Appeal Denied: A Cliff Hardy Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

about ex-cops, some of whom had gravitated to my profession, but Gregory was a serving officer and Frank knew what pressures that implied.
    ‘You’d better tell me what you’ve got and maybe I can contribute something.’
    ‘I’ll have to think about that. Thanks. I’ll get back to you.’
    ‘Hey, Cliff—come on …’
    ‘Listen. Lily left me half of what she’s worth. That’s a lot and I never gave a thought to doing the same. I feel ratshit about that on top of everything else, and I reckon the police investigation’s a dud. I don’t give a flying fuck about Inspector Gregory’s reputation or his future or the New South Wales Police Service in general. Why should I? They scrubbed me for doing my job. I’ll find out some other way.’
    I hung up on my best friend.
    I had to get out of the house. I drove to the Redgum gym in Leichhardt and threw myself into a workout routine much more severe than usual—double sets on the machines, longer on the treadmill. I worked up a sweat and stuck at the free weights until I reached ‘fail’—when you can’t do another lift—something I usually avoid like the plague. Wesley Scott, the West Indian proprietor and trainer, gave me a massage. Deep tissue. Hurt like hell.
    ‘You’re strung tight, man,’ he said. ‘What’s troubling you?’
    I told him with as few details as possible.
    ‘That’s tough. So you think putting yourself through this kinda pain is going to help?’
    ‘I’ll tell you something, Wes,’ I said as I rolled off the table. ‘I’m going to put some bugger through pain, no mistake.’
    I showered and went home, denying myself the usual after-workout coffee in the Bar Napoli a few doors away. The activity had done me good. I went straight to the computer and began to look for Lily’s files. I didn’t find any current ones, just a couple of incomplete drafts of stories already published.
    Lily could be secretive about her work, one of the reasons I never questioned her too closely. Had she been more so lately? I couldn’t remember. I got up and opened the wardrobe, thinking I’d better do something about the clothes. St Vincent de Paul seemed the best bet—Lily hadn’t gone in for Donna Karan power dressing. I took out the hanger holding the jacket and prepared to drop it over the back of the typing chair while I reached in for the next hanger. Something fell out of the jacket pocket—a packet of cigarettes. Like me, Lily had given up smoking years before. I hung the jacket back up, retrieved the packet from the floor and opened it. Hard pack. Twenty-three king size filter cigarettes. Two missing. Had she taken to the fags on the q.t.? I doubted it. But then I didn’t know she’d put me in her will.
    The packet felt funny. I’d lapsed myself once or twice and had also bought them often enough for informants to know what they felt like, even though my own preference had been for rollies. I took the packet to the desk and shook it. Twenty-three cigarettes about two-thirds of their true length came out, then a layer of foil. Wedged in the bottom of the packet was a thumb drive.
    Lily’s files were a chaos of notes, interview transcripts, downloaded material and draft paragraphs. How she honed them into the clear, insightful stories she produced was a mystery. The stuff bore her unmistakable imprint— frequent swearwords, wry asides and capitals for emphasis, the way she’d written in notes left for me and in her emails and postcards. I made a pot of coffee and sat down to work out what she’d been doing. One thing was clear: she’d kept a running record of the dates of the writing and research in reference to the deadlines she entered at the top of the files. This was all very recent work.
    As always, Lily had been working on several stories at once. There appeared to be three—a piece about money laundering by a media personality, an investigation of a political figure suspected of running interference with the immigration