Animal Kingdom (2 page)

‘What are you doing?' Smurf asked in that lazy kind of singsong voice she used to show her disapproval of her sons' minor foibles.

‘What do you think I'm doing?' Craig shot back, an angry little boy in a 25-year-old's body.

What he looked like he was doing was going to chop the dog in half, or at least castrate it, for some real or imagined crime, but what he
looked like
he was doing and what he was doing were always two completely different things with Craig, because he was one seriously deranged dude, covered in pirate boat and Lady Luck tatts and with ants in his head from spending too many nights on the goey. Or something. J didn't know what. All he knew was that wherever Craig went, it was like watching a cyclone go through the place.

Still, this was going to be his home, and, apart from the fact that the Codys were all on someone's watch list, it was a pretty ordinary suburban existence, and this was a pretty ordinary suburban kitchen. With the proceeds of a recent armed robbery sitting flush on the table. An armed robbery involving the shooting of a security guard, resulting in his permanent paralysis. But every occupation has its hazards, and nobody seemed too concerned as they settled down to do the business.

‘Nine … four,' Baz said, dividing the money, not because he was the only one who could count, but because he was the only one everyone could trust.

J didn't say anything, because it wasn't his place to say. He knew enough to know when to keep his trap shut, and he was no cleanskin himself. Sure, he was a schoolkid, but he'd fiddled about with cars, and you couldn't really be part of a family like this—even if he hadn't seen most of them for years—without some of it rubbing off.

They had their own
don't ask, don't tell
code of honour and, for what it was worth, it worked pretty well, keeping a semblance of normality on the maddest shit you could imagine.

So J sat there playing dumb while the business was done, and his grandmother offered him cereal and breakfast juice and asked if he was going to school.

Baz had almost instantly liked J. That wasn't unusual, because J was a pretty likeable kid and Baz liked most people. Unlike Darren and Craig, his partners in crime, there was nothing mean about Baz. If he had to hit you, he would, but it wouldn't be because he enjoyed it; it was just a means of getting what he wanted. Violence for him was a way of achieving his goals, not something he took pleasure in, and that gave him a certain respect, even here. You knew he wasn't a psycho who was going to thump you till you were a pulpy mess just because it made him feel good after a bad day, but you didn't know that about the other two. And you definitely didn't know it about Pope—Smurf 's other son.

Darren was okay: the sort of guy you might meet in a nightclub and do a few lines with but basically harmless. Craig was wild, if that was the way you liked your fun. And the only one who looked like she had a leash on him was Smurf.

J was glad someone did but didn't really get what it was between her and her boys. It had always felt a bit weird to him, even when they were little kids. And now, to watch her call Craig over after he'd done whatever he'd done to the dog, and to see him slink up to her like a guilty ten year old; to see her kiss him the way she did, full on the lips, lingering … Well, that was
really
weird. In fact, it was so weird that J would force himself to forget it every time he saw it, and so he'd get a surprise every time it happened. Which was way too often.

Still, this was his family and these were his people. It was probably like every other family; he didn't know. Everyone's got their secrets and everyone's got things they regard as pretty ordinary that anybody else would say were totally insane if they knew about them, but that's just life. You'd be amazed by what goes on in most people's houses when the front door is shut and the Codys were no different. The boys were just that—boys in men's bodies—but the real men, men like you think men should be—there weren't too many of them around the place. Baz, maybe—no, Baz, definitely. He was a man, and J was glad to feel the warmth of his smile and the gentle teasing of his ways, even if he had just put someone in a wheelchair for nine thousand dollars.

Baz was okay. Baz was the kind of man you'd be glad to have as your father, and, if there was something J needed right now, that was it: someone to look out for him. So for the moment he was happy to be where he was, and this was the kind of family he was happy to call his own.

Baz didn't need a family; he had his own family.

Catherine, his wife, and their little girl, Evie. And a nice house—well, nice enough. Better than Baz had been brought up in, anyhow. Yeah, Baz had it sweet. He was his own man, his own boss, not needing to kowtow to anyone. And he had a future, he knew he did. It wasn't going to be like this forever. Not that there was anything wrong with this, but he just knew it wasn't going to last. And, to tell the truth, after a while the hassle got to you, that low-level annoyance of knowing someone was watching you, waiting for you to slip up.

That was the way Baz felt as he swung into his street and noticed the silver Ford parked opposite his house with a couple of plainclothes stiffs sitting pretty inside. Just sitting there to give him the shits.

‘He's not here, mate,' Baz said, offering the driver a fistful of flowers he had yanked out of the front garden. ‘You guys are wasting your time.'

The copper just stared at him, an amused look playing in his eyes. ‘Who's not here?' he asked, teasing him, tugging playfully on his line, fishing for him.

‘You know who I mean,' Baz said.

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' the other man answered, with something hard and edgy entering his voice.

He did know what Baz was talking about. It was Pope, J's other uncle. The one hiding out in a motel room somewhere because the heat was on and the Armed Robbery Squad really wanted to take him down and, if the truth be known, take them all down, and had decided to do something serious about it.

They didn't scare Baz, but it wasn't a good look to have a couple of coppers—plainclothes or not, you could pick 'em a mile away—sitting in their car opposite your house. Because, after all, this was the suburbs. Baz and Catherine weren't just playing house; they were ordinary, everyday suburbanites. They had grown up in the burbs and that's where they felt comfortable, arguing about where to put the roses and wondering if it was paper or garden refuse recycling this week. When you looked out from the front room, all you saw were gum trees and Holdens. So to have a couple of coppers there day and night, well, it did what Baz supposed it was intended to do. It got on his nerves.

And when he arrived home that afternoon, it was just one more irritant in an already disappointing day that had started with slim pickings from the security van job they'd pulled off. Thinking about it, he felt—more than ever— that the happy days of carefree crime they had all enjoyed were coming to an end.

That thought hadn't occurred to Craig. Or, if it had, he wasn't able to keep it in focus long enough for it to have any effect.

Craig was into drugs. Lots of them. He liked them, and he liked the sense of power and control they gave him, the buzz, the speediness; he just loved getting out of it. And he loved selling them—when all was said and done, it was a pretty easy thing to do. Not much call for guns, none of that heavy shit—the occasional biffo to maintain respect and get what was yours, but all in all a pretty chilled clientele who came to
you
looking for the magic stuff, and somehow a bottomless bag of money to pay for it. Selling drugs was the easiest thing in the world, especially when Craig's supplier happened to be a bent copper called Randall Roache.

Craig regularly met Roache in a pet shop, because Craig liked fish and had a fish tank in which he fed guppies to his clown fish and as on a number of previous occasions, he had brought J along just to see how he'd handle himself. Like any good uncle, Craig thought J needed to be given a bit of direction in life, and the pet shop seemed just the right place to do it.

Swimming around. Innocent. Are fish innocent?
Idle thoughts floated through J's mind as he stared into the blue, watery light. He wasn't really thinking. You don't really think when you're watching fish: that's why you watch them. You just sort of immerse yourself—forget yourself.

And that's what J was trying to do as Craig and Roache talked in undertones at the other end of the aisle, next to the angel fish. Still, no matter how hard he tried to ignore them, he could hear morsels of their conversation; or maybe it was the tension in their voices he could hear, a nervy tension rippling out from them, alerting the sharks of this world that something was in trouble. While they pretended everything was perfectly normal.

And perhaps it was normal. Perhaps cops and robbers need each other, are naturally drawn to each other, know and understand the same sorts of things. Are found in the same places. Perhaps they even like each other.

Like tigers like monkeys.

But it wasn't just like that, was it—not just the predator and the prey—because in this jungle everyone had a bit of the tiger and a bit of the monkey in them.

Baz could have been a cop, no question about it, and even Craig, once, before he strayed so far onto the dark side that he couldn't find his way back. Pope could never have been a cop, or, if he had been, he would have been the commissioner: some heavy-dude cop who had the last say-so on who was to get the green light and who was to get the stop. Yeah, Pope could have been a cop, and there were plenty of cops who could have been Pope, or who were skirting pretty close to it. There was no black and white in this zoo. There never is.

That's the way it looked to J as the two men hovered in the ghostly fluorescent light of the fish aisle.

J didn't know what was going on, but did really. Craig was picking up a deal. Not the whole deal: half of it was still in lockup, he heard Roache say. So Roache was stealing drugs that had been impounded from other drug pushers. J didn't know how a copper could steal drugs from a lockup, but it didn't matter whether he stole it or just paid off some other corrupt copper to get it for him: he had it, and J didn't have to understand anything else.

In fact, the less he understood, the better. If there was a truth in this world, that was it, and as he was thinking about this, the conversation between Roache and Craig took a more sinister twist.

Roache told Craig to make Pope—that's
Uncle
Pope— pull his head in. Armed Robbery knew the stuff they had on Pope wouldn't stand up in court, so they'd decided to do something about it themselves, because he'd become too much of a liability.

This didn't sound good, and Craig looked stressed. ‘His head's pulled in,' he answered plaintively. ‘Your head doesn't get more in than Pope's head.'

‘Mate, even if I gave a shit, you'd still be telling the wrong bloke,' Roache answered as he picked up his money and left to take his son to the soccer.

Looking at J, Craig nodded towards the door.

J didn't know much about his Uncle Pope, not even why they called him
Pope
. Probably just some mean joke about some poor bastard he'd done over, some terrible thing he'd done, and some wit had made a crack about it, and there you are, you're stuck with it.

None of them had much religion. J had been to church, to his grandfather's funeral, and he knew a bit about God from TV, but that was all. Jesus was supposed to have saved the world by dying for its sins, but J didn't have a clue what that meant. Someone had come to the door one time and tried to sign him up. He'd heard them out and taken their paper and then thrown it into the bin when they'd gone. It didn't look like the sort of thing he'd be interested in.

His mother used to say religious stuff to him.
Be good. Don't lie.
That sort of thing.
Don't steal unless you have to.
Didn't stop her from blowing her brains out with one shot too many. He'd never prayed, but he had seen someone do it one time. Close their eyes and sort of hold their breath. J under stood that.

Craig was driving. He'd done his business and now they were just hanging out, cruising along Marine Parade, not looking at anything in particular.

‘What did you think of that?' Craig asked.

‘What?' J replied, looking at his uncle.

‘That guy Roache,' Craig answered. ‘I can get whatever I like off him. Smack, coke—you name it, he's got it. He's got his own key.'

‘Key?' J asked.

‘Key to the kingdom,' Craig answered, looking away. ‘Key to the strongbox. He can get me whatever I want, by the truckload.'

The water was slopping around out on the bay and the palm trees were soaking up the sun. It was summer; that was why everyone was in shorts and crop tops. There wasn't much going on. It was a weekday, so most people were at work, which was what made the drive so sweet. To be out in the sun, hooking school, lazing around when nearly everyone else was hard at it—it just tasted like freedom at its best.

‘You like this?' Craig asked.

‘Sure,' J answered. ‘Who wouldn't?'

And he liked his uncle, too. A bit of a pirate.

‘You're okay,' Craig said, smiling. ‘I think you've got a future here.'

Reaching for his mobile, Craig started to dial. Maybe to organise a drop somewhere. J didn't really know if he wanted a future as one of Craig's drug soldiers, because that was obviously what Craig was getting at. But because of his mother's habit, J wasn't really sure he wanted to have anything to do with drugs.

The traffic lights up ahead had turned red so they slowed to a stop, and J checked out some girls in bikinis sauntering past. They gave him a look and J felt that twinge in his guts that he got every time a girl looked at him; he never knew what to do.