How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling Read Online Free PDF

sandwiches?’
    â€˜No way!’
    â€˜Gives you energy.’
    â€˜Gives you wings,’ I said. Wouldn’t I have liked to fly away.
    Spanner and I sat in the kitchen with Cookie while he made sandwiches. He heated us one of his beef pies too. I liked Cookie, although he and I had rarely had a chance to talk alone. Partly I guess that is the nature of running a station kitchen. Up early, sleep afternoons. As I watched him work I thought he seemed happy with what we had told him, and that perhaps, if he ever learned the truth, he would not be too quick to condemn me.

4
    Spanner, Cookie and I had been here the longest. We were the old hands and knew a few things we preferred not to but it was Cookie who seemed best able to ignore it all.
    A couple of years before the shooting, it was morning, just after breakfast. A muster and import had finished a few days ago and we were all relaxing. Arif and I were in the canteen, him talking at me and me pretending to listen. Charles and Simms were there too. Spanner was down in his shed and Palmenter was in the office. We heard the rumble of a car approaching on the gravel. That in itself was unusual and I stood to look out the window.
    A police car drove up to the canteen building and stopped. No one got out and in each of the buildings curious eyes must have been watching for what would happen next. The police never came out here. For them to do so now, something must be serious.
    â€˜Better hide the harvest,’ called Arif to Cookie who was chopping leaf in the kitchen. Arif was serious, but the joke was that an entire plantation thrived immediately out the back door.
    â€˜Someone must have been caught,’ Cookie said as he came from the kitchen casually wiping his hands on his apron. He peered out the window.
    Perhaps he was right: one of the previous imports had been picked up and then said something, given up the station and Palmenter and all of us. Unlikely, but I was wondering what this would mean for me, if I’d be charged, if we’d all be charged, with people smuggling.
    Palmenter admitting anything? Ha! We’d all be for it. He’d find some way of pinning it on us and getting off scot-free. I wondered what the penalty for people smuggling was. A few years jail? Andhere was Cookie calmly packaging up serious quantities of dope, a crime I suspected carried a far more severe penalty, again, a crime for which Palmenter would deny all knowledge and for which I could not claim innocence.
    Hopefully the police had come about something else entirely but I realised suddenly how things were. The truth was I was working on a station that routinely broke the law and each day, by my silence or inaction, I became more complicit. And there was no way out, I was trapped. I should go and get in the police car, lock myself in it and tell them to take me away.
    But life is not that simple. Palmenter was a bully, an arrogant bastard, he was a ruthless money-hungry opportunist preying on the weak and dispossessed. Yet these people had no choice and at least they now had a chance at a new life, a better life, and I wasn’t going to be the one to end that hope. I wanted to get away, but I had to do it on my own terms.
    Palmenter strolled over to the car and two policemen got out and I could hear friendly deep voices, laughter, howdyados, as Palmenter led them towards us. We drifted like ghosts back into the kitchen as they came in the canteen door. Palmenter opened beers for them at the bar while we listened from behind the swing doors.
    â€˜We hardly ever see you out this way. Don’t be strangers, always a meal or a beer here for you. Anytime.’
    I couldn’t make out the reply because just then the freezer motor started up. Cookie scurried out to turn it off. Last thing Palmenter wanted was cops dropping by unannounced, so him telling them not to be strangers, to drop by for a feed and a drink anytime, that was plain bullshit. I wondered if