Animal Kingdom Read Free

of money to pay for it. Selling drugs was the easiest thing in the world, especially when Craig’s supplier happened to be a bent copper called Randall Roache.
    Craig regularly met Roache in a pet shop, because Craig liked fish and had a fish tank in which he fed guppies to his clown fish and as on a number of previous occasions, he had brought J along just to see how he’d handle himself. Like any good uncle, Craig thought J needed to be given a bit of direction in life, and the pet shop seemed just the right place to do it.
    Swimming around. Innocent. Are fish innocent? Idle thoughts floated through J’s mind as he stared into the blue, watery light. He wasn’t really thinking. You don’t really think when you’re watching fish: that’s why you watch them. You just sort of immerse yourself—forget yourself.
    And that’s what J was trying to do as Craig and Roache talked in undertones at the other end of the aisle, next to the angel fish. Still, no matter how hard he tried to ignore them, he could hear morsels of their conversation; or maybe it was the tension in their voices he could hear, a nervy tension rippling out from them, alerting the sharks of this world that something was in trouble. While they pretended everything was perfectly normal.
    And perhaps it was normal. Perhaps cops and robbers need each other, are naturally drawn to each other, know and understand the same sorts of things. Are found in the same places. Perhaps they even like each other.
    Like tigers like monkeys.
    But it wasn’t just like that, was it—not just the predator and the prey—because in this jungle everyone had a bit of the tiger and a bit of the monkey in them.
    Baz could have been a cop, no question about it, and even Craig, once, before he strayed so far onto the dark side that he couldn’t find his way back. Pope could never have been a cop, or, if he had been, he would have been the commissioner: some heavy-dude cop who had the last say-so on who was to get the green light and who was to get the stop. Yeah, Pope could have been a cop, and there were plenty of cops who could have been Pope, or who were skirting pretty close to it. There was no black and white in this zoo. There never is.
    That’s the way it looked to J as the two men hovered in the ghostly fluorescent light of the fish aisle.
    J didn’t know what was going on, but did really. Craig was picking up a deal. Not the whole deal: half of it was still in lockup, he heard Roache say. So Roache was stealing drugs that had been impounded from other drug pushers. J didn’t know how a copper could steal drugs from a lockup, but it didn’t matter whether he stole it or just paid off some other corrupt copper to get it for him: he had it, and J didn’t have to understand anything else.
    In fact, the less he understood, the better. If there was a truth in this world, that was it, and as he was thinking about this, the conversation between Roache and Craig took a more sinister twist.
    Roache told Craig to make Pope—that’s Uncle Pope— pull his head in. Armed Robbery knew the stuff they had on Pope wouldn’t stand up in court, so they’d decided to do something about it themselves, because he’d become too much of a liability.
    This didn’t sound good, and Craig looked stressed. ‘His head’s pulled in,’ he answered plaintively. ‘Your head doesn’t get more in than Pope’s head.’
    â€˜Mate, even if I gave a shit, you’d still be telling the wrong bloke,’ Roache answered as he picked up his money and left to take his son to the soccer.
    Looking at J, Craig nodded towards the door.
    J didn’t know much about his Uncle Pope, not even why they called him Pope . Probably just some mean joke about some poor bastard he’d done over, some terrible thing he’d done, and some wit had made a crack about it, and there you are, you’re stuck