Crystal Coffin (5 page)

Locklin looked at his cousin. He knew the quotation: ‘Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.'

‘Yeah, that's it,' Scotty said, trying not to smile. He knew he was getting somewhere, but he also knew he couldn't push it. Too hard now, and his cousin would clam up faster than a dirty set of pistons.

Scott leaned on the counter and shifted his know-all grin from one side of his face to the other. ‘I thought you'd be too old for that kind of deep stuff.'

Locklin smiled back at him. ‘Hey, sport I'm only four years older than you.'

Scotty poked a right cross at his cousin, but military reflexes intercepted it, catching his fist like a fly in midair.

‘Ya cheeky, scrawny rat,' Locklin said. ‘I'll give you
too old
.' He flipped Scott into a headlock under his good arm and tickled him, but movement in the next street caught his eye and he stopped. It was a bus. It passed a gap between the bargain mart and the dry cleaners, which meant it hadn't stopped where the local buses did across from the hardware store. That meant it had to be a special charter.

He released his cousin slowly, helping him to stand, but his eyes never left the window. Scott stared at him, but it wasn't his cousin's face he was looking at, it was Locklin's fists, opening and clenching at his side.

The colour drained from Scotty's face. ‘You gotta let go, cuzz,' he said. ‘Or you're gunna end up as a wipe-out like I did. You won't ever be free of the past.'

‘Sorry, sport,' Locklin said. ‘It doesn't work for me. I remember the past well enough and I'm still in bondage to it.' He emptied the last of the Coke into his mouth. The coach was at the corner now, giving way to a council tractor before it turned into Main Street. His eyes narrowed as he considered the opportunity he suspected was aboard it and he slapped his hand over his cousin's shoulder.

‘Quit worrying,' he added, dropping the empty bottle into a waste bin. He clapped his hat back on and headed for the door. ‘There's another way to break free from the past. It's called justice.'

Scotty watched his best mate turn away. It wasn't justice he saw etched in Locklin's eyes. It was revenge. And it scared him. ‘Whatcha gunna do?'

Locklin stopped, his hand on the door. Nothing, he wanted to say, but the fifteen year old was already too close to the truth. And Scotty was like him. He'd never drop the subject until he found an answer, and that gave Locklin only one path to follow. He sucked in a long breath and slid the cigarette packet from his pocket.

He opened it, watching Scotty's eyes widen as he slid the velvet pouch out of the space where cigarettes should have been, and then he opened the pouch. Inside were two gold and silver earrings. On both were angels, but there were slight differences between the two. One was of a child about five or six years old holding a Bible, while the other was a chubby baby that was sucking on a cross as if it was a teething ring. Locklin rolled it between his fingers wishing there was a better way, and then he handed the baby angel to his cousin.

‘Give this to Helen,' he said. ‘Tell her it's part of what I had to show her and tell her to meet me at twenty-three hundred. Make sure she waits until Gran is asleep. And Scott,' he added, ‘tell her I said that you can come, but just this once.'

Scott's grin nearly cracked his head in two. ‘Twenty-three hundred,' he echoed. ‘That's 11pm, right? And Helen knows where?'

‘Yes,' he said in answer to both questions. ‘Helen knows where. Make sure you don't blab your theory to anyone else though, okay? Not Gran, and especially not Helen,' he added, more seriously than ever. ‘She's got enough worries with the baby coming. Got it?'

‘Got it,' Scotty said, opening the door to let him out. ‘I won't let you down.'

The bus pulled up at the stop and Locklin crossed the street behind it. He stood against the trunk of a shady gum tree in the park to watch the passengers get off, but there was only one, a skinny brunette with shoulder-length hair and fancy embroidered jeans. Her long-sleeved blouse looked chic enough for a city office, he thought, but the nearest one was about half an hour away in the opposite direction of where he had to take her.

The girl stepped down from the air-conditioned coach and seemed to wilt in the heat, but even so she tugged her long sleeves even lower over her skinny wrists, denying all but her face and hands any breeze.

She stood back while the driver removed her two small bags from the belly of the coach and she nodded politely when he dumped them at her feet. He climbed back in without saying anything, the doors closed and the girl watched the bus disappear into the haze of its own exhaust.

She looked like a stray that had been abandoned by the roadside, but Locklin wasn't in any hurry to pick her up. Her last name was Fletcher. The company name on the title deeds to his father's estate was now the Fletcher Corporation. And he figured
that couldn't
be a coincidence.

He moved around behind a large gardenia hedge, but no matter which way he looked at her, he couldn't see anything but bad news. She had a thin wallet that bulged in the left hip pocket of her jeans, but her jeans were tight and he doubted he could lift it without her noticing.

She twiddled with her necklace a couple of times and frowned as she looked around and checked her watch.

She wasn't late. But he decided he would be.

Sweat began to dampen her cotton shirt around her armpits and a march fly buzzed her ear, making her startle. March flies were big, but this one sounded like a pterodactyl with fangs. Locklin could hear it from a dozen metres away. She waved at it a few times, but it didn't leave her alone. Then she struck at it, stumbling over the two small bags at her feet. Stuffed like bulging-eyed terriers that had eaten too much for their leather bellies, they sat in silent repentance. Telltale swellings poked from their innards, betraying the heel of a shoe too quickly packed, and she humped them into the shade of a jacaranda tree a few metres away.

She fiddled with the charm on her necklace again and she tapped her foot, reading the poster for Friday's carnival at least four times between looking up and down the street. She tucked the charm out of sight between the pearl-coloured buttons on her blouse and tugged her long sleeves down again over her wrists. Her watch blipped the hour and he heard her stomach grumble.

‘Rats,' she said, eyeing the phone booth in front of the post office. ‘I should have got a phone number.' She rummaged through her bags to find a phone card, and that's when she saw them — the boots that were standing behind her.

Nikki saw the truck rocking in the car park, but it didn't hold her attention for long. She looked into the face of the stranger who was staring at her. His grey eyes hardened like steel against her as they surveyed the length of her nearly seventeen-year-old body. He soon looked back at her face with a decision that she could easily read. Girls like her weren't his type.

‘You Nick Fletcher?' he said flatly.

‘Nikki,' she corrected, trying to smile. She wasn't sure if she should offer him a handshake, but she did and he took it like medicine.

‘Jayson Locklin,' he said, letting go to whistle to a dog that was asleep outside a cafe across the street. ‘Thorna Maitland sent me to get you.'

The red dog trotted over, sniffing her hand with its nose but it smelled like wet manure so she didn't try to pat it.

Locklin picked up her bags and whistled to it again as he headed off towards the truck.

Nikki followed with the dog at her heels. She felt like a cow that was being herded home from the market. She pinched her nose at a smell as they neared the truck, and stopped a short distance from the crate. It reeked like the dog. She could smell shoe polish too, but Locklin's boots weren't to blame. They were scuffed and dirty.

He rolled the back door of the crate open and tossed her bags onto the floor behind a pair of horses that looked around their rumps at her. One was bridled, but it wasn't tied to anything and it turned sideways to watch them putting bags in through the open door.

Locklin reached his arm in and clicked his fingers.

Did he want her in the back of that?

The cattle dog leapt in behind the bags and got a scruff round his ears for the effort. Nikki relaxed, but not much, just enough to remember something that she should have done before she got off the bus.

‘I need to
go
first,' she lied.

‘You just got here.'

‘I mean, to the loo,' she said frowning. ‘Or am I supposed to squat behind a tree?'

‘Oh,' he said, glancing up at the pub. It was close — less than a hundred metres up the road past the cafe — but there'd be faces there that he wanted to avoid. Behind him was the park with shady trees and under the shade of the biggest tree was a small brick building. He nodded to that instead.

She reached past him to rummage through one of her bags and withdrew her hand with a small grey purse. Then she headed off alone.

‘We're on a schedule,' he said to her back, but he didn't have to. She wanted to get this over with as much as he did.

Inside the musty building, she cupped water from the tap in her hands and swallowed it with half a pain-killer. Her headache didn't seem so bad out of the sun and she didn't need to use all the facilities, only the water to help her swallow and a little more to cool her face and hands.

She pulled her long sleeves up to cool the scratches on her hands and saw the angry marks left by handcuffs. The cuffs were designed for adults and she'd worked her way free; Her wrists were swollen now, red and painful in the heat, and she ran them under the water. Then she rolled her shoulder to work out the soreness and pulled her collar aside to see bruises in the shape of fingers against the base of her neck.

She splashed more water on her face, rubbing her wet fingers around the back of her neck to cool away her headache, but it only skipped a throb or two.

She blinked at the face staring back at her from the mirror — hers, but she saw only her mother's. She splashed her eyes, wondering where the tears were and realised that all she felt was numb. When she looked at her fingers, she still saw her mother's blood, but the rage and fear were gone. The hatred for her stepfather was gone too, as if she'd run away from her feelings when she'd run away from the murder charge in Sydney.

She patted her cheeks dry and painted a little confidence on where innocence had once been, using lipstick, blush and eyeshadow from her purse. Then she straightened her blouse and pulled her sleeves down over her aching wrists to hide them until they healed, and she tied her straggling chocolate curls up into a respectable ponytail.

She hooked a slim, silver-framed set of glasses over her ears, perching them at the top of her nose, and for a heartbeat she remembered what it was like to be Nikki Dumakis, daughter to the first female Federal Minister for the Arts. Then she traded that for reality and the kind of age that takes trauma and not time to accumulate.

A month earlier, she couldn't fake her way into a Kings Cross nightclub past a bouncer with a seeing-eye dog, and yet that morning she'd faked her way into an adult-wage job without references or a curriculum vitae or formal resume.

She wondered if it was the lingering guilt for doing that which made her gut ache, but she knew it had to be the name that still buzzed in her ear louder than the march fly.
Nick Fletcher
, she repeated in her head. It sounded so wrong coming off that stranger's lips, as if he didn't like the taste of its venom any better than she did whenever she spat it off her tongue.

Nick, short for Nikola, too masculine for someone attempting to trace her trail on paper. And Fletcher, because no hunted girl in her right mind would choose to live with the burden of her torturer's name on her lips.

But as she stepped into the searing heat of a hot summer's sunset, it struck her as ominous that someone by the name of Nick Fletcher would step from the ladies toilets in a quiet country park in a town called Lowood.

Sydney's youngest detective, Kalin Burkett, rocked back in his grey swivel chair and meshed his fingers together behind his head. He watched his subordinate pace the office and wondered just how long it would take him to confess that he'd blown the surveillance. A sixteen-year-old girl had slipped a police net — but worse than that, she'd done it twice. Once had been within days of her mother's murder, and then again early yesterday, when her stepfather had caught her back at the crime scene, allegedly attempting to tamper with the evidence.

Both times, Burkett noticed, it had been Sergeant Underwood's responsibility to bring her in.

He watched the sweat gather at the sergeant's temples as he paced the room. Fifty-four-year-old sergeants often had a problem handing case files to younger men of higher rank, and Sergeant Joseph J. Underwood was no exception. Sweat was even swelling in the bald patch at the back of his head. And considering the fact that Sydney Central HQ was kept at a comfortable twenty-four degrees, Detective Burkett began to wonder if there wasn't more to the story than what Underwood had put in his incident report.

‘So where's the girl?' Burkett asked again — and a dozen more sweat beads swelled across Underwood's forehead.

Locklin studied his enemy as she emerged from the public toilets, wishing to his core that she wasn't a she. His fists clenched and then released, and as he watched her hips rock below a slim waist, heat surprised him as it rose up from low in his belly. He kicked his boot against the curb and tried to look away, but couldn't. Then his eyes narrowed again at a new opportunity that he saw.

‘Nick Fletcher,' he whispered, rolling the words on his tongue. Then he hurried to the passenger door, swung it open for her, and waited.