Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (36 page)

‘Boss,’ Trevor intervened, ‘why don’t we wait and see what she’s got for us? If Gracie’s out with her she’s got to be careful, but she should be able to handle it. That’s what she’s paid to do. We’ll have backup out there for her.’

Harrigan glanced at him angrily before looking through the one-way glass once again.

‘The air in there — how can you breathe it?’ he said to Grace, who did not reply.

Both of them watched him calm down. On the other side of the one-way eye, the girl watched without seeing them, her face expressionless, like a rabbit sitting blankly in a set of car lights. Grace looked once and looked away.

‘Get her some coffee and let’s get on with it,’ Harrigan finally said.

The coffee was sent for. Gina sipped it and lit yet another cigarette.

‘Has your boss made up his mind? Or are you going to back out on me?’

‘No, we’ve still got a bargain, Gina,’ Grace said. ‘And you’ve still got things to tell us. It could be worth a lot of money to you.’

Gina grinned in reply, a thin and bitter smile.

‘Yeah. I guess. Something to look forward to, isn’t it? But this has got to be worth something. Because we were there. The morning that shooting happened. In that little shop? It’s just a place people go, we’d been there all night. Me and Mike in that shitty little room. It was so fucking cold. He’d had a hit and he got sick, but I guess you noticed that when you went in there.’ She sipped more coffee and drew on her cigarette. ‘It was getting light and I wanted us to get out of there but I couldn’t shift him. Then I heard someone coming in the back way and down that hallway. And I thought, we’re getting out of here now if there’s someone else around. I got Mike on his feet and out the back somehow, I don’t know how, and I sort of had him leaning in this doorway at the back of the warehouse there. I saw there was this car there and I thought, good, we’re going to take that. Then I heard these shots. These really loud cracks, you know, one after the other. I couldn’t believe it, I was so shit scared. It was like Mike just woke up, right then. We were standing in this little doorway staring at each other. And she came out the back. Running. She had this gun. I was just staring. Then she tripped, you know? She fell and this gun, she dropped it and it went skidding somewhere, I don’t know where. I didn’t see where it ended up. I thought it went in a drain or something.

And then she got up and she got in the car. Like she hadn’t even noticed she’d fallen down. She had this thing around her face but in the car she was pulling it off. Just kind of ripping it away like she couldn’t breathe. She drove right past us really fast. I don’t know how she didn’t see us. I don’t know what she was looking at. We didn’t wait around, we just got out of there. We got a taxi out on Broadway. Some drivers don’t care, you just have to wave your money around and they’ll pick you up anyway. Doesn’t matter what you look like.’

There was silence. Grace could sense Harrigan leaning on the glass outside the room, waiting.

‘Did you see her face, Gina? Can you give us any kind of a description?’ she asked.

Gina smiled to herself and took another cigarette, lighting it from the end of the one she was smoking.

‘You going to keep your word?’ she asked.

The thin and fixed smile was still on her face. Grace felt a small shock as she watched the girl’s expression.

‘Have you got a name for us, Gina?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I do. But I have to know if you’re going to keep your word first.’

‘I’ll keep my word.’

‘I knew her. That was the thing. I knew who she was. She was a friend of mine once.’ The girl rubbed her forehead, her face haggard.

‘Lucy Hurst. Yeah, Lucy. I liked her, you know. I never thought I’d do this to her.’

On the other side of the glass, Harrigan stood upright. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Got you!’

‘Do you have an address?’ Grace asked.

‘No, I don’t know where she came from. She used to hang around near where I worked. She used to buy from me sometimes, if you really want to know. That’s how we got to know each other.’

‘She was an addict?’

‘Sort of. She moved in and out a bit, she was someone who could do that. She’d binge sometimes. I used to think she was playing some kind of funny game of her own, I don’t know what. Lucy could be really strange.’

‘She didn’t work herself?’

‘Oh, no. No way. No one got within cooee of Luce. I’m not saying she didn’t get jumped on while she was out there, she did. That happens, you just can’t do anything about that. But she never got involved with anyone. She used to hang with this kid called Greg. But they were just friends, you know, they never did it or anything like that. And she had this brother who used to come around looking for her sometimes. His name was Stevie.’

‘Can you do an identikit for me?’ Grace asked.

‘Yeah, I’m good with faces. I’ve got to remember the ones I don’t want to see again.’

‘One more question, Gina.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Why did you take so long to come in here with that information?’

The girl drew a circle on the edge of the ashtray with her cigarette.

She stared up at Grace with a look that seemed to be waiting for some kind of blow, violence of some kind, as if she had withdrawn into herself before this expectation. It was a look that said she had never grown used to it.

‘I really couldn’t get here before. I couldn’t.’

‘But now you can. Because you want the money?’

‘How much of it am I going to get?’

Grace glanced at the blank window before she spoke.

‘Quite a lot of it on that information. All of it, probably,’ she replied.

‘I’ve got to have it,’ the girl said very softly, almost a whisper. ‘I just have to.’

‘It’s okay, Gina. We can fix it up,’ Grace said. ‘Let’s go and do the identikit.’

Outside the interview room, Trevor was waiting by himself.

‘Harrigan wants to see you before you leave with her, mate,’ he said quietly.

‘Sure,’ she replied, not without some anxiety.

Later, Grace placed the identikit, together with a statement, on Harrigan’s desk. He picked up the slightly surreal picture: a robotic, not quite cartoon-like reproduction of a young woman’s face. A face with high cheekbones, a wide forehead and short reddish-brown hair.

‘Not a bad-looking face,’ he said. ‘Do you think this is reliable?’

‘Yes, I do. She was very clear about it. No hesitation, didn’t change her mind once.’

He put it back down on the desk. Outside in the main office, small groups of people had gathered to look at the picture as another copy did the rounds. There was a buzz of activity as his officers rang contacts, searched databases and checked lists for any addresses and possibilities.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘The Cross.’

‘How did I know that? Stay in contact. The last thing I want is anyone hurt.’

Or dead, but superstition prevented him from saying that aloud.

‘I’d like to ring Matthew and let him know. Is that okay with you?’

he asked.

‘No, that’s no problem,’ she said. ‘Don’t let him find it out on the news.’

‘Grace,’ he said, as she stood up to go, ‘this has got a very nasty smell to it. You have thought about that?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about it quite a lot. What are we going to do about it? Go after Gina? Is that what we do now?’

‘I’d like to. I’d like to charge her with withholding information. I’d like to throw the book at her for sitting on that name for all this time.

But no, we don’t do that. I’ll tell someone else about her and maybe they’ll go and look into whatever is going on. If they’ve got the time and the money. In the meantime, watch your back. Make sure you ring in when you’re finished. You’d better get going.’

He went back to his papers, she walked out. Neither of them looked at each other, until the last moment when he looked up to see her walk out the door, just in time to see her glance back at him. Once she had gone, he rang the media unit, advising them he had an identikit on its way over to them to be released for saturation coverage. Then he rang the hospital and asked to speak to Matthew Liu.

25

‘Where do you want to go first, Gina?’ Grace asked as she eased out into the evening traffic.

It had clouded over and begun to rain, just lightly. Gina was lighting one more of Grace’s cigarettes and looking at her side on. She leaned forward, bracing one hand on the dashboard. Her nails were bitten to the quick, her cigarette smoke curled up against the windscreen.

‘Do you want to go to Maccas? I can show you where you can park.’

‘Okay.’

Grace cruised up Liverpool Street. The bright lights of the traffic flowed around her.

The girl hummed a tune which Grace recognised. She sang along quietly.

‘Corinna, Corinna, where you been so long?/Corinna, Corinna
where you been so long?/Got no home, baby, since you’ve been gone.’

‘You know it?’

‘Yeah. I used to sing it once. I used to be a singer. That was a while ago now.’

‘It couldn’t have been that long ago. What did you give it away for?’

‘Got sick of it. I wanted to do something else for a change.’

‘It’s my working name,’ the girl said, ‘Corinna. Because I like the song.’

‘Yeah, I do too,’ Grace replied.

‘You’ve got a nice voice,’ Gina said after a little while. ‘I wouldn’t have given it away if I could sing like you. I would have kept going.’

‘Well, I didn’t. I still don’t want to. It wasn’t that much fun after a while. It was just everyone wanting a piece of you.’

‘Everything’s like that, it doesn’t matter what you do,’ Gina replied.

‘What you do now must be like that.’

Grace smiled. ‘Maybe a bit. No, it’s not the same,’ she said. ‘You’re clean now, aren’t you, Gina?’

‘Yeah. I got my mind back. Weird.’

‘How’d you do it?’

‘It was that or gaol, wasn’t it? I don’t really know how, to tell you the truth. Just did, I suppose. I was helping Mike out. I thought maybe he could do something for himself. Stupid. He was never going to do that.’

‘Attached to him, are you?’ Grace said sympathetically.

‘Yeah. You do get attached. People start to mean something to you.’

‘They do. They get to you after a while.’

They get under your skin whether you want them to or not. Even if you’re not sure what to make of them. Or what they think of you.

Gina found Grace a parking spot down towards Rushcutters Bay, near a large run-down terrace, its exterior painted in bright colours. A man sat on a nearby step, his arms tensed, rocking backwards and forwards in the light rain, lost in the drug. Grace looked at him and notched his existence into her mind, an imprint of the outside world.

They walked past him up a narrow, dog-legged road. They went to McDonald’s on Darlinghurst Road where they had hamburgers with everything, fries and hot apple pies.

‘How well did you know Lucy, Gina? Do you want to tell me something more about her?’ Grace asked, ploughing her way through the food.

‘She used to come in here.’

Grace looked up more sharply at this answer. Gina had wiped her mouth clean and was looking around. Her gaze did not seem to have a focus as she stared at the people near her, most of whom looked away, some of them laughing. Her mouth was moving but she did not speak. Grace followed her stare.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ Gina regained a toughness as she spoke. ‘It’s just that we all used to come in here. We’d sit and we’d talk and that. Just over there in the corner.’ Grace looked at a large table, with seating for about six people. ‘We’d sit in here all afternoon and we’d just laugh.’

‘She really was your friend?’

‘Yeah, she was. For a little while.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing really. Just time. You don’t see people any more for all sorts of reasons. She can’t be my friend now. She’s going to gaol for ever because of me. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.’

‘What do you think might happen to you?’

‘I was just saying that. Anything can happen to anyone. You never know what’s going to happen, you could walk under a truck tomorrow.

But we used to come in here. We used to have fun. I wanted to have a look at it again because of that. Because they were good times. She’d say these things, she’d make you laugh. She wasn’t frightened of anything.’

Grace glanced around at the plastic fittings, the bright lights against the light-coloured walls and mirrors.

‘And she liked a hamburger as well?’

‘She did. And a chocolate thickshake. That was her favourite meal.’

Gina was shredding her used napkin into small soft snowflakes of paper.

‘Do you want to go somewhere else and have some coffee? I want to get out of here now. I know a place where they have really nice baklava, they make it themselves. We can smoke in there. I need a cigarette.’

‘That’s fine with me. I could use a smoke too.’

They walked out into the damp, crowded night-time street, full of light and movement. Gina looked around, her mouth moving silently as it had in the restaurant.

‘I used to work back down there a bit. You can get really tired by the end of the night. But I don’t care about that, you know. I love it here. I do. There just isn’t anywhere else for me.’

‘Does there have to be anywhere else for you? If this is what you want,’ Grace asked.

‘I’m just saying it. It’s really nice to be here right now.’ She stretched her backbone, her mouth a little open, drinking in the soiled air. The rain touched her face, she laughed. ‘It’s just being here. That’s all I want. Just for this little while.’

‘I’ve got more time than a couple of hours if you want it, Gina,’

Grace said. ‘If you want help, I can try to help.’

‘No, I’ve got to be somewhere. Let’s go, okay?’

Inside the café near the other end of Crown Street the air was blue with cigarette smoke. They sat at a table at the back and were served thick sweet coffee and small diamonds of baklava dripping with honey.

‘You know Lucy,’ Gina said unprompted, ‘she did things no one else would do. She could steal anything that wasn’t tied down. She used to take orders.’ The girl laughed. ‘She got me clothes, all my make-up once. She never wanted any money for them, nothing. If she wanted any stuff for herself, she’d just go and take it. But then other times she just gave things away. She used to rip things off just to give them away. Anything. It was a game, that’s what she was doing all the time. She used to say the whole world is crap so what does it matter what I do. That was her way of letting everyone know it. I don’t really want to see things that way. You don’t have to think like that. You’ve got to hope sometimes. Don’t you think?’