Heinrich remembered small sections of what had happened after they dragged him away from Bear, but there were long dark stretches between them that were filled with blackness and wailing, the frantic whispering of those left behind after the Fall. He remembered lying in the back of a car, squashed between the bodies of two people, someone fumbling with rags at his stomach, listening to them and the two people in the front as their words rose up and down against his ears, like the ocean through a window.
“We can’t go in. We’ll leave him out front.”
“We can’t take him there at all. We need to get him out of the car. He makes it and Caesar hears we took him to Doc’s we’re all dead.”
“He’s not going to make it.”
“Calm down, Sam. He’s gonna bite it. I’m covered in his fucking blood. I’m soaked in it.”
“What if he does make it?”
“He won’t.”
“Christ Jesus. I’m scared. Why are we doing this?”
“Shut up.”
“Sam, his eyes are all rolled up.”
“Why are we doing this?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do. Shut up! All of you shut up.”
The asphalt, hard against the side of his head and his shoulder, wet with rain or blood, he didn’t know. Rolling onto his stomach, clawing to look, the lights of the car in the distance. Heinrich the Dogboy of Darlinghurst scraping his head against the tiny black stones because it was too heavy to lift, looking at the door as the light fell on him. Doc looking at him, breathing, grabbing his bag, running away into the street, down to the corner, toward the pub where other men would see him, say he was there, say he never helped the Dogboy when Caesar came knocking.
Heinrich hugging the ground. Gripping it with his nails against the pain. Bending his knees and trying to hold onto it as the earth thundered and shuddered and turned. All of him wet. His socks, wet. Thinking he would be all right if he just kept hold of the moment that Bear had left him, because if he could somehow know just how long it had been, just how far he had gone, maybe he could get back to that moment and change it, wake up faster, run into the bedroom before the shooters went there, call out, scream, fight, do something more than hide behind a chair, anything more, one thing to save them all, to save the man who had saved him. So he lay on the earth and kept his eyes open wide and breathed and tried to remember.
It’s an hour or so since Bear died.
I’m three miles from the spot.
Heinrich held the bullet in his stomach and watched the moon creep across the sky. As the light grew, he dragged himself up until he was on his knees, began to crawl.
It’s five hours or so since Bear died.
I’m three miles and a few yards from the spot.
He pushed the door to Doc’s house open, blundered about, knocked things over, grabbed things he wasn’t sure would help him, left blood dark brown and smeared like shit all over the jars and tables and cloths and walls. He packed it all in a bag, holding his guts in with one arm, dragging the lead weight of the supplies with the other, out into the street again, through the laneways, down the hill, to the warehouses lining the canal.
It’s ten hours or so since Bear died.
I’m five, six, seven miles from the spot.
He rested in the dark and cold and grit of a warehouse floor, the coiled metal shavings and flat hard carcasses of dead rats and wood chips and screws that made a bed for him. No idea what was around him, five or six feet from the door that led to the seven miles that led to the spot where Bear had died, that spot he would return to, he promised to return to, to fix things, fix it all.
He slept and lost count of the hours, cried at that, cried and howled at that. He hadn’t cried, though, when he began to strip off his trousers to see to the hole there, because Bear wouldn’t have liked a thing like that, tears shed over stupid things like blood and torn flesh. He twisted the cloth, bit it, fished around inside himself. When he pulled the bullet free and threaded the needle and pulled himself together and washed it all down it was like nothing had ever happened, and he felt good, because that was how Bear would have liked it. He pulled the bullet from his shoulder, but left the one in his guts, because it was lost in all the softness and slippery folds, a little tick buried deep inside him, refusing to let go.
He slept more. Lost more hours.
It’s ten days since Bear died.
I’m seven, six, five, four miles from the spot.
Heinrich approached the house from the back alley, stood leaning against the wooden fence and avoiding the shape of it with his eyes. The tape that was around it fluttered in the wind at the edge of his vision, crisscrossed against the doors and windows. He focused instead on the ropes and chains lying in piles in the unmown grass outside the greenhouse until he found himself wondering what would happen to the dogs now that Uncle Mick was dead, because he would be dead, everyone who had been in that front room where the shooting began would be dead. He half-expected to see Sunday here, and then realized that Sunday was a dark hole in his mind that he couldn’t bear to step into right now, to wonder how she got away before the shooting began, how she’d known, if she’d known at all.
Heinrich shook himself, let the solid walls of the greenhouse support him as he shuffled through the grass to the door, his heart breaking as he looked through the glass at the pots overturned and cracked and scattered, the dirt turned to mud, the tiny plants shriveled and curling brown in the craters of footprints, tiny lives snuffed in their hundreds, a massacre on the edge of a massacre.
He dragged himself into the back room. The bigger pots here were knocked from their shelves too, trees overhanging, leaves curled and rolled and folded. The one he was looking for was still in its place among three or four others, too heavy, it seemed, to be easily shifted in the chaos. In it, the gnarled fingers of many red flowers, spiked kangaroo paws gripping at nothing in death.
Anigozanthos rufus.
Ani . . . Ani . . . Ru . . .
Oh, boy.
Boy.
Heinrich reached over, grabbed the kangaroo paw by its sticky trunk, and pulled the pot toward him with all his strength. It tumbled, rolled, crashed. He lifted the board from beneath it with shaking fingers and then stopped, breathing, trying to maintain his balance. Heinrich reached into the cavity dug into the dirt beneath the panel and pulled up the bag.
It was heavy. Bear had been close to what he needed to leave for good.
I
t took all day and some of the night to find Michelle Wisdon. I got home from the gym around midday, slapped a couple of packets of Oxy on the kitchen table, opened a bottle of red, and started at the top of the list. It was lonely work. The cat made a circle of himself on the end of the couch, blinking at me resentfully across the hours. At three or four I got up, fried a couple of sausages and microwaved some instant mash, plugged my phone in when it started getting low, put on some Chris Isaak, thought about Eden and how she knew everything all the time.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is that Michelle?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Michelle, do you know a guy named Jackie Rye?”
“Who?”
“Nevermind. Thanks.”
When Clarinda: Customer Service came over at about seven that evening I was barely able to move my shoulders. She straddled my back as I lay on the bed with the papers still calling, calling, calling—kneading my spine and neck and arms, making me groan. Her kisses behind my ears, folding the hard flesh forward, finding the warmth, exploring me. I went back to the kitchen table as she dressed, watched her walking around, bending over, making herself coffee, snapping off a row from a Cadbury’s Snack block. I kissed her as she left, on the mouth, like I knew her. When she left she didn’t look back. I felt used.
Just after the clock struck nine I hit pay dirt.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is that Michelle?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Michelle, do you know a guy named Jackie Rye?”
Silence, a long one. And then a click.
Gotcha.
It was about eleven by the time I arrived at the excruciatingly lit supermarket in Paddington. I stood in the fruit and veg section for a few minutes molesting the avocados before I recognized her at the checkout, beeping items through for an expressionless Asian couple, the approach of midnight wearing on her shoulders, making them curve forward around her like the wings of an injured bird. The curly hair hadn’t shown in her membership photo at Galaxy Fitness. It was only by chance that I happened to be looking at the screen as we trawled through the 174 Michelles in her age range and seen a single raven ringlet poking from behind her ear.
She had it out in all its glory now but seemed to be regretting it. She kept pushing it back as she gave change, looked for barcodes, turned things around in her strong hands. I left the avocados alone and walked to the cigarette counter. She came around to meet me with barely an upward glance. When she hit the counter and plastered on her pitiful checkout-chick smile I put my badge on the counter and left my hands there so she would feel less threatened. I conjured up a pathetic smile of my own.
“Hi, Michelle,” I said. “I’m Detective Frank Bennett.”
She touched her lips first and then seemed to swallow something hard in her throat.
“Oh, no.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Christ.” She slid a hand up her forehead and into her curly crown, gripped hard.
“I’m really very sorry.”
“I knew someone was coming and I still went out.” She looked around. Her eyes were wet, ready for tears. “I knew it.”
“I was going to speak to the manager first but I wanted to see what you wanted to do.” I followed her eyes to the manager, a squat Greek guy standing texting in the tampon aisle. “What do you want to do? Do you want to come with me now?”
“I finish at midnight.” She looked at the register in front of her.
“Okay.”
“Don’t tell the manager.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll meet you out there. At the bus station.”
She pointed. I looked. Put my badge back in my pocket.
“Don’t run off on me, Michelle. I’m not here to make trouble.”
“I won’t.”
I walked out the glass doors to the bus shelter. Sat there with my hands in my coat.
Michelle came out in a pink hoodie covered in monkey cartoons that didn’t suit her but was probably warm. She sat on the other end of the bus bench, waiting for me to talk while she traced the engravings in the painted wood with her fingernail.
“Want to go someplace?”
“I’d rather not get in a car with you.”
“I don’t . . . I know it probably means nothing to you,” I leaned toward her over the bench, “but you can trust me. I’m not interested in anything in the world right now beyond nailing Jackie Rye and his shit-faced sidekick for what they did to you and probably dozens of other girls.”
“Words are cheap.”
“They are, but they’re all I’ve got right now. Well, not all I’ve got. I’ve got a work charge card. We could get something to eat. You hungry?”
“Why are you alone?” She looked at my eyes with her full hurt and I felt my throat constrict. “Don’t you guys work in pairs?”
“We do,” I said. “My partner’s in the field right now. She’s a tough nut, like you. But I still worry about her. I’d like to bring her home from where she is as soon as I can. She’s relying on me to get this thing moving.”
Michelle considered my words, her hands in her pockets and her back hunched under a great invisible weight. In time she got up and walked to my car. Must have seen me looking at it. I got in and shifted all the takeout packets out of her side before I unlocked the door.
I knocked on Eden’s door at three a.m. There was light under it, and when she pulled it open she was dressed and her hair was perfect—apart from the horrendous dye job. I opened my mouth to ask why she was up at this ungodly hour and then closed it, slammed those thoughts away into drawers, and bolted the drawers closed.
“What an inappropriate time to visit.” She gave me the once-over.
“I try to be inappropriate as often as possible.”
“Is it pressing?”
“It’s more throbbing than pressing.”
She pushed open the door. I scooted in before it could close on me. There was soft piano music playing and that bottle of Armagh was on the coffee table, a quarter full, an empty glass beside it. I helped myself. She sunk onto the couch beside me and hung her arm over the back again the way women do when they’re flirting in bars. But Eden wasn’t flirting with me. I wasn’t sure she’d ever flirted with anyone. Women like Eden don’t need to flirt. She could make filling out her tax return look erotic.
“I’ve just been to see Michelle Wisdon, the girl from the video.”
“Don’t you ever sleep anymore?” she squinted.
“Eden, the correct response was ‘Holy shit, Frank, you found her already? How did you do that? You’re a wonder. Look at your biceps.’ ”
Eden looked at the ceiling.
“Yes, I sleep. But not right now. I found Michelle Wisdon and she’s the girl from the video and I turned up at her workplace and got it out of her. All of it.”
“And how much was there?”
“Not much.”
“Uh huh.”
“She tried to play like it was a fakey at first.” I stretched my legs out. Put them on the coffee table. Eden bit her tongue. “I brought her round. We got a couple of bags of Maccas and some Jimmy cans and went up to the top of Watsons Bay. Looked at the city. You can get a woman to tell you anything over Maccas and a beautiful view.”
“
Your
kind of woman.”
“She won’t testify, but she was willing to tell me the video was nonconsensual. She thinks Jackie got her with Xylazine. It’s meant for cattle. Helps them endure castration. Says she was at one of those Saturday night bonfires they have there and everyone was laughing at how she couldn’t put her words in a row. And she didn’t know why, because she’d only had two drinks. Literally, two. Then Jackie and Nick grabbed her bag and took her off, told everyone they’d put her to bed. Everyone seemed to know.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Everyone seemed to know and did nothing.”
“It’s pretty brutal out there.” Eden took the wine back, put it to her lips. Didn’t drink.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“I don’t like you being in the middle of something even you admit is brutal.”
“You don’t like women being in precarious situations in general. It’s one of your many Old World masculine hang-ups.”
“Maybe.”
“You can’t protect me, Frank,” she said.
“I guess we agreed you don’t really need it, do you?”
“No.”
“Do you feel sort of . . .” I struggled. Got half the words out and then lost the rest, squirmed under her eyes. “Do you feel like you know Jackie and Nick? Do you feel like they . . . Is there like a kind of . . . an instinct . . . ?”
“Don’t wander into dangerous waters, Frank.”
“Sorry.” I looked away.
“We agreed we weren’t going to talk like this.”
“We’re not. We’re not going to. I just. Sometimes I want to know. And sometimes I don’t want to know. Most of the time, I don’t want to know. But sometimes. I came here tonight and you’re up.” The words were dropping off my lips. “You’re dressed and your hair is done and if I went downstairs and felt the hood of your car . . .”
“Don’t.”
“It’d be warm. Wouldn’t it?”
“Frank.”
“Sorry.” I drew a deep breath, let it fill me, get to my brain, blow out all the stupidity. What was I doing? What was this going to do other than push Eden away from me, push her back into that shadowy place where she hid like a snake in a cave and considered what exactly it was that made her decide to keep me alive—a liability, a fool who couldn’t stop words coming out of his mouth. And yet she kept me alive. Day after day she greeted me like a friend, as much as a woman like that can have friends in her life.
“So we find the bodies,” she said. “We find Xylazine in their systems, we nail Jackie and Nick. Boom.”
“Sounds pretty simple.”
“It’s never simple.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What was the Manning boy doing with this video? Did he get it from Jackie?”
“No. He got it from his sister. Seems my girl Michelle managed to break into Jackie’s van and get it on DVD, texted it to the Manning girl as a kind of warning. I think the aim was to circulate it among the girls. Get them out of there. But it never went any further. Keely Manning passed it on to her brother and then promptly went missing.”
“Could be that Jackie was trying to stop the leak.”
“Could be.”
“Huh.” Eden sipped her wine. “So the girls got into the boys’ greatest hits collection and started jibber-jabbering among themselves, and the boys decided to clean up their mess.”
“Maybe.”
“So why isn’t Jackie after Michelle?”
“He might be.”
“Maybe we could give him some help.”
“No.”
“She wouldn’t have to know,” Eden said.
“I’d know.”
“Did the girl say there are other tapes?” Eden asked.
“A couple of others, but she didn’t see who they were.”
“And these tapes are in his caravan?”
“Probably not now that he’s got the little bunny rabbit living with him.”
“Did she say they were for personal use? Or is he selling them?”
“She didn’t know, but Juno wasn’t able to find any copies of the tape on the Internet. Would have been a dumb move, now that the girls are missing. I’d say they’re just for personal use. Trophies of conquests.”
“Could be that the other tapes are in Nick’s van. Could be that the two of them started out with rape scenarios and then stepped it up with Erin, Ashley, and Keely. We might have tapes of what happened sitting there on the lot.”
“You better get snooping then, Super Sleuth.”
Eden sighed, cracked her neck.
“When you going back?” I asked.
“Today.” She looked at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. “Soon.”
“Ahh, Juno should be pleased at the series return of the Adventures of Eden Archer.”
“Give me a break. You staying here?”
“No,” I rubbed my eyes. “I need to get back to the cat.”
“Stay here.” She smirked, got up and grabbed a cashmere throw from the back of the couch. Tossed it at me as she walked away. “Jesus. The fucking cat, of all things.”