Peter Corris - The January Zone

I made sure the gun was secure in the holster; I kneaded my calf muscles and took the first step-right foot so I’d be on my take-off foot with the third step…two, three-I jumped, straining for distance and trying not to land too hard. The roof creaked and groaned as I hit it but it held. I straightened up, breathing hard. I’d jarred one knee but I scarcely felt it. The loft was 12 feet away. Two minutes.

I bent below the level of the window and scuttled across. The four panes of the window were dusty and there were cobwebs on the outside and inside. Less than a minute. I lifted my head to look through the bottom corner pane. Through the dirt I saw Charles standing at the other window looking out onto the street. I couldn’t see Karen Weiner. I straightened up and at that second Charles broke the window, shoved a rifle through and fired into the street. I looked down and saw a man in a grey flak jacket duck back under cover. The street had gone suddenly still.

Charles fired again. He screamed ‘Magda!’ and ducked out of sight. I kicked the window squarely in the middle and the wood and glass collapsed inward. I pulled out the. 38 and climbed through ready to shoot at anything that moved. Nothing did. Karen Weiner lay on a mattress on the floor. She was tied and gagged and her eyes were wide open in terror. I made some kind of gesture that was meant to be comforting and went through the door to the steps which were steep, and turned once before reaching ground level.

An explosion from below seemed to shake the steps. I went down in three plunging leaps which carried me into the back of the shop. Charles was several feet in front of me, squatting behind a large bin slamming shells into a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. The air was filled with echoing sound and fine, swirling flour. Men were shouting in the front of the shop and on the street. I could see Borg’s reflection in the shop window. He was inside, crouching below the counter on the customer’s side with his gun out. He signalled urgently and authoritatively for quiet behind him.

‘Charles, put it down!’ Borg shouted. ‘It’s okay-I’m not the police.’

The commotion around the doorway got louder. A shotgun was fired over Borg’s head; the blast destroyed a shelf and sent more flour into the air and sprayed Charles and me with sweet smelling liquid. I had Charles’ eye view more or less; Borg moved and his shoulder was unprotected. Charles lifted the gun.

I levelled my. 38. ‘Don’t move, Charles, or you’re dead.’

He swivelled and fired at me. I didn’t think; I dived under the blast and tackled him around the knees. He went down but he held onto the gun. A shadow flitted from behind a rack of spices a few feet from where we hit the shppery floor. I dropped my pistol and clawed at Charles’ hands holding the shotgun but he twisted away. The shadow moved fast, became white. Charles fired again and the shadow screamed and red blotches erupted over the white.

‘Madga!’ Charles stood and lurched forward. The shotgun boomed again from the front of the shop and Charles was lifted and spun around; his knees buckled and he collapsed on his back into a spreading puddle of oil that smelt of warm winds and flowers.

Tobin stepped over the woman. He held a pump action shotgun and his enormous chest was covered by a bullet-proof vest. He glanced down at Charles. ‘Don’t stand there, Hardy. I should have your balls but it looks like it went all right. Where’s the woman?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Gelignite? More guns?’

‘Probably up there too.’

‘Good. Who’s this?’

Borg had put his gun away and was crouched, feeling the pulse in the slim brown wrist. He shook his head and stood. ‘You don’t need to know,’ he said. A siren wailed outside.

‘Get the woman out the way you came in, Hardy,’ Tobin said. ‘I’ll keep to the deal.’

I grabbed Borg’s arm and pulled him towards the steps. ‘You never kept a deal in your life, Tobin.’

‘Piss off.’

‘I’m taking her out the front. You clear us a path and keep any press away or I’ll pick up anything that’s in that loft and sling it into the street. How’d you like that?’

Tobin sniffed. ‘Smartarse, I should’ve got you too. Make it fast, then.’ He turned and started shouting at the men who’d crowded into the shop. Smoke and flour filled the air along with the smell of honey and sweet oil and death.

It was Christmas in October-everybody was getting what he or she wanted. Tobin had set up a production crew for his raid; he had cameramen and reporters, an explosives expert and a medical team all ready to go into action. He orchestrated the whole thing and he got maximum coverage for removing the threat to the hero of the hour, Peter January.

Tobin appeared on the front page of the tabloids looking menacing and effective in his TRF gear. Charles Galloway came into the public eye as a dangerous sociopath, a man obsessed with his own obscurity and with a hatred of the opinion-makers. Tobin destroyed the last note and Trudi received a broad hint that the emergence of the earlier notes from Galloway would mean trouble for January. There was no point in resisting: Madga Galloway was ‘slain’ by her husband as a last desperate act. Some gelignite, detonators and various guns were artistically photographed.

Galloway was a childhood immigrant from Northern Ireland, a fact not lost on a sensation-hungry media. The case was closed on Alison Marshall, ‘the politically sophisticated 16 year old who had died as a result of Galloway’s twisted terrorism’.

‘What shit!’ Mike Borg said. He crumpled the paper and shoved it in a bin. We were at the airport two days after the raid and I still hadn’t heard from Helen. I shook hands with Borg and told him I’d like to work with him again if he came back to Australia.

‘Might hold you to that,’ he said. ‘I gather you don’t always work for these crap holes, like January and Creighton Kirby?’

I shook my head. ‘First and last time.’

I drove back to Glebe with the last pieces of the case falling into place in my mind before I would start to file and forget them. Tobin had thrown a smokescreen over the way his identification of the terrorist Galloway had been arrived at. Karen Weiner had not been mentioned; January had got her away into safe-keeping. I saw January briefly the day after the raid.

‘Karen understands that I never laid a finger on the woman,’ he said. He wore only a gauze pad taped to his forehead now. He had an interesting bruise and I fancied a few more grey hairs. ‘She understands that it was all a blind.’

‘I thought she might,’ I said. ‘What did she say about Galloway?’

He shrugged. ‘Not much. He wasn’t very rough. Had his wife terrified 24 hours a day. A nutter.’

‘What now for you and Karen?’

He smiled, ‘I don’t know, maybe we can come to some arrangement with Weiner. Like you’ve got with Michael Broadway. Works doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘You handled it well, Cliff, very well. I’ll have to go back to America again and…’

‘America! You’re going back for more?’

‘What’s the difference? Look what happened here.’

‘It’s organised there, you know that. Here it’s… more individual. It’s not built in.’

January shrugged. ‘Just as dangerous from my point of view. What I’m asking is whether you want a steady job?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m going to vote independent for the rest of my life.’

Trudi voted independent too. She quit her job with January and said she was going to write a book.

‘What about?’ I asked. We were leaning against the Falcon parked outside my house. Trudi had walked Gunther from Lilyfield and was going to walk him back. I patted Gunther’s sleek head and he smelled cat on my hand and growled.