The Roadhouse

by Kerry McGinnis

  If I could buy Mike and Bob more time, I reasoned, they might come up with something. To admit that what he wanted was already in the hands of the police would be to sign my own death warrant. He would immediately cut his losses, kill me and leave, perhaps adding rape to his crimes before doing so. I shuddered and he noticed, his face hard in the gloom of the tiny hut.

  ‘That’s their problem – and yours if they come up empty.’ He shoved me forward, barking, ‘Sit.’ I lowered myself carefully to the stained and dusty stone and he taped my ankles again, taking care to finish behind my legs where only a contortionist would ever get the fingers of their bound hands to reach.

  ‘Now I’m gonna bring you writing gear, then cut your hands free, so work out your message,’ he said. ‘The jewels are in a cloth bag. Not very big, so easy enough to hide. You’ll tell them that. And I want it by – let’s see, it’s ten now – let’s say by four this arvo. If they don’t turn up, then you’re for the chop. Be sure to tell them that. Only one man to bring it. I’ll draw a map to show him where. Now, when I free your hands, do just what I’ve told you and I’ll leave you water while I’m gone. But try anything and I can promise that you won’t like what I do to you. Understand, Charlie?’

  Unable to nod, I said yes submissively, but my heart beat a little faster at his words. If he was leaving to deliver his demand, perhaps my chance would come then. A tiny spark of hope lit the dark pit into which the morning’s events had plunged me. If I could somehow free my feet … I let my eyes roam over as much of the cell-like enclosure as lay within my line of sight. There had to be something sharp or edged. And if there wasn’t? Then I would just have to rely on the men to devise a plan. But first, I was resolved to do my damnedest to escape.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  After some thought I addressed the letter to Bob. If Mike wasn’t at the roadhouse but off somewhere searching for me, Bob or my mother might hesitate to open something addressed to him.

  ‘How will you know that he gets it?’ I fretted. With the paper pressed against my thigh, I wrote shakily, He says he killed Annabelle and will kill me too, unless you find a packet of jewels she hid somewhere at the Garnet and bring it to him … There was more, the time frame and the map showing Mica Valley.

  Belligrin didn’t bother to answer. I added I love you and signed my name. It didn’t matter who read it – it applied equally to my mother and Bob, and might well be my last communication with them – but eventually, even if the others had it first, Mike would see it too.

  Belligrin read through the note, stuffed it into an envelope and watched me address it. ‘Who’s this Bob, then?’

  ‘An old man. He manages the roadhouse.’ Too late it occurred to me that Annabelle might have told him differently but he just nodded, doubtless pleased by the thought of having somebody elderly and therefore more amenable to deal with. He didn’t know Bob.

  ‘Good.’ He vanished from sight to return a few moments later with a plastic bottle of water and a packet of wheatmeal biscuits, which he tossed onto the floor beside me. ‘See? Obedience pays off, Charlie. If this Bob’s as sensible as you, by this time tomorrow it’ll all be all over.’

  And I’d be dead. I kept the thought to myself and said petulantly, as if I believed him, ‘How am I supposed to get the top off the bottle with my hands tied?’

  ‘Use your teeth.’ He smirked and left me but didn’t go far, for the next thing I heard was a series of grunts until a boulder, the size of a calf, was heaved against the doorframe, blocking out half the light. It wouldn’t have stopped me had my hands and feet been free, but bound as I was it made an effective prison of the little hut. Then the throaty roar of the troop carrier sounded and, after a short pause while the diesel motor warmed up, moved slowly away. Without waiting longer, I grappled with the water bottle until I had it between my palms and raised it to my mouth.

  Use your teeth, he’d said and I did. The bottle was one of those soft plastic ones. I doubted it would cut butter but I had nothing else to try. The little room was bare – any overlooked artefact from its previous occupation had, I assumed, been taken away by the police along with Annabelle’s body. I calculated that I had an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, depending on the method Belligrin used to deliver the note. He was hardly going to walk into the Garnet with it and risk being seen; on the other hand, simply dumping it on the verandah or near the fuel pumps didn’t guarantee it would be found. I intended to make the best use of my time even if my feeble plan failed to work.

  I had to bend my neck to get at the bottle without spilling its contents, which I knew I’d need for I was already quite thirsty. It was agony, but I persevered, gripping the plastic top in my molars and trying to maintain the pressure of my palms against the body of the bottle. After several attempts I felt the cap begin to loosen and, by moving my hands back and forth to twist the bottle, was finally left with it in my mouth. I spat it out and straightened my neck with a moan, taking a breather before trying to drink the contents, which involved more neck movement. My thirst helped, and when the bottle was empty I considered my next step, which was to detach the base from the sides. This time my teeth failed me: I couldn’t get enough grip on the slick surface, even when I pressed the bottle flat between my palms. I tried holding it between my hands and flogging the end against the stone wall but the first blow sent the bottle flying from my grip. Swearing, I scooched after it on my bottom and tried something else. I was wearing closed shoes with low, solid heels. Perhaps they would do it?

  Positioning myself and gritting my teeth against the jarring my neck was about to absorb, I raised my heels as high as I could and smashed them down onto the bottle. It took several attempts before the first split appeared and, encouraged, I kept at it in a sort of fury, my nerves crawlingly aware of time ticking by, feeling tears of pain and frustration on my face. Finally, I could stop, the battering having separated a section of the base from the sides. I would like to have lain flat then to ease the sheer weight my head had assumed, but I didn’t dare.

  I had no way of measuring time but it must have taken me five minutes of manipulation between my teeth and my clumsy hand grip to peel the base from the bottle and retain the latter in my mouth. I could taste and feel the grit of the floor upon it as I tongued the edge clear of my lips and bent my head to rasp it against my taped wrists. I didn’t know if it would succeed and had despaired long before the edge of the tape began to part, but it was my one and only shot so I kept at it, ignoring the pain and the saliva that drooled from my mouth.

  What felt like eons later, my ears tuned with painful intensity for the first distant throb of a motor, I threw caution to the winds and wrenched at my bonds. The plastic stretched but didn’t break and I sawed at them in a renewed frenzy. The next attempt allowed me to reach the tape with my fingers and I spat out my makeshift cutting edge and tore at them, then started on my bound ankles. Twisting them within reach, I used the edge of the plastic to tease the end of the tape free and was then able to get a thorough grip and unwind it. By then I was light-headed from my efforts, but only a broken leg could have kept me in that hut.

  Sobbing freely with pain and fear and the relief of my release, I grabbed the biscuits, slid headfirst over the boulder and bolted into the nearest scrub. My very haste was my downfall, that and the fact that I was holding my neck with both hands in an attempt to minimise its jolting, so that when my foot caught on something – a rock or a dead branch – I fell without a hope of saving myself.

  It was a long, painful slide to the bottom of the gully. I felt the biscuits, which I had thrust down the neck of my t-shirt, crunch against me as my hat came off. There was a blinding pain in my foot, echoed by the sharp agony of my right knee smacking into a rock and the smart of grazed palms before I rolled to a stop against a clump of grass, gritting my teeth against the renewed assault of agony. Everything hurt, but the urge to flee drove me to struggle up, only to promptly collapse again as my wrenched ankle announced its pres
ence.

  ‘Oh God! Just what I need.’ My knee hurt but it was ignorable, as were the pinpricks of blood on both palms. I sat for a moment sick with despair, giddy and light-headed as I grasped my leg, telling myself it was nothing, just a sprain. If it meant crawling I still had to put distance between myself and the hut. I had no idea how long my escape had taken and Belligrin could return at any moment. My hat, I saw, had followed me down. I grabbed it and, with the help of a sapling, rose waveringly to my feet. The pain of that first step made me gasp and the second was no better, but there was no help for it.

  Grabbing onto the shrubby wattle bushes and the stems of sprawling mallees for support, I dragged myself on, thankful for the rocky ground that hid my tracks. Bob might’ve followed the faint traces I left but I doubted Belligrin could – except, of course, that he would expect me to take the easiest route along the gully, which meant I had to leave it and climb the exposed flank of the ridge. My heart quailed at the prospect but it would be better to do it before he returned. If I could get over the ridge and find a place to hide – a nest of boulders or a dense thicket of conkaberry say, where my jeans and green shirt would meld into the shadows …

  The weakest part of the plan, or at least the hardest, would be climbing the ridge without the help of scrub to hang onto, and added to that was the slight matter of water. I had none and the nearest supply I knew of was at the police station – as good as a million miles away. Looking on the bright side, I thought grimly, if Belligrin caught me I’d have no further worries about thirst. Time to get started, then, but first I needed a stick.

  The gully was choked with scrub but it seemed to take forever to find a support that didn’t snap under my weight or wasn’t too unwieldy for the task. I settled on a mallee branch and with its help started on a diagonal course across the ridge. It was hard going and I was panting and sweating freely before I’d achieved more than a few metres of ascent. Forced to rest, I stood leaning on my helpful stick until a faint rumble in the air vibrated against my eardrum. It galvanised me into action as nothing else could have done. Sound carried a fair distance in the quiet of the range and there was no mistaking the growl of a diesel engine. Blinded with the sweat of fear, I pegged away with my stick amid the rocks and spiny rings of spinifex until I reached the crest of the ridge, and then for the sake of speed and because I really couldn’t take another step, sat and shuffled myself down it, going into a free slide at one stage when the rocks changed suddenly to scree.

  There was a creek at the bottom, narrower than the Garnet, its banks sparsely lined with the ubiquitous white-trunked gums. Of red clay and about a metre high, the top of the bank was thickly furred over with buffel grass. Beyond it the country opened out in to a small vale dotted with a few corkwoods and a clump of wild orange before humping up again into another bare, grass-grown ridge. No handy rocks or thickets. My heart sank as I contemplated the labour of crossing such an open stretch of country. Then the suddenly shockingly loud bellow of the distant troop carrier had me scurrying to the shelter of the creek bank. I half fell over it and, for lack of any other cover, pressed myself into the narrow band of shadow at its foot where the roots of an old, scaly-barked gum jutted from the bank, forming a hollow in the sand.

  My mind, catching up with my body’s movement, reasoned that he wasn’t close enough to see me, not through a solid ridge. In fact, he didn’t know yet that I had gone. Then the engine noise sank to an idle and eventually died, and I held my breath, wondering if he’d just assume that I was still where he’d left me. But I knew he would check: it might take him five minutes or half an hour, but sooner or later the need to torment me or to savour my fear would take him to the hut. Trembling, my eyes squeezed shut, I waited, not moving a muscle, my throat so dry from apprehension that I could no longer swallow.

  Lying there, my heartbeat gradually slowed and I began to think again. I was supine against the bank, only half in the shade, and the sunny bits of my body were growing uncomfortably warm. By the shadows I could tell it was near enough to midday, which left four hours before Belligrin’s deadline. Would Mike and Bob involve the police? It wasn’t as if they could comply with my kidnapper’s demands and if either turned up at the rendezvous point without the package, I shuddered to think what Belligrin would do to him. They couldn’t even borrow the goods back from Tom Cleary, for he would no longer have them.

  A faint yell broke my concentration. I lay rigid, holding my breath, my hearing drowned by the sudden thunder of blood from my racing heart. The sound came again, incrementally louder. My escape had been discovered, then. Gasping in fright, horrified at how little distance I had managed to drag myself if a shout could encompass it, I pressed my body into its pathetic cover and, closing my eyes, waited to be discovered.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Belligrin yelled twice more, though I dared not lift my head to check. He sounded so close that he must have been on top of the ridge I had descended, possibly even directly above me.

  ‘I’m going to find you, Charlie, and when I do, I’m going to make you sorrier than you ever imagined you could be. You won’t get away from me – your cousin didn’t. And when I’ve finished with you, who knows? Maybe one night your home’ll catch fire, and the roadhouse with it. Think about that, Charlie.’

  The sun’s heat vanished as a cold dread seized me. I heard a stone rattle down the slope and the distant ki-ki-ing of a hawk, but he must have kept walking because when his voice rang out again it was fainter. It was hard to breathe through the terror choking me. Would he really do it? I thought of the homestead on fire with Mum asleep inside – though of course she wouldn’t be sleeping with me missing, and anyway, the road camp would be there, and the police by nightfall at the latest, so he’d never get near the place. Unless he was vindictive enough to return long after I’d perished and the search was over …

  I was being ridiculous. Determinedly, I shook away my fears. I was going to get out of this. And right now was the time to move again, while I knew where he was. If I waited I’d never know if he was circling back, which he’d do, I reasoned, once he’d reached his estimate of the distance I’d be able to achieve. So maybe my injury would actually work in my favour. Grabbing my stick, I sat up, cast a cautious glance at the empty ridgetop and hauled myself across the shallow creek, deliberately dragging my feet sideways in the sand in a bid to camouflage my footprints. Hopefully, he’d never think to look or, if he did, he’d be unable to tell the difference between a human’s track and a camel’s.

  I toiled across the vale and up the subsequent slope, accompanying my progress with nervous, backwards glances. The longer it took the more I fretted. It had seemed simple at first – Belligrin’s fading shouts had given direction to his whereabouts – but once I could no longer hear him, my mind became prey to doubt. Was he really out of hearing, or had he fallen silent on purpose and was circling back? He couldn’t afford to miss the rendezvous with Bob, so how far would he pursue me? It was irrational, but I felt so exposed to his sudden appearance from behind a thicket of scrub or the top of a ridge that, plagued by fear and indecision, I began casting frantically around for another hiding place.

  I was hot and very thirsty by then – hungry, too. It was well past noon, the shadows had moved to the far side of the trees, and I’d had nothing to eat since an early breakfast. The packet of biscuits still rode inside my shirt but my anxiety was too great, and my throat too dry, to even consider them. I found a small pebble, rubbed it clean on my shirt and sucked it to keep the saliva going in my mouth and struggled on.

  Once, I thought I heard a vehicle far in the distance but that was plainly impossible. I was too far from the highway and, anyway, the blood pulsing in my ears and the stir of the occasional breeze made every sound suspect. Nobody was coming to my aid. I wished now that I had dug in the sand of the creek where I’d sheltered. I remembered the easy way Mike had found the soakage water on our fossick in just such another creek. Perhaps there had been water th
ere too where I had lain, just waiting below the sand for me to dig down to it? The thought was maddening, but it was too risky now to return to test the theory, even if I had been able to.

  As it was, I was forced to stop and rest. My ankle, I discovered on inspection, was grossly swollen and had turned a nasty shade of purple. It needed strapping and rest, but the most I could give it in my twitchy state was another five minutes; even as I decided on that, my ears picked up the sound of a human voice, carried on a gust of breeze. It was fleeting, but the burst of adrenaline it provided had me on my feet, hobbling with all speed towards the only cover in sight, a rocky outcrop half screened by a thicket of wattle and deadwood.

  Panting and whimpering with pain, I eeled my way into concealment amid the old leaves and fallen pollen, finishing up with one hip wedged against sun-warmed rock and the dried blades of buffel grass tickling my nose. My hat had been pulled off against a branch but I didn’t dare move to retrieve it as I pressed myself against the earth. It was warm and very still in the thicket; I could hear only the buzz of insects and see a broken patch of sky visible between the wattle foliage. With slow precision I moved my head to avoid the grass, noting as I did so the occasional blades of maroon through its mostly ivory colouring. Then the voice came again, no longer ranting, but a quiet, conversational tone that was somehow more threatening, along with the unmistakable crunch of boots on gravel. I stopped breathing and had to resist the urge to curl into a protective ball.

  I knew I mustn’t move. I shut my eyes instead, praying for him not to see as the steps came closer and closer, almost as if he was following my tracks. But he couldn’t have been – he wasn’t a bushman. Then the swish of grass ceased and a strange male voice sang out, ‘Right! Got her.’