Free Jill Jackson - 04 - Watch the World Burn by Leah Giarratano Page B

opened the freezer to get some bread.
    ‘No way,’ she said, rummaging around. He’d eaten the whole loaf!
    Laughing, Jill made a cheese sandwich with lettuce leaves instead of bread, smearing mustard straight onto the cheese. She remembered Scotty going backwards and forwards this morning for more toast, but she hadn’t exactly been counting. She’d been kind of distracted by that bare back, those brown shoulders when he walked to the kitchen in his boxers. And then that chest when he walked back to join her on the lounge. A trill of pleasure fluted through her stomach, hurting.
    Still smiling as she bit into her ‘sandwich’, she walked into her bedroom and pulled on shorts and a T-shirt. She then took her lunch out to the balcony.
    Jill wondered whether there’d ever been a more beautiful day. Across the street, across the park, across the snowy sand and a smattering of sea-smoothed rocks, glowed the ocean. With every shade of blue and most of green, today the sea’s opalescence was lit from beneath. The motes of sunlight skipping across its facets seemed as though they’d exploded from the waves. Billions of pinpricks of energy, bursting free to dance in the sun.
    Shielding her eyes, Jill watched the gulls in the park. Every morning, a local baker dropped off the previous day’s leftovers. When jogging this morning, she’d seen a riot of birds feasting on broken meat pies, donuts and custard slices. The Maroubra seagulls and pigeons had to have higher cholesterol counts than the regulars who waited each morning for the pub doors to open down the street.
    Suddenly, a piece of blackness broke away from the birds on the grass and soared into the sky. The massive black crow caught an air current in line with her balcony, and she watched it, transfixed, as it hovered and surfed right in front of her, like a hole rent in the daylight, allowing a bird-shaped slice of midnight into midday Maroubra.
    Jill’s mobile rang and she picked it up. ‘Jackson,’ she said.
    A throat cleared. Male.
    ‘Hello,’ she said.
    ‘Ah, yes. Ah, Jill. This is Bert.’
    Bert? Captain Andreessen? ‘Bert?’ she said.
    ‘Yeah, Andreessen,’ he said. ‘I, ah–’
    The phone became the world – there was suddenly nothing else. Jill’s former boss never called her. He’d never used his first name in her presence. And now he was talking to her like a civilian. No – like a civilian about to be told something fucked.
    ‘There’s been an incident,’ he said.
    No no no no no no no. ‘What?’ she said.
    Cassie, Mum, Dad, oh God, Lilly, Avery–
    ‘What?’ she said.
    ‘It’s, ah, Scotty.’
    Andreessen always calls him Hutchinson, she thought. Jill pulled her knees up onto the chair and into her chest, freezing now.
    ‘Where is he?’ she said.
    ‘We’re at RPA, Jill.’
    ‘I’ll be there in twenty.’
    ‘You want me to send someone to pick you up?’
    ‘No.’ Why? ‘It’s faster if I come now.’
    ‘Just drive safely, Jill.’
    He calls me Jackson, she thought. She dropped the phone and the shivering began.
    Jill kept the bullshit up all the way to the hospital. He’s going to be all right; he’ll be all right. Whenever she stopped the mantra, the other thought rolled in, like a huge breaker, smashing her down: Andreessen used his informing-the-family voice.
    When she reached the front of the hospital, she ripped up the handbrake in a police bay and wrenched the car door open. Almost screaming in frustration, she tried to get past a man pushing a woman in a wheelchair up to the hospital.
    She saw them before they saw her. Waiting out the front. Andreessen, Emma Gibson. Jill understood everything from the way they stood there, scanning the heads for her. They wanted to tell her before she got in there.
    Scotty’s dead.
    Andreessen found her eyes. He nodded.
    She dropped.

14
    Saturday, 27 November, 12.30pm
    Troy put the phone down. His boss, Caesar O’Brien, was taking things pretty well, considering. When Caesar