Death by the Book - Lenny Bartulin [68]
Jack remembered the day Ziggy Brandt leaned into his driver’s side window, while his boys pushed some poor power-suited bastard into the back seat. Middle of the night. ‘Take him out to Smithfield and dump him somewhere off the highway.’ Ziggy pointed at the glovebox. ‘There’s something in there for you.’ As Jack drove away, he looked. Even wrapped in an oily black cloth, he knew it was a gun. His test. His moment. The initiation. Club membership for life.
In the back seat, the guy had pissed himself. He had a broken pinkie finger and a few bruises around the kidneys. He kept repeating his split-lip promise that he would never cross Ziggy’s yellow-brick road again. Jack did not say a word to him: just glanced into the rear-view mirror of the big black Mercedes while the guy babbled. He drove straight to the emergency ward at the Royal Prince Alfred and left him in the car park. Then he went out to Ziggy’s luxury city apartment, parked the car in the street, lit a cigarette and walked away. He was still waiting for the fallout. Ziggy Brandt was a very patient man.
Jack sat up, looked out the window. They were heading south. Not the way to the police station.
‘I want to see Glendenning.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Where the fuck are you taking me?’
The detective smiled, said nothing.
Jack slipped down in the seat. His head felt like ten hangovers, his body like an old mattress thrown out into the street. He figured Peterson would probably drive him around for a while, cook him up a little. The Ziggy Brandts of this world were not the only ones who stuck it hard and mean to their fellow man.
They passed the airport, Brighton le Sands, drove towards Cronulla. The suburbs were quiet, damp, their leafy front yards deserted but for kids’ bikes and garden hoses scribbled on concrete driveways. Australian flags were draped in the windows of a few houses, as though a parade had passed by.
They turned onto the highway, headed for Wollongong.
‘What’s down this way?’
The detective yawned. ‘Gotta see a man about a dog.’
‘You really think Glendenning’s going to believe I had something to do with Kass’s murder? He’s not as stupid as you.’
‘He already believes it, Jackie boy.’
‘Just like that? No evidence necessary? I thought that was priests, not the police.’
‘Who says there’s no evidence?’ Peterson grinned into the rear-view mirror.
Jack tried to adjust his wrists inside the tight handcuffs. Everything was starting to feel tight: his neck, shoulders, his lungs, his stomach. He looked through the window. Oncoming traffic drove by, people off to work. A nice job in a bank, his mother used to say. A cheap loan, buy a house, get married. Two or three kids. Live like a normal person.
They followed the highway for a while then turned off and took the coast road, climbing gradually, cutting through hill flanks thick with trees. Sharp morning sunlight pierced the clouds and dappled the car. Jack’s ears popped. There were glimpses of the deep blue Pacific on their left. The coastline was all cliffs and jutting headlands and hemmed in beaches only fish and seagulls could get to. Further out the horizon was endless, blurred by mist and glare. Everything was big: Jack’s life had never seemed so small.
Peterson wound his window down and cold air blustered in, raw and wet and clean. They passed Stanwell Park. A few more bends and then onto an unsealed road. It followed the coast for a while until it swung up into the trees covering a long hill. No cop stations here. No nearby neighbours either. Everything was perfectly still. The bush was damp with shadows, cold and silent. Jack listened to the car tyres splash through puddles and chew the coarse paste of wet dirt road. His uneasy feeling had a sudden growth spurt. He knew where they were going.
It was dark the last time Jack passed through, but he remembered the loaded calm around him: like a gun on the ground, just waiting for somebody to pick it up.
‘So how’s Ziggy?’ The words caught in his throat as though they were written on wet pieces of cardboard.
Detective Geoff Peterson looked