‘I can’t remember their names.’
He softened his voice. ‘They frightened you?’
She hesitated and placed a skinny hand over her mouth, nodded without looking at him.
‘There was a pig working Vice at about this time, his name was Tye Davis,’ he said, noting her gleam of recognition. ‘He was accused of taking bribes from a pimp, to look the other way when you and your mates were picking up tricks.’
‘Yeah, he used to get freebies from us girls. I never had much to do with him. I don’t mix with cops. There was talk, but.’
‘What kind of talk?’
‘That him and some other cops were setting up business, planning on running some girls of their own. Kitty and Lorna were recruiting for them. They were going to be the managers or some such shit.’
‘Kitty Bonilla?’
‘Yeah.’
The first KP murder victim. Monty’s mind began to whirl. Perhaps taking bribes had been the very least of Tye’s misdemeanours.
Aloud he said, ‘I have a cop mate in Central. He looked at the records and said part of your interview was missing. There’s no mention that you saw Reece Harper after his fight with Lorna. They reckoned Reece followed Lorna after she turned him down and killed her in the park.’
Charlie sprang to her feet. ‘Why should I give a fuck?’ Heads in the fast food restaurant turned. ‘If the cops want to pin it on the wrong bloke, who’s now dead, what do I care? It’s not going to get Lorna back.’
Twitchy and anxious now, Charlie lifted her wrist to her mouth and sucked, staring out of the window into the city night.
Then something or someone in the street caught her attention. She drew breath with a gasp and whipped her head back to Monty, lunging for the fifty on the table. The speed at which she moved took him by surprise. Before he knew it she was on her feet and out of the door.
He reached the pavement outside McDonald’s just in time to see Champagne Charlie running across the road, dodging traffic. A taxi missed her by inches, its honking horn almost drowned in the sound of squealing brakes. On the other side of the road now, he could see her heading for the steps leading down to the station.
He had to catch her.
About to step onto the road he was forced to leap back when a souped-up VL swerved by him. He heard adolescent male laughter and flipped them the obligatory bird. When there was a break in the traffic at last, he flapped across the road as fast as his loose trainers would allow, down the steps to platform one. He stood for a moment under the vaulted glass roof, his eyes taking in the echoing vastness of the near-empty railway station as he searched for Charlie. Few silhouettes darkened the window of a train as it slid from the platform with barely a pneumatic hush. A man was buying a ticket from the automatic machine. A group of tired soccer fans stood around a boarded up newsstand, spitting, smoking and talking.
The clanging of a locker door and the sound of hurried footsteps ahead drew his attention and he saw Charlie’s sticklike figure heading towards the exit stairs. He ran to follow and soon found himself on the street again. With her head hunched and her stride brisk, Champagne Charlie strode under the green tubular footbridge that stretched like a caterpillar above the road, up the pavement and towards the quieter end of the street.
Several minutes later Monty found himself in the same stretch of road where Linda Royce had been abducted. The absence of pedestrians was eerie compared to the hustle and bustle of the club district only a few streets away.
Ahead, a vacant plot of rain-washed weeds marked by a developer’s sign stretched alongside the railway track. Here Charlie stopped and leaned against a light pole, breathless after the exertion of her walk.
Monty caught up with her as she was adjusting the plastic strap of her high red sandal.
‘Hey, I still need you to talk to you about my girl Lorna.’
She opened her mouth, no doubt to tell him to do something physically impossible to himself, but her sentence petered out before it started. Her eyes widened as she tried to focus on something over Monty’s shoulder. He turned to see two men walking up the pavement towards them. In the flicker of the faulty streetlight their movements looked jerky, like computer graphics. He had to squint to make them out. Both were wearing long coats, one man was tall and beefy, the other smaller and wiry.
Champagne Charlie echoed his own thoughts when she said, ‘Oh fuck!’
He glanced back to see her toeing off her shoes. In an instant she’d stepped out of them and was thumping away bare-footed up the pavement.
One of the men has to be her pimp, Monty thought. As he was the one who’d got her into trouble, the very least he could do was prevent them taking off after her and giving her a beating.
He turned to face them and braced his legs like a sailor on a heaving deck, making it obvious that he was not going to let them pass. But when they stopped in a shadow about two metres away from him, it became clear that they had no intention of chasing after Champagne Charlie.
‘Well, well, well, what have we here?’
At the sound of the voice Monty didn’t need to see the face to identify the speaker. It was Keyes, one of the cops who’d trashed his flat.
The instant the larger man stepped under the light, a hazy memory that had been stuck somewhere in the dark recesses of Monty’s subconscious flashed into awareness. Now he remembered where he’d seen their names before—in the case notes he’d been reading the night he was drugged. In his mind’s eye he saw his notebook, and in his own handwriting the names of the Vice cops who’d worked the KP murders: William Keyes and Duncan Thrummel.
Now he knew exactly what they were doing here.
Shit.
Thrummel moved to stand next to his older colleague, his gait rigid, his arm pinned to his side.
Keyes said, ‘We’ve got to bring you in, McGuire. You’ve been interrogating witnesses while on suspension. You have the right to remain silent...’
‘Blah blah blah,’ Thrummel finished, taking a step forward.
Monty saw Keyes take the handcuffs from his coat pocket. He gestured to Thrummel’s stiff right arm. ‘Since when has making an arrest involved a baseball bat?’
‘Shut it, McGuire. Put out your hands,’ Keyes told him.
Monty made to put out his hands, but before the cuffs could be snapped, he jerked his knee into the soft flesh of the older man’s groin.
He ran.
He hadn’t been aware of the street’s gradient until his calves started to burn and his lungs laboured for air. No time for a backward glance, he could hear the thud of feet chasing after him. He sensed it was the younger man, Thrummel, matching every stride of his and more. The clatter of wood on concrete indicated the baseball bat had been dropped. Less encumbered, the distance between them narrowed until Monty could hear his pursuer’s breath.
Ahead he saw the white railings of a new footbridge across the railway track. It connected Wellington Street to a series of building sites that were slowly changing into a complex of classy boutiques, restaurants and arcades. If he couldn’t shake off his pursuers in this maze of construction, there was a good chance he could still lose himself in the Saturday night crowds in the clubbing district on the other side.
Hope of escape brought with it a final rush of adrenaline. With a surge of speed, he pumped a last burst of energy into his aching muscles.
He failed to see the taped-off patch of pavement until he’d tripped over it. With a flurry of flailing limbs, tangled orange tape, witch’s hats and flying trainers, he tumbled through the air over the exposed manhole. The breath escaped from his lungs with a painful whoosh as he landed face first on the pavement. The phone in his pocket crunched against his hip.