Fallout Read online

  ‘Aren’t you the smart fart?’ said Boulder Head. ‘Fat lot of good it’ll do you.’

  Ihaka nodded thoughtfully. ‘So you’re going to knock off a cop because Willie Smaile doesn’t like people poking around in stuff that happened thirty years ago? That old prick must have some dark secrets.’

  ‘Don’t even try to second-guess Mr Smaile,’ said Boulder Head. ‘He’s way ahead of a stooge like you.’

  ‘Shut up, Wayne,’ said Murray.

  Ihaka switched back to Murray. ‘Still, I suppose you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb — it looks like Miriam might not make it.’

  Murray told Wayne, ‘Something’s not right here. Why isn’t he shitting himself? He’s walked into a trap, but he’s sitting there like he holds all the cards.’ Wayne shrugged blankly, not sure what Murray was on about. ‘What’s with the blithe unconcern, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’ve got you to thank for that,’ said Ihaka. ‘You remember telling me Smaile had these secret party members, guys who pretended to be anti the WVP so they could keep tabs on the other members? Well, Miriam’s a smart lady. She wouldn’t have put herself in harm’s way, so she must’ve been set up by someone she trusted. I got to thinking: what if Boyle was one of Smaile’s spies? What if Miriam took Boyle at face value and confided in him and he was funnelling everything back to the great leader? If so, he probably set her up. So when Boyle suggested this little jaunt, I thought chances are he’s lining me up for the same treatment.’

  ‘Search him, Wayne,’ said Murray. ‘Give me the gun. I’ll keep him covered.’

  ‘No fucking way I’m giving you the gun,’ said Wayne, glowering at Ihaka. ‘That’s exactly what the cunt wants me to do.’

  ‘All right then, I’ll search him,’ said Murray.

  ‘You’ll do as you’re fucking told,’ said Wayne. ‘And I’m telling you to stay right where you are.’

  Wayne stood in front of Ihaka, pointing the pistol at his forehead. ‘Get up.’ Ihaka did so. ‘Turn around and spread your arms out.’ He jabbed the muzzle into the back of Ihaka’s neck. ‘If you try anything, I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

  He patted Ihaka down, starting from the top. Feeling something in the front left pocket of Ihaka’s jeans, Wayne thrust a hand in and brought out a black rectangular device about the size of a Zippo lighter.

  Showing it to Murray: ‘What the fuck is this?’

  ‘I can answer that,’ volunteered Ihaka. ‘It’s a GPS personal tracking device. It tells my partner exactly where I am.’

  Ron Firkitt came through the door holding a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol at eye level in a two-handed grip. ‘Police. Drop the gun and move away.’

  Wayne wrapped his left arm around Ihaka’s neck, planting the muzzle in his right ear. ‘I’ve got a better idea. You drop your gun and I won’t put one in this cunt’s brain.’

  Ihaka said, ‘Don’t even think about it, Ron.’

  Wayne rapped Ihaka on the side of the face with the pistol. ‘Shut your fucking hole.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Firkitt. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

  Murray had his hands out, palms opened upward, like a mediator urging both parties to give peace a chance.

  Wayne yelled, ‘What the fuck are you doing there, Tom?’

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ said Murray firmly. ‘This has gone far enough.’

  Firkitt to Wayne: ‘Let Ihaka go and beat it out the back door. That’s the best offer you’re going to get.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Wayne. ‘But what’s going to happen is, I don’t let Ihaka go, me and him beat it out the back door. If you come after us, I’ll waste him.’ He cracked Ihaka on the side of the face again. ‘OK, shithead, let’s move. Out through the kitchen.’

  Wayne backed across the room, keeping Ihaka between himself and Firkitt. Firkitt stayed in the firing position, waiting for a cue. Ihaka gave him a wink. They shuffled backwards through the kitchen and out the back door onto another deck. As Wayne adjusted his grip, the muzzle came away from Ihaka’s ear. Ihaka launched himself backwards, lifting Wayne off his feet. The gun roared, the balustrade gave way under their combined weight and they toppled backwards, crash-landing in a rock garden a metre and a half below the deck. Wayne hit the ground first, cushioning the impact for Ihaka.

  Ihaka heaved himself up, ears ringing. Wayne was on his hands and knees, rasping like an asthmatic, scrabbling among the rocks for the pistol. Ihaka steadied himself and slammed his right foot into Wayne’s exposed mid-section, sending him over the edge of the rock garden and rolling down a slope into the undergrowth.

  Firkitt was on the deck. ‘You all right?’

  Ihaka tapped his ear to indicate his hearing was on the blink. Firkitt jumped down to the rock garden and put his mouth close to Ihaka’s better ear. ‘I can hear him in the bush — he’s heading for the beach. I’ll run the bastard down. You look after the other one. He doesn’t look like he’s up for a fight, but you never know.’

  Firkitt plunged into the bush. Ihaka found the revolver and went inside. Murray, looking much more at ease, was at the sideboard pouring himself a whisky. He glanced up. ‘I take it Wayne’s exit strategy didn’t go quite to plan?’

  Ihaka’s hearing was coming back. ‘You could say that.’

  ‘There’s a surprise. Are you a single-malt man, Sergeant? I can offer a choice of Islay, Highlands or Speyside.’

  ‘I’m still on the job,’ said Ihaka. ‘You own this place, right?’ Murray nodded. ‘As you said to me a few minutes ago, you’re looking pretty relaxed for a man in your position.’

  Murray sat down, cupping his drink in both hands. ‘What position would that be?’

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ said Ihaka. ‘Potentially there’s accessory to murder . . .’

  ‘You mean Ms Lovell?’

  ‘Let’s start with her.’

  Murray shook his head. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I can’t see your mate Wayne copping to that on his own.’

  ‘I can,’ said Murray. His assurance bordered on complacency. ‘First of all, that’s the way it happened. Secondly, Wayne has two talents in life, if you can call them that. One is for inflicting brutality on people weaker than himself; the other is for following orders. And his orders include keeping me well out of it if things go sideways, which they clearly have. And a good thing too, I might add.’

  ‘Orders from Smaile?’

  ‘Correct.’ Ihaka started to say something, but Murray gave him the stop sign. ‘We’re going to have to leave it there, Sergeant. Much as I’d like to give you a full and frank account, that’s simply not possible. As long as Willie Smaile’s alive and twitching, I have nothing further to say. That’s just the way it is. He’s an old man and not a very well one, so he probably won’t be with us a whole lot longer. Let’s hope not, anyway. The day he goes to the inferno, I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘Will my old man feature?’

  ‘Yes, he will.’

  ‘Was he murdered?’

  Murray looked into his glass for a few seconds. He swallowed what was left of his drink, set the glass down on a side table and, without looking up, slowly raised and lowered his head.

  ‘You sit tight,’ said Ihaka, heading for the back door.

  Firkitt jogged along the beach under a full moon that threw pale half-light across the beach, wondering if Wayne was too dumb to realise he was leaving a trail of footprints in the sand. There he was, only fifty metres away, lurching like a lame animal. Firkitt slowed down. No need to bust a gut. It was touch and go whether the guy would even make it to the rocks.

  He did, but only to sit down, elbows on knees, head bowed, sucking in air. When he lifted his head, Firkitt was right in front of him. ‘You’re under arrest,’ said Firkitt.

  Wayne dropped his head again, nodding
.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Wayne shook his head. ‘I’m fucked,’ he panted. ‘Give us a mo.’ After a couple of minutes, he hauled himself upright, clutching his side. ‘Feels like I’ve done some ribs.’

  ‘Tough shit.’

  Firkitt cocked an ear, hearing human sounds on the breeze. He stepped away from Wayne, glancing around. Ihaka emerged from the darkness, talking on his mobile. He stopped a few metres away, slipping the phone into his jacket pocket. ‘The boys are on their way. I’ll take it from here, Ron.’ Talking to Firkitt; looking at Wayne.

  Firkitt seeing the look, thinking, Jesus Christ. ‘Tito, listen mate —.’

  ‘It’s OK, Ron. You head back and babysit the Muffin Man. I’m just going to have a quiet word with this piece of shit.’

  ‘A quiet word?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ihaka’s ominous stare didn’t waver. ‘There’s not much to say, but it has to be said.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ said Firkitt.

  ‘Don’t leave me here with this bastard,’ said Wayne, his voice rattling with anxiety. ‘Look at him.’

  ‘What’s the matter, pal?’ said Ihaka almost soothingly. ‘You’re a big boy. Off you go, Ron. Don’t look back.’

  Firkitt looked from Wayne to Ihaka, then back to Wayne. ‘Fuck you — you asked for it.’ He turned and walked quickly back up the beach.

  A minute went by, Ihaka still staring at Wayne who kept his eyes down, watching Ihaka’s feet. When Ihaka advanced, Wayne took a ragged breath and bounced a weary roundhouse right off Ihaka’s cheekbone.

  Ihaka didn’t seem to notice. ‘Much more fun hitting chicks, isn’t it?’ he said.

  He rammed the heel of his right hand into Wayne’s chest. Wayne staggered back a couple of steps. Ihaka followed, giving him another explosive shove. Wayne went over backwards, almost hitting his head on the rocks. Ihaka bent down, clamped his left hand, reverse grip, over Wayne’s mouth and dropped a knee onto his ribs. Wayne’s eyes bulged and frothed and sweat popped on his forehead.

  ‘It’s a horrible place to be,’ said Ihaka conversationally. ‘In pain, knowing there’s more to come but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Completely at the mercy of someone who doesn’t give a fuck.’

  Ihaka switched his left hand to Wayne’s chest, grabbing a handful of fleecy, and hauled him into a sitting position. He gripped Wayne’s face in his right hand and slammed the back of his head down on a rock. Wayne’s skull caved in with a mishmash of contrasting sounds: sharp and dull, hard and soft, dry and wet.

  Three hours later, around 2 am, Stu Boyle awoke from an interesting dream. He was on a train somewhere in Eastern Europe with his late wife’s sister who was giving every indication of reciprocating the covert desire he’d nursed for almost two decades. It was sometime in the early 1980s, before the Berlin Wall came down and his late wife’s sister let herself go, not that the two were connected.

  Boyle lay there in the dark resenting the interruption of the rare and promising developments in his resting mind and dormant groin. In the faintly static silence of deep-night wakefulness the culprit revealed itself. Tap, tap, tap. A minute went by, but it could have been two. Tap, tap, tap.

  It didn’t make sense. He lived alone, without pets. It didn’t sound like a dripping tap and, anyway, drips are regular. You can anticipate them to the second; that’s what drives you nuts. Maybe a machine or appliance was acting up. Tap, tap, tap.

  Boyle swore, got out of bed, put on his dressing gown and went to investigate. As he groped for the light switch in the hallway, he heard from behind him: ‘Seconds out. Ding.’ He spun around. Next thing he was airborne, feeling as though his face had exploded.

  Boyle came down hard on his back, blacking out for a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, the lights were on and Ihaka was looking down at him the way people look at giant cockroaches. Boyle knew from experience that the fiery pain engulfing the middle of his face signified a broken nose. This was his sixth and, by some distance, the messiest.

  Six hours later Ihaka sat in a meeting room at Auckland Central. In two minutes he would have been sitting there for fifteen minutes. That was his limit. With thirty seconds to spare, Detective Inspector Tony Charlton and Ron Firkitt walked through the door.

  Charlton looked as photoshopped as ever. Ihaka had often thought he really belonged on TV, either as head of an unfeasibly perky but scrape-prone family in a vomitous sitcom, or in an advert claiming that you too can have it all if you just choose the right brand of breakfast cereal. Charlton dropped a file on the table and sat down. ‘You look tired, Sergeant.’

  Ihaka nodded. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘That’s probably because I wasn’t out at some west coast beach in the middle of the night putting someone’s lights out.’ Charlton flipped open the file. ‘I assume you’re aware that Wayne Rex Mowbray was DOA?’

  Ihaka glanced at Firkitt who had his chair tilted back, arms folded, studiously expressionless.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Ihaka. ‘But he didn’t look too good.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He whacked me.’ Ihaka tapped the bruise on his left cheekbone. ‘I gave him a shove. He fell over and hit his head on a rock.’

  Charlton nodded, his mouth turning down, the expression of someone who wasn’t expecting much and hadn’t been pleasantly surprised. He tapped the file. ‘Ron and I have just spent a couple of hours on this. It’s interesting, but I’m afraid to say it’s not going to fly.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t think we can get this into court, let alone obtain convictions. There’s virtually nothing in the way of hard evidence, for the old stuff or Lovell. Murray and Boyle — what happened to him, by the way?’

  ‘I dropped the cunt,’ said Ihaka. ‘He set me up for a bullet.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Charlton, ‘he’s seventy-one years old and half your size.’

  Firkitt lurched forward, causing the legs of his chair to bang on the floor. ‘Who gives a fuck?’

  Charlton gave Firkitt a long, questioning look, then refocused on Ihaka. ‘As I was saying, Murray and Boyle are hanging tough, putting it all on Mowbray who of course is the ideal fall-guy having nothing to say for himself. I’ve spoken to the Crown Prosecutor. To say he’s doesn’t want any part of it scarcely does justice to his lack of enthusiasm.’

  ‘What about Smaile?’ said Ihaka.

  ‘Oh yes, Smaile,’ said Charlton. ‘I’ve had his oncologist on the phone. Smaile’s terminal: he’s got a year, year and a half tops. Putting a terminally ill eighty-two-year-old on trial for this . . .’ Charlton pushed the file towards Ihaka, shaking his head. ‘Sorry, but it’s a non-starter.’

  There was a knock on the door. Detective Constable Joel Pringle poked his head in. ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Charlton.

  ‘I thought DS Ihaka would like to know. We’ve just heard from the hospital. Ms Lovell’s come out of the coma. The signs are all good — they’re pretty confident she’ll make a full recovery.’

  Pringle backed out, closing the door. Ihaka looked at Firkitt who stared back, hitching his right shoulder in a fatalistic shrug.

  ‘Well, that’s great news,’ said Charlton with a curious glance at Ihaka. ‘Or am I missing something here?’

  Ihaka stood up. ‘Yeah, fantastic.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Charlton, ‘we haven’t finished.’

  ‘I’m getting close on McGrail’s cold case,’ said Ihaka. ‘Real close.’ He leaned forward to slide the folder back towards Charlton. ‘And you can keep this one open because it’s not over.’

  Twenty One

  Is this how it starts? wondered Johan Van Roon: not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. Actually, it wasn’t so much a case of not wanting to get out of bed as h
aving no particular reason to. And while the bed wasn’t all that cosy or comfortable, it was cosier and more comfortable than anywhere else in his flat.

  He hadn’t had any particular reason to get out of bed since his trip to Fiji. The PR man Caspar Quedley had commended him on his professionalism and paid the balance of the fee, but there was no bonus because the client had gone sour on the whole exercise the moment Ihaka stuck his beak in. Quedley had nothing for him at the moment, but promised to keep him in mind.

  Van Roon had rung around his shrunken circle of contacts and former clients, an exercise that netted him some expressions of sympathy but no assignments. He’d even rung his competitors to see if they had any shit work they wanted to offload or needed an extra pair of hands to tide them over. They didn’t.

  Meanwhile, his ex-wife Yvonne had confirmed that she and the kids (and the Labrador) were moving back to Auckland at the end of the school term. He had to admit it made sense: she had family and a support network there and the kids were all for it. They were nostalgic for the simple certainties that Auckland represented; Wellington was where it had all gone wrong. It probably made sense for him to move back as well. There had to be more work in Auckland and he was never going to regain the ground he’d lost with his children while he was stuck in this dump. And with Yvonne having less time on her hands and less to complain about, she might wean herself off the urge to sabotage what was left of his relationship with them.

  Christ, he envied Eddie Brightside. He envied the way Brightside operated beyond the horizon. He envied the easy, bone-deep amorality that simplified everything, boiling it down to pure self-interest. Most of all he envied Brightside’s rootlessness: he’d walked away from everything — job, relationships, commitments, burdens, the whole magnetic suck of networks and circumstances — to an existence that owed nothing to expectations or convention.

  His mobile rang.

  ‘Van Roon.’