The Labyrinth of Drowning Read Online Free PDF

pushed out onto the road, Newell tumbling after him. Dragging some kind of cutter out of his pocket, the gunman cut the handcuffs that joined the two men together.
    Then it was all over. The driver of the four-wheel-drive and Newell were on the back of the two motorbikes, roaring out of sight.
    Harrigan and Griffin got to their feet. Griffin’s sunglasses had been knocked off in the fall and had landed some distance away on the footpath. He went and got them before brushing himself down. He touched his lapel. ‘I’ve lost my badge.’ His face and voice were calm. ‘Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!’ he said, sounding almost like a schoolboy. ‘Trigger-happy people. They really like using their guns.’ He matched his words with the feigned action of shooting at the people lying on the road.
    ‘Are you okay, mate?’ Harrigan asked, wondering if the reaction might be shock.
    ‘I’m fine. There’s my badge.’ He bent down and picked it up. ‘The pin’s broken.’
    ‘Wait here for the police,’ Harrigan said. ‘They’ll want your statement.’
    Griffin looked at Harrigan. His eyes showed no emotion. ‘Don’t call me mate,’ he said.
    ‘Aren’t you worried about your client?’
    ‘Why should I be? You’d have to say his troubles are over.’
    Harrigan would have said they were just starting but he didn’t have time to talk to Griffin any longer. He ran to the scene throughthe chaos of stopped traffic. Passers-by were getting shakily to their feet. When he reached the prisoner’s car, he saw the driver clearly dead, one guard lying seriously wounded on the road and the other bleeding and unconscious in the back. There was another dead man at the wheel of the escort car, while his partner was sprawled on the road, wounded and bleeding, unable to move.
    A man shouted over the ruckus. ‘I’m from St Vincent’s, we’ve got help coming. Stay calm.’
    ‘I’m a doctor,’ a woman called and hurried to the wounded man lying on the road by the escort car.
    Harrigan returned to the prisoner’s car to help the two wounded men there. ‘We need another doctor over here and quickly,’ he yelled back. Around him, car horns rose to a blaring cacophony. On what should have been a quiet autumn day in Sydney, all hell had broken loose.

3
    C race sat facing a largish man at a small table in the bright room; a video camera was recording their meeting. There were no windows in the room; its brightness came from the overhead lights and the bare white walls and floor. The man was reading over the fine print on a form he had just filled in. He looked up at Grace; she smiled professionally.
    ‘If you’re happy to agree to all this, Doug,’ she said, ‘I need you to sign here and here.’
    He half-smiled in return, with a touch of embarrassed egotism at finding himself the centre of attention. ‘Will I really go to gaol if I tell anyone I’ve been here or even that I know this place exists?’
    The sound of their voices was sharp in the bright clarity of the room. He wore light-sensitive glasses which seemed to have become fixed in a permanent, very pale blue colour, giving him the look of someone wearing sunglasses unnecessarily.
    ‘Do you want anyone to know what we’re going to discuss here?’ she asked in reply.
    He shook his head. He had heavy features and looked older than his thirty-nine years. The form said he was a married man with three children, and that his wife was a part-time commerce teacher at the local Catholic high school. He worked as a middle-rankingpublic servant for the state government. A family without much spare cash after the mortgage, car and private school fees had been paid. The last person who’d want his wife to know he regularly visited a brothel called Life’s Pleasures.
    ‘I’m only here because Coco’s dead,’ he said. He didn’t look at Grace. ‘She had to be illegal. When you went and saw her, she’d freeze up. The last time I saw her, she was curled up on the bed, really tense.