Dark Summer (18 page)

“Kids frighten me, sir.”

“Garn,” said Maureen, who, in her short time, had frightened more than her fair share of adults. “We're harmless.”

Then Lisa came to the back door. “Time to eat. What's going on?”

“Tom and Maureen want to bring the school down tomorrow afternoon for a press conference. Seven hundred and thirty-three, I think, was the last figure I saw in the school report.”

“Sure, why not?” said Lisa. “That's only seven hundred more than we had here yesterday.”

Malone looked down at Constable Elmore, who had started to grin but abruptly stopped when he saw the look on Malone's face. “Put your head under water, Constable. This conversation isn't fit for the ears of an unmarried man.”

“It's gunna be a domestic,” Maureen informed the young officer.

Malone flicked her with his towel and she yelped. “Inside!”

“So can I have the kids here tomorrow?” said Tom, not giving up.

“Your mother just said no.”

“I didn't hear her—”

“You're just too young to hear the nuances in a woman's voice,” said his mother.

“What's nu—what you just said?”

“Inside!”

The two children disappeared into the house. Lisa held open the screen door for Malone. She
looked
past him, at Constable Elmore lifting himself out of the pool and shaking the water from himself. “Gorgeous, isn't he? You going out again tonight?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“Oh, don't apologize. Dick doesn't go off duty till twelve.”

“Dick?”

“Yes, lovely name, isn't it? Has sexual overtones, too.”

“I think I may turn into a wife-beater—”

“Great! That means you'll be staying home to do it?”

He kissed the top of her head. She was the constant in his life that he needed, someone to paper over the cracks.

5

I

THE WATERFRONT
at night always seemed unreal to Malone; the play of light and shadow made it another world. The darkness above compressed the scene; the cranes, the ship loomed larger. Sounds, against the silence beyond the wharf, were magnified; the occasional shout from a wharfie on the night shift sounded more urgent than the shouts Malone had heard during the day. He would not have been surprised if aliens from outer space had appeared at the ship's railing above him, asking if they needed to go through Immigration.

“The divers are working from under the wharf,” Dibble told him. “They came round by launch and slipped in there, just paddling. The wharfies won't know they're there.”

“It must be pitch black down there.”

“It probably is, but they won't switch on their torches till they go below the surface. These guys are used to working in all sorts of conditions.”

He and Malone were standing in the shadow of a stack of containers, obscured from the teams unloading the holds of the
Southern Pacific.
Malone had checked that White and Schultz were not on this shift. Two senior Customs men were hidden amongst other stacks of containers and plainclothesmen from the Federal police were in a car parked up by the wharf gates. So far the police and Customs presence was undetected.

The heat was still oppressive and the night air seemed to have thickened; Malone's nostrils were stuffed with the mixture of salt air and the smell of molasses from across the narrow bay. He began to wish for an early end to the night.

“If they find nothing—”

Then
Dibble's walkie-talkie crackled and he held it up to his ear. A voice, its excitement showing through its mechanical flatness, said, “They've got something! They're bringing it up now!”

“Okay, here we go!” said Dibble and, considering his bulk, surprised Malone with the speed with which he took off; he still had some of the greyhound swiftness of his youth of which he had boasted. Malone, caught flat-footed, was some yards behind him by the time they reached the steps that led down to the launch moored out of sight of the ship. A few moments later the two senior Customs men tumbled down the steps and into the boat.

Dibble took the boat cautiously round the end of the wharf and crept it, engine ticking over quietly, in under the stern of the
Southern Pacific,
between the ship and the wharf. It slid in beside the divers' launch, where three men in diving suits crouched, while a fourth hung from its side in the water. The darkness was intense here, the divers in their black suits indistinguishable but for the gleam of water on the rubber.

“What've you got?” The senior Customs man was named Radelli; tall, thin and prematurely grey, he had the watchful eye of a well-trained guard dog. Malone, meeting him, had wondered if he did his own sniffing. “That it?”

One of the divers flicked on a narrow-beam flashlight and held up a slim metal container, painted yellow and attached to two long magnets. “We brought up only one—there are another five still down there. We've covered the whole of the hull below the waterline. There's nothing else. But this'd be enough.”

Radelli took the container. It had a screw-on top, like the lid of a Thermos flask; waterproof tape was wrapped round the join. He opened it, tipped it up and six plastic bags filled with white powder slid out. He pierced one of the bags with a penknife, tasted the powder and nodded. “Cocaine.”

“Don't they know there's a recession on?” said Dibble. “That's yuppie stuff. What're you gunna do, Luke?”

Radelli carefully rewound the binding tape, handed the container back to the head diver, who snapped off his flashlight. “Put it back. We'll post a watch for the next twenty-four hours—the ship is due
to
go out on Thursday morning's tide. If they don't come for it before then, then we'll know they're on to us.”

He looked up at the side of the ship towering above them like a steel wave about to break. “Someone on board could have been keeping an eye on this end, knowing where the stuff was. Chances are one of the crew is part of the set-up.”

“We've been pretty invisible,” said the head diver.

“We'll try and stay that way. Back off over to the CSR wharf. You guys be prepared for twenty-four-hour stand-by.”

“Shit!” said the diver in the water.

“Not in your wet-suit,” said Radelli and for the first time all night smiled, a pale rip in his face.

Dibble eased the launch away from beneath the ship, took it back to the wharf steps. Once up on the wharf again he looked at Malone. “You gunna join 'em in the stake-out?”

“You're welcome,” said Radelli, making it sound like a
get lost
dismissal.

“You're looking for smugglers, I'm looking for a murderer.” Malone felt let down. Against reason, he had hoped that Schultz would have bobbed up out of the water, ready to confess everything as soon as he was nabbed. He had suffered from the lack of enthusiasm that infects any professional who has to work in someone else's show; Radelli's indifference to his presence had only increased his own desire to get home as quickly as possible. “You have first choice, since he's in your territory.” If Radelli caught the mild sarcasm, he didn't show it. “If you grab anyone, let me know and I'll be in to see him. The Feds will hold him, I take it?”

Radelli and the other senior Customs man left; Dibble accompanied Malone across to his car parked behind the Customs office. “Thanks for showing me that diving mask, putting me on to this. It'll look good when the report goes in.”

“I'm glad someone will look good.” Then Malone heard the sourness in his own voice. “Sorry, Bill. I'm cranky from the heat, it's been a long hot day. And I'm not getting anywhere. I'm pretty sure I know who killed Jimmy Maddux, but why? Did Maddux find out about the stuff being stuck to the
bottom
of that ship?”

“Who do you suspect? Never mind, don't tell me, I don't wanna know. I got enough headaches, without that sorta information. Maybe Jimmy Maddux saw whoever it was swimming around at the stern of the ship? He could've made the mistake of letting the guy see him.”

“There's the matter of the diving mask being in Maddux's locker—how would he have got that off the swimmer?” Then he stopped, his lethargic mind suddenly slipping into another gear. “Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless Jimmy Maddux wasn't as afraid of the water as everyone thought? I wonder if he was the contact man for whoever is bringing the stuff in. but someone, someone from another mob, got to him first?”

II

“Who suggested you come here?” said Janis Eden.

“I
—
I just heard about it,” said Ava Redgrave. “Everybody on the street knows about this place.”

Janis sat back in her chair, her head brushing against the wall behind her. This cubicle she called her office was designed for one-on-one counselling; another person in the so-called room would have made a truism of three is a crowd. The new State government spent more words than money on drug and alcohol rehabilitation; it believed in “self-help” as a slogan, even though too many of the country's entrepreneurs had given a new meaning to the term. Janis, a true conservative, had voted for the new government, but she wished it had increased the budget enough to provide decent accommodation at least for herself. She did not care much for her fellow counsellors, most of whom were lefties and suffered from dedication.

“What's your problem?” But the rolled-down sleeves had already told her what the problem was. “I—well, it's smack. Heroin.”

“What's your name?”

“
Ava Redgrave.”

She had a good counsellor's talent for not showing reaction till it was needed; but mentally she rolled her eyeballs at the name. At least it was better than yesterday's visitor, Jesus Christ Smith. “How long have you been on it?”

“Two years, almost.”

“What do you do, Ava?”

“I—I'm a receptionist.”

Janis sighed. “Ava, if you and I are going to get anywhere, we'll have to at least show some of the truth. Otherwise you're wasting my time and yours.”

Ava was sitting straight up in her chair, knees together, hands folded in her lap. Janis wondered if she had been convent-educated, it was the way some schools still taught their girls to sit, as if keeping one's knees together locked in the libido. Ava looked down at her hands, then she seemed to relax, her shoulders drooping, her knees slipping apart. “Okay, I'm on the street. It's the only way I've been able to pay for my habit.”

Another one, thought Janis: the market out there was unlimited. She sneezed; she hoped a summer cold wasn't coming on, and took a handkerchief from her pocket. She never brought a handbag with her to a counselling; no matter how much you trusted the client, you never put temptation in their way; it was a standard rule. Twice in her first month as a counsellor she had been relieved of her wallet.

“Do you work for yourself or for someone? I mean, a pimp?”

“I—I work for a guy. He gives me the stuff at cost price.”

No dealer, not even a pimp, was ever that generous. “Do you want to give me his name?”

Ava frowned. “Are you supposed to ask that?”

There were no definite rules on such a question, but most counsellors, as a matter of ethics, did not ask it. With Janis, ethics were like ticks: she kept her head free of them. “No-o. But the dealers are as much a part of our problem as they are for you. If you want to tell me, I promise it will go no further.”

Ava hesitated, then said, “His name's Leroy Lugos. Do you know him?”

She
had come to know the names of most of the dealers here in the King's Cross area; but she had not heard of Leroy Lugos. “Where does he get the stuff?”

“I don't know, I've never asked. But he's always got it.”

That meant he was not a part-time dealer, that he had a major source somewhere. “Okay, let's forget him for the moment. Why do you want to give it up? The heroin, I mean. The determination is yours, we can only support you in it.”

Ava was silent. She looked up and about her, everywhere but at Janis. The tiny room was painted pale pink and held two medium-sized prints, both of them restful landscapes; there were no anti-drug posters, no strident threats or warnings to those who came into this room seeking help. It was doubtful if Ava saw her surroundings at all; she was looking for courage but found none. She looked back at Janis.

“I'm scared, really shit scared. The woman where I live, she was on the game, but not on the street like me, she was murdered on Sunday night. Some kinky client killed her with a needle.”

“An overdose?”

“No, it was some poison, one of the cops told me. It killed her almost immediately, he said. They warned us he might come back, do the same to me and my girlfriend. I—I just decided it—it wasn't worth risking being—
murdered.
It happens, y'know, I mean to us sometimes. The guys we pick up, most of the time we've never seen 'em before.”

“I know,” said Janis, sounding sympathetic, hiding her sudden concern. Had this woman, whoever she was, died the same way as the man Grime? The coincidence chilled her, but Ava would never know that the well-groomed girl opposite her was disturbed. Janis had learned to act, for the best counsellors are good actors, otherwise their audience would never sit still for them. Counsellors have problems of their own; the act is to hide them. “Where do you come from originally?”

“The country. Wagga.”

“Your parents alive?”

“Yes. They don't know where I am, I think they've given up on me.”

“
Do you want to go home?”

Ava looked down at her hands again. “Yes, I think so. At least I'd be safe there.”