the drugs they’d been carrying when they crashed? Gone, presumably burned. More than $2 million worth. Even Jenssen would feel that.

And wonder.

Hence the long drive south, swapping cars and putting a lot of miles in, fast.

Stig glanced at his co-pilot, currently asleep with his head tilted up against the window, bright-orange hair mashed against the glass, looking strangely childlike. His big, beard-enveloped mouth wide open, a hint of dribble collecting at the corner. Dreaming of God knew what. Stig still had no idea what made the Wild Man tick, but he was a good guy to have if you thought things could get nasty. Stig might even follow through on splitting the money with him, to avoid the unpleasantness of having to deal with all the other variations of that situation.

He thought again of how Wildie hadn’t blinked at killing the South Africans and fixing the crash site. They were things Stig wasn’t sure he’d be able to do, but the Wild Man shrugged that it was no different from finishing off a roo after you’d hit it and broken its legs. Stig didn’t ask any more after that.

He stared into the night and drove, oblivious to the fact that, while he fretted about Jenssen and their immediate plans, the Wild Man was dreaming happily of penguins. The best thing about Wildie being asleep was that Stig didn’t have to endure the hardcore rap making the car vibrate. Instead he could think about Melbourne and which people he should avoid when he got there. And who he wanted to see.

Like Louie.

Stig had lots of vivid memories of Louie, most of them naked and sweaty, but because of circumstances at the time he hadn’t even said goodbye to her when he’d left. She may or may not know the details of his hurried evacuation from Melbourne by now, a couple of years on. But Louie would be interesting. Louie wouldn’t like the Wild Man at all.

But Wildie would probably like Louie. A lot.

That could be a problem.

***

Jake’s world was nothing but blue.

A light-blue world with a thin black line, spreading ever onward in front of his arms as he freestyled down the pool, goggles steadily filling with water but not so badly that he couldn’t see. The dark shape of an approaching body loomed and Jake almost broke his neck, swimming awkwardly so he could look ahead instead of down.

The dark shape revealed itself to be a woman in a blue bathing suit splashing past, looking like she might be swimming off the effects of a pregnancy.

Not her.

The black line formed a T and Jake was at the end of lap thirty-eight. It gave him an opportunity to stop, adjust his goggles and take a moment to look around.

And there she was.

The same black one-piece bathing suit as always. The same endless legs rising to meet the suit and, above the taut flat stomach, the breasts that filled his dreams, slightly straining against the lycra. The same black swimming cap covering every single hair on her magnificent head. Those impossibly grey eyes. And no goggles – the only swimmer Jake had ever seen at the pool who didn’t bother with goggles.

Jake prayed to, pleaded with, cajoled the gods of swimming to make her choose his lane, but she didn’t. She squatted, showing the muscles in her sculpted legs before taking her weight on her arms and shoulders – man, those shoulders – and then was waist deep in the adjacent lane, waiting for a puffing, blotchy-skinned, overweight man to huff his way to the end and turn, then waiting a few more moments to begin her first lap. She duck-dived quickly to wet her head and shoulders and stretched her arms above her head, showing her armpits, bald and somehow stirring to Jake.

He clogged up the end of his lane as he tried to surreptitiously watch all of this, taking in her profile and trying not to ogle the side view of her breasts, now outlined beautifully by the wet bathers. He fiddled with his goggles, pretending there was a problem, until she took off, giving him one lightning glimpse of her perfect backside as water swallowed her and those arms began their distinctively smooth journey down the pool.

Jake was vaguely aware that this was probably beyond acceptable stranger lust, but that had become unimportant some time ago.

There was a gap in the traffic in his lane, so he swam and cased her one more time from afar as he slid away from the wall, her body disappearing ahead of him as those arms sliced through the water, barely leaving a splash as she moved, unlike every other swimmer in the Fitzroy Public Pool. At the deep end, Jake’s neck again battled the forces of gravity and freestyle technique as he craned to watch her touch the wall and push on to lap two. He completed lap thirty-nine with the vision of her legs kicking in his head. He had only one lap to go, just as she began – beaten again by the clock.

If he wasn’t out of the pool soon the traffic would be unmanageable, even as he headed to the Heidelberg Groc-o-Mart against the peak-hour rush. As assistant manager, it was up to him to be there by 8.30 am to set an example to the staff. Sighing, Jake pulled himself out of the pool, hovering for a moment with his weight on his arms, in case the girl was watching from her lane – giving her a moment to appreciate his physique. He had it all in his mind – the moment he would turn and find she was gazing, that she was quietly watching him. Their eyes would meet and it would be she who gulped, smiling in nervous anticipation.

Jake dragged himself out of the pool, fighting the dual urge to dig his Speedos out of his butt crack and take one more look at her. He lost one battle, looking over his shoulder into the end of her lane. She wasn’t there. Almost at the other end of the pool already, she was in motion, leaving barely a splash in her wake.

Oblivious. As always.

Jake sighed and headed for the change rooms.

It had been five or more years since the coffee chains had
attempted their invasion of Melbourne – a European city happily stranded in the wrong hemisphere and boasting a strong population of Italian descendants, which meant a decent coffee was never far away.

The Starbucks invasion had been underwhelming, but it opened a door – and now there was a Gloria Jean’s dominating the eastern side of Queen Street, near Little Bourke. A Hudson’s Coffee offered yet more leather couches and mediocre lattes on Bourke Street’s south side.

Watching the mid-morning coffee crowd thin, Tony Laver sat in Nick’s, a coffee shop and restaurant that dated back to the early 1950s, as proven by décor that hadn’t changed since its opening. It was home to a loyal clientele, spectacular and cheap pasta, and a series of black-and-white photos on the wall showing the owners with a lot more hair.

Laver pushed aside the local tabloid with the front-page headline ‘COWBOY COP’ and sighed.

He was refusing to admit the possibility of a hangover. He hadn’t planned to drink last night. But then he’d arrived home to find a dead pigeon inexplicably in his apartment, like a demented gift in the middle of the lounge room – nothing obviously wrong with the apparently sleeping bird, although it was stiff as a board. Laver had been forced to remove it. He briefly considered a burial in the communal yard, but finally dumped it in the green waste bin, stopping only to check that the self-appointed ruler of the flats, Mrs Macleod, wasn’t watching from behind her blinds.

It had unsettled him enough that he’d immediately felt the need for a drink. Plus Marcia was due at any time.

Things hadn’t been great with his fiancée of two years before the shooting, but now he could feel his life unravelling. Or maybe he was just being paranoid.

Either way, last night he’d known he probably shouldn’t be drinking in his state of mind, but then, post-bird, thought, ‘Fuck it,’ and poured himself a whisky while he waited for her to arrive. He was thinking about her first response when he’d phoned her and told her he’d shot a man: ‘Oh for God’s sake, Tony.’ The same note of disdain she might have used if she’d caught him farting in a supermarket aisle. Not once in the call asking if he was okay.

Pondering that, he had another whisky as he got ready to watch the nightly news. And then he’d simply had to go a third, and a large one, when, second item, the police minister was shown giving the media a lecture about police ethics and trigger-happy cowboys who needed to be weeded out of the force. A man with red hair and a thin moustache stood by his right shoulder, looking stern and smug at the same time.

Another whisky got him through the sports segment – an under-performing Australian cricket team was the only target in the country facing more media heat than he was – before Marcia finally turned up, wanting to head straight out to catch the eight o’clock session at the cinema. Walking down the stairs to the car park, Laver, not completely ready to throw his career away on a drink-driving charge, suggested she drive, but regretted it immediately when she said, ‘You’ve been drinking. You’re pissed before we even go out.’ She sniffed the air, as though he reeked of alcohol.

‘A bird died. I had a whisky,’ he said.

‘Meaning six,’ she wearily replied, brushing past him.

And he knew already how the night was going to go.

As she drove, Marcia didn’t ask if he was okay or show any concern for her future husband’s psyche after such a traumatic event, instead saying, in a wondering voice, ‘Tony, are you for real? You sound surprised that this happened, that you killed somebody. Since when wasn’t your entire life leading up to this?’

‘What?’

‘It’s all about the job. It’s all about you versus them.’ Marcia taking on the persona of a movie preview announcer: ‘Rocket and Flipper and the boys against the bad guys, armed to the teeth, in their own little dangerous world on the edges of society.’ It would have been funny if there weren’t such bitterness in her tone. Now back to her normal voice as she stared at him hard. ‘How was somebody not going to die? You’ve had friends die.’

‘You mean Richie? That was in Afghanistan, and he was in the army.’

Marcia looked sad as she pulled into the cinema car park. ‘It’s all big boys with big guns, Tony. I’m honestly surprised you’re not smugger that you’re finally in the killer club.’

Her mobile phone chirped. She hit her code to unlock it, smirked as she read and then started tapping out a text. Discussion over. Laver was speechless.

Did she honestly think he was proud to have killed somebody? Shit, be honest. Was he proud? He didn’t feel guilt. He’d followed his training. He kept thinking about Coleman, lying there, oozing life. But Laver had been shooting
back
, not starting something. He’d waited longer than he was supposed to. Had almost been shot because of that pause. No way had he been trigger happy, or thrilled to shoot. Was that how Marcia really saw him?

Maybe it wasn’t a hangover he was nursing. It was just a Life Headache. Who could blame him?

‘Hey, Rocket,’ said the barista from behind the counter. Laver looked up from his flat white. ‘Some chick called Simone says they’ve phoned. It’s time.’

Laver nodded. ‘Thanks, Georgio. I was hoping if I kept my mobile turned off, they wouldn’t know where to find me.’

‘You’re getting predictable in your old age, mate,’ Georgio’s partner, Nick, called from the kitchen.

‘Gotta have some certainties in this crazy mixed-up world, mate,’ Laver said as he stood up. ‘Your coffee being drinkable is one of them.’

He threw ten dollars on the counter and headed for the door.

‘You’re too kind,’ Georgio said. ‘Everything all right, Rocket?’

Laver stopped at the door and looked back at Georgio and Nick, in their matching white Bonds T-shirts, at ease behind their counter, their lives uncomplicated by fatal shootings – at least, as far as he knew. ‘I shot a bloke and now the assistant commissioner, no doubt accompanied by a few pollies, wants to have a chat. How do you think that’s going to go?’

‘Tony,’ said Nick seriously. ‘The coffees are on us.’

Laver smiled and took back the ten-dollar note, then shoved it in a charity tin for the Royal Children’s Hospital. ‘Thanks, guys. I’m sure they’ll all recognise that they’ve never been in a crisis situation and will trust my professional instincts at the time.’