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  “Wendell was found to have died from—” I began.

  “He was a user, yeah,” Jax cut over me. “He must have dealt with the wrong guy. Sometimes those dealers in the city spice up their batches with hot shots just to keep business rolling. If the skels hear a few people have kicked it in a certain area then they know where the strong stuff is, and arsenic is cheaper than fentanyl.”

  “Mr. Gotten,” I said slowly. “If you interrupt my partner or myself one more time I’m going to take that pin and stick it into your eyeball.”

  Jax gave a broad smile, rolling the pin between his fingers. He was starting to like me.

  “We understand Wendell Hamm had been released from prison only days before his death,” Whitt said. “And that he was in prison largely as a result of the efforts of Deputy Commissioner Joseph Woods.”

  “He’s got a good title, hasn’t he?” Jax mused.

  “Here’s a scenario for you,” Whitt said. “Wendell Hamm gets out of prison. He starts talking about getting revenge against Joe Woods for putting him inside. He’s obsessed with it. Driven. You’re a smart guy, and you know targeting one of the highest-ranked police officers in the country is a terrible idea. Bad for business. If the cops get wind of Hamm’s plan, they’re going to be crawling all over this place, and you don’t want that because this is the hub of your business. This is ground zero.”

  “You tell Wendell to let it go.” I took over, tagging Whitt with a glance. “But he keeps on blathering about Woods. He’s a user. He talks to whoever will listen. He does something stupid—he gets a hot shot to Woods’s junkie daughter. You know the hot shot can be traced back to you. It’s your product, and Wendell’s spiked the shot the old-fashioned way—with arsenic. You know it’s only a matter of time before the cops start thinking whoever targeted Tonya Woods was old school. An ex-con. Maybe a bikie.”

  “You can’t take out one of your own guys without rattling the whole crew, so you give Wendell a taste of his own medicine,” Whitt said. “You switch out his personal stash with a hot shot. Wendell goes down, and you hope both your crew and the police think it’s just another Kings Cross overdose. Wendell’s gone: part one of the problem is solved. Part two—you’ve got to get the hot shot back from Tonya. You go to her room at the Oceanside, try to find the baggie and can’t. Tonya and her toddler arrive unexpectedly and you have to pop them both and bury them in the desert.”

  Jax was silent. Whitt and I stared at him. I heard the whoosh and the bubbling sound of the frozen chips being sunk into the deep fryer out in the bar. While we’d talked, Jax had pushed the pin into the surface of the desk all the way to the plastic stopper and now he was turning it slowly, gouging the wood. His dark eyes settled on my face, and when he spoke the words were so calm and measured he might have been telling us the time of day.

  “You’ve got some balls suggesting I would hurt a kid,” Jax said. “Just saying something like that makes me wonder whether you two deserve to ever walk out those front doors again.”

  Chapter 47

  THERE WAS A knock at the door and Jax went to it, brushing roughly past me. I leaned urgently toward Whitt.

  “Get me the room to myself,” I breathed. The men at the door were talking quietly.

  “What?” Whitt frowned at me.

  “I want to look at the computer,” I said. “Get me the room. Now’s your chance. Draw them away from here.”

  “Are you nuts? He’s never going to—”

  “Just do it!” I hissed.

  Whitt rose reluctantly and walked to the door behind me. I set my feet, ready to spring into action as soon as the coast was clear.

  “Wait a minute,” Whitt said loudly. I glanced back and saw him pushing between the men, trying to make his way back down the hall. “I remember that guy now.”

  “What guy?” Jax glanced back at me, torn. He turned to follow Whitt. A roaming cop in the house was a bigger threat than one sitting quietly in his office.

  “There’s a guy out here I arrested once,” Whitt said. “George Bell. He’s supposed to be on parole in Perth. Hey! Bell!”

  The door to the small office swung closed but didn’t click shut. I didn’t take the chance of closing it completely. I went to Jax’s computer and tapped the keyboard to wake it up. On the desktop was the Silver Aces logo. I opened the only program running, a spreadsheet with numbers, no names, huge amounts of money. I went to the email icon, clicked it open. Another win; Jax kept his email open and ready to go. There were no names in the inbox that I recognized. Without really knowing what I was looking for, I danced through the computer madly, my fingers aching with tension as they tapped the keys and mouse. Down the hall I could hear Whitt’s voice.

  “You’re telling me this guy isn’t Bell? You’re the spitting image, mate! Are you his brother or something?”

  I took a deep breath, tried to focus. Fishing randomly through Jax’s personal emails wasn’t helpful. I was burning a good opportunity. I went to the search bar and typed a whole-system search for the name Tonya Woods.

  Nothing. I tried Joseph Woods. Wendell Hamm. Emails arose with Wendell’s name and I scrolled through them, looking at the preview text. Friends emailing to ask about Wendell’s release, his funeral. In desperation I spied a folder full of photographs and clicked it open, scrolled through the latest saved images. Tonya Woods had been missing eleven days. I looked through the dates and found there was only one image saved around the time of her disappearance. A picture taken the day after Tonya took Rebel home from Joe Woods’s house and wasn’t seen again.

  I opened the picture. Jax Gotten was standing under a huge, unnaturally blue sky, a shovel in his hand and a smirk on his face. I selected the image, went to Jax’s email account and emailed it to myself, went back to searching for anything useful. I had just closed the email application and was poised to type something else into the search bar when I realized the voices in the hall had silenced.

  I looked up and saw Jax standing in the doorway, Whitt beside him. They were both watching me.

  Chapter 48

  THEY TRIED TO separate us again, but Whitt and I knew and told each other with just a meaningful glance that we wouldn’t let them do that. If we were going to get out of this alive, we needed to stick together. A guy jammed a gun into Whitt’s ribs and tried to push him up the hall. Instead of going the way the man wanted, Whitt backed into the room with me, stood by my side.

  “What did you see?” Jax asked me. I said nothing. It didn’t matter what I said, and we both knew it. All pleasantries were abandoned. Jax’s offsider was looking at him like an expectant dog, waiting for a command. But we were standing in his office, and that gave Jax pause. He didn’t want his stuff peppered with bullets and blood.

  “You’re not going to do this,” I said. Jax looked from Whitt to me. It was clear Whitt was his bigger concern. He’d defied instructions once by slipping back into the room with me. He was sizable and defiant, and apparently I was not. Underestimated, as I had been all my life.

  “You’re not going to kill two cops on your property in broad daylight,” I said.

  “I’m not?” Jax asked.

  “There are too many unknowns. You don’t know who we told that we were coming out here. Who came with us. There might be ten guys waiting just up the road, planning an ambush if they don’t hear back from us.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Jax’s guy said. “The road’s clear. You think we didn’t check?”

  “You don’t know when we’re expected to call in,” I continued. “It might be an hour from now. Which means reinforcements will be out here before dark looking for us, before you’ve had time to bury us. You don’t know what I’ve seen. If I’m even a threat.”

  “Think about it,” Whitt said. “Letting us go is smarter than acting rashly. You can keep the car and the phones, even. Delay us getting back. Buy some time to clean up whatever secrets Harry might have just been exposed to on your computer.”

  “Shut up, both
of you,” Jax snapped. He looked at his man. Seemed to have a silent conversation with him, their eyes locked. “I need to think. Whatever we do, we can’t do it here. Put them in the lock-up.”

  The guy grabbed Whitt’s arm. He let me follow untouched. A big mistake. Jax walked behind me. We turned right out of the hall and moved through behind the bar area, as I’d hoped we would, past the bartender. There were two baskets of chips sunk into the hot oil of the fryer, bubbling madly. I grabbed one and, in a single fluid motion, lifted it, swept it through the air and smashed it into Jax’s face.

  Chapter 49

  FRYER OIL BURNS at about 370 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 187 degrees Celsius: almost twice the temperature of boiling water. That kind of liquid heat will make your skin blister and bubble, leaving scars that might last a lifetime if the wounds aren’t treated properly. There was about half a kilo of chips in the frying basket, soaked in oil, and as the basket hit Jax’s head it sprayed oil droplets and chips over the bar and the area beyond, a huge arc of searing liquid fire. The closest men were seated at a table nearby. I saw the oil hit them, their whole bodies jolting with shock and pain like they’d been blasted with buckshot. Jax’s scream was high and loud, his face and arms soaked and scalding.

  Before anyone could react I grabbed the second basket and turned it sideways as I swung it and smashed it on the bar. Chips and oil again sprayed out across the room. There was a wail of surprise, shouting. I dove for the floor as Whitt grabbed the gun of the man escorting him, smacked it out of his hands while he shoved the guy into the bar top, knocking and scattering a collection of bourbon bottles lined up there.

  It didn’t take long for the men around us to compose themselves. The first bullets hit the mirror behind the bar, then punched through the splashback behind the sink above me, raining shattered tiles on my back. Whitt knocked his escort down and crawled with me to the end of the bar. We got up and ran toward the rear of the building.

  The room we found ourselves in was small and made of brick, the door thick steel that swung closed slowly under our hands. The locking bar clunked into place. There was a reason for the overkill on the door. We turned and saw that lining the walls all around us were plastic storage tubs stacked to the ceiling, each laden with bread-loaf sized packages wrapped in plastic. In the middle of the room was a table with a scale, more plastic wrapping, scissors, sorting and mixing equipment. If I hadn’t seen anything incriminating on the computer, I was sure getting an eyeful now. There were more drugs in this room than I had ever seen in one place in my entire life.

  “Jesus,” Whitt said, momentarily forgetting about the enraged, scalded bikies pounding on the steel door. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” I went to the barred window, looked out. Beyond the compound were empty fields, waist-high grass. Even if Whitt and I could get through the barred window and run for it, we wouldn’t make it far. “We need to act fast before they send guys around the back.”

  I shoved the window behind the bars but it was nailed shut. There was an air conditioner in the corner of the room. I dropped and peered between the stacks of storage tubs, found what I was looking for. The vent was a foot high and two feet wide. The room needed airflow or the men packaging the drugs would be overcome by airborne particles of the narcotics within an hour of sitting down to work.

  “I don’t want to leave you here,” I told Whitt. “But I’m going to have to.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s OK.”

  Together we set about prying the vent cover off the wall. The sounds of our enemies assembling outside reached us, muffled by the steel door. At first there was furious yelling and screaming, the pounding of fists. Then a gunshot, another scream as the bullet ricocheted off the steel and hit one of the men crowded into the hallway. It was only a matter of time before they thought of sending someone around to the window at the back of the building.

  I bent to the vent and looked in. There was daylight on the other side, maybe ten feet away. My best bet was to squeeze backward into the opening, get to the other end of the vent and kick the door out. Whitt took my hand and helped me to my feet.

  “I’ll cause a distraction,” I said. “Stay put. I’ll draw them away from you. If I can’t make it back I’ll—”

  Whitt dragged me to him and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  Chapter 50

  THERE WAS NO time to think about the kiss. My mind was flooded with images of my grisly death inside the ventilation shaft. As I crawled backward into the hole, my knees and elbows banging awkwardly on the edges of the opening and my boots thudding on the steel, I thought of the bikies bursting through the door and mowing Whitt down in a hail of bullets, bending and doing the same to me as I lay trapped and helpless. I inched my way backward toward the opening, panic unfurling in my chest as the square tunnel lengthened in front of me. Whitt replaced the vent opening and turned away, his voice echoing back to me.

  “Let’s talk about this!” he was yelling. “We can work this out!”

  The exterior grille gave way after three sharp kicks. I slid out into the still burning afternoon, bracing myself for the impact of a bullet. But there was no one there. I bolted into the long grass and sprinted in a wide circle toward the road.

  I thought about the kiss as I ran for the car. Stupidly, uncontrollably, the feel of it came back to me, Whitt’s arm around my back and hand in my hair, his sharp exhalation of relief or excitement or whatever the hell it was. I was running for my life, for our lives, and trying to decide if I’d had a momentary lapse of sanity and imagined the event, or if Whitt had just planted one on me without any kind of warning in the midst of deadly chaos. I was feeling something. Confusion at his actions. Terror at the possibility of reaching the car too late, hearing gunshots on the wind and knowing Whitt kissing me was the last thing he would ever do on the Earth. I reached the car, threw myself into it and screeched off the road and through the gates of the compound.

  Only one thing was going to draw the bikies away from Whitt. I gripped the wheel of Pops’s lovingly restored Datsun, took a deep breath to get me through the pang of regret lying heavy in my chest and floored it toward the building.

  The dogs all headed for the grass, as though they knew my plan. At the last second I wrenched the wheel, cut a sharp arc and sent the back of the Datsun smashing into the line of bikes standing on the concrete. The sound of the car swiping and crunching the bikes as it wheeled by was a deafening, crashing explosion. The back window of the Datsun burst with the impact. Sparks flew. I hit the brake and swerved again, almost spun out on the gravel, the nose of the car ending up pointed at the side of the building. I looked over my shoulder.

  I had reduced a good number of the bikes to scattered piles of debris. Broken backs of mechanical horses, carcasses piled and leaning against each other. The first men began arriving at the door of the building, mouths gaping, hands gripping hair. I didn’t hear their howling, furious cries. I’d spotted Whitt exiting the building through a side door, his gun out, sweeping for danger. I’d drawn the men away from the hall outside the room we’d been captive in long enough for him to slip out and away.

  I barely stopped to let him in. The Datsun bashed and banged over rocks and rotting logs in the field as I gunned the vehicle toward the tree line. Whitt gripped the seat with one hand and the dashboard with the other, his jaw locked as we raced to safety.

  Chapter 51

  TOX BARNES SAT in his Monaro and watched Travis Blenk in his car fifty meters away on the other side of the pretty suburban street. Blenk got out of the vehicle, went to the boot and extracted a small nylon pouch. Tox watched him walk confidently down the driveway of the house he was parked in front of. A few seconds later he appeared briefly, hopping the back fence of the property and dropping into the yard behind.

  Tox waited. As he expected, he soon smelled smoke on the wind. Blenk jumped the fence again and ran to his car. Black smoke began coiling from the house beyond, an
d Tox heard a window blow out. Blenk drove away and Tox followed.

  Blenk didn’t clock Tox’s presence in the car park of the Nicholl Hotel or standing at the almost empty bar. Tox followed him right into the gaming area and stood a meter away as Blenk set his beer down and pulled a Keno card from the stand on the tabletop. The older man only looked up when Tox sat down right in front of him.

  “Aw, shit.” Blenk dropped his Keno card and pencil and sat back resignedly on his stool.

  “You’re not a terribly perceptive person, are you, Blenk?” Tox clicked the hammer back on the gun in his jacket pocket so Blenk would hear it. “I’ve been just about stepping on your heels since that house over in Merrylands.”

  Blenk said nothing, just worried at the scab on his cheek, given to him that morning in the scuffle with Harry.

  “You’re setting insurance fires for a dime now? In broad daylight?”

  “It’s better during the daytime,” Blenk said. “Most people expect fires to happen at night. I don’t know why. The owners are at work. They have an alibi. No one gets hurt.”

  “That was your aim this morning, wasn’t it?” Tox said. “Someone hired you to come after Harriet Blue. You agreed because you thought you could do it without anyone getting hurt.”

  “That was a misunderstanding.” Blenk glanced at the patrons around them, old men at the nearby tables watching horses racing across lime-green screens. “I just needed a car.”

  “Come on, Travis,” Tox sighed.

  “Look.” Blenk put his arms on the table. His pudgy face sagged at the cheeks and below the eyes, exhaustion brought on by years of hard living. “I needed the money, OK? I’m not the guy in the cage anymore. That stuff used to be my bread and butter, but I’m fifty-eight years old now. It’s been a decade since I got behind the wire. The last time they put me with a guy trained in some kind of weird dance fighting.”