The Sudden Dark

Nineteen

'Okay, Maddie,' I said, 'we're nearing the end of the line now. It's just you, me, Kit, and Rusty left on the playing field. I need everything you know right now, or else I can't guarantee no one else will die. Us included.'

Maddie made a dark sound at that. 'You really swing for the fences, huh?' she muttered.

'It's what's given me such a long career,' I said, 'as well as what's putting me in early retirement. Now where's Kit?'

She slumped against my door and let out a breath. 'I don't know. Honestly. He wasn't at the flat, so I don't know. He could be anywhere.'

'Okay. What about Rusty?'

'He wanted to know where the money was—I gave him a cock-and-bull story to buy some time. By now, he's on his way back to the shed to slit my throat because of it.'

'What money? Wayne's?'

She shook her head, and scoffed a little. 'You don't know?'

'I'm this close to piecing it all together, but I need your help with that. No more veils and no more bullshit. Tell me everything after Rusty got out of prison.'

'Okay, Max,' she said, as nothing more than a release from her lungs. 'You know about Rusty, Frank, and Clive, right?'

'That they were the Three Musketeers of dirtbag drug pushers till Rusty took a rap for them and went away for a time? Yes.'

She nodded. 'The Shooting Star was their hub, if you want to call it that. Apparently they opened it together, the three of them.'

'You worked there?'

'For a couple years. Not good years.'

'And you married Clive.'

She coiled a little at the mention like an acid taste on her tongue, and paused. 'That wasn't a good time of my life,' she said finally. 'I just needed something stable...I didn't realise until after who he was really. I just thought I'd string him along till I was back on my feet and could move on. But he was...controlling. It wasn't as easy to just get out of his life and out of the club like I'd planned.'

She didn't need to say any more. I nodded it off. 'So Rusty got out of prison and went back to the old gang,' I said.

'With Kit in tow—they met inside and he brought him along. That's where I met him.'

'And you started seeing each other.'

She looked at me quickly with a sharp gaze. 'We fell in love,' she said solemnly. And I believed her.

'So you kept each other on the down-low,' I said.

She nodded again. 'It was all we could do. He wasn't like what he was trying to be hanging with Rusty and Frank, really—some kind of big tough idiot like them. He was sweeter than that. We were just counting the hours until he could make enough working with them—and I could make enough working at the club—that we could run away together. Have a good life finally, away from all the shit, and Clive, and crime, and everything.'

'So what happened then?'

'All I know is what Kit told me—this was about a week ago now. He told me that Frank had spoken to him wanting some kind of deal. According to Frank, he and Clive were getting pissed that they now had to split with Rusty three ways when they'd been halving with themselves for the past ten years, or something like that. So Frank told him this: he wanted Kit to find a way to kill Rusty to get him out of the picture.'

'Why Kit?' I asked.

She shrugged weakly. 'So that they could then get rid of Kit to clean up all the loose ends and go back to being a twosome? That's my guess.'

'So what happened with Kit and Rusty?'

'I don't know—the last time I saw him was when he told me. He was freaking out about the whole thing. I told him it would be okay; that I'd find a way for us to get out of all of it with just a little more time. But that was it. He disappeared, and I don't know what happened after that. Rusty was still alive, I heard you starting to sniff around, and then all of a sudden Frank and Clive were dead themselves. And I haven't been able to find Kit.'

'So what was your plan, then? For you two to get out of it all?'

She looked out the window at the dry scrub flatlands starting their growth back into buildings. 'I'd spent enough time as Clive's armpiece to be close enough to know about his and Frank's secret stash,' she said. 'All of the money they made from dealing that they kept together to be split between them. And they kept it secure at the Shooting Star.'

'How much?'

'Just under a million. And I was going to steal it.'

I looked at her. 'How?'

'I knew the ins-and-outs that only he and Frank knew. I knew how to unlock and snatch it. And then all I needed was Kit so we could run away together.'

'So did you do it?'

She inhaled. 'I stole all it the night Kit was supposed to kill Rusty,' she said. 'I was going to try and meet up with him, but I never could. Whatever happened between them, it must've been bad enough to scare him off, because he's been hiding ever since. I haven't been able to tell him about any of it. I stashed the money, and have been doing nothing but waiting for him so we can just take it and run.'

'So that's what Rusty's been doing the past few days,' I said. 'He must've learned that Frank and Clive tried to make a move on him, dodged it, dealt with them, and also learned that it's you that knows where the grand haul is.'

She turned her head half-way toward me to acknowledge that, and nodded it once. 'Frank and Clive are out of the picture,' she said. 'If he can catch up to Kit, and learn where the money is from me, then he's home free.'

'But you don't know where Kit is? Where did you tell Rusty the money was?'

'Somewhere bullshit—God knows not where it really is.'

'Which is where, then?'

Then she looked hard at me. 'Look, I can thank you for saving me from that shed like the stupid fucking damsel in distress I am. Fine—you got my duct tape off before Rusty could get back and do fuck knows what to me. Thank you. But do you think I'd really trust you enough with something like all that money? You're a fucking cop.'

I shook my head at her. 'No, I'm not,' I said quietly. 'Not anymore. I was once. And God, did I believe in it. I believed in my job so goddamn much that it ruined my life—drove my wife away, turned me to drinking, made me useless to everything that wasn't a part of the law, and finally made me make a bad goddamn mistake that ruined everything. This is all I can do, Maddie. I don't need a million dollars. I don't even need a badge anymore. But I need you and Kit to stay alive. Because that's all I have these days.'

She thought about that for a while. I don't know what she was thinking, but I guess it didn't matter in the end, as we broke back into the bounds of the city, because what she said finally was, 'Darlinghurst. I stashed the money in Darlinghurst.'

She didn't need to say anything else. I knew exactly where we were driving.