That Empty Feeling

by Peter Corris

  After the first few kilometres there were no turn-offs and it was clear that Jackson’s Track was a dedicated route to Jackson’s Farm. The track flattened out about the same time as the rain eased and the bush thinned out. The mud lay thicker but there were fewer sheets of falling water and more puddles. The tall, swaying trees had kept the light down on the drive but it grew brighter as they receded and there were paddocks on either side and an occasional cattle grid made itself felt under the mud and washed-along debris.

  The rain had eased to a drizzle and stopped as I rounded a gentle bend. Fifty yards ahead I saw a chest-high metal gate stretched across the track and a sign that read:

  JACKSON’S FARM

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED

  No phone number or way to make contact. The gate was set into two steel posts and fastened with a thick chain and padlock. A rusty padlock can be tricky but one in good condition is, literally, easy pickings if you have the tools. I dealt with the lock in a minute or two and pushed the heavy gate open.

  There are three rules for approaching unchecked-upon country premises: be prepared for unfriendly dogs, when parking turn your vehicle back the way you came, and leave the gate open. The last violates country practice from Cape York to Wilsons Promontory but I wasn’t about to ignore it. Any livestock would have to take its chances.

  I pinned the gate open with a stick pushed deep into the mud and drove slowly up to a farmhouse just visible around a wide, curving, rain-washed concrete strip.

  21

  I took the .38 from the glove-box and put it in my pocket, parked and got out of the car. The parking area was well laid and maintained gravel but the heavy rain had created puddles. I stepped straight into one, but with solid hiking boots on my feet I didn’t care. The afternoon air was cold at this elevation; smoke drifted up from the chimney of the main house—a large, traditional, double-fronted structure with a wide bullnose veranda in front and down the west side. A two-storey add-on was visible at the back on the east side.

  I stood at the bottom of the three steps leading to the veranda to see if my arrival had sparked any activity. The steps were built of sandstone blocks and railway sleepers, deeply scuffed by generations of boots. No sounds, no movement. I went up the steps and knocked at the door. The last thing I expected to hear was the click of high heels on a hardwood floor. The door opened and a young woman stood there, cigarette in hand and attitude in place. She was wearing the same kind of Arsenal cap and scarf I’d seen Ronny wearing when we left the gym for the pub.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she said.

  I told her to shut up and backed up the order by taking out the pistol. I grabbed her by the arm and pushed her in front of me down the passage.

  ‘That fuckin’ hurts,’ she squealed.

  ‘It’ll hurt more if you don’t behave. Where’s Ronny?’

  She pointed to a door a little further down the passage. I sucked in a breath: not mission accomplished, but progress made. I tightened my grip on her skinny arm.

  ‘Who else is here? And where’s Des?’

  ‘No one else. Des’s g-gone huntin’.’

  ‘In the rain?’

  ‘Rain stopped ten minutes ago.’

  True enough. I released her arm, pushed her hard against the wall and gave her a good look at the gun before I put it away.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you but I will if I have to. Go into the living room, sit down, keep smoking and keep quiet and you’ll be okay. Got it?’

  She nodded and tottered away, puffing furiously on her cigarette and not looking back. Although it was cool in the house, all she wore was a skimpy black lacy bra, an unbuttoned white satin blouse and black satin tights. Stiletto heels. The scarf provided a bit of warmth without compromising the display. She wasn’t there to do the cooking and cleaning.

  I eased open the door she’d indicated. The smell—a pungent blend of booze, sweat, massage oil and sperm—hit me before the physical details of the room. Ronny, only his head, upper chest and shoulders visible above a tartan blanket, lay in the middle of a three-quarter bed. Trousers, shirts, a sweater and underwear lay scattered on the carpeted floor. A couple of bottles and glasses sat on a card table in a corner of the room. I went in and saw a handbasin in a corner with two pill bottles and a plastic syringe on it.

  Ronny was asleep. His hair was lank and his face pale, but his breathing was even and fairly deep. The upper part of his chest and his shoulders were covered with scratches and love bites. He had a few days’ stubble and some spittle at the edges of his mouth. When I tried to rouse him he snored and threw one tattooed arm out from under the blanket, but otherwise didn’t respond. Champagne and scotch on the card table; Rohypnol and something I couldn’t identify on the washbasin.

  I left the room and opened the next door. An overnight bag spilling women’s clothes lay on the floor. I grabbed the fluffy white coat hanging on the back of the door and went down the passage. The woman, still smoking, was sitting hunched near a dying fire. She looked up at me with wide frightened eyes that weren’t quite focused.

  ‘Put some logs on,’ I said.

  She held up hands with nails like talons, painted bright red.

  Hence the scratches, I thought.

  I draped the coat over her shoulders, took the poker and prodded at the embers and put some kindling and a couple of light logs on the fire. The kindling caught and I held my cold hands out to the warmth. She threw her cigarette into the fire and shrugged the coat around her.

  ‘Comfy?’ I said.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Eve.’

  ‘Very nice. Easy to remember and spell—same way backwards and forwards. So what’s the deal here, Evie?’

  She waved at a table in the middle of the room. ‘Will you get me a fag?’

  ‘When I get some information.’

  ‘Are you a cop?’

  I showed her the licence. ‘Private enquiries; could be better than the cops, could be worse. Up to you.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘A man has been abducted and held under restraint. Drugs have been used. Those are serious crimes, worse than your pick-ups for soliciting.’

  Eve was in her middle twenties and, at a guess, had ten years of bad experience with men and drugs and struggling to stay alive behind her. As she picked at the fraying polish on her nails and rubbed at the nicotine stains on the fingers of her right hand I could see her working out how much to play me, just another man out to do her harm.

  ‘Des is an old friend,’ she said.

  Read client, I thought. ‘Yes?’

  ‘He comes to me and he says he’s got this young bloke who needs to lie low for a while but he needs, like, some encouragement to get out of Sydney and stay out. I didn’t know nothing about the drugs. When I first met him I just thought he was pissed. Well, I’ve had some experience dealing with drunks and that.’

  ‘I can imagine. Did Des say why he needed to go bush?’

  That was the first serious question she’d faced. How much she knew led to how much this was her responsibility. She hesitated and stared out the nearest window. I could read her mind.

  ‘The sun’s shining, love,’ I said. ‘After being cooped up in the rain for days, Des’ll be happy to be out and about. Especially if he’s got a toy to play with. If I know Des, he’ll have taken a bottle with him and he’ll shoot at anything that moves, or doesn’t. He could be away the rest of the day.’

  She nodded. ‘He didn’t say much at first but then he got a phone call and he started Ronny on the Roies and the pethidine. He reckoned he had to keep him for longer than he thought.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He said some people wanted to use Ronny to get at his father somehow, but it had all gone wrong. That’s all I know.’ It wasn’t, I could tell, but how to get more out of her? ‘How much is Des paying you?’

  She shrugged. ‘A grand.’r />
  ‘Has he paid you yet?’

  ‘Bits.’

  ‘I can guarantee you two thousand bucks, no questions asked, if you tell me what else you know.’

  ‘How can you guarantee that much?’

  ‘I’m working for Ronny’s father. He’s very rich. He’ll be grateful to get Ronny back and he doesn’t need to know you fucked and drugged him into a coma.’

  ‘A coma?’

  ‘What it looks like to me. He’s not good. I have to get him to a hospital pretty quickly after I talk to Des.’

  ‘Give me a fag.’

  I got the Winfields from the assortment of things on the table and handed the packet to her with her lighter. She lit up, sucked the smoke deep and blew a long plume into the fire that was now burning brightly.

  ‘Couple of nights ago, when Ronny was well and truly out, Des and me had a fuck. He was pretty pissed and sounding off about this bastard he reckoned had found them and how his mate Titch had copped it.’

  ‘Copped it how?’

  ‘Dead. Shit, I never expected to get into this fuckin’ mess. It was just a job, a cushy fuckin’ job. I guess there’s no such thing.’

  ‘Right. Last question. Who’s Des working for?’

  She’d smoked half of the cigarette already. ‘I have no fuckin’ idea.’

  ‘For whoever it was wanting to use Ronny against his dad?’

  ‘I suppose, but I dunno.’

  I sat back and thought about it while she continued smoking. I’d been puzzled by the attempt to take Ronny away from Des in Randwick. Now it was clearer: perhaps Des had tried to make his own private deal and it had gone sour.

  I said, ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Land Rover.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In a garage at the back.’

  ‘Where’re the keys?’

  She pointed to the mess on the table.

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘Yeah. Lost my licence, but.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Pack up your stuff. You’re leaving.’

  I took a hundred dollars from my wallet and handed it to her. ‘This is to get you on your way. You give me a number where I can get in touch with you to pay you the two grand.’

  Life and hope returned. She jumped up, located a handbag among the mess and rooted through it. She found a pencil and scribbled a number on a scrap of torn newspaper.

  ‘What about Des?’

  ‘I’ll take care of Des. He won’t bother you.’

  She scurried away and returned with her overnight bag packed. She’d put on tight jeans and a sweater and exchanged her stilettos for solid-heeled boots. I picked up the keys to the Land Rover and we went through the kitchen and back sunroom to the yard and a two-car garage with unlocked sliding doors. I handed her the keys.

  ‘What sort of a gun has he got?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Shotgun or rifle?’

  ‘Search me. Perhaps a shotgun?’

  ‘Watch yourself on that track down, it’s bloody tricky.’

  ‘You’re a good bloke, whoever the fuck you are.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘Just practical.’

  The Land Rover started at a touch; she backed it out efficiently, turned, waved and drove off. I followed her around the house and watched her disappear down Jackson’s Track. Then I went back inside and waited for Des O’Malley, former contender for the Pan-Pacific middleweight title.

  22

  The land at the back of the house sloped gently upward and spread out to the north and the south. I made periodic trips inside to check on Ronny, have a piss, make a sandwich and drink a can of beer from the slab of Toohey’s Des had in the fridge. But I was never away from my lookout post for more than five minutes. After about two hours I saw him coming over the hill down towards the house. He had the rifle or shotgun across his shoulders at the back, secured by his crossed arms, like Steve McQueen in Nevada Smith. Good, I thought. It takes quite a while to get from that self-satisfied macho pose into a shooting position.

  I stood behind a half-folded-back screen that was designed to give some shade on the open back porch until Des was safely in pistol range. I stepped out and down with the .38 pointed squarely at his broad chest.

  ‘Gidday, Des. Don’t move a muscle. I don’t see any bunnies. Too quick for you, were they?’

  He stood with his mouth hanging open. He was wearing a flannie over a T-shirt, mud-splashed jeans and rubber boots. No hat; the bald head gleamed in the afternoon light.

  ‘Hardy.’

  ‘Right, locked and loaded. Unship the weapon, Des, and let it drop easy.’

  ‘It’s unloaded.’

  ‘So you say. Again, let it go easy, no throwing.’

  He released what I could now see was a shotgun and let it drop onto the wet, foot-trodden grass.

  ‘Where’s the slut?’

  ‘Gone, in the Land Rover.’

  ‘The kid?’

  ‘In my care.’

  He took a flask from the pocket in his jeans and had a long swig. ‘Who’re you working for, Hardy?’

  ‘Funny, that’s exactly what I was just going to ask you.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  He threw the flask at me with a quickness I wouldn’t have credited him with. I dodged and it missed but it gave him time to come bullocking towards me, roaring, shouting and getting too close, too quickly, for me to bring the gun back to bear on him. He made a battering ram of his head and hunched body and knocked me sideways so that I reached at a post for support and lost my grip on the gun. It went spinning away.

  I regained my balance in time to avoid his first wild swing. I circled away as he went into the Mike Tyson-style crouch he’d adopted in his ill-starred ring career.

  ‘I’ve been looking forward to this, Hardy.’

  The trouble with fighting ex-professional boxers is that they know all the tricks—the quick moves, then deceptively slow ones, the feints, the counters to various punches. They learn them over hours in the gym and they employ them under pressure when it comes to the real thing. They remain ingrained even for an overweight, over-the-hill pug like Des O’Malley.

  We moved around each other on the slushy ground without doing much damage. I was lighter and quicker, with better wind, but he knew a trick or two I didn’t and he landed a couple of heavy punches that stung, one high on my right cheekbone and one to the right shoulder. Another shot like that to my shoulder and I’d lose some feeling in the arm, and that could be fatal.

  The only advantage I had was better footing. He was clumsy in his wellies and aware of it, so he kept his foot movements short and precise. He caught me again with a left rip to the side that had me backing away and I had to take a chance. I gasped as though I was really hurt, dropped my hands and sagged. He gave a grunt of triumph, abandoned caution and almost rushed in. I’d chosen the spot and his feet went from under him on the particularly greasy patch of ground. He fought for balance but I was set, ready and desperate. I landed a straight right with all my weight behind it below the ear on the hinge of his jaw. His neck twisted violently. I heard a click and his yelp of pain and alarm but by then I had retrieved the pistol and I clubbed him hard with its butt on the right temple. He went down like an animal shot with an anaesthetic dart.

  I stood over him, panting and hoping I hadn’t broken his neck. Unlikely; it was well padded with muscle and fat. I dragged him through the mud, hoisted him up on the porch and propped him against the wall of the house. I used my Swiss army knife to cut lengths from a roll of garden twine I’d found in the house and tied his hands in front of him and his feet at the ankles. I tilted him unresistingly sideways and took his wallet from his hip pocket.

  It was gratifying to see that one of my punches had split his lower lip. I went inside, soaked a tea towel and took two cans from the slab. Back on the porch, Des was stirring. He looked at me with eyes bulging and blinking at the same time.

  ‘You’ve broke my f
uckin’ neck.’

  ‘Don’t think so. Give it a wobble, up and down and side to side.’

  Despite himself he did as I said and made the movements without trouble although it clearly hurt him.

  ‘There you are. You’re all right. Nasty cut lip but you were game enough in your day, Des. You’d have been able to go a few more rounds.’

  ‘I’ll kill you, Hardy.’

  ‘Don’t think so. You had your chance.’

  I gave him the tea towel and took it away as soon as he’d wiped the blood from his face. Then I cracked the cans and gave him one.

  ‘Time for a little talk, Des, and please don’t say fuck you again. At least come up with something more original.’

  He set himself to say it again but thought better of it and clamped his mouth shut. That hurt his lip and he yelped and licked at the split. He drank as best he could with the side of his mouth.

  ‘I’ll help you get started,’ I said. ‘Someone paid you to take Ronny and you worked out who’d hired them. You tried to make your own deal for more money but it went to shit and somehow Titch got shanked. You’ve burnt your boats with Barry, that’s for sure, and you’ve lost Ronny. What’ve you got to lose by telling me who you were working for and why?’

  He shook his head and drank more beer.

  ‘Had to be someone planning to use Ronny as a tool against his dad. I can tell you this, the Federal Police had the same idea but it didn’t quite work out.’

  His eyes widened in surprise but he stayed silent.

  ‘It’s big stuff, Des. Too big for you. Probably too big for me. Nothing to say? Okay, let’s do a bit of detecting.’

  I opened his wallet and went through the contents—driver’s licence, RSL membership card, bank keycard, sixty-nine dollars, a card for Paddington Pussies, two lottery tickets, cards for various businesses like a motor mechanic and a laundromat, and a stiff white one for Ratan Mining International with an address in Singapore. CEO Lady Betty Lee Mountjoy.

  I held the card up for O’Malley. ‘That who you’re working for?’