Jill Jackson - 04 - Watch the World Burn (5 page)

Troy kicked on the door to his apartment with his foot.

‘We don’t want any,’ Lucy said from inside.

‘Open up, smartarse,’ he said. ‘These bags are heavy.’

When she opened the door, he immediately scanned the floor for Chris’s bag. Frowned.

Lucy caught his expression. ‘Don’t worry, Chris called. He’s having dinner over at Makayla’s.’

‘Yeah, well, he knows he’s not supposed to. He’s supposed to be home with you after school.’

Lucy shrugged, then helped him with the groceries.

‘Tim Tams!’ she said. ‘You’re a good brother.’ She ripped the packet open.

Troy took it from her hands. ‘Dinner, remember?’

She snatched the packet back, grabbed a biscuit and ducked out of her brother’s reach.

‘What do you think of Makayla, Luce?’ asked Troy.

‘She’s all right,’ said Lucy.

‘And what would you tell me if you weren’t being loyal to Chris?’

‘Oh, if that was the case, I’d tell you that I think she’s a particularly unintelligent, disrespectful little street girl, who’ll be locked up or knocked up, possibly both, within the next year.’

‘Well, good thing you’re loyal to Chris, then, and you didn’t tell me that, or I’d have to stop him seeing her.’ He met Lucy’s raised eyebrows with his own arched look, and they both laughed. As if Chris would do what Troy told him, anyway.

Troy’s neck ached. He stabbed a steak knife into the shrink-wrapped plastic around his six-pack of beer. He twisted a cap off and hooked it towards the bin. Half the bottle was gone by the time the cap hit the bottom of the bin.

‘Don’t you think you should just buy cartons?’ said Lucy, watching him. ‘They’re more economical than buying a six-pack every day.’

‘I don’t drink a six-pack every day,’ he said.

She gave him the eyebrows again. ‘You know we’ve got the addictive gene from Mum. You’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself.’

Troy finished the bottle. What a frigging day. ‘What a frigging day,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’

‘The fire investigators came out to Incendie again. They’re pretty sure Miriam Caine was murdered.’

‘That’s horrible,’ Lucy said. ‘I mean, it’s horrible for the woman, but you were there. You could have been hurt.’

‘It could have been me or anyone in the restaurant.’ He explained further when he saw Lucy’s expression. ‘Oh, I don’t mean that I could have been killed, it’s just that anyone could have been the killer, even me.’

‘Oh, that’s much better,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m so relieved.’

‘I’m just saying, you know, that the cops are now going to look at everyone as a suspect,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, sis, they’re not going to think it was me.’ I hope, he thought. ‘But it is freaky that I was so close to a killer. Bloody hell. I might as well have stayed a copper. I thought I’d be safer in a restaurant.’

Lucy put the remaining five beers in the fridge. ‘God. Poor Mona,’ she said. ‘She came over this arvo.’

‘Yeah?’ said Troy. ‘Did you guys have much to do with each other before this?’

‘No. She’s in a completely different crowd. But I think us being at the hospital when her grandma died – I don’t know, I think she feels connected to me now. Like, she doesn’t have to explain how she’s feeling because I know what happened.’

‘You’re a good kid, Luce,’ said Troy. He leaned into the fridge. ‘Steak all right with you?’

‘I’ve got honey-soy-garlic chicken drumsticks in the oven,’ she said. ‘You should be smelling them soon.’

‘You see, this is why I buy you Tim Tams,’ he said.

Troy grabbed another beer from the fridge, left the kitchen and dropped onto the lounge. He’d missed the top of the news and wasn’t sorry. He’d had enough real life the past couple of days.

He put his beer on the table just as the key turned in the door. Chris walked in, dumped his backpack on the floor and then held the door for two friends to come in behind him. One skinny white boy wore a plus-sized basketball singlet that fitted him like a prom dress. The other had been here once before – Jayden, a Koori kid. He had the hood up on his baggy black sweatshirt, his obsidian eyes and broken nose in shadow beneath the deep cowl. Chris wore a hoodie too – a new one. Troy hadn’t seen it before. His little brother’s skin was the darkest of the family, but his eyes, today almost hidden by his trucker cap, were amber. The boys wore matching baggy jeans and bad attitudes. Without speaking, they moved towards Chris’s bedroom.

‘You guys want some dinner?’ Lucy called from the kitchen.

‘Nah, we’re going out,’ said Chris, without turning around.

‘Where?’ asked Troy, standing. ‘I thought you told your sister you were at Makayla’s tonight.’

‘We just left there,’ said Chris, his hand on his bedroom door. He closed it. Hard.

Lucy had moved. She stood between Troy and the bedroom.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked quietly.

‘Talk to him.’

‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘Don’t start, Luce.’

‘Well, promise me you won’t–’

‘I’m just going to talk to him.’ Troy stepped around his sister, knocked on his brother’s door.

‘What?’ Chris opened the door.

‘Where do you want to go?’ said Troy.

‘Just out, you know,’ said Chris.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Troy. ‘You want to go out and fuck around. Get into trouble.’

‘You don’t even know my business,’ said Chris. ‘How would you know I’m gonna do anything wrong?’

‘Because you’re wearing shit I’ve never seen before, and you’ve got no money to buy it. I reckon you stole it. Because you’re speaking and acting like some wannabe American gangster, and because you’re hanging out with these two–’

‘These two what?’

Chris now stood as tall as Troy. He thrust his chest forward, ready to go. His boys behind him watched; the white boy’s eyes afire; Jayden’s dead. Troy moved away from the doorway. He hadn’t hit Chris for years. Raised the way they were, it had been an automatic reaction to give his brother a backhander, or even a flogging, when he’d done something wrong. But one night, when Chris was twelve and had been suspended again, Troy had walked into their unit and been almost physically ill at the sight of his brother dropping to the ground, curling into a ball, ready to take a beating. He’d pulled Chris up and hugged him, promised to never hit him again.

‘Yeah, you’d
better
step back, boy,’ Chris said. The white boy behind him caught Chris’s hand in a ghetto slap.

Oh, for God’s sake. Troy took a deep breath. ‘Chris, I’m going to ask you again not to go out,’ he said. ‘I really want you to stay home tonight. I know you’re going to get hurt or get in trouble if you leave. And I’m not a cop anymore. I can’t get you out of any shit you get yourself into.’

‘We’re not gonna get in trouble,’ said Chris. ‘We’re not gonna get hurt, bro.’ The threat had dropped from his voice. ‘What are you doing home, anyway? Aren’t you s’posed to be at work?’

‘Someone got killed at the restaurant, Chris,’ said Lucy. ‘Troy’s had a shit couple of days.’

‘Damn,’ said Chris. ‘Unlucky.’

Jayden walked towards the front door, a bulging backpack over his shoulder.

‘You want some chicken, Jayden?’ asked Troy.

‘No,’ said Jayden.

‘What’s in the bag?’

‘My dick,’ said Jayden.

The white boy pissed himself laughing, and Chris failed to stop a snigger.

‘So you wear a strap-on, then, Jayden?’ asked Troy. ‘What, you just got a pussy in those pants?’

Chris and the white boy both shouted with laughter. Jayden gave him a death stare, and Lucy spoke from the kitchen.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘This is just the kind of inspiring conversation I look forward to each evening. Opinion on world affairs, discussions about literature.’

Chris grinned at her. ‘Save me some chicken, sis,’ he said. ‘Later.’

Jill paid for her salad roll and iced tea and walked quickly to the doors of the college cafeteria. Almost out, she heard Roseanna call out behind her.

‘Jill, wait up.’

Jill turned, forcing a smile. Roseanna’s cop-issue shirt strained at the bust; like most of Jill’s classmates, she rushed to the Australian Graduate School of Policing straight after her shift.

‘Toni’s just talking to Gamble about the assignment,’ continued Roseanna, in the queue to pay for her food. ‘I told her we’d wait for her.’ She curled behind her ear a ribbon of dark hair that had escaped its ponytail. Her tray held a meat pie with sauce and a bowl of chips with gravy.

You’re gonna need to go up a size in uniform after that meal, thought Jill, and then mentally slapped herself for the bitchy thought. Michael Westlake didn’t seem to mind the curves. Next in the queue behind Roseanna, he leaned forward over her shoulder and whispered something close to her neck. That’s gotta be quite a view, Jill thought. Roseanna’s quick giggle was music. Jill was pretty sure she’d never laughed like that.

‘Yeah, and then you woke up, Westlake,’ Roseanna threw back over her shoulder.

‘I got some calls to make, Rosie,’ Jill called over to her, another foot out the door. ‘See you in the next class.’

Professor Gamble’s psych class had tonight focused on non-verbal cues as indicators of stress. Gamble had emphasised to them that should they ever find themselves interviewing a psychopath, they had to assume that almost everything said would be a lie. What was his line again? She tried to remember. ‘It’s never a question of
if
they’re lying, but why.’ Gamble had listed some behavioural indicators of deception, and Jill had found herself feeling frustrated and then anxious. Frustrated because Gabriel had taught her far more about the principles of kinesic interrogation than Gamble seemed to know. And anxious because that’s how she always felt lately when she thought about Gabriel.

Which was a lot.

She slipped quietly through the shadowy corridors of the college. With just the one class here tonight, most of the old weatherboard building slumbered. The scented Manly evening breathed in through the open front doors.

In front of the building, Jill stepped out of her thongs and gathered them up in her hand. The tarred pathway held stubbornly on to the heat of the day. She padded barefoot over to the frangipani tree, its blossoms just beginning to burst in the dark green foliage. She threw her hoodie down onto the grass underneath and sat upon it, cross-legged. Took out her phone. Stared at it. Put it down.

Gabriel.

Scotty.

For twenty-two years she’d tried everything to convince herself that not all men were dangerous, that some could be trusted. But although by adulthood she’d accepted this intellectually, her body had never agreed. Dating was worse than the dentist, and given the choice between eating offal and having sex, she’d quite happily have sat down to a plate of boiled brains.

But then a couple of years ago, Scotty had snuck halfway under the radar. Her sensors had finally detected the breach and automated lockdown, but something had changed. She realised now that all of their super-competitive workout sessions and playful wrestling had happened simply because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And now...

A slow, delicious smile spread over Jill’s face and she reclined back on her elbows, seeing, smelling Scotty in her bed this morning. With Scotty she felt known, safe, loved. It was as though he could read her, anticipate her moods and go with them, her fears extinguished before they had a chance to take off.

With Gabriel she felt she didn’t know herself at all. She felt inexplicably capable of anything. And that something deep inside her, something she’d never known had existed, was asleep. And waiting.

Jill hadn’t spoken to Gabe for two weeks. She’d been busy having sex with Scotty. Right now, she wished she had a clone. That was a first. Most of the time she had trouble dealing with the one Jill Jackson.

She dropped her phone into her handbag. Forget about them for a while, she told herself. She unwrapped her salad roll, picked at the lettuce, then wished she’d bought a pie. She half-wrapped the roll again and reclined on the grass. Her T-shirt rode up at the waist and the grass was damp against her hot skin. She shivered, and laid right back into it. Stars. Huh. She’d grown used to empty black skies in the city. Street and building lights outshone the heavens in Sydney. But here, above a nook of Manly forgotten by progress, the stars cavorted and winked just as they did above Camden, her home town. The chill bit deeper into her spine and she shifted, preparing to sit up, but a warm sea-scented breeze played through her hair and tipped her sensory scales from almost painful to pleasurable.

She wondered whether pain and pleasure were so closely connected for everyone else.

After he’d helped Lucy wash up, Troy went back to the lounge room with beer number four. He turned the TV volume down so he wouldn’t distract Lucy from her homework. He pulled at his bottom lip.
Oh, Chris, what am I supposed to do with you now?
He didn’t know how to stop his brother taking the slide he seemed determined to take. He couldn’t physically control him anymore.

He wondered how much Chris still thought about what had happened before Troy got them out of foster care. Their father had been dead two years, and Chris and Lucy had had four ‘uncles’ by the time the state took them in. Chris’s kindy teacher had called DoCS when Chris had showed up one morning filthy and nursing his right arm. DoCS had taken him to hospital, and his broken humerus bone was their least worrying finding. When the doctor told them that the injury was most likely caused by abuse, they’d done a full exam. Chris had extensive anal trauma. He was four years old. They’d sent a squad car with sirens to get Lucy.

It had taken Troy months to get custody. But by age nineteen he’d effectively become the father of a four- and a five-year-old. He knew they were far better off with him than with his mother, but he often wondered whether he should have let them stay in a foster home with two regular parents.

Chris never spoke of the years between when Troy left the house and DoCS rescued them. Privately, Troy was relieved – for a few reasons. Firstly, he had no idea what he’d say to make his little brother feel better about what had happened – he’d probably say something stupid and make it worse. He also felt like shit that he’d left the little kids there when he took off. Life was pretty fucked up for him from age fifteen to eighteen, living where he could, but he knew that if he’d stayed no one would have hurt Chris that way. But mostly Troy was glad that his little brother kept quiet about those years because he knew that if Chris told him who’d broken his arm and raped him, he couldn’t have lived with himself until he’d found the cunt and killed him. And then he’d be in gaol and the kids would have no one again.

He’d been pretty lucky with Chris and Lucy for the first few years. His great-grandmother, his father’s nan, was still alive then; she was an elder in her community in Far North Queensland. When he was five, Troy had had the best Christmas of his life when his father had taken him up to Nan’s. Years later, hearing about what had happened to her grandson’s kids, she’d contacted Troy, offering help. So when he’d got a week off at the service station he worked at, Troy took the kids up to meet her. Nan was a mum for six children under twelve in her own home, kids whose parents were drugged up, locked up or bashed up too regularly. And every day and night, Nan fed and consoled many more from the community. Some of her former charges were now old enough to help out, and Nan’s home was bursting with children, breastfeeding mothers, great cooking smells and gossip. For a week, Chris and Lucy swam, ate fish, laughed and tore about barefoot. For the whole of the next year, they’d begged to go back.

Troy remembered that life-changing year very well. His long-held fantasy of joining the police force looked like staying just that, until the servo got done over by two druggies with balaclavas and a shotgun. Suddenly, he decided he was going to go for it – he wanted something better for his life. He’d worried that Chris and Lucy would baulk at a three-month stay with Nan while he studied on campus, but they’d started packing that night.

Lucy and Chris had been inconsolable when he’d told them, years later, that Nan had died. Thinking back now, Troy figured that this was the year Chris had really begun acting up at school – and giving him hell at home.

Lucy’s giant ginger cat, Shrek, now thumped about his ankles. Bigger than most designer dogs, Troy couldn’t believe that they’d managed to smuggle him into this rental apartment and keep him here for the past eighteen months. Had to have something to do with his tiny voice. Despite the fact that his paws were the size of racquetballs, he had a little squeak of a mew. Troy knew that Shrek was not operating on all cylinders. His golden eyes were slightly crossed, and he stumbled and bumbled his way through the unit, leaping up to furniture and missing, having knock-down brawls with the cat in the mirror every time they forgot to cover it. Shrek always had a bruised or split lip.

Right now, Shrek trilled in his little-bird voice for food.

‘Yeah, yeah, Dumb Dumb,’ said Troy; Shrek answered to both names. ‘I’ll get you some chicken.’ Shrek wove and warbled his way to the kitchen with him, almost tripping him up. Troy sat in the kitchen with a beer while Shrek, up on the table, chortled his way through his food. Cleaning, dreaming or eating, Shrek let everyone know he was having a good time.

‘I’m pissed off they didn’t let me sit in on the rest of that meeting today, Dumb Dumb,’ Troy said. But if he was honest, though, he thought Hutchinson and Gibson had been pretty sloppy in letting him sit in on even part of the fireys’ findings. Crime Scene 101 told you not to let any potential suspect back onto the scene. Otherwise, if it turned out this person was your squirrel, they’d have had plenty of time to cook up a story, make it plausible for a jury. But no one would seriously consider him a suspect. ‘Would they, Dumb Dumb?’ Shrek gave him cross eyes, and bent back to his bowl.

Troy took the last beer back to the lounge. ‘Too smart for your own good, aren’t you, Luce?’ He saluted bottle number six at her bedroom door. He nudged the volume up a smidge and reclined back on the couch.

Troy woke to the phone ringing and a wet patch on the cushion under his mouth.

‘What the fuck?’ he said. ‘Christopher.’ He scrambled for the mobile on the table in front of him but dropped it. ‘Fuck!’ He fell to his knees and reached for it. Lucy snapped on a light, blinking, in her pyjamas.

‘Hello,’ he said into the phone. ‘Is he all right? ... I’ll be there in fifteen. Thanks.’

‘Is he okay?’ Lucy’s eyes were huge.

‘The fucker’s got himself charged,’ said Troy, looking for his shoes. ‘What did I say?’

‘Where is he?’ she said.

‘Copshop, Redfern. I’m going to get him.’

‘What did he do?’ asked Lucy.

‘Vandalism, graffiti. Little fuck,’ he said.

‘You can’t drive. You’ve been drinking.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘I’ll get dressed. I’ll drive,’ she said.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘At least I have a licence.’

‘You’ve taught me. I can do it.’

‘Forget it. Cops get schooled in how to drive pissed. It’s part of the job.’

‘You’re an idiot. I’m coming.’

‘Hurry up then,’ he said.

Troy washed his face, brushed his teeth and gargled. He then went back to the kitchen and scoffed some more garlic chicken. Entering a copshop smelling of mouthwash or mint gum was as good as blowing beer fumes in their face. Every drunk prick had tried that one.

‘Ready, Lucy?’ he called.

As Troy and Lucy left their apartment in the middle of the night to pick up their brother from the police station, Troy had a feeling that this scene would soon become familiar.

Troy parked the car in a one-way street near Redfern Station, wondering if he’d ever see it again. Graffiti covered the surface of every wall on the street. He kept Lucy close, and encouraged her to jog with him across Regent Street to the TNT Plaza tower building, which housed Redfern Police Station. The sight of his former workplace soured the beer in his gut. He and Lucy entered the station.

It had been four years since Troy had last been in here. It had been a home, then he’d become a hero, and finally he was hated. Thank Christ he didn’t know the Koori female customer-liaison officer behind the partition. He gave her Christopher’s name and she told them to take a seat. Troy dropped into a bolted-down plastic chair on the wrong side of the glass and waited.

‘So, I was, what, twelve, when you left here?’ asked Lucy. She walked past the noticeboards, picked up a flier about domestic violence and flipped it open.

‘Yeah, maybe eleven,’ he said.

Lucy put the flier back, chose another. ‘You never really told me and Chris why you left the job, you know.’

‘Didn’t I?’ he said.

‘We always guessed it was because of the shooting.’

Troy looked over towards the partition. The liaison officer was too far away to hear them.

‘But I remember you went back to work after that,’ said Lucy. ‘You came back here. You brought me back here once when your hand was still bandaged up.’

‘You were cute,’ he said.

‘I had the mumps.’

‘You didn’t act sick, walking around here, talking to everyone. You climbed up on Singo’s desk and scribbled all over his whiteboard. He lost half a day’s work with what you rubbed off.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ she said. ‘So, if it wasn’t your hand, why did you leave, then?’

‘Are you going to keep nagging me until I tell you?’ he asked.

‘You know it,’ she said.

‘I was assigned to a smash-and-grab in a leatherwear shop that was just across the road there. Maybe forty leather jackets got boosted. It happened around five o’clock one morning. So we get there, dust for prints, and – surprise, surprise – the prints are in the system. Couple of local hoppers, just kids, not much older than you and Chris. So that afternoon I go around to their aunt’s house – where they live – and half the street’s wearing leather jackets.’ Troy laughed, rubbed at stubble on his cheek. Lucy came and perched next to him, knees bent, feet up on the chair.

‘Anyway, I go in and the kids are in bed. The rest of the jackets are all over the floor in their room. I bring the hoppers back here, feed them McDonald’s, and they tell me everything. Thing is, they swear they only got eighteen jackets.’

Lucy rested her chin on her knees, blinking slowly.

‘Am I keeping you awake here?’ he asked.

‘Keep going,’ she said.

‘So I figure that the shop owner’s just doing an insurance scam – as you do – but there was nothing I could’ve done about that. Couldn’t prove either of them were lying.’

Lucy leaned her head against his arm.

‘So,’ he continued, ‘the next thing I’m around at the workers’ club, just behind this building, and Singo and Herd, two of the guys I worked with here, are bragging about how they got to the smash-and-grab before the responding car, loaded up with a rack of jackets and pissed off.’

‘Damn,’ said Lucy.

‘Yep.’

‘So what’d you do?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You don’t roll over on another cop.’

‘What happened then?’ she asked.

‘Well, nothing should have happened then,’ he said, and sighed. He lowered his voice. ‘But the next day I’m walking past the interrogation room and I hear something.’

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘It was someone getting flogged. I look in, and Herd and Singo are kicking the crap out of the two hoppers. I mean smashing them. One of the kids is screaming; the other was past that, eyes rolling back in his head.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Lucy, sitting up, hand over her mouth. ‘What happened?’

‘I busted in there and pulled the pricks off of them. There was blood fucking everywhere,’ he said. ‘Herd and Singo were laughing. Singo fucking
thanked
me. Said he’d been having too much fun and couldn’t stop. I asked them what the fuck they were doing, and Herd said the kids had been telling anyone who’d listen that him and Singo had boosted half the jackets. “So?” I asked them. “Isn’t that enough?” they wanted to know.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Lucy. ‘What happened to the kids?’

‘I got them over to RPA and one of the boys was blinded in one eye. The doctor said he couldn’t save it and wanted to know what had happened.’ Troy leaned his head back in the seat. ‘I gave him a full report.’

‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ said Lucy.

‘Well, it’s good in that it was the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘But Herd and Singo were charged and kicked out, and I became known as a mongrel dog whistle-blower that no one wanted to work with.’

Lucy opened her mouth to speak, her eyes burning, but at that moment the latch of the heavy security door clicked. Chris walked through, head down. Lucy rushed over to him. ‘Chris, are you all right?’ she said.

‘Let’s just get out of here,’ he said.

After completing the paperwork, Troy was happy to oblige.