Blood had soaked into the sheet around her head, there were bloody prints on the cotton. Hades unwound the duct tape holding the sheet and rolled her out onto the floor. Tape around her wrists and face, sticking in her hair. She howled as he ripped it off her mouth, long and loud and full of fear.
“There’s another one,” he said to himself, hearing his voice tremble as it never had before while his fingers fumbled with the tape at her eyes. “He said there was another one.”
Hades left the girl on the floor and ran out of the house, his fingers slick with the blood that had coated her face. He smeared it on the keys as he tugged them from the ignition of the beaten-up red Ford, on the trunk as he shoved them into the lock. The little girl tottered drunkenly out of the house behind him, her long dark hair lit gold by the light of the kitchen. She watched soundlessly as he opened the trunk and dragged the other bundle of sheets from the darkness, her eyes lifeless orbs in a mask of red.
“Oh please,” Hades heard himself murmuring. “Come on. Please.”
The head of this body was soaked through with blackness. He pulled the damp sheets away and cradled the broken skull in his fingers. A face carved from onyx. Gaping mouth and sunken eyes. The man pushed his fingers into the slimy neck of the child. There was nothing. Warmth and stillness.
“Come on, boy. Come on.”
Hades didn’t beg. Not to men, anyway. He’d begged plenty of racehorses in his time. Begged greyhounds zipping across static screens. He was begging a boy now. Begging him to live. He bent his stubbled mouth to the boy’s wet lips. The girl watched, her hands gripping the front of her dress. Hades pinched the boy’s tiny nose and chin in his huge fingers, watched the little chest inflate and deflate like a wet balloon. As he pumped the small birdcage chest with his palms he looked up at the girl, watched her shaking in the light from the kitchen without really seeing her. The seconds lagged on. Peacocks made from twisted pieces of an old car stood and watched the happenings before the house. A bronze wolf howled in silence. In the kitchen, the stranger’s blood made a thick dark pool on the linoleum.
The body in his fingers bucked and coughed. Hades shook the boy roughly and thumped his back.
“That’s it,” he growled. “Come back now. Come on back.”
The boy vomited, gurgled, fell limp again. Hades knelt over him in the gravel and dust, his heart raging as it had not done in some time. He reached down and wiped the strands of matted black hair from the massive wound in the side of the boy’s head. Clotted flesh and frayed skin, the beginnings of bone underneath. Hades looked up at the sky and hated the stranger. Hated him over and over as the boy slept.
The girl followed Hades as he carried the boy into the kitchen. The child was so much smaller in the light, white skin between ink black and ruby splashes and streaks. He lay the ruined doll out on the table. Hades looked down at the boy, inspecting him like a butcher with a slab of meat, noticing the bulbous joints where cartilage strained and contracted, the limp feet and curled hands. He turned and looked at the sagging body of the stranger in the chair, and then his eyes fell to the girl who stood close by, her hands by her sides, her eyes locked on his face. Breathing, thinking, sorting through frantic voices in his head. For a moment the man and the child simply watched each other and wondered what was to come next. Hades seemed to decide what it was and reached out, encircling her thin arm in his massive fingers.
“Come with me,” he murmured, pulling her forward. She let herself be led. In the cramped hall between the bedroom and the living room Hades rose up onto his toes and reached over the top of the ornate plastering that lined the wall, punching a hidden button. The wall sunk and slid away, folding into itself seamlessly. He pushed the girl into the tiny room. She glanced about her at the shelves that lined the three walls, the stacks of cash and dismantled weapons, the locked boxes and safes, the dozens of passports and forged birth certificates lying in neat piles.
And then she turned back to him. He reached up and pressed the button again.
“No!” she gasped, holding her hands out as the hidden door slid shut. “No! No!”
She screamed. Hades felt his face burn as the door closed and her fists began pounding on the other side.
“It’s only temporary,” he grimaced. “I’m sorry. It’s only temporary.”
He was speaking more to himself than to her. He could barely hear himself over her cries.
3
E
den coordinated everything from the shade of a blue plastic tarp strung up between two paddy wagons, leaning with her long legs crossed against the edge of a makeshift desk. She held a map of the marina in her hand and with her fingernail she drew a line around the boundary where she wanted the place cordoned off, her eyes lowered with the unenthusiastic appreciation of someone reading a tabloid magazine. The junkie was stripped, wiped down and photographed, and the ambulance where he’d been sitting driven off to the lab. The junkie himself she had driven away for a proper forensic examination. He put up a fuss but she ignored him. Her directions had a calm finality to them as though to defy them would be an act of idiocy.
Within an hour the barricade at the entrance to the marina was packed with spectators. Nothing will make strangers talk to each other more than a good scandal. The place was abuzz with gawkers leaning, murmuring, pointing, folding their arms and predicting. Helicopters whumped overhead, winding a circuit up and down the coastline. Four patrol boats were being prepared to deploy divers in selected spots around the bay.
I stood by the desk and sipped a coffee someone had brought in on a cardboard tray. I felt like mentioning to Eden that there was little chance the junkie had been in his right mind when he saw the other boxes, chained as he was to a weighted toolbox and sailing towards the bottom of the ocean in the dim morning light. What he’d thought he’d seen were probably rocks, submarine pipes, crab cages or illegally dumped waste. I didn’t say anything though. Eden hadn’t consulted me on the coordination process and so I was happy to let her make a fool of herself if it all went pear-shaped. She folded her arms and stared out at the hive of activity around her like I wasn’t standing there. I cracked a couple of jokes and she ignored me. I could see the cool arrogance of her brother in her then.
One of the technicians, a young Filipino guy with acne scars on his cheeks, brought a laptop over and dumped it beside Eden. I recognized him as one of the frightened owls from back at headquarters. He ignored me as he opened the computer and clacked away, adjusting a wireless modem and linking up to a satellite service.
“What have you got?” I asked, moving around behind him. His shoulders seemed to lift up around his ears as I spoke, as though he were bracing for a blow. Eden squeezed in beside me and the technician shivered.
“I’ve got a link to the main patrol boat’s computer,” the owl murmured uncertainly. “They’re going to feed us the diver’s vision. The coast guard has spoken to the two guys who picked up the witness and got their GPS position. Calculating current, drift and the estimated time he was in the water, we’ve got a pretty good idea of where he was dumped. We’re going to put a team of divers down and see if they can locate the boxes. We’ve tried to pick them up on sonar but it’s not precise enough at that depth.”
The owl pulled up a GPS map of the coastline beyond Watsons Bay. The sea was illustrated in a pristine, depthless blue. There were animated arrows and markers on the screen, ten or twelve vessels depicted with Xs and triangles. I watched the tech click away at the black laptop keys. In minutes he was showing us heavily delayed muted vision from a camera that was strapped, it seemed, to a diver’s helmet. The screen showed a blurry shot of the patrol boat deck with the commander of the team giving a briefing as other divers suited up around the one with the camera.
Eden and I stood behind the owl and watched as the briefing was conducted. The divers zipped up their suits and moved into position. The sun was warm on my shoulders and I shrugged off my jacket. When I turned up my shirtsleeves, Eden glanced at my tattoos. I folded my arms and closed my eyes, feeling drunk on the warmth of the morning. It was the kind of day for lunching in outdoor cafés on the harbor, for strolling home and snoozing in the afternoon with Eden stretched out beside me. Her long white limbs sweat-slicked and stark against the sheets. Who wanted to work on a morning like this? The weekend was coming. The surf would be up.
The divers submerged and the camera delayed for a moment or two with the jolt of the water around the diver’s head. More people had crowded in around us. For ten minutes there was nothing but blue and black shadows dancing on the screen. The audience murmured in anticipation. I glanced over and saw Eden’s limbs had tightened, the stringy muscle of her forearms flexing in the shadow of the tarp.
Twenty minutes—and nothing more than the flailing of the nameless diver’s limbs and the occasional glimpse of the others as they sunk together. The rise of the seabed materialized on the screen, and there was a notable shift in the mood of everyone around us. There, on the screen, was the rocky edge of what looked like a wide sea cavern. And in the cavern were about twenty weed- and sludge-covered toolboxes.
It was two hours before Hades opened the door to the hidden storage room again. The little girl was crouched in the corner farthest from the door, her arms tucked against her chest and her eyes wide. Hades hefted the limp body of the boy up onto his shoulder and spread a thick blanket out on the concrete floor. He let a pillow fall from his fingers and laid the body down. The girl watched, taking in the bandages around the boy’s skull and his sunken eyes with barely contained terror. The boy was wearing an unfamiliar man-sized T-shirt. Hades groaned as he crouched above the boy, spreading a thinner blanket over his sleeping body and tucking it under his chin. When it was done he stood and met the girl’s eyes.
“Come with me,” he beckoned, reaching out his hand.
She didn’t move.
“If I was going to hurt you, I’d have done it by now.”
The girl shifted on her bloodstained feet, thinking. She rose up slowly, taking tentative steps towards the man.
Hades took her hand and led her into the kitchen. He directed the girl to sit on the edge of the table where the boy had been lying minutes before. The stranger’s body was gone, the pool of blood mopped up and bleached away. There were bundles of bloody rags on the table beside the girl, cotton bandages and the clipped ends of medical wire, an open first-aid kit and a pair of scissors. The girl recognized her brother’s soiled clothes dumped in a black garbage bag on the floor.
Hades filled a bowl with warm water. He set it beside the girl. Her eyes followed everything—his hands, his face, his tired steps back to the sink where a bottle of Johnnie Walker now stood. He poured two glasses. The girl shook violently as he approached her, her tiny nostrils flaring.
“This’ll make you feel better,” Hades said, taking her hand and pressing one of the glasses into it. Her fingers were sticky with blood. She looked at the whisky, then at his face. Hades swallowed his drink and set the glass down with a sigh. The girl hesitated.
“It’s okay. I promise.”
The girl gulped the scotch as she had seen the man do. She winced and coughed.
“Good work,” Hades said.
He half-filled her glass again. When he picked up a cloth and rinsed it her brother’s blood turned the water in the bowl a pale pink. Hades tried to take the girl’s chin in his hand but she flinched away. He seized her face in his wide fingers and she whimpered.
“Settle down.”
The scotch worked quickly in her veins. As he began cleaning the mask of blood away she was stiff and resistant. She soon softened up. Hades dipped her face and inspected the deep gash in her forehead. It was about four centimeters long, running across her hairline. He put down the cloth and looked at her. She had a chiselled appearance that would make her seem sharp and calculated when she was older. Dangerous and beautiful. Both children were greyhound thin. Hades wondered which dead parent they took after. The girl sighed with exhaustion as Hades cleaned her hands.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Morgan.”
He spread her fingers and examined the scrapes on her palms. Her face was inches from his, her big eyes downcast to the ruined flesh. He tried to guess how old she was. Probably five, he supposed.
“What did they hit you with, Morgan?”
“A stick,” she whispered, tears sliding down the edge of her jaw.
Hades wrapped her hands in bandages. He took out the needle and the wire and her eyes followed his fingers, drunk and sad.
“Did they mean to kill you both?”
“I think so. They said so. They made us kneel on the gravel. They yelled at each other.”
Hades nodded, threading the fine wire through the soft white flesh surrounding the gash in her head. The girl didn’t flinch. She stared at his chest, licking her wet coral-colored lips.
“What’s going to happen to Marcus?” she asked.
“He’ll either wake up or he won’t.”
“Are we going to stay here?”
“For now,” Hades said, pulling the second stitch tight. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure something out.”
Outside the house, beyond the mountains of trash, a truck blasted its horn on the highway. The sound spoke of the world outside the kitchen, an unimportant and distant place. A place of lost things. The girl’s tears were silent. Hades rested his palms on her forehead as he worked to pull the wound closed. When he was done he patched the wound with a clean cotton bandage and stood back like an artist assessing his work.
The girl whose name was Morgan sat still, studying the floor as though she had forgotten he was standing there, as though considering some terrible decision. Hades frowned and felt a knot grow in his stomach. There was a strange coldness to her eyes now. It gave him the feeling that something he couldn’t name, something that had been there only moments before, was now dead and gone.
He had never seen a child look that way.