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  Black stares at Yellow for a long moment, then turns to Red for support.

  It is not forthcoming.

  Yellow puts a hand on Black’s shoulder. ‘We’re nearly there. We can do it, but only if we remain strong, keep focused and stay the course.’

  Black nods but clearly isn’t convinced.

  ~ * ~

  3

  Billy shifts in his seat as he looks across the bullpen.

  The police station is all but empty. Everyone’s either working at the Formula One race or attending it. There are a few uniformed cops around but that’s about it. At the very rear of the room a small television is on with the sound down. Billy doesn’t need audio to see Nico Rosberg in a Mercedes leads the Melbourne Grand Prix by what looks like twenty seconds.

  The German is only three years older than Billy, a true contemporary, and yet here Billy is during the first Formula One race of the season, waiting in a run-down cop shop in Melbourne while Rosberg commences his ninth year in the main game.

  Billy shifts in his seat again. It hurts like hell, ‘it’ being his whole body. Chasing that truck yesterday had not worked out the way he had hoped. Sure he saved the security guard, but it had nearly killed him and put undue stress on a body that was already showing the kind of wear and tear a forty-year-old football player experiences, not a twenty-five-year-old who hadn’t played contact sport since primary school.

  The door opposite Billy creaks open and an overweight man with a reddened drinker’s face and a pink shirt one size too small steps out and looks at him. Billy can see by the man’s expression that he’s already annoyed by the conversation they haven’t had yet.

  ‘On your day off? Really?’

  Billy tries to smile it off. ‘I was just doing my job.’

  The large red-faced man nods Billy towards his office. ‘And now I have to do mine.’

  Billy stands and enters the room, feels like a scolded child sent to the principal’s office. He tries to lighten the mood. ‘Does that shirt come in pink, Sarge?’

  ‘It’s “rose” and fuck you.’

  Senior Sergeant Burt Macklin is usually a happy-go-lucky kind of fella, rare for a cop, but he’s got his game face on today and is clearly pissed off. Billy takes a seat inside the small office.

  ‘And you need to get a haircut, Ringo.’

  ‘Now, was Ringo the drummer for the Beatles or the Monkees? I keep getting them mixed up.’ Billy points a finger at the sergeant and grins, to make sure he knows it was a joke.

  ‘Don’t smile at me. There’s no smiling today.’

  ‘Well that doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘You realise it isn’t Lethal Weapon, right?’

  Billy doesn’t follow. ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Your life! Chasing trucks, pulling guys off armoured cars —’

  ‘I saved that guy.’

  ‘He doesn’t see it that way.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s suing the Police Department.’

  Billy is gobsmacked. ‘For what?’

  Macklin picks up a piece of paper and reads it aloud. ‘Injuries sustained —’

  ‘It was gravel rash —’

  ‘— injuries sustained through the direct action of Junior Detective William J. Hotchkiss —’

  ‘Gravel rash.’

  ‘Really?’ Macklin extracts a photo from a file on his desk and flips it around to show Billy.

  ‘Aaah.’ Billy recoils, shocked by the gruesome injury. ‘Is that his thigh?’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Oh man. That looks terrible.’

  ‘And that’d be why he’s suing.’

  Billy feels a cold dread turn in his chest. ‘What was I meant to do?’

  ‘Follow protocol, wait for backup to arrive—not do it yourself.’

  Billy takes a moment. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘The Commissioner wants you gone.’

  The world stops turning as Billy tries to process the words. ‘So pretty much as bad as it gets.’

  ‘They want to pay off the guy and bury this thing before it goes public. There’s an election in four months so they can’t have these “distractions”.’ Macklin stops, can see Billy is both bewildered and dazed. ‘It’s your fourth reprimand in two years. You can stay on but you’ll be suspended and the disciplinary tribunal will recommend your dismissal, which, of course, will be on your permanent record and follow you around forever. If you resign you avoid that and leave with the basic severance package.’

  ‘Jesus, I was just doing my job —’

  ‘You recklessly endangered the public. And the fact you can’t see that is part of the problem.’

  ‘I just—I can’t—you can’t speak to the Commissioner?’

  ‘I already did. Reckless endangerment, Billy. If that guy had been critically injured, or died then —’

  ‘I was only trying to do what was right.’

  Macklin looks at him and Billy’s almost certain he knows the statement is not completely true. Billy did it for the adrenaline rush as much as anything else.

  ‘Is there something I can . . .’ Billy trails off, studies the worn linoleum beneath his feet, at a complete loss. ‘Christ.’

  ‘I had the letter of resignation typed up.’ Macklin pushes it across the desk towards him. ‘With vacation time owed you’ll end up with about seven weeks pay.’ Macklin holds out a pen.

  Billy takes it and signs the letter quickly, doesn’t want to read it, doesn’t want to know what it says. ‘Well that didn’t work out the way I hoped.’ He tries to smile it off but his heart just isn’t in it.

  What the hell am I going to do now?

  He doesn’t have an answer.

  ~ * ~

  4

  ‘Two point three million dollars. Milllion.’ Marcellus Jaspernik stares out the window of his large office at the lush, French countryside beyond. ‘Milllion. Such a great word. It really gets the point across. So that brings the total they’ve stolen to . . .’ The rotund sixty-five-year-old German clicks his fingers as he tries to remember: ‘Do we know how much they’ve stolen, in total?’

  Claude Michelle rises from his desk outside and enters the sprawling office. ‘Christ, can’t you remember anything?’

  ‘That is why I have you.’

  ‘Just under eight million, sir. That’s the retail value of all the robberies so far.’ Claude’s French accent is as thick as hollandaise.

  ‘Right. Eight milllion.’ Marcellus is impressed by the number. ‘That’s really quite a lot.’ Then he thinks about it. ‘Of course it would have been divided by three so that’s—well, that’s not much after all.’

  ‘It’s more than my Grandpa earned his entire life.’

  ‘Then clearly Grandpa wasn’t trying hard enough.’

  ‘Ha ha, sir.’ The forty-six-year-old Claude feigns laughter. ‘Har-dee-ha.’

  ‘So, do we have anything on them or is it the same old same old?’

  The stocky Frenchman had worked as the executive assistant to Marcellus, the head of Interpol’s Criminal Investigation Department, for five years so he knows what his German overlord means when he says ‘same old same old’. The Melbourne job was the fifth robbery this crew had pulled in the last eight months and, so far, they had not left one single clue. Not a fingerprint or a strand of hair or scuff mark that could be used to uncover who they were, where they’d been or where they might be going next. Marcellus didn’t expect there’d be anything from the heist in Melbourne either—but he was wrong. ‘Actually there is one thing I thought you should see.’

  ‘And what, pray tell, might it be?’

  ‘It’s not an “if” so much as a “‘who”.’ Claude moves to Marcellus’s desk and works the iMac’s mouse. The screen fills with a video frame.

  Marcellus turns and studies it. ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘His name is Billy Hotchkiss. This is raw footage from the heist in
Melbourne.’

  ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘It was collated by the Victorian PD from the security cameras in the area surrounding the getaway route. It just arrived.’ Claude hits play on the video file.

  The film begins with a low-quality, wide-angle, black-and-white image that could only be from a security camera. Within it a truck drags an armoured car, which is on its side, along the roadway. Marcellus takes it in. ‘It’s like that Brazilian job they did late last year.’

  Claude nods, winces as the armoured car clips a vehicle and sends it careering across the roadway. ‘It’s amazing there were no fatalities.’

  ‘So they dragged it how far?’

  ‘Five kilometres. Through the city to a disused railway yard where they used C-4 to blow open the rear door and gain access before they torched it.’

  The image cuts to another low-quality, black-and-white security camera shot. Marcellus notices something and leans forward. ‘What is that?’

  ‘That’s Billy Hotchkiss.’

  ‘He’s, what—following them on a Vespa?’ The bike wobbles into an epic tank-slapper. ‘Oops—owww, he held on to it!’ Marcellus is delighted. ‘That was excellent.’

  ‘If you think that’s good, wait for the next part.’

  Marcellus studies the screen, then leans in closer. ‘He’s—what’s he doing? He’s not going to, oh—he’s getting that guy off the armoured car!’ The German is both amazed and enthralled. ‘He’s getting him off the armoured car!’

  ‘He’s getting him off the armoured car.’

  ‘Does he know him? I mean, are they friends? Family?’

  ‘I don’t believe they’d met before this.’

  Marcellus can’t take his eyes off the screen. ‘So he’s just, what— doing it on spec? Oh! Another tank-slapper. Oh! They’re down! That’s gotta hurt. That happened to me once and it was very unpleasant. You take a week off work after one of those—what’s he doing now?’

  ‘Getting back on the bike.’

  ‘He’s getting back on the bike?’ Marcellus is just confused. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’

  ‘He’s going after the truck.’

  ‘What? But he’s riding a Vespa and they’re driving a big rig. Is he crazy?’

  The video image cuts, then picks up another wide angle in black and white. Marcellus watches the screen as the truck and armoured car approach the camera—then the Vespa zips out from a side street and races up beside it.

  Marcellus shakes his head, dumfounded as he watches the guy climb onto the truck.

  ‘Why is he doing this?’

  ‘He’s trying to catch them.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’

  ‘He’s an off-duty cop. A Victorian police detective—junior detective.’

  Marcellus keeps staring at the video image. ‘Oh! They shot at him—oh Jesus —’ Marcellus winces. ‘He jumped! Where’d he go?’

  ‘He landed in a river.’

  ‘Did he really?’ The image cuts out and Marcellus sits heavily in his Herman Miller chair, both amazed and exhausted from watching the video. ‘Is he okay?’

  Claude nods. ‘Apart from a little road rash.’

  The German stares into the distance for a moment, lost in thought. ‘Billlly Hotchkissss. Why is that name familiar?’ He turns to the iMac, works the mouse, accesses Google and types on the keyboard. A list of hits blink onto the screen and his face lights up in recognition. ‘That’s right.’ He clicks on a YouTube link. ‘This was him six years ago.’ The video plays and they watch Billy’s enormous, multi-rollover shunt at Bathurst.

  Claude recoils. ‘Oh man, this guy is insane.’

  The German nods. ‘He used to be a professional racing car driver. In fact, he was, from what I can remember, a bit of a prospect. Had managers looking to bring him over to race in Europe. Even my friend was interested. Then this happened and he fell off the map. I think he was quite badly injured.’

  Marcellus works the keyboard again. This time he accesses the internal Interpol database. It takes a moment, then Billy’s file flips up onto the screen. Marcellus skim-reads it aloud: ‘He was accepted into the Victorian Police Academy, fourth in his class, one of the youngest detectives, yada yada, has been reprimanded on numerous occasions for, well, you just saw it, “reckless endangerment” and—oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It seems like—yeah, he just resigned. Or was forced to. Looks like that chase was the last straw.’ Marcellus turns and stares out the window, lost in thought once more. ‘Interesting.’

  Claude studies his boss warily. ‘What are you up to, old man?’

  ‘I’ve had an idea.’

  ‘How nice for you. I know how rarely that happens these days.’

  Marcellus ignores the comment and turns to the Frenchman. ‘It’s time, Claude.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘If I did I wouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘You need to get back on the horse.’

  ‘The horse is dead.’

  ‘I just bought you a new one.’

  ‘But I don’t want it.’

  ‘Tough, it’s already in the stable —’

  ‘Omigod! Enough with the equine metaphors. It’s not going to happen —’

  ‘I’m retiring in two months —’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And I want you to take over as head of this department.’

  ‘Really? You want—really?’ Claude is both shocked and delighted by this news.

  Marcellus nods. ‘You’re imminently qualified and the only one I trust in this viper pit. But it’s not my call. The director will seriously consider who I recommend but I know he wants to hire someone with recent operational experience and you —’

  ‘— haven’t been in the field for five years.’

  ‘Yep. Since, well, you know. But, if you work a high-profile case, like this one, solve it, that will seal the deal.’

  The Frenchman takes this in, then shakes his head. ‘I’ve been driving a desk for a long time. I’m too rusty for field work.’

  ‘It’ll come back to you just like that.’ Marcellus clicks his fingers.

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘It will.’ Marcellus takes a moment. ‘Don’t you miss it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Christ, I do. Every day.’ The German looks out the window again, a little wistfully this time.

  ‘I don’t miss being dead.’ Claude turns and nods at the iMac. ‘So what does this have to do with the Australian?’

  ‘We need to get proactive with this crew—we really should give them a name by the way—before somebody gets hurt. Just waiting for them to screw up isn’t going to cut it. So I want someone on the inside and this guy fits the bill.’ Marcellus turns and studies the computer screen. ‘He has the right background and there doesn’t seem to be anything about his career as a police officer online, though I’ll get the boffins in the lab to scrub anything that might show up.’

  ‘How do you even know that he’ll be suitable?’

  ‘I have a gut feeling.’

  ‘Really? A gut feeling?’

  ‘Just like the one I had when I hired you.’

  ‘Point taken.’

  ‘We’ll get him in for a formal interview to be sure. But before that you need to agree to be his partner.’

  Claude studies his German boss for a long moment. Going back into the field. Is it really something he wants to do? There’s a much higher chance of dying in the field than there is sitting behind a mahogany desk, and as dying is something he’s already experienced he’s not keen on a repeat performance. Of course he lied when he told the old man he didn’t miss being in the field. He does. A great deal. He misses the hunt, misses tracking and smoking out criminals. He has yet to find anything else that’s quite as satisfying, but is that a good enough reason to override his sense of self-preservation? He sh
akes his head. ‘No. I’m not doing it.’