Leah Giarratano - Vodka doesn't freeze

Swaying slightly on her feet from the mental tug-of-war, Jill suddenly swore under her breath. The white-eyed girl was running down the lawn towards the ocean. Jill noticed a boatshed at the bottom of the grounds. It was a better place to wait than here, exposed. She followed her down to the water's edge. It wasn't until Mr Sebastian told Jerome that he wouldn't be able to stop Jamaal from hurting him that Jerome managed to stop himself crying.

'He doesn't have a lot of patience, I'm afraid, Jerome,' said the big man, smiling down at him kindly. 'He particularly dislikes crying, you see. He once told me that his father would punish him when he used to cry, and now it seems that the sound of it triggers something quite ferocious in him.'

Jerome swallowed hard. Jamaal was looking at him as though he were food.

Jerome thought it was maybe an hour since the big man, Tadpole and Jamaal had entered through a heavy door into the garage. The big man had spoken first.

'Jerome, I realised only this afternoon that I have not properly introduced myself to you. My name is Mr Sebastian, and I hope that we can be firm friends.' His eyes crinkled in a friendly fashion. 'I know you've met Tadpole here' – Tadpole positively beamed – 'and this is Jamaal, who brought you to us, of course.'

Although he was ashamed of it, Jerome could not stop some hot tears falling.

'I-I want to go home.'

'Of course you do, but not before the party, young man!' Mr Sebastian continued. 'Jamaal has some clothes for you to wear, and I'm afraid you'll have to have a shower now.' He leaned forward and stage-whispered conspiratorially, 'You're starting to smell!'

Tadpole giggled.

'I… d-don't want to go to a party,' Jerome cried in earnest now. He felt like someone had punched him in the throat.

'Oh, but of course you do. There will be balloons and cake, lollies and chips, and you're the guest of honour, young man. Some very important men have come here to meet you. We've told them all about you. You wouldn't want them to be sad, would you?'

'N-no.'

'Of course not.'

'And then can I go home?'

'Well, that will be then, and this is now, is it not? And you've a shower to take, and a party to attend.'

It was around then that Mr Sebastian had told Jerome about Jamaal's aversion to crying. The floodlights didn't reach the water's edge, and Jill approached the boatshed by padding quietly across the thick lawn. Boats clanked gently, rocking in the calm water where the property ended. The harbour smelt like life and death.

The white-eyed girl stood on her toes at the boatshed, peering into a rind of light around a window. Jill crept up to join her, the grass giving way to sand beneath her sneakers. The boatshed sat at the very edge of the water, a single-room wooden structure that could have been sold for twice what Jill's flat was worth. Silent, she stepped up on a rock upon which the shed was built, and peered in through a crack in some sort of window covering.

A small gasp of surprise from the white-eyed girl made Jill want to scream. Dr Mercy Merris lay on the floor of the boatshed staring unseeingly at the window through which Jill peered. Blood pooled on a white concrete floor lit by a single overhead bulb. Probably she's been knocked out, probably she's going to be okay, she tried to reassure the white-eyed girl.

Jill determinedly ignored the cabbage-sized hole of an exit wound in the middle of Mercy's chest. There's definitely going to be a problem with her brother, thought Jamaal. The father he could talk around – Allah knew the father could manage his own women – but his wife's brother was going to be difficult. The last time his wife had got out of control, her brother had promised Jamaal he would kill him if he ever saw her bruised that way again. This time she was in Westmead Hospital with a fractured jaw. And his brother-in-law was no softcock. He'd done infantry training in Lebanon, he'd been shot twice in Sydney, and he had a lot of friends, inside and out of gaol. The brother was going to be a problem.

Jamaal knew where the blame lay, and he intended to make the bitch pay. His wife's questioning about why the cops had come to his home had been too much to bear after the interrogation that morning. He had a hard-on for Sergeant Jillian Jackson that would not go away until she was bleeding.

Now in the basement, Jamaal chewed on an antacid tablet and stared at Jerome. Just give me a fuckin' reason, his eyes told the boy. The kid didn't, showering and dressing in the small bathroom off the garage without saying another word.

Tadpole danced through the basement room, whipping himself up for the special party. He stopped mid-pirouette in the kitchen when he caught the look in Jamaal's eye.

'Coffee, Jamaal?' asked Tadpole uneasily.

Jamaal just chewed the tablet; the burning in his diaphragm remained.

'Mr Japan is going to love our little friend in there,' Tadpole continued. 'Let's just hope he doesn't love him too long 'cause Sebastian's promised me seconds.' There was a pause. 'Unless, of course, you wanted to play first, Jamaal? You found him, after all. Fair's fair.' He smiled ingratiatingly.

His face full of the acid in his gut, Jamaal left the room. I'll cut that fuckin' poofter's throat if I have to listen to any more, he thought. He'd take what he wanted when he was ready. Using the hidden stairwell, he made his way up to the house.

When the foundations had been laid for the harbourside mansion, the basement garage had been cut deep into the hill upon which it sat. There were no windows in the huge room, and it was undetectable from the outside of the property. The two entrances to the basement were also concealed, and neither was accessible unless one knew where to look. Sebastian had told him years ago that his father had bought the house in the sixties from some paranoid Jew. Along the back of the regular, above-ground, triple garage was a motorised fibro wall that slid sideways to reveal a truck-sized entry dropping to a short, sharply angled concrete tunnel. Jamaal had driven his van, with the kid in the back, down through this tunnel to the basement. A couple of other kids had made the same journey with him in the past. Enough room existed in the underground bunker to drive the van full-circle and exit back up the same way. Not many had made this journey back with him.

Tonight, however, Jamaal left the room through the second access door. He knew Sebastian did not like the door used when there were guests in the house, but it was after midnight and it was unlikely that anyone was still in the entry foyer. They'd bring the kid up to the main house this way soon. He climbed the steep wooden staircase in darkness, and pushed open the trapdoor that lay in the floor of the large coat cupboard in the lobby of the stately house. He leaned the trapdoor against the wall of the interior of the cupboard, careful to be silent, and climbed out of the hole in the floor. He stood upright and listened. He could hear nothing outside the cupboard. He cracked the door and, seeing no-one in the marble foyer, Jamaal slipped out and headed for the rear of the home.

Ten years ago, Jamaal had at first found it diverting to attempt to find the barely discernible handle in the cupboard that gave access to the basement room, but when the moments had ticked away, and Sebastian had laughed once too often, he'd lost patience. He would watch in admiration as Sebastian would instantly locate the recessed lever that lifted the trapdoor. Even after seeing it done several times, Jamaal would usually wait for Sebastian to open the door ahead of him.

As he made his way through the opulence of the house towards the lights and music in the ballroom, he looked down at his black jeans and jumper with satisfaction. Sebastian would be pissed that he was not wearing a suit. Sebastian's other minder, that cement-head wog, would be all decked out. Arse kisser. Jamaal's wife's 'accident' would serve as an excuse for not dressing properly. He enjoyed such small moments of power over his boss.