23

The limestone church was pocket-sized, Helena thought, compared to the building that loomed behind it. The continued existence of these little places in the city that took up all this ground-level space felt like a feat of strength. For a moment, she considered going down the short cobblestone path, through the wide-open church doors, and asking for counsel; but she could not trust her composure in there.

Limitless Medical Manufacturing Associates, behind the church, took up thirteen floors of an icy grey twenty-six storey building. Helena walked up to the reception desk, pushed her blonde curls behind her ear, put two coffees down on the pastel orange counter, and said brightly, ‘Hello! I’m here to see Darwin Weiss. I have an appointment.’

The man behind the counter was small, with tiny, circular glasses. He peered at her and said, ‘Mr Weiss has no appointments today.’

‘But I booked this weeks ago,’ Helena said. ‘Can you please check again? I even brought him a coffee, like he requested.’ She held up the cup and smiled.

He did not check again. ‘Mr Weiss is not here.’

‘That’s … frustrating,’ she said. ‘Can I make a new appointment?’

‘I’m not his personal assistant,’ the man said. ‘You’ll have to try his offices.’

‘Thank you,’ Helena said, gathering her coffee, and heading to the elevator.

‘Not in person,’ he called after her, and the security guard – also in pastel orange, to match the desks – moved from the window he had been looking out of, and stood next to the lift door.

‘All right,’ Helena said, turning back to the reception desk unruffled. ‘Can I speak to Eddie, please?’

The man stared at her, and she said, ‘Eddie Roubicek?’

‘He’s not in either.’

‘Is anybody in that I can speak to? I’m sorry, and I’m not trying to stick in your craw here, but I travelled a long way, and nobody let me know my appointment was cancelled. I’d really love to be able to speak to somebody, even briefly. You’re welcome to the coffee, at least? I know it’s a pretty weak bribe.’

He smiled, almost. ‘Thanks, but I don’t drink oat milk. What was your meeting regarding? I don’t have anything on the schedule.’

‘Donations,’ she said. ‘Not from him,’ she added, seeing his flinch. ‘My company is looking to match the donations he makes from Limitless. And hopefully make other connections.’ She gave a wide smile and hoped her lipstick didn’t crack.

‘Maybe Vasilia can speak with you,’ he muttered. ‘Hold on.’

She waited in the plush yellow seats by the window. The security guard watched her, and she smiled at him as well.

A woman came through the lifts, with waist-length hair and loud heels. She reached out a hand. ‘Vasilia Kostakis. Sorry, what was your name?’

‘Helena Baker,’ she said.

‘And where are you from?’

‘Baker King,’ Helena said.

Vasilia visibly searched her memory, then asked, hesitating, ‘You in manufacturing as well?’

‘You could say that,’ Helena said.

Vasilia looked her over and said, ‘Is that a hard question?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Helena replied, contrite. ‘It’s more that I’ve heard it a lot. Yes, manufacturing. Not medical, but adjacent. I think I’m just feeling a little frustrated about my meeting with Darwin being cancelled without knowing about it before I travelled here. That’s not your fault, I’m sure. I even got him his oat milk latte, as he requested.’ Helena held up the coffee, then dropped it in the bin beside her.

Vasilia looked at her for a long moment, considering. ‘Where did you say you came from?’

‘Adelaide.’

‘That’s a long way. But he never said anything to me about your company, or you. There’s nothing in his calendar. We’ve cancelled everything of his.’

‘Is he all right?’ Helena asked, with concern.

‘He’s on indefinite leave,’ Vasilia said, head high. ‘For personal reasons.’

‘Can I reschedule?’

‘Indefinite,’ Vasilia repeated.

‘And Edward Roubicek isn’t here, either?’

‘He is not. You’re welcome to schedule a meeting, but it won’t be here. He’s rarely in this office.’

‘Would you be the person to meet with?’

Vasilia gave a sigh like the smallest crack in the air, and looked again at the bin, five dollars sixty worth of pity in her face. ‘I do have half an hour until my next meeting.’

‘Wonderful,’ Helena said. ‘Do you have access to Darwin’s emails? I’ve already sent him all the details.’

‘Why would I have access to his emails?’ Vasilia snapped, and then she closed her eyes and visibly loosened, slumping her shoulders, running her fingers through the lengths of her hair. ‘I didn’t even know he was going away until he didn’t turn up. I’ve been trying to catch up on everything for weeks. Again, no, I don’t have the details for this meeting nobody knew about.’

Helena held up her hands. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘That’s fine. I’ll just collect my laptop from my hire car, and I’ll be able to show you everything. One minute.’

Helena left out of the front door and walked past the church again, wishing it wasn’t there trying to invite feelings in through those hundred-year-old doors. She looked up and down the street for a taxi, but instead, saw Alice, leaning against her Golf.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Alice said, opening the passenger-side door for her.

Helena sighed and climbed in. Alice got into the driver’s seat and said, ‘Who are you today?’

‘Helena,’ Teddy said. ‘She’s very professional, but her lipstick is going to be a bitch to get off afterwards.’ She touched her nose. ‘Is the putty coming off? How did you recognise me?’

‘I will always recognise you. Also, I was tracking you. Did you make a wrong turn on your way to rehab?’

Teddy crossed her arms. ‘I didn’t tell you, because I knew you’d say no. I just can’t sit around and wait anymore, all right?’

Alice pulled away from the side of the road. ‘You’re not going to be much fucking use if you don’t go see your physio. You can’t get into fights if you’re not doing your stretches.’

‘I am too doing my stretches,’ Teddy said petulantly. ‘My shoulder’s fine.’ She laid her palm flat on the ceiling of the car and said, ‘See? I’m not even crying.’

Alice looked at Teddy’s trembling hand and said, ‘Just stop, all right? You need to exercise. Or get some pills.’ She paused. ‘Have you got all you need? Or should I find a guy who can help?’

‘I don’t want any of your street painkillers, thank you,’ Teddy said. ‘I want to be conscious when we figure this shit out.’

Teddy had been sleeping on Alice’s fold-out couch for three weeks. They had been spending their days at Choker’s offices working with the physio at the downstairs gym, then back home doing sometimes mundane, occasionally coded data entry for Choker’s various assistants. Teddy dictated, Alice typed, they both hated it.

Sometimes the police visited, to interview her about Art’s death. Rusty said that after they found a little meth in Nina’s car, they’d decided it was a drug deal gone wrong. They still asked Teddy anyway, over and over: are you sure the man who shot you was nobody you knew? Are you sure you didn’t understand what they were saying? You definitely didn’t recognise the car that left after you were shot?

No, Teddy thought but didn’t say. I’m not sure of a goddamn thing.

Teddy knew Alice had been waiting her out, making sure she was all right physically and psychically before they started doing anything. Teddy usually told Alice all she felt, but she had brought a gun to a fistfight, and now she was shot and Art was dead, and until today there hadn’t been enough words in the world to talk about it, so she just didn’t.

Alice wanted to talk, she knew. Alice wanted Teddy on her couch, wanted to replay every moment they’d spent with Art, every conversation and every car ride with him. She wanted to go over the path that led to his death, from the moment they met him to the first time she’d called him champ and he’d said thanks, Mum as a joke, and she wanted to go over all the times she’d tried to keep him out of trouble after that. She wanted to find and destroy his killer and transform Art’s memory into something that wasn’t so full of rage and fire and vengeance.

She also wanted to protect Teddy from anything bad ever happening again. One bullet was enough, and it was too many. Before Cherry was born, Teddy had been the one thread that connected Alice to the living. She had grown up with a mother and father who loved her in the sense that a family was supposed to love you – they sent her to school, paid for her shoes, asked if she’d done her homework. But her parents and her sister felt like they were polite actors in her life, not people she loved with any kind of ferocity.

Before Cherry, Teddy had been the only person who Alice loved, because Alice knew that Teddy loved her too. And somebody had tried to shoot her – shoot Teddy, the Teddy who belonged to Alice – and she couldn’t imagine having another peaceful sleep in her life until she knew that the fucker who did it would never do it again. She knew people who would say stuff like this in angst, but for Alice, with what she did for a living and who she knew, it wasn’t just a lament. It was a goddamn fucking fact, and she would not rest until she knew what had happened to Teddy – and to Art – and set somebody on fire.

For weeks, Alice’s rage and loss had been waiting to rush over Teddy like a fierce king tide. Until now, Teddy had been a stack of wave breakers, immobilised by sadness, trying to dissipate Alice’s different grief so it didn’t get on her.

But, Alice thought, if Teddy was sneaking out to find out information, then something was changing for her.

She took a breath, settled her anger at everything, and said, ‘So what did you find out at Darwin Weiss, Inc?’

‘He’s on indefinite personal leave,’ Teddy said. ‘His colleagues were taken by surprise. It’s been a few weeks.’

‘But he didn’t call in dead?’

‘I honestly have the impression that they don’t know.’ Teddy drummed her fingers on the dashboard. ‘There’s a coffin, but his body isn’t in it. So is he dead but the confusion of his coffin stalled the process of getting word out? Or is he not dead?’

‘Maybe he’s undead,’ Alice said. ‘Medical manufacturing, huh? Sounds like an experiment gone wrong. Exposed to toxic waste. I’ve seen how this goes.’

Teddy almost smiled.

The city was busy on this weekday afternoon. Alice was driving down Lonsdale Street, slowly, because everybody drove like an asshole and people ran in front of you like you weren’t even there. Teddy just wanted to be loose and free like everyone else, just out for lunch, or walking, buying sneakers or sushi or anything.

‘How many of these people do you think have seen a gun?’ she asked Alice.

‘Seven per cent,’ Alice said.

‘You sound confident.’

‘It’s a question without an answer. Do you want to go and interview everybody? Or do you want my educated guess? Or are we talking about Art?’

‘I don’t want to,’ Teddy said.

‘Ted,’ Alice said softly.

‘Go on,’ Teddy said, wiping at her eyes. ‘Tell me how it’s okay.’

‘Here is how it is for me,’ Alice said. ‘You’re here with me now. I don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t bring your gun, but as far as I’m concerned, it created this situation where you are still here, on my couch, in my car. I’m glad for that.’

‘And for Art?’

Alice said what she had been saying to herself, to try to survive it all: ‘Maybe he would have died anyway.’

‘That guy couldn’t have beaten him in a fight,’ Teddy said, trying to remember, like she did every moment of every day, what the man who had shot her looked like, and all she could say was: human.

‘You don’t know that. He was fearless in the face of a gun. He knew how to use it. Maybe he was stronger than he looked. What if this was the best-case scenario?’

‘Together we would have beaten him,’ Teddy said.

They drove out of the square that was the city, to the outskirts of the Fitzroy Gardens. What was it like, Teddy thought, to roll in that grass, to have a picnic there, to sit with the sun on your face, surrounded by your friends? To sit there with Art while he told her improbable stories and ordered takeaway from a company nobody had heard of that would taste better than anything because he was there with her?

Alice passed her a tissue.

Teddy said, ‘I can’t stop thinking about it.’

‘I know,’ Alice said. ‘I love you.’

And finally Teddy said, ‘We have to find out who did it.’

Alice reached out for her.

~

Choker had come over after Teddy got out of hospital and sat on Alice’s couch and told them what he knew. The white car that followed them was a rental. The name the guy had given to the company was a fake. He hadn’t worn his sunglasses in their offices, but he had worn a paper mask; the receptionist said his eyes were green, or maybe brown; the video footage they kept was even grainier than Teddy’s memory. The credit card was a prepaid Visa bought that day and stacked with a thousand dollars. The car was found around the corner from the rental place, detailed, cleaner than it had ever been. Choker had rented it anyway to check it out once the police released it, and his techs hadn’t been able to find anything.

‘My best people are on it,’ he had told them.

‘Aren’t we your best people?’ Teddy had asked, put out.

‘Not for this case,’ he said. ‘Your judgement is too clouded. You would murder anybody who said they didn’t like him.’

‘Are you saying you didn’t like him?’ she asked, eyes narrowed.

He spread his arms out: see?

He said they were trying. He said his employees didn’t die on him without him doing something about it. He said they would figure it out. He said he had some ideas about what had happened, and he’d let them know.

‘What ideas?’ Teddy asked, touching her wounded shoulder, for comfort, or to make a point, she didn’t know.

‘I’m not telling you that, because I’m going to check I’m right before I make any decisions that can put any of us in jeopardy.’ He raised his voice and said, ‘Do not look into it, you hear? You’re incredible at your job, but you might fuck this up for needing it so badly. The police are already up our asses because they can connect him to us, but only for two jobs, both above board. If they catch wind of you looking, then they won’t just look at him and me, but you as well, Teddy. And Alice.’ He looked pointedly at the picture of Cherry on the side table next to him.

Alice had clenched her fists. No, she had agreed, they weren’t going to look for Art’s killer.

Teddy got his point too, and nodded, with more sincerity than Alice. She trusted Choker, almost pathologically, and she knew that he followed up. She knew that if you hurt somebody he employed, you paid a price, and sometimes she never found out what the price was because she never saw some people again.

Alice knew this too, but she wasn’t sure how much Choker had liked Art. Choker had bristled when Teddy introduced Art to him; Alice was sure Choker only agreed to hire him out of affection for Teddy. The day they brought him in, Art had flirted shamelessly with Choker’s PA, Mary-Louisa, and Choker had walked up to him and told him to get the fuck away from her. Later, Alice had asked Mary-Louisa what that was about, whether she and Choker were together. Mary-Louisa had just laughed, and said, ‘God, no. He just doesn’t like some people.’

But Alice and Teddy had liked him. They had liked Art, and spent their days with him, and he was dead.

‘He was the best kind of person,’ Teddy said now, in the car heading out of the city, her hands pushing at her heart like she could fix it. ‘A prince among men.’

‘Remember when he picked you up from hospital near here?’ Alice said. ‘When it was two o’clock in the morning and I slept through your call?’

‘That was nice of him,’ Teddy agreed. ‘I mean, he was part of the reason I was there in the first place, remember? He missed that guy swinging at me with the bat.’ Teddy touched her ribs, even though they had long since healed. ‘What about that time he brought sushi to you every day for a week because Cherry was losing her shit whenever she didn’t have sushi in her lunchbox for kinder?’

‘That was sweet,’ Alice said. ‘I mean, it was his fault for coming out for sushi train with us and telling her if she liked it so much she should ask for it every day.’

‘Troublemaker,’ Teddy said.

They didn’t speak again until they were on the freeway.

‘I think I need to do something now,’ Teddy said. ‘I can’t sit around anymore.’

‘But you should heal,’ Alice said, without much conviction. It had been itching at her like a bite, this need to figure out how everything had gone wrong.

‘We have to figure out what happened with Cole and Darwin. First, we talk to the people we probably won’t have to fight. The ones that might require convincing can wait.’

‘And we aren’t allowed to ask anyone about Art,’ Alice said. ‘Choker made me personally promise him.’

‘Like a friendly promise, or a threat?’

Don’t you fucking let her even look at his name online, Choker had hissed to her when she had walked him out to his car the day he visited. ‘A friendly threat,’ Alice said. ‘Let’s just say that.’

‘So where do we start?’

‘Sadie.’

Teddy sucked her teeth. ‘I agree, but I don’t think I can guarantee I won’t get into a fight with her.’

‘You’d win,’ Alice said. ‘She’s thirty years older than you and smokes five packs a day.’

‘And has employees,’ Teddy said. ‘And two working arms.’

‘You just said you had two working arms too?’

Alice did not need to turn her head to know Teddy was pouting.

‘We’ll do Sadie later,’ Teddy conceded. ‘There’s Nick.’

‘And Elizabeth.’

‘Streets,’ Teddy corrected. ‘And Heidi and Adrian. And Hank.’

‘We should probably go see Toby and Elinor again,’ Alice said. ‘That’s a later thing, too. It’s a long drive for you.’

‘I’ll be fine. It’s not like I use my arm to watch you drive.’

‘Later,’ Alice said, firmly.

‘Like Friday?’

It was a Monday now, sunnier and warmer than Teddy felt like she deserved. Her mind was like constant hail, battering against her skull: the gun, the gun, why did you always bring your fucking gun.

‘What about the rest of today?’

‘How about I take you to the physio, where you were supposed to be? I let you leave my couch because you said you would take care of yourself.’

‘Let me? Alice, I’m twenty-seven years old.’

Alice tsked.

Teddy knew what it must have been like for Alice, not hearing from her when they needed each other the most, not knowing Teddy had been shot, but knowing something was wrong. Tearing along the roads of Eastern Victoria to get back to her friend. She was always protective; they both were.

‘Fine,’ Teddy said. ‘What about Cherry?’

‘At kinder,’ Alice said. ‘We can pick her up later.’

In the gym’s rehab clinic, Alice waited the whole time for Teddy to finish her exercises, sitting with her arms crossed in a chair by the door.

‘I wasn’t going to run away,’ Teddy said, when she was done. ‘I like rehab. It makes me strong.’

‘It also makes you cry,’ Alice said, passing her a tissue again.

Teddy wiped her eyes. ‘It hurts,’ she said. ‘I deserve it.’

Alice took Teddy’s sweaty body in her arms for a moment. She had said you do not deserve it enough times already; this was all she could do.

‘You missed a call while you were crying,’ Alice said.

Teddy searched in her bag, then looked at her phone like it was poisoned.

‘It’s Art’s sister,’ she said. ‘It’s Nina.’