Page 82 of Last Shot

‘I tried real hard,’ he said, as though concerned they were reporting back to Marvin. ‘She was originally gonna go with a Thatcher red, but I convinced her to go for the sangue. Fuck. Oh, fuck, if I hadn’t ...’ His fingers dug into his temples.

‘If you hadn’t,’ Max said, ‘someone else would have bought it and the same thing would have happened. It wasn’t your fault ... ah, sorry, I didn’t catch your ...’

‘Ollie.’

‘Ollie, we believe the wine was tampered with before it was delivered to you. There’s no way you could have known.’

‘Have you got the recalled bottles out back?’ Grey flicked a yellow and red label on an empty shelf dedicated to Barbarani Sangue.

Ollie nodded miserably. ‘Marvin said the truck would come take ’em later today.’

‘I’ll need to look at them.’

Ollie led them through the smells of damp cardboard and old ice in the beer fridge to a large storeroom stacked with multi-coloured boxes. The recalled sangue was quarantined to the side, and someone, Marvin perhaps, had stuck an A4 piece of paper with a boot print on the top box and scribbledRECALLEDin permanent marker beneath a skull and crossbones.

‘He drew that before we found out she’d died,’ Ollie said as Max and Grey started to pull the bottles from the casings. ‘What you looking for?’ The young guy circled them like a puppy trying to sniff their butts in a park.

Grey ignored him but Max felt for the kid; she understood guilt like that. ‘We’re not exactly sure,’ she said gently.

‘Look at this,’ Grey said as the dull chime of the doorbell summoned Ollie back to the front of the store.

Max tried not to inhale too deeply as she looked over the crook of Grey’s elbow to his phone. ‘What’s that?’ she squinted at the red circle on the screen.

‘The lid of the bottle Poppy Raven bought.’

‘Okay.’ Max didn’t want to know what he’d had to do to get access to that evidence photograph.

‘What do you notice?’

‘It’s red – oh. Shit.’ The centre of the lid had a black dot, kind of like a little eye. The bottles on the floor in front of her didn’t. ‘How zoomed in is this picture?’

‘At normal scale, the hole wouldn’t be noticeable. It’s about the circumference of a small syringe.’ Grey clicked the screen shut.

Max stepped away so she could breathe properly; she didn’t need to be corralled out of the store room. She practically scampered back into the storefront, heart in her throat.

‘Everything okay?’ Ollie asked.

Max felt electricity course through her as Grey’s brown eyes pierced the space between them. But she was getting better at displacing her thoughts about him now that they were getting somewhere with the investigation.

‘I was wrong,’ Grey said. ‘We’ll need the CCTV footage going back to when this batch was delivered.’ He pointed at the pile of sangue. ‘Someone injected rat bait into the bottle Poppy bought.’

28

Max

Max still felt cold from the beer fridge even though she’d been sitting in the driver’s seat of Bessy’s climate-controlled belly for the past hour. She figured it was probably also her icy insides due to the man beside her, who was watching a week’s worth of CCTV from Liquor Paradise with blue headphones.

It was the mostnormalthing she’d ever seen him do. Not the watching CCTV footage part, but if you didn’t look at the screen, it looked almost like Greyson Hawke, in his jeans and casual T-shirt, was on a road trip, watching a YouTube video on how to deep-water fish or whatever. What would he be like in an actual casual situation like that? Would he loosen up? Tell a joke? Take off his shirt while he flipped sausages on a barbecue? Did he even have a Netflix subscription? The image of a shirtless Greyson in floral swim shorts on an inflatable flamingo in one of Bindi Bindi’s lagoons, flipping through a paperback book, did not compute in her mind.

Had Grey ever had a holiday? What did he do for his birthday? (Assuming he had one and wasn’t just rebooted once a year for his annual update.)

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

The question burned her face as she clenched the wheel tighter.Yep. Just fantasising about assaulting you on a beach.‘Fine.’ Eyes straight ahead. Oddly, apart from the humiliation that came in waves and the squirming nausea that had lived in her since she’d arrived at the bachelor auction,drivinga car actually didn’t make her freak out as much as being in the passenger seat.

He tapped his phone, pausing the video. ‘I’ll take over whenever you want. I don’t have to watch these now. We can stop if you need air.’

Her throat stung. How was he able to be like this? Disproportionately nice to compensate for what he’d said? She wished he’d ignore her, or gag in disgust at her profile. She didn’t want his pity.

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