How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling by Martin Chambers Read Free Book Online Page B

certain number if you are going to create a viable community and although eleven wasn’t quite enough it was better than before. Without making up jobs I couldn’t really justify having any more on the station.
    Anyway, we flew into the creek. Spanner drove Bitsy down there. He doesn’t like flying, says he doesn’t trust machines but we think it was that he didn’t trust machines he hadn’t taken apart and reassembled himself. Rob parked the chopper in the creek, actually in the creek in ankle-deep water and we got out the sponges and soap, gave her a good wash. It was a good day. So hot. Even splashing around in the creek you couldn’t get cool but at least we got to see the station from the air. Everyone enjoyed it. You’ve got to look after your staff like that. Give them things to do, fun things. Things together.
    The picture swung open and behind was a large metal safe door.
    â€˜Need a key.’
    Neither of us wanted to say what we were thinking. We had buried the keys with Palmenter and there would never be any way of opening the safe.
    â€˜Might be a spare hidden someplace.’ Spanner looked around the room. Although it was neat, there was an impossible number ofplaces a key might be hidden and we didn’t even know if there was one. I was wondering if Spanner might have some powerful tool down in his shed – whatever it was he had used to cut the barbecue plate from a grader blade would cut through anything. But cutting open the safe would throw us into a whole new level: somehow shooting Palmenter was much less than shooting Palmenter and then cutting open the safe. I was sure that was how the authorities would see it.
    â€˜Is there anything in there we really need?’
    â€˜Guess not.’
    I was interested to read the real accounts and see what was in the safe but we were really just snooping around. We began picking out books from the shelves and looking at them, laughing that Palmenter might have such titles. Novels. I guess we didn’t know, but we didn’t think he was a reader. By now it was late, the house was quiet and everyone had long since gone to bed, and it would be best if we did too and left the office untouched, but as we were about to leave Spanner found a set of keys hidden behind a brass bookend. He opened the safe.
    On the top shelf was a bunch of documents in yellow envelopes. These turned out to be passports and personal documents, genuine drivers’ licences, birth certificates. I leafed through them. None of them meant much until I came to Arif’s. Arif. Palmenter must have taken and hidden Arif’s possessions. I wondered why he would have kept these documents hidden rather than bury them out in the pit with the clothes and whatever else Arif had. And these other passports, whose were they? Another envelope had some banknotes in it, several types of strange foreign ones neatly banded with their own type.
    The bottom half of the safe was a file cabinet on rollers that slid out to reveal a suitcase that Spanner lifted out onto the desk and opened. There were more banknotes. It was full of tightly bound American dollars, Australian dollars and Euros. Mostly it was just stacks of banknotes but there were also some folded manila envelopes with smaller denomination notes, a few thousand worth in each envelope. In the main bundles there must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars of each currency.
    Spanner whistled. ‘Jeez!’
    He picked up a bundle of fifties and leafed through them, counting.
    â€˜Couple of hundred or so. That’s, um...’
    â€˜Ten thousand. Ten in each stack, two rows of five, fuck! That’s half a million bucks. And there’s a bit more in American and Euros. Must be close to two million total.’
    â€˜What’s he have so much cash for?’
    â€˜Who cares? Cash business. Going in and coming out. He wasn’t doing it for the charity.’
    â€˜How much do you