The call, p.21
The Call, page 21
She tentatively brought up the sleeping arrangements. The easiest thing would be to put Kloe in her room and for her to sleep in Scarlett’s, but after the day’s revelations — Christ, was it only today? — she wasn’t sure she could bear it. And that was without factoring Marshall into the mix. But Rachel was briskly no nonsense — well, of course Kloe could stay in Scarlett’s old room, she’d put some fresh sheets on. Just like that.
Honey left the two of them chatting away like old friends and went out to her mother’s Corolla.
AFTER ALL HER WORRY AND catastrophising, finding Marshall was a bit of an anti-climax. His truck was parked outside the pub. She went in, saw Gemma all over him. He looked about as miserable as a man could look, and when she told him to come with her he did as he was told. She was vaguely aware of filthy looks from Gemma, but she didn’t have the will to explain, she just needed to get Marshall out of there.
He was so compliant she was in danger of losing respect. It was only when they got outside that she saw what a momentous effort he’d been making to stay upright. He staggered, and she only just managed to catch him.
‘Christ, Marshall, how pissed are you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Shit, you are not a feather.’
‘S-ry.’
‘Yeah, I know. Can you walk?’
‘’Kay.’
‘Good boy.’
Somehow, she maneuvered him into the front passenger seat of the car. He slumped against the door the moment she closed it. By the time they’d driven the few blocks to Rachel’s house, he’d fallen asleep or passed out. Honey was tempted to cover him with a rug and leave him, but a sudden image of him choking on his own vomit propelled her to action. She was going to need help.
She tiptoed inside to find Kloe talking a mile a minute about her kids, as if she saw them every day, and Rachel chipping in the odd encouragement.
‘Kloe, could I have a hand for a sec?’
‘Me and your mum was just talking.’
‘Yes, I can see.’
Rachel sighed her long-put-upon sigh. ‘Better see what her ladyship wants, Kloe, or she’ll get all huffy. Don’t worry about me. I was just about to put myself to bed. See you in the morning, girls.’
Who was this woman? Honey wondered. She’d read about changes in personality due to Alzheimer’s but maybe this was just Rachel-with-company and she’d forgotten.
She’d obviously made a fan in Kloe. ‘She’s a lovely old duck, your mum.’
‘She is when she wants to be.’
‘What are we doing?’
Honey lowered her voice. ‘Getting Marshall out of the car. He’s very drunk.’
‘Does he wanna get out of the car?’ Kloe sounded nervous.
‘He’s pretty much out to it.’
‘That’s okay then.’
The two of them managed to drag Marshall out, prop him up and walk/carry him to the front door. Getting him through the doorway required more pushing and shoving. He half fell into the hallway before Honey caught him. They had got him as far as the door outside her bedroom when Rachel appeared from the bathroom at the end of the hallway. Honey, a teenager again, froze.
Rachel gave her a look of deep and abiding disappointment, turned, and went back into the bathroom, shutting the door firmly behind her.
Kloe was grinning. ‘You in big trouble now.’
‘Shut up.’
They tucked Marshall in — on his side, fetal position — and went back to the dining room, where they drank herbal tea and Kloe recounted what she knew about the contents of the plastic bag. Honey emptied the papers and photos onto the table. A couple of them slipped to the floor, and Honey glimpsed the naked back of a woman astride a man. She had a cat tattoo on one shoulder. Kloe’s eyes were gleaming. She looked triumphant, smug even.
Honey was irritated. This wasn’t a game. ‘Okay, you can go to bed now,’ she snapped.
‘What if you want to know stuff?’
‘I’ll ask in the morning.’
‘But—’
‘I don’t want any distractions.’
Kloe finally took the hint and said goodnight.
Honey decided the herbal shit wasn’t going to cut it. She brewed a mug of industrial-strength black coffee, and began examining Kloe’s stash. The photos were self-explanatory. The angle and quality suggested a hidden camera in the ceiling. The fifty-something bloke with the flabby arse snorting white powder off a pierced navel looked familiar; a quick Google search confirmed he was indeed Bradley Morgan. That would explain the availability of the luxury ‘bach’ for use by the gang. It wouldn’t be great publicity for a high-flying moneyman like him to be known as a drug user and gang associate. Rooting a young Asian sex worker wasn’t illegal, but the whole package would be enough for the Reapers to blackmail him into doing their bidding, at least up to a point.
Honey turned her attention to the financial papers, which seemed to confirm what Kloe’s friend had told her. She was no expert, but the proximity of the photos to the banking details, company registrations and other legal gobbledygook suggested that Morgan was helping the Reapers to launder their ill-gotten gains.
It was the kind of information that could get Kloe killed.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t likely to get her in witness protection any time soon. There was no evidential link between this stuff and the Reapers. Kloe claimed to have taken it (stolen it) from a safe at Reapers HQ. Good luck proving it. And Kloe as a credible witness? Doubt it. The defence (and Morgan could afford the best) would love her.
The papers showed various companies in offshore tax havens, along with suggestions for New Zealand investment opportunities. The investments themselves were probably legitimate, so unless the money could be proven to be dirty, Honey wasn’t even sure there was a provable crime committed. Even if there was, who were the criminals? Unpicking the real owners behind myriad shell companies — who’d have the time or inclination for that?
At dinner parties with Tony’s lefty liberal friends, Honey had got bored defending the cops, but the argument that really got up her nose was the comparisons between white- and blue-collar crime. She used to put it like this. Take a couple of undereducated, drug-addled dickheads with fetal alcohol syndrome who rob a liquor store. It’s all on CCTV, they’ve probably got form — easy arrest. Low drain on resources. Compare that to some financial manager or lawyer, educated, careful, working in an area that requires specialist knowledge, squirrelling away millions in client funds. How many resources and person hours would it take to bring them down? What were the chances of a conviction? Honey guessed Morgan would be on the radar of the Serious Fraud Office, but they were seriously understaffed. They tended to work a few big cases, sometimes for years, and it didn’t always go their way. And even if a legally admissible link between Morgan and the gang could be established, it would involve thousands of hours of tedious investigation. It was hard to see a place for Kloe in any of this.
She supposed she could release the photos anonymously to the media or put them online. It might hurt Bradley Morgan for a minute, it certainly wouldn’t be good for his marriage, but he was unlikely clickbait. Or it might get swept under the carpet. The powers-that-be had a sad history of blaming the whistleblowers rather than the real villains, and the New Zealand media, with some staunch and notable exceptions, was hardly a beacon to investigative journalism. Morgan was more likely to get PR advice from them. She pictured the statement: he’s sorry for the distress this has caused his family and has sought help for his drug problem, made a donation to the Drug Foundation blah, blah, blah. A former telco CEO had gone the same route not long ago, and was now making a very nice living as a consultant, thank you very much.
That’s the way corruption worked in New Zealand. Not the kind that registered on international lists, more the ‘you scratch my back ’cos our dads went to the same school and I married your cousin’ kind. But it could be a death warrant for Kloe. Maybe not right away, but one day she might quietly disappear, a warning to other potential narks.
There was no way around it. It was on Honey. She was the one who’d pushed Kloe to inform on the Reapers. All she’d wanted was someone to talk to about her shitty little life. Honey had known this, and she’d exploited it.
She turned her attention back online, following the inglorious career of Bradley Morgan. Epsom upbringing, King’s College, he’d scraped through an MBA, and escaped conviction for drink driving and drug offences. He had two children by wife number one; wife number two was the ex-girlfriend of an All Black, an influencer, and wrote an advice column for a Sunday paper. Bradley liked to describe himself as a self-made man, and that was true in the sense that he’d taken his father’s multi-million-dollar transport company and asset stripped it into insolvency, erasing hundreds of jobs for loyal employees in the process. He re-emerged as a hedge-fund manager and proceeded to make and lose several more fortunes, all of it money belonging to other people, earning himself the rather unimaginative business section nickname of the Phoenix.
A wave of disgust, salty and dark, swept over Honey. God knows she hated the Reapers, she had good reason, but she understood where they were coming from. They’d made choices, bad, violent, criminal sure, but from a much less varied range of options. Bradley had made choices from a position of privilege, and that’s what really got up her nose. Why should Kloe die so that Morgan could carry on unscathed, as if his life mattered more than hers?
A germ of an idea lodged itself in her brain. It was seriously wrong — morally, ethically, she’d be crossing a line. She poked at it, though, examined it from different angles, and decided she could make it work. But could she live with herself afterwards? Once upon a time she would have said an emphatic no, but she’d already learned to live with more trauma than she’d known was possible. Could she justify it to herself as the lesser of two evils? Maybe. She groaned and leaned forward to rest her head on her arms.
‘Howzit?’
Marshall was standing in the doorway, looking sheepish and unwell. He swayed a little.
‘You should maybe sit down before you fall down.’
He plonked himself in the nearest chair, head bowed.
‘You want some water?’
He nodded.
‘Some coffee?’
He nodded again.
‘Lost the power of speech?’
She didn’t wait for him to nod again, but went into the kitchen, filled a glass from the tap and put on the kettle. She went back and handed him a couple of paracetamol as well.
‘I woke up, didn’t know where I was.’
‘I’m not surprised. You were out to it.’
‘How?’ He seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘The pub?’ Honey prompted.
He shook his head, helplessly.
‘Then Kloe and I carried you in.’
It took a moment to register. ‘Kloe? As in? Fuck me.’
She resisted the urge to add the rejoinder, Not if you paid me. ‘You missed out on quite a bit.’
She gave him the broad strokes of what had happened at Jim’s shack after he’d gone walkabout. He was furious with himself for not being there when the Reapers turned up, but Honey reassured him it was for the best. When she got to the bit about finding him and Gemma at the pub, he winced and filled in the rest of the gaps as well as he could remember.
IN A RED HAZE MARSHALL had driven straight to the hospice to confront Jim, only to discover someone already there, beside his bed, talking softly about faith and redemption. Marshall was appalled. Jim Before Cancer wouldn’t have given Father Yun the steam off his piss.
He paused in the doorway and watched Jim taking in every word, his dark eyes wide in his skull face:
‘… who formed you from the dust of the earth.
May Holy Mary, the angels, and all the saints
Come to meet you as you go forth from this life.
May Christ who was crucified for you
Bring you freedom and peace.’
Like fuck, thought Marshall. Or maybe he said it out loud because Father Yun briefly glanced in his direction but didn’t break from his work. Marshall considered waiting for him to leave, then putting his hands around Jim’s matchstick neck and telling him to give his regards to the devil. But looking at him now, grey skin hung over angular bones, he just felt a great wave of hopeless sorrow — for Scarlett, for himself, for his uncle who had virtually raised him. With the back of the hand sometimes, sure. But Jim had taught him how to repair a net and strip an engine, how to read the weather and steer a boat by the stars. Given him the gift of self-reliance. Off the piss, Jim was hard-working, taciturn, a man who kept to himself. But drunk … the thought made Marshall’s throat dry. Who was he to argue with his legacy? If he asked Jim why he did it, what would Jim say? Because he could? Marshall quietly turned and left the priest to it.
More than anything he wanted to throw himself down a stairwell of oblivion. The scraps of wisdom and self-control painfully learned over the last decade seemed pointless. Who was he, anyway? Scarlett had trusted him, relied on him, and he’d let her walk into the lair of the beast. He could still see her back in the green velvet dress disappearing down the track towards Jim’s cottage. Still remembered the moment of decision when he turned his bike around and headed off — to what? He couldn’t even fucking remember.
But even as he was drowning in guilt, autopilot kicked in and he had used the phone at hospital reception to call his long-suffering neighbour on her landline. Something had come up, he’d make it up to her; if she could just take care of the animals, everything else could keep. Then he’d bought a bottle of bourbon and sat in his truck in the scenic rest area overlooking the bay, and drank. Sometime later (how?) he drove himself to the pub (why?), but all of that was gone, erased from his hard drive.
HE DRAINED THE DREGS OF his coffee, then looked to Honey, as raw and open as she had ever known him. He said it worried him that he could lose a few hours so easily. That was one of the reasons he’d quit hard drinking for a while in Oz — the fear of what he might be capable of while he was in blackout. Maybe he wasn’t so different from his uncle after all. Honey shook her head and put her lips to his for a moment. He was nothing like Jim, she said. She put his cup aside, took him by the hand, and led him to her room. He apologised that he might not be up to much, but that was okay by her. She was exhausted. They spooned and fell asleep almost straight away.
Sometime after sunrise, with the rest of the house still sleeping, she brought them both a cup of tea and they made love as softly and as slowly and as quietly as they could.
They were quiet right up until the moment when they dissolved into each other, flesh into flesh, and Honey could hear cries coming from her own throat until Marshall, giggling like a school boy, clamped his hand over her mouth.
‘Stop it, your mother will be in here with her broom to chase me away!’
When the giggling had subsided, in gradually diminishing waves, Honey lay back and gave Marshall an abridged outline of the plan she’d come up with overnight. He pursed his lips and widened his eyes and blew. Was she sure about this? She’d be sailing pretty damn close to the wind.
Honey deliberately underplayed the risks, shrugged and said it was the only way she could think of to keep Kloe alive. She could see he wasn’t entirely happy, but he admitted he didn’t have any better ideas and agreed to help.
That settled it. She was going to take it to her enemies.
29
HAMMER SHOULD’VE BEEN THE CAT that got the cream. That first big deal with the Knights and the Asians had paid off, everyone had made plenty of money and the cops had been left holding their dicks. The Reapers were putting in place the new business model, bypassing the Mexicans, onselling crystal meth to Oz, the money coming back as foreign investment in legit businesses. It was a sweet set-up and even if Renata was the brains behind it — he’d give her that — he was still the man in charge and riding high on the hog.
But he’d been to see the doctor again, and his blood pressure and cholesterol were through the roof. He was facing a lifetime of the pills that made him feel like crap. Some mornings he woke up wading through mud. In his guts, which were also giving him gyp, Hammer knew it all started with the drunken call from that fucktard bitch who told him what she’d seen in the safe. His fucking safe. At first he thought maybe it was bullshit: the bit about her taking pics and making copies sounded way too fucking bright for Kloe. But it kept gnawing away at him, what she could do with that information. That she could have got one over him. The thing that kept coming back to him was the cop who started all this. What if Kloe had given her the info?
What if the pigshit used it to pressure Morgan to back out on the deal? What if the cops started on the money trail and it messed up the plan? He’d no longer be the swinging dick who made everyone rich, he’d be the guy that blew it ’cos he let his brainless sister-in-law get one over him. The thought was humiliating, and it kept him up at nights, feeling sick as a dog.
He couldn’t bring himself to talk it over with Renata. When she’d asked him what Kloe had said during that drunken call, Hammer had bullshitted, thankful he’d grabbed the phone off her when he did. He said Kloe must’ve overheard something but she didn’t know what she was talking about. Renata was obviously suspicious but she didn’t push it. He’d downplayed and said, ‘Fuck her, long as she stays away from me, I’ll stay away from her.’ He didn’t want Renata to know he’d buggered things up by leaving his key where Kloe could find it. Truth was he was hoping it would just go away if he ignored it. And it had, for months, until the bitch showed up in Rotorua and got away from him (again), sending him into a spiral of paranoia, a churning feeling that everything was sliding away from him.
