The Dry (Aaron Falk #1)(85)

“Fifty grand. It’s a grubby amount to kill three people over,” Barnes said.

“It’ll be less about the money than you’d think,” Falk said. “Gamblers like him are always chasing something else. I’ve seen it get pretty desperate pretty fast. They think every roll of the dice is a second chance. The question is, what was Whitlam chasing?”

“Doesn’t matter what it was. It can’t justify this,” Barnes said.

“No, but that’s money for you,” Falk said. “It can get bloody disgusting.”




Whitlam stood in the school doorway cradling his mug between his hands. The wind was up again. He felt the dust stick to the sweat on his skin. The kids shrieked and ran in the playground in front of him, and he wondered if he could start to breathe again. A couple of days and Falk would be gone, maybe sooner with any luck. He would breathe then, he decided. Not before.

A few more months. Keep his head down, keep his luck up, and he could disappear to that job up north. Part of him couldn’t believe he’d made it to this point. He’d nearly had a heart attack when Raco had mentioned they had security footage from the Hadlers’ farm. He’d had no idea the farmhouse had a camera, and he’d sat in a cold sweat between the two cops as he contemplated how near he’d come to being discovered.

He had to get away from here. He would have to convince Sandra to give him one last chance. One more fresh start, and this time he would stop gambling. He promised. He had said the words to her last night, and through his tears he’d felt that for the first time he really meant them. She had watched in silence. She’d heard those words before. Right before they’d moved to Kiewarra, and at least twice before that. But this time he had to make her believe it. More than that, he told himself, he had to do it. He had to stop. Because this time there was so much more at risk than he could bear to lose.

Just the thought of it made his guts churn. Sandra was so worried, and yet she had no idea of the real weight of the axe dangling over them. She thought having a bank account constantly in the red was the worst of her problems. The secret shame of having to buy the weekly groceries on credit cards. Having to keep up appearances behind a veneer of rented houses and payment-plan coffee machines. She thought the problems ran day to day, but not much further. She didn’t know about the trail of debts that stretched from here to Melbourne. Or the horrors waiting for her and their daughter at the end of that trail if he didn’t pay.

Whitlam almost smiled, a wild, loopy grin at the idea of telling her the truth. The promise of the nail gun alone would be enough to send her racing up north.

They had delivered the message to his house. Here in Kiewarra. Two thick-necked steroid junkies from Melbourne, showing up on his tidy suburban-like doorstep in person to tell him their boss was getting twitchy. Pay. They’d brought the nail gun with them to show him. Whitlam had been paralyzed with fear. Sandra and Danielle were in the house. He could hear the sounds of his wife and daughter chatting idly in the kitchen as the two men detailed in low tones what they were going to do to them if he didn’t come up with the cash. It was a horrific soundtrack.

The notification of the Crossley Educational Trust funding had come through two days later. The letter was addressed to Whitlam directly. It had arrived with the claim form on Karen’s day off and landed on his desk unopened.

He’d made the decision in less than a heartbeat. They gave away millions. Fifty thousand was a drop in the ocean for those rich bastards. He could earmark it for something vague and tricky to quantify, training courses perhaps, support programs. That would tick their boxes. For a while. But that was all he needed. A while. Borrow it now to pay Melbourne; repay it, well, later. Somehow. It wasn’t enough to clear his debt, not by a long way, but it was enough to buy him some breathing space.

He hadn’t let himself think about it too closely as he’d diverted the money. He’d simply swapped the school’s account details for his private one. The one Sandra didn’t know about. He kept the school’s account name on the form. Banks used only the numbers, not the names. Whether the two corresponded was never checked, he knew. The plan had been OK, he told himself. Not great, not even good, but holding water. Then Karen Hadler had knocked on his door one afternoon, holding that Crossley Trust form.

Whitlam remembered the look in her eyes and, making a fist, he lightly, discreetly, punched the wall next to him until his knuckles were raw and weeping.

Whitlam watched Karen leave. As his office door clicked closed behind her, he rotated in his chair and silently vomited into the wastepaper bin. He could not go to prison. He couldn’t pay off what he owed in prison, and the people he owed weren’t the kind to care about why. Pay, or his family paid. That was the deal. Signed and sealed. He had seen the nail gun. They’d made him touch it. Feel its leaden weight in his hand. Pay, or his … No. There was no alternative. He would pay. Of course he would pay.

He sat alone in his office and forced himself to think. Karen knew. Which meant she’d probably tell her husband, if she hadn’t told him already. How soon would she blow the whistle? She was a cautious woman. Almost overly diligent in many ways. It slowed her down. Karen Hadler would want to be 100 percent certain before she committed herself to action. Luke, however, was a different story.

He didn’t have much time. He couldn’t let this get out. He could not let this get out. There was no alternative.