Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1) (11 page)

“Hey,” said a voice behind them.

Romano watched an old-timer try and lift himself off his nest of blankets. He didn't make it all the way up, but he was lucid.

“You know where they are?” she said.

“Yeah, they're over there,” he said, nodding to a patch of scrub off to the left. “Now, fuck off.”

“Or what?” screamed Denny.

“Leave it,” said Chandler.

Frith stood in place. He rubbed a hand over his Adam’s apple, agitated.

“What?” said Harris.

“They're dead,” said Frith.

“Okay,” said Denny. “Okay…”

“You sure,” said Harris.

Romano pushed through. “I want to see them,” she said.

Frith took them further inland. There, the bush tapered off into another valley not far past the clearing, and at the base they stepped down into a gravel basin. It was dark at the bottom, despite the blazing sun overhead. Further along the basin sat a small grove of thin tall trees. Frith headed towards it. The place felt wrong. A cool breeze came out of the grove, carrying a smell. Harris recognised it. They all did, but no one spoke. There was something in there. There were shapes in the canopy.

“Jesus,” said Denny, mouth gaping. Harris felt the same push and pull of revulsion. The grove was filled with hanging corpses. There were dozens of them, a series of swaying, rotting bodies strung up to branches as far as the eye could see. And the place was lousy with flies. The flies buzzed like swarming bees, rising up in waves from the ground—with its hideous pools of human dripping—and up to the silhouetted tree branches above.

“What, what is this?” said Romano.

“The locals call it Suicide Valley,” said Frith. The old priest looked bad, like he was dying, too. “I don't come down here. No one comes down here.”

“Can anyone see these cunts?” said Denny. He started walking through the bodies. In shock, Harris presumed. “Let’s find them and get the hell out of here.”

They walked through in silence. On one side of the grove, the bodies looked less swollen, color still visible in their clothes. They were newer. Within minutes, they found the two men. Petey and Drags were strung up together, back to back, their necks pinched together through a horrifyingly thin noose of plastic packing tape. Unlike the rest of the bodies, Petey and Drags had been badly beaten, stabbed by the look of it, either post or pre-mortem. One of Petey’s eyes sat open, staring down at them.

“Happy now?” said Chandler.

Harris looked at the bodies, noting they were dressed in the exact clothes from the hotel surveillance footage.

Romano came closer and said, “Should we cut them down?”

Harris took a small camera from his pocket and wound the film. “They don’t deserve it,” he said. He took photos. “Let’s go check their tents. We better take Denny back home before he has a heart attack.” He turned to Frith. “Do you need a moment, Pastor?”

Frith crossed himself and muttered a fast prayer. When he was done, he spat on the ground at the base of the tree.

“Not with these two,” he said.

B
ack up at
the camp circle, they got the old man awake and had him point out the tents belonging to Petey and Drags. Harris told Chandler to go and grab the little girl they’d found earlier, distracting the others for a moment. Romano took Petey’s, talking it out as she rummaged around. Harris stood in the tent belonging to Drags and listened:

Dirty needles.

Porn mags.

Hunting knife. Broken

Half-eaten tin of beans.

Then Chandler brought the little girl over. Through the canvas, he could hear Romano outside again, trying to calm her down.

It’s okay, it’s okay.

This was it, as safe as it was going to get. He took Carl Yates’s gun from his waistband and wrapped it in a dirty pillow case. When it was done, he brought it out for the others to see.

“Look at this. Slipped in under the tent through a hole.”

Romano crouched by the girl. Frith had her now. She thrashed around. Her crying left no impression on Harris, and he realised he was slightly in shock as well. The whole scene felt distant, light years away.

Romano came over. She lifted the pistol up, carefully turning it to have a better look. She slipped it into an evidence bag. She nodded.

“Great. Case closed,” said Denny.

They walked, leaving Drainland and the girl and the rest of it with the priest.

R
omano was determined
to juice the end of the case for all it was worth. She needed to wring out every detail and nuance of it for the senator. The fuller the report, the more it screamed,
Get this diligent cop off Tunnel.

She set herself deadlines:

A crisp report to O’Shea by Monday.

A copy of the same report faxed to the senator on the sly a few hours later.

Romano poured whiskey into her coffee.

She started in:

There were no known motives for the killings. This did not overly concern her. Motive didn’t prove much, but the family would want an explanation. She typed,
Suspected unlawful entry and theft, in keeping with the perpetrator’s history of similar activity. Entry via passkey found or stolen in a previous incident. Subsequent assault considered opportunistic
. It wasn’t neat or pretty, but it was enough.

Romano pushed the physical evidence. She described the gun and the surveillance footage, going into further detail about Petey and Drags. With the files open beside her, Romano listed everything that tied them to the scene. Every scrap of history put Drags in that room almost out of habit. He had a history of borderline random violence, often for money. Petey, on the other hand, was a calculating rapist through and through. Down in the guts of his file she found a listing of his blood work: B- with hepatitis, a perfect match for the scene samples. He’d undoubtedly assaulted the Bachelard kid. In the file, someone had pencilled
Frith / Holy Beach Mission
beside Petey’s blood work. Old Bill’s handwriting. A loose end. She transferred it to her notebook, then took another small pour of the whiskey and pushed on.

The gun recovered from the tent looked like a match. It was the exact calibre. Romano didn’t write it in, but her own conclusion was that these two idiots were high as kites. Their plan was pure junk-brain. They’d obviously drugged Sophie Marr by force and planned to do the same to Bachelard, but he put up a fight. What they gave Marr had ended up killing her. Romano had no real theory why they’d shot Bachelard in the head. Something went wrong, someone got angry, someone felt shame. It all worked. Romano refused to dwell on the scene too long. It didn’t need it. She could see it escalating, two bad men spinning out of control. They both had a history of rash and violent decision-making. Their whole lives were marred by it. It was what they knew. And now they were both dead as well.

Romano typed the rest of the report with clinical efficiency. Petey and Drags laid to rest as lonely suicides, cause unknown. She described their hanging bodies in the scrub, giving the senator and his family what she could.
They appear to have died an uncomfortable death at their own hand in bushland in the south of the island. A search of their belongings revealed the before-mentioned evidence as well as evidence of drug use and destitution. They were both, by every measure, of an unsound mind.
She hit print, and sorted the reports into two neat piles.

It was only as she walked away from the station house, out towards the main road under a wide cloudless sky, that Romano felt the pull of something else. This was the right play, the smart politics, but it was also more of the same: two more suicides for the records. She was starting to sound like the man she’d replaced.

I
t took
a week for word to come back. They were long, quiet days. Chandler and Denny weren’t talking to her. Harris had disappeared again. No word from O’Shea. As summer ramped up, the wet, dank heat filled Romano’s house and she sweated through her bed sheets, swimming through one fever dream of Drainland after another. Junkies loomed and morphed in her nightmares. In one vivid episode, the ship at Drainland’s centre rolled back into the ocean, spilling the children of Taradale, children from another nightmare. The tiny bodies poured out the side into a blood-red ocean.

Taradale.

Drainland.

The pit never ended.

And then the text message came through.

Two words:

Call me
.

It was late and Romano had been drinking. She took her cigarettes and headed for the ocean. There was a pay phone down near the boat club, right by the start of the jetty, a lonely-looking thing under a single white streetlight. Romano closed an eye and punched the number.

It rang.

Matt Dyer answered.

“It’s me,” she said.

“I thought we had a deal.”

He sounded tired. She barely remembered him but at the sound of his voice, it all came back. The lockup in Melbourne. The wiretap of her apartment. Will Holding.
Better the devil you don’t know in this shit you’re in.
Romano imagined Dyer at the other end of this line, sitting in the same suit, at some desk up in a government building overlooking the city.

“You there?” he said.

“You said to call, so I’m calling.”

“I thought we had a deal,” he said a second time.

“Fuck you and fuck your deal. Our deal’s off. If I’d known what this place was like, I’d have tried my luck with Ray Herbert and prison.”

"Then let me remind you that those two options are still on the table.”

Romano dragged on her cigarette and waited. “Uh-huh,” she said after a time.

“You were supposed to keep in touch.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“So I noticed. You know what I’ve got in front of me? I’ll tell you. I’ve got an official police report with a ribbon tied on it, sent to Senator Ron Bachelard, who, despite the death of his son, has absolutely no jurisdiction in this at all. I take it this was a play to win favour.”

“Sorry,” said Romano. “That pertains to an ongoing investigation and I’m not really at liberty to discuss it. So go fuck yourself.” She went to put the phone down, but heard Dyer holler for her to stop.

“—just wait! Just wait a minute! I can get you out of there, but not right now and not because of this. It’s a move in the right direction, but it’s not enough. You need to give me more. I need to know how it works. And…”

“And…”

“You need to get me Harris.”

“Right. Shit, of course. So that’s what all this is about?”

“Have you seen him?”

“Seen him? I’ve been working with him,” she said. “Why?”

“Good. I need you find out how he fits into everything.”

“Nothing fits into anything else over here. Half the island’s a resort, the other half is…I don’t know, it’s like fucking Haiti over here. It’s sickening. It’s dangerous as shit, too. You threatening me with jail time, that’s a walk in the park compared to some of what I’ve seen here. I got myself into all sorts of trouble just trying to work that homicide report you’ve got sitting in your lap—”

“I guess you could call it work. This file’s a bloody joke, Romano. It’s enough to drag any one of you in front of an inquiry, so let’s be frank with one another. You listen—”

“No, you listen. What do you know about this place?”

“Enough to sink the whole bloody thing,” he said.

“Bullshit. Don’t think for a second you’re going to fence me in on this and then tell me I fucked up. I’m clean now and I see you coming, and I’ve run this game enough times myself to know it inside out, remember? You tell me how I get out of here—you lay it out now—or you get nothing. And do it fast. That’s the new deal.”

“You know, Romano, I might just close the book on you. I could do that, if I wanted. This thing with Senator Bachelard. That’s done. There’s no gold star for you in this. I have his ear and you don’t. So have a good time over there. When you’re ready to talk about a transfer, we’ll talk…after you start telling me what I need to know.”

Romano lit another smoke off the ember of the last and puffed out a cloud. “We’ll see,” she said.

“I guess we will.”

Neither of them spoke.

After a time, Romano said, “So, Harris huh?”

“Harris first,” said Dyer.

“What do you want on him?”

“Everything,” he said. "The lot.”

“You should have told me this from the beginning.”

“He would have smelled it on you. He’s smarter than he looks. And a lot more dangerous, too.”

T
he rest
of September passed in an alcoholic blur. Romano knew she was beat. There was no getting off Tunnel anytime soon. She had no leverage. Giving Dyer what he wanted would take years, not months, and he knew it. The more she thought on it—always in the yard, with a smoke and a drink—the more she felt that Dyer hadn’t even started working her. She was a cog in this and he was turning the wheel.

By October that frustration subsided into a type of quiet acceptance and then slid further down into apathy. She fucked off work wherever possible. Denny and Chandler didn’t seem to mind. They seemed relieved, if anything. They enjoyed ribbing her. (One afternoon she found a hand-drawn note reading,
Displaced Romano Unit,
posted above her desk.) She started to see Chandler more often outside the station than in. Denny kept to his family, and the gym, but every so often Chandler appeared at the Point Hallahan pub and after a few instances of politely ignoring each other, they both gave in and drowned their sorrows together. He wasn’t such bad company in the end. Chandler had his own problems; he didn’t care about hers. He didn’t ask questions. He never talked about work. “You didn’t miss much,” was his rote response to almost every question.

She started back with the gear on November 11
^th
.

The anniversary of Taradale.

Six years to the day.

It was somehow worse on Tunnel. Taradale was still there inside her, and she knew it shouldn’t be. Everything on Tunnel was different, from the policing to the people to the long stretch of white beaches, and yet the anniversary of Taradale still found her. It had that much reach. The state of her house and the routines she kept and the sleepless nights in-between all started to feel like a clean transplant from Melbourne. Romano got to thinking there was no escaping it. She’d made a mess of things permanently. That realisation drove her to a whole other level of anxious ferment. Not even a year clean of narcotics, she tumbled back into the same old crutches: weed (lasting only a week), then coke, then the real deal: the opiate pills, the eternal luxury. They had them all on Tunnel. Vics, Oxys, something called Lorcet. On Tunnel, these things were easier and cheaper than she’d ever dreamed possible and, to her horror, Romano felt herself properly relocated for the first time.

She kept it civil at first, spacing out the doses. She knew enough about opes to know that alcohol could be a dangerous side-dish, and she couldn’t lose that. For the most part, drinking was the only thing that got her out of the house. So she coasted along on alternate days of calm highs and dull nights of drunk lows and, curiously enough, by the first week of December she felt like she needed a project. She had a lot of time on her hands, felt up to something challenging. She craved distraction. It was something that had always gone well with pills. She did some of her best policing like this.

As the warm humid nights flitted away, Romano entertained questions about the Gold Point murders. Fuck Dyer and his dog work. She wanted to punch her own way out. With a steady medicated gaze, she stared right back into the Gold Point thing, into the way it unfolded, into the island politics, the collective shrug of the community, and right down there into the belly of Drainland, to that horrific hanging forest where—now free from recoil—she admitted to herself that they’d witnessed something she shouldn’t ignore. Not a second time. They had all seen evidence of mass murder that day, occurring without explanation or consequence. The state she was in, that hanging grove in the gravel basin looked ripe for consideration, for churning thought. In a strange way, it made perfect sense. Throughout her life, Romano had always concocted elaborate ways to self-destruct. And she had always used props, the more horrific the better. So it was, against all her better judgement, that she brought the files back out.