BRUNO FORCES HIMSELF TO sit.
Mind reeling.
‘How?’ he says, mostly to himself. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m going to fucking shoot this cunt,’ screams Sunny. ‘That’s the one who killed Seth.’
Webber edges around, gun pointed directly at Bruno. ‘Go upstairs, Sunny. Go on. See if there’s anything worth stealing up there.’
‘Fucking pig cop,’ says Sunny. ‘This isn’t right.’
‘We’ll take care of him,’ says Webber.
Sunny looks at them, but he doesn’t move.
‘Samson, come on now.’
Sunny lowers his gun. He spits on the carpet. Then he slowly retreats up the stairs.
Webber lets out a long, unsteady breath.
‘Sit down a minute, Bill,’ says the minister. ‘You’re going to give yourself a heart attack, if you keep this up.’
Webber takes up residence on the opposing couch. He puts his gun down beside him on the fabric. ‘Probably not going to make it through the night anyway. Not with him.’
‘We can all just walk out of here,’ says Bruno.
Webber smiles sadly.
‘You want to tell me how you got into this mess, while we wait?’
He does, it seems.
It’s why Bill Webber invited Bruno in.
‘Take your notebook out,’ he says.
Bill Webber grew up with Samson O’Grady, or Sunny, as he’s known in the Webber household. ‘Samson means sun in Hebrew,’ Webber says. ‘Dad’s Jewish. He never called him Samson, not a day in his life. None of us did. Sunny practically lived at our house. Had that big place of his own, but …’
‘I know what his father did,’ says Bruno.
‘How?’
‘Found the room downstairs. I figured Sunny was in one of those barrels. I thought he was dead. Was that the idea?’
Webber shakes his head. ‘I wish.’
He tells them that Sunny’s father, Phillip, was tall. He says he didn’t quite fit in one barrel. As he tells the rest of the story, Webber’s eyes catch the light, lost in the horror of it.
‘You helped him?’ says Bruno.
‘It was an accident. Well, kind of an accident, in the beginning.’
Sunny had fallen on hard times. Severely addicted to coke, he pissed away his chances at an inheritance, but landed himself back home, nonetheless. He was on a strict regimen of straightening up and repaying broken promises. ‘Bit rich, if you ask me,’ says Webber. ‘But his dad was a pious old prick, despite everything.’
Phillip got Sunny a job through a family friend.
‘Her dad,’ says Webber, nodding at Amy. ‘He sorted it out.’
Victor knew Allan Watts was looking for help with the Silver Fish. Victor knew the O’Gradys.
‘It was some rich-guy thing,’ says Webber. ‘Hands washing hands, all that, or at least that’s how it looked at the start. These days, it looks more like Victor moving everything into place. It didn’t help Sunny any. There was plenty of coke to be had at Allan’s spot. The Silver Fish was lousy with it.’
Cocaine and untrammelled ambition.
Allan hears about a big score: Fantasyland.
Buddy Winters is looking to cash out and run away from the family business. He has an asking price and all sorts of backroom bullshit sorted out. Buddy is ready. His stake is promised to the highest bidder. A neat takeover with compliant co-investors. The whole deal.
‘Allan actually heard all about Buddy and Fantasyland from our lot,’ says Webber. ‘The Joke wants to buy in. They’re sizing it up. Sorensen, Lewis, they’re all about it. And there’s Allan, serving drinks to them in the private room of his restaurant, soaking up the inside skinny. They underestimated him.’
A consortium came together.
Allan Watts with a piece.
Victor Owens with a piece.
Samson O’Grady vying for a piece.
‘To his credit,’ Webber says, ‘Sunny asked his father to invest before he started making demands. And old Phillip was a greedy fucker, bent in every way, so Sunny figured it would work. It did, kinda. The old man agreed at the start, but …’
The problem: Phillip O’Grady was owned wholly and solely by the Queensland Police.
Had been for years.
They kept him out of jail.
In turn, Judge O’Grady kept other evil men out of jail, on their behalf.
‘They told him he couldn’t invest in Fantasyland because he’d be bidding against the boys, and essentially slitting his own throat. Couldn’t have Sunny doing it either.’
There’s a pause.
‘I take it Sunny didn’t like that?’ says Bruno.
‘No,’ says Webber. ‘He figured his father owed him.’
Another pause.
Webber stares at the carpet. His hand gently touches the gun barrel on the lounge beside him.
Bruno pushes on. ‘Bill, we found the bodies in the barrels. We found the room. The whole thing is breaking open. There are pictures and records from that room. I can guess why you were involved.’
‘Phillip was a monster.’
‘There’s not a jury in the country that isn’t going to take what he did to Sunny into account. You know that, right?’
‘It wasn’t just him,’ says Webber.
Bruno starts to answer before the full extent of it announces itself. Webber is a victim too. ‘We can … We can still …’
Webber seems to hear it and not hear it. With a completely neutral tone, he says, ‘It was a shakedown at the start. We put the hard word on Phillip one night. He either had to cough up the money or we were going to blow the whistle on the whole thing. I was a cop, for crying out loud. I mean, I fucking tried to dob him in years ago. I made submissions, back before all this. God, I probably ended up a cop in the first place just to get back at him one day. When I first signed on, I wanted to stop people like Phillip. But I couldn’t, could I?
‘For a long time after I signed on, Sunny didn’t want to say anything. He had it worse than me. It was a weird situation. But then … that night at the house, we demanded the money from Phillip and he didn’t do the right thing. He sent us packing. He said Sunny had stolen enough money from him over the years and it’d all gone up his nose. As for what he’d done to us, he told me I could tell anyone I liked. There was nothing we could do about it. He was protected. He just stonewalled us. I got out of there. I went home. Later, I got a call in the middle of the night and knew as soon as I picked up the phone. Sunny had snapped and done them both. I don’t know why, but I went over and helped him clean up the mess. It was Seth Blackwell and me. We both helped him.’
‘Was Seth another victim?’
Webber nods. ‘He went to school with us for a stretch. We all came up together. He wasn’t much more stable than Sunny.’
‘How do the banks come into it?’
‘I knew that disposing of the bodies would only buy us a little bit of time, even though we were smart about it. We had maybe a couple of weeks at best. Maybe a month or two, and then we’d be in the shit. Victor offered to take care of Sunny if we came through with our share for the Fantasyland bid. Victor said he could get Sunny out of the country on his boat. Get us all out, if we wanted.’
Webber blows out a breath.
‘We didn’t just hit any old bank. I want you to know that. I had a lot of information on these fuckers. Phillip had records, but Arthur Sorensen had them too. The Joke was taking a cut, of course. They were shaking these pests down while they were protecting them. That’s part of the system. When this is all over, I’ve got enough to pull the whole thing down. For Jamie as much as the rest of us.’
Amy frowns. ‘Jamie Leaver?’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ says Webber. ‘Jamie was my line into the Joke. An informant, off the books. He was a friend of Seth’s, actually. Between what he could get me and what I could find out for myself, I had most of it down pat. Just didn’t know what to do with it exactly, until all this. We robbed them. They used shared safe deposit boxes to move money around, as drop points and pick-ups. That’s the money we got, for the most part. I worked over Phillip’s network for keys and codes and box numbers, whatever we needed. Sunny cased out the banks. Seth did the driving. Jamie stayed out of it, mostly. It was pretty clean, in the beginning. No one got hurt at the start. To be honest, it’s not that difficult, you know. Most bank robbers are junkies and psychos. Knowing what I know, we got through it without too much hassle.’
‘But things got out of hand?’ says Bruno.
Webber nods, points upstairs and taps his nose. ‘Of course it did. Killing his parents did his head in. But, to be honest, a lot of those bank people deserved what they got. He wasn’t totally out of his mind. The manager and his assistant on the last bank job, the one you were at, they knew the sort of money they were handling. And we both knew the sort of people they were.’
‘What about his mum?’
‘Who?’
‘Marion O’Grady,’ says Bruno. ‘What did she do to deserve all this?’
Webber doesn’t like it, but he acts straight. ‘She knew what she was married to.’
‘What about the cops you shot yesterday and the bank guards and everyone else?’
‘I didn’t shoot anyone.’
‘You didn’t stop him from doing it.’
‘No,’ Webber says slowly. ‘I didn’t.’
‘We can still walk out of here,’ says Bruno. ‘It’s the right thing to do, Bill. Come on.’
Webber looks like he’s thinking it through.
Tongue moving around in his mouth.
Calm suddenly.
Relief.
Until: a droning sound in the distance.
Louder and louder.
‘Holy shit,’ says Sunny upstairs. ‘Holy shit!’
It’s a helicopter.
‘It’s too late for that,’ says Webber.