Hush Page 22

  But still, Whitt waited.

  At midday he could wait no longer. He crossed the road, spying a mother trying to wrestle both her toddler and its stroller through the front door of the building. He held the door open and then slipped in after her, trying to affect an air of confidence as they took the lift together.

  Whitt got out on the third floor and walked to apartment eleven, then crept the last few meters to apartment twelve. He stood listening, heard nothing, then knelt and looked under the crack of the door.

  A movement. But it could have been anything—light shifting through the windows, a plane passing, heading toward the airport. The flicker of shape was not accompanied by sound. Whitt would have to make himself known. He put his hands out, drew up a foot to stand and got no further.

  A hole was punched in the door two feet above his head, right where his center mass would have been if he’d been standing. Splinters of wood fell all around him. The blast was like hands clapped over his ears, vibrating his eardrums. Whitt scrambled sideways and grabbed his gun from his belt, flattened instinctively on the carpet half a second before another hole blasted through the chipboard wall above his head, only an inch too high this time. He sprang into a standing position, stepped back, and kicked the door in. He fired rapidly into the open space, creating cover for himself, enough for him to slip in the door and duck behind a couch.

  Chapter 96

  THERE WERE A number of strategies available to him. Whitt crouched, sweating, and reviewed them in the ticking silence. There were no fire escapes on the east side of the building. Romtus was trapped. If Whitt simply waited, covering the door, backup would come, alerted by triple-zero calls from residents in the building. But he could also charge forward, cornering the bearded bikie, cutting off any strategizing the man himself was doing. It was possible Romtus was arming himself with something more substantial than whatever had blasted the holes in the apartment’s entry. Whitt had known bikies to carry hand grenades and pipe bombs, a rocket launcher once. He had also known cornered suspects to take their chances with third-story leaps onto concrete as a means of escape, and he needed Romtus conscious enough to tell him where Jax was hiding.

  Whitt was moving toward the end of the couch, where he could hear heavy breathing coming from around the corner near the kitchen. Then he heard shuffling at the other end of the apartment, near where a beautiful walnut piano was reflected in a mirror hanging on the wall.

  “Who else is here?” Whitt called.

  Whitt thought he saw Jax Gotten step out from behind the wall near the piano. He didn’t have long to look before a hole was blasted in the couch behind which he was hiding, tearing the padded arm clean off.

  “Guys, this is not the way to do this,” Whitt ventured. “If there’s still a chance we can save Rebel Woods, your cooperation now would turn everything around. Just tell me where the baby is. I’ll back off and we can get a negotiator in here.”

  “We didn’t do this,” Romtus called. “Tell ’em, Jax. Don’t let them pin it on—”

  “Shut up, Ed!”

  “Look, mate. A rival club is one thing,” Romtus continued. “We’re going to go down for wiping out the Rabbits crew. We can’t get out of that. But if they stick us with the Police Commissioner’s daughter and grandkid, we won’t make it to the intake cell alive. They won’t risk us getting into the prison yard where the other crews will protect us. The cops will put us in a cell and we’ll be carried out in a body bag, Jax.”

  “I said shut up!”

  “Tell ’em,” Romtus said. Whitt listened to his heavy, panicked breathing as it was slowly consumed by the sound of approaching sirens. “Tell ’em about the lawyer.”

  Chapter 97

  TOX HAD BEEN through five of the phones himself. The men around him in the store were reading the others as best they could, but Tox couldn’t count on their ability to discern information important to the Woods case, or indeed their ability to read at all. He picked up a newish Samsung as the nervous teenage store clerk set it down, having just tapped his jailbreaking code into its secure page. He opened the messages folder and felt a bolt of energy sizzle through him as he noted there was only one collection of texts there, under the letter “T.”

  He opened the most recent message from “T” and read it aloud.

  I don’t want to play games. It’s a simple exchange. The money for the tape. You can afford this, Louis, and you know I need it.

  “What does that mean?” Jelly asked.

  But Tox didn’t answer. He was rolling up the sliding door of the phone shop and slipping away into the crowded shopping center.

  Chapter 98

  ABOVE 130 KILOMETERS an hour, traveling by car is all just fast and loud. I took Pops’s long-suffering Datsun to its limits around corners and through intersections, heading for Lane Cove. Whenever corrections staff transport prisoners, they tend to take the most discreet and secure routes, even if it means making a longer trip and subjecting their human cargo to soaring temperatures in the back of the vehicle. I knew the truck heading out of Johnsonborough that morning was going to take the Lane Cove tunnel, north of the facility, then head south through the Harbour Tunnel, staying underground all the way to the airport.

  The Datsun screamed up behind buses and trucks, the steering wheel shaking in my grip. There seemed to be a million hazards on the road before me. Slow-moving semis spewing smoke, old ladies wheeling walking frames over crossings, groups of teenagers carrying schoolbags spilling out onto the asphalt. Terry Lancer’s words on the phone rumbled through my head as I cursed the traffic.

  A truck left for Long Bay ten minutes ago. Three inmates, three guards. The inmates were Dolly Quaddich, Susan Wu, and Anna Regent.

  I had been wrong about Doctor Goldman’s murder from the outset. I ground my teeth with regret as I sped through the traffic. All along I’d assumed that such a brutal and vicious killing must have been related to the kind and sweet woman somehow. Because that was how it went in my job—the victims were so often people who had listened or risked or given too much to bad people and been cut down for their efforts. But it was starting to look like the person who had killed Doctor Goldman hadn’t done so because she was so willing to cross the line into the territory of those irredeemable souls. And she hadn’t been killed because she wouldn’t smuggle drugs into the prison, or because she broke the rules and fell in love with a colleague.

  Doctor Goldman’s death had been one step in a long and complicated plan, and I now had to interrupt that plan.

  Or a woman who should never again walk among the innocents of society would take her first steps to freedom.

  Chapter 99

  “WHAT ABOUT THE lawyer?” Whitt called.

  There was silence in the apartment. In the hallway, Whitt could hear residents leaving, running, talking frantically about the source of the blasts. Jax Gotten didn’t speak. It was Romtus who continued.

  “The lawyer, Mallally. He came to us,” Romtus said. “He’d already tried to hire someone to knock off the girl. Some button man for hire in the city, I don’t know. Either the guy fucked it up or refused to do it. Mallally was paying big money, so we thought we’d play it easy and give her a hot shot. A simple way to do it, you know? No violence. She would take care of it herself.”

  “And that didn’t work?” Whitt asked. He was watching for Jax Gotten in the mirror. Now and then he could see a slice of shoulder as the man paced in the short hall.

  “She didn’t take it. People said she was trying to get clean. We don’t know what she did with it.”

  She hid it, Whitt thought. In her filthy motel room.

  “After a week Mallally asked us to go in,” Romtus said. “Do it right.”

  “You need to shut the fuck up,” Gotten warned.

  “I’m telling him we didn’t do it!” Romtus protested. “Listen, man. We didn’t do it. We got there and saw she had a baby. He didn’t tell us nothin’ about that. We don’t do kids, man. No amount of money
is worth that. You won’t find a crew in Sydney who does kids. That’s a specialist deal.”

  “So what happened?” Whitt asked. He crept to the blasted-up end of the couch to see if he could get a better angle on Gotten, but the man had disappeared.

  “We pulled out,” Romtus said. “The lawyer was saying we didn’t need to do the kid. Just go in there and pop the mother, whatever. But it was just getting too complicated, man. He was leaving shit out. Not being real with us. There was too much communication, too many trails. We don’t work like that.”

  “Did Mallally—” Whitt began. But he spied Gotten at the bedroom door, directly to his left. There must have been a passage through the bathroom into the bedroom, a loop in the apartment that meant Gotten could sneak up beside him.

  Whitt turned and raised his gun, tugged the trigger, as two bullets impacted like punches in his chest.

  Chapter 100

  A DAY TRIP was exciting for Dolly. She usually got at least one during her stints at Johnsonborough. The last time she’d been banged up for participating in a burglary, and she’d scored a trip to see the ear, nose, and throat specialist at the Prince of Wales Hospital. The guards had even bought her a vanilla thickshake from Hungry Jacks on the return journey to prison.

  She sat now in the back of the transport truck, gripping the rail that ran along the inside of the vehicle and watching the highway roll by, cars passing beneath her. She stood to catch a glimpse of Sydney Harbour before the truck dipped into the Harbour Tunnel, blackness lit by orange lamps enveloping the vehicle. She tried to think if there were any Hungry Jacks restaurants between Johnsonborough and the Bay. The trip home, after the guards had dropped off Anna the Spanner and the mystery woman, was a good bet for a treat, if Dolly asked nicely.

  She took her seat on the bench again, her ankle chains rattling on the steel floor, and looked at the great hulking mass of Anna Regent on the bench opposite. The violent inmate was counting silently, her lips forming regular, familiar shapes, and Dolly watched for a while, wondering what she was counting down or up to. There was one female guard seated beside her, dwarfed by the kid-killer’s bulk, and two male guards in the front, chatting behind the steel grille that separated them from the prisoners’ area. The third inmate was a woman Dolly hadn’t seen before, another ultra-violent freak, judging from the paleness of her skin and her exhausted look. She’d probably spent her entire stint at Johnsonborough in solitary, where there was no sun and no sleep, and the fact that she was going to the Bay permanently meant she was crazy to boot.

  Dolly was just thinking about asking the guard what the chances of a quick stopover at Hungry Jacks on the way home might be when Anna stopped counting. She slid her hand into her prison-transport jumpsuit and brought out a bundled-up white undershirt.

  Dolly watched, perplexed, as Anna wound the shirt around her nose and mouth.

  Chapter 101

  I SPOTTED THE Johnsonborough transport truck from nearly a kilometer away, breaking free of a tangle of vehicles and heading down into the Harbour Tunnel, hitting eighty kilometers an hour. I floored it, the Datsun’s temperature gauge soaring and the vehicle smelling of burning oil, praying for the little car to make gains on the truck before Anna’s plan was initiated.

  I knew I was too late when the truck swerved. It was a sudden, shallow move, a jolting that was corrected immediately, but the truck immediately sped up as though the driver was trying to flee the trouble inside his own vehicle. I heard the engine roaring as it climbed quickly to over a hundred kilometers an hour. Then I watched helplessly as the truck swerved again, harder this time, the side of the cabin throwing up a shower of orange sparks as it hit the concrete barrier that ran along the wall of the tunnel.

  The truck overcorrected, turned at a jarring angle, and toppled over. I saw the front of the vehicle tear away from the cabin, bouncing off the side of the tunnel like a pinball and smashing through two other cars, as the back half crashed onto its side and skidded to a halt.

  I wedged the Datsun in as close to the crash as I could, shoving an old man back into his car as he tried to get out to help. Black smoke was thick in the air, but as I neared the scene I felt a familiar stinging in my eyes and throat, a tightening pain, like tiny razor blades being sucked into my nostrils and windpipe. As I ran between the cars, horns blaring all around me, the fire extinguisher system deployed from above, hard rain falling, making it impossible to see.

  I staggered blindly forward, glimpsing the broad, hard shoulders of Anna Regent hunched as she ripped the handcuff keys from the belt of a female guard sprawled on the floor of the van. Anna was free in seconds. She emerged through the smog at the truck’s torn side, spraying mace wildly back into the vehicle as she went.

  Chapter 102

  I COULD CATCH a killer, or I could save my friend.

  The hissing of engine oil hitting the asphalt was like a clock ticking down to the engine of the truck exploding. Flames licked and swirled from the cabin, where a guard emerged, coughing, clawing his way free. I pushed my way into the back of the truck and grabbed the guard in the blackness and choking heat, recognizing the feel of her buckles and belt as I searched. I dragged the unconscious guard out onto the roadside and went back in for Dolly. An inmate I didn’t recognize was kicking at the back door handle, unable to get to the torn piece of the truck’s side, cut off by twisted metal benches. Her face was awash with blood. I stumbled over Dolly, picked her up and tumbled out of the vehicle as the inmate named Susan Wu broke through the dented doors of the truck.

  Dolly was limp and small in my arms. I glanced at the bloodied, unnamed woman as she got her bearings in the crowd of people and vehicles.

  “Don’t,” I warned, holding my friend against my chest. But the woman gave me a defiant half-smile and took off limping, scattering gawkers as she disappeared in the opposite direction to Anna.

  I’d thought Dolly was unconscious but she gripped my shirt with a bloody, chained hand as I set her down a safe distance from the truck. Her shoulder looked dislocated and there was a gash the length of my index finger in her forehead. I lay her flat and let the water from the sprinkler system fall on her face, trying to wash the mace and blood out of her eyes.

  “I’ve got you, cellie,” I said. “You’re all right now.”

  “She maced us,” Dolly exclaimed, her chained hands shaking as she gripped me. “How…how rude! I don’t even know Anna the Spanner!”

  “She knows you. You took a murder rap for her,” I said. “Don’t worry, Doll. I’m going to drag her back here by her hair and make sure she pays for what she did.”

  “I…I was waiting for you to call again,” Dolly said. “I think I remember what I was holding. In the hallway. When I came out of—”

  “Dolly, just—”

  “I had one of Goldie’s worms. Those gummy worms. They’re really good.”

  “I’ve got to go, Doll,” I said.

  “I’ll just wait here.” Dolly put her head back against the road surface. “I’m staying put. I think my leg is broken.”

  People from the cars around us were gathering at my side. A young man in a courier’s outfit knelt over Dolly and started giving her gentle reassurance as he placed a jacket under her head. I knew she was in safe hands.

  I got up and sprinted in the direction Anna had fled.

  Chapter 103

  TOX ARRIVED BACK at the Mallally house just as a red-wine-colored Chrysler Pacifica was pulling out of the left-hand door of the double garage. He saw the whites of Mallally’s eyes as the man glanced toward the approaching Monaro, jerked the wheel and sped away up the hill.

  Tox cursed and used his phone one-handed as he drove. Nigel Spader picked up in one ring.

  “I’ve got the lawyer for the Woods killing,” Tox said. “He’s made me and he’s heading west toward Old South Head Road. I need a chopper and every available patrol car.”

  “Forget it,” Nigel said. “Whittacker has pulled a fucking miracle and tracked down Ja
x Gotten in an apartment in Erskineville. Let the lawyer go. It’s the bikies we want.”

  “Let the lawyer—” Tox shook his head, trying to clear his ears. “I—You—Just trust me, Spader, it’s the lawyer who’s behind all this. I have proof.”

  “And it’s the bikie who’s got the violent background and the nationwide manhunt on his back. We’ve got shots fired and Whitt’s trapped inside the building. We’re about to move on the ground floor entry. I’ll call you back.”

  “But Mallally’s family is—” Tox heard the line disconnect and roared the words anyway “—in the back of the car!”

  Chapter 104

  WHITT WAS DEAD. Two .38 shots entered his chest, a perfect military-style double tap, bullets that smashed through his sternum, his diaphragm, tearing holes in his heart and lungs, crumbling his spine on their way through him to the wall behind. The bullets collected his soul on their way out of his body, tugging it from his being far too soon. By the time he crumpled to the floor he was just the warm shell of the man he had been only seconds earlier, crouched behind a couch, trying to talk down a pair of killers.

  That’s what would have happened, anyway.

  He considered the scenario of his almost-demise as he lay gasping for breath on the carpet. As the men talked above him, on the other side of the couch, Whitt reached up gratefully and slid his hand under his shirt, pulled the still-hot bullets from the surface of his bulletproof vest. He silently gave past Whitt all the thanks and praise he could muster for purchasing the vest when Harry suggested he should.