LIFE GOES ON. BRUNO and his siblings put their father’s house on the market. Buyers start sniffing around. Danny considers it a done deal and starts talking about moving out, telling everyone he’s off to university. He keeps calling it a fresh start, asking the same question over and over, ‘Are you going to be okay on your own?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ says Bruno.
For the first time in a long time, he believes it.
Work is still a mess. After the events at Fantasyland, the Joke is rattled. The Surfers Paradise police station throbs with paranoia. There are no congratulatory drinks for Senior Constable Bruno Karras after closing the O’Grady case. No promotion pending. He may have solved a double homicide, but everyone knows there’s a tranche of missing evidence and everyone can guess who has it.
To keep Bruno in line, Internal Investigations ask difficult questions, all of them veiled threats.
How did you end up at Fantasyland that night, at just the right time?
How did Mike Nichols end up with a gun during the siege?
How does Amy Owens figure into this?
Bruno lets his union rep do the talking, and it’s no comment all the way. There’s only so far they can push it because the God Minister was there as well, and he’s not saying a word either.
The murder of Allan Watts is swept under the carpet. No one wants to look too hard at Allan, not with his connections to the Force. As such, Amy Owens walked away, unscathed.
Everyone else, not so much.
Mike Nichols is dead, evaporated in the helicopter fire.
The O’Grady family, dead.
Bill Webber.
CIB detectives found Webber and Sunny in Fantasyland, their bodies not five metres from each other, pummelled and broken on the bank of the canal. Webber’s involvement with the Gold Coast bank robberies was never publicly disclosed. They buried it. Couldn’t have a detective seconded to the Robbery Division named as a culprit. The embarrassment to the Force would be too much to bear.
The deal put to Bruno is to let sleeping dogs lie, or get fired.
Or worse.
But at least he’s not alone in the ether. Every other night, Pete Reynolds comes to the house and the two of them sit around Bruno’s kitchen table and look at everything O’Grady had in his sick bunker. It’s grim work, but they can handle it. They do it to honour the dead, for the victims guilty and innocent. They stay on it. They collate leads. They work the case, refusing all censure. But they don’t rush, either. It’s a long game and some nights—lonely, hopeless nights—they just talk and keep each other company.
Unfortunately, they’re still on the books with Colleen Vinton. But there’s hope on the horizon now. A new deal in play, a way to get out from under, because of the helicopter crash that killed Mike Nichols.
The wreckage presents conflicting stories.
The official one is that Mike Nichols effectively killed himself, and the pilot, by discharging a firearm inside the cabin. The bullet taken from the impacted skull of Samson O’Grady lends some credence to this.
But the unofficial story is that this is the handiwork of Deputy Commissioner of Police, Arthur Sorensen. It was his private helicopter that went up, and everyone who saw the thing come apart in the night sky knows the truth: it was loaded with explosives.
Colleen wants her revenge.
Bruno and Reynolds tell her they can deliver.
We’re sitting on something that can give you Sorensen’s head.
But we need to keep our jobs to do it.
We need you out of our hair.
We need time.
She agrees.
Nonetheless, dark days are coming.
‘I might just throw it in,’ says Bruno on one of those long nights at the house.
‘Oh yeah? What are you going to do?’ says Reynolds. ‘Open a bakery?’
‘Surf shop,’ says Bruno.
Reynolds loves the sound of it.
Bruno floats in the dark ocean, out past the breakers where the quiet water is. Another morning—just him and two other blokes further down.
In the distance is the Strip.
Still not much action there. A city still in recession. A construction site, biding its time. But progress can’t be far off. The money is coming.
But not today.
Today’s Monday. Mid-October 1982. The start of another work week, another stretch of endless complications and their impossible balancing act and—
A long shadow passes beneath his feet in the water.
Bruno stays in place. There’s no thrashing around in the surf and screaming shark this time. He stays on his board with his legs out in the sea, waiting.
The shadow passes again, a little further out.
Then, nothing.
No dolphin diving from the waves.
Just the slow undulation of the tide. An ocean filled with unknowns.
Bruno rides it back to the shore.
He puts his surfboard in the back of his ute and slips behind the wheel. It’s a balmy day and the interior of the ute is blisteringly hot. He reverses out and puts the thing in gear, and there it is, tucked under the wiper.
Another envelope.
The same white half-page business stationery.
His name written in the same blue biro, facing in.
Bruno.
He reaches around, puts his hand in. It’s a document of some sort. A list of names and dates and figures. There’s a Post-it note attached: From Mike Nichols, RIP. PS: Turn it over. Someone has written, Under Sorensen’s tennis court, in pencil on the back. Bruno doesn’t know what it means, but there’s more inside the envelope. He reaches in a second time and touches the glossy surface of a photo.