Stockman’s Showdown (The Stockmen #4)

Forty-five

‘Coffee? Tea? Wine? Beer? Bourbon,’ offered Leo as he led them inside the simple demountable normally found on mine sites. For Bree, it reminded her of the ringers’ rooms on Elsie Creek Station.

With the windows closed and the air conditioner on full blast, it was like walking into Antarctica, except it reeked of greasy sausages.

‘How many times have I told you lot to not cook inside?’ Leo ripped out the electric cord and passed the greasy frying pan to Wrench, who dumped it outside.

‘May I?’ Charlie pointed to the old dining chair, at the table that seated four. Other than that, they had a desk and a kitchenette in this sparsely furnished room. Behind her was the bedroom with bunk beds, and further along a small bathroom.

‘Go ahead, Pop.’ Bree pulled out the chair while glaring at Leo.

‘Sorry, I forgot my manners.’

‘You could show a shred of decency and let us walk home.’

‘Charlie won’t make it.’

‘I’m a lot fitter than you know,’ Charlie mumbled, pushing back the brim of his hat. ‘What’s this all about, Leo? You said you wanted to show us something. So show us and let us be on our way.’

Leo poured himself a bourbon, even pouring one for Charlie and Bree. ‘It’s a nightcap then, or a peace-offering.’

Bree grabbed her glass and sipped on the hard liquor that was surprisingly smooth. No wonder Ryder liked it.

Right now, she had to think like Ryder. How would he size up this situation as a soldier?

Her eyes darted around the room as she leaned her back against the wall with Charlie in front of her. Gator and Bones lounged around on her left side. Opposite was Leo. To her right, bookending the door to freedom was Hammer, with his brother, Wrench. They were a ragtag lot.

While the AC was threatening to give her pneumonia, Leo’s men were sweating, clearly not used to this outback weather. Hammer and Wrench were sunburnt, obviously showing their southern skin.

‘Okay, Leo, now that you’ve brought us to your little house-warming party, can we get on with the show-and-tell? I already told you that this Cinderella’s pumpkin has lost its puff hours ago.’ She even feigned a yawn, mixed with weariness and boredom.

It didn’t fool Leo, who only smiled with amusement. ‘Charlie, I’d like you to tell me about your brother, Harry.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tonight, at the rodeo, they had that one minute of silence for him. I was under the impression that Harry was wanted for murdering Elsie Creek Station’s head stockman, who’d then run off with the man’s wife?’

‘But Harry didn’t, you see.’ Charlie fiddled with his glass where it rested on the table.

Leo, seated opposite Charlie, crossed one leg over a knee like a gentleman, cradling his glass of bourbon as if in some country club. ‘Go on.’

‘Harry was going to run off with Penelope.’

‘The married woman.’

‘Not legally. Jack Price wasn’t his real name.’

‘What was his name, then?’

‘Jack Price was Jake Blackwell. An army deserter who’d pinched a load of shotties from them and done a runner to the scrub.’

‘What else?’

‘Well, I only knew the man as Jack Price. As my boss, he was a good head stockman, and before you ask,’ said Charlie, raising his open palm, ‘I had no clue what was going on with my brother and Jack’s wife, coz I was out musterin’. By the time I’d come back, Price was dead, my brother was accused of murdering him, and run away with Jack’s wife, Penelope.’

‘So when did that story change?’

‘The other week. We were out musterin’ and there was a stampede. Bree cut ‘em off. You should have seen it, riding her horse with the reins in her teeth, pumping the shotgun in one hand, while cracking her whip to stop them.’

‘Pop, they don’t need to hear that.’ She internally cringed with embarrassment. But Charlie always loved an audience, even if it was at gunpoint.

‘Leo wanted to hear this, and I don’t mind tellin’ a tale now and again.’ Charlie then swivelled around to face Leo, but he also included the other men in the room speaking to them just like he did to the crowd at the rodeo earlier. ‘Anyhoodle, with the ground shaking from over a thousand head of cattle, it started a landslide.’

‘Hey, we felt that,’ said Hammer, with Wrench nodding beside him. ‘We thought it was an earthquake.’

‘I’m not surprised. It happened just on the other side of Cattleman’s Keep there.’

‘Any damage to the property, or the cattle?’

‘The cattle bolted back the way they came, along with Bree and Ryder. But once the dust had settled, it revealed this old mining cave.’ Charlie scooped up the glass, his hand shaky as he swallowed a mouthful of liquor. ‘And… Well…’ He glanced back at Bree to finish for him.

‘That’s where I found Great-Uncle Harry’s skeleton, holding his lover, Penelope. They’d died in each other’s arms.’

‘No way.’ Wrench pulled out a chair and flipped it around to sit on it like a horse’s saddle. Even Bones sat on the edge of the kitchen bench, with Hammer sitting on the desk. It was Gator, as the watchdog, who hadn’t relaxed his stance. ‘From the cave-in?’

‘Lack of oxygen.’ Charlie nodded. ‘We didn’t even know the cave existed. But there it was. And according to them geo-whatnot mining specialists, they’d been trapped alive by dynamite blasts.’

‘Did they know who did it?’

Again, Charlie nodded. ‘Jack Price did it. Murdered his own wife, he did.’

‘How?’ Leo’s look shifted from one of amusement to something else entirely.

‘Jack Price used the dynamite to get back at his wife for leaving him for another man. The police reckon some bad people were after him for skedaddling with his stolen shotguns, that he’d been trying to sell as fast as he could. But when he went to grab his cash and passport so he could leave, it was all gone.’

‘Where was it?’ This time Bones, on the other side, asked the question.

‘His wife, Penelope, had his ID and all that dosh. The thing was, Price didn’t know it, only realising after he’d buried her behind tons of rock and rubble.’

‘Jeez…’ The brothers Wrench and Hammer looked at each other, both raking fingers through their hair. It had Bree wondering if they were twins.

‘Now them coppers reckon, based on the evidence Ryder and Bree found—’

‘What was that?’ Leo asked her.

She shrugged. ‘The murder weapon and some dynamite.’

‘How did the police—’

‘Oi.’ Charlie raised his hands at the men who were holding them hostage, as if trying to control the conversation in the pub.

Bree grinned, shaking her head. ‘Sorry, Pop, the floor is yours.’

‘Right, where were we?’ Charlie pushed back his hat, the light catching on its unique hatband made from the crocodile that had dared to bite him. ‘Oh, yeah…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Now, according to them copper’s findings, they reckoned Jack Price was so devastated that he had nothing left, and with them bad guys after him, he set up his suicide to look like a murder and pin it on Harry. Which is what everyone had thought these past sixty years.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘But according to the forensic whatnot and the DNA thingy they scraped from the gun, the dynamite, the clothing, and stuff they dragged out of archives, they matched the DNA to Jack Price. He not only murdered my brother and his own wife, but he also hid Harry’s car in the Stoneys, letting everyone—including me—think that he’d absconded with a married woman. But I never believed my brother murdered anyone. He just didn’t have it in him.’ Charlie sighed, picked up his glass and raised it in the air. ‘Either way, it’s a sad tale… May they all rest in peace.’

Everyone raised their glass in a toast before taking a sip, even Leo.

Charlie rested his forearms on the table opposite Leo. ‘So why do you want to know that story, eh?’

It then clicked, and Bree’s eyes flared. ‘Are you related to Price?’

Leo nodded. ‘Jake Blackwell was my uncle.’

‘Blackwell Mining Company!’ It was the name of Leo’s mining company. Why hadn’t she seen this sooner?

‘My mother picked out the company name. She was Jake’s sister, who believed your family killed my family, making her suffer. And where I come from, we believe in payback. An eye for an eye.’

‘But we had nothing to do with Price’s death. He killed himself,’ said Bree.

‘So, I’ve just found out. Honestly, I’d only recently learned about my uncle.’

Bree leaned closer to Leo over the table. ‘This is about those stolen guns, isn’t it?’

Leo didn’t nod, but his cold eyes grew darker. ‘My uncle was supposed to settle his gambling debt with the organisation by giving them those stolen guns. But he never showed, leaving my mother behind.’

‘They didn’t hurt her, did they?’ Charlie’s concern was genuine. Even Bree stopped looking at Leo like a villain for just a moment.

‘My mother was forced to marry a lower-ranking member of the family as a way to repay that debt.’

‘Did you know?’ Bree asked.

‘I always knew my mother was part of an arranged marriage, just not the reason why. And my father always treated her well.’ He stared long and hard at Bree.

‘Go on,’ urged Bree

‘I never knew I had an uncle, or what he’d done, and how it affected my mother, until my mother spotted an article about his death in some obscure newspaper and demanded justice.’

‘Those news articles were written over sixty years ago. Why only now?’ Bree had seen the articles that Charlie had kept in a scrapbook, piled on their table with the rest of her grandfather’s notes in his search for Harry.

‘My mother is part of this charity that helps save the archives in libraries and stumbled upon an article written about the head stockman. It had a picture of Jack Price, and she knew who it was straight away. She then hired a private detective to find out where her brother was buried, where the station was, and how he’d been murdered. That’s when my mother learned that Elsie Creek Station was up for sale. Only then did she explain the entire story to me, demanding some sort of family justice.’

It sounded lame to Bree. But then again, if anyone dared harmed a hair on her family, she’d cut loose. ‘Is that why you wanted the station?’

‘I never wanted to buy it. Not when I got this property so easily. And I knew the caretaker’s caveat was watertight, so there was no way Charlie was going to sell to us.’

‘What about your lithium mine? Was that ever going to happen?’

‘Nope. It was something to keep the Riggs brothers busy chasing their tails.’ Leo’s smirk irritated Bree.

‘Hey,’ she said with a sneer, ‘you burned down our crops, making me play drover to feed our cattle for months. You destroyed Starvation Dam, poisoned our dogs, and made us sick from lead poisoning, Charlie had to go to hospital for a few days. Not to mention that idiot I shot in the arse…’ She gripped her glass as a random thought popped into her head. ‘Did you have anything to do with Darcie’s death?’

‘No. But I have been wearing down the defences of a certain old man,’ he said with a cold smile, nodding at Charlie. ‘Call it settling the score for what your family did to mine.’

‘You prick.’ She threw the glass at Leo. His arm deflected it to smash against the far wall, as she dragged her grandfather out of his chair and used her body to shield him. ‘You leave my grandfather alone. Charlie had nothing to do with any of this.’

‘So I found out only tonight.’ Leo motioned his hand to his men who’d pulled out their guns. ‘Calm down, all of you. Sit down, men. I mean that. Bree is only doing what I’d do for my family.’

But Bree wasn’t giving Leo the satisfaction of agreeing with him for being protective over what little family she had left.

Leo angled his head towards her, the light deepening the sharp shadows of his cheekbones, and the sinister shine to his darkening eyes. ‘You know, Bree, I wish it could have been different. I honestly believed it would have worked out with us.’

‘In your nightmares, demon seed. I don’t know why you’d even want me, I’m just the caretaker’s granddaughter, a simple bushie’s blacksmith.’

‘Oh, you’re far more than that, Bree. You have that rare outlaw quality, and bucketloads of mobster wife attitude that is rare for women in my world. With your level of cunningness, matched with my financial backing, we would have become very rich together without the need for getting our hands dirty.’ Leo glanced around the hovel with a level of disdain.

That was never going to happen, not least because this man had hurt her family and was holding her against her will. ‘What do you want? You know we had nothing to do with your uncle’s death, so let us go.’

‘Well…’ Leo licked his lips as his eyes crawled over her.

She answered it with a sneer.

It only made him chuckle. ‘I want to show you something.’ Leo swiped up a remote control, turning the monitor around on his desk and hit play. ‘Our cameras caught you finding our hidden pipeline.’

She remained expressionless, while watching herself on the screen at Starvation Dam, where she tracked that hidden irrigation pipe, with her black stallion dutifully following her to the border.

‘You were about to jump the fence,’ said Leo, fast forwarding the video, ‘but something spooked you and then once you mounted your horse, something spooked it too.’

She watched as Black Hand reared up as she tried to control him, before turning to gallop away and fast.

‘When was this, kid?’ Charlie asked.

‘A while ago.’

‘Must have been something bad to spook your horse, when Black Hand never once flinched when you cracked that whip as he raced ahead of that stampede.’

‘I agree,’ said Leo, pointing the remote at Bree. ‘You are fearless. It’s one of many qualities I admire about you. So when you found that water pipe, I was expecting you to jump that fence. But you never came back. And you never cut the water line. What was it that spooked someone like you?’

‘Ever hear of the Travellers?’ she asked, completely deadpan.

‘Noooo.’ Charlie dragged off his hat, shaking his head, with his voice full of doom and gloom. ‘That’s bad news of the worst kind if you’ve got Travellers, boys.’

‘What’s a Traveller?’ Hammer leaned closer from his seat.

‘Ancient spirits that guard the outback. They’re bad omens for some. You don’t muck around with the Travellers, even the animals know to steer clear of ‘em.’

‘Yeah, right,’ scoffed Gator. ‘Next you’ll be telling us it’s drop bears and bunyips.’

Bones shook his head with a low chuckle. But Charlie had Wrench and Hammer listening for more.

‘Well, we don’t just have the Travellers in this region, we’ve also got the Billabong Bunyip to deal with, too. He’s a legend in this area.’

Bree shuddered. ‘It’s the story every local bush kid gets told from the time they can walk.’

Leo narrowed his eyes at Bree while scratching his cheek, unconvinced. ‘Bree, how about you tell me the truth? What was it that scared you off enough to not come back?’

She peered at his men spread around the room. ‘You didn’t tell him?’

‘Tell me what?’ Leo shrugged.

She feigned a gasp. ‘Your men are keeping secrets from you.’

‘What secret?’ Leo leaned closer to her, with only the table between them. ‘What did they do?’

‘They shot at a plane.’

Leo spun around to face his men. ‘What plane?’

‘It was a red one, boss. It was getting too close. We had to do something,’ said Hammer with his hands out as if to calm down a lion. ‘We didn’t hit it, did we, Bones?’

‘No, boss.’

‘Oh, yes, you did.’ Bree was having fun stirring the pot. ‘They clipped that plane’s wing, the pilot had to land next door. And guess what?’

They all looked at her, the air crackling as she paused for dramatic effect, just like her grandfather did in his storytelling. But this pause was ticking off Leo more.

‘Bree…’ he warned her.

‘That pilot, of the plane your boys shot at? She’s a cousin to the Riggs brothers.’

Leo’s face said it all as he stared at her for the longest time, as if the air had been sucked into a vacuum. Due to the actions of his men—shooting at that plane—they had drawn the worst kind of attention, and Leo knew it. ‘ You idiots!’

‘Boss?’ All his men stood.

Leo paced the floor, the anger darkening his features. ‘Wrench, Hammer, burn the crop, now. Bones pack up our gear and get ready to torch the rest of this place. We leave no evidence behind.’ He picked up the laptop and ripped out its cord. ‘Gator, tie those two up. They’ll be coming with us.’

‘Just let us go.’ Bree scowled at Leo.

‘You’re a smart girl, you know I can’t do that, not until we’re safely out of the Territory. But if you behave, maybe I’ll let you go. Or I’ll use that time to convince you to be with me. But I’ll let my mother decide Charlie’s fate.’

‘ Not gonna happen! ’ Shielding her grandfather, she grabbed a chair, ready to use it as a weapon. She may not have been able to protect her mother all those years ago, but she was a grown woman now and she’d do anything to protect her grandfather, no matter the cost.

That’s when something exploded on the other side of the door, forcing them all to duck for cover. The noise was deafening and so was the flash of light.

Bree pushed the table over and dragged Charlie behind it, as the windows smashed, sending shards of glass across the room, as the upper walls of the demountable were peppered with bullets turning it into Swiss cheese.

‘Bree!’

It was Ryder.