I
wasn’t really expecting to find anything the next night when I set out for Utulla to catch Hades’ watcher. I spent the night before and all that day near Rye’s Farm, cooped up in a van parked behind a liquor store in Camden with a tall, gangly ginger bloke named Juno, one of those 100 percent gingers so speckled and spotty and orange all over he was fascinating to look at. Hipster glasses with thick black frames and an unkempt flame-orange beard. Juno fit into the van the way a spider might fit into a straw, all joints and thin limbs tucked in toward his center, fingers clicking and tapping, sensing vibrations in the string and things near to his grasp.
It was clear to me within minutes that Juno was new to our station and had never done much for the force other than tech work. For one thing, he was constantly going on about how “hot” Eden was, even in her feral down-and-out camouflage. He talked about all the gear littered around the van, the cameras and monitors and radios and laptops, like they were his impressive and successful friends. I got sick of his jabbering midway through the night and wandered into the liquor store just for something to do. The Jack Daniel’s pre-mixers I bought were from the back of the fridge and painfully, gloriously cold in the summer night. All we were doing was watching Eden sleep anyway, in her unnaturally still and silent and beautiful way. I got out of there before Juno started sketching her in charcoal.
Juno was useful for the techy little iPad-looking thing he lent me, a flat-panel computer no bigger than my palm that had an infrared display. I planned to use it to catch the watcher. He gave me instructions in about ten thousand words more than were necessary, so I was pretty confident I’d be all right.
It was weird driving the company car on a job without Eden. I wondered if all this restlessness might have been a strange kind of longing now that Eden was nowhere that she could hassle me and intrude in my life. Eden being away meant that I was thinking about her, trying to fill the empty spot in the car with some vision of her and what she’d do and say and think as we drove along. This was awful, because it meant I was thinking about Eden all on my own, without prompting. I didn’t want to be the kind of cop who thought about his female partner when she wasn’t around, whether it was romantic or not. It’s a sure sign of weakness—and weakness leads to addiction.
At the entrance to the wide dirt road that led to the Utulla dump I veered off and hid the car on the edge of an embankment. I stripped down to my black tank top and cargo pants and made sure my boots were laced tight. I tucked some small binoculars, a 9mm, the tracking device, my mobile phone, and a pair of handcuffs into the various pockets of my oversized pants.
Without much of a plan I walked toward the dump. Eden was the one who organized our operations. She would think about things for long quiet hours, sleep on it if she had to, draw maps and calculate approaches and write up contingencies. I like to wing it most of the time. Sometimes just turning up somewhere and hanging around, chatting to local store owners or ordering a coffee and reading the paper in the general vicinity of wrongdoing can throw up some useful clues.
Hades had seen his stalker once, in a car on the road to the dump, but the other times had simply “felt” that someone was hanging around. I wanted to know how easy it was to see Hades in his shack from the road. I wanted to know what it took to sit out here for lonely hours watching, just how dedicated this guy would have to be, what he hoped to see.
I had a sweat going before I got far. I stuck to the mud tracks in the road to muffle the sound of my boots and glanced up at the stars, which were blazing like pinholes of lightning between the dense canopies of the trees that lined the road. There was no moon to speak of and now and then animals rustled and scampered in the blackness around me. Things seem farther in the dark. I reached the end of the road, where Hades had seen the car, in about twenty minutes. My hair was slick with sweat and the tank top clung to my stomach. I crouched by the gates and took out my binoculars, had a look at Hades’ shack. I could see the kitchen, but there was no Hades. A slice of curtain or something, bright green. I watched. In time Hades walked into the kitchen, sat where I assumed he always sat at the table facing the door, and read his newspaper. It was the briefest flash of stern face, gray hair, collar. Then he was gone.
I let the binoculars drop. What was the point of all this? The experience of seeing Hades there had been exhilarating, I had to admit that. It was a cheap thrill, though. He didn’t know I was there, and that gave me a little zing in a very simple, ironic way. After the thrill wore off, he was just a scary old crim no different to plenty of scary old crims I’d come across in my career.
Whoever was after Hades wasn’t feeding his curiosity to endure the sweat, the patience, the physical discomfort required to stalk the old man out here all alone in the bush. It was fury, that fuel. Real fury burns low and strong, sometimes for years, but the explosion potential is always there. I knew this from years of looking down at the mangled bodies of unfaithful lovers, abusive fathers, overly successful sisters, those who had ignored a quiet fury for too long, until it got out of control, turned, and came back to bite them.
I set myself another hour to wander in the bush. In time I came across an old shack and walked up onto the porch to have a look. Inside were two bare desks and empty bookshelves, a couple of couches covered with sheets. I wondered if this had been some kind of teenagers’ retreat in Eden and Eric’s old days here. I tried the door. It was locked. Above the porch steps hung a hand-carved fairy windchime, its slender body intricately chiseled from beechwood and strung with a collection of mismatched bells that tinkled when I reached up and touched it. I turned the fairy in my hands and noticed a single word, “Eden,” carved into one of her dragonfly wings.
I sat on the porch and pulled out the device Juno had given me, set it on my knee, and waited for it to power up. The thing worked like a GPS, gave me a colorful layout of the land constructed by Google Maps and a blue ball telling me where I was. The highway out to the Utulla dump loaded, along with the dirt track and the dump grounds illustrated in a pleasant stone gray. The map adjusted as it found my position and the blue ball began to radiate waves on the screen. I was alone in the shapeless green wonderland of the bush around the dump.
But in the middle of the Utulla dump a red dot was glowing. I tapped the screen and a bubble emerged with some data and a phone number. The device was triangulating Hades’ phone. Right. Now, all I had to do was see who else was around.
To the north, just off the highway, was another red dot. It was stationary. I tapped the dot and found the number for the mobile phone my device was detecting. I hit the arrow alongside the number and a web page opened. John’s Tire Lot. Of course. I’d seen it on my way in. I wandered and played with the device. Two more businesses up on the road were blinking their presence. I shifted the map around and looked out to the east. Nothing.
I walked along the barbed-wire fence separating the bushland from the dump and fiddled with the device’s settings. West, nothing. South, nothing. It was kind of fun, watching my progress on the screen, an insignificant blue bubble rolling along the earth, surrounded by a few other idle blobs and, as I widened the map, dozens and then hundreds of others. I found my car on the map, another red bubble, giving off a signal. My mobile. I stopped walking and chewed my lip. Then I slid my hand into my pocket. My mobile was there.
I walked faster and, as I did, whoever was giving off the red bubble at my car seemed to sense this new awareness and began to move. I shoved the tracking device into my pocket and ran. I was back at my car within minutes. There was no sign of the watcher.
I pulled out the device and looked for him. The red dot was moving toward the east, winding a diagonal path through the bush to the highway. My car had spooked him. I tapped the bubble and a window emerged, but the number was replaced by a series of dots. I pocketed the device and took off.
The embankment was steep. The thin fingers of bracken clawed at my bare arms. I stopped, held my breath, listened. I couldn’t tell if the sounds I heard were footsteps or my own breath. Ahead through the trees glowed the orange lights of the highway. Something passed before them. I stood still. The voices of the insects fell and there was a strange warm silence.
I was aware of the watcher’s presence behind me and to my right, half a second before he swung at my head. I ducked and his fist glanced off my ear. In those first frenzied seconds I remember thinking how rude that was, how cowardly to try and clock me without even saying hello. I spun and ducked and threw myself at his legs. He was all taut limbs and rock-hard fingers and pointy elbows in the dark.
We wrestled, teeth glancing off skin, and bones jolting with more accidental luck than real strategy. It was pure chance that my gun slid out of my back pocket and the light from the highway hit it just right so that he saw it and I didn’t. The man in the dark lifted the gun above his shoulder and clubbed me in the face with it. I sprawled in the wet earth.
“One guard dog ain’t enough, uh, bro?” The man laughed. He dropped the gun beside my head and stepped over me.
It was light by the time I got off my ass. I don’t know how long I sat on the embankment in the dark with my face in one hand and my gun in the other, blood running between my fingers and down my wrist, trying to come to full consciousness. Whenever I tried to get up I swayed, and I wasn’t game to lie down in case I passed out. So I just sat there breathing and thinking about what I should do next.
I went back to the car and took out a notepad. I wrote down everything I could remember about the watcher in the dark. Tall. Wiry. All bones. What felt like short, hard hair in a shaven Afro. A sort of Aboriginal-sounding inflection to the end of his phrase.
One guard dog ain’t enough, uh, bro?
Then I put the notepad away and drove in to work.
I woke up at around five in the afternoon, the grossly clean bedroom full of pink light, my phone vibrating under my shoulder.
I took the call with my notepad on my knee and my pen moving slow, crookedly. I was getting old. Once upon a time I could get in a good punch-up and carry on for days like a kid with scraped knees, never slowing, the pain becoming part of every moment until suddenly it was gone, as though it had never been.
Gina at the station gave me three names living in the Sydney metro area that matched the partial print from my gun. From them, I picked the guy who was identified as Indigenous Australian on his criminal record, short wiry hair, bony, previous assault charge. Gina was good for squeezing things through the lab that should have been placed in the queue, things that didn’t need to be written down in the logbook or explained to bosses. Some women, you just have to give them a look. They’re the kind of women who had good fathers. I sat for a minute and thought about sleep, staring at the name on the paper, the man who’d hit me.
The Watcher. Adam White.
I’m coming for you, Adam,
I thought.
E
adie slept little. She’d lived in places like Jackie’s farm before, when she was growing up at the dump and for a couple of months during her specialist training—city-limit places where the air was thinner and colder than it should have been and carried sounds for miles. A cough would reach her as she stood at the window looking out at the yellow lights, even though her caravan was away from the clusters of others. It was up against a fence, nestled in overgrown weeds and grass that for all manner of creatures probably acted as ladders up to the badly sealed window in the filthy kitchenette. The cough could have come from anywhere. There was laughter out there, too, and the lowing of cows in the first light hours.
Inside the caravan things crawled and crept and shuffled about. Eadie lay in the damp sheets as the sun was rising, watching some elongated grasshopper-like insect wander across the chipboard ceiling, feelers out exploring, touching mold spots and lumps of dried toilet paper hurled there. Cigarette-stain clouds spread out before it like burned wastelands. She wondered if it could fly. She didn’t want to crush it but would if it pushed its luck.
She heard the girl, Skylar, coming at a sprint across the barren dirt. Sounded like she jumped on the foldout stairs. Eadie was tying up her hair.
“Breakfast is on and you’re gonna miss it.”
“Yeah yeah,” Eadie called.
The girl came bumbling in, child on Christmas morning. Dust-covered pink Uggies and a denim miniskirt. Eadie hadn’t realized how oddly shaped she was, short and nimble but somehow layered with pale milk baby fat on her thighs and above her breasts. Cellulite under the skirt. Bad diet begun long ago. Something to grope in the dark. The peachy face and rabbit eyes were beaming with curiosity beneath layers of unnecessary makeup. Eadie imagined Jackie spooning the girl in his gray-stained bed.
“Heard from the ex?”
She was straight to the drama, this one.
“No.”
“Rude.”
“It’s a bit of a rude business.” Eadie pulled on a denim jacket and stood looking at her chewed nails. The girl was going through her things, taking the sunglasses from the counter and trying them on like a bored kid in Daddy’s big office. Eadie took the glasses.
“Do you want this?” Eadie held up the deodorant can with the camera embedded in its base. “Gives me a rash.”
The girl took the canister, smelled its tip.
“Mmm, yum. Thanks.” She bounced on the bed. “So what happened with your ex? Tell me everything. Was he sleeping around? My ex was. Some short slut from his work. Fat, too. I mean I’m short but I ain’t fat. This bitch was like your reflection in a car door. Fucken wide.”
“Cushion for the pushin’,” Eadie said.
“Yeah, man. I mean, honey, you gonna trade in?
Upgrade,
for fuck’s sake.”
Eadie smiled. A girl child talking about exes like a seasoned housewife from the North Shore. She couldn’t know how ridiculous she sounded.
“Men are idiots.”
“So?” The girl pulled her leg up, exposing floral undies in the hollow of the skirt, settling in for a deep’n’meaningful. Truth or dare.
“Oh, you know,” Eadie said. “Let’s go get this breakfast.”
“Oh.”
“It’s too early for this. Really. Trust me. It’s a pathetic story, hardly the sort of intrigue you’re imagining.”
“The what?”
“Nevermind.”
“All right then.” Skylar jumped up and pulled down her skirt, seemed to want to do a little dance but, because of the limited space, settled for an enthusiastic stamp of her boots like a soldier marking time. “Sorry, I talk too much. I’m just excited, you know? It’s been ages since I’ve had a mate out here.”
“You do talk too much,” Eadie said. She held open the door. “But that’s all right. You can do the talking for the both of us. You can be the company rep.”
“The company rep.” Skylar laughed too hard, mouth open, teeth like a sheep, some missing in the back. “Yeah, that’s me.”
The meal sheds were little more than a pair of flimsy aluminum carports touching unevenly in the middle. They were concreted into the barren earth, surrounded by dry white dog feces. The dogs rushed out to welcome them as they headed across the plain, a three-legged kelpie, some half-dingoes, and a collection of scruffy rat-dogs.
Several heads turned as she approached. The groups were oddly segregated by sex. Some women in ragged Kmart sweaters and Ugg boots were smoking around a wooden picnic table, a two-liter Coke bottle swaying between hands. In the group of men Eadie recognized the androgynous twins from the night before, one staring at her, heavy browed, the other picking its nose. Blue smoke leaked from the men’s table. Skylar grabbed a paper plate and passed one to Eadie. She loaded it with a pair of black chalk-like sausages and reached for the bread.
Plenty of eyes on her. None of them Jackie’s. She wondered where he was. A plastic kettle stood at the end of the table, a box of coffee sachets, tea bags, sugar packets lumped together in a Tupperware container. All of them McDonald’s brand. Someone had done a smash and grab at the local.
Eadie turned to ask Skylar if she wanted a coffee and found a rock-hard male chest where the girl’s face had been. Eadie looked up into a leathered face, jewel eyes peeking from beneath a scarecrow fringe of sun-scorched blond. Trucker cap, bright yellow. Eadie took it all in and went back to her coffee.
“You’re new,” he said.
“I am.”
“You’re hot.” The bigger man hooked a finger around her ponytail, let the blond hair slither through. “Wanna date?”
“I’m here as a laborer.”
“You’re funny.”
“No, really,” Eadie said.
“What’s your name?”
“Does it matter?”
“Does to me.”
“Eadie.”
“Eadie. Cute. Greedy Eadie, stealing all my sugar packets. Keeping those fine round titties for the horses and the pigs. What a fucking tease.”
Eadie didn’t smile. She slapped the sugar packets in her hand to loosen the old grains. The man reached around her to take the Tupperware container. They were wedged between two foldout tables, nowhere to go. Eadie ignored the cock against her hip. The casual brush of her ponytail as he righted himself.
“Pass the milk?”
Eadie slid the jug over. His hand grabbed at it, her fingers, entrapped them in his own. She shook him off. Laughter from behind her at the men’s table.
“You didn’t ask my name. How rude.”
Eadie let out a sigh, staring at the kettle, waiting for it to reboil. She worried a nail with her teeth.
“It’s Nick.”
“Good on you.”
“Let’s think of some things that rhyme with Nick.”
“Let’s not.” Eadie poured. Watched the water fall on the old coffee without encouraging the black grounds to mix at all, water on dirt. She thought of her new espresso machine at home, the five grand she paid for it, the manual it’d come with and the chapters explaining how to get the perfect crema, how to make sure the press didn’t scorch the powder. The smell of it. Eadie scraped at the coffee with her plastic spoon.
“Let’s just have coffee and get to work.”
“What a bitch of a thing to say.” Nick licked his lips. “I’m only playing games. I give you a compliment and you just brush it off. Who are you?”
“I’m someone who doesn’t like games.” Eadie smiled, turned around, found herself almost pressed against him. The heat of his body enveloped her. Too much Lynx, not enough soap. He smiled back and reached for the kettle. His hard groin pressed against hers. She bore it without stiffening, without letting her eyes leave his own. She thought of thrusting her hand up, knocking the cup into his face. It was almost as if he was tempting her to. His eyes through the steam. Challenging.
“Well, you come tell me when you want to learn how to play, Greedy Eadie.”
Approaching the table where Skylar had settled was very much like the first day of high school. At least she’d had Eric to walk her onto the barren grounds of Utulla High and see that she got to the right classroom, but when recess came around she’d been alone in the jungle for the first time, and the loss was aching. She remembered the groups of children sitting hunchbacked against the wind, making mounds of wrappers and apple cores and orange skins in the center of circles like witches swapping runes, laughing, throwing things, trading and comparing cards.
Eden was aware of being a misfit from the first moment, as she stood beside the door to the classroom, trying to find a slot. She’d watched for a while and then gone back inside where her teacher was sorting piles of assignments on her desk. An adult. Someone like Hades who would look down at her, guide her with a steady hand on her shoulder.
She had crept to the back of the room and sat there a good ten minutes, watching the sorting and the sighing before Mrs. Daniels noticed her and ushered her back outside into the turmoil.
“It’s important to fit in, Eden,” the teacher had said. “Here, let me find you a buddy.”
Eadie supposed that Skylar was her buddy now, even though the girl hardly seemed at ease with the others at the table, sitting at arm’s length on the end of the bench, eating a sausage with her fingers. Eadie toyed with the camera pendant. Frank was there, too, she supposed, though she couldn’t hear him, the way he broke into any kind of tension with a joke, taking the self-deprecation in exchange for the comfort of others. Eadie sat next to Skylar in the cigarette smoke and sipped her coffee. One of the girls was illustrating an argument, standing with one leg up on the bench on the other side, waving her arms.
“I said you can have him. You fucking take him, ya mongrel.”
“Mongrel bitch,” someone confirmed.
“You know what she’s like. Ain’t the first time. Ain’t be the last. Fucking lunch-cutter.”
“What pacifically did she say’d gone on?”
“Aw, just that she’d been there watching a fucking DVD. Thinks I came down in the last rain. I did so much for that bitch. I gave her everything.”
“So what then? Did ya have a go?”
“Did I have a go.”
Laughter. The plastic bottle was passed around, but not to Eadie. She watched it, smelling the bourbon. She perked up a little, listened to the retelling of the story about the fight. This, at least, was something she understood. Violence. Brutality. Skylar offered her a cigarette and she took it, lit it in cupped palms. It was years since she’d smoked. The wind was carrying desert heat across the farm, already baking the morning. Soon Uggs would be replaced by flip-flops, sun for shade. A fly, in her hair, waved away, back again on her temple. The dogs at their feet, snapping, growling at each other.
Eadie sat on the edge of the bench with Skylar for a good ten minutes before the conversation ebbed. Eyes on her. She flicked the ash from her cigarette onto the ground, watched it fall.
“Is this Nick’s new root?”
“No,” Skylar said. “Eadie’s working with Pea.”
“Jesus, you’ve got your priorities screwed up, girl,” someone laughed. “I’d rather be bent over Nick than a pile of horse shit.”
“What’s her name?”
“Eadie,” Skylar answered.
“I weren’t talking to you.”
“Eadie,” Eadie said, glancing up.
“Girl, you’ll change ya mind, or Nick’ll change it for ya. Ashley’s been gone what, two weeks now? Man’s got to be horny as fuck. Two weeks is ten years in a man’s world.”
“Horny as, mate,” someone agreed.
Ashley, the missing girl. Eadie tried to keep her expressions neutral, disinterested.
“Yeah, maybe,” Eadie said. She tapped her cigarette out on the edge of the table. A woman approached, short and round all over, shoulders sloping to fat-coated arms and hands, calves that would never fit boots. She was wearing ex-army coveralls, the epaulets and name bar torn off with only the crest remaining. Her black curls were pinned behind her ears and under glasses with taped frames. A face like a bronze moon, downturned, creased with hard years.
Everyone looked. Fell into silence.
“This her?” The woman flicked her dimpled chin at Eadie.
“Sure is.” Skylar leaped up, standing upright like a soldier presenting a prisoner to a commandant. Eadie swung off the bench and rose to her full height, a good forty-five centimeters above the stocky Pea.
“Well, let’s go.” She gave Eadie a look up and down and spat in the dirt. “Ain’t got all fucking morning.”