Marriage & the Mermaid (Hapless Heroes)

by Cusack, Louise

  Venus slid her gaze sideways.

  A young woman in shiny pink clothes stood watching them. She flicked her blonde ponytail and added, “I don’t think your young friend would approve of you using his gun to kill someone.”

  Venus opened her mouth to say Randolph? then snapped it shut again, remembering that Randolph had told her to pretend they hadn’t met.

  Ted glanced at the pink girl. “You didn’t give me the gun. I took it off you, Betty, while you were stealing it.”

  “What can I say? The briefcase fell over. The gun fell out.”

  Ted smiled grimly. “I hope Randolph didn’t have anything else in that briefcase that he wanted to keep.”

  Venus frowned. Who was Betty? And then she opened her mouth to say that she’d knocked Randolph’s briefcase over in the cabana and it hadn’t opened, but… there was that pesky pretending–they–hadn’t–met promise again.

  “But of course he’d have a gun,” Ted said. “Resourceful boy.” He turned his attention back to Venus. “Were you going to take Winifred to the secret cave?” he asked, “where your kind lures their prey?”

  “No,” Venus said. She hadn’t enjoyed the cave. She would have taken Wynne to her room. “But I’m leaving tonight —”

  “Yes, you’re finished here,” he spat.

  The pink girl said, “I’m not staying around to watch you top someone. Just give me the money and —”

  “You’ll put my valuables in your car and go?” He shook his head. “You’re not going anywhere, young lady. I saw you take the rotor out of Randolph’s convertible, but you couldn’t find his keys, could you? They weren’t in the briefcase. So you can’t steal his car, and neither can you take your own car because that young constable has your rotor.”

  The pink girl narrowed her eyes.

  “I’ll give you Randolph’s when I’m ready to let you go,” he said. “So you’d better do as I say.”

  “Do what?” she snapped.

  Ted turned back to look at Venus, but he continued speaking to Betty. “Keep my son busy and send Randolph down to me so we can conclude our business transaction. The cave is twenty paces north of the stone stairwell. It has a hidden entrance.”

  Venus took a slow breath and tried to relax. If Randolph was coming to the cave, he would save her from Ted, wouldn’t he? Or would the fact that he was more interested in money than sex mean he’d do as Ted asked? It would be up to Venus to rescue herself then. Because she really had to get into the water.

  Ted pulled Venus’s arm and gave her a shove towards the back door. “It’s time to for me right the wrongs of the past,” he snarled.

  “What past?” Venus turned back to face him. “I haven’t been here before?” What had her sister done?

  She stayed just inside the doorway, not wanting to leave the brightly lit kitchen with its floor that Ted didn’t want bloodied. While she stalled she struggled to remember something about guns, but could only recall that they fired bullets. Unless they were empty, in which case people sometimes used them as an empty threat. Could that be what Ted was doing?

  “Does that gun have bullets?” she asked, pointing, because if it didn’t —

  He aimed away from her and pulled the trigger. Glass shattered over the cream colored double sinks and Venus’s ears rang with the blast. “Yes it does,” he said, and pointed it at her chest again. “Betty, hand me that lantern.”

  Betty whistled soft and low. “You are one mad old coot,” she said, then she hurried to obey.

  Chapter Thirty–Nine

  A loud bang halted conversation, and the library became still. Rand felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. That hadn’t been thunder. That had been a gunshot. Baz’s girlfriend, who had just run in babbling, closed her mouth and put her both her hands over it.

  “Wait here,” Baz snapped, maybe at both of them, but when he left the girlfriend followed him out.

  The moment the door was shut behind them Rand dived for the French windows that led onto the veranda and shoved them open.

  The shot had come from the east side of the house so he ran that way, to the end of the veranda where he plastered himself against the house to look around the corner. What he saw hit him like a kidney–punch. Ted had a gun pointed at Venus, and he was forcing her along the garden path. Rand remained perfectly still, watching, but inside his chest his heart was thundering and that was trouble.

  Venus had become his ‘people’ and that meant he had to protect her. From Ted. The moment he’d felt a twinge of empathy after they’d had sex he’d wondered if this might happen. He’d hoped like hell that it wouldn’t. But it had, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  It wasn’t a rational decision. You didn’t use logic to work out who your ‘people’ were. It was something that just happened. In his short lifetime Rand had fucked hundreds of women, and only two of them had ever become his people. Both had been prostitutes. One had OD’s and the other had been beaten to death by a drunk Rand had found and subsequently castrated.

  All he had left now was Poss, lying badly beaten at Lillbit’s, and Venus, possibly about to be shot.

  Baz Wilson’s unimaginative accusations of five minutes ago were suddenly irrelevant. It didn’t matter that Rand had felt clever in the face of them, knowing Theodore Tiberius Wilson had required far more finesse to sway than a simple blow job. Being seen as the ‘injured innocent’ had immediately raised Rand in Theodore’s estimation and lowered Balthazar to the bottom of the stack. It had been exactly what Rand had needed to clinch the deal. To win.

  But none of that mattered if Theodore shot Venus.

  None of it.

  So he padded along the veranda behind them and out into torrential rain that immediately plastered his hair to his head and ran down the collar of his suit jacket and stuck his shirt to his back. His beautifully shined shoes sloshed through puddles as he trailed Ted through the rose garden and then down a stone staircase onto the beach.

  Rand kept far enough back to ensure the old man never saw him, and that worked perfectly until Rand reached the bottom of the stairs and first Venus, then Ted, melted into a solid wall of rock and disappeared.

  No way!

  They’d only been ten meters ahead of him, and now they were gone. He ran over the wet sand, keeping close to the cliff face and wary of the tide that appeared to be rising. At one point, a foaming wave almost reached the sheer stone cliff and he had a heart–beat’s hesitation, wondering if he’d be trapped. But he kept running, right up to the place where they’d disappeared.

  Rain lashed his face and the roar of the ocean at his side was terrifying. Then thunder met lightning directly overhead and the combination of blinding light and deafening sound tore along his nerves like cocaine.

  Where was she?

  He felt along the wall, searching the shadows. Then he saw a faint illumination that quickly disappeared. He took two steps forward to where he’d seen it and slid his hand along what appeared to be a straight section of cliff, but the shadows were deceptive. There was a gap that led behind, perhaps to a cave, and he followed his hand to slip inside.

  Miraculously, the sound of the tempest outside dulled. Rand knew it was there, but it was no longer an assault on his senses. Reprieved, he stood perfectly still in the inky darkness and tried to catch his breath.

  The brief glow of illumination he’d seen was no longer there, but he knew that somewhere ahead of him Theodore had a gun on Venus. He wondered what the old man intended to do to her, then realised it didn’t matter. Rand just wanted her away from the threat.

  So he strained his hearing over the muted noise of the storm and thought he detected voices. He crept towards them, lifting his feet as quietly as he could and using his hands to guide him along the narrow passageway. Twenty paces along he saw the glow again and he slowed, straining to pick words out of the murmur of sound ahead.

  “… send a message to your people.”

  “Just let me go.” Venus soun
ded scared, and that stirred up Rand’s already tight stomach.

  “I don’t want your kind coming to Saltwood again.”

  “But I’m already going and I don’t know what —”

  “That’ll keep you quiet.”

  Ominous silence.

  Rand wanted to run but he forced himself to go slowly, to feel his way in the tight, dark tunnel. The journey was interminable but at last he reached the end and stepped out into a ten meter cavern lit by a gas lantern. Half the cavern was taken up by a rock pool, and at its side Venus was gagged and her purple hands were handcuffed to a ring jutting out from the wall. At her side, Ted sat on a flat rock beside the pool, his pants legs dripping into his slippers. The gun was nowhere to be seen.

  “That was quick,” Ted said when he saw Rand emerge. “Were you followed?”

  So the old bastard had been expecting him. “Not at all,” Rand said, and pretended to catch his breath. “I imagined you might need me, so I ran.” He looked at Venus handcuffed and then he turned back to Ted, and with his best perplexed expression said, “How can I help you, Theodore?”

  “You can dispense with the cultured accent for a start,” Ted replied, and tilted his head to assess Rand with a gaze that showed none of the dottiness of their afternoon miscommunications. “I know you’re a homeless hacker who came here to steal my estate.”

  Rand blinked, but that was his only betrayal of surprise. He took another step forward, still scanning for the gun. “You asked me to come here, Theodore,” he said, “to help you —”

  “The Power of Attorney has a backdoor clause,” Ted told him. “You were never going to get Saltwood. I tricked you.”

  “Bullshit,” Rand snapped, suddenly glad that the gloves were off.

  Ted simply smiled. “Youth and greed are so easily manipulated.”

  Rand shrugged out of his jacket, dropped it onto the sand and took another step forward, visually searching the rocks for the gun. Not seeing it. Did the old fart have it tucked into his cardigan?

  “Aren’t you curious about my motives?” Ted asked.

  Rand shook his head. He didn’t care why he’d been fucked over. He just wanted Venus, and out of there.

  But Ted was on a roll. “My son wasn’t coming home anymore,” he said. “He’d lost interest in Saltwood and I needed to be sure he wouldn’t sell it when I died. It’s been in our family for generations.”

  Rand wanted to puke. He couldn’t believe fuckers who had so much money they were worried about what happened to it after they died.

  “So I created a situation where he’d have to fight for his inheritance.” Ted smirked an I’m–so–clever smirk that Rand wanted to smack off his face.

  “And what do I get?” Rand said, hating to sound even remotely like he was begging, but he still had Poss to worry about. “I waste all this time, steal a fucking car to get here, and for what?”

  “Unlawful use of a motor vehicle,” Ted said smiling. “Tsk, tsk. Well you get nothing really…” But Rand had only taken one step forward before Ted pulled the gun from behind himself and aimed it at Rand’s chest. “Now, now, Randolph, you don’t want to be stabbed with your own sword, do you?”

  “What?” Stupid fucker, talking in riddles.

  “Your gun,” Ted said, wiggling it from side to side before aiming it at Rand’s head again. “Don’t you recognize it?”

  Rand dropped his gaze to the pistol then met Ted’s eyes again. “Oh yeah. I see my name on the barrel.”

  “So, you borrowed the gun,” Ted guessed, then smiled. “More used to a knife I suspect.”

  “Getting back to the topic, what do I get?”

  “You get to live if you can hold onto your temper,” Ted said, his smile gone now. “And if you do a small job for me I’ll give you a unit in Cairns and a million in shares.”

  That stopped Rand cold. Fuck. They’d be away from the Valley, getting jobs in the tourist industry. He could take Venus with him. It was just the start they needed. The tight hot anger in his stomach dissolved into liquid relief. This was going to work out after all. “Sounds fair,” he said, noncommittally, “What’s the job?”

  Ted glanced across at Venus. “Kill her.”

  Chapter Forty

  Baz dripped all over his father’s mahogany desk and didn’t give a shit. “What the hell are you up to, you stupid old man?” he muttered, opening and closing drawers, looking for some clue to what he’d been doing with Rand before Baz had barged in.

  “Betty’s making us a quick dinner,” Wynne came in behind him. “What can I do?”

  Wake me up from this nightmare, Baz thought, but what he said was, “Have a warm shower and change into some dry clothes,” sparing her a quick smile before he went back to the desk drawers. “No point both of us catching pneumonia.”

  “Should we have kept looking? Outside?” she added.

  Baz shook his head. “If dad’s further into the scrub than where we looked, we’ll never find him. We’re better to…”

  The drawer he’d just yanked hadn’t budged. He leant down and saw a keyhole. Locked. There was a thick letter opener on the desk and he jammed that into the drawer and shoved. It snapped.

  “Screwdriver?” Wynne asked, and Baz nodded. She ran out of the room and came back less than a minute later with a small canvas roll she unraveled on the desk. Baz thought it was a manicure set, but the implements were too big. It took him a second to realize it was full of the cutest pink–handled screwdrivers Baz had ever seen.

  He blinked, then looked up at her. “You keep this in your handbag?”

  “Boy Scout motto,” she replied, and dimpled. “Plus, I have no brothers. A girl has to fend.”

  “Not any more,” he reminded her, and gave her a quick kiss before snatching up a thin bladed screwdriver and jamming it into the drawer. One shove and he had it open.

  “A photo album,” Wynne said and frowned.

  Baz pulled the red leather–bound album out and opened it, not sure what he’d find. Secret papers? Power of Attorney? And was disappointed that it was only photos, until one caught his attention. It was his mother on the beach, smiling at the camera, standing against the cliff wall below the rose garden wearing a polka dot bikini. Baz remembered it had been new and he’d been counting the dots on it only days before… he’d left for boarding school.

  And there was something odd about this photo. The sadness he’d seen in the other photo album was gone and in its place was a look in her eyes that he wouldn’t have recognized as a child, but as an adult Baz could pick it. Sexual invitation. She’d been flirting with whoever had taken the photo.

  Baz closed his eyes, searching for memories but instead of grief, he saw another image behind his eyes, that same look on his mother’s face, followed by shock and shouting. He remembered her hands on his shoulders, shaking him, telling him…

  “The cave.” Baz opened his eyes and turned to Wynne. “I know where dad is.”

  “Then let’s go.” Wynne took the photograph album off him and put it on the desk.

  “No,” Baz said. “I want you to stay here with Betty.”

  “Betty wants to leave,” Wynne said. “She’s lost her keys and she wants to know if she can borrow the four wheel drive to —”

  “We might need that later ourselves,” Baz said, hoping no one was hurt but realizing a quick dash to Bundaberg might be necessary. If his father still had the gun Wynne had seen him with, anything was possible. “Tell her to wait here with you. I won’t be long.”

  Wynne gave him a hug and buried her face in his chest. “Be careful,” she whispered, then looked up into his eyes. “I’ve never had a fiancé before. I don’t want to lose the first one I get.”

  He smiled at that. “The only one you get, Ms Malone. I intend to make sure of that.” He kissed her hard and let her go.

  “You sure we shouldn’t ring the police?” she asked, her expression strained.

  “Quite sure,” Baz lied. “I’ll sort this out, don’
t worry.”

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  “And if Carlos comes back, tell him to wait in the house with the two of you.” Just in case my father is completely crazy.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Wynne said and let his hand go.

  Baz took off, out of the study doors onto the veranda, down the stairs and along the garden path, dodging rose bushes illuminated by the lightning. Thankfully the rain had stopped.

  Gripping the slippery metal railing, he ran down the old stone stairs to the beach where the pounding surf competed with the thunder for noise supremacy. Everything seemed smaller than his childhood memory, but he felt along the cliff face to where he knew the opening must be and, surprisingly easily, he found it, slipping through the natural camouflage in the rock wall to feel his way along the narrow tunnel. Venus would be okay. He’d get her away from his father and find a way to sneak her off the estate. Baz was actually more worried about Wynne’s reaction to his father’s latest stunt. The last thing he wanted was to scare her off when he was so close to having his dream of a family and children, but how realistic was it to expect her to stick around with his old man acting like this? Stupid fuck. First the Randolph Budjenski debacle, and now he was wielding a gun. Where would it end?

  He came out of the tunnel blinking, into the shadowy light of the cavern and the first thing he heard was his father’s voice.

  “I told you someone was coming,” he said, and Baz saw Budjenski in shirt–sleeves standing beside his father. What the hell is he doing here?

  Ted waved Baz away. “This is none of your business.”

  Baz glanced around the cavern and saw Venus handcuffed to a metal ring set into the wall. She was trying to make noise over the gag stuffed in her mouth. “What the fuck?” He turned on his father. “You’ve gone too far this time. I don’t care —”

  A shot rang out in the tiny cavern, the bullet ricocheting off the wall behind Baz who halted in mid–stride and gaped at his father.

  “You will return to the house, Balthazar,” Ted said calmly, aiming the gun at Baz now. “Randolph and I have business to transact.”

  Baz couldn’t take it in. He shook his head to clear it, to work out what the hell… “Venus,” he croaked, pointing. Baz knew then that he had to get the police. His father was too far gone. But he wasn’t about to walk out and leave her there.