Catch the Zolt

by Phillip Gwynne

  ‘Well, it looks like our time’s up,’ he said.

  It was four-twenty!

  ‘But how did you find him when nobody else could?’ I said, trying to appeal to his vanity again.

  ‘Cops,’ he said dismissively again. ‘It’s all there, under their noses, and they’re too stupid to see it.’

  ‘It’s all where?’

  ‘Facebook,’ he said. ‘Now get the hell out of here.’

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I got up, walked across to the door.

  ‘Oh yeah, and one more thing.’

  I turned around. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The next time I catch your friend – and don’t worry, I will catch him – I’m going to kill him.’

  My eyes flickered over all those photos of Hound de Villiers with his biceps and his guns, and I had no doubt that he was serious, that he’d killed before, and that if he caught Otto Zolton-Bander, he was going to kill him too. Which was exactly why I had to get to the Zolt first.

  Outside, the taxi had gone.

  The man in the red bandana approached me.

  ‘Let’s start with the watch,’ he said.

  There was no malice in his voice, just a sort of matter-of-factness. I was carne fresca, he was a meat-eater; this was how the world worked.

  I thought about taking off, and I had no doubt I could outrun him – he looked too big, muscle-bound – but where could I run to? I knew nothing about the Block, or this side of the city for that matter. I’d started unclipping my watch when a hand grabbed me by the elbow.

  Carne fresca, I thought. Of course, they’re going to fight over it.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  It was Luiz Antonio.

  ‘Don’t look behind,’ he whispered. ‘Just keep walking.’

  I did as he said until we reached the parked taxi. We got inside, he started the engine, swung the wheel hard and we took off with a squeal of rubber.

  CREATURES OF THE NIGHT

  It had seemed like a good idea to go back to the Block that very night. ‘Cloak of darkness’ and all that.

  Especially since Mom and Dad had gone to some big charity function and Gus was ‘looking after’ us.

  It didn’t take me long, however, to realise that it wasn’t a good idea at all. Because at night the night creatures come out. They huddle on the corners, they skulk in the shadows, their hooded eyes watching your every move. Though technically they aren’t vampires, or werewolves, they have exactly the same desires: to drain your blood, to feast on your flesh.

  And this taxi driver, unlike Luiz Antonio, didn’t hang around, didn’t even question what I was doing. He just took my money and got the hell out of there.

  I walked past the Cash Converters. Although there was a light on, the front door was locked and there was no movement inside.

  ‘Hey!’

  From the shadows, a voice.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You want some, kid?’

  ‘No,’ I said, hurrying on.

  At the end of the block I turned right, and walked quickly until I came to the service lane I’d seen on Google Maps. I hesitated. At least on the street there were lamps, but down here the gloom was only occasionally relieved by the weak light spilling out from barred windows. I had to keep going, however. This was my plan, and I needed to stick to it. As for my backup plan, it was pretty basic: run like Usain Bolt, and keep running like Usain Bolt.

  I walked hesitantly down the laneway, past the overflowing bins, the scurrying rats, the stench of rubbish filling my nostrils, until I came to the back of Cash Converters. I took a quick look around before I started climbing up the fire escape. It was loose, and each step resulted in a loud rattling noise, a noise that I was certain the whole neighbourhood could hear. Nobody came, nobody called out, so I kept climbing, stopping at the second level.

  I tried the door. As I’d expected, it was locked. I took the tension wrench out of my pocket, inserted it partway into the keyhole and turned it as far as it would go. I took the pick out and got to work. Earlier, when I’d picked all the locks in our house, it’d had been surprisingly easy. There was nothing easy about this, though. Especially as I was halfway up a fire escape, in the most dangerous part of the city. Still, the first pin was straightforward. So was the second. The third pin didn’t want to go, though. I remembered what it said in the lock-picking manual I’d downloaded from the internet: Project your senses into the lock to receive a full picture of how it is responding to your manipulations. At the time it’d seemed a bit, well, zen, but now it was all I had so I projected away, trying to imagine the troublesome third pin.

  It must be a modified, I thought. Perhaps a mushroom pin.

  I recalled what the manual said about mushroom pins: less torque on the wrench, more pressure on the pick. I put this into action and it worked – I was able to set the pin. The fourth and fifth pins were also straightforward.

  I gently pushed the door open and the alarm went off.

  According to my research I had twenty seconds until the base was contacted.

  Down the corridor, down the stairs and into the Cash Converters. I grabbed the phone line and ripped it out of the wall. The alarm was still going, but I was hoping that wasn’t an issue. Even in good neighbourhoods people had alarm fatigue; I really didn’t think anybody around here would care less. I figured that as long as the security company hadn’t been alerted, I was fine.

  Back up the stairs, and the door to Hound de Villiers’s office wasn’t locked. I turned on the light. When I recognised a Garmin Oregon 550 in the top drawer of his desk I knew that it was the answer to my break-and-enter dreams. It was a handheld sat nav and a camera.

  I could’ve just taken it, I suppose.

  But somehow that seemed too much like stealing, and I may have technically been a criminal but I was certainly no thief. I turned it on and scrolled through the photos, stopping at the photo that had been on the television, in the papers: the Zolt handcuffed to a tree.

  And, being a sat nav, it gave the latitude and longitude, the exact place the photo was taken. I copied these numbers into my iPhone, smiling as I did. Espionage? Piece of cake.

  ‘What’s so funny, snotnose?’

  I looked up. At two night creatures: a vampire, a werewolf. Ready to drain my blood. Feast on my flesh.

  The vampire brought a knife up high so I could see it. The size of it. The seriousness of it.

  ‘I said, what’s so funny, snotnose?’

  How stupid was I to assume that everybody would ignore the alarm, that there were no concerned citizens? Of course, they were concerned, concerned that they wouldn’t get part of the spoils.

  ‘Here, it’s all yours, fellas,’ I said, holding out the sat nav.

  The vampire swiped it from my hand.

  ‘Where’s the money?’ demanded the werewolf.

  ‘What money?’ I said.

  The vampire flashed the knife.

  Thup!

  A drop of blood hit the floor.

  I looked down. My hand was bleeding. Now that I could see it, I could feel it too, the steady throb of blood leaving my body.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, panicked by the blood. ‘I don’t know anything about money.’

  ‘The money,’ said the vampire, coming closer.

  Middle distance running is often about gaps, about finding a way between two bodies. My hand reached down and grabbed a handful of paper, tossing it in the air. The two creatures were momentarily distracted and I took off, running between them. Again the knife flashed, the tip catching my shirt, but I was through. Out of the door, down the corridor. Back out through the fire-escape door. I could hear them, but they had no chance. A mere vampire, a mere werewolf, against an elite runner. I clambered down the fire-escape stairs into the laneway. Just as I was about to take off, a third night creature appeared out of the gloom and grabbed me. Wrapped his arms around me. Squeezed me.

  ‘He’s got all the money,’ yelled the vampire
from the fire escape.

  My arms were pinned, but my hand managed to reach into my pocket and grab the pick. I jabbed it down hard into the night creature’s arm. It punctured flesh, but I maintained the pressure, feeling it travel deeper and deeper, until it hit something hard.

  The night creature screamed, released his grip.

  And I ran.

  And kept on running until the Block and its creatures were far behind me.

  A$9.99 CASIO KEYBOARD

  ‘The Jazys have asked us over,’ Mom said to Dad at breakfast the next day.

  Dad looked up from the Financial Review and did this sort of pouty thing with his mouth.

  ‘Not the crumby Jazys,’ said Toby.

  ‘That’s so, like, you know, like,’ said Miranda, mimicking Briony’s precocious way of talking.

  Both my siblings looked at me, no doubt expecting my usual excellent anti-Jazy contribution.

  ‘Yes, let’s go to the Jazys’ house!’ I said, almost American in my enthusiasm. ‘I’d love to spend some quality time with Tristan.’

  Of course, they all thought I was being ironic, or facetious, or whatever the word is, so I had to keep enthusing, take it beyond ironic, or facetious, or whatever the word is.

  ‘No, seriously, Tristan’s a really nice kid,’ I said, recalling the really nice punch in the guts.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Miranda. ‘Once you get past all that obnoxiousness.’

  ‘All that obnoxiousness probably comes from a place of deep insecurity,’ said Mom, who’d obviously been watching Oprah lately.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘A place of very deep insecurity.’

  I’m not sure whether it was my enthusiasm that did it or not, but we ended up at the Jazys’ house, dipping biscuits into dips, listening to Mr Jazy talk about real estate.

  Mr Jazy was a short, thickset man whose most distinctive feature was a black, bushy beard that seemed to go from his neck to just below his eyeballs.

  ‘Prices in the Gold Coast can’t keep going up,’ he said. ‘The bubble is going to burst any day now.’

  Dad didn’t agree, however.

  ‘There is no bubble,’ he said. ‘As long as people from down south keep moving up here, then demand will outstrip supply and prices will keep trending upwards.’

  ‘Look at the stats, Dave. They’re not the ones driving this. It’s people who already live here, re-mortgaging, buying rental properties. Really, it’s one huge Ponzi scheme.’

  I was looking right at Dad when Mr Jazy said this and a look passed across his face.

  It was almost like he’d been caught out.

  It didn’t last, though, and Dad quickly returned to his usual good-natured self.

  ‘Ponzi schemes?’ he said, half-laughing. ‘You really do come out with some rippers.’

  ‘Why don’t you kids go and play?’ said Mom, who obviously thought the conversation was getting a bit too Ponzi for our ears.

  ‘You want to play Xbox, or something?’ I asked Tristan as we went outside.

  ‘Why are you being so goddam nice?’ he said. ‘It’s creeping me out.’

  Not as much as it’s creeping me out, I thought.

  But again I remembered those coordinates from the photo on the Hound’s Garmin Oregon 550. How every time I entered them into Google Earth they came up with the same location: Gunbolt Bay on Reverie Island.

  Still, Tristan was right: nice wasn’t the way to go with somebody like him.

  ‘So this holiday house of yours?’ I said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s as big as you reckon it is.’

  ‘Not as big as your holiday house, you mean?’

  ‘Nowhere near it,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a moron,’ said Tristan.

  ‘Prove it,’ I said.

  ‘Prove that you’re a moron?’

  ‘No, that your holiday house is bigger than ours.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Tristan. ‘You want us to bring them both here so we can compare them?’

  Occasionally, like now, when you looked at Tristan, you didn’t see anything but smirk. No legs, no arms, no torso; just a disembodied smirk.

  ‘Or I could check it out myself. Take you up on that offer and go there with you, it’s school holidays after all,’ I said.

  ‘You said that you’d rather eat Ronny Huckstepp’s faeces than go to Reverie Island with me,’ he said.

  I’d hoped he wouldn’t bring that up.

  ‘It’s just a figure of speech,’ I said, but Tristan didn’t look convinced. ‘As if anybody would even contemplate eating Ronny Huckstepp’s faeces.’

  Tristan considered this for a while. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask Mom,’ I said.

  Tristan looked at me, and there was an expression on his face that I didn’t get: was he grateful, or surprised, was he even going to cry?

  Right then I got the tiniest glimpse of Mom’s theorised place of deep insecurity. It was only the tiniest of glimpses, and it didn’t last long, but for a moment it made me wonder whether I had misjudged Tristan.

  ‘And you’ll sort it with Imogen, of course.’

  ‘Imogen?’

  ‘Yeah, Imogen,’ he said, hand moving to his crotch. ‘That’s the only reason I invited you in the first place, dipstick.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll sort it,’ I said. Nope, I hadn’t misjudged him; Tristan Jazy was so not okay. I had no idea how in hell I was going to persuade Mrs Havilland that she should let her precious daughter go away, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

  Tristan gave me a playful punch on the shoulder – playful for him – before he said, ‘Silvagni, you’re going to wish you ate Ronny Huckstepp’s business when you see how big our house is.’

  And then he disappeared inside to, as he put it, ‘hang with the serious people’.

  I knew that it was no use, that there was no way I’d ever get Imogen away from her mother, but I rang her anyway.

  ‘Thanks so much for saying yes,’ she said immediately.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I know you don’t really get on with Tristan and I really appreciate it.’

  Again, all I could come up with was, ‘Sorry?’

  Imogen explained it all to me.

  How Mrs Jazy had kept ringing Mrs Havilland, asking her if Imogen could come to Reverie Island with them. How there was this charity barbecue on. How Mrs Havilland had kept saying no. But then Mrs Havilland’s sister had decided to come to stay during that weekend. Because she wouldn’t be alone Mrs Havilland had finally relented and said yes, but on one proviso: that Dom go along, too. Sensible, responsible Dom. That it wasn’t just Tristan and Imogen.

  ‘So we’re going,’ Imogen said, excitement lifting her voice several octaves.

  ‘It seems like it,’ I said.

  It was exactly what I wanted, what I needed for The Debt, but why did I have this feeling that Tristan has just played me like a $9.99 Casio keyboard?

  POSTCARD WORTHY

  It was a three-hour trip to where we’d catch the ferry to Reverie Island. Mr and Mrs Jazy took turns to drive the 8-seater Lexus, while Tristan and Briony took turns to whine.

  ‘I don’t know why we didn’t take the plane,’ whined Briony from the very back seat where she sat next to Imogen.

  ‘Cars are so boring,’ whined Tristan from the middle seat where he sat next to me.

  It was soon obvious why Mr Jazy and his extensive facial hair liked to drive, though.

  ‘Those places are already returning low eights,’ he said, pointing to some newly built houses that seemed to have sprouted overnight like mushrooms. ‘Kicking myself I didn’t get a piece of that.’

  He seemed to know the value of every building we passed; it really was pretty incredible. Occasionally Mrs Jazy would look up from her Sudoku and say something like, ‘Well, you have enough on your plate already, dear’ or ‘There’s only twenty-four hours in a day, dear.’

 
When we stopped at a small town for a toilet stop, Mr Jazy said, ‘This joint has to be the next to move.’

  I looked around. It was a pretty place with little weatherboard cottages with rosebushes out the front. Two old men were sitting at a table in a nearby park playing chess.

  ‘It just can’t stay like this, can it?’ said Mr Jazy, looking at me.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Too close to the sea, and that new highway’s being built. This place has got to move. And soon.’

  One of the old men picked up a piece, went to move it, but changed his mind and put it back again.

  I remembered what Mr Jazy had said to my dad yesterday.

  ‘So what’s a Ponzi scheme?’ I asked.

  Mr Jazy smiled at me, the same way a teacher smiles at you when you ask them a question about their pet topic.

  ‘It’s an investment scheme where the returns are paid from other investors’ money, not from any actual profits.’

  I must have looked a bit blank, because he went on to explain it further. When he’d finished I said, ‘What happens to Ponzi schemes in the end?’

  ‘They run out of gas,’ he said. ‘They run out of new money and things get ugly.’

  ‘How ugly?’ I said, wondering if this could possibly happen in the Gold Coast.

  ‘You’re talking money, son. Lot and lots of money. So the answer’s real ugly. Things get real ugly.’

  Surely Dad was right, I thought. Surely things couldn’t get real ugly somewhere like the Gold Coast.

  ‘So you’re interested in real estate?’ Mr Jazy asked me, scratching at his beard.

  ‘A bit,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’d have to be more than his nibs over there,’ he said, indicating Tristan who was touching his toes, showing Imogen how flexible his hamstrings were. ‘Don’t know what’s the use of building up a business when there’s nobody to take it over.’

  ‘Total bummer,’ I said.

  Mr Jazy gave me a funny look. ‘So you and Tristan are really hitting it off, eh?’ he said as we walked back to the car.

  ‘Totally,’ I said, trying to manufacture some enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, you’re going to love Reverie,’ he said. ‘Plenty of mischief for a couple of likely lads to get into.’