Hell to Pay (19 page)

“No! God no. Look, does anyone have to know about this? Can you leave my name out of it? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“His wife left him, you know. Moved in with her parents.”

“I know.”

“You know? How?”

Hirsch shrugged.

“I forgot—you’re all mates. Do you need a statement?”

“Brief one.”

Hirsch took it, then gave her the Honda keys and returned to the street. Latimer was swinging punches now, hitting nothing, Nicholson and Revell struggling with him, shouting at him.

Spotting Hirsch, Nicholson snarled, “For Christ’s sake move our car out of the way.”

“Don’t know if it’s drivable. Look.”

They looked at the edge of the rear panel, resting against the tire. “Fuck.”

Some of the bleariness went out of Latimer. He’d noticed Hirsch at last. “Look who’s here.”

Hirsch nodded hello. “Mr. Latimer.”

Latimer shot out his fist. Hirsch swayed neatly away, too late, the hard knuckles spending their energy on his cheekbone.

He rubbed it. “Ouch. You want to explain that?”

Latimer took a boxer’s stance, Revell jerking him back. “Moron.” He glanced at Hirsch. “Well?”

Hirsch sighed. “Raymond Latimer,” he said, and ran through the formal arrest statement while Latimer struggled and Revell swore.

“Do you understand these charges, Mr. Latimer?”

“You’re arresting me?”

“Mate, it’s already done,” Revell said. “Weren’t you listening? You’ve been arrested. You’re spending the night in the lockup.”

Meanwhile Nicholson was shaking his head. He scraped both palms down his cheeks tiredly. “How do we get him there if we can’t fucking drive?”

“The others can come and collect us,” Revell said.

Hirsch might have been invisible and irrelevant. He walked back across the lawn, knocked on the door to Number 6. Finola Armstrong had changed into her black dress.

“Mr. Latimer’s been arrested.”

“That figures. This’s such a mess.”

“He’ll spend the night in the lockup. Without meaning to pry, what’s your relationship with him? Will you stay the night and take him home in the morning? Go home and return for him? Let his family deal with it?”

Armstrong flushed. “That’s really none of your business.”

“Your headache, not mine.”

Hirsch rejoined Nicholson and Revell, who had a hand on each of Latimer’s elbows, Latimer trying to shake them off and shouting, “How about you call Bill Kropp, he’ll sort this out.”

“How about we add another charge, interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duty,” Revell said.

“Fuck you.”

Out of the night came a pair of headlights and a whooping siren, the other patrol car rocketing alongside them, tires scraping the curb. The passenger side window whined down and Andrewartha leaned out, full of humor. “Evening, gents.”

“What took you so long?”

“Busy.”

“Doing what?”

De Marco exchanged a grin with Molnar, the driver. “Showing Dee Dee the town.”

Hirsch went still. He peered in. The backseat was empty. “What’ve you done with her?”

“Oh, she’s on official police business,” said Andrewartha, helping to bundle Latimer into the rear of the car. Nicholson and Revell climbed in after him, Nicholson winding down his rear window to say, “You stay with our car, okay? See if you can get it moving.”

“Shouldn’t I—”

No one wanted to hear what Hirsch thought he should or shouldn’t do. He was alone, the road deserted and not much light leaking from the motel now. The street lighting was dim out here, blurred by mist. With a shrug, he returned to the police car and tugged on the lip of metal, feeling it move. A gap opened, he ran his hand along the surface of the tire. No damage.

Then he called Dee, and her voice in the barren night was far off and frightened. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself. Where are you?”

“Middle of nowhere. Those pricks just left me here.”

“Where? I’ll come and get you.”

He heard sounds on her end of the line: a squeaky gate, a knock on a door, murmurs. Then her voice was loud in his ear: “Apparently it’s easier if I give directions rather than a street address …”

A minute later, Hirsch was heading northeast, crossing the dark town to a road signposted for Morgan, a town on the Murray River, on the far side of saltbush plains. Hirsch wasn’t going that far. A hundred meters down it, he turned off. There were no pretty stone houses out here. This was a hardscrabble fringe, where people struggled on a couple of hectares of undernourished dirt, fibro dwelling and starved pets. Midnight and the sky was densely black. His headlights picked out Dee beside a rusty fence. She climbed in. “Thanks.”

Hirsch planted his foot, headed back to the empty streets of the town. “What’s the story?”

After a while she said, “Sex.”

“Sex.”

“Sex, sexism and sexual harassment.”

“Okay,” Hirsch said, drawing the word out.

“I can deal with the innuendos and crude suggestions. I had it all through training. But they wanted to have it off with a kid.”

“How old?”

“About fourteen, pissed out of her tiny brain when we picked her up. When I say ‘we,’ Andrewartha nabbed her for jaywalking. Has anyone been charged with that in living memory?”

“In this town, yeah,” Hirsch said.

“She was with a gang of kids, all of them a bit drunk but not doing anyone any harm. Andrewartha’s plan was he and Molnar should take her home while I stayed behind and kept an eye on the friends.”

She paused. “You should have seen the look on her face. And her mates. Fear, pure and simple.”

“They knew what would happen.”

“I’d say so.”

Hirsch circled the town square, the lights misty and no movement anywhere.

“So I said no way, I was coming too, and when we got to her house I walked her to the door and checked someone was home.” She snorted. “That’s when they pissed off and left me.”

Hirsch told her a little of his night. He was driving slowly; they were cocooned together in the warmth of the car. Out past the mine, back to the square, out past the motel. No sign of Finola Armstrong’s Honda. Time dragged. The town was dead.

Presently Dee said, “You do know that I know who you are.”

“Yep.”

“So is this the new you or the real you?”

“Time will tell.”

They lapsed into silence. Hirsch drove. And then at one o’clock in the morning, Sergeant Kropp came crackling over the radio: “Okay, boys and girls, call it a night.”

B
ACK AT THE STATION
, Kropp took Hirsch aside and whispered fiercely, “The fuck you arrest Ray Latimer for?”

Hirsch had had enough. “So if your mates break the law they’re allowed to get away with it?”

“That’s not what I meant. He didn’t have to spend the night in the lockup.”

“Do him some good, Sarge. And it was Nicholson and the others who put him there. All I did was arrest him.”

Kropp shook his head as if seeing life in all its stupidity. “The magistrate has offered to hear it at ten tomorrow morning.”

Hirsch winced. Kropp smirked. “That’s what you get for being the arresting officer.”

“Sarge.”

As if it pained him to say it, Kropp muttered, “We generally have a few beers after an operation.”

Operation. “Great,” lied Hirsch.

T
HEY FOUND
N
ICHOLSON AND
the others in the tearoom, herding Dee into a corner. “Come on, love, no hard feelings, stay and have a couple of drinks with us.”

“In your dreams,” Dee said.

“Don’t be like that. You need to wind down, right? We’ve even got a bottle of woite woine in the fridge, if that’s your fancy.”

“Fuck off and goodnight,” Dee said, inclining her head to drag the band from her ponytail, shaking her head to free the hair, free it to swing around her neck and over her cheeks, and at that moment, Hirsch knew he’d seen that precise set of movements in the recent past.

He reached out a hand. “You …” he said, wanting to say,
It was you who placed that stuff in my car
.

He didn’t. She gave him a curious look and a smile half of gratitude for looking after her and then was gone out the door.

“Bitch,” Nicholson said.

H
IRSCH DISCOVERED THAT HE
had a bottle in his hand. The hours passed and the Redruth policemen sprawled, bottles, pizza crusts and cigarette butts accumulating on the floor and the tearoom table. Two o’clock, three, the air so heavy, thick and male you could cut it with a knife. When the chairs couldn’t hold them they slumped on the floor and sang
“We will, we will, rock you.”
Nicholson and Kropp arm wrestled, tipping the table. The phone rang unattended in the front office. Andrewartha found a stash of pornographic DVDs and Hirsch watched, absorbed for about thirty seconds, the others slightly longer, catcalling the porn stars. They lapsed into talk and long pauses, then more talk, the pornography a forgotten flicker in the background. When the beer ran out, Kropp staggered to his car, returning with three six-packs. Ring-pulls tinkled, the cans foamed. It was the music of policemen winding down while a town sleeps.

And the others would say, “Drink up.”

Hirsch would say, “Cheers.”

The others would say, “Piker.”

Hirsch had played this game before. He knew the moves. He swigged, burped, swiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He roared and laughed through until four in the morning, and presently the others forgot who he was, forgot his story.

In those deep hours, people will come and go, you’ll scarcely register their movements, you’ll lose track, but at some point it occurred to Hirsch that Nicholson and Andrewartha were gone, the pikers.

So he struggled to his feet. “Time for some shut-eye.”

“The night is young,” snarled Revell.

“It is somewhere, I’ll grant you that,” Hirsch said, grabbing his cap and his jacket and the belt load of crime fighting gear that threatened to do his back in. “Night, night, gentlemen.”

Kropp waved a bottle at him. “Get your arse back here in time for court.”

“Will do.”

A
COLD, STILL, SILENT
, dampish pre-dawn, with dew beading the HiLux. Hirsch climbed in and worked the wipers and fired the ignition, then drove back through the square and out to the edge of the town with an agricultural rattle, the motor as stupefied as he was. He passed the Overlander Hotel, an antique store and two bed-and-breakfast joints, the high school, the latter arousing a mental picture of Wendy Street. He thought about Constable Dee. He thought about his love life, which had slipped away when it all went wrong for him.

N
ICHOLSON AND
A
NDREWARTHA BUSHWHACKED
him on a slow, blind bend between Mt. Bryan and Tiverton, flicking into his slipstream from a concealed farm gate, giving the siren a bit of a whoop. Hirsch pulled over, switched off, powered his window down. “Guys.”

Andrewartha grinned, waving a breathalyzer tube at Hirsch. “We have reason to believe, etcetera.”

Hirsch feigned an itchy ankle to retrieve and pocket the little Beretta. A desolate spot out here, the highway a black ribbon, the moon pushing shadows across the valley. Dawn was staining the horizon and there’d be early farmers and interstate truckies pretty soon, but Hirsch wasn’t taking comfort from that. How would they play it?
We stopped him for driving under the influence and he just went crazy
.

But first they had to arrest him and take his service pistol. Andrewartha’s face-splitting grin said he knew Hirsch’s breathalyzer reading would top .05. “If you would blow into this, please, sir. We need a steady, continuous exhalation, think you can manage that?”

“Right across it,” Hirsch assured him, beginning to blow.

“Give it all you’ve got, pisspot,” Nicholson said.

Andrewartha retrieved the tube for testing, still with his killer grin. The grin faded. He shook the tube as if it were a thermometer. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“Point oh nothing?” Hirsch asked sweetly.

“We’re conducting the test again.”

Hirsch complied. He said, “Maybe both units are faulty. Maybe we should go back to the station and take a blood sample.”