Chapter 45
RUSSELL
I didn’t call Bridie. Didn’t text her back.
Because there were a dozen or more scenarios running through my mind, each one of them more horrifying than the last, and none of them were resolved or improved by there being some indication on Bridie’s phone that her SOS message had successfully reached me and that I was on my way.
I shoved my gun into my waistband and my phone into my pocket, ran out the door of the houseboat and remembered that my daughter had my car.
Sprinting across the field, through the gate and along the road into town, my whole body aflame from last night’s injuries reawakened, I skidded hard and almost fell in the gravel as I spotted Rob Winter, the publican, driving slowly towards me in a dusty blue Land Cruiser.
With bewilderment he pulled over sharply as I waved him down, and actually reeled back in the driver’s seat as I yanked open the door.
‘Get-out-get-out-get-out!’
He got out. I swung into the driver’s seat like a man pulling himself up on a horse and slammed the door closed as I drove away. Rob Winter stood in my dust cloud in the middle of the road, hands by his sides, watching me.
The first clue that Bridie had stumbled onto a drug lab came when I spotted the gate.
It was entangled in a passionfruit vine, rusted and barely hanging on to the rotted wooden post it was attached to.
It had all the appearances of a gate that was never opened, but the groove that the corner of the swinging arm had cut in the mud was nice and deep and spoke of regular use.
I passed the gate, parked Rob’s car and walked back, ducked under a wire wrapped in the same camouflaging vine.
I stepped into the moist, rainforest-like undergrowth.
The road became barely visible only a few feet back from the gravel edge, the property’s interior disguised, as Stephen Branch’s had been, by an entanglement of weeds, vines and scrubby trees.
I made my way towards the road leading off the gate, and walked by its side but not on it.
It wasn’t long before I spotted a pipe running across the road, lazily cut into the dirt and painted a similar sandy colour.
Intruders, cops, or lost teenagers here to rescue a wallaby would run over the pipe with their vehicles and set off a silent alarm somewhere up at the lab itself.
I drew my gun and walked quickly and quietly, keeping the road in sight but sticking to the thickness of the bush.
The sentry knew something was up. Whether it was because I’d walked under a camera or set off some other hidden alarm, I didn’t know.
But he was dumb enough to take action not by hiding and waiting for me to arrive, but by going out and standing in the middle of the road, a big unwieldly revolver of some type hanging in his fist. I skirted him by as much as I dared, cut in and came back up the road behind him, walking in the dampness of the sandy clay so my boots wouldn’t crunch on the gravel.
Despite my efforts, a stone popped under my boot maybe six feet out.
The sentry turned, and I raised my gun two-handed, cop-style, looking right down the barrel at him, so he’d know exactly who he was dealing with.
Like me, he was pushing fifty and broad.
He had salt-and-pepper hair and a badly flattened nose that was covered in deep, dirty pores.
‘Well.’ He blew out air in a disappointed huff. ‘Shit.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I tipped the gun a little, and he dropped his weapon in the sand like a good boy.
He stepped to the side and put his hands out, and I went over and felt his pockets and waistband.
He even tugged up the thighs of his jeans to show me his boots: someone who had clearly been searched thousands upon thousands of times in their criminal career and knew the routine.
‘Where is she?’
‘At the house.’
‘Get going,’ I said. ‘Stay ahead of me. You stop to scratch your arse and I’ll put another hole in it for you.’
The big guy made an aggrieved sound and started walking.
Sweat was making my T-shirt cling to my chest, and my jeans and boots were wet to the thighs from the forest. Intrusive, unhelpful thoughts kept zapping through my brain, carrying horrible visions that I had to fight the urge to succumb to.
Bridie tied to a chair. Bridie on a bed.
Bridie on the floor. Bridie in a grave. My career had presented me with plenty of dead and tortured and mangled women to draw inspiration from.
Staying present, and keeping my breathing steady, was exhausting me.
We came upon a damp, mouldy single-storey house set into the rainforest, an asbestos-clad thing that was peeling and dropping paint and sheets of fibro like a half-dead insect shedding its exoskeleton.
My Mustang was parked at the side. Another big, meat-faced guy stood at the bottom of the steps and watched me come up, escorting my hostage.
He didn’t look surprised, or worried. Bridie came out of a screen door onto the verandah and a shorter guy emerged behind her, and though he was holding another stupidly big silver revolver I was pleased that he wasn’t pointing it at my child, otherwise I would have had to kill everyone right then and there, and I was still hoping for a nonviolent solution to all this.
The curtain in the front window fluttered, and I knew I had a fourth man watching me, probably pointing a rifle at my head.
Bridie looked bloodless and big-eyed, but she wasn’t crying.
‘I’m Rick,’ the shorter guy said, raising a hand at me in a tired and annoyed and embarrassed kind of way. The wave guys give each other when they step out of their vehicles after a rear-ender that was kind of both their fault. ‘This is your kid, is it?’
‘Yep,’ I said.
‘We didn’t call her here,’ Rick said. He had the hollow cheeks and pink eyes of almost all the junkies I’d ever dealt with, but for some reason I got the sense that the thinness and raggedness of him was due to hard work and self-neglect rather than getting into his own product.
He was too calm. ‘She’s explained it to us all.
The property that called her about the wallaby is actually our neighbours next door.
Your daughter has mixed up the directions and come onto our land by mistake. ’
Rick cast an arm out westwards. I didn’t follow the gesture, aware that I might have a fifth guy creeping up on me from behind. I kept my ears pricked for footsteps on gravel and said, ‘We can get out of your way and forget this ever happened, right now.’
‘That would be so nice,’ Rick said. ‘But the problem is, she’s seen the inside of the house.
’ Again, he gave an almost apologetic sigh.
He indicated to my hostage. ‘That idiot took a piss break and let her get all the way up the driveway. And that idiot’—he gestured to the man at the bottom of the stairs—‘found her at the house and brought her in. She’s seen all the product, all the gear, everything. I can’t just let you walk away.’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘Mate, there are people to answer to, okay? People above me. If it comes to your two arses, or mine, I know who I’m going to choose.’
‘You’re not going to kill her,’ I said. ‘Or me.’
‘I’m not?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Because, while there’s been a whole lot of idiocy around here today, you’re not going to let it continue.’
Rick gave a rueful nod, like we were on the same team. Two guys surrounded by morons.
‘Right now,’ I said, ‘your worst-case scenario is having to bail out on your set-up. And that’ll be annoying.
Because you have found a nice little spot, and it looks like you’ve been here a while.
But if you kill us, you’ll have every cop in the state on your tail in five minutes time, and they will chase you to the ends of the earth, I promise you.
Try explaining that to your higher-ups.’
‘You’re a jacko yourself, aren’t you?’
‘Sure am.’
Rick filled his cheeks with air, let them slowly deflate, as though something like this was just typical of his kind of luck.
‘Your bosses will forgive you for bailing on your set-up. They won’t forgive you for killing a cop and a teenager and making the national news.’
‘This is not what I needed today.’ Rick adjusted the grip on his gun.
‘Sit us both on the ground,’ I said. ‘Have your smartest lug-head watch over us. You can have the lab packed up and be on the road in an hour. You have your lone lug-head watch us for another hour while you all burn rubber. You can be in Sydney by then. They’ll never find you.’
Rick thought about it. ‘It won’t take a genius to figure out where she’s gone,’ he sighed. ‘If we do kill her, I mean. She showed us the app with the bloody animal rescue job on it.’
‘Right.’
Rick looked at Bridie, fingered the trigger, thinking. I counted my breaths. In, out, in, out. The little drug lord turned to me, let his eyes wander from my gun to my hostage, back to my face. ‘You’re in town for the murder, are you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Girl at the pub.’
I nodded.
‘We had nothing to do with that, you know,’ Rick said. He looked at Bridie, gestured in her direction with the gun in a way that made my shoulders tighten. Didn’t go so far as to raise it to her completely. ‘We’re not here to hurt people. Especially girls.’
‘I believe you,’ I said, though I’d been listening to him weighing up whether to kill both my daughter and me for the past five minutes. Drug people have a strange relationship with the truth. ‘Listen, this is just a mobile cook-out, yeah?’
‘Right.’