by Zane Lovitt
Perhaps that’s why Cheryl was killed. She came home, unexpected, caught Rudy stashing Busby in the duct. Blood on his hands from killing the dog, itself overwhelming evidence that he’d killed Mister Jinx, and Cheryl already up to her neck in his bullshit. The perfect storm.
[JIVE]FaNcY_tUrDs leaps into my sightline. I lightly machine-gun his balls and he dies where he lands. Free-For-All means you don’t wait to determine if the stooge is on your team or not, you just kill him. Kill everyone. I searched for twenty minutes for a Team Deathmatch, but there’s always a Free-For-All running somewhere. Kill Everyone is the default mentality.
The computer-generated corpse of [JIVE]FaNcY_tUrDs disappears without so much as a sound effect. That’s what corpses do in this world.
How the fuck does Nina Chiancelli know about Busby? Or at least, that there’s evidence out there which turned out to be a dead dog? Rudy didn’t tell her or she wouldn’t have brought it up the way she did. Maybe Rudy told someone who told Chiancelli. Beth? She’s surely the only person he’d tell, all that misplaced puppy love, but what’s she doing talking to a journalist? Another grift?
It takes four bullets to dispatch FckU,Bogan_66 when he sprints into view. Even then he only dies because the last of them is a headshot. You can withstand three hits to the chest and still be functional, but one headshot and you’re out of the game. Just ask Cheryl Alamein.
Chiancelli called the dog ‘evidence’, said it was something the police hadn’t found. But why would the police care about a dead dog? What the fuck is it evidence of? Piers could easily have murdered Busby, so it doesn’t prove anything new. What does it prove?
But the real splinter in my brain, the thing that gives me a jarring sensation when I think of it, is Rudy’s behaviour after the fact. If he killed Busby, why go from shelter to shelter asking after him? For years. More crazy self-delusion? Is it a cover? Does he think the police are checking up on him thirteen years after the murder was solved? And if they are, does he think they’re checking up on how much he misses his pet?
GTFO.
[JIVE]FaNcY_tUrDs must have respawned on the other side of the map but finally here he comes. First there’s the telltale rattle of a flashbang, which is the telltale rattle that someone knows you’re here. I’m loaded out with a tactical mask, making me impervious to flashbangs, but suddenly there are two of them, [JIVE]FaNcY_tUrDs and [IMPY]Craw.fishMayo, who turn on each other at close quarters: [JIVE]FaNcY_tUrDs takes a knife from [IMPY]Craw.fishMayo, who goes down with another lucky bullet from me. The corpses vanish and leave me with the realisation that, for the first time since yesterday, I’m allowing myself to consider that maybe Rudy didn’t kill his mother.
But then who? Ken Penn, as revenge for Mister Jinx? Piers? Did he have it in for Rudy as well as Cheryl, only Rudy wasn’t home so he killed the dog instead?
Whoever was responsible, why kill a pet and hide it? What did it achieve in Ken Penn’s house that it had to be done again?
All three of them lurch into sight, [JIVE]FaNcY_tUrDs leading the way. They must have agreed to do away with the camper before they go back to murdering each other. A grenade flies by and a semtex hits my body, but before they pop I go down in a cyclone of bullets. Explosives wrench my corpse, four or five of them. These stooges really wanted me. Now I’m dead among the chickens.
What did it achieve the first time that it had to be done again?
When the killcam replays my death in slowmotion, you can see all those bullets, the detonations. And what else you see is that I don’t let off a single shot, not even a spray-and-pray. I don’t move in those final seconds. Because suddenly I’ve got a whole new idea about who killed Cheryl Alamein.
58
Beneath the button is a name, Woods, and by pressing it I pump a friendly tone into the house beyond the door. It has no peephole but a long window to my left that must be how they see who’s ringing the bell. I try to appear officious and norpy with my hi-vis polar fleece and my clipboard. The clipboard is mine but I bought the polar fleece from an army disposals on my way through the city.
I woke up this morning in a kind of fugue state, the return on a night spent asleep when sleep was not possible. My curtains glowed with morning and I tried to remember what day it was, checked my phone to be sure it was only Tuesday. Not Friday. Not Friday. I sat up too quickly and stirred the codeine pill that had pooled at the base of my brain, it being my solution to last night’s sleeplessness and the endless cascade of possible outcomes for what I planned to do this morning. I’m hoping eight-thirty is an acceptable time to come knocking.
A solitary chime sounds some distance off. As if someone’s holding a teacup next to my ear and they’re tapping on it with their fingernail. I hear it again. Tink. A remote worksite. It echoes off the homes and parked cars on the street, its source unclear. Too far away to be from this house.
The door opens to reveal a slim woman in a white T-shirt tucked into jeans that are fastened high on her waist. Her tan is recently sprayed on, her teeth recently whitened. My first thought is to wonder why she’s done that to herself.
Before I even speak she seems to detect my judgment, winces with worry.
And I’m like, ‘G’day.’
The phrase sounds wrong in my mouth and instantly I drop the rugged persona. ‘I’m Craig from WestTech Electric?’
I leave it at that, as if surely I’ve said enough. She only stares back, still fretting.
‘Sorry I’m a bit early. Got a few jobs to do along this street and I had to get started.’
‘Pardon me?’ A nervous laugh. ‘What is this about?’
I put some panic in my eyes.
‘Geez, I’m…I must have got the wrong house. I’m really sorry. I’m looking for…’ I consult the clipboard. ‘…483 Grand Street, Albert Park?’
She’s got the hips of a woman with kids and her face is slightly warped, as if childbirth was so traumatic it made her eyes bug out of her head like Quaid at the start of Total Recall. They wrinkle at me now, not suspicious but confused.
‘That is…here. I mean, this address.’
‘Are you Missus Woods?’
‘Ummm…’ Another nervous smile. ‘Should I have been expecting you?’
Her name is Alana Woods and her electricity provider is WestTech, but that’s all the information I could find last night before the codeine kicked in.
‘I have a work order here…’ I wave the clipboard. ‘It says there could be a repair issue and I’m supposed to inspect between ten and twelve today.’
‘Ummm…That’s the first I’ve heard…’
‘Your meter’s working okay?’
Still that tink tink noise just above the traffic.
‘I wouldn’t know…’
‘The Jebson gauge is ticking over twenty times a minute?’
I made that up. I made up the very concept of a Jebson gauge. And I choose in this moment not to feel bad for duping her.
‘I…I’m not sure. It’s right here.’
She pushes open the door to reveal a long hallway, tasteful pictures on the walls. A single-storey home, sparkling with fresh paint in an effort to compete with the terraces across the road and the red-brick mansion, Ken Penn’s former home, that looms directly next door like the schoolyard bully. A slew of men’s shirts hangs off the laundry door, a stained-glass window keeps the hallway dim and classy.
The breaker box is here at the entrance, mounted to the panelled walls. I step inside. She keeps the front door open and waits there; if I’m a psycho she can run for it.
‘Just so you know,’ I say, not trying to sell it anymore, just saying the lines because I spent the drive here inventing them. ‘Clients with WestTech are entitled to an inspection every twelve months. You’re a little overdue. Your last inspection was eighteen months back? Does that sound right?’
For a moment I’m impressed with myself. I’ve really got the knack of ringing people’s doorbells and lying to them. You’d think I would hav
e been caught out at some point in the last few days. Then I remember that Glen Tyan did catch me out and he pushed me into a urinal and I’m not impressed with myself anymore.
‘Will this take long?’
Her hands clasp at her waist, fingers dance with embarrassment.
‘About ten seconds.’
I open the box door to find a bright new board but the box itself is old so there’s hope. The back of the door wears a sticker with steps on how to do a monthly safety check and a sheet of A4 held up with tape, identifying the role of each circuit on the board.
Nothing more.
I sigh. For a moment I feel a sting of tears, but that’s just self-pity.
‘All right,’ I say. Conclusive and instantly bitter.
When Mum had our old place in Eltham treated for termites, like, a decade ago, the record of application was taped inside the door of the breaker box. We sold the house before she died but I would bet the sticker’s still there. This one’s been removed. The one that will tell me who it was that treated this house in 1999, who it was that helped Ken Penn find the dead Mister Jinx in his living room. The last meagrely viable suspect for the murder of Cheryl Alamein.
It’s possible the box isn’t as old as it looks. Or the sticker is somewhere else in the house and I don’t have a chance of finding it. Or…
From a distance: Tink.
Before I leave, I’m going to look behind that A4 page.
Tink.
The nervous woman faces out the door, apparently talking to herself.
‘What is that child up to?’
Tink.
But I’m not listening to her.
Tink.
I pick urgently at the tape, catch a splinter of wood under my nail but I claw harder. The paper tears and there’s something here. Faded and brown. Warped and peeling.
I tear off the A4 in its entirety, don’t care if she protests.
Treated for termite infestation: 3-4/6/1999
Treatment performed by: Des Blake
Treatment used: Fipronil (Terminate)
Des Blake Pest Control
It hardly seems professional. No logo, no job number or ABN. The words are scrawled in such a way that either Des Blake wrote it on a boat on the high seas, or he’s someone who didn’t do a lot of writing. I can’t tell if I recognise the name or just want to. Des Blake. Desmond Blake.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You’re all good. Sorry to bother you.’
Tink.
If previously she was worried, now she seems downright panicked, but manages ordinary conversation because I think panic is her natural disposition.
‘You’re not going across to 486, are you?’
She wrings her hands like they’re trying to strangle each other.
‘486 Grand Street?’ I check my imaginary work order. ‘Ummm… might be. Why?’
‘Just be careful.’
‘Careful of what?’
‘You’ll see when you meet him.’
And the knowing smile she makes as she shuts the door, it’s like whatever. Puh-leez. I bet she’s never talked to Rudy, not enough to judge him on anything more than the scuttlebutt she hears from the other Grand Street busybodies.
Tink.
I’m thinking all this butthurt when I realise that the worksite sound, it’s coming from Rudy’s house. That’s what she meant. Rudy is building something over there. A rocket to fly to the moon.
I move down the steps, pulled on a zipline to Rudy’s home. Despite the lack of evidence I can tell that something’s happened. Something that makes the skin on my neck tighten. I bolt across the road, narrowly avoid a speeding motorcycle. Stomp over the wilful garden. Ring the doorbell and no one comes. Ring again, wait, ring again, then again, to be sure that no one is in fact coming.
I back up, back down to the street. My phone vibrates—it’s Beth, but I’m not taking calls. At the end of the row I see a laneway that I jog to and scrutinise: just a strip of wonky cobblestones between high brick walls, but it doglegs at the end—the bluestone laneway behind Rudy’s bungalow. I hurry, still with my clipboard, wearing my hi-vis. What will I say if Rudy asks about them?
Around the dogleg there’s an old printing factory. To my right is Montrose Row.
The noise is louder as I approach the rear of Rudy’s bungalow. I can hear the belting noise, not a distant tink anymore but a wholehearted thunk, woofing out in shock waves from beyond the wall. The door into the bungalow is ajar, itself an indication that today is not like other days.
Fumbling, I use my ballpoint pen to draw on the teeth, force myself to take my time after yesterday’s disaster but my hand is shaking. The final product is not artistic, not gapingly accurate, but I’ll keep it concealed beneath the clipboard.
From inside, Rudy grunts, pained.
I push the door open and step through.
59
The bedroom is austere like yesterday and Rudy isn’t here but a section of brick above the window is gone. Gone as in leaving a hole like a Tetris piece and I can see clear to the house at the end of the garden. Thunks and yawps come from above, then a metallic boom that shakes the structure, all the air inside it.
I call, ‘Rudy?’
Before the ceiling can fall in I scurry to the open garden door, past the stairs that are hidden beneath the junk from the first floor, past another block of missing wall above the landing. A shower of brick dust and ash swoops my path.
‘Rudy!’ I yell it this time.
Silence. I peek out and up.
His face is a coalminer’s. Clothes and hair sooted grey and a perpetual mist of dust swirls around him, around the yard. The source of the dust is the second storey of the bungalow, the front portion of which, as well as most of the roof, has been demolished. Now it smoulders like London after the Blitz. A sledgehammer hangs from Rudy’s hands. Rudy is the Blitz.
‘Hi.’ He smiles through the grime.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Watch!’
Rudy raises the hammer. I arch across the garden to a safe distance and watch him bring the iron weight down onto the south wall, dislodge another brick that plummets to a great pile of them rising up against the ground floor, climbing over each other to get back where they belong. He swings again, grunts, swings again and crash, another brick, his face red and intense, glowing with the accomplishment of having destroyed so much of a solid, fit-for-purpose dwelling.
His exertion triggers a coughing fit. The sledgehammer drops aimlessly to the bricks below and Rudy grins like I’ve caught him pulling the wings off a fly.
‘I thought I’d…’ He gestures at his destruction like it’s a big joke. ‘The roof almost collapsed on me. I mean, it did collapse on me. It almost killed me.’
My bafflement only makes him more excited.
‘Imagine these…’ he points to three thick timber beams. Before the first floor became a sundeck, they probably held up the rafters. ‘…and all this falling on you. Now look at me.’
Rudy pulls up the sleeves of his T-shirt, points to his face.
‘Not a scratch. It’s amazing.’ He laughs, waits for my amazement.
I force a smile. If someone relayed that story at a cocktail party, I would be amazed. But that’s not where we are. I stagger across the strewn bricks, as close to the remaining structure as I’m prepared to get, fan dust from my face.
‘Why are you doing this, Rudy?’
‘Listen,’ he says, climbs awkwardly off the ravaged top tier of the studio and onto the bricks, still with exhilaration in his eyes as he reaches me. ‘Tonight’s it. The night.’
Another shiver crowds my neck.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m doing it.’ He lowers his voice, self-conscious. ‘I’m doing it tonight.’
‘But…’ Today is Tuesday. I checked. ‘What about the insurance?’
Rudy grins, shakes his head, looks at his wrist where there’s no watch.
‘If I died right now, B
eth would get a million dollars.’
‘What?’
‘We went yesterday. She took me. After we saw you. It was her idea. We went to this place, Tatham…Tatam Insurance, and I got this thing…provisional thing. It means I’m insured now. Starting now. So we don’t have to wait for Friday.’
From the back of my mind, I hear a slow clap for Elizabeth Cannon.
Rudy senses my disbelief.
‘I tried to call you. I tried to call you when I got home. But there wasn’t…Something weird happened with the phone…’
‘But what about our policy? My policy? It’s illegal to have more than one.’
‘Yeah, but your one hasn’t come through, right? They told me at the place that you could just cancel it and that’s all. I had to pay them the fee but…but that’s okay. It’s not like I need money anymore.’
‘What about all the work I put in, Rudy?’ This is me clutching at straws.
Rudy smarts, doesn’t get my irritation.
I’m like, ‘How are you going to pay the premiums?’
‘Beth said she would.’
‘Does she know what we’re doing? What we’re planning?’
Now Rudy hesitates, which means he told her. She acted surprised and supportive. And she told him there was a way for it to be over with tonight. That’s what his hesitation means.
And that’s why she’s calling me. She wants to give me her side of the story. Smooth things over. Keep me in her corner.
‘How do you know she didn’t go to the police? She could be talking to them right now.’
‘She wouldn’t.’ It’s Rudy’s turn to be irritated. He thought this was good news. ‘She reckons Glen Tyan’s got it coming. She was proud of me. She wouldn’t dob me in. She…’
He’s right, of course. She wouldn’t do that, not now that she’s actually in line for a million actual dollars. Bravo, Beth.