The Broken Ones (4 page)

Neve looked at him. “Dixon was five weeks ago.”

Oscar covered his surprise by pretending to adjust his seat belt. Had it really been five weeks?

He felt Neve still watching him. “I know why you do it,” she said.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly.

“Letting these fucking criminals walk won’t undo what you did three years ago.”

“Enough.”

Neve wrapped her arms tighter around herself and stared at nothing.
Oscar put the exhausted sedan into gear and eased out into the street. As he turned the wheel, his headlights picked out the young man who’d been watching him when he arrived. As Oscar drove closer, the boy took a shy half step back into the alcove. Ignore the dismal shit, Oscar thought. But he couldn’t help himself. After he’d passed the doorway, he glanced through the smeared window at the boy. Reflections of Oscar’s headlights fluttered over the youth’s pale face like white wings: a brief touch, then gone.

Oscar pressed hard on the accelerator, keen to flee the whores, junkies, scarred children, and the dead.

How nice not to smell smoke. No matter how much he hated returning to headquarters, there was always the one upside of filtered air. Coming here was like a respite in a clean-scrubbed oasis. Even the hospitals suffered rolling blackouts, but here in City Station the air was warm and cleansed of the harsh smoke tang that, over the past three years, had burrowed its way into almost every room, every brick, every piece of clothing, every pore. People burned anything to cook and heat, although most didn’t have a proper wood-burning stove, so many ended up accidentally torching their houses and themselves.

He tried to engage Neve in small talk as they wended between the empty cubicles of the Industrial Relations Branch to his so-called department’s so-called office, but she remained silent. They reached a tiny corner desk adjacent to the emergency exit: two chairs, one old computer, a cluster of cell-phone chargers, and a hat stand Oscar had brought from home. There had once been a laminated sign that proclaimed the cubicle the Nine-Ten Investigation Unit, but one day the sign had simply vanished, leaving only four blue gobbets of Blu-Tack. The next day, even the Blu-Tack had disappeared. He hung his wet hat on the stand and switched on the computer. Its cooling fans clattered dispiritedly.

He turned to Neve. “Listen—”

“Back in a minute.”

He watched her walk toward the far corridor, which led to the toilets. He sat. His in-tray held his payslip and an interoffice envelope, the kind scrawled with the names of previous recipients and sealed with
string looped between two buttons. Oscar ignored them and typed a brief report of the Tambassis interview. With every word, he grew angrier. Haig and Neve were both right: Tambassis had strong motive, a piss-weak story, no lawyer. An easy conviction. There were few people whose minds had not been twisted when the ghosts appeared on Gray Wednesday. Many couldn’t cope with their new, ghastly shadows; hospitalizations for self-harm erupted, and psychiatrists and telephone helplines were overwhelmed. In the short time it took to understand that the ghosts weren’t leaving, suicide rates skyrocketed. And many began taking others’ lives. Violence and murder cases soared, and courtrooms became jammed with perpetrators who claimed that their ghosts “drove them to it.” There were stories of ghosts leading people to lost brooches and buried tins of money, so why not to murder? Clause Seventeen had been included in the Personal Sightings Act to exonerate people whose mental health had been genuinely fried by the appearance of the dead. At first, the courts had loved the clause: it was the perfect pressure valve for a justice system on the brink of explosion. But there lay the curse of Clause Seventeen—since nobody can see any ghost but the one that haunts him, if a suspect stuck firm to his story, who could argue that his specter
didn’t
drive him to kill? Courts and cops alike soon realized that blaming the dead was becoming the blanket excuse for murder and units like the Barelies were hastily created. It was Oscar’s job to sort the psychologically traumatized from the rat cunning. Yet here he was, signing another get-out-of-jail-free card. Not doing his job. He clicked Print.

As the old Epson in the middle of the office wheezed into life, he felt eyes on the back of his neck and turned. The shadows near the stationery cabinets were deep; the outer corridor was dark. He was alone. The printer clacked loudly and paper began to hum through the machine. Oscar turned again to his desk, and leaned back in his chair. He had discovered that if he angled and twisted just so, he got a glimpse of buildings, and so could tell his father without lying that his office had city views. True, there wasn’t much to see; the skyscrapers were almost all dark spires, and only the occasional streetlamp worked. In the distance, near the Captain Cook Bridge, the glass flanks of a distant high-rise flickered an angry, wasp-wound red. Fire. Oscar waited for his cell phone to ring, but it slumbered in his pocket. Nine-Ten calls were becoming rare. Some uniformed cops simply skipped the protocol
of calling the Barelies to a crime scene even if the suspect pleaded Clause Seventeen, and received no reprimand. Oscar wondered if he should have removed himself the day the sign disappeared.

“On your feet, Mariani!”

The thunderous yell at his shoulder made Oscar jump.

Jon Gest was as big as his voice was deep. He was like some huge Victorian-era engine made flesh: a heavily cast machine of wide catenaries and lumpen mass, capable of grinding rock or pistoning tonnage without fatigue. Unstoppable. He was grinning.

“Jumpy bastard. Guilty thoughts?”

“About why your wife keeps calling, begging to be satisfied by a real man.”

Jon’s grin faltered, and he sat heavily in Neve’s chair—it sagged precariously under his nineteen stone. “It’s true. Leonie knows.” He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. “My heart hasn’t been in the marriage since my true love rejected me.” He grabbed Oscar with hands the size of hams and planted a wet kiss on his cheek. “Love me, Oscar! Love me back!”

Oscar pushed his friend away and wiped his face. “Idiot.”

“No woman wants you. You’re wound up tighter than an eight-day clock. I’d be surprised if you could convince your one-eyed baldie to puke, let alone make a kitty shriek.” Jon chuckled and began hunting through Oscar’s desk drawer, flipping aside bulldog clips and spent batteries. “Where are they?”

Oscar reached into the lowest drawer, pulled out a half roll of peppermints, and threw them to Jon. “So why the visit? Bored? DCP burning the midnight oil?”

Jon worked for the Department of Civic Prosecutions. When he and Oscar had been reassigned from Ethical Standards, they’d been split up: Jon—with a law degree—was slid down and across to DCP. Oscar—with half an undergraduate degree in philosophy and three semesters in horticultural studies—slid even further to this tiny desk without a sign. Judging by Jon’s unpatched jacket and reasonably new shoes, he was doing okay.

“Nope.” Jon chewed. “Looking for you.”

“Aren’t you lucky?”

“
Au contraire, mon ami
. Detective work. I
detected
that you were here. And speaking of here: here.”

He handed Oscar a folded sheet of paper.

“What is it?”

Jon suppressed a smile and nodded for Oscar to open it. In Jon’s handwriting were a name and two phone numbers.

“And this is?”

“A job.” Jon smiled openly. “Friend of a friend told me. Cushy position, ranger service in the state forests up north. Decent super, sick pay, no stress, simple. Applications have closed, but my mate’s mate reckons they’re still open to hearing from the right person.” He nudged Oscar with a prodigious shoulder.

Oscar stared at the paper as if it were a curiosity from another century, the purpose of which wasn’t quite clear.

Jon leaned forward, excited. “It’s plant shit, your kind of stuff. You know, like your precious damn fruit trees but on a big scale. Easy work. I mean, the pay’s not great, but nothing runs on money anymore anyway, right?”

Oscar nodded. “What about Neve?”

“Neve’s smart. She’ll be fine.”

Oscar looked at the phone numbers a moment longer, then up at Jon.

“Couldn’t get me anything in DCP?”

Jon’s expression faltered.

“Oscar.” He sat back in his chair. “Man, sometimes … I just don’t know.”

“Haig threatened me tonight,” Oscar said.

Jon sighed. “Here we go.”

“Oh, come on, Jon.
Haig
. Would you want to leave the service with him still here?” Even to his own ears, Oscar’s voice sounded childish and petulant, but he couldn’t stop himself. “We had him.”

“We didn’t have him,” Jon said. His voice gained a hard edge. “We half-had him. Maybe quarter-had him. Then we totally lost him. I don’t want to go over all this again. Good Christ. He’s an
inspector
. He won.”

“He tried to have you killed.”

Jon shook his head, exasperated by a subject that had long ago become boring. “Look, one: I don’t believe that—”

“Stabbed.”

“—and two: so what? I’m here. If he did try, he failed. And now
we’re out of Ethical Standards and we’re no threat to him. We’re safe. Isn’t that enough? I’m not saying the slate’s clean, but Christ, does it matter anymore? It’s a whole new world now. Everything’s different, everyone’s got grief. You especially, man, I know. But, seriously, you gotta move on.” He tapped the note with one solid finger and stood. To Oscar it felt like a wave lifting beside him. “I thought this was a way to help with that.”

The door at the far side of the silent office opened. Neve entered, adjusting her holster and straightening her shirt. She saw Oscar and Jon, lifted her chin, and headed over.

Jon looked down at Oscar unhappily. “Leonie’s birthday party. Sunday. Sevenish.” Before Oscar could speak, the big man was on his way out, greeting Neve in passing. “Detective de Rossa, looking beautiful.”

“Sergeant Gest, looking married.”

Jon grinned and ambled out of the office.

Neve arrived at the desk. Her face was dry, but she’d missed a tiny patch where her mascara had run. The lights in the bathrooms weren’t good. Oscar congratulated himself: he’d let a murderer walk free, physically assaulted one of Haig’s detectives, pissed off his best friend, and made his partner cry. As Mrs. Tambassis had said: some detective.

“It’s late, and we don’t get overtime.” Neve’s words were clipped.

“We’re done,” Oscar said. “Could you just grab that from the printer?”

While she was gone, he opened the interoffice envelope. Inside was a memo from the deputy commissioner. The budget review of State Crime Command, scheduled for next quarter, was being brought forward to next week. One telling sentence was highlighted in yellow: “All units must provide a two-page (max) summary of operations during the last financial year (i.e., arrests, charges laid, prosecutions), including person hours per.”

Oscar felt his mouth go dry. Unemployment was running at twenty-five percent; state-funded institutions were acting like desperate field surgeons, cutting off useless limbs, and the police service was hacking with fervor. Budgets ran on statistics, and the Barelies’ statistics were less than favorable. As Neve had pointed out, they hadn’t brought in a prosecution in weeks.

And whose fault was that?

Jon must have caught wind of the advance review and had begun hunting about for a safety net for his former partner. Instead of gratitude, another flurry of dumb anger sloshed about inside Oscar. He didn’t need saving.

“What’s that?” Neve nodded at the memo.

Oscar folded the paper. “Reminder not to use the east elevators after nine.”

She held out his printed report on the Tambassis interview. Oscar could see that her hand was trembling. “I don’t feel comfortable signing this.”

He nodded wearily. “I didn’t ask you to.”

Oscar signed it, put it in the interoffice envelope, addressed it to the attention of Inspector Moechtar, and put it in the out-tray.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said. “And, listen—”

He looked around. She’d already left.