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  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.’

  ‘Capoeira?’ Tox asked.

  ‘I don’t fucking know.’ Blenk took his ear off with a pop sound and started toying with it. The old men looked over in undisguised horror. ‘It was one of those new-age things. He was swaying and bobbing all over the place. I thought it was pretty amusing until the kid snapped both my femurs.’

  Tox winced.

  ‘Yeah,’ Blenk said.

  ‘So why the desperation for money now?’ Tox asked. ‘You’ve put some away over the years, haven’t you? Those cage fights don’t pay peanuts.’

  ‘That’s for me,’ the older man said. ‘But my sister needs the help. They’re hard Christians. She lost her husband last year. Got run over by his own car while he was changing the oil. Popped his head like a tomato right in front of their eldest son. There’s six kids altogether. So I’m trying to put together a nest egg that’ll help my sister keep her flock together.’

  ‘She’ll take your dirty money?’

  ‘I’ve always told her I’m a whizz at the stock market.’

  ‘Right.’ Tox looked at Blenk’s smashed and scarred face, his fighter’s knuckles, swollen and crooked. ‘So you’ve been taking odd jobs from all comers, or do you work for someone?’

  ‘Look, I don’t talk to cops.’

  ‘You’ve been sitting here talking to me for five minutes,’ Tox said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve got somewhere to be now.’

  ‘You do,’ Tox nodded. ‘It’s in the men’s room over there. Your head in a urinal. I won’t pull any weird dance fighting on you, but you will come away with broken bones.’

  ‘Man,’ Blenk sighed. ‘I just can’t catch a break right now. I’m trying to be the good guy here, you know?’

  ‘Are you working for someone?’ Tox asked again.

  ‘It’s just me. I take a blind drop.’ Blenk fitted his ear back on. ‘All my jobs are like that these days. Someone mails a letter to the bar here, no return address. I put the word out a while back that that’s how I want to get work. That way anyone can hire me and I don’t have to get into a crew.’

  ‘What happens if you don’t want to take a job?’ Tox asked. ‘What if it’s not your style?’

  ‘If I don’t want it, I just don’t do it. They get the picture after a while that I’m not interested. If I’m willing, I usually get it done within a couple of days and they mail the fee in. Same deal, no return address.’

  ‘So someone hired you to grab Harry?’ Tox said. ‘How’s that possible? She’s only been out of prison two days.’

  ‘Well, this time I got a call. Guy called the bar and they called me. It’s not how I work but he said it was urgent. It was nothing personal, just like I told her,’ Blenk said. ‘It was good money. Not my kind of money.’

  ‘You mean the fee was disproportionately generous?’

  ‘It was about ten times what I’d usually charge for something like that.’

  Tox took his hand off the gun in his pocket and folded his arms. He thought for a minute, staring at the broken capillaries in Blenk’s nose.

  ‘How’d he know where to find Harry so fast?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘What was the job, exactly?’

  Blenk shrugged. ‘Snatch her up, take her to a field out near Eastern Creek Raceway, give her a talking to.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Whatever she’s working on right now. I was just supposed to tell her to take a break. Go to Queensland. Get a suntan. I don’t know. Just make sure she leaves off whatever the hell she’s doing.’

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t hurt girls?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to hurt her.’ Blenk held his hands open wide. ‘I was supposed to threaten her. I don’t hurt girls. I told you. Believe me, I’ve had good offers. Recent ones.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A month ago, maybe more, I got a blind drop. Another really big fee. Only this time they were asking me to pick up a girl and her baby and I wouldn’t do it.’

  Tox felt his breath quicken. He put his hands on the table.

  ‘You still have the note?’

  ‘No, I threw it away,’ Blenk said. ‘I told you, I’m not like that. Had that Harriet person cooperated this morning neither of us would have got hurt.’ He rubbed his head. ‘There was going to be a return on it, too. Second job, if I did the first one right. Get rid of Harriet, then get rid of her partner. Edward Whitman or something like that.’

  ‘Shit,’ Tox said to himself. ‘It’s not about Goldman. It’s about Tonya and the kid.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Tox lifted his head. ‘The girl and the baby. That would be the Oceanside Motel in Punchbowl, right? Tonya Woods and her daughter Rebel.’

  ‘That sounds right.’

  ‘What did the guy want done with them?’

  ‘It was bad stuff.’ Blenk shook his head. ‘I was supposed to take them both out to a river somewhere and drown them.’

  Chapter 52

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN over Officer Hugh Ridgen’s Rydalmere home, slowly bathing the large, empty rooms in pink and purple light before the yellow streetlamps came on. I sat in his recliner in the corner of the living room and waited, drinking one of his beers. The house was barren, a place where he slept between long shifts at the prison, a nowhere zone where he passed the hours before he could go back to work and enjoy the powerful weight of cuffs and a baton on his belt.

  With the blinds drawn, I was safe to watch Ridgen’s television quietly. I saw a familiar face surrounded by journalists on the steps of the courthouse in Liverpool Street. Louis Mallally was waving the press away, talking as he walked.

  ‘There was no bribe,’ Mallally was saying. ‘Our position remains unchanged. The story about the bribe is a fabrication, and we’ll prove it.’

  Mallally seemed to be defending the small, suited man hiding from the journalists in his shadow. The small guy had apparently been accused of bribing a round-faced, rosy-cheeked man who appeared on the screen – something about airport security. Mallally and his defendant scooted away through the crowd as one of his lackeys distracted the press, his arms out like a traffic cop.

  I couldn’t focus on what was happening on the screen. I hadn’t talked to Whitt about the kiss yet. I’d told myself it was a mindless, desperate move by a man staring down the barrel of his own violent death at the hands of a mob of scalded, raging psychopaths. He hadn’t mentioned it either, and when I’d dropped him at his apartment we didn’t say goodbye. It was easy to compartmentalise what had happened inside my fractured mind, to set the kiss aside for another time. I was being driven by hunger alone: an itching, burning need to know what happened to my friend Doctor Goldman and a survivalist desire to see Tonya Woods and her daughter found safe and well. If I couldn’t find Tonya and Rebel,
my bail would be rescinded and I would go back to prison. And if I couldn’t prove Dolly innocent, a murderer would remain stalking the halls of Johnsonborough while a good woman was punished for their crime. I didn’t have the time or the strength to feel anything about what Whitt had done.

  Ridgen’s heavy, clumsy trudge up the porch stairs was unmistakeable. I stood and slipped into the small space between the front door and the coat rack beside it. As he closed the door behind himself, I raised the butt of my pistol.

  ‘Nighty-night, dickhead,’ I said.

  Chapter 53

  THE BLOW TO the back of the skull didn’t draw blood. It didn’t even render Ridgen unconscious. I needed him to be awake. He was like a man sleepwalking as I led him to the dining-room chair I’d pushed against the wall of his big, empty kitchen. I duct-taped him into place and he watched, stunned. Within fifteen minutes he was coming to his senses, stirring to the sound of the objects I was clunking onto the kitchen table.

  ‘What the fuck is this? What – what are you doing here?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ I said. ‘I haven’t escaped. If I was a fugitive on the run from the law this hellhole is the last place I’d spend my precious time.’

  ‘What do you – I’m gonna …’ He was working hard, trying to form threats and deadly promises, but we both already knew that he was never going to report this. A man like Ridgen wasn’t going to have his fellow guards telling stories next week about the police cutting him from a kitchen chair, drenched in sweat and shaking, a woman’s name on his lips.

  ‘I should probably be surprised, but I’m not,’ I said, continuing to lie the weapons out on the table. ‘You have basically no furniture here. No knick-knacks. No pictures on the wall. Everything is functional. So when I went looking for things to play with, I had to scratch around. The one thing I come up with? Knives. Lots of knives. Of course a predator and a creep like you has a huge knife collection.’

  Ridgen and I looked at the knives on the kitchen table. I’d found the weapons lovingly displayed on the wall of the garage, where a normal man might have hung tools. The garage itself had been converted into a half-hearted man cave, with another recliner, a big-screen TV, a bar fridge and the knife rack. Ridgen lifted his eyes from the knives to me and tested the duct tape binding his wrists to the arms of the chair.

  He drew a huge breath, ready to bark and bluff.

  ‘I’d keep it down if I were you,’ I said, selecting a small, thin knife from the collection. ‘I need my focus. I’m not trained. I’m just an amateur.’

  ‘Not trained?’ he exhaled. ‘Not trained in what?’

  I walked to the other side of the kitchen, lifted the knife by the blade and threw it with all my strength at Ridgen’s head.

  Chapter 54

  THE KNIFE SHUNTED into the drywall a foot to the right of Ridgen’s left ear. He bucked in his chair, his eyes squeezed shut.

  ‘Jesus Christ! What the fuck are you doing?’ He cowered, looking at the handle of the dagger sticking out of the wall. ‘You’re insane. You’re going to get put away for the rest of your life for this!’

  I selected another small knife.

  ‘I have some questions about the murder of Doctor Bernadette Goldman.’

  Ridgen stared at me. He was wide awake now, sweat blossoming in the fabric at the front of his uniform shirt.

  ‘Just go now. Go and I won’t tell anyone about this,’ he blurted.

  ‘You’re not going to tell anyone about this anyway. You’re a man of little pride. You’re not going to sacrifice it for me.’

  ‘My girlfriend’s going to be here in fifteen minutes. She … her whole family. They’re coming over for dinner.’

  ‘You don’t want me laughing my arse off, Ridgen. It will affect my aim.’

  I threw the knife. It buried itself in the wall fifteen centimetres above Ridgen’s head, making a chunk sound that shook his whole body.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘A few minutes before Goldman was killed, there was a fight in E Block,’ I said. ‘Was the fight connected to the killing? Did someone start it to draw resources away from C Block?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Ridgen snarled.

  ‘Well, you better get knowing fast.’ I picked up another knife.

  ‘It wasn’t … No, it can’t have been. The two fighters had been beefing for months. Claudia Pittman and Nadia Cowell. It was a gang thing, and the fight was a long time coming. There was no set-up over Doctor Goldman. Dolly Quaddich was the killer. She went into the doctor’s surgery and snapped, and stabbed her. It was just coincidence that –’

  ‘Dolly didn’t kill the doctor,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ I weighed the knife in my hand. It was heavy, an ornate dagger. ‘Whoever killed her did it with a knife as thick as this one. It wasn’t something that could easily be obtained or hidden. That means a guard was involved. A guard let the killer take it out of the prison kitchen, or brought it into the prison themselves. The fact that it wasn’t found in the shakedown after the killing means it was either returned to the kitchen – during lockdown – or taken back out of the prison.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, you stupid bitch!’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘Goldman would have been a juicy target for a guard for a number of reasons. She had easy access to drugs. While guards bringing drugs through the front doors of the prison have to spin the roulette wheel with random searches, Goldman could have just ordered them in bulk and sold them on to inmates. A guard like you, someone known for supplying drugs to inmates, might have wanted a piece of that action. Goldman said no.’

  ‘Please.’ Ridgen huffed a huge sigh. ‘Listen, I just –’

  I threw the knife. It embedded itself into the drywall close enough to Ridgen’s head to pin some of his hair to the plaster.

  ‘Oh fuck! Fuck!’

  ‘Yeah, fuck.’ I laughed. ‘That was close. I’m getting better at this.’

  ‘Look. I pushed Goldman for drugs,’ Ridgen confessed, gripping the arms of the chair until his knuckles were white. ‘I did it, OK? I nudged her a little. Made her upset once or twice. But I didn’t kill her and I didn’t put a hit out on her with an inmate.’

  ‘Did any other guards hassle Goldman for drugs?’

  ‘Of course they did!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Everyone. Everyone had a shot at it at some point. If Goldman had been on board the place would have been raining cash. But without her we had to go to extreme measures. Guys have been bringing coke in up their butts.’

  ‘So who killed her?’

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!’

  I picked up a knife.

  ‘It might not have anything to do with that! I heard the doctor was fucking some crazy bitch in ad seg.’

  ‘Anna Regent?’

  ‘Yeah, the kid-killer.’ Ridgen sniffed. ‘Goldman was always taking a special interest in the worst of the worst. She was one of those serial-killer groupies, you know? She and Anna had lots of meetings in Goldman’s office, and people saw Goldman on the phone in her office all the time, laughing, chatting. Not work calls. Maybe Regent would call her through the prison’s internal line.’

  I remembered the document on Goldman’s home computer.

  Sexual Boundaries: Guidelines for doctors.

  ‘Goldman got Regent a cushy spot at Long Bay,’ Ridgen said.

  ‘I know. And that doesn’t fit with your theory. If they were in a relationship, why would Goldman get Anna a placement at another prison? They’d never see each other. No more of those perks she enjoys so much in solitary: wandering around out of her cell, using the phone. Even if it meant Anna would get out and be free again one day and she and Goldman could be together, we’re still talking decades.’

  ‘I don’t know, for God’s sake!’ Ridgen snapped.

  I stood silently, trying to put the pieces together. I threw another knife
at Ridgen for good measure. It shunted into the wall an inch from his sweat-slick jugular. I was too deep in thought as I left the house to pay much attention to the furious shouts following me from the kitchen.

  Chapter 55

  THERE WAS A man standing in the dark at the back entrance to Pops’s house. I recognised the big frame and stooped shoulders. Cigarette smoke on the wind. Joe Woods was pacing back and forth across the narrow street, watching as I parked Pops’s battered car a few metres away. He stopped as I approached, examining the car’s condition in the street light.

  ‘This damage has to do with the bikie thing,’ he concluded.

  ‘As they say in the classics, I can explain,’ I said, holding my hands up.

  ‘I’m very interested to hear the explanation.’ Woods exhaled smoke at me. ‘You’ve been on this case forty-eight hours and all you’ve managed to dredge up is a bikie boss claiming grievous bodily harm. Jax Gotten says you and Whittacker raided his property without cause and attacked his crew with hot oil. He’s got second-degree burns on his face, neck and arms.’

  Whitt had messaged me to say that Nigel Spader and his officers had picked up Gotten at Cowra Hospital. Nigel’s team had raided Gotten’s property, finding only twenty-one dogs at home. The uninjured members of the Silver Aces crew and the drugs we’d seen had disappeared into thin air.

  ‘Did he tell you I smashed up about four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of their bikes?’ I asked.

  ‘He did,’ Woods said. ‘Between that and the burns, you’ve almost certainly got a hit out on you now. Whittacker too.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I said. ‘He’s only making noise about the assault because he wants you to go away. He won’t follow through. He won’t want you to look very closely at that property, because you’ll find it has been the headquarters of probably the nation’s biggest drug operation. The drugs are gone, of course, but a sniffer dog would keel over a metre inside the door.’