Tell the Truth (17 page)

SIXTEEN

P
aris was wary when she walked into the station the next morning. Rowan had said the other officer had been at yesterday's crash, which meant he'd know exactly how badly she'd stuffed up. There were guys in the job who'd go hard at you, guys who'd bring up something like that every chance they got. Well, she probably deserved it.

After the slightly awkward introductions, Rowan sat at the desk to finish paperwork and Wayne Loftus followed Paris to the ambulance. He stood at the back door, watching while she went through her checklist.

‘I'm sorry about your aunt,' he said.

‘She's not dead,' Paris said.

‘Sorry she's missing. Sorry whatever's happened.' He hitched his belt up with his thumbs. ‘I worked with her a couple of times. Good operator. Switched on.'

It was the highest praise one officer could give another. Paris thought back to her first day on the road, when she'd imagined her trainer saying that about her.

‘I hear you've been having some problems,' Wayne said.

‘My aunt's on my mind.'

‘Before that, I mean.'

She counted oxygen masks and ticked boxes.

‘It's probably your expectations,' he said. ‘I've seen it happen. People want to be perfect, and when they're not they can't handle it. Young girls especially.'

‘Especially, huh?'

‘Brought up to be Mummy and Daddy's little princess, to be perfect all the time. I have two girls, ten and nine, and I'm always saying to them, hey, life's not like that. You gotta roll with the punches.' He put on an accent. ‘You gotta learn to deal.'

‘My dad died in a truck crash when I was ten,' she said. ‘My mum doesn't particularly like me. I know how to deal.'

The station phone rang. Paris saw Rowan answer it in the muster room, then write something down.

‘Looks like we got a job,' Wayne said. ‘That's your spot there.' He pointed to the resus seat at the head of the stretcher. ‘Watch and learn, kiddo.'

‘My name's Paris,' she said.

‘Like the dude in the Trojan movie. Gotcha.'

Rowan came out with the keys. ‘Man caught in a chair in Potts Point. Caller's in a state, so that's all we've got.'

‘How do you get caught in a chair?' Wayne slammed the back door and the air pressure popped Paris's ears. He got in the passenger side, still talking, while Rowan climbed behind the wheel. ‘I've been to kids with their heads stuck in the back of chairs, but never an adult. How could they not give more info? How do we know if we need Rescue?'

Paris clipped in her seatbelt and sat with her knees jammed against the head of the stretcher, watching out the back window as they drove out of the station. It felt odd to see the cars behind them instead of in front, and how people pulled in to follow, hoping for a clear run through traffic. The siren was as loud in here as in the front, and the ambulance rocked and swayed as Rowan braked and cornered. She breathed deeply, tried to be cool.

At the address, Wayne opened the side door and pulled out the Oxy-Viva. ‘Bring the first-aid kit and drug box,' he said to her as she clambered out. ‘When you don't know what you're going to, you gotta be prepared for everything.'

The cream brick of the ageing apartment building was stained by water below each balcony, and equally ageing residents peered over the railings to see what was going on. A woman Paris guessed was in her seventies stood in the open front door, her blue dress soaked, her hands shaking as she gestured for them to hurry.

‘Hello there,' Wayne said. ‘How are you? What's happened?'

‘He's stuck, oh, it's terrible how he's stuck.'

‘Your husband, is it?' Wayne said, but she herded them into the lift and pressed the button and started to cry.

‘Your husband?' he said again as the lift wheezed upwards. ‘How is he stuck?'

‘Oh, it's awful, it's terrible.' She wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue.

‘What kind of chair is it?' Wayne said. He whispered to Paris, ‘Sometimes you have to change your approach.'

‘He screamed with the pain, I didn't know what to do.'

The lift shuddered to a stop and the doors opened on a hallway with grimy walls. The woman hurried out, her slippers scuffing the thin brown carpet, and Wayne muttered, ‘Sometimes even then you don't get a straight answer,' as he and Paris and Rowan followed.

The door to the apartment was propped open by a chair. The air inside smelled of cats, and Paris heard at least one scratching at a closed door as they went along a gloomy corridor.

At the end, the woman tapped on a half-closed door and pushed it open. ‘Arnold? They're here. Go on in. I can't look.'

Paris saw the glaring light of a fluorescent bar, tiles with dirty grout, threadbare towels on sagging racks. In the shower, an elderly man sat on a plastic chair with a dressing gown draped over his shoulders and across his thighs and a look of intense pain on his face.

‘Mate.' Wayne put down the Viva. ‘What's happened?'

‘The chair's got me,' Arnold croaked. He gripped the chair's arms so tightly the veins on his wrists stood out. ‘Got me by the knackers.'

‘Ouch,' Wayne said. ‘Okay then. Let's have a little look.' He crouched and lifted the dressing gown. ‘Aha. Right. I see.' He lowered the gown and turned to Paris. ‘The chair's got those gaps in the seat, you know the type, an inch or so wide, so you can leave the chair in the garden and the rain can go through. And his package has slipped right down one of those gaps.'

He clapped his hand on Arnold's shoulder. ‘How'd it happen? Hot shower, the plastic legs give way a bit, something like that? You try to stand up and can't?'

Arnold nodded. His face was red, his bushy eyebrows and wet hair white. He blinked at them. ‘Not a girl. I don't want a girl looking.'

‘Don't worry about her,' Wayne said. ‘She's one hundred per cent professional and specially trained in matters like these.' He checked under the gown again. ‘Looking a bit swollen and chafed there, but I think we can manage without Rescue. You got some pain? Yeah, not surprised. Allergic to anything? Okay. Let's check your blood pressure, and we'll give you something for the pain, then let's see if between us we can't push the chair down and set this nice gent free.'

He gave the sphygmo to Paris, and she stepped gingerly onto the wet tiles beside Arnold's chair. ‘Hello,' she said, then groped around for something else to say. ‘We'll have you feeling better in no time.'

Arnold looked like he didn't believe her. He'd bitten his lip so hard he'd bruised it, and his clammy skin gave off a sharp vinegary smell that mixed badly with the dank odour rising from the drain. She moved the dressing gown back from his shoulder, wrapped the cuff around his bicep and inflated it. He looked like he'd once been big and strong, but age had turned him flabby on a shrinking frame.

‘One-forty,' she said.

‘All good,' Wayne said. He was inspecting Arnold's forearms. ‘You don't have anything in the way of veins here, so Rowan's going to give you this stuff – it's called fentanyl, and you just snort it up your nose – for your pain, and then we're going to get you out of there.'

A black cat ran into the room, saw them, and shot back out.

Rowan gave the drug to Arnold, and in a couple of minutes he'd started to relax a little.

‘Pain easing?' Wayne said.

‘It's a bit better.'

‘Good, good. Now Rowan and Paris are going to stand either side of you and press down on the arms of the chair when I say, all right? And . . .' He raised the gown and took another look. ‘I might soap things up a bit, make it a bit easier. That okay?'

‘Anything to get out of here.'

Wayne soaped his gloves into a foamy lather at the sink, then crouched in the cubicle and reached under the chair. ‘Okay, just a little bit here, excuse my cold hands.'

Arnold flinched and shivered, and Rowan squeezed his shoulder.

‘That should do it,' Wayne said. ‘All righty, girls and boys, take your positions. Arnold, you have to let go there. Put your hands on my shoulders instead if you need to grab onto something.'

Arnold released his grip on the chair's arms and Paris and Rowan took hold of one each, their palms hard against the surface.

‘One, two, three, and push.'

Paris pressed down, leaning into it with her back. On the other side Rowan did the same. The chair legs skidded out and stopped, then skidded further. Arnold gasped. Wayne reached under the chair again.

‘Little bit more,' he said.

Paris pushed down and felt the legs give way again. She pictured the plastic gap widening. She heard a slippery sucking sound and Arnold yelped and half-stood as the chair released him, his hands grabbing hers and Rowan's, his legs shaking as they took his weight. The dressing gown slipped off him onto the floor. His sagging back was fish-belly pale and dotted with fleshy moles, his drooping buttocks marked with red lines from the chair.

He shuddered. ‘Oh god, oh god.' He clutched at the shower wall, at Wayne's shoulder again.

Paris let go of the chair and grasped his arm. Rowan kicked the chair aside, and Wayne put his arm under Arnold's and around his back. Arnold clung to them and burst into tears.

Wayne wrapped Arnold's bruised and swollen scrotum in a towel-covered icepack, then they took him and his twitching wife to Sydney Hospital. Afterwards, Wayne stood filling in the case sheet and talking while Paris put clean sheets on the stretcher. She didn't know how to take him. His idiotic yap about expectations had her assuming he was one of those loudmouth guys who didn't really care, but the way he'd managed Arnold made her think otherwise.

‘See now, that was a good job,' Wayne said. ‘We worked as a team, everything went smoothly, the patient's nuts were saved. Who could ask for more?'

Rowan came out of the Emergency Department and helped Paris tuck in the sheets.

‘I was just saying how well that job went,' Wayne said to him. ‘I mean, it's not like I want to rub soap over some old guy's ballbag, but when the job goes well you can't help but feel good. Am I right or am I right?'

‘He said to say thank you,' Rowan told Paris.

‘And that's nice too,' Wayne said. ‘Some of
'
em forget the social niceties. So it was a good job all round.' He finished the case sheet. ‘And you did well, Paree. Nice and calm, did as you were told. Didn't lose it for a second. Team player.' He bumped her shoulder with the side of his fist. ‘Props, man.'

‘Thanks,' she said, but it came out funny and she hoped he didn't think she was being sarcastic.

He glanced at her, then at Rowan, who was walking away, back into the hospital.

‘I know kids like you,' he said. ‘Playing it too cool for school, but underneath you're all quivering and soft, afraid of being kicked. Life's given you a hard shell, man, but times like this you need to open it up a little. I can see in your eyes how much you want to be good at the job. Why don't you let people help you?'

Paris didn't know what to say, where to look. If that was true, then . . .

‘Thirty-seven,' Control called over the radio. ‘Can you clear?'

‘Rock'n'roll,' Wayne said, scrambling to answer. ‘Thirty-seven's ready to go.'

‘Thanks, Thirty-seven. Got a female with some issue we can't quite work out.' He gave them an address in Woolloomooloo.

‘Thirty-seven's on the case,' Wayne said.

Paris got into her seat in the back, glad to be away from his gaze. Rowan ran out to close the rear doors, and swung up behind the wheel.

*

The morning meeting over, Ella and Murray got into their car in a somewhat tense silence and headed through the sunshine to Dural, where they planned to speak to Steve Lynch, the third person Stacey had defriended on Facebook. Other detectives were following up with the lab about the numberplate of the car whose driver appeared to speak to the cyclist at the lights; with a couple of Crime Stoppers calls that had come in overnight, about someone dumping a bike in the Parramatta River and about what may have been a domestic in a car that vaguely matched Stacey's; with trying to find anyone who'd seen or heard anything in the area around Bicentennial Park where Stacey's phone had been turned off, and in the areas where the later messages had been logged. Dennis was chasing up the requests for the Durhams' phone records; and Elizabeth Libke was continuing her close examination of James Durham's computers, both the machine and laptop they'd collected from his home and the one in his shop. One good thing: George Tsu had been interviewed last night and had told the detectives that he and Stacey had gone to a miscarriage, and Stacey had broken down in tears afterwards. The parents had been hysterical with grief and Tsu said he himself had had a hard time keeping it together. The hug was friendly, collegial, and he said they'd both needed it, never mind what Lamarr thought she saw and accused them of.

Feeling good about last night, if less so about the case, Ella had smiled at Murray a couple of times and got nothing in return. Now, as he drove, she said, ‘I'm sorry about yesterday.'

‘Uh-huh.' Murray didn't look over.

‘It was mean, and hurtful. I'm glad you're excited about the wedding. I think it's really great.'

He nodded, his eyes on the road.

She tried to sound jaunty. ‘What's the forecast saying today?'

‘Back to five per cent.'

‘Good as nothing,' she said. ‘It'll be great.'

He braked at a red light, and scratched his chin.

Ella touched his arm. ‘I truly am sorry.'

He hesitated, then looked at her. ‘You really think it won't rain?'

‘It wouldn't dare.' She smiled.

*