Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1) (10 page)

T
he station house was empty
. No Denny, no Chandler. Even the DPU was empty. A pile of faxes sat in her pigeon hole. She flicked through them. They were the crime scene reports she ordered, old news. With the place to herself, she took a beer from the DPU fridge (they kept it stocked with Fourex Gold) and drank it in front of the television in reception, the midday news.

Romano was at something of a loose end. Harris had done much as she’d asked. He’d made the introduction requested. He was working on getting the notebook translated. All he had left was to get hold of Donald and Mary Marr, something that seemed inevitable, seeing they lived on Tunnel. In addition to which, she now had all the paperwork.

What she was running low on was progress. None of it was coming together. She remembered the sensation of a case gaining momentum, and felt none of it here.

Romano took another beer from the fridge and laid herself out on the DPU couch. She closed her eyes and slept, finding herself swimming in the ocean. There were people there, people she knew. Their faces changed each time she lifted her head from the water. O’Shea became Chandler became Harris. She saw her mother and Sophie and Mary Marr and another woman. Further out in the water, Romano could see a life buoy. As she swam towards it, the ocean turned pink, then red and warm. It was blood. She pushed on through. At the point of exhaustion, she reached out through the gore for the buoy and watched as her hand passed through it like a ghost.

She woke.

She sat up and wrote it down:

Swimming.

Changing faces.

Vapour.

Blood.

It didn’t make sense.

R
omano gathered
her things and drove home. She changed, had another drink, and took herself to the beach at the end of her street just as the light was fading. Hoping that a conscious swim might trigger something new, she swam out into the surf, past the waves, into the calmer water. There was no buoy out there, but the island itself looked different. It was coming into dusk, only a few minutes from night. The dark hills were so much closer than they felt. They towered over The Strip and the house. The place would have been beautiful before development.

Romano swam out further, hoping for a longer view. In the deeper water, she could see all the way to Arthurton. An old rust-coloured barge puttered in around the point, a relic from before the tunnel, from before the rest of it.

Romano closed her eyes and floated. The two victims hadn’t killed themselves. Sophie might have overdosed but Thomas Bachelard had been stone-cold murdered. As she reviewed the interviews in her head, Romano saw that no one was really denying it.

The senator’s kid had been acting up.

Everyone wanted him to stop.

He didn’t.

And he had a history of writing about poker.

Romano treaded water and looked back to the shore. She stared right into the pitiful haze of The Strip, the worst blight on the coastline, the centre of things. That made sense. An idea came. It was high time she hit the casinos.

H
arris sat
in his office in the dark and waited. At ten, the call came in. He answered it, then walked to the kitchen and took a bundle wrapped in a tea towel out of the pantry. He unwrapped it—a handgun—and checked the clip before sliding the thing down the side of the couch cushions.

A knock at the door sounded.

“It’s open,” he yelled, planting himself on the couch by the piece.

Carl Yates let himself in and climbed the stairs. Gold Point Security by designation. On the inside, he was the hotel’s drug connection. He looked after that.

“Where’s the girl?” he said.

“Having a nap, I hope,” said Harris. “Sit down.”

Yates was a big man, a fighter of some sort back in the day. He’d held onto the physique. Harris had seen him work in the ring. He was fast. Dirty, too.

“Been a while,” said Yates, planting himself in a chair. “Thought for sure your mate was going to come right over in the car park today.”

“She’s still learning the ropes,” said Harris. “What do you want?”

“I’ve got myself in a bit of strife, yeah.”

“Right.”

“Steady on, okay?” he said and very slowly he lifted his shirt. Yates removed a gun from the rear waistband of his gym shorts. With his eyes on Harris, he laid it down flat on the coffee table.

“You’re probably looking for this.”

Harris leaned over and had a look. Right calibre, right make. “You pinch this from the crime scene, Carl?”

“Look, I had to knock a bloke over the weekend, and things have been a bit hairy lately. The bloody Chans have got themselves some sort of forensics shit, apparently, and it’s fucking stressing me out. They can prove things all of a sudden. That’s what they’re saying, anyhow. Zane’s taking it as fucking gospel. She’s listening to them all of a sudden.”

Harris had heard it.

The golden rule on Tunnel was don’t make waves. The Chan family owned bits and pieces of the island—The Pyramid Hotel, a string of brothels, a residential development down the coast—but they played nicely with the other families, with the Agriolis and the Doomriders and O’Shea. Everyone kept the peace but this cooperation only existed at the top, on the management tier. There was never any turf war on Tunnel, but at the street level, where Yates worked, things were a lot looser. People like Yates could do pretty much as they pleased, as long as he didn’t get caught or compromised further up the chain, by another family.

“So are the Chans looking into things on their own now? Or is that just gossip, too?” said Harris.

“Look, a month back, one of my guys took care of, eh, a problem, and the next week they send The Fox over to Bruno with a ballistics report. Bruno didn’t give a fuck, but then Zane called him and then we had to let the bloke go. I really liked the bloke too, it was fucked.” Yates looked more scared than he should have. He kept glancing at the gun. “So I’ve gone and ordered a bunch of clean guns from the Riders, but they’re stretched at the moment because of all this…and I dunno, I guess I…”

“I guess you just what?” said Harris.

“I guess I just borrowed this. I didn’t know it was going to be a big thing.”

“Well, it is now. So why’d you bring this to me?”

“I don’t like where things are headed with it. I’ve been asking around. Talk is, it doesn’t look so great. I liked Sophie. People are saying she OD’d on bad gear, in my hotel. People are saying it’s my fucking stuff, and it’s not, and now I’ve used this gun, as well, somewhere else and…it’s all fucked up.”

“And you think the Chans might trace it all back to…”

“Back to the hotel or someone else in my crew, yeah. I certainly don’t like the way the wind’s blowing.”

“Bad for business?”

“Yeah. And…”

“Just say it.”

“I…I don’t like what happened to the kid before they topped him. Fair enough he had it coming. Christ, we all knew his days were numbered, but fucking a guy in the ass when he’s dead, that’s not on. I don’t want anyone putting me anywhere near this whole thing. I’ve got no interest in that sort of stuff—none—and I want O’Shea to know it. I don’t want
that
to come back on me.”

“Okay,” said Harris, mainly because Yates seemed to want to hear it. “What are we gonna do here, with this?”

“I’ll leave this here with you, yeah? Like I never had it. No one joins the dots, you just let sleeping dogs lie. No matter where the talk comes from, I never had it, right?”

“Okay. I can handle the Chans if they come my way with this thing. But it’s going to cost you.”

Yates reached into the front pocket of his shorts and placed a small grey USB drive on the table beside the gun. “Would this get me clear of it?” he said. “You know what Jeff would do if he found out about this, so keep this to yourself. Deal?”

Harris picked up the drive. “Is this what I think it is?”

Yates nodded. “Deal?”

“That’ll work,” said Harris.

R
omano smoothed
her dress across her thighs and looked around the room. The dress, the only one she had, was too much. Too tight and too short. It wasn’t working. The Gold Point poker room was a nerd convention. The players were retirees in fishing hats, young guys in grey marl hoodies, overweight guys in discount slacks. There were more t-shirts than collars. And there were no women. None. Romano sat at the bar and wondered how anyone could spend a lifetime in this, writing about it. Their victim must have been half playboy and half loser.

At the bar, she told every guy who tried it on the same thing,
I’m supposed to be meeting some writer guy here.
The geeks didn’t need much in the way of discouragement. None of them argued the point. She sat there and drank and watched them do their thing. After a good long while, a waitress tipped her off. The writers all hung out in the booths by the high roller’s room. It was down the hall.

Romano went there. Most of the booths were empty, but she came up on one containing a dishevelled older man in a loose-fitting suit. He sat on his own, a pile of papers beside him and a scuffed black laptop plugged into a stray wall socket. Typing away, he barely noticed her as she slid in across from him.

“Excuse me but—”

“Hold on,” he said, and kept typing.

Romano signalled for a drink. A waiter made his way down. She ordered Jameson and ice.

“And for the gentleman?”

“I’ll have the same,” The writer waited until they were alone, then said, “What can I do for you? I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m married and broke so I hope it’s something else.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Romano. She took her ID out and said, “You’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

“Writing about these poker dickheads for a living.”

He laughed. “Oh, dear. Guilty as charged.”

Romano lit a cigarette, dragged deep. “It’s almost as fucking pointless as being a copper. What’s your name?”

“Gordon. Gordon Ramsey.”

“Like the chef?”

“Different spelling.”

“Okay, Gordon Ramsey, I want you to tell me about another writer, a guy called David Marshall, real name Thomas Bachelard.”

“He’s dead,” said Gordon, without hesitation. “I didn’t know he used a pen name.”

“You over here when it happened?”

“Yes.”

“You kill him?”

“No.”

“Okay. That’s progress,” she said. She opened her notebook and jotted Ramsey’s name down. Writing proved a little harder than she expected. Her handwriting had a scratched feel to it that she recognised. When the waiter arrived with her drink, she made a mental note to take this one a bit slower.

“So, you said
didn’t
kill him right?”

“Correct. Can I see that badge again?”

She showed him. “So, this Marshall guy. Tell me his story.”

“He was a little shit,” said Gordon. “None of us liked him. A trust-fund kid that managed to buy his way into more than a few places the rest of us can’t afford. And he was a hack because of it. All access, no talent—well, none for writing.”

“I haven’t read his stuff,” said Romano. “You see him last week?”

“I’ve seen him. But maybe not last week. He came over last month. Him and that Nancy Spungen character, the local girl, they were around together. He told me he was working on some story about high-stakes prizes in one of the closed rooms. It sounded like nonsense to me. My readers are more interested in the play-by-play. I do that type of thing. David wrote about entertainment. Who was there, how much they won, what they wore, who they fucked, what they drank. That sort of thing. The prizes, the glamour. To his credit, he had his niche. It sold.”

“Had you met him before?”

“A few times. I met him here in fact, maybe a year or so back.”

“So he’d been to the island before then?” said Romano.

Gordon nodded. “I believe he’s been over a few times.”

So much for the theory that Bachelard was some babe in the woods. “You’ve been a big help,” she said. “I’m going to buy you another drink.”

She did. They shared another round, then another, running down other writers she could speak with, people involved in the Gold Point, high rollers, a select few who might be amenable. Gordon seemed all right to Romano. Easily the most helpful person she’d met so far. But there was something else to him as well. As the night progressed, she started to like the guy. He was another observer on Tunnel. “I’m pretty much invisible,”
he said at one point. He told her he probably shouldn’t be seen with her, but as the drinks really took hold, he also said he no longer gave a fuck. He was done with the island’s skewed social contract. It all wore at him. He said he was tired.

I
t was
a crisp morning as Harris opened the gate to Romano’s place. She’d let the yard go to hell. The lawn was ankle-deep. What survived in the garden—the natives, built for this type of neglect—poured out of their beds. Old Bill Dranger would have been appalled. He hadn’t been the best policeman but he’d kept his house in order. After ringing the bell at the front door, Harris tried the rear kitchen screen. Romano answered, half-asleep in smeared make-up, wearing some sort of black cocktail dress. She was holding a handgun, police issue.

“What the fuck?” she said.

He followed her into the living room where she slumped down, resting her head in her hands, leaving the gun on the chair beside her.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said.

“Oh, God. What is it?”

“Go and have a shower first.”

The hangover must have been bad, because she got up and did it. Harris made tea in her disheveled kitchen and listened to her retch in the bathroom, remembered it clear as day. When she came back out, Romano took one look at the tea and said,
Get that shit away from me,
before fixing herself a Bloody Mary. In a bath towel, with a cigarette and a cocktail, she seemed to brighten a little.

“Okay. So, let’s see it. And whatever it is. It better be fucking good.”

“It’s good,” said Harris.

He took the printouts from his pocket and unfolded them. These were from Yates’ USB stick. There were four images. He placed them in a row on the kitchen bench. Romano bent over and looked. She spotted it immediately.

“Are these stills from security footage? Where did you get these?”

“Someone needed a favour,” he said.

Each photo showed two men. They walked the hallway of the Gold Point to Bachelard’s room. They stood outside his door. One of them was holding something, a black shape.

“Christ, that’s our gun,” said Romano, pointing at one of the figures.

“See this?” asked Harris. In the third photo, one of the men slid a passkey into the room’s lock.

“What the...”

The final photo was time-stamped twenty-five minutes later. It was taken from the lift security camera. The same two men stood together, eyes fixed forward. Smiling. The photos were clear.

“You recognise them?” Romano asked. She brought her face close to page. “They look pretty rough. Is that blood on his fucking shirt?”

“Yeah,” said Harris. “I know them.” He pointed to the one on the left, a balding, solid-looking man, like a footballer gone feral. He wore shorts and a denim work shirt. His face had an exaggerated quality to it: huge nose, eyes and mouth. “This is Drags. That’s what they call him.” The other one was almost the opposite; he was tall and thin with a crop of wild curly hair. He wore round spectacles, and his clothes looked especially tattered and worn. “And that’s Petey,” Harris said. “Petey and Drags. They’re bad news, but I didn’t think they were in any sort of shape for something like this, not up here.”

“I don’t suppose you know where we can find them?” said Romano. She started to move around, grabbing a pair of socks off the back of a chair.

“I do,” said Harris. “But…”

“But what?” she called from the hallway.

“They're fucking junkies. We're going to have to go down to Drainland and dig them out. You might want to put a call in to the station. We’ll need those other two.”

Harris heard her stop.

“Is it that bad?” she said.

“It’s pretty bad,” he answered.

T
he camp was
forty minutes south. They met the other two down there. Harris hadn't seen Denny and Chandler up close for a while. They seemed about the same. Denny had bulked up a little. There were rumours he was getting a little help with that from Carl Yates. Chandler was the same evergreen deadshit he always was: Ranger Smith with a chevron moustache. Both of them looked angry today. They stood there next to their cruiser and glared as Romano pulled the police cruiser in alongside.

“Look at this,” said Denny, as Harris stepped out.

“Jim,” said Chandler. “Long time no see.”

“Not long enough,” said Harris.

“It might have been Bill’s funeral,” said Denny, smiling through it. “I think that’s the last time we were all together.”

“Did you guys run the files?” said Romano.

Denny lifted a manila folder off the cruiser’s bonnet and handed it to her. “These two must have been bad. Even old Bill had paperwork on them. They’ve done it all. Assault, B&E, sexual assault, possession with intent, you name it. Drags killed a bloke back in the seventies. Did time in Boggo Road. Petey is a convicted pedo. He’s not even allowed up in the North. He’s technically not allowed on the whole island.”

“So what is he doing here?” Romano asked, head down, scanning through the paperwork.

Chandler smirked. “What
were
they doing here, Jim?”

“Fuck you,” said Harris.

“What’s this about?” Romano asked.

They all looked at her.

“Drainland is before our time,” said Denny. “We don't normally go in there. That place is its own thing. They fix their own problems.”

“Wow,” said Romano, “Sounds like some good quality community policing.”

Denny shrugged.

“Maybe you should have a look before you run your mouth,” said Harris.

They rode down together in one Land Cruiser. The camp lay at the end of Robinson Beach behind a headland of thick scrub and tea tree mangrove. Chandler drove, and he took them down to the tideline and along the beach to the beginnings of the outcrop. They walked in from there.

The camp sat in a kilometre-long cove between Point Rhoda and another jutting section of rock that Harris couldn't remember the name of. It was where the lighthouse stood, beside the Mission. As they came over the crest of the point, Romano lost her color. Seeing Drainland for the first time was always a moment. She kept it together but there was no mistaking her fear. They all stood there on the headland and surveyed the nightmare.

The entire site looked like bomb wreckage or a refuse dump. Torn-apart canvas tents flapped in the morning wind. Rusted caravans sat half-submerged in the sand. All manner of make-do shelters (corrugated iron huts, tarpaulin strapped over barrels, hollowed-out furniture) dotted every conceivable part of the beach inbetween. In the centre of Drainland sat the hull of a beached ship, the back half of it rusted open, disappearing into the ocean.

“Welcome to Club Med,” said Denny.

Harris had forgotten how busy the place was. People staggered around and swam naked. Parties gathered around open lit fires trailing columns of black smoke into the air. Dogs roamed freely, like flies.

Denny said, “Jim, you better have a word to the Riders when you get a chance. This looks worse than last time. It looks worse, right?” He turned to Chandler and Chandler shrugged. “O’Shea would have a conniption if he saw this.”

Harris ignored it. O’Shea was getting his cut.

“It smells like…” said Romano, failing to find the words. “How the fuck?”

It was everyone’s question when they first saw it.
How could this happen?

“Come on,” Harris said. “The Priest is meeting us down there.”

T
he residents
of Drainland were not generally wary of strangers. People came and went from the place. From what Harris had heard, initiation into the camp was entirely about turning up and not causing too much trouble in the first few days. There was no law or governance, no organisation. No one in the camp represented anything except desire and hopelessness. And it showed. As Harris edged up on the first circle of beach dwellers—a party sitting around a boom box wired to a car battery—he noted the smell of decay. Rotting skin. There were a dozen of them. Living zombies, the lot. There was one woman, her head bandaged, a bright red splotch of fresh blood soaking through the gauze. She laughed at them as they passed.

All the residents shot junk down here, or had, until the meth swept through. Both were cheap in the camp, and it was the whole reason to be here. The Doomriders ran that side of things. They funded Drainland through government benefits, had a team of people who crawled through the mess to keep everyone’s cash rolling in. Then they bought and cooked the gear in bulk, skimming a good profit. The business wasn't quite enough to lift the gang out of Domino and into the big time, but it wouldn’t be long.

Harris spotted the priest closer in. Harris watched him stand from a campfire across the beach and walk towards them. Harris had met Father Frith before but the man didn’t make a lot of sense to him. He was no merry parish pastor. Instead, Frith was tall and dark-eyed, with a face of weathered skin, almost ghoulish in appearance. His uniform black suit had an unnatural neatness to it. He was a caretaker, of sorts.

“Jim,” he said, holding out his hand.

“You know these two. This is the new girl, Bill Dranger’s replacement. Laura Romano,” said Harris.

Romano shook the priest’s hand without looking directly at him. She remained distracted by the flush of movement in the camp around them.

“It’s been a while since you’ve been down this way,” said Firth.

“Not long enough Pastor,” said Denny.

“How are things faring?” Harris asked.

Frith looked at his feet. “Much the same.”

“Everyone’s white,” said Romano, out of nowhere.

“There’s an Asian part on the other side,” said Chandler. He was twitchy, too, standing with a hand on his sidearm.

Frith seemed not to hear it. “You said you needed to find someone?”

“Two blokes. Petey and Drags,” said Harris.

He handed over the pictures.

Frith nodded. “These two, hey. I know where to start.”

Frith led the way, taking them further into the camp. The locals in the centre of Drainland were older and warier. Conversations quietened as they came through. People brought their children and dogs in beside them. Frith stopped at a caravan awning to speak with a party inside; two women and a man, all of them bloated and sickly, sat in camp chairs around a portable television.

“I’m looking for these two,” Frith said, holding up the printouts.

Only one of the women moved. She stared past Frith for a few seconds and said, “Twenty dollars.”

“Okay,” said Romano. “Have another look first.”

The woman took the printout and looked at it. Her eyes seemed to focus through the page. “Twenty dollars,” she repeated.

“Where are they?”

“In the pit,” said the woman.

Romano turned to Frith. “You know what she’s on about?”

Frith nodded.

Romano took the page back from the woman and handed her five dollars.

“Fuck you,” said the woman.

“Slick,” said Denny.

“Lead the way,” said Romano.

Frith pointed them north. “You might want to keep your wits about you in this next bit,” he said. “The pit is where they dump their garbage, so watch where you’re walking.”

“Why would they be up there?” said Romano.

“It’s where they put the troublemakers,” said Harris.

“Great,” said Romano. “The ghetto of the ghetto.”

Chandler took out his service revolver and checked it.

The smell got worse as the tree line of the dunes appeared. They were back from centre now, diverting up the beach away from the wreckage of the ship. They each had to scramble up a wooden ladder onto the higher ground. When they stood level with the beached ship’s upper deck, Harris noticed a group of children playing in the wreck, perilously high. A small boy spotted them and waved. Chandler waved back. Frith looked displeased. He took a small folded piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled a note on it.

Behind the dunes sat the pit, exactly as described. The sand tapered off into a steep, narrow valley, and the valley was dug out further and filled with every type of garbage. At the bottom, a few skeletal humans picked over the site, looking even more wretched than the rest. With Frith in the lead, they circled around the edge of the dump to a stretch of bushland. Five minutes into the scrub, they entered a clearing, and at the centre sat a hub of tents and shanties. A group of men sat around an open fire.

Harris walked into the circle and said, “Nobody move. We're looking for two blokes, Petey and Drags. No one’s getting into trouble, so everybody just relax and stay still.”

He went a bit closer and looked each of them. The men were comatose, barely upright. It was quiet in the clearing and when of one of them leaned forward to vomit, the sound of the liquid hitting the sand rattled Denny. “Let’s get this over with,” he said. “Come on Jim.”

Frith said, “He’s right. It might be a good idea to do this quick. I know some of these men.”

Chandler provided cover while the rest of them searched the tents. Most were empty. A small girl sat in one, pressed into the corner. Another contained a bucket of human shit sitting in a weird occult circle of fake plastic candles. The final tent housed a dead body, an old man, a syringe still poking out of his arm. Romano went in and checked the man’s face. She shook her head.

“Which one?” said Harris, coming back to the camp fire. He was looking at the men.

Frith seemed to catch his meaning and pointed to a smaller man with deep welts on one side of his face. Harris slipped on a pair of blue surgical gloves and grabbed the man, slapping him awake. “I want Petey and Drags. Where are they?”

The man groaned and passed out again.

Frith winced.

Harris moved around the circle, slapping each one and shoving the printouts in their faces. He was about half through the circle when a man he'd already hit came awake again and said, “They’re fucking dead, man. Dead as a fucking doornail, hey.” The man’s head rolled on his shoulders like a broken limb.

“What?” screamed Harris.

“The pit…the pit,” said the man.

“I’m not going into that fucking pit,” said Denny. “This is crazy.”

The man laughed in Harris’s face, a trickle of blood trickling from his nose. Denny moved quickly, bringing his gun up and placing it against the man’s forehead. “This isn’t funny, shit-for-brains.”