In Safe Arms (12 page)

Allegra frowned. Did he mean her cases or Josie? ‘Everything’s fine — considering.’

A pause. ‘Considering what?’

Allegra sat up in bed, appalled one of the firm’s principals was unaware of the situation back home. She quickly filled him in on the details of Josie’s disappearance, leaving out the bit about Nate Hunter.

Luke had sworn her to secrecy on that topic.

‘I’m sorry, Simon,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘I was going to call you, but Henry assured me he’d do it.’

There was silence from the other end and Allegra frowned as Luke opened the door and came into the bedroom. He raised his eyebrows over the rim of his coffee mug.

‘Simon,’ she mouthed the words.

He nodded his understanding and sat down on the bed.

‘Well, Henry must have his reasons,’ Simon mused, and from his tone Allegra had no way of determining his thoughts. But that was Simon. It was one of the things she admired about him most. He kept close counsel, and if he had a beef with anyone, he’d speak directly to the person involved.

In this case, Henry.

They talked a little more about Josie, and then Simon asked if she were alright.

‘Yes, I’m okay.’ Allegra turned to look at her husband. ‘Josie’s parents are home now, and the police are doing everything they can. Everyone here is hoping for good news.’

‘Can anyone at the Southern Cross shed light on why Mulvaney was trying to make contact?’

‘I’ll call Mrs. Mulvaney tomorrow, see what I can find out.’

‘Good.’ Simon gave a heavy sigh. ‘Give her my condolences, Allegra, and keep me in the loop.’

‘I will. Have fun skiing.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, but the enthusiasm had gone from his voice.

Allegra killed the call and turned to look at her husband, a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.

‘What was all that about?’ Luke brushed her hair away from her face.

All at once Allegra was consumed with a terrible sadness. At the time Josie was taken, her only family were in Singapore, Henry hadn’t even bothered to inform Simon Poole about it, and she and Luke were flying home from Lord Howe Island, their phones off when Josie called.

She gazed into Luke’s steady eyes, and it was all she could do to get the words out. ‘I don’t understand. It’s not the kind of thing that slips your mind.’

Luke frowned. ‘What is? Come on, baby, talk to me.’

‘Simon had no idea about Josie, Luke. Henry never called him.’

Henry Grace loosened the paisley tie from around his neck and took the call in his office at Grace and Poole. He couldn’t speak about this at home, couldn’t risk his wife overhearing anything.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me,’ the man said.

The man usually said very little, but that was the nature of their relationship.

‘I’m sorry this has happened,’ said Henry.

A pause, then. ‘The arrangement can stay in place.’

Henry took a deep breath and closed his eyes. ‘As you wish.’

The line went dead.

4:00 a.m. Tuesday

Nate drove the WRX, choosing to leave Katoomba in the blackest part of early morning. As it turned out, luck was on his side, a thick fog blanketing the region and reducing visibility to a few feet.

Out on the highway, he switched on the fog lights, passing mostly semi-trailers and B-doubles on the steep descent into Sydney. At Wallacia, a small rural town situated on the banks of the Nepean River, he pulled into a deserted rest area. Within minutes, he’d changed into his bikie apparel and shrugged on the long black overcoat he usually wore over his suit in winter. If he were caught on camera, there’d be little chance he’d be recognised as the bare-chested guy with shoulder length hair driving a ute the night Josie went missing.

Josie
.

She was as he remembered, and more. Was it possible she’d grown up so much in the space of two years, or had she always been perceptive and sensible at heart, and he just hadn’t looked hard enough?

He’d labelled her, and put her in a box he was comfortable with.

And that was Josie.

Except it wasn’t.

She’d enquired about the photograph in his wallet, and told him he’d make a good father. He’d almost spilled his guts right there and told her it was definitely part of his plan, that he had no desire to be an old father, or risk missing out entirely. But he’d refrained. There was no surer way of sending a twenty-year-old female, unlikely to start a family for at least ten years, running for the hills.

And he didn’t want Josie to run.

Nate rolled up his civilian clothes and stowed them underneath the spare tyre. He couldn’t deny there was some kind of pull/push dynamic going on with him and Josie, but it was nuts to get any ideas about the two of them. She was just shy of twenty-one, barely old enough to know her own mind. And they were from different worlds.

Before Josie had crashed into his world again, he’d been thinking of finding a woman his own age and settling down after all this was finished. He missed being a father to Jonathan, and while women worried about their biological clock, he’d seen too many detectives leave it too late. By the time they had kids, they were browned off, tired and overweight. And those who were childless routinely drank too much.

He could just imagine his mother clicking her tongue and pointing out it didn’t happen that way, that he couldn’t orchestrate a time to meet the woman of his dreams. That it just happened.

But he wasn’t sure about that either.

He only knew Josie was getting under his skin, distracting him a little, no, distracting him a
lot
from the job at hand, like now, when he couldn’t stop thinking about her asleep in the house with Dickson in the next room.

Nate scowled. His partner hadn’t missed the white skin, the golden halo of curls framing her face or the serious curves.

He opened the driver’s door and slid in behind the wheel, grateful she hadn’t unleashed her potty mouth on Dickson yet. Insane as it was, he found it hot when she let fly in that clipped, cultivated tone, and he liked to think she reserved it for him.

He smiled, a pleasant buzz humming through his body as he recalled her order to get his tight arse back to the house so they could drink the Grange.

Tight arse hey?

Nice that she’d noticed.

And that kiss!

He hadn’t meant to kiss her like that. He’d been going to return her peck on the cheek, but the way she’d looked at him, eyes all confused as she pointed out he’d been teasing her with a taste of him. It was so hot, he hadn’t been able to resist.

Desire tightened his body, and armed with an added incentive to get back to the mountains, he set off again, sun visor down so it covered much of his face.

He made good time, and once he hit the motorway he got a straight run into the city, the only hitch, a brief stop for some maintenance work being carried out under powerful light towers. For a full two minutes he sat there, exposed in a blaze of artificial light, waiting for the Stop/Go man to turn his sign around.

After that, he was passing through the sleeping north shore suburbs and crossing the Harbour Bridge. He turned right at the Conservatorium of Music, a gothic structure complete with turrets, then wound his way around the Barracks and Hyde Park.

At five thirty, he parked the WRX ten minutes from his home in inner city Surry Hills, stowed the overcoat with the rest of his clothes, and covered the remaining distance on foot. It was humid in the city, and he was sweating inside the leather jacket by the time he turned into James Road and scanned the streetscape.

As befitting his bikie status, the house was in the light industrial part of the suburb, surrounded by clothing factories and printing businesses, away from the trendy shops and cafes. This early, the road was eerily quiet, streetlights reflecting on the wet bitumen, the only sign of life a guy who’d passed out among the rubbish near a set of concrete steps.

Resignation weighed Nate down like body armour, anxiety eating away at the lining of his stomach as he let himself in the front door and switched on the hall light. A central corridor ran the length of the house, transporting him back to Sunday night.

Another house, another corridor, walls papered with magazine cut-outs.

Kennett’s massive frame.

A crunch of bone, a hiss of air as the breath left Mulvaney’s body.

Josie’s traumatised face on screen.

It was an image that would haunt his dreams.

Looking for signs of disturbance, Nate checked the two bedrooms and living room. The house, so different from his home in the Blue Mountains, remained exactly as he’d left it. Not that he was concerned. There was no incriminating evidence here that would reveal his true identity, save for the notebook computer hidden under the old copper in the laundry.

He ran his eye over the cheap vinyl lounge and scratched wooden furniture, the “clincher that made the place a real bargain”, according to the leasing agent. A mug, half filled with congealed coffee sat where he’d left it on the wobbly table, along with last Saturday’s newspaper.

He stared at the room as if from a distance. Was he capable of stepping inside this world again, this dreary undercover existence? A few days ago, browned off and lonely as he was, he would have said yes.

Now he wasn’t sure.

Gees, Hunter, get a grip. No going soft. Not with the end in sight
.

Forcing aside the negativity, Nate checked the back door then went into the laundry, a largish room at the back. The suburb had little in the way of off-street parking, and the room served as a garage.

He hesitated in the doorway, again checking for signs of disturbance. An oval, plastic basket filled with clothes, sat atop the old-fashioned copper in one corner of the room. A washing machine stood under the window, hose draping into a large cement tub, black motorcycle helmet perched on the lid.

But it was the blacked out, double-barrelled exhaust, Harley Davidson Night Rod standing in the centre of the room which commanded Nate’s attention. Sinister as hell and aggressively styled, the bike was a dream to ride, and by far the most valuable item in the house.

He stared at the beautifully constructed motorcycle.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of freedom
.

The signature phrase was losing its relevance, the fabric of the bikie movement fraying at the edges. Outlaw gangs recruited young men straight from prison, and drugs weren’t the only order of the day, but luxury car jackings for spare parts, and the importation of illegal firearms.

Josie wouldn’t stand a chance.

Nate’s gut tightened like a steel band.
He
wouldn’t stand a chance if they caught the merest whiff of betrayal.

And if they discovered he was a cop?

The end wouldn’t be quick.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of freedom.

Bullshit
.

He reached under the copper, slid the notebook out from the hidden bracket underneath and put it in the storage compartment on the bike. Then, he picked up the black beanie from where he’d left it on the bike seat. It would cover his newly cropped hair, at least until he got inside the bikie compound and confronted Kennett.

Half an hour later, Nate stopped at a small deli on his way to western Sydney and forced a bacon and egg roll and a cup of strong coffee into his rebellious stomach.

As planned, he was half an hour early when he pulled into the driveway of the Altar Boys’ compound and saw Bull on the gate.

Bull was around five ten, with a shaved head and a long seedy plait hanging between his shoulder blades. He was patched up, and had a reputation as an extreme member of the inner circle.

No-one ever crossed Bull.

Nate sat on the idling bike, scanning the compound from behind the perspex shield of his helmet. Three lines of barbed wire topped the corrugated iron fence surrounding the property, the gate being the sole access in and out. Cameras, mounted on either side of the driveway, fed CCTV footage back into the clubhouse. The club flag flew at full mast from a white pole just inside the gate.

Barely glancing his way, Bull came towards Nate. Edgy, the bikie’s eyes followed the movement of traffic out on the road, as if expecting trouble.

A counter strike from the Southern Cross no doubt.

‘Bull,’ Nate greeted him, flipping up the facial, the collar of his jacket turned up. There was no way Bull would notice the long hair was gone.

‘Bolt.’ Bull swung the gate open, eyes still on the street. “Bolter” was Nate’s club name, bestowed on him after he’d taken out one of the club’s in-house boxing tournaments. Compared to the stouter bikies who favoured street fighting, Nate was light on his feet and had a quick one two jab, thanks to hours of training in the police boxing gym.

He’d bolted in, they’d said, the win earning him as much respect as his ability to pick a deadlock. Within hours, “Bolter” had been shortened to “Bolt”.

Kennett was the only one who sometimes referred to him by another name, usually “pretty boy” or “dolly”.

Nate opened the throttle a little and roared up the driveway. An old hosiery factory, the clubhouse was a large, single story brick structure with an iron roof. Access into the clubhouse was via two roller doors, now open.

Kennett’s bike was parked outside.

The only other machine was Bull’s.

If luck was on his side, he’d get to speak to Kennett before the other bikies arrived, though the chapter leader wouldn’t want to know the details of Josie’s demise. The less Kennett knew, the better he’d perform in any police interrogation or lie detector test.

Arranging his features into an expressionless mask, Nate parked the Night Rod on the other side of Bull’s Chopper, took off his helmet and entered the clubhouse.

Stretching out the taut muscles in his neck, he scanned the huge space. The club banner hung above an unlicensed bar, three quarters the length of one wall. The adjacent wall was decorated with framed photographs of special edition Choppers and Harleys.

Nate walked towards the bar, eyes shifting to the boxing ring in the corner where he’d achieved much of his notoriety. Two pool tables and a couple of white plastic outdoor settings were arranged nearby. More chairs were lined against the wall as if in an old-fashioned dance hall.