Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (20 page)

Mac groaned. Johnny liked to warm up with a few rounds of Greco-Roman, followed by some Judo forms, followed by a half-hour of sparring. And when Johnny Hukapa sparred, it wasn’t hugging. The PCYC judo room would resound to a strange banging sound as Mac consistently tapped out, unable to deal with the power and technique of the bloke.

Mac stood and watched Johnny go, his gear bag held at his side in a huge paw. His hair was still thick and in a military cut, and he walked like he was marching to a C-130 for another secret rotation.

Mac turned to his own crossing, hit the pedestrian button and pondered what Johnny had said about anxiety and instincts:
Either way,
I’d take a bullet …

There was nothing wrong with Johnny’s reasoning. But still Mac had decided to say
yes
to Davidson and was meeting him the following afternoon.

He felt very nervous. He was back in … and he hadn’t told Jenny yet.

Mac and Jenny walked the fi ve blocks north to the Surfers Paradise Surf Club. It was a balmy evening with a light salty breeze coming off the Pacifi c, the setting sun making the ocean look like a purple carpet.

The transformation in Jenny once she’d left the stress of her AFP

role in Jakarta had been remarkable. They’d been lovers on and off since meeting in Manila seven or eight years before. During a period in ‘05, Mac had been in Sydney while Jen was in Jakarta, and Mac had become besotted with an English girl, Diane. But Diane wasn’t all she pretended to be and Mac had found his way back to his true love, Jen, and since they’d married and had Rachel, Mac had fallen for her all over again. He’d always admired her resilience and toughness in the face of people smugglers and the sex-slavers, but she had the strength to be a wife and mother too.

At thirty-seven, Jenny could pass for someone ten years younger with her long dark hair and athletic body, and Mac always enjoyed the way she held his hand in public and leaned into him when she spoke.

They got the stand-up table next to the window overlooking the sea and Mac brought over a couple of Crown Lagers. Tradies and real-estate hawkers sank beers in the sprawling bar while plasma screens carried news about what someone had said to someone else in Canberra. The surf club was a tourist-free zone and drinkers spoke in Queensland mumbles.

They chit-chatted and then Jenny cornered Mac about getting his will done at the solicitors. Jenny had had one drawn up when she fi rst joined the Feds and had it altered after they got married in ‘07 and again when Rachel was born. She couldn’t understand how someone could get to be almost forty and not have a will.

‘You’re a dad, mate,’ she chided gently. ‘Now you get to sit in front of a lawyer, tell her whether it’s burial or cremation.’

Mac did the
yeah, yeah - I’ll do it
, and Jenny said that was just as well because she’d already made an appointment to see Sian next Tuesday at ten o’clock.

Mac groaned. Sian Elliot was a former federal cop who was now in general practice in Southport. As a rule, Mac steered clear of people who asked too many of the right questions.

‘So, Mr Macca,’ said Jenny, giving him the look that told him she knew something was eating him, ‘what’s up?’

Mac had spent the year commuting down to Sydney to do his classes at the University of Sydney. He’d had them scheduled on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and by putting everything on the rewards card it had become viable. The fact that his mate Scotty from the Service had arranged a Commonwealth apartment in Pyrmont for him had pushed the idea into profi t. As a family they’d got used to it, even though Mac sometimes ached to see Jen and Rachel. Now things were changing.

‘I’m not going back,’ Mac said quickly. ‘I’m marking assignments but that’s me, I’m done.’

Jenny gave him the patient look. ‘Not going back where?’

‘Uni. Lecturing. That shit.’ He couldn’t look at her, fi ddled with the bottle.

‘Oh,
that
shit?’ smiled Jen.

Mac felt himself getting nervous. There were two women in the world who could get him on the back foot. The other one was his mother.

‘Look, Jen -‘ he started, before running out of words. He’d done his best with civvie life and he liked teaching South-East Asian politics to postgrad students. But the academic world had moved on since he was at UQ and it was no longer enough to put themes to students, get them to do the reading and then insist that they formulate their own arguments in essay form. Modern students had been trained to adopt the right pose rather than construct arguments, and what he did felt more like preaching than teaching to Mac. The fact he couldn’t do it made him feel like a failure.

Finally he looked up at Jen, who was still smiling.

He smiled back, surprised. ‘Not angry?’

Jenny laughed, stood up against him, held both his hands. ‘Angry?!

Christ, Macca, I’m amazed you’ve lasted as long as you have.’ She roughed his hair, kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’ve been very brave about it.’

Slightly boozed, they walked along the Esplanade to the Umi restaurant where Mac had a reservation for seven-thirty. He told Jen what she needed to know and left everything else vague: there was some freelance work for the government and he’d technically keep his gig at the uni as one layer of cover. He’d go onto half wages, paid by the Commonwealth, and be paid per diem for any contract work they gave him. Mac didn’t want to lie to Jenny, but there were good reasons to keep things non-specifi c. You didn’t want the wrong people making links back to your family.

The maitre d’ came over with two menus, spun on his heel and led the way through a narrow bottleneck near the bar.

Mac almost ran into the back of Jen as she suddenly stopped. He felt her tense through her upper back and he looked down to see a pair of legs and expensive cowboy boots in her path. They belonged to an Italian-looking bloke with lead-guitarist hair and a black Tex-Mex ensemble.

Mac pushed alongside Jenny but she jammed her arm back to stop him coming too close.

The bloke looked her up and down and, nudging the heavyweight Thai thug sitting beside him, said, ‘Well, well, well. If it isn’t little Miss Toohey.’ He smiled, fl ashy but lopsided. ‘Oink, fucking, oink!’

‘G’day, George,’ said Jenny conversationally. ‘Free at last and the fi rst thing you do is audition for
The Three Amigos
. Nice.’

Seeing violence fl ash in the bloke’s dark eyes, Mac pushed through in front of Jen and tapped George’s leg with his foot. ‘Coming through, champ, if you don’t mind.’

George kept his legs where they were and the Thai eyeballed Mac.

Mac looked straight back at him, wondering why Thais wore their gold chains on the outside of their T-shirts. There was a brief moment of bristling silence during which Mac decided the fi rst one to stand up got a straight right in the teeth.

George broke the deadlock and, pulling his feet back, motioned them through like a courtier, saying, ‘Have a nice night, folks.’

Mac grabbed Jen by the hand and pulled her into the dining area.

Nine months had passed since Rachel was born and this was the fi rst time they’d gone out without her. Mac’s folks, Frank and Patricia, had been coming down every second weekend, but Jenny hadn’t wanted to use their in-law babysitting credits to go drinking. Mac said he didn’t understand that, and Jenny had replied that she wasn’t asking him to.

They moved to wine, drank steadily, let the tension out. The altercation with George got Jenny talking about the old days, when she was working the narcotics detail out of Brisbane, and George Bartolo and his cousins were satisfying the Gold Coast’s endless desire for cocaine.

Two penniless brothers - George’s father and uncle - had migrated from Sicily in the early 1960s, worked the concrete gangs in Sydney, bought their own truck, won the contracts for the big construction pours and then headed to Surfers Paradise to build their own dreams. By the 1980s they had a publicly listed development-construction-management company which owned hotels, apartment buildings and shopping centres across Australia and into Malaysia.

Now they hobnobbed with politicians, campaigned winning horses at the Magic Millions and had built - as a gift to the city of the Gold Coast - a security compound for battered women and their kids.

And between them, these two Aussie icons had fathered fi ve sons with nothing on their minds but easy money, fast cars and stupid women.

Jenny had been part of the team that put away George, Christian and Luca Bartolo for the importation of twenty-three kilograms of cocaine. They’d fi ngered the mule - a Portuguese-Australian fi shing-boat owner - and sequestered him for three and a half days at his Southport unit, ignoring phone calls and early morning drive-bys and taking it in turns to keep the mule quiet. When a messenger masquerading as a pizza boy was sent over to pay a visit, the cops ordered the fi sherman not to open the door.

The Bartolos held out almost until day four, but fi nally the lure of $18 million worth of drugs proved too much. They stormed the apartment, demanded the drugs, threatened the mule with handguns and almost hugged the twenty-three plastic packets that were sitting in a black Puma sports bag on the kitchen bench. Which was when Jenny’s crew stepped into view and arrested all three, the whole thing on tape and a Crown witness who stank of fi sh.

‘Surprised to see him here again?’ asked Mac, as the latest round of dishes arrived.

Jenny shrugged. ‘He got nine years, six non-parole. Must’ve behaved himself.’

Mac poured the last of the Wither Hills sauvignon blanc, dead-soldiered it in the ice bucket and nodded to the waiter for another.

There was a candle in a red glass between them, the dying light of day fl ickered on the Pacifi c. Around them were fl ash women in big hairdos, pearls and high-rise heels, but looking at Jen in her Levis Mac reckoned he was ahead on points.

Jen’s face had changed slightly since Rachel was born, a little less plump but with a lot more laugh lines. She was still very pretty. She was on twelve months’ maternity leave from the Feds, the end of which was eleven weeks away. Every bone in Mac’s new-father body wanted his wife to stay at home with Rachel, but he knew Jen was ready for that fi ght; ready like he was never going to be.

‘Sorry about uni,’ mumbled Mac. ‘And the freelance stuff - it’s routine work. Nothing to worry about.’

Jenny smiled, sipped the wine. ‘It’s me you’re worried about, isn’t it, Macca?’

He looked out over the sea and exhaled. Part of him wanted to tell her that he didn’t want her going back to being a frontline cop, not against the scumbags she dealt with. He’d grown up in a cop household and it was bad enough being a boy with a detective dad.

He didn’t want Rachel having to wear all the crap that went with it.

Mac could have done that whole song and dance - he’d sure rehearsed it enough. But he could also own up to who he’d married.

He remembered the night he’d realised that his own family was not the neat patriarchy projected to Rockhampton. His mother Patricia had just gone back to Rockhampton Base Hospital where she was a senior nursing sister. Mac was ten and his sister, Virginia, eight and there’d been some mix-up one afternoon about who was supposed to pick up Ginny from her swimming squad. Frank had made sure the argument was all about his wife going back to work and Mac remembered lying in bed, hearing his mother say, ‘Well that’s who you married, mate. Why don’t we start with that?’

Mac looked back from the window, they locked eyes and Jen smiled. Mac smiled back, raised his glass and felt a sigh rush between his teeth.

‘A toast,’ said Mac, raising his glass. ‘To mothers, wives and cops.’

They clinked and drank, then Jenny got out of her chair, came around the table, kissed Mac on the left ear, put both arms around his neck and snuggled in. ‘I love you, Mr Macca,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘You’re a beautiful man.’

They staggered slightly as they walked south on the Esplanade. Jenny’s right arm was across Mac’s shoulderblade and she leaned into his neck, the warm breeze off the beach blowing her scented hair and wine breath into his face. Jen was incredibly strong - she’d gone back to the pool when Rachel was one month old and was already swimming for an hour at a pace that Mac couldn’t hit for two laps.

They made into the dark of Hedges Avenue, the beachfront road where the millionaires lived, when they both heard something and stopped as Jen put her hand up. Below the breeze they could hear a girl’s voice, pleading, sobbing. It was almost ten-thirty pm as they stared into the dark driveway of an apartment block under construction. Mac followed Jen as she started walking down the driveway. The sobbing came up again, this time with a yelp.

‘Hello,’ yelled Jenny. ‘Are you okay?’

A plaintive, late-teens voice called, ‘Help me!’

Jenny sprinted into the dark, heading towards a small light behind the builders’ dumpsters at the end of the alley. Mac followed, breathing shallow, body and brain on high alert, his instincts wanting to tell Jenny not to go in there. Further into the dark, and then under a small service lamp at the end of the alley, they rounded the dumpster and stopped. George Bartolo smiled back at them from where he was crouched beside the bin, holding a young blonde woman by the hair.

Jenny shaped up to him as George stood and threw the girl aside, who almost fell over in her heels, the night breeze blowing her purple baby-doll dress up to her ribs.

The girl looked at Mac, sniffed. ‘Sorry - it wasn’t my idea.’

‘You shut your fucking mouth!’ yelled George as Jenny moved closer, her fi sts clenched.

Mac was putting his hand out to pull Jenny back when he felt cold, hard steel behind his left ear. Then there were three small clicks that could only come from one source. Slowly putting his hands out, Mac turned slightly to his left and saw the Thai at the other end of what looked like a silenced 9 mm handgun.

‘Jen,’ he shouted, but she didn’t hear him.

‘I’m sorry,’ cried the fl oozy - manic-eyed with fucked sinuses

- who was now panicking at the appearance of a gun.