Snapshot

36

A bummer, Andy thought, getting bogged this morning.

And avoidable, too, if he’d twigged earlier that the day was going to turn out badly. First, Nat had been out of her skull. She’d turned up on time, thanks to a rare good-parenting impulse on the part of her mother, and was even dressed in her school uniform and carrying a packed lunch, but she’d turned up stoned.

Then, when timing and efficiency mattered, she’d been no use at all.

Andy had a special trailer for these Peninsula burglaries, towed each time by a ute or van stolen especially for the job. Andy’s Mowing, like Jim’s Mowing, that franchise operation you saw everywhere these days. High steel mesh sides, the handles of rakes, shovels, pruning shears and a lawnmower showing. A few padlocked aluminium lockers in the well of the trailer: anyone would think they contained secateurs, sprinkler nozzles, lengths of hose, weed poison, bags of blood-and-bone. They wouldn’t think portable TVs, laptops, DVD players, leather coats, jewellery boxes, CD collections.

All that weight on board, he should have thought twice about letting Natalie drive, especially given the rain they’d been having lately. Before he could stop her she’d cut across the lawn on the way out, bogging the van. She’d then proceeded to cack herself laughing as she revved the motor and he pushed, getting himself sprayed with watery mud and grass in the process.

Then a tense moment when a guy delivering leaflets in a big four-wheel-drive had pulled up at the front gate, slipped a leaflet in the letterbox, and noticed their predicament. ‘Need a hand getting out?’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ Andy had said, prattling on nervously about gardening work being slow in winter, and you had to be careful on these rural properties, three times he’d been bogged in the past month, and he’d have to come back tomorrow, do the right thing and patch the owner’s lawn.

‘Tell me about it,’ the guy said, shoving a leaflet at him and hitching a towrope to the front of Andy’s stolen Toyota van. Andy glanced at the leaflet as the guy pulled him out of the mud. ‘Dave’s Farm Drainage,’ with a mobile number at the bottom.

‘Thanks, Dave.’

‘No problems,’ Dave said, and was gone-Andy and Natalie forgotten, with any luck.

Andy took charge after that, grabbing the leaflet from the letterbox outside the gate, then removing copies from every letterbox along the road, and finally driving home to his place. With Natalie’s ‘help’ he shifted the stolen goods to the back of the van and unhitched and stored the trailer. Finally he did what he always did with laptops: he transferred the contents of the hard drive to his PC with its 120 gig hard drive. He’d examine the files later. You got all kinds of stuff, porn, bank account details, sensitive documents. You never knew when it might come in useful.

And now it was mid afternoon and they were heading up to the pawnshops in the city. Nat was bored, restless, so he let her fiddle with the stolen laptop. She always got a kick out of scrolling through the intimate aspects of some stranger’s life.

‘Boring,’ she said, her slender fingers flashing over the keys and rolling the cursor ball. ‘Wait a minute.’

‘What?’

‘Wicked,’ she said.

‘What?’

Natalie was silent, her fingers busy. ‘I think,’ she said in a bright, wry, singsong voice, ‘we hit a cop this morning.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Some case he’s working on.’

Natalie continued to search the contents of the laptop. ‘Hello. Dirty pictures.’

Andy thought a cop was as entitled as anyone to visit porn sites. ‘So?’

‘Not what you’re thinking. These look like they might be evidence.’

‘Evidence. Shit, Nat, I don’t like it.’

Andy felt very tense suddenly. If they had hit a cop, and were in possession of evidence pertaining to a case, they were in deep shit. He wanted to put some distance in between the van and the Peninsula-quickly. They were on Stumpy Gully Road, approaching Eramosa Road, which would take them down to the highway. They could be out of the district and well on the way up to the city in less than thirty minutes. But should they hang onto the gear? He made the turn at Eramosa Road and headed down towards the Coolstores.

He slowed for a tractor hauling a trailer load of hay; he couldn’t pass, too many cars coming the other way. ‘Nat, I don’t like it, let’s dump the gear. It feels unlucky.’

She gazed at him, full of dope-head empathy, reached across and stroked him between the legs. ‘Poor baby,’ she said.

‘There’s a dumpster at the Coolstores.’

She shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she said in her sunny voice, the dope still singing in her.

And so Andy steered into the Coolstores carpark, and a minute later there was a dinky little sports car pulling up next to them, a cop saying, ‘Excuse me, sir.’