The Dry (34 page)

They had delivered the message to his house. Here in Kiewarra. Two thick-necked steroid junkies from Melbourne, showing up on his tidy suburban-like doorstep in person to tell him their boss was getting twitchy. Pay. They'd brought the nail gun with them to show him. Whitlam had been paralyzed with fear. Sandra and Danielle were in the house. He could hear the sounds of his wife and daughter chatting idly in the kitchen as the two men detailed in low tones what they were going to do to them if he didn't come up with the cash. It was a horrific soundtrack.

The notification of the Crossley Educational Trust funding had come through two days later. The letter was addressed to Whitlam directly. It had arrived with the claim form on Karen's day off and landed on his desk unopened.

He'd made the decision in less than a heartbeat. They gave away millions. Fifty thousand was a drop in the ocean for those rich bastards. He could earmark it for something vague and tricky to quantify, training courses perhaps, support programs. That would tick their boxes. For a while. But that was all he needed. A while. Borrow it now to pay Melbourne; repay it, well, later. Somehow. It wasn't enough to clear his debt, not by a long way, but it was enough to buy him some breathing space.

He hadn't let himself think about it too closely as he'd diverted the money. He'd simply swapped the school's account details for his private one. The one Sandra didn't know about. He kept the school's account name on the form. Banks used only the numbers, not the names. Whether the two corresponded was never checked, he knew. The plan had been OK, he told himself. Not great, not even good, but holding water. Then Karen Hadler had knocked on his door one afternoon, holding that Crossley Trust form.

Whitlam remembered the look in her eyes and, making a fist, he lightly, discreetly, punched the wall next to him until his knuckles were raw and weeping.

Whitlam watched Karen leave. As his office door clicked closed behind her, he rotated in his chair and silently vomited into the wastepaper bin. He could not go to prison. He couldn't pay off what he owed in prison, and the people he owed weren't the kind to care about why. Pay, or his family paid. That was the deal. Signed and sealed. He had seen the nail gun. They'd made him touch it. Feel its leaden weight in his hand. Pay, or his … No. There was no alternative. He would pay. Of course he would pay.

He sat alone in his office and forced himself to think. Karen knew. Which meant she'd probably tell her husband, if she hadn't told him already. How soon would she blow the whistle? She was a cautious woman. Almost overly diligent in many ways. It slowed her down. Karen Hadler would want to be 100 percent certain before she committed herself to action. Luke, however, was a different story.

He didn't have much time. He couldn't let this get out. He could not let this get out. There was no alternative.

The end of the school day came and went, but brought with it no real answer. Whitlam waited as long as he could, then did what he always did in times of stress. He took all the cash he had, and some he didn't, and went to the pub's slots room. It was there, cocooned in the glow of the lights and the optimistic jangling sounds, that the first stirrings of a solution came to him. As they so often did.

Alone and tucked out of sight among the slot machines, Whitlam heard Luke Hadler's voice from a table round the corner. He froze, hardly daring to breathe as he waited for Hadler to tell Jamie Sullivan about the school money. He felt sure it was coming, but the secret remained unsaid. Instead, they bitched about rabbits, planned a shoot on Sullivan's land for the following day. Times were arranged. Luke would bring his own shotgun. Interesting, Whitlam thought. Perhaps the game was not quite over. Not yet.

Another hundred dollars in gold coins pushed through the machine and he had the skeleton of a plan. He ran it over and over in his head until there was some flesh on the bones. It was OK. Not perfect. Not a sure thing. But maybe fifty-fifty. And Whitlam would take those odds any day of the week.

Down in the playground, Whitlam watched as a group of tiny children hurtled past him, his own daughter in the mix. For a second he thought he saw Billy Hadler in the crowd, not for the first time. Whitlam's head jerked involuntarily, a sort of spasm from the neck. He still felt sick when he thought about the boy. For what it was worth.

Billy was never supposed to be there. Whitlam's scraped fist clenched around the coffee cup as he made his way back to his office. The boy was supposed to be out of the house. It was all arranged. He'd made sure. He'd deliberately dug out that badminton set. After that it had needed only a subtle suggestion from him for Sandra to get on the phone and organize that last-minute playdate with Billy. If the boy's stupid mother hadn't canceled, stuffed up the plan, then Billy wouldn't have been caught up in it. She only had herself to blame.

Whitlam himself had tried to save that kid. No one could say any different. He took a swig of coffee and winced as the liquid burned his mouth. He felt it trickle down his gullet, turning his insides sour.

Guts writhing, Whitlam had left the pub and passed a sleepless night picking holes in his plan. The next day, he sat in his office in a blank-eyed stupor, waiting for the inevitable knock on the door. Karen would have spoken up. Surely. Someone would come, he just didn't know who it would be. The police? The school board chairman? Karen herself again, perhaps? He both feared and longed for that knock. A knock meant Karen had told. It meant it was too late. And he wouldn't have to do what he was planning.

He didn't need to ask himself if he could go through with it. He knew he could. He'd proved it with the guy in the Footscray alley. That was a guy who should have known better. He was supposed to be a professional.

Whitlam had come across him once before. Then, the man had cornered him in a parking lot, relieved him of his wallet and delivered his message via a sharp blow to the kidneys. It was supposed to play out the same in Footscray, Whitlam guessed. But then the man had grown angry, started waving the knife around and demanding more than they'd agreed. Things got messy fast.

The guy had been sloppy and almost certainly under the influence of something. He'd heard the word principal and underestimated Whitlam's athleticism. A poorly timed lunge was countered with a lucky rugby tackle, and they hit the concrete with a crack.

The blade had flashed orange in the streetlight, and Whitlam felt the point slice across his belly, leaving a warm red line. Adrenaline and fear rushed through him as he grabbed the man's knife hand. He held and twisted it, using his own weight to force it back toward his attacker's torso. The man wouldn't drop the knife. He was still holding it as it slipped into his own body. He grunted wetly into Whitlam's face as the principal pinned him down, feeling the slowing rhythm of the blood pumping out onto the road. Whitlam had waited until the man had stopped breathing, then waited a full minute more.

Whitlam had had tears in his eyes. His body was trembling, and he was terrified he might pass out. But somewhere, buried many layers down, was a pinpoint of calm. He'd been driven into a corner, and he'd acted. He'd done what was needed. Whitlam, so familiar with the sick free-falling sensation every time he reached for his wallet, had, for once, been in control.

With shaking fingers, he'd examined his own torso. The cut was superficial. It looked far worse than it was. He bent over his attacker and dutifully performed two rounds of CPR, making sure his fingerprints smeared in blood reflected his civic actions. He found a house in a neighboring street with its lights on, and let forth the emotion he'd been holding back as he asked them to report a mugging. The attackers had fled but quick, please, someone was badly injured.

Whenever Whitlam now thought about the incident, which was more often than he expected, he knew it had been an act of self-defense. This new threat may involve an office rather than an alleyway, paper instead of a knife, but at its heart he felt it was not so different. The guy in the lane. Karen on the other side of the desk. Forcing his hand. Compelling him to act. It came down to them or him. And Whitlam chose himself.

The end of the school day came and went. The classrooms and playground cleared. No one came knocking on the office door. She hadn't reported it yet. He could still salvage this. It was now, or it was never. He looked at the clock.

It was now.

37

“How did Whitlam get to the Hadlers' farm?” Barnes asked, leaning forward between the front seats. “We turned our eyes square watching that school CCTV footage, and I thought his car didn't move from the school parking lot the whole afternoon.”

Falk found the photos of Luke's body sprawled in his truck's cargo tray. He pulled up the close-cropped shot of the four horizontal streaks on the tray's interior. He passed it to Barnes, along with his phone showing the photos he'd taken of his own car trunk the night before. On the trunk's felt upholstery were two long stripes.

Barnes looked from one to the other.

“The marks are the same,” he said. “What are they?”

“The ones in my trunk are new,” Falk said. “They're tire streaks. He rode there on his bloody bike.”

Whitlam didn't tell anyone in the front office he was going. He slipped out of the fire door unseen, leaving his jacket on his chair and his computer switched on—the universal symbol for “on the premises, back in a tick.”

He nipped out to the sheds, avoiding the limited range of the two cameras. Thank God for lack of funding, he caught himself thinking, then almost laughed at the irony. Within minutes, Whitlam had unlocked the ammunition store and pocketed a handful of shots. The school had a single shotgun for rabbit control, which he placed in a sports bag and slung over his shoulder. He would only use that as a last resort. Luke Hadler would have his own gun, Whitlam begged silently. He'd been shooting with Sullivan. But ammunition? No idea.

Whitlam jogged to the bike sheds. He'd driven in early that morning and parked in a quiet street near the school. Pulling his bike from the trunk, he'd cycled the short rest of the journey. He'd chained his bike up where he knew it would soon be surrounded by others. Hidden in plain sight. Then he'd walked back to his car and driven it into the school parking lot, choosing a prime spot well within the camera's range.

Now, he unlocked his waiting bike and moments later was cycling along deserted country roads toward the Hadlers' property. It wasn't far, and he made good time. He stopped a kilometer from the farm and picked an overgrown spot by the side of the road. He pushed his way into the bushes and waited, whispering a silent, feverish prayer that he'd timed it right.

After twenty-five minutes he was sweating, convinced he'd missed his chance. Not a single vehicle had come along. Eight more minutes ticked by, nine. Then, just as Whitlam was sliding his eyes sideways toward the end of the shotgun and wondering if there wasn't in fact another way out for him, he heard it.

A truck engine rumbled in the distance. Whitlam peered out. It was the one he needed. He felt light-headed as he sent up a silent prayer of thanks. He stepped out onto the side of the road, dumping his bike at his feet. He stood next to it and put out his arms, waving wide and wretchedly, like the drowning man that he was.

It looked for a terrible moment like the truck wasn't going to stop. Then, as it drew closer it slowed, pulling to a halt where he stood. The driver's window rolled down.

“Looks like you've got some trouble here.”

Luke Hadler leaned out.

Whitlam's elbow jarred painfully as he brought the sock packed with stones crashing down on the back of Luke's skull. It connected with the top of his neck with a gritty crunch, and Luke crumpled face-first into the dirt and settled with a dead weight.

Whitlam pulled on rubber gloves pocketed from the school science lab and opened the truck's cargo tray. With the speed of an athlete he shoved his hands under Luke's armpits and hauled him clumsily into the back.

He listened. Luke's breathing was shallow and ragged. Whitlam raised the sock and brought it crashing down twice more. Felt the skull crunch. There was blood now. Whitlam ignored it. He covered Luke loosely with a tarpaulin he found in the tray and flung his bike on top. The dirt-caked wheels came to rest against the side panel.

Luke's shotgun was in the passenger seat. Whitlam felt dizzy with relief and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel for a full minute while the sensation passed. The weapon was unloaded. Fine. Whitlam took the school's Remington ammunition from his pockets and loaded Luke's gun.

The die was cast.

38

Morning break time had been over for thirty minutes, and all was still. The playground in the distance was deserted, and Falk was stifling a yawn when his cell phone rang. Raco and Barnes jumped as it trilled loudly in the silence of the car.

“Federal Agent Falk?” a voice said as he answered. “It's Peter Dunn here, Crossley Educational Trust director. We spoke this morning.”

“Yes,” Falk said, sitting up a little straighter. “What is it?”

“Look, it's a bit awkward, but that claim you asked about, for Kiewarra Primary?”

“Yes.” Falk wished the man would get to the point.

“I know you said it needed to be hush-hush, but I've discovered that my assistant—she's new, still trying to find her feet—it seems she passed it on to another team member who didn't quite grasp the confidential nature and—”