Chapter Sixty-seven

Jack had excused himself from lunch with his father as soon as he judged it to be merely impolite rather than outright rude, which was about sixty seconds later. He found Tony admiring his handiwork – he’d just finished polishing the Kingswood. It looked like new.

‘Tony, any chance of a lift into town?’

‘Sure, where are we going?’

Jack realised he didn’t know. He wanted to find Caitlin and tell her everything his father had told him not to tell anyone. But Jack had no way of contacting her. He’d lost three phones in a week, and apart from a few old numbers he could still remember, all his contacts had disappeared with them. ‘I’m trying to find Caitlin. I’m hoping she’s at Zoe’s.’

As they set off, Tony pointed to a shoebox on the bench seat between them. ‘I found some more.’

Jack was amazed to find the box was full of cassettes. He closed his eyes, picked one at random and inserted it. By the time the car turned onto the road, ‘Into My Arms’ was being sung inside the car – in three different keys.

As they drove towards the Arts and Industrial Estate, a Harley Davidson roared past them at high speed, its rider dressed as Animal from The Muppets. A motorised skateboarder with a death wish swerved within millimetres of the Kingswood at a roundabout, its rider raising a two-fingered peace sign when Tony honked the horn.

At Zoe’s, Jack took the stairs two at a time. Nobody answered his knock. He had no idea how to find Caitlin now.

Then someone called his name. He turned to find Ricky and Caitlin walking up the stairs behind him. Ricky hugged Jack. Caitlin didn’t.

‘You escaped Alcatraz,’ said Ricky.

Caitlin said, ‘We went to the station to find out what was happening. The detectives wouldn’t tell us anything because we weren’t your next of kin.’

‘They wouldn’t believe you and I were married,’ said Ricky, and blew Jack a kiss.

Upstairs in the apartment, Caitlin put on the kettle and took some Panadol. She looked exhausted.

‘How are you going, Caitlin?’ asked Jack.

‘How do you think? We’ve lost all Dad’s work. I was hoping it would be a tribute to him. Some sort of memorial.’

Ricky raised both eyebrows, in surprise. ‘What makes you think it’s lost?’

‘I know how these things work. The police will have Dad’s memory stick locked away in evidence hell for ever.’

‘Trust me, anybody using a twenty-eight-character password has more than one backup,’ said Ricky. ‘You just need to find it.’

The kettle started whistling and was ignored.

Caitlin and Jack exchanged glances, then simultaneously asked, ‘Where?’

‘It won’t be at his house – he wouldn’t keep all the backups in the same location. Did he walk somewhere regularly where he could hide something? Is there a holiday house? Did he have any hobbies? What about a Post Office box? Nobody thinks to look there.’

They continued to ignore the increasingly insistent squeal of the kettle.

Jack suddenly slapped his thigh and his infected stitches retaliated with a sharp stab of pain. ‘It’s been right in front of us all along.’

‘Where?’ asked Caitlin.

Jack stood up and headed for the door. ‘C’mon.’

Caitlin’s clomping Doc Martens followed him. Ricky put the kettle out of its misery and went after them.

The Beamer made good time to Zoe’s salon. No more Muppet costumes. No grey nomads driving caravans at half the speed limit. But Jack did notice Ricky spent an inordinate amount of time looking in the rear-vision mirror, yet whenever Jack looked over his shoulder, he saw nothing unusual – just cars.

Ricky parked illegally out the front of the salon. A ‘Closed’ sign dangled in the doorway. Jack cupped his eyes and peered through the glass and saw Zoe was still inside, cleaning up. Jack rapped hard on the door, and she let them in. Before even saying hello to Zoe, Jack went straight to the candle and picked it up.

‘I’m sorry, Zoe, Patrick hid something inside.’

Zoe looked puzzled. ‘And I thought, for all those years, he was being romantic.’

Jack ran hot water from the basin onto the outside of the porcelain jar until it released the candle. He hacked away at the wax with Zoe’s scissors until a corner of plastic appeared, and soon he held a small bag in his hand. Inside was a memory stick identical to the one the police had confiscated.

Caitlin was jumping up and down in uncontrolled excitement. ‘Can I hold it?’ she asked.

When Jack handed it to her, she wrapped both hands around it so tightly it looked as if she would never let it go. She gave Jack a huge smile. ‘Let’s go and see what’s on it.’

‘Whoa,’ said Ricky. ‘Before we do anything else, we need to back that baby up – that might really be the last one.’

But nobody had brought a laptop. Their nearest one was back at Zoe’s apartment. Jack and Caitlin rushed out the door together, and barrelled into two huge men standing outside. Jack’s elation evaporated. It was the Bruce brothers.

Bruce One extended an enormous paw out to Caitlin. ‘Give me that.’

Caitlin screamed and doubled over, clasping the memory stick to her midriff.

Jack swung a punch in the direction of Bruce One’s head, but his fist glanced off harmlessly.

Bruce Two, who looked like an overweight raccoon with his two black eyes, wrapped a massive hand around Jack’s neck and squeezed. Jack could hardly breathe. Bruce’s other hand curled into a fist in front of Jack’s face, preparing to strike.

Behind him, Jack heard Ricky shout, ‘Vincent, don’t even think about it!’

Both Bruces looked at Ricky. The fist in front of Jack’s face unfurled.

‘Oh, fuck me,’ said Bruce Two, and Jack’s neck was released. Both man-monsters turned and legged it along the lane without looking back.

Jack was overcome with relief – it had been a close call. He rubbed his neck and looked at Ricky, once again so grateful his friend was by his side. ‘You know them?’

‘Sure,’ said Ricky. ‘The Parata brothers. Everyone knows them. Small-time goons for hire.’ He grinned. ‘They’re shit-scared of the Martinellis.’

As they walked to the car, Caitlin said to Jack, ‘You were right.’

‘Yes, but it was so obvious, I should have thought of the candle before.’

‘Not about that.’ Her smile was back. ‘Everybody needs a Ricky.’

Zoe sat in the front of the Beamer with Ricky as he gunned it out of town. Caitlin couldn’t sit still in the back. Ruth Bader Ginsburg danced up and down in time with the Doc Martens, Betty Boop smiled seductively at Jack from Caitlin’s shoulder. Jack felt happy – the two people whose company he most desired in the whole world were here together, by his side.

Ricky pointed the Beamer into the carpark in front of Zoe’s apartment and then drove straight through and out the other side without stopping. ‘Change of plan,’ he said.

‘Why?’ asked Jack.

‘Man, have you forgotten everything I taught you? Didn’t you see that white Commodore with an extra aerial? The apartment is being watched.’

Ricky drove back around and parked as far from the unmarked police car as he could. He turned to Zoe. ‘Can you get the laptop while I distract them? Jack, you’re driving.’

Zoe set off to blend in with the shoppers.

Ricky climbed onto a ute parked in front of the police car and started moon-walking on its roof. A crowd of onlookers gathered, including the ute’s owner who started arguing with Ricky and then ran around and around his car trying to grab Ricky’s legs. Ricky jumped off and climbed onto the bonnet of the police car. It was Duffy who got out and started yelling at Ricky, who was now running backwards and forwards from bonnet to boot. When Ricky jumped off and ran down the road, Duffy only had about twenty metres of chase in him.

Zoe returned with her laptop and Jack drove off. They found Ricky leaning against a lamp post a hundred metres down the road and as he stepped into the car, he was grinning like a child in a toy shop.

‘Jack, why didn’t you tell me Byron was this much fun?’

Jack pulled off the road into a carpark surrounded by industrial units. Caitlin handed Ricky the memory stick and he copied all Patrick’s data across to the laptop, then uploaded it to two different cloud-storage services and emailed Caitlin their links. He closed the laptop, gave the memory stick back to Caitlin and said, ‘Where to?’

‘Somewhere safe where we can look at the documents,’ said Caitlin. ‘And we need a printer, we can’t all gather around a laptop.’

Jack started the Beamer. ‘I know the perfect spot. The last place the police would be looking for us.’