The Stone Dog

by Robert Mitchell

  “Who’s your mate with the shotgun, Jude?” Rick asked, one hand holding the side of the dinghy, the other slowly sliding down the zipper on his wetsuit.

  “I already told you, Rick.”

  “Sebastian?”

  “Right, friend,” the big man answered.

  “Oh,” Rick muttered.

  “Is there anybody out on the trawler with Henry?” Sebastian asked.

  We both shook our heads.

  “Any guns?” he asked again.

  I caught the slightest of twitches in Rick’s left hand and then he answered: “No.”

  “What about the Lee-Enfield and the shotgun?”

  Sebastian knew more about us than just who we were.

  “Customs got both of them,” I replied.

  “You weren’t quick enough, eh? Spear guns?”

  “There’s three of them,” I said. “And you already know where they’re stored.”

  Sebastian looked across at Judy. She winked and turned to me. “So you found the chest then?”

  I nodded.

  “We thought you might have,” she added, the smile broadening. “What’s in it?”

  “We haven’t opened it,” Rick snarled. “It’s still down below.”

  “That’s obvious!” she snapped back at him, and then returned to me. “What’s it look like?”

  “About what we expected,” I said. “A black iron box, fairly solid, but old enough to be treated with care.”

  “Great,” she replied, crossing those well-tanned legs as though she had all the time in the world.

  There was a pause of maybe twenty seconds whilst the four of us stared at each other, each of us uncertain of what to do next. Nobody had expected this scenario, least of all Rick and I. The suspense got the better of me.

  “Look, Judy,” I snapped impatiently. “What the hell’s going on? What do you two want?”

  “We want a share of the treasure, Andy,” she replied sweetly. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

  I pointed to Sebastian. He hadn’t said a word since asking about the spear guns. “What’s he doing here instead of Rod?”

  She told us then, a strange conversation for a South Sea beach in the middle of a sunny morning; but then it was a strange foursome: a beautiful, grasping woman sitting relaxed on a large rock, smiling demurely; a bearded barrel of a man, scowling; and two tired divers standing in black wetsuits under the twin muzzles of a very lethal-looking shotgun.

  It appeared that at the time I had called Rod to ask if he wanted to come along, he had already been in deep financial trouble for over a month.

  “Why didn’t he tell us?” I asked. “Maybe we could have helped.”

  According to the way Judy told it, he was too proud to admit his mistake in selling his share in the trawler; but we both knew that his only mistake had been asking her to marry him.

  “God, he was a miser,” she continued bitterly. “All that money he got for his share in the Sally May, and he wouldn’t even spend part of it to get me a decent car.”

  “What did you want?” I asked.

  “A dark-red Mercedes sports. The business could have supported the lease payments.”

  It all came out then. They were supposed to be running a fashionable restaurant, weren’t they? Well, she should dress the part, shouldn’t she? She should have jewellery to match those latest fashions.

  “He always grumbled when I bought something new,” she spouted.

  His problem, she said, was that he didn’t know how to run a business, wouldn’t put on enough staff. From the way she talked about spending money, you would have thought Rod had sold a one-third interest in one of the big cargo vessels operating out of Cairns, and not just a lowly prawn trawler.

  “Did you help out?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Why should I?” she snapped. “I’m his wife. He’s supposed to look after me. I stopped working for him the day we got married.”

  I could visualize her flirting with the customers, playing the proud lady, ordering complimentary champagne for her favourites.

  “The bailiff came the morning after you called,” she went on. “He posted a notice on the front door and closed the business. That pathetic bastard of a husband of mine just sat down and cried; right there in the middle of the restaurant, in front of a half-dozen customers, two of them very good friends of mine.”

  “What happened after that?” I asked.

  “What do you think happened? I told the bastard what I thought of him, that’s what! Pathetic little man.”

  “What happened to your hair?” Rick asked.

  It had been puzzling me too, but I hadn’t been game to ask. The long blonde hair had been her crowning glory. She went red in the face.

  “Yes,” I said. “What happened to it?”

  “We had a fight over the jewellery. He’d taken my jewel-case. He didn’t get the good pieces I’d hidden away, though. God, I nearly scratched his eyes out. I wished to Christ I had. The bastard bent me over the back of a chair and hacked it off with a pair of scissors. Hacked it off!”

  I could hardly restrain a grin at the thought of Rod finally coming to his senses and getting stuck into the bitch.

  “That was the last straw!” she snapped. “As soon as he left to see the solicitors, I packed whatever I could lay my hands on and went back to Sebastian.”

  “Went back?” I asked.

  She told us how she had lived with Sebastian on a yacht moored on the Brisbane River for a year before coming north to the sun and starting to work for us. She had picked up with him again after returning to Brisbane with Rod, spending the occasional afternoon down on the yacht while Rod was busy in the restaurant. She was quite open about the whole story. Judy had no hang-ups at all.

  “We get on well together, don’t we, Seb.” She smiled, placing a hand possessively on the back of his thigh. He grinned down at her, pride in the attention she gave him.

  “So you both figured you might like a share of the treasure?” Rick asked. “Rod’s share.”

  “I’m still his wife, and what’s his is mine. It’s no good him getting it anyway. The bailiff would only grab the lot.”

  “Didn’t take you long to track us down,” I said.

  “We left two days after I called you from Brisbane. I wasn’t certain when you were leaving or whether you were even going, so I phoned Mandy. You remember Mandy off the Southwind?” I nodded. “I told her I was coming up to see you guys; a surprise visit. She told me not to bother; said you were off to the South Pacific in a couple of days. So I knew you were serious. We got to Suva the day before you did.”

  “What took you out to Cagalai?” Rick asked. “I presume it was you we saw out there.”

  She nodded and said: “Henry. Sebastian was sitting at one of the tables at the Tradewinds Hotel when Henry came ashore with those local girls you picked up. Your standards certainly have fallen, haven’t they.”

  I didn’t bother to answer. She shrugged her shoulders and continued.

  “Sebastian overheard some guy ask Henry whether you three would be doing any trawling. Henry told the guy that you were just going diving at an island twenty or thirty miles the other side of Nukulau. We thought you were out after the treasure. We’d already chased you out to Nukulau that afternoon. It took us two days before we found you, and all you did was dive and spear bloody fish, and then you went back to bloody Suva. A few days later you disappeared, and we figured that this time you must have gone to Wakaya. We arrived here and couldn’t find you, so we headed back to Leleuvia and passed you coming out through the passage.”

  “Henry did it again, eh, Rick?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s that?” Sebastian asked.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “It was you that Henry saw in the market, I suppose?” Rick asked Judy.

  “Certainly was. The dear boy gave me a hell of a fright. Luckily Sebastian saw him before I did and managed to head him off.
”

  The big man looked down at her again, and smiled. She stood up and leaned into his side. I had seen her do it before with more guys than I cared to remember.

  He took his left hand from the barrels of the shotgun and placed it on the small of her back, moving it down and over her tight little bottom, caressing both cheeks gently, stroking them slowly, almost as though subconsciously, knowing it was what she liked. The nipples hardened through the thin material as her face began to soften and glow.

  I remembered the last time I had played with that cute backside, and what had followed afterwards.

  “Where’s your yacht, Sebastian?” I heard Rick ask from somewhere in the distance. I shook away the memory of Judy lifting a similar T-shirt above her head, those proud pointed breasts jutting forth. Sebastian raised his head: the scowling brooding face didn’t reflect the soft underbelly conjured up by the label his parents had inflicted him with.

  “We thought we’d be safe in the harbour,” he replied. “I had ropes strung out everywhere: to coconut palms, to the concrete jetty. You name it, and we were tied down to it. We were okay until the bloody thing switched direction in the middle of the night. I thought the bugger had blown herself out, and didn’t bother to check the lines.”

  “But she was still around though, wasn’t she,” I interrupted.

  “Yeah,” he replied, surly at being shown to be wrong. I stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

  “Tell him how you stuffed up, Seb,” Judy urged, the hardness coming to her face.

  “Yeah, well, she blew up again and broke every rope, one by bloody one. I got the motor started, not that it did much good, but I managed to get her around to the northern point and tried to run down along the eastern side of the island, hoping we could find some protection. It only prolonged the bloody agony. Three hours after the wind changed direction we hit the outer reef.”

  “Tough luck,” I replied sarcastically, but he didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm.

  “Yeah,” he went on. “We hung on until daybreak. She was wedged hard and fast and wasn’t goin’ anywhere; half full of water, with a lump of coral pokin’ up through the hull. I reckoned it was better to stay up on the reef than to launch the rubber boat and risk bein’ pushed a couple of hundred miles further to the east.” He was surer of himself now, knowing he had done the right thing after a string of disasters. “She’d blown herself out by mornin’, so we salvaged what we could.” He patted the gun, and pulled three cartridges from his pocket to prove that the gun was loaded. “Then we come round here to see if you guys were coming back.”

  “Where’s your rubber boat?” I asked.

  “About a mile down the beach. You can get it later.”

  “No, mate,” Rick said. “You can get it later.”

  All Sebastian did was laugh, head thrust back.

  “Don’t be stupid, Judy,” I said. “Take your friend and bugger off. You’re not getting a share of whatever’s in that chest. So forget it.”

  “I don’t want a share,” she replied sweetly.

  “No?” I replied.

  “No, sugar. Sebastian and I want the lot.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Rick didn’t share my dilemma. I saw the weight-belt come flying up from the dinghy, and then go spinning through the air towards Sebastian as Rick launched himself across the beach.

  If he had given me even the slightest indication of his intention we could have had them then – maybe; but I was just that fraction of a second too slow in bending down and releasing the knife from the sheath on my leg.

  The belt hit Sebastian full in the chest, knocking him backwards as he tried to duck; but before Rick could reach the bearded man, Judy had jumped into his path, grabbed hold of his hair and yanked it downwards. He stumbled over a rock and they both fell to the sand.

  I was still a few feet from the bow of the dinghy when they hit the sand. I stumbled forward, my knife held out in front ready to stab, my knees moving high through the shallow water, my feet starting to pound into the broken coral. I raised my head for the final charge up the beach.

  The twin holes of the barrels stared into my eyes.

  “That’ll do, you smart-arse son-of-a-bitch!” Sebastian boomed, eyes fixed on mine as I slid to a halt. “Move back down the beach or I’ll blow your bloody head clean off your shoulders!” I moved back. I didn’t think he was bluffing.

  It was only then that he looked down at the pair rolling and grunting amongst the sun-bleached coral. He wiped a smear of blood from his lip where the weight-belt had caught him, and moved forward, the gun still aimed in my direction. Lifting his right leg back, he kicked Rick full in the ribs with a sneaker-shod foot, and then kicked again, and again. I started to move and the gun came up, but it had been enough to stop his furious onslaught.

  Judy rose to her feet, her composure gone, brushing herself down, leaving Rick moaning on the sand, ignoring him until all the sand was gone from her shorts, and then turned, kicking him hard. “Bastard!” she screeched. “Bastard!”

  I walked across to Rick, taking slow steps in case Sebastian might misinterpret my motive. The fingers clasping the gun tightened.

  “Take it easy, Sebastian,” I said. “Nobody wants to get shot.”

  “You tell that to your bloody mate!” he snapped.

  I helped Rick to his feet and half-carried him back to the dinghy. He rolled over the gunwale and lay down across the back seat, his face contorted with pain.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Bad enough,” he whispered. “But not as bad as those two bastards think.”

  “I think you’ve broken one of his ribs!” I called across to Sebastian. “It wasn’t bloody necessary, you know.”

  “Tell him to keep his hands off Judy!”

  So it wasn’t the blow with the weight-belt that had raised the sudden outburst of temper. He was besotted with Judy. Another one of the poor bastards.

  “Okay, Jude,” I said. “What now?”

  “How long before you bring the chest up?”

  We needed time to get our thoughts in order, time to formulate some sort of plan. I felt certain that Sebastian wasn’t the kind to shoot us out of hand, unless we did something to push him into it. We could always let them have the chest and be rid of them both; but I was damned if I was going to do that. What right did they have to take the prize that had nearly cost us the Sally May? And what of the two bodies off Nasilai? What did they count for?

  And yet maybe the chest was the least of our worries. With Sebastian’s yacht now a wreck, they would need some way of getting out of the country with the treasure, and the only way would be on the trawler. Judy knew how to handle her, and the engine-room probably wouldn’t present any problems to Sebastian. I could see us left behind on Wakaya while they sailed away into the sunset.

  “How long?” she repeated.

  “At least another day!” I snapped back.

  “Another day! Bloody hell! You’ve already spent more than two days diving on the thing!”

  Rick’s head snapped around.

  “Yes, friend,” Sebastian chipped in with a smug grin. “We were watchin’ you from the cliff even before you come ashore with the three Fijians.”

  That explained the reflection from the cliff-top I had seen. It hadn’t been my imagination, nor a piece of broken glass, but the sun bouncing off a pair of binoculars. It also explained why they hadn’t been able to run for better shelter before the hurricane struck. They would have lost time crashing back through the scrub to the yacht anchored in the harbour; probably intending to follow us again, until they were told about the impending storm.

  I told her how the chest was cemented to the two large boulders with living coral. She didn’t know whether to believe me or not.

  “Why don’t you go down then, Jude?” I asked. “Or are you still shit-scared of sharks?”

  A big one had come racing in at the trawler about a year or so ago, ripping into a sma
ller shark that we had caught and tied alongside. Within minutes there had been half a dozen of them boiling the water into a feeding frenzy. We had never been able to get her into the water after that.

  “Shut your face!” she snarled.

  “What about your mate here then, Jude?” I continued. “You want to come down, Sebastian? You can dive I suppose? We’ve only seen a couple of small reef sharks, a sea-snake and some barracuda.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’ve got pierced eardrums, friend, otherwise I’d have been down there long before this.” He grinned. “But why should I worry? You two buggers and your mate out there on the trawler can do all the divin’. Me and Jude’ll just worry about countin’ the gold when it comes up. You buggers can worry about the sharks.”

  “Well then,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait, won’t you.”

  “Why? There’s still plenty of time for another couple of dives. You could have the chest up by tonight.”

  If he had pierced eardrums, he had probably got them by diving too fast and not equalizing the pressure in his ears, something that only novices tried to do, and if that was the case then he wouldn’t know much about diving. I hoped I was right.

  “That water out there is nearly eighty feet,” I said matter-of-factly. “I’m not risking the bends for you or anybody.”

  He looked at Judy for confirmation. She had never been past thirty feet and didn’t have a clue about diving times or depths, but she had heard about the bends. They both had; and neither of them noticed the extra twenty feet I had added to the depth.

  “We can wait another day,” he muttered as though believing that he was the one in charge and not Judy.

  “All right, Seb,” she said smiling across at him. “Shall we take the boys back to the trawler? I can introduce you to Henry. You two must be almost like old friends.”

  They both laughed at her poor attempt at humour.

  Sebastian placed Rick and me down at the stern of the dinghy, the outboard tiller separating us, while he sat high on the bow with his feet hooked under the front seat in case we tried anything funny: like ramming the dinghy into the trawler and throwing him over the bow. Judy sat by his feet, the shotgun barrels poking out well above her left shoulder, giving him an open field of fire.