Bones of Contention

by Jeanne Matthews

  “Don’t move,” she said, backing away.

  A black man limped out of the tent, clutching his leg. He said, “You broke my leg.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, noting that his forehead was adorned with the same bead-like scars as Bill’s.

  Acid took a step forward. “Put down the gun. I’ll drive you back to Jabiru and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  She backed up against the truck. The engine was still running. Her whole body seemed to vibrate with it. At least, the hand that held the gun was vibrating. “One more step and I’ll shoot. I swear I will.”

  “You’d better put down that gun before you hurt someone seriously.”

  Who? She spun in the direction of the new voice. It belonged to a big strawberry blond with a freckled face and a rifle as long as California.

  “Shoot the bitch,” said Acid.

  Dinah’s attention triangulated. She shifted her aim from man to man to man. It looked like a zero sum game. If she put down the gun, she was a goner. And if she didn’t, same difference. Her head throbbed and her hand shook.

  She aimed the gun at the newcomer. “I don’t know if I have the nerve to pull this trigger. But you’re not giving me much choice here and my fingers are starting to spasm.”

  He laid down his rifle.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Burdett?” Acid looked at him in disbelief.

  So did Dinah.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her heart was whanging away so loudly they all must hear it and she had no idea what to do next.

  Burdett said, “Why don’t you just get back in the truck and drive away. Nobody’s going to stop you.”

  It sounded so obvious. So simple. “Where are we?”

  “A couple of miles from the Black Point wharf. You’ll be there in no time. Without the truck, we can’t follow you.”

  For a kidnapper, he was a remarkably accommodating guy. Too accommodating. The rest of the gang would no doubt be lying in wait for her in Black Point. She willed her thoughts to slow down. Gradually, her heart quieted and her fear subsided enough to keep her voice from quavering. “Mr. Burdett, I want you to tie up your two friends. Use the tent’s guy rope.”

  “Lady, you’re holding a gun. Why don’t you declare victory and leave?”

  “Do as I say.”

  “Buggeration.” He walked over to the tent and began to disjoin the rope from the tent and stakes.

  Dinah pointed the gun at Acid. “What’s your name?”

  “Sykes.”

  “And you?” she asked the black man.

  “Tommy.”

  “Well, sit down on the ground, both of you. Tie their arms behind their backs and their ankles tight together.”

  “But my leg’s fractured,” said Tommy.

  “Then you’ll have to keep very still and not let Mr. Sykes toss about and make it worse.”

  Burdett grabbed Tommy under the arms and forced him onto the ground.

  Acid said, “Are you insane, Burdett? What gives? Did you let her out?”

  “Of course, not. Get down and don’t be a jackass.”

  Dinah eagle-eyed the operation to make sure there was no funny business.

  When Sykes and Tommy were incapacitated, Burdett threw a covering of canvas over them. He said, “It’ll keep the flies off.” He put his finger to his lips, jerked his head toward the water, and mimed a walk down the beach.

  What fresh treachery was this? Dinah picked up a bent tent pole for a staff and with the gun, gestured him ahead of her. They walked about twenty yards, past row upon row of cages, more than she’d been able to see from inside the truck. The squawking had abated somewhat, but there were a few rowdy diehards, especially the parrots.

  When they were out of earshot of Sykes and Tommy, Burdett turned around and said, “You’re making a big mistake here. I’m a federal drug enforcement officer, undercover, investigating a major cartel.”

  “And I’m an undercover Martian. Investigating the disappearance of humanity in humans. Cops don’t shoot at innocent women or gas them and truck them off to the boondocks.”

  “You were never in any real danger. If you were, I’d have stepped in.”

  “My hero.” She cast a leery look over her shoulder. “Where’s the other Nigerian? The one who calls himself Bill?”

  “He’s going to meet us later tonight. Look, I’m telling you the truth. My name’s Josh Burdett, AFP, Australian Federal Police. Don’t you speak English?”

  “Well enough to know it’s used almost exclusively for the telling of lies.”

  “What do I have to do to convince you?”

  “Show me your ID.”

  “I’m undercover. I can’t carry ID.”

  “And I can’t wear green hair. Everybody would know I’m an extraterrestrial.”

  “Look, this is a major operation. There’s a boat due in tonight from Papua, New Guinea with four thousand kilos of heroin on board. I have to be ready to play my part.”

  “You see what I mean about the lying?”

  “Undercovers have to lie or we’d never get any evidence.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Who do Sykes and the Nigerians work for? Who wanted me shanghaied and why?”

  “The big kahuna, the money man who calls the shots. He thinks you have a portable hard drive with some data that jeopardizes his operation. I’d like that, too. You can trust me to get it to the right people.”

  “Uh huh. And did the kahuna order me killed back in Jabiru?”

  “He just wanted you out of the way for a day or two. Sykes got gun-happy.”

  “Did he get spear-happy, too? Is he the one who killed the journalist?”

  “Probably. I wasn’t there. The crew took its orders from a man named Fisher, but he’s dead now. With him gone, there’s a lot of suspicion. Tonight’s shipment could be the last one for a long time. That’s why we have to make the bust.”

  “The man who ordered Sykes to get me out of the way, have you ever seen him?”

  “No, but his name is Wendell Dobbs.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ve got cell phone taps on most of the crew. Hard to believe an old duffer like that’s the brains of the outfit. Talks like a hayseed. Y’all bettah taste the product to make sure it ain’t mixed with sugah, you heah?”

  Dinah dashed away a tear. The truth ain’t for sissies.

  A scaly lizard with a gaudy orange neck frill gaped and hissed at them like an espresso machine and the birds amped up their screeching. She raised her voice. “What does animal poaching have to do with drugs? Do you hide the stuff inside the cages to deter custom officials from any hands-on inspection?”

  “The poaching’s a natural offshoot of the drug operation. Boat comes in with the drugs, goes out with the birds and snakes and what have you. Same as with truck drivers, they don’t like to deadhead. This way, they’ve got cargo to sell at their next port of entry.”

  “Not this time, they don’t.”

  “What?”

  She was seized by an epiphany, maybe the spirit of some indigenous deity, or maybe just her sense of outrage and fair play. These creatures were quintessentially Australian. They belonged here, in the wild, not plucked or skinned or caged for some foreigner’s amusement. “Open the cages.”

  “You’d blow a whole year’s worth of undercover work? Just when we’re about to spring the trap?” Burdett was incredulous. “Empty cages will tip the people on the boat that something’s wrong.”

  “Something is wrong, especially from the animals’ point of view. Let them go.”

  He shot her a corrosive look. “The goanna back there is mean. You want me to get my face chewed off?”

  “Use this to shunt it aside.” She dropped the tent pole on the beach and stepped out of its reach. “If the goanna turns on you, I won’t let you suffer.”

  They were standing in front of the last row of cages. Angrily, he snatch
ed up the pole and, working his way back down the line, he began to dislodge the latches and liberate the captives. Lizards and various small marsupials scampered out and made a beeline for the trees. The parrots and cockatoos squawked and flapped as they swooshed off into the bush. The green snake uncoiled and crisscrossed the sand with surprising swiftness. The goanna hissed and charged, switching its heavy tail from side to side, but Burdett deflected it with the pole and it scuttled away toward the safety of the woods.

  When all of the cages had been emptied, Burdett stood at the opposite end of the line from Dinah, a short sprint to the truck. A shorter sprint to the rifle he’d put down. She felt a rush of panic. What if he drove off and left her stranded? What if he picked up the gun and started shooting?

  His face was a study in disgust. Shaking his head in frustration, he hurled the tent pole like a javelin into the trees and slogged back across the sand toward Dinah. The nearer he came, the queasier she began to feel. Why hadn’t he driven off? In hindsight, she should’ve given more thought to why her hands were so loosely tied, why the key was left in the ignition, and why he laid down his rifle so obligingly when asked.

  He flumped down on the grassy dune where she was standing and handed her a cell phone. “You’d better dial zero-zero-zero.”

  “Is that…?”

  “It’s Oz’s nine-one-one.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  Dinah paced up and down in Jacko’s Katherine office, scratching her mosquito bites and listening to his end of a conversation with somebody she surmised to be high up in the Australian Federal Police.

  “You should’ve notified local law enforcement about your bloody federal lurk if you didn’t want a balls-up. And that drongo Burdett who let my witness be gassed and kidnapped couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, much less a major bloody drug bust.”

  Dinah felt bad for Burdett. She hoped he didn’t suffer any career repercussions as a result of her recklessness, but she didn’t have time to sit around and postmortem the government’s mistakes. This was D-Day, the end of denial, and she had places to go and things to do.

  “Stop your whinging, Danneman.” Jacko hunched over his desk and stabbed a pen up and down on a notepad with measured ferocity. “It wasn’t my lot that put the mockers on the operation and reaming me out gets you sod-all. It’s down the gurgler and you may as well admit you bollixed it up when you tried to do an end run around us yobs here in the Territory.”

  Dinah got the sense that a turf war between Jacko and the feds was the only reason she wasn’t scratching her mosquito bites inside a jail cell. Not that Burdett or anyone else could blame her for what happened. She hadn’t gone to Black Point of her own free will or torpedoed their drug bust on purpose. They should be thankful she hadn’t killed anybody. Not yet, at least. Of course, the day was young. If Jacko didn’t cut her loose soon, she would strangle him with her bare hands.

  She’d been forced to spend last night in Jabiru where she was debriefed by what seemed like a whole battalion of policemen. The hours had oozed by like molasses in January and by the time she arrived back in Katherine this morning, she was mad to be on her way to Crow Hill. Jacko had promised not to keep her long, but the phone call from Danneman had lasted approximately a millennium and still no wave of dismissal.

  She tuned out his voice, pulled her mother’s letter out of her tote, and read it again. Remember Campiglio. That was it. Two slapdash words scrawled on a piece of scented blue stationery were the sum total of her mother’s contribution to knowledge. The freaking mystique never ended.

  “Bloody hell, Danneman, are you going to rabbit on about it all day or am I…you what?”

  Dinah could stand it no longer. She picked up her tote and walked out. If Jacko had anything more to say to her, he could bloody well chase her down. She ran out into the street and jumped into the Rav. It’s go time, she thought, and drove to the Katherine Lodge where she made a call from the public telephone.

  ***

  Seth loafed outside the lodge bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the house. There were only two cars out front, Seth’s and Cleon’s. She parked behind Cleon’s Mercedes. Her thoughts were yeasty, foaming with anger and disillusionment and a host of disorderly feelings she couldn’t sort. She tried to marshal them, line them up to march into battle. Get him talking, lull him into a relaxed state of mind, be oblique, go with the yin. Or was it the yang?

  She got out of the car and started toward the door.

  Jiggling the ball in one hand, Seth walked around and joined her. “I was hoping I’d see you again before I left.”

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Your friend, the inspector, carted Wendell off to the clink day before yesterday. Margaret’s in town doing the mother hen thing and trying to round up an attorney for him. Tanya quit and Neesha and the kids had an emergency. She’s taken Thad to the hospital.”

  “Oh, my God! Drugs? What happened?”

  “Seems Thad wouldn’t give K.D. her journal back and she rubbed some of those poisonous Gympie-Gympie leaves on the inside of his jeans. The kid left here wearing nothing but his briefs and screaming in agony. I think K.D. got more payback for her prank than she counted on.”

  Neesha certainly got more payback than she’d counted on when she mated with Cleon Dobbs and bore his devilish progeny, thought Dinah. She felt a pang of guilt that Thad had taken the rap, and suffered K.D.’s over-the-top revenge, for her meddling. But sometimes people were punished for things they didn’t do, which was what had brought her here this afternoon. “Where are Mack and Lucien and Eddie?”

  “Mack came back this morning, all was forgiven, and the three of them motored off in pursuit of art. Cleon and I are the only ones holding down the fort.”

  She knew that Cleon was here. She’d telephoned and warned him to expect her. “I need to speak with you, Seth.”

  “Let’s go inside. There may still be some coffee.” He salaamed. “After you.”

  The kitchen was dark and cool with a greasy smell of fried mutton. The late morning sun filtered through the dirty window above the sink, but it seemed only to accentuate the gloom. The room had the feel of a grotto. Poor little Cantoo, abandoned and despondent, rested her head on her paws in front of the pantry and paid them no heed.

  Seth poured leftover coffee into one mug, filled another with water and set them in the microwave. The seconds ticked by. Neither spoke. When the beeper beeped, she flinched.

  He handed her the mug of coffee, dropped a tea bag into the hot water and dunked it up and down. “Shall we sit?”

  “No.”

  “You sound kind of uptight. What’s on your mind?”

  “How did Cleon take Wendell’s arrest?”

  “Howled like a hyena. He and Margaret can’t believe he’s guilty.”

  “He’s not. Not of murder anyway.”

  Seth shrugged.

  She said, “Cleon must be pleased. In spite of sticky-fingered Thad and meddlesome me, his plan worked like a dream. I expect you’ll be rewarded for your stellar performance.”

  “What plan are we talking about?”

  “Payback. Vengeance. A final settling of accounts.”

  “Against Wendell, you mean?”

  “Wendell, Lucien, Neesha. And you were instrumental, weren’t you?”

  “I just know that if I stand here long enough you’re going to say something I can follow.”

  “You’re not Cleon’s son. That was a pretext, a way for him to introduce you into the household and jerk everybody’s chain.”

  “Why would he want me around if I’m not his son?”

  “To help him punish Lucien and Wendell. They’d each betrayed him. He hatched a plan to out-Judas the two of them before he died.”

  “And how is it you think I furthered this fiendish plan?”

  “That first night, you phoned the lodge to let Cleon know you were on your way. You identified yourself to Mack as K
ellerman, Cleon’s P.I. But you couldn’t keep the name straight. You told me that Kelliston was the P.I. For a pro, you’re not a very adept liar, Mr. Farraday.”

  “I misspoke. We’d had a fair amount of wine as I recall.”

  “The night Fisher died, you didn’t go into Wendell’s and Lucien’s rooms to search. Your job was to plant. The memory stick you slipped into Wendell’s briefcase lays out the details of a huge drug operation. Cleon’s operation, not Wendell’s. Wendell may be a cad, but I’m guessing he’s clueless about his father’s avocation as a money man for the sale and distribution of illegal drugs.”

  “Why would I help the old man frame Wendell?”

  “Somehow you got wind of poachers in Kakadu and connected the operation to Fisher. That shouldn’t have been hard to do. Fisher did a lot of reckless talking. You traced him to Sydney and found him keeping company with Cleon. I don’t know how you and Cleon fell into your conspiracy. You wanted to spy on the doctor, maybe kill him. But Cleon made you a separate proposition, didn’t he?”

  “You’re strung too tight, Dinah.” He smiled his Mona Lisa smile and bunched into a t’ai chi stance, moving his arms in slo-mo as if floating under water. “The dark and downward-seeking force is the yin. The t’ai chi master learns to yield so that the negative is overbalanced by the opposing force of the yang.”

  “Cleon probably brought the knife with Wendell’s prints on it with him from Sydney. But tell me this, did you poison Fisher or did he?”

  He rotated his torso, pivoting on the ball of his left foot while his right hand rose in a balletic arc. “You know, t’ai chi would mellow you out. It cleanses the mind, lets the negative energy flow past.”

  “The negative flow from you would shame Niagara.”

  He reached out a hand and caressed her hair. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs and relax.”

  “Don’t!” She jumped away and slapped him across the jaw.

  He grabbed her arm. “Hit me again and I’ll deck you. You know I didn’t kill Fisher or you wouldn’t be fronting me off like this without a gun in your hand. Where is my gun, by the way?”