Garry Disher - Whispering Death

The sergeant’s voice took on a tone of disgust. ‘Galt and his mates had their own thing going long before Anita appeared on the scene. Kickbacks from dealers and brothel owners. You name it. They’d lose evidence, stand up in court and give character references to scumbags. And they had an arrangement with bent officers in Victoria and Queensland. One of your guys-cop in a suburban station or one of the squads, like the armed robbers-would send through word about a payroll, say, and Galt and his mates would make a fast trip over the border, grab the payroll, head home again. The bent locals’d run interference for them. Meanwhile it didn’t occur to the good guys to look for an interstate crew.’

‘What happened? Galt got careless? Greedy?’

‘They all did. We were monitoring their phones, bank accounts and movements by then, and the upshot was, Galt and the others were arrested, and the girlfriend was offered a deal: go to jail, or give evidence against them and go into witness protection. Apparently Galt used her as a punching bag sometimes.’

‘But he spooked her, so she ran.’

‘Took the money too, what we heard. Meanwhile he got himself a good lawyer and it turned out our case was a bit leaky…’

‘Now he wants revenge.’

‘Wants it badly,’ the NSW officer said.

Pam thanked him and was hanging up when a probationer appeared at the entrance to the open-plan CIU office. ‘Excuse me, there’s a woman downstairs, got a little girl with her and she needs to speak to someone in CIU.’

‘What about?’

‘People called Newkirk? Some name like that.’

Pam glanced at her watch. Two-fifteen and she needed to contact the New South Wales ethical standards department for more on the man named Galt. But a call like that took patience, tact and determination; she’d do it later when she had a free half hour. She followed the probationer downstairs and stuck her head around the door of the victim suite.

Tayla, the nanny, was holding Natalia on her knee. ‘They lied to you,’ she said. ‘Stuff was stolen.’

At that moment, Galt was trying a let’s-talk-this-over approach.

‘Actually, I don’t think I ever knew your real identity, Neet. According to the title deeds for this place-and that was foolish, by the way, storing them in your bank-you’re going by the name Susan Grace, but-’

Grace dived through the sitting room window.

She hadn’t tested this as a means of escape, but she had planned it and spent money on it, knowing that someone like Galt would come for her one day. Hence, shatter-proof glass on all the windows, secured by beading designed to pop out of the frame when pressure was applied.

Like now. ‘Jesus, Neet,’ Galt said, as Grace’s body described a tidy parabola through to the lawn on the other side. In the three or four seconds it took for him to cross the room and fire her own Glock at her through the empty window frame, she was feinting left and right into a thicket of garden trees and bushes.

From there she scuttled around to the back wall where the land sloped down, leaving a gap under the house. A useful space, somewhere to store timber offcuts, a chewed-up surf board, her extension ladder. And her backup gun, which was a Beretta. Grace located the concrete stump that supported the laundry floor, slid her hand in, felt around for the shallow wooden box she’d nailed there, retrieved the little pistol.

She worked a shell into the firing chamber then extended her arm, sighting along it: the left-hand corner of the house, then the right, then the garden trees and finally the back door, trying to anticipate what Galt would do.

He was here to kill her, of course-but he could have done that without chewing her ear off, so he was also here for his money.

Except it wasn’t his. He and his mates had put her to work, but she had succeeded beyond their expectations. By rights, the money was hers. Not that any of it was left. She’d spent the lot: this house, her car, the guns, the fake ID, the clothes, the travel…

The online poker.

Grace exploded away from the wall, ducking and weaving to the neighbour’s fence, clearing it at a run as the next bullet buried itself in the soft pine beside her, missing her thigh by a whisper. A Tuesday afternoon in spring, nobody around, a wind rising from the sea beyond the dunes.

Grace ran along the far side of the neighbour’s house, an old-style dwelling on stilts, and darted across the street. A sizzling sensation, a tiny shock wave, as a bullet singed the air beside her ear. Grace whimpered, ducked, sidestepped down into a ditch.

Was Galt shooting to wing her? He’d won pistol-shooting awards. She’d seen the trophies in his Bondi flat, seen the loving way he handled his guns, and almost been jealous.

Grace doubled back along the drainage channel, towards the caravan park, which was screened from the road by scraggly trees.

She stopped for a while, listening, wondering what Galt would do. He was generally quite direct. She’d asked him once what he wanted, and he’d said, ‘Simple. I want money, I want you.’

Grace swiped at the perspiration beading her face. Then she jumped, hearing his voice nearby, calling, ‘Anita! I just want to talk!’

She didn’t move. Scarcely let herself breathe.

‘No hard feelings, Neet!’

Sure.

Grace climbed out of the channel and crouched in dense shrubbery to glance both ways along the road. She jerked back: Galt stood on the far side, scanning the undergrowth as if aware she’d come out sooner or later, a half amused expression on his lean face.

How had he known she was here in Victoria? Mates all over the country, she supposed. Keeping their eyes and ears open. He probably knew her MO by now, knew about the Hobart job, the Clare job, all the others.

She saw him tip back his head again. ‘You probably think I want to pop you, do you Neet? Look I just want to talk, okay?’

Grace slithered back into the ditch, his amused face in her head. ‘Pop you.’ They had their own language, Galt and his gang. ‘Chow practice’ was an all-day, all-night drinking session, ‘paying for shoe leather’ was petty pilfering, to recoup what they’d spent on petrol and phone calls.

They’d been untouched for so long, they thought they could get away with everything, but in the meantime had got greedy and careless. All that money coming in, but for Galt it was never enough. Then the market crashed, and he’d say, drunk and mercurial, ‘I need you, Neet’. And, his lean mouth twisting, ‘If I can’t be with you, no one can.’

The road into Breamlea was deserted and Grace, prone on the grass in a thicket of stunted trees, sprang up and darted across. Another sharp noise as the bullet scorched across her shoulder blade. The pain came moments later, then the blood, trickling down to her waistband.

She scuttled back.

‘Anita!’ he yelled.

He didn’t seem to care who saw or heard him. The shadows were closing in, a time for men and women to return from their office jobs in Geelong and Queenscliff. Time to drive up, park, empty the letterbox, walk the dog, drag out the garbage bin for tomorrow morning’s collection. See a stranger with a gun walking down the crown of the road like a character in a western.

Well, he had a gun and a badge, who would challenge him? And the real law was thirty minutes away. Grace knew he wouldn’t give up. He’d kill her. She’d turned on him, transgressed some precious, insane code.

Grace retreated further. Here, between the road and a creek, the soil was marshy. Shallow pools dotted miserably with stunted plants and miasmic with mosquitoes. She was in the open and if Galt came parting the branches he’d spot her immediately.