Leopard Dreaming (41 page)

Smile for me,
he said, when she’d finished.
Smile big and pretty and I’ll give you two weeks off
. With his hand in her hair, he encouraged her to look up with her mouth still suckling him. Her eyes glazed and her mind already partying elsewhere, she obeyed. Too well trained in submission, too frightened of pain, and her mind drugged open well enough for suggestions.

He snapped a photo of her on his phone, and sent it to the rest of his gang with his first open invitation. Before that, the weekly parties had been a private affair.

Stupid bitch,
he laughed, and dragged her into the bedroom by the hair.

‘He kept the cash anyway,’ Mira said, determined not to follow them or relive the next few hours. Once was more than enough for a lifetime. ‘He increased his price to fifty grand a week, and threatened to break your jaw to ensure you never complained again.’

Kevin Stoush barged in through the front door next, the first of eleven to join them. He peeled off his clothes and headed halfway down the hallway.

‘By midnight the party was mostly spent, most of them sleeping off one drug or another, while yours was just beginning to wear off. You noticed a vial of the unlabelled liquid he used on you, along with the discarded needle and a small stash of the powder he’d been snorting in lines on the table. You filled him up.’

‘How exactly?’ asked Kitching. ‘So far, this could be second-hand news from one of the party guests.’

Mira didn’t bother correcting him about that night being the first party to involve more than Lina and Liam. She also preferred not to mention the blow job Lina had to give in order to slide the powder directly into his rectum. ‘She injected his groin …’ Penis actually, which seemed more appropriate, ‘along with an air bubble into a vein to ensure it put an end to him. Then when he really started to space, she convinced a group of them to go swimming down at the pier. They dragged each other down past all the security cameras they’d destroyed in the alley to cover their other activities, and she swam with them between the piers until he started vomiting. Which in turn attracted the sharks, scared the rest of his friends away and made it look like death by misadventure. But if you ask me, good riddance to him.’

‘If you had any of that on film, I’d be in jail already.’ Lina’s voice sparked with the same courage she’d managed to muster on the nights she’d killed her tormentors. ‘There’s the TV, if you really want to scare me. Why go to all this trouble playing house with my furniture and your nervous little narrator?’

‘I can’t have you learning all the angles to find the covert cameras.’ Kitching tsked his tongue at her again. ‘You’re mine now, Lina. At least for a week. So let’s revise your options, shall we? One, play ball, or two, I
dump you out in the cane fields, where the gang has the barn they use for their really big parties.’

‘Option three,’ she argued defiantly. ‘One of us takes a flying leap off the balcony.’

‘Suicide?’ Kitching laughed. ‘You’d never take the coward’s way out, my dear.’

‘Oh, I’d leap with a grin and a clear conscience before I’d bow to any man again, I swear it! Those animals got what they deserved! Minors or not, they neutered my husband with a flick knife and made him beg to service them in the most disgusting ways imaginable. I haven’t been able to kiss him since then. Not even in his coffin. Those little bastards had the hide to play innocent victims when it came to his trial and made everyone believe that he asked for it!’

‘I’m aware of all that and far more,’ Kitching assured her. ‘We have all the names of the others involved the night of your first murder, along with enough information on them to make them sing to police finally. Better to cut a deal against you and incriminate themselves for minor drug and alcohol offences with get-out-of-jail free cards for everything else, than go down for the bigger things they’ve been up to in the city.’

Mira wondered how long he’d really been watching her. Strange to feel a bond growing with another woman who’d also been subjected to covert surveillance.

‘Amazing the miracles that forensics specialists can pull once they know where and exactly how closely to look,’ Kitching continued without any audible emotion. ‘Never worth the effort or expense when an overdose is the obvious cause, and yet an image deleted from a phone is never really deleted until it’s overwritten, even if the phone’s been soaked in salt water for a few hours. And this stuffed toy …’ He made the sound of sucking in a deep breath. ‘Smells so strongly of that
pine bleach in your laundry. Your washing machine didn’t get all the traces of blood that soaked into the stuffing.’

‘You set me up!’ Lina shouted. ‘He didn’t fall with that toy. You must have planted it! I just assumed it was one of them!’

Mira nodded, knowing the first three weeks after Liam’s death had been nerve-racking for Lina. Shaking every time the door bell rang in fear of who might come to blame her. Always watching her windows. Buying an Alsatian as a guard dog. Sleeping in her car in its locked garage, and never again in her own bedroom. She’d already started to pack to leave town, but couldn’t yet do that without triggering suspicions amongst the financial watchdogs who were overseeing the public listing of her husband’s company; a situation that had been forced on her since his death. Her greatest fear was that she’d fallen pregnant. Until she came home one day to find Kevin Stoush in her sofa with a cold beer, a thin snake, and his feet up on the dying canine.

Hey, bitch.
He’d waved casually and grinned.
Where you been? It’s pay day.

‘What about the snake?’ Kitching said. ‘It’s been up in your apartment, so how much would you like to bet that examination of its scales will reveal a combination of your DNA and your second victim’s?’

‘Why are you doing this to me? He wasn’t my victim! Listen to your precious Miss Sex, if you won’t believe me. If anyone’s a victim here, you’re looking at her!’

‘I’d prefer to hear a confession.’

‘Never! Aren’t you listening, old man? That gang’s been terrorising the whole neighbourhood. They scratched my car, stole my tyres and mugged everyone with a boat or grey hair on the marina. They’ve also plastered their filthy graffiti all over the place, and
made it unsafe for any of the families to take their kids outdoors night or days. So the rest of them could drop dead tonight, and I wouldn’t care. I’d even organise a cheer squad.’

‘Hand me a pom-pom,’ Mira said. She’d seen Kevin Stoush take a call from one of his uncles in Lina’s living room. Fresh instructions from the big house. And seen poor Lina’s treatment between rapes taken to far darker places. All with the goal of compliance. Ultimately, so they could use her to heist all her community banks around the country, and in the meantime, milk her weekly for cash. She’d also seen him emptying the carved timber blanket box at the foot of Lina’s bed, forcing her to curl up in it, naked — and dropping a snake in with her, along with a few hand-sized huntsman spiders.

Don’t move,
he’d whispered, and locked her in for a few hours. One small hole in the side served as the only way to suck in enough air to breathe.

Shattered was the only way to describe the woman he’d pulled out that first time. An even match for him in height and strength, and yet she’d begged to please him any other way to avoid going in again. On her knees, when he’d shown her mercy, her smiles had been desperately genuine; and many more photos had been taken.

One night was all Lina could endure. Something inside her snapped again. Mira saw it in her eyes, and the second week she welcomed him at the door with her apartment fully decorated for partying. Transformed into a spider herself. Widow spider, tapping her web to lure him in. Tears rolling in streams, and yet willing to do anything to get him out to that balcony, or into the spa to drown him. She’d peeled open her own sarong, dribbled beer down her body, inviting his tongue. He’d made her stay in the open doorway for that part, but the humiliation and risk of being seen had been worth it.

By dawn the next morning, he was her king, and his overconfidence became his undoing.

‘He deserved it far more than the first one.’ Mira wished she could put an arm around the woman. Hug her back into one piece, and yet her supportive words had the opposite effect.

Lina broke down crying.

‘Leave your blouse on,’ Kitching said as if she’d started to open it. ‘I don’t need you that way. I need access to your banks.’

‘You can’t have it!’

‘You were generous enough with the local street gang, and what I have in mind is far less painful. Even profitable for you.’

‘No, I mean, I can’t give you access to any of the vaults. Like I told them, I don’t have access without all the safeguards and escorts. The money I gave them all came from my own pocket. Check my accounts if you want. I’m nearly dry now myself.’

‘I don’t think you understand,’ Kitching argued.

‘No, please,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s you who doesn’t understand. I’m only one director now on a board of ten. Since Cyrus died, we’re in the process of listing on the stock exchange, so every cent we have in the vaults and overseas is under close and explicit scrutiny.’

‘I know all that, Mrs Creed. I’m also aware that your little community banks are only store fronts for your real business. That your husband didn’t start out as a banker. He was a chemical engineer who founded the plastics company that supplies all the patented chemicals, equipment and processes to the Reserve Bank for production of all credit cards and polymer banknotes. And not just in Australia, since the RBA supplies currencies to at least ten other countries.’

Dizzy, Mira grabbed for the nearest ghostly chair, forgetting it had been shifted. The armed men beside
her both grappled to catch her, dropping their weapons briefly to steer her into it.

‘She okay?’ Lina asked, sounding equally shell-shocked.

Mira struggled to catch her breath. Kitching’s scheme seemed so much bigger than she’d ever imagined, and her role in it shrank unexpectedly from critical to expendable.

‘She’s dizzy all the time,’ Kitching said. ‘Doesn’t eat enough. Forget her; stay focused on
our
conversation.’

‘I can’t! Please, it’s not possible. Nobody’s supposed to know any of that. It’s a national secret.’

‘Still is, Mrs Creed. What I’m about to tell you has to stay in this room, or the consequences for you will be instantly lethal. I’m a colonel involved in a black operation. My mission involves establishing a new intelligence agency and a covert battalion to head off neighbourhood disputes and terrorism on a world scale, before they escalate. Shadow subsidiary to the UN, you might say. We need to stay off the books, which means we need to be self-funded.’

‘I can’t just print money for anyone who wants it. The press is at the Royal Mint and they have government watchdogs stationed there, night and day. If you’re really an army colonel, you should know that! There’s an army base right next door that provides a whole extra level of security.’

‘You’re talking about counterfeiting, Lina. I’m talking about a quiet exchange.’

‘You mean laundering? Forget it. There’s a battalion of watchdogs for that too.’

‘I didn’t come here without a plan. That’s all I can say, except … don’t let your husband’s sacrifice go to waste.’

‘Sacrifice? He was murdered! Same week the Pig Dog drowned. Same week he was due to be released.’

‘Actually, he took his own life,’ Kitching said, shaking Mira’s tree of security at the same time. He’d
obviously been investigating the Creeds so thoroughly it seemed almost redundant that he needed Mira at all — and yet he’d somehow missed the news that Sir Cyrus Creed had been the only unwilling participant in that sick and nasty spa party. ‘I have it on good authority that everything you paid to prevent was happening to him anyway. Not that he could stop it. I just assumed he was a willing participant in that too, but it seems more likely now that he only cooperated as part of a deal for them to leave you alone.’

‘But they didn’t!’

‘A double-edged scam. You were paid to protect him, and he was paying in another way to protect you. To sum up,’ he continued, ‘you were both screwed. After Pig Dog drowned, his uncles let slip that they’d been extorting you. That meant your husband’s death was the only thing that could break the cycle, because you’d have nothing left to protect. And as soon as the company lists on the exchange you’ll get a pay-out big enough to retire anywhere you want in the world.’

‘Only two weeks to go,’ Lina said longingly. ‘You can’t imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I can’t disappear until then. My signature is needed almost daily on paperwork.’

‘Don’t let them beat you, Mrs Creed. Side with me and get all the protection you need.’

‘I have to go! There are still too many … memories. And a gang who knows what Liam … did to me.’ Her voice wavered, as if trying not to reveal any more details than Mira had been obliged to give away. ‘They probably knew about Kevin’s pay day too, so the next little bastard who steps up to fill his shoes is bound to come after me too. I can’t sleep here any more as it is.’

‘That much is certainly true,’ Kitching said. ‘We got past your security upgrades, which means they can too. I’m sorry I had to put you through all this, Mrs
Creed, but it was necessary to remind you that you’re not safe.’

‘Brilliant, Einstein! Master of the bleeding obvious! Kill me yourself. I’m dead anyway!’

‘Do this one favour for me,’ Kitching pleaded, ‘and I’ll do one for you that ends all your problems.’ We don’t need to be enemies. I’d much prefer a lasting relationship. One in which you stay working at the bank, and do so profitably. Even enjoyably.’

‘How exactly? And don’t shit on me and call it fertiliser. I need details.’

‘You can’t have them. Not as many as you may want anyway. My business is my business and yours remains yours. All you need to know is that I’ll give you shiploads of cash, quite literally, in such a way that you can give it back to me almost immediately without attracting any unwanted attention from your watchdogs. Your cut will be twenty-five per cent. And that’s standard commission on money trades.’