Chapter 10 #2
I’d never told him that. He needed to figure that shit out on his own.
Three men. I’d raised them the way my old man had raised me, the way his old man raised him. No softness. No sympathy. The day I dropped dead, none of them would shed a tear, and that was exactly what I expected.
Tears never brought back the dead. Ask Donny.
That was the Branson way.
But those boys were mine, and it was their turn to keep Koolaroo going after I was gone.
And Bob Ackerman wasn’t going to lay a finger on any of them while I was still drawing breath.
A thought hit me as I tipped a careful ration of rum into the bottle cap.
I was about to die for my boys.
Maybe that’s what made me a father after all.
That word had never fit me. Never sat right. I’d had three wives, and the two who’d actually stuck around long enough to raise my kids had rattled off the same complaint, nearly word for word, like they’d compared notes or something.
Frank, you’re a rotten husband, and you sure as shit ain’t a father.
Edith and Ingrid. Different women. Same verdict.
But sitting in this cave with a stitched-up hand and a few old graves in the dirt around me, I couldn’t think of a better word for what I was about to do.
Father.
The word sat weird in my head. I drank the bottle cap of rum.
The word didn’t fit any better after a second slug neither.
I stood, went to the back wall of the cave, and counted three rocks down from the bat roost. It was the same count I’d done in 1999, when every idiot in the country had been convinced the world was about to end at midnight.
It had seemed as good a time as any to bury something that Bob hadn’t wanted found.
The dirt was hard as iron where I’d packed it down all those years ago.
I dug with my one good hand and Willy’s knife. It took so bloody long I was seeing stars, and they weren’t the ones in the sky.
The tin lunch box came up the same as I’d left it. Rust on the corners, lid still tight. Inside, wrapped in a dishcloth, was the old service revolver Bob had told me to make disappear. I’d never asked who’d used it or who he’d used it on. I hadn’t wanted to know.
But why the hell did he want to keep it?
He could’ve buried it anywhere out here, and nobody would’ve found it in a hundred years. But he’d wanted it gone from his hands, not destroyed. There was a difference. It made me think he wanted to use it again one day.
Pity there were no bullets to go with it, or I would damn well use it. On him.
Under the gun was a small stack of photographs.
I took them out and sat back against the rock.
Some of them I didn’t even remember putting in there. Joy on a horse, young and beautiful, back when she’d still thought the sun shone out of my ass—before she’d caught me balls-deep in Edith and thrown every plate in the kitchen at my head. I still had the scar above my eyebrow to prove it.
The next photo was Razor as a colt, the two of us covered in red dust. I don’t remember who took that shot but was glad they did. It was probably the only photograph in existence that showed me smiling.
Edith was in the last photo.
She was sitting on the verandah with our three boys around her—Mitch on the ground near her feet, Declan on her lap, and Kayden in her belly. She’d been about six months pregnant in the photo, smiling, blonde hair pulled back, and wearing one of them yellow sundresses she liked.
I looked at the photo for longer than I meant to, and for some reason, my damn chest began to ache.
“Fucking hell.”
Putting the gun aside, I shoved the photos back into the tin and the tin back in the hole. I filled it and patted it flat. Then I picked up the revolver, tucked it into my waistband, and staggered back to the rum bottle.
The gun didn’t have bullets, but Bob didn’t know that.
I kept myself busy, doing shit, until I couldn’t stand the pain anymore.
I scouted around outside, working out where Bob would come from, where the shadows would fall once the sun dropped behind the rocks and the cave mouth went dark.
I dragged the duffel of cash up against the back wall and opened the zipper.
There was nothing like bundles of cash to draw Bob’s eye.
If he got past me, which he damn well wouldn’t, the money could be the distraction I needed.
I stretched lengths of fishing line between the trees outside and tied a couple of bottle tops on the ends. If anyone touched those lines, I’d hear the rattle in the cave before they came inside.
I set up a few traps, like I’d used to catch feral pigs.
Old tricks. Stockman tricks. Like the things my old man taught me when I was nine and we chased off a dingo pack from the calving paddock.
Some ideas I’d come up with myself over the years. Some I’d used on blokes Bob had asked me to sort out for him.
Now, I was going to use them to sort him out. I felt mighty fine about that.
With all that done, and my gut twisting as if it were playing with barbed wire, I moved to my fallback position deeper in the cave, just before the fissure that led to the back exit.
If Bob came at me from the front of the cave, I’d make damn sure I took him with me.
If everything went to plan, I’d fall back through the fissure, come out the back, circle round, and put a shotgun blast through his spine.
Either way, Bob was already sucking in his last breaths.
I sat down at the mouth of the cave with the shotgun across my knees and watched the sun drop behind the western ridge. The country went orange, then red, then that purple-orange the Outback got just before dark, then dark proper.
A bird I couldn’t see called once from the rocks above me.
A long way off, a dingo answered.
The land settled around me the way it always did at this hour, heat coming out of the rocks, cold creeping in behind it.
This place felt like the right place to die. I don’t know what I’d been thinking when I went to Willy’s place to end my days. That house was a shithole.
I’d been born on this land. I’ll die on it, same as every Branson before me, except for Willy, but he hadn’t counted.
I loved this place harder than I’d loved any woman. Harder than I’d loved any of my own sons, and no crooked cop was gonna take it from me.
I was halfway through the second-last bottle of Bundy when a thought hit me.
Hit me hard.
What if Bob walked in here and I missed, and he didn’t?
Bob would take the cash and leave me to rot right here.
Then, when the stink from those bodies at Willy’s house got the neighbors’ attention, Bob would be the cop who went to that scene first.
He’d find my notes in the Chivas box, and he’d burn the lot.
Nobody would know Bob was a lying, thieving, murdering bastard.
My sons would never know what I’d done to protect them. They’d just go on thinking Frank Branson had been a mean old bastard who’d gotten himself killed and good riddance.
Mitch would pour a beer.
Declan would go back to the books.
Kayden would saddle up Meteor and ride till he stopped all feeling.
And Bob would have it all—the coverups, the cash, the victory.
I sat there with the shotgun across my knees, the dark coming in fast and a cold that had nothing to do with the night settling deep into my bones.
I hadn’t thought about him killing me first.
What the fuck had I been thinking?