Cross Kill

Forty

Napper had got the idea from a rapist he’d arrested after a stakeout one night several years ago. The rapist would climb onto his victim’s roof, remove a few tiles, crawl into the space above the ceiling, then drop into the house through the manhole. Except the rapist had been a weedy little squirt. Napper’s broad thighs felt scraped and bruised from squeezing through the manhole of the house in Northcote where Wyatt and Jardine were staying and he’d landed hard, hurting his shins.

Added to which he’d panicked when the pistol jammed. Next time he pocketed a drug-raid gun, he’d make sure it was a double-action revolver, not a semiautomatic. If a pistol misfires and jams, you’re stuffed. If a revolver misfires, you don’t have to stop and clear the jam, you just pull the trigger again.

Still, he was home safe and two hundred and nine thousand dollars better off. Napper clapped his arms around himself on the edge of his bed, rocking a little, relieved and exultant. He reached out and touched the twenties, fifties and hundreds. He’d unbundled and scattered the notes to give an impression of bulk. Somehow, bundled together, it hadn’t looked like a lot of money. In fact, he’d been disappointed until he’d actually counted it. And-probably owing to all the vodka he was drinking-the more he looked at the money the less real it looked, like a spill of jam jar labels, rectangles of coloured paper, swimming, swimming.

Napper jerked himself awake, swallowed more vodka. It was past midnight and he’d been sitting here like this for over two hours. He’d rung Tina, but she’d bitten his head off, said she was sleeping, she had to get up at five, as he well knew, so why didn’t he just piss off, and had slammed down the phone.

The more Napper thought about it, did he want her anyway? This was some serious money he had here. With that kind of money you can pick and choose your birds. He gazed at the money again, unfocused, looking inward at the years with Josie. It had seemed like the real thing at first: as a social worker she’d appreciated the problems the cops had, Roxanne had come along, they’d bought a house-then suddenly everything had turned around on him. Josie found feminism-and lesbianism, for all he knew-and a mouthful of slogans she used on him twenty-four hours a day. She’d wanted to return to study. She accused him of being brutalised by the job, said it would taint Roxanne, said he never spent time with Roxanne. Napper stiffened as he remembered it all, the glass of vodka halfway to his mouth. Wasn’t that a contradiction? He was tainting Roxanne yet he never spent time with her? Lousy bitch. He’d have to make sure she never got wind of the money.

By degrees Napper came to see that his two hundred and nine thousand dollars amounted to fuck-all. Lawyers’ fees, maintenance, child support, replace the ute with something that didn’t have a hole in the floor between him and the exhaust pipe, find a better place to live, pay off the few thousand he owed the SP bookies-Jesus, it could all be gone by the end of the year.

He swallowed the vodka, poured himself another glass, reached over and scattered the money some more, making it cover a greater area of the bed. But then he caught himself, and laughed. It was still two hundred and nine thousand bucks; scattering it wasn’t going to make it bigger. Napper put down his vodka, stood up, leaned over and gathered in every twenty, fifty and hundred, and bundled them back into the vinyl bag. He zipped it closed and sat again with the bag in his lap. The bag felt solid and comfortable. Napper had removed his trousers to rub cream into his scraped thighs. He was wearing his towelling bathrobe and liked the feeling of nakedness it gave him, the idea of his cock in striking distance of all that dough.

Napper looked around his bedroom. He couldn’t stash the bag under the bed, under dirty clothes in the bottom of the wardrobe, in his sock drawer. Or in the kitchen or bathroom cupboards, or behind his collection of Willie Nelson LPs. And that was the extent of his miserable flat. If he left the money in the flat, he’d spend all his time thinking of burglars when he wasn’t at home. If he took the money with him, he’d spend all his time looking out for muggers. Well, no one was going to break in tonight, not at this hour, not with him at home. Maybe he’d bank the money tomorrow, twenty accounts of nine thousand nine hundred dollars each to avoid the government legislation that required banks to report all deposits of ten thousand or more. Jesus Christ, were there that many banks and building societies? It would take him days. A creeping kind of dread grew in Napper. He had the money but where was he going to hide it, how was he going to hold onto it?

That fear gave rise to another, and this one gripped him hard. It wasn’t burglars he had to worry about, it wasn’t muggers, it was the business he should have finished tonight but hadn’t. He had failed to kill Wyatt and Jardine. He had shot one, clubbed the other, but it had been panicky and it hadn’t felt final. How would they see it? In Napper’s experience, crims were always ripping each other off. With any luck they’d look in that direction. But they weren’t stupid, they’d start wondering who knew about the job. Eileen wouldn’t stand much pressure, she’d soon shop him.

Napper looked at his hands and they were shaking- the drink or fear or both.

He tucked them into his armpits and rocked on the edge of the bed, trying to think it through. Should he do something, or try to find out what had happened? He couldn’t go back to the Northcote house. He could try ringing around the hospitals, try the Homicide Squad or the Northcote station boys, but there’d be questions, cops wanting to know who he was and why he was so interested in a man with a gunshot wound.

That left the Rossiters. If he could shut them up, the trail would end right there, and Wyatt and Jardine would never find him. Only the Mesics knew he was involved, and they thought he was out of the picture. Napper sniggered. Thought they could get rid of him. Thought he’d be happy with their measly two and a half grand. Just as well he’d decided to stick around tonight, see what he could salvage. Only the fucking jackpot, that’s what.

His anxieties came back. How do you wipe out three people one after the other without disturbing at least one of them? It happened all the time, crazed fathers walking through the house shotgunning the wife and seven kids in their beds, but Napper didn’t want to risk it. A knife? Napper had never used one, didn’t know if you stabbed the heart or sawed through the neck. All that blood, and the person in the act of dying rearing up in bed at you. Napper couldn’t do it.

It had to be a bomb. Get all three Rossiters at once. Bombs he understood. He’d been to army bomb-disposal lectures, done a short course, and one of his informants, the man who’d given him the mercury switch idea, had been a car bomber in Belfast before he’d got tired of poverty and politics.

Napper put on his pants and went outside. There were lockup garages at the rear of the flats. Napper didn’t use his as a garage. He drove the ute every day and it was a drag unlocking and locking the garage door all the time. He used his to store the gardening gear he’d had from when he’d owned a proper house: lawnmower, fertiliser tins, rakes and shovels. Most of the space was taken up with removalist’s cartons, stuff he should have flattened and recycled, except the word ‘recycled’ made him think of Josie and her lefty notions, and so the cartons stayed where they were.

The gelignite he’d got from the car bomber, three sticks of it, plus detonators. Napper closed the garage door, turned on the light above the work bench, and gingerly took it out of the shoebox. It was sweating. ‘Past the use-by date,’ his snitch had said, ‘so go real careful with it.’

Napper stared at the gelignite. He’d be better off using a plastic explosive, C4 or Semtex, something he could mould into shape and which wouldn’t blow up on him if he got careless. But he didn’t nave any, and where would he get some at this time of night?

Still, gelignite would do the same job. He ran through some of the possibilities. First, your car bomb. Wire it into a headlight or the ignition circuit, or set a pressure switch under the driver’s seat, or wire the boot so that when the lid was opened it pulled a slip of cardboard free from between the jaws of a clothespeg, thus closing a circuit. Or a bomb inside the house. The good old alarm clock device. The wired desk drawer. The string-tied parcel. Or some sort of remote control, like a radio signal, except he didn’t have signalling or receiving devices. Maybe wire it to the telephone, ring the house and kaboom. Or the good old bomb through the window.

The main problem was detonating the gelignite. Maybe he could use its instability somehow. Some sort of extreme and sudden shock or atmospheric change should set it off. He pictured the Rossiters’ house. They had gas-a wall furnace to heat the place and a gas stove in the kitchen. There would be a pilot light on the wall furnace. What he could do, plant the gelignite, turn on the gas in the kitchen, piss off, wait for the gas to accumulate, wait for the pilot flame to do its work.

An hour later the gelignite was sitting on the rusted-out floor of the ute and Napper was grinding the starter motor. He glanced up the street. It was a street like Tina’s, a block of flats, a lot of tarted-up cottages, a few double-storey terrace houses. It was full of yuppies who’d stacked the local council and forced it to put in a one-way system and speed-traps every fifty metres. He switched on the headlights and peeled away from the kerb. He had half an inch of vodka left and he toasted all the quiche eaters and civil libertarians and their dinky houses and their tin-can cars. He lived a cloaked and dangerous life, and they wouldn’t know if their arses were on fire.