The Fix (29 page)

I had left no space in my own story for the role I had played, or for the role Ben's father had played in shaping him. He had his own fears and weaknesses and ways of disguising them. And Frank Ainsworth had caught him in the fog of the siege and put a medal in his hand, or at least the prospect of it, before he could draw breath or work out right from wrong.

* * *

I THOUGHT I KNEW
it all then. I thought the story was over. As I lay in bed that night with it kicking around in my head, I could find no good way of making the truth public, no way that would let me fix what had gone wrong. I was too far from the source, too far from evidence. I had nothing substantial.

I had two more days of it, and then it would be gone. I could picture Miriam Mueller. I had seen her talking to the media, tearful, bereft, an unfathomable space opened up in her life.

‘What a terrible thing,' Hayley said, as she lay with her arm over me. ‘Terrible for everyone.'

Except Frank Ainsworth, I thought. We had the window open and I could hear the sea, waves breaking and breaking far below on the beach that looked like it went forever.

It was hours later when she woke me. It was still dark. Ben was gone.

Hayley had been in the kitchen getting a glass of
water when she noticed that his door was wide open. Even in the dark, she could see his bed was empty. He wasn't in his bathroom or on the balcony. Then she noticed my car keys were missing.

‘Maybe he just went out for something,' she said, though there was nothing to go out for, no reason for him to be driving around the Gold Coast at night.

I stood at the kitchen counter, still adjusting to the light, expecting my keys to be somewhere, Ben to be somewhere. I had pulled a T-shirt on, I realised, but no pants.

‘I'll call him,' I said to her. ‘He'll be somewhere.'

I found his number in my phone and called it. It rang three times, four. I thought he wasn't going to answer. I listened for his phone ringing, but it was nowhere in the apartment. Then there was a click, and a rush of sound.

‘What's up?' he said. ‘Couldn't sleep?' He was talking loudly. There was a roaring noise in the background, my car driving at speed.

‘What are you doing?'

For a few seconds he said nothing. There was just the roaring noise. ‘I have to fix this.'

‘Fix what?' Dumb question. ‘Fix it how?'

‘You know what,' he said. ‘And fix it definitively. I'll handle how. It's not your problem. You got me thinking. This isn't going to go away until I make it go away.'

‘You can't be safe to drive. All that chianti.' I knew as I said it that it wouldn't stop him. ‘Where are you?'

‘In your car. But you knew that.' I was about to tell him to pull over, to say that we would come and get him and that there had to be a better way, when he said,
‘Anyway, two hands for driving. That's the law. Going now.'

He hung up. I called back right away, but he didn't take it.

‘What's he doing?' Hayley said. ‘Where is he?'

We were both wide awake now. She was wearing a T-shirt of mine, I noticed, and probably nothing else. It came down to mid-thigh. Her hair was a mess. She pushed it out of her eyes.

‘I think he's going to confront Frank.' It seemed like the worst idea in the middle of the night and in his present state of mind.

I called him again, and again he ignored it. I left a message on his voicemail telling him to stop, telling him that there was a better way, that he would be sober in a few hours, it would be daylight and we would fix it. I had no idea how. I sent him a text telling him to stop. I called again. No answer.

‘We're going to have to go,' Hayley said. She reached out, took the phone from me and closed it. ‘Where's Frank? Where does he live?'

I had no idea. I hardly knew these people. ‘The award paperwork. The form Frank had to fill in for Ben to get the medal. It's on that.' He had to put his home address.

I went to my room, my original single-bed room. All my junk was there, all my siege notes and the file from Randall Hood Beckett. In England I had got into the habit of carrying everything with me until the job was done, until the last interview. I tipped out the DVDs and my own notes, and opened the firm file. There were newspaper clippings marked
with highlighter, letters from the police and, finally, the form with Frank's address on it. Hakea Crescent, Chapel Hill.

Hayley was dressed and holding her car keys when I walked back into the lounge room.

‘This would best be done with pants,' she said.

* * *

ON THE HIGHWAY,
we switched between radio stations and tried to talk ourselves into believing it would all be okay. That Ben would change his mind and call, or turn around, or pull off the road to sleep.

At the same time, as our headlights lit up the empty road, and white concrete bridges and green exit signs flashed by, I kept staring ahead, fearing that I would see my car somewhere off the edge of the bitumen, crumpled and caught by the barriers.

‘It's different, late at night, isn't it?' Hayley said. ‘What they play on the radio. I've had nights when I've worked till about now, so I hear it a bit.'

‘Me too. The gonzo life. I'm up late, high on something.'

She laughed. ‘Turns out it's fortune cookies. That's not quite the same.' She checked our speed, eased back a little.

The song playing was Charlene's I've Never Been to Me. Years had passed since I'd heard it, but only a week since it had last come up in conversation, with Max Visser. He had been talking himself into singing it that night, and now I was driving an hour before
dawn on a highway with the stripper we had seen instead.

‘Oh God,' Hayley said. ‘My mother does this. At karaoke. That's what she tells me. She thinks it's about a woman who's never had a real orgasm. Which I'm afraid is probably her, but by that bit of the story I've got my fingers in my ears and I'm screaming, so I can't really say.' There was a car ahead of us. Not an Echo. Hayley changed lanes and we passed it. ‘Where do you think he is? What do you think's happening?'

‘I wish I knew.' I tried to call Ben again, but his phone was switched off.

‘Turn your phone on, bugger you,' I said to him, because it felt better to say something. ‘What are you doing?' Charlene was singing about sipping champagne on a yacht. I shut my phone and put it back in my pocket. ‘I'm sorry for dragging you into this.'

‘Come on, what would I be doing if I was at home now?' she said. ‘Five am would be completely going to waste.'

At the Sunshine Coast, my father would be up already out of habit. It was closer to five-thirty, in fact, so he would be on his way to the newsagency. He walked to work and he appreciated the silence. He liked that the only noise he could hear was the sound of his feet on the damp grass. It was his favourite time of day, though it wasn't, by my reckoning, day at all. Soon he would be selling papers to early dog-walkers, the same people, day after day, each conversation refloating the same entrenched view of world events and the ills of change.

We reached the outskirts of Brisbane. I tried Ben's phone again, but there was still no answer. I wondered
how fast he was driving, how much of a lead he might have. I wondered if he was close to Frank Ainsworth's house.

We passed Mount Gravatt and came up the rise that showed the city skyline laid out ahead of us. At five twenty-eight by the car clock, Hayley's phone rang.

‘No one calls me now,' she said. ‘No one.' Her phone had the jangling-bell sound of the classic olde-phone ring tone. ‘It's in my bag. Could you answer it?'

I was already reaching behind her seat to pull the bag through to the front. The phone was lit up and easy to find. The word ‘work' was scrolling across the screen. I answered. It was Melanie.

Once she had adjusted to me not being Hayley, Melanie said, ‘Look, Josh, there's a guy here. He got backstage somehow. He said he was a friend of Hayley's. He's in Ross's office. Something's going on in there.'

‘Okay, his name's Ben,' I told her. ‘I've been working with him. Let him know you've got me on the phone and I want to talk to him. We're coming into town now on the southeast freeway. We can be with you in –'

There was a shout at the other end of the line, and a clattering sound. The phone went dead.

I wasn't getting it. Frank Ainsworth would be nowhere near the Silver Spur. What was Ben fixing? What was he doing? I wondered if I had it completely wrong.

I called back twice, but the phone line rang and rang.

‘I've got Mel's mobile in there,' Hayley said. ‘Call her on that if you can't get through to the club. What's happening?'

‘No idea. Ben's with Ross. I got cut off.'

I found Mel's number and called it. She answered by the second ring.

‘He's gone,' she said. ‘He pulled the phone out of the wall on the way past. He's got Ross's gun. I don't know how . . .'

‘Are we going to the club?' Hayley said. We were still too far from town, barely at Holland Park.

I put my hand over the phone. ‘No. We're going to Chapel Hill.' Then I got back to Mel. ‘I think I know where he's heading.'

‘We can't let the police know about the gun,' she said. ‘Ross'll go down for it. I've told him a million times . . . What's this guy going to do?'

‘If I can stop him, nothing.'

I didn't know if he had taken it to threaten Frank, or to use it. I didn't know if we could get there first, or a close enough second. I put the phone back in Hayley's bag. I called Ben again on mine, just in case, but there was still no answer.

‘So?' Hayley said. ‘What's happening?'

‘He's left the club with Ross's gun.'

‘What? How did he . . .' It took her a second or two. ‘You told him about the gun? What were you thinking telling him about the gun?'

‘Well not this, obviously. Fuck . . . I need Frank Ainsworth's number. That's got to be where he's going.'

I felt like an idiot, like the fool he had played me for. In the bottom drawer with a box of ammo, I had said. And Ben had stored it away. Then there had been the chianti in the restaurant, and all the talk about the club –
the spa, the gym, the ways of getting from front to back. It had seemed at the time like the intense but purposeless microscopic focus of the pissed. I had felt sorry for him. And he had been playing us both.

I found Frank's mobile number below his address on the award nomination form. I called it, but it was off. I could imagine the phone, charging silently on his bedside table as Chapel Hill slept. I put the number in again, in case I'd got it wrong, but it was still off.

I called directory assistance.

I gave Frank's name and the address, and the voice at the other end said, ‘That's a silent number. I'm sorry.'

‘But I really need it,' I said, as if I was the first person in history to try that. ‘I've got his mobile number, but it's turned off.'

‘Hopefully he'll turn it on soon. He's decided his landline's a silent number, though. He pays for that service.'

‘If I give you his mobile number, can you give me the landline?'

‘No.'

We were over the river on the Captain Cook Bridge with the city buildings right in front of us. Ahead in the left lane, a street-sweeping truck was at work, its lights flashing.

‘How about the number of anyone nearby in Hakea Crescent?'

‘We don't give that kind of assistance,' she said. And then, in case I was still in any doubt, ‘It's not that kind of service. We can't give out numbers near things, or of people you don't actually want to contact, or of people who have chosen to pay for silent numbers. I'm sorry if
that means we can't help you at this time.' It was a line that had all the empathy of voice-activated software. It meant we were done.

‘I've got nothing,' I said to Hayley. ‘Ben's on his way to Frank's place with Ross's gun, and I've got nothing. At least I assume that's where he's going.'

I didn't want to think that there were alternatives, that he might be driving to the edge of the bush or to his neatly kept apartment with other plans for the gun, recalling the burst of Rob Mueller's head, like a melon. Frank's house was our best and only bet.

‘So what do we do?' Hayley said. We were sweeping left onto Coronation Drive. The first hints of daylight were coming into the sky. ‘Do we call the police? There'd be hell to pay with Ross and the gun, but . . .'

‘No. He's not rational. Ben, I mean. It'd all go bad.'

I could see it. I could see exactly how badly it might go, Ben cut down by a hail of bullets in a suburban street, or holed up in the house in a siege, the last of his plans unthreading as he took shots at the bushes, working his way through Ross's box of ammo.

‘We've got to do better,' I said to her, with no idea of what better might be. ‘We've got to be able to do better than that. And we can get there as quickly as they can now. I think we had our chance to call the police.'

We kept driving west, with the traffic lights running our way. I had the street directory open on my lap at map 177, with my finger on Hakea Crescent.

‘You stay in the car when we get there,' I told her. ‘There's no point both of us getting out.' That was my whole plan, I realised. I had nothing but the first two seconds covered.

‘This isn't your fault,' Hayley said after a long silence, a silence that I had spent making a list in my head of the ways in which it was my fault.

It had been almost twenty minutes since Ben had left the Silver Spur. Any time now, he would be driving down Hakea Crescent, looking for Frank's place. And we were five minutes away, or not much more. That had to be enough. There had to be more than five minutes talking before any shooting started. Or maybe the gun wasn't about that. Maybe it was about making Frank weep and piss his pants and recant, with the feel of the cold barrel against his temple and the siege back in his head. Or maybe Ben would sneak in quietly and put a bullet in Frank's skull while he slept, blow his brain across his bedhead, and we would be far too late.