Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1) (15 page)

R
omano ran
the archives to be sure. She found Pastor Frith’s track record and cross-searched it with abuse stories. It took an hour but the dots started to appear. The last person to pull it all together was a journalist named Maslow from the Courier Mail. He was in Brisbane. He’d published a piece on childhood abuse and the church back in ’83. Over the course of a few articles and mentions, Frith’s name sat in amongst a list of dirty priests and bad men.

Maslow was in the book.

Romano called.

He remembered Frith.

“I’ll be damned. I haven’t thought about that in years. Spent half my career trying to forget it, in fact. Wrote it all up when I was a young bloke, full of piss and vinegar. Didn’t know a thing like that could…” He trailed off, waited a beat. “And you say Joe Frith is on Tunnel now? With another parish? I’ll be damned.”

“No parish. They moved him on in the eighties, by the looks—after the attention, I think.”

“That makes sense. They swept a bunch of the old buggers under the rug when we stirred things up. Shut them all out, for a time. Though you might well find he’d done his dash by then anyhow. Those blokes have a tendency to move around every couple of years. They have to.”

“He runs a Mission over here with the island’s drug afflicted. He wouldn’t still be getting money from the church, would he?”

“I wouldn’t think so. I can probably find out. Can I call you back? I might know someone I can ask. If they are sending money over, you might be able to use that. I’ve heard the island’s a bit of a lost cause, but there’s leverage there if the church is still involved.”

Romano gave him her number.

S
he went out to score
. Over time, she’d worked her way through a few of the island’s drug dealers, before discovering her local pizza guy. He was always holding. He ran a tight ship. You ordered pizza: it came with sides. At home, Romano unwrapped her gear and sorted her pills from her powder, ate a slice of Hawaiian and knocked back a line.

It was time to work. She got out of her uniform. She checked her gun. On the way out, she grabbed a short bottle of vodka in case she lost her nerve.

T
he gate
to the Holy Beach Mission was still locked. Romano had never been much good with locks. She’d never learned to pick one. Her old sergeant wasn’t keen on it.
Why fuss with something and risk getting shot when two of you can kick the damn thing in?
She stood there in the darkness and thought about that man, trying to remember anything else that felt important. A warm wash of memory started to run through her.

She thought of Will Holding.

Romano shook it off. It was madness. A wave of the drugs coming on, that was all.

She decided against driving in, and stashed the cruiser. As she walked down into the scrub towards the Mission, Romano began to twitch. The bush was alive with animal call. It was dark. She heard the gentle breaking of twigs and dried foliage. She kept her gun unholstered, and stayed low to the ground.

She kept walking.

It got worse.

She had been here before. Felt this exact sensation before. As the scrub grew thicker, disorientation kicked in. The drugs and stress and the island pulsed through her. She was alert but suddenly aware of a million possible problems. After a time, Romano couldn’t even be sure she was walking in the right direction. The scene around her started to dissolve. The black thicket of dry forest started to mash with the past.
What was in that gear? And
hadn’t they’d walked through bushland like this down in Taradale?
Wasn’t the gravel underfoot the same?
She kept moving.

A
squad
of police hiked through bushland to the site. About halfway down the valley, they stopped. The men in front had spotted the first light of the settlement below. Sergeant Connor gathered them round and handed over to Romano. She squatted down and laid the maps out under torchlight for a final once-over. She didn’t know most of these guys. They were local Taradale cops. The regional unit had called them in. They were yahoos mostly, and they didn’t trust her. They took their orders from Connor, watched for his signals, even though it was her show.

"This is the lab,” she said. “We think these structures here are caravans, probably used to package materials up for storage. I’m not expecting a lot of action out of here but still, be careful coming round. Remember they all have windows facing out. The layout of the whole thing speaks to expecting visitors.”

"Take no chances,” said Connor.

It didn’t matter. The whole thing went to shit anyhow.

The first shots rang out as soon as they crept from the valley’s cover. First, each of the caravans on the perimeter blew, huge eruptions lighting the sky like fireworks. They all heard the screams. A forensics crew would come through later and report that each van was detonated by a hand grenade. And each one contained a body, chained to the furniture, fixed to their job packaging up drugs and Christ knew what else before being eviscerated. One woman survived, blinded but alive. She told them that each van had a guard and was packed with explosives. The grenades were just the fuse.

Romano ran into the clearing popping off shots as soon as the vans went up. They lost two police in that first push. Connor took a bullet in the arm, but a few of them managed to circle round—as planned—and flush out the buildings. Romano got inside and ran through the main hall, seeing the whole thing down the sights of her gun.

They were animals. The whole set-up was something out of a horror film. Romano had never seen anything like it. Everyone chained to their workstation. A sweatshop of guns, drugs, pornography. They had it all. There was a wing on one of the halls mocked up like an office, another like a child’s bedroom. And as Romano ran through, she couldn’t even begin to tally up the bodies, piles of bodies. They were insane. The men behind this shot everyone on the way out. The shock and the sound of gunfire was the only thing that kept Romano moving.

Running point, Romano was the first to find the hatch. They had a tunnel down into the ground. Without thinking, without a moment’s hesitation, she dropped down into the basement and ran the tunnel. The others caught some fire from behind and were forced back, leaving her sprinting through that space alone. That was how it always was from that point onward. That was what happened: she ran into it, like a void. There was no undoing Taradale at that point. At the earth tunnel’s end, Romano learned everything about herself, every crooked, corrupted part of herself.

T
he ground
under her soles started to loosen. Then gravel gave way to sand and Romano stopped running. Her vision spun. She’d pushed it too far, had taken too much. She collapsed on the ground and heaved in deep, painful breaths.

Shaking her head, she wiped her face and looked up at the sky, trying to orientate herself. In the distance, up through the canopy, she could see a beam of light arcing across the sky.
The lighthouse.
She got up and willed herself towards it. A few minutes later, the Mission came into view: a dark set of buildings, on a dark plane, underneath the blazing tower sweeping the sky.

Romano crouched down in the scrub and watched. Nothing moved in the Mission. She circled round the compound in the cover, until she reached the ridge that abutted Drainland. Romano took a moment to look down into the camp. It was dotted with campfires and light, full of corpse-like silhouettes. Smoke poured out of the wrecked ship in the camp’s centre. It was a communal bonfire of some sort. The wind blew up the sound of arguing and laughter, and the smell of waste and charcoal. It had a carnivalesque hellishness to it, and the Mission sat almost on top of it.

She checked her watch: 1:05 AM. She kept moving. The rear door of Frith’s house was locked and the windows were closed as well. An air conditioner rattled above. Romano tried another door before taking it as a sign that searching the house was too bold. She did not really have a plan. Half of her wanted confrontation, to wake the priest and see what he had to say for himself. The other half, a more conscious part, knew that this was dangerous, more dangerous than it felt. The photo. The camp. The history tucked away down here. People would kill for it. And yet Romano wanted a better look. She wanted the unguided tour.

As she skirted the hospice buildings, she noticed dim light shining inside. A man coughed. Footsteps on timber. The children’s dormitories were completely silent. The curtains were swept open on one of the rooms, and Romano spied a half-dozen boys out cold in bunk beds, the bared windows wide open to let the breeze in. She tried those doors. They were locked. The one building that looked more accessible was the chapel. The timber by the lock looked broken and scarred. It was a door that had been busted open a few times, and it had some give. She waited a moment. The wind came up and stirred the trees. She kicked it in.

Pauline’s description of the place married up.
The rest of the year we store food in there.
The chapel was half cleared of its pews. In their place sat pallets of tinned produce and dry food. Up further, the altar was set for service. Romano poked around. She found a cart containing what looked like wine, and took a sniff, then wandered back further, round into the small chamber room at the rear of the hall.
Frith would have an office back here
. She turned on her flashlight and stepped into a short corridor off the main room. At the end, she came to a closed hallway with two doors.

The first was unlocked.

The room was almost empty. In one corner was an unmade bed: a mattress on an old steel frame. Beside it, a sink and toilet. The floor was tiled in the adjoining corner, a sinkhole in the centre. It took Romano a moment to recognise the room as a holding cell. She turned and checked the door, and sure enough, there was a food hatch at the bottom. She found a light switch and walked the room. She sat on the bed, tapped out a small bump of powder and knocked it back.

The second door was locked. She crouched and checked the lock. It was tight but the coke made her impatient. She worked fast and messy. The door came open with four fast kicks.

Inside was an office. A wall of books lined floor-to-ceiling shelves. There was an old desk, a rug underneath. An office chair. A computer. He had charts on the walls. A plan of the Mission. A calendar. A weird painting of Jesus on one wall, Mary on the other. The place was a mess. Newspapers piled up on the floor. Paperwork spilling out of multiple trays. The books looked unordered, half of them shoved into shelves pages-out.

Romano tossed the place. There was a wall safe behind Jesus, but it was locked. She found a paper envelope tucked in the back of Mary’s frame. Romano opened it: a couple of thousand in cash, high denominations. She pocketed it.

Romano yanked the drawers out of the desk and emptied them onto the floor. There was nothing of interest: packets of aspirin, old keys, stationary, a Dictaphone. Someone had taped a yellow Post-it note to the inside of one drawer. The note had a series of words and numbers:

Sammy98

Peter99

Sonya97

Billy00

Computer passwords. Romano could never remember hers, either. She fired up the PC and waited. Tapped in the last word and it loaded.

She searched for spreadsheets and documents. She copied everything she could find onto a directory on Frith’s desktop. He had a spindle of writable discs on the desk and she set one up to burn. It was going to take eight minutes.

While she waited, she checked his email. She searched for
Bronze
. She searched for banking transactions. She filtered by attachments. She scanned and sorted. It took two minutes. There was a string of receipts from something called
bronze72
with banking details attached. Romano printed off the last five receipts and paced as the printer’s shrill clicks and whirrs echoed down the hallway outside. When it was done, she shut down the computer, grabbed the money and evidence and ran for it.

A side door took her out of the chapel and down between the buildings, to an open field between the Mission and the scrub. She was a few yards out into the field when a voice screamed:

“Don’t move!”

A spotlight came on behind her.

Romano turned her head slowly.

Pauline and another woman Romano didn’t recognise. They both stood by the chapel steps. The other woman held a pump-action shotgun.

“Pauline, it’s me, Laura. Constable Romano. We met back in December. I’m going to turn round now.”

She turned.

“Don’t take another step, so help me,” said the woman. “We’ll come over to you.”

“What have you got with you there?” said Pauline. She stepped closer, dressed in the same tracksuit as last time, but still in her slippers. The other woman wore a dressing gown. They both walked slowly towards her.

“Nothing,” said Romano. She opened her jacket up. She felt woozy. As they came within reach, she let herself stagger back. The barrel of the shotgun was close.

“I’m a little loaded, if I’m honest,” said Romano, looking at Pauline.

“Get down on your knees,” said the other woman. She was shaking.

Romano swept the barrel of shotgun away with her right arm, twisting it around, taking the woman’s fingers with it. The woman shrieked and Romano kicked her in the stomach, then drew her own gun. Pauline swivelled to run, but Romano reached fast and pulled her back by hair. She pressed the gun into Pauline’s cheek.

The other woman wheezed on the ground. She still had the shotgun.

“Don’t point that thing at me,” screamed Romano.

“There’s no need for this nonsense.” A man’s voice.

“Fuck me,” said Romano, under her breath, searching around. Pauline whimpered and struggled. “Steady now,” said Romano, wheeling Pauline around. Pauline’s body shook in Romano’s arms, on the edge of some sort of convulsion. “Steady on, I said.” Romano had to pull Pauline’s hair tight just to keep the gun from going off.

Pastor Frith walked out into the light. He had a rifle with him, and he had the thing braced properly. He was steady. The pastor had definitely fired a gun before. Amateur hour was over.

“Let her go,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Romano. “You’re an old man. Put that fucking gun down before you accidentally blow your wife’s brains out.”

He didn’t buy it. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Pauline, come away from her.”

“Don’t move, Pauline, or I’m definitely going to shoot you. You too, bitch,” she added, for the woman on the ground. “I’ll tell you what. I’m just visiting from Drainland. Maybe you’ve heard the rumours. I’ve had a bit of a bad Christmas. I needed money. Figured you might have some.”

“Is that right?” said Frith.

Romano pointed the gun at him but kept hold of Pauline. “Pauline, you just go on and reach into my jacket pocket for me,” she said.

Pauline did, then threw the money in the dirt.

“See. That’s that,” said Romano.

“What do you want?” Frith asked.

“Don’t do it, Pastor. I’m probably a much better shot than you.”

“You don’t look so steady.”

“I may not be,” she said, and started to slowly walk backward, keeping her grip on Pauline, placing her between them.

“What I am going to do is take Pauline here for a walk. Once I’m back in the scrub, I’ll let her go and you can all go about your business.”

“Is that right?” said Frith.

“Please, Joe,” said Pauline.

“Won’t take two minutes. Stop moving,” said Romano. “You follow me all the way over there, we’re going to get ourselves into trouble. Okay? Okay Pauline, just stay with me, nice and easy, one step at a time, back you come.”

The priest kept coming.

“I said stop fucking moving!” said Romano.

The priest bristled. He clenched the gun tighter.

“You need to calm down,” said Romano. “Or someone is going to get hurt.”

“You come into
my
church,” said Frith. “And point a gun at me and
my
wife, you take
my
money, walk around and—”

“Let’s not lose our heads, here,” said Romano.

“Do you want to deal with all this? Do the police? Answer me,” said Frith. “You think you want to pay for it? You shut this place down and you’ll all be dead inside of a week. The camp will overrun the whole island. They’ll find you and they’ll—”

Romano fired her gun into the air.

“Shut up,” she said.

Frith let off a shot. It missed. Deliberately wide and at the ground.

Pauline stopped walking. She was done.

“Fine. You just stand there, Pauline. You just stay nice and still for me, now.”

Romano backed up, keeping the woman as cover. It took seconds that felt like minutes. When she was halfway back to the scrub, the other woman on the ground stood up and went to Pauline. Frith lowered his rifle. He said something to his wife and went back to the house.

All the lights came on.

Romano ran into the bush.