Chapter 3 Kyle Roberts
Jimmy
Kyle Roberts parks his BMW across 2 bays, the way he always does, and comes in through the front at 8:15 with his sunnies on his head and a coffee he didn’t buy me.
“Jimbo.”
Nobody calls me Jimbo. He knows that. It’s why he does it.
Kyle’s been Director of Operations at Knowles Security for 18 months. Dad hired him off a big Brisbane firm with a LinkedIn full of words like scalable and synergy, and since then the quotes have gone up, the guards’ hours have gone down, and there’s a laminated sign in the lunchroom about logging every kilometre in the company utes. He’s 41, gym-built, with teeth a dentist in Robina retired on. He’s not stupid. That’s the problem with him.
He sits on the corner of my desk without asking. His eyes slide past me to the door of the back room.
“Got a sec?”
“I’ve got a site walk at Southport at 9.”
“This’ll take less.” He sips his coffee. “Fuel card audit came back. Your Hilux did 600 k’s last week. Logbook says 2 jobs. Both in Nerang.”
“Ricky’s ute’s in the shop. We used mine.”
“For what?”
“For driving.”
He smiles like I’ve told a joke at a barbecue. “See, this is why I like you. Ex-army. Short answers. Very clean.” He taps his cup on my desk, 3 times. “Thing is, I’ve been doing the rosters. You, Vasselo and the big fella. Hank. You 3 take a lot of nights off, for blokes on a security contract.”
“We work nights. That’s the job.”
“You work the nights you tell me you work.” The smile stays. The eyes don’t do anything. “And the back room’s always locked. Your dad says it’s your stuff from the army. Medals and that. Fine. But it’s on our lease, and I’m responsible for what’s on our lease.”
Through the wall the coffee machine gurgles. Out the front window Ricky’s Hilux pulls in, not in the shop at all, with a ladder on the roof and Ricky’s elbow out the window. Kyle sees it. He doesn’t say anything. He lets me watch him see it.
“What do you want, Kyle?”
“Nothing.” He puts both palms up. “Honestly. I’m a numbers guy. Numbers don’t add up, I ask. Somebody tells me you blokes have got a little side thing going, I don’t care, I really don’t. Everyone’s got a side thing. I’ve got a mate does wedding DJing.” He slides off the desk. “I’d just want to know about it. In case there’s an opportunity. For the company.”
“There’s no opportunity.”
“So there is a thing.”
I don’t answer. 4 years of this company, 6 in uniform before it, and I’ve never once said a word I didn’t mean to say. I’m not starting with Kyle Roberts.
His eyes go back to the back-room door. The deadlock. The second deadlock, the one I put in myself.
“Your dad’s not going to be here forever, Jimbo,” he says. “When he goes, somebody runs this place. Be good if we were friends by then.” He picks up his coffee. “Enjoy Southport.”
At the front door he stops, takes his phone out and photographs the back-room door. The deadlock. The second deadlock. He doesn’t hide it. He wants me to watch him do it.
He goes. The BMW backs out over the gutter.
Ricky comes in 30 seconds later with 3 flat whites in a cardboard tray. He checks my face, then the window, at the gap where the BMW was.
“Was that Kyle?”
“Fuel card.”
“Shit.” He puts the tray down. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.” He sits on the chair backwards. “What did he say?”
“He thinks we’ve got a side thing.”
“We have got a side thing.”
“I know, Ricky.”
He laughs, short. Then he doesn’t. Ricky’s a sparky, a good one, and the way he tests a circuit is the way he tests everything: touch it, see what comes back. “He doesn’t know what it is, though.”
“He doesn’t know what it is.”
“So we’re fine.”
I unlock the back room. Desk. Cabinet. Year planner. The whiteboard turned to face the wall. Nothing in here Kyle could photograph and understand. No names on the planner, just dots. No forms in a drawer; they come in on a site I built and they go out through a shredder. No money in a tin, because there’s no money. The bond covers the kit and whatever a hire house costs us, and it goes back afterwards. Nobody’s paid for their time. We turn down nearly every form that comes in, and we’d turn down the last one too if it wasn’t right. That’s what Kyle won’t get. He’ll look for the cash and there isn’t any. He’ll think that means we’re hiding it better.
Ricky leans in the doorway. “Jim. What does a bloke like that do when he can’t find the money?”
“Keeps looking.”
“And when he finds out there isn’t any?”
I think about Kyle’s eyes on the deadlock. A man who’s never done one thing for free in his life, trying to work out what else 3 blokes could be getting out of a locked room.
“Decides there’s an opportunity,” I say.
Hank comes in at 8:40 with sand on his boots from wherever he walks before work. He doesn’t ask what happened. His eyes go to the second deadlock, then to me.
“Kyle,” he says. It isn’t a question.
“Kyle.”
Hank nods, once. Then he goes and gets a screwdriver from the drawer, kneels at the cabinet and takes the lock barrel out, and puts a new one in from his pocket, a brand I’ve never seen. It takes him 4 minutes. He hands me the only key.
“Had it in the truck,” he says. “For a while.”
That’s the thing about Hank. He’s always 3 weeks ahead of the rest of us, and he never says so.
The year planner’s empty through to Christmas except a few single dots. No 4-day windows.
I put the new key on my ring, next to the Hilux, and go to Southport.
