Pascoe shouldn’t have closed his eyes, not even for a moment. There he was, flare gun in hand, in the middle of the street, looking at Mark Hurley entering the restaurant. Pascoe turned away but had to conceal the pistol from two pedestrians walking their sausage dog in the semi-dark. Fortunately, the old couple were preoccupied with the stiff-legged dog, so black and low to the ground that it looked like they were dragging a shadow behind them.
Pascoe had gone close to doing it. He cursed under his breath as he strode to the van door and pulled it open, even though it was understandable for him to have taken his eyes off the target. He’d never killed a man in cold blood before, and Jared Page’s death would be followed by his own.
Pascoe stowed the pistol under the newspaper that had his mugshot on the cover. He was out of oxygen but he still had the asthma puffer. He gave himself a couple of good blasts and wheezed in the chemical-tasting air. If Pascoe had an attack now, then he would suffer the death he most feared – slowly and painfully choking out, suffocating while his lungs haemorrhaged and his heart burst. He took another hit off the asthma inhaler and tried to calm his heartbeat.
Nobody in the street had seen the pistol in his hand. Neither had the bodyguards in the restaurant or Jared Page, who was holding court now with a middle-aged man in a suit while Mark Hurley stood and waited, hands at his waist like a chastened schoolboy.
Two sets of people had entered the restaurant while Pascoe had his eyes shut. Pascoe didn’t recognise the man in the suit, whose body language said victim or supplicant, alongside another man who did look familiar. Pascoe sifted the face through his memory and came up with the name – Dave Gooch of the CIB branch. Gooch was a detective sergeant in armed rob when Pascoe was arrested those nineteen years ago, one of three arresting officers who’d then stolen most of the takings from the botched robbery, when only Pascoe had made it out of the bank. The bank said one hundred and fifty thousand and the newspapers concurred, but only fifty thousand was recovered and presented as evidence in court.
Pascoe didn’t care about that. He’d do the same in their position. What made it hard to stomach was that they’d beaten him for two days, pretending to extract the whereabouts of the missing money. Then they verballed him by presenting Pascoe’s unsigned ‘confession’ at the trial, stating that Pascoe refused to tell the court the whereabouts of the missing money. Pascoe’s accomplice Ben Davey had wounded a security guard before being shot dead himself, and Pascoe took the full punishment for the crime. The appearance of holding out on the missing money and Davey’s violence meant that Pascoe received the harshest sentence ever handed down to an armed robber. Pascoe hadn’t cared about that either. Davey wasn’t part of his regular crew, but Pascoe took responsibility for hiring the young hothead. He’d gone to the trouble of unloading Davey’s sawn-off before they’d gone in, but somehow Davey reloaded again between leaving the car and entering the bank.
What nobody else knew was that the guard was their inside man. He’d told them where the alarm buttons were and who knew the safe combination and who didn’t. Which of the banded notes in the tills contained dye packs and the temperaments of each of the tellers. Pascoe hadn’t told his young accomplice about the guard, in case they were caught and the kid spilled. In those days police interrogations always involved beating and torture, something for which the Armed Robbery Squad was famous. And that was Pascoe’s big mistake. The guard had overcompensated for his complicity by acting up during the robbery, presumably to protect himself from the suspicions of the armed-rob detectives, thinking that he was safe. The kid had lost his nerve and fired, seriously wounding the guard. Everything changed in that moment. It mightn’t mean anything to people outside the trade, but Pascoe had built up a reputation over the course of his lifetime of being a smart and staunch armed robber, something that was blown when the guard went down. The kid fired the shotgun, but Pascoe had organised the robbery. It was on him – the guard’s shooting and the kid’s death at the hands of the police.
The memory of the slain kid and Detective Sergeant Dave Gooch working Pascoe over with a phonebook and a gloved fist brought on the sense-memories of the beating he took that day. Pascoe’s heart fluttered like a small bird in his chest. Every now and then it missed a beat, and he felt a hot charge of shock flood his body. He knew that he should return to Fremantle and get more oxygen, but there was the matter of Mark Hurley.
Pascoe couldn’t do the job now, not with the kid in there, newly released on parole. He watched Gooch and Page round on the suited man, smirking and poking him while Hurley stood and waited his turn. Gooch and Page were clearly enjoying themselves. There were no other customers in the restaurant now and their gestures were theatrical. Gooch slapped the table and the suited man flinched. The man clearly didn’t know the rules. Pascoe would never flinch around men like Dave Gooch or Jared Page, which would just spur them on. Better to take the slap or the punch than give them the satisfaction. And just like that, it was over. The suited man was forced to shake Page’s hand. He stood and was led to the door by Gooch, who ushered him out onto the footpath. Gooch followed him but they went to their cars separately. The suit drove a white Mercedes sedan while Gooch climbed into a silver LTD with mud on its rims.
The two vehicles drove away and Pascoe turned his attention to Hurley, now seated at the table with Page. Hurley was trying hard but whatever Page was saying at him, barely even bothering to meet his eyes, was bad enough news that his shoulders sank and his head bowed. There was a moment when Hurley raised his right hand and shouted something, which made the bodyguards pay attention, but he soon enough returned to his resigned posture while Page talked. Then the meeting was over. Hurley too was forced to shake Page’s hand before being waved to the door. The bodyguard turned the open sign, locked the door and dimmed the lights in the room. Page could no longer be seen. Tony Pascoe had missed his chance.
He watched Hurley stride down the footpath opposite, away into the gloom. He turned the ignition and set the course for home. He was just about to pull away when he heard tapping on the passenger window. It was Hurley, who’d doubled back. Pascoe leaned over and cracked the door, but didn’t invite Mark in. He kept his eyes straight ahead while Hurley crouched on the footpath below window level. ‘I saw you there, before I went in. I know what you’re planning to do. I want to thank you, but –’
‘You should get lost,’ Pascoe said. ‘You never saw me.’
Mark Hurley’s voice wasn’t as he remembered it. Gone was the humour and enthusiasm. He sounded broken.
‘You don’t understand, Tone. Things have changed. What that meeting was about. Page has sold my debt. He’s sold all the debts owed to him. He’s got something else on.’
Pascoe felt his heart tumble again. He saw that his knuckles were white on the wheel. ‘Sold it to who?’
‘The Nongs. For a fifty-fifty cut.’
‘It must be big, whatever he’s got on.’
Already, Pascoe was working the angles. He couldn’t take on The Nongs, the state’s most notorious bikie gang. Not the biggest, but certainly the heaviest. Pascoe had served time with plenty of Nongs over the years. They had it good with the guards and no prisoners messed with them. He could remove their leadership group, but others would take their place. Mark Hurley’s debt would stand.
‘Whatever it is, it has something to do with that bloke they had there, before me. I could hear everything and they didn’t care. They were all over ’im. Page and that copper. That’s the reason Page’s offloaded his debt-collection goons. They’re all going to be working for the guy in the suit, the one they were threatening.’
‘The guy have a name?’
‘Tremain. They kept calling him that. I dunno who he is, some kind of gold miner.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘They were talking about shares in his company. Equal shares. Classic standover. They let ’im keep his naming rights, but that’s about it. The copper said, the company stays Lightning Resources, but we come on as directors. Equal share of profits. Like I said, they didn’t even care I was listening.’
Pascoe averted his face from the kid, didn’t want Hurley to see the struggle for breath. Pascoe’s body was warning him with little bolts of shock that every breath might be the last. He took a long while to fill his lungs. When he did, he yanked up the three-on-the-tree gearstick. ‘Who are you going to be paying at The Nongs? Who precisely? Where and when?’
‘I got to go to the clubhouse, every Thursday at five. Pay the sergeant-at-arms.’
‘Yeah, I know him. He going to give you product?’
‘Every Thursday, five o’clock. Takes my money and gives me more gear. But you don’t need to be –’
‘I do, son. And now, it’s goodbye again. We never met and we’ll never meet again. You keep doing what you need to do. I’ll do the same.’
‘Sure, Tone. It’s just …’
Pascoe dropped the handbrake, gently lifted the clutch until the engine engaged. ‘Now walk off. I can’t pull away till you leave.’
Hurley shut the passenger door, tapped the side of the car as he wandered back into the darkness. Pascoe lifted his foot and rolled the van through a turn. The restaurant was empty now, just the glow of fridge lights while the kitchen-workers behind the service counter flitted to their tasks.