AMY EMERGES FROM A soft sleep, sprawled out on the rear seat of her car. The interior is as hot as an oven and it pushes her out onto the footpath where she squats by the car’s rear tyre and sucks down lukewarm water from a canister. Wiping her mouth, Amy recalls dim memories of last night’s stake-out. The old man. His house in the sticks. And Bill Webber, the policeman, doling out his violence. Webber’s house is just up the street. Amy has come off a long night of watching it, made all the worse by the constant desire to drink this mess away.
Amy gets flashes of the Adelaide hotel room:
Half-naked and looking straight-up possessed in the bathroom mirror.
Gun in hand.
Snap.
Quivering now. She tries to tamp it down.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
This mess she’s in is almost worse.
She forces focus.
The quiet street reappears.
Amy polishes off the water, then grabs her pocket camera and a leather-bound bible from the boot of her car, taking both up the street.
Webber’s carport is empty. Amy knocks on the front door, ready to tell Bill about her lord and saviour, just in case he’s inside. But there’s no answer. She checks the windows and knocks again.
Nothing.
Amy opens her bible and fishes out the lock kit from the cavity inside. The entry alcove provides all the cover she needs. The lock pops on the second try.
‘Anybody home?’ she calls.
The interior is decked out like a bachelor pad. Bill’s got a black leather couch, a gaudy white rug and a big TV. There’s a Mad Max poster on the wall.
She sets her watch alarm for five minutes and gets to work.
Sweeps room to room, starting with the master bedroom in detail.
Standard police-issue stuff in his wardrobe.
Empty nightstands.
Panadol and shaving gear in the ensuite bathroom. No meds.
Amy keeps moving.
The spare room has a set of dumbbells.
The study has nothing, not even a desk.
She takes an interior stair down to the rumpus and goes through to the garage. Not much to see there either until she inspects a tool shelf lining the far wall. There’s a box on the shelf covered in an old towel. Amy pulls the towel free and finds a safe.
She takes a polaroid photo of it.
And that’s time. Her alarm bleeps.
Out the back door.
A quick look at the backyard.
She sees a concrete block incinerator down further, goes to it and touches it. Still warm. He came home and burned the clothes.
Back on the Strip, Amy uses a payphone she likes, tucked away in the nook of a hallway in the Imperial Hotel. She calls the Surfers Paradise police station and asks after Bill Webber. Out in the field. She hangs up and drops another coin in the slot.
Dirty Doug picks up on the first ring. ‘Yeah?’ he says. ‘Who’s this?’
Dirty Doug is a PI. He works out of the Redlands, up near the city.
‘It’s Amy from Southport.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Can you still pull police records?’
‘Sure. Two hundred a pop.’
No one knows how Dirty Doug plies his trade, but the nickname is probably well-earned. Amy gives him Webber’s name and date of birth, then the name and address of the old man Webber assaulted. ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘I’m pretty sure that last bloke is recently deceased, so there might be eyes on it.’
‘What are you looking for?’
Amy spots a familiar-looking woman up the hallway of the hotel. The woman sees Amy and turns back. ‘I’ve gotta go,’ she tells Doug. ‘Just give me anything out of the ordinary, okay?’
In the front bar of the hotel, Amy takes a stool beside the woman from before, watching her probe the depths of her handbag. Without looking up, the woman says, ‘I thought that was you.’
‘Yeah,’ says Amy.
Her name is Angela Clarke. She’s Amy’s stepsister.
‘Figured this was still your local. I can get this one, Angie.’
‘It’s a free country.’
Amy orders a bloody mary and a lemonade, then watches her sister shakily light a smoke.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ says Amy, unable to stop herself.
‘Christ.’ A single tear rolls down Angela’s face. She wipes it off with the back of her hand. ‘I didn’t expect … I didn’t expect this, is all. You’re like a bad penny.’
‘Keep your fucking shirt on.’ Amy pushes the cocktail over to her sister. ‘You’re going to need this.’
‘Why? Oh Christ, what have you done?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Amy, I swear to god, if—’
‘Jesus, Angie. I’ve got a question about Dad. That’s all. Bottoms up.’
‘Oh, it’s just Dad.’ Angela takes a deep slug of her drink. No straw, straight from the glass. ‘Is he dead?’
‘No, not that I know of.’
‘Fuck,’ says Angela. ‘I could have sworn that was why you were here.’
‘Sorry.’
Another tear rolls out.
They take their second round out to the garden where the sun and the booze seem to chill Angela out a little bit. Amy’s mother split when she was a toddler. Their father, Victor Owens, remarried eighteen months later, bringing her two step-siblings: Angela and her brother, Will. The marriage didn’t last. The new stepmother fled the country—such was Victor’s effect on people—leaving the three of them with a revolving cast of carers. None of them lasted long, either. For the most part, it was three kids in a mansion with a madman.
‘I’m still working for Colleen Vinton,’ says Amy. ‘She’s got me looking at a local businessman. Allan Watts.’
Angela slides on a pair of black sunglasses. ‘Sure. I thought this was about Dad?’
‘I’ll get to that. What can you tell me about Allan?’
‘Well, if it’s on Colleen’s dime, you need to pay me.’
Angela’s a journalist for the Gold Coast Bulletin these days. A shill, by all reports.
Amy stares at her lemonade. ‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Where do you want me to start?’
‘Can you just …’
‘What?’
‘Just tell me what you know and I’ll leave you alone,’ says Amy. ‘That’s how this works. This doesn’t have to be …’
‘You’ve already upset me, Amy, so it’s going to be how it is.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, you’re not.’ Angela takes a sip of her drink. ‘Let me see. Allan Watts. Allan is … well, he’s smarter than he looks, but not much.’ The rest comes out like a press briefing, or an obituary. Allan got his start in Hobart. He’s a country kid. No family connections, but he’s bright enough for a business degree and diligent enough to make his way in the Tasmanian banking sector. ‘He looked after logging interests, for the most part,’ Angela says. Like everyone else, he took a shine to the Gold Coast in the seventies, but unlike everyone else, he had the seed money to spend up big. He invested in a local restaurant, then another. ‘And ever since then, he’s one of the crew. In with the big boys. The White Shoe Brigade do all their work over beers and tits, and Allan is their office manager, their concierge. He brings people together, sets the party. And they’ve richly rewarded him for it. Not bad for a dickhead from Tassie. Is that enough?’
‘It’s a start,’ says Amy.
‘What’s Colleen’s angle? I thought she’d have a bloke like Allan by the balls already.’
‘She probably does. I think she’s trying to catch him out.’
Angela tilts her head, studying Amy from behind those dark glasses. ‘She doesn’t like it when people pull on the leash, does she?’
‘No,’ says Amy. ‘She certainly does not.’
‘How’s the hand?’
‘It’s like this,’ Amy says, giving her sister the finger.
‘Still sore then.’
‘Colleen thinks Watts has some connection to Dad. That’s the clincher.’
‘Well, he does. Of course, he does. Dad has money invested in the Silver Fish. That’s one of Allan’s spots. I think there’s money of his in Clydes, as well.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I looked it up.’
‘Just looked it up?’
‘Haven’t you ever thought about trying to hurt him?’ says Angela.
‘Not by looking through his financials.’
‘And that, dear sister, is why you’re living your sad little life, and I’m living mine.’
That’s the end of the discussion, but they sit there a while anyhow. Two sisters with a shared history and not much else.
As Amy gets up to leave, Angela turns her face to the midday sun and blasts out a lungful of smoke, like she’s won an argument or something. ‘Goodbye, I guess,’ she says.
Amy doesn’t even bother.