by Dave Warner
‘Jensen?’ She called several times in slightly different tones.
Jensen was torn between his new find and his owner’s voice. Finally Jensen pulled himself away and ran to her. She scolded the dog playfully before continuing. The archer took a deep breath. He had decided on a throat shot. It was his best chance to kill Edershen but the wind was picking up making it more difficult. While he was debating whether he should aim for the heart instead he saw Edershen’s head appearing over the rise. He quickly drew an arrow and took aim. The bow he was using was not a tournament bow. It had been chosen for portability but though it was less accurate, up until now the archer had not seriously considered the possibility he might miss, not at short range. He paused, his arm extended taking the weight of the bow. Edershen’s dog must have found the beagle’s scent. Instead of continuing he sniffed in a tight circle. Should he fire now? It was tempting: the target was less than twenty metres away.
He held his nerve.
Finally the pooch lost interest and began moving forward fast, perhaps picking up the old scent. Edershen’s mind was elsewhere. He had had no idea that less than just a few metres in front of him a deadly arrow was pointed at his throat. Peter felt a great calm as if the anointed hand had laid itself upon his shoulder. He let the arrow go.
47
‘Page four.’
Wallen slapped down a newspaper on the bench. This time they were at a coffee shop on the other side of Hamburg, a more bohemian place where would-be film directors and the like might hang out. It was five days since he had killed Edershen. Peter scanned the newspaper article. Police were ‘baffled by the killing of an elderly man by an arrow through the neck’. Klaus Eldershen was described as a ‘former soldier’, a ‘quiet man who kept to himself’. Police thought it may have been inadvertent and requested whoever had fired the arrow to come forward.
He looked at Wallen. ‘They haven’t called you?’
‘No.’
‘If they had found prints they would have don’t you think? I’d say Klaus washed up the glasses you drank from. They are dead-ended. They think it’s a psycho or an accident.’
Wallen was inclined to agree but cautioned that they should stay alert.
Caution was foreign to Peter. ‘Next, Dieter Schaffer,’ he declared.
‘He’s disappeared.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve made enquiries. He’s quit his apartment, no forwarding address. If you believe his drinking cronies he’s in Turkey, Australia or South America.’
‘His old police buddies might know.’
‘They might but no way am I going near them.’
‘Fuck Schaffer. Edershen said Donen was in Bangkok. We’ll go there. We’ll find the bastard and kill him over his tom yum soup.’
But poor Wallen wasn’t up to it. His health was failing and in the end Peter had to go alone, traipsing from sordid bar to bar, through the strident clang of traffic, the petrol fumes and the sticky heat, acting hale and hearty with arsehole ex-pats. He’d had an artist do up a sketch of how Donen might look and he’d worked his way through sleazy bars showing it to bar girls, drug dealers, paedophiles. A couple of older German guys claimed to recognise the man but not as Kurt. ‘Gerd’ he was calling himself. Three weeks he’d done this until his money had run out and he’d been forced to return.
He had just one slim hope left. His oma. He had not wanted to involve her but what choice did he have now? He played on her sentiment, suggested they do something for grandad’s anniversary, contact his old friends. All this took time. Poor old Wallen went into hospital on his last legs. Then from an ex-colleague of Dieter Schaffer she learned he had moved to Australia. She even got an email address.
‘But you don’t want to push and ask for a physical address because when he’s found dead, when the wasp stings the spider, someone remembers, especially old cops. But Australia is a big place, he could be anywhere. How was I going to find him? He wasn’t in any phone book, he wasn’t on Facebook. How, how, how?’
Peter Bourke paraded back and forth along the lip of the trench. He was shouting only to get his voice above the wind. He was in control, a fundamentalist preacher playing to a congregation of one.
‘You know how?’ he continued, slyly. ‘What obsesses all men? Come on, give it a shot?’
Bourke smiled, it was important his foe appreciated his guile. ‘Football. Schaffer was a huge fan of Hamburg Football Club. So, I contact them and say, “I have a friend of my late grandfather moved to Australia, Dieter Schaffer but I don’t know where he is and I’m going there for a visit. Is he on a mailing list or something?” Sure enough, next thing I know I am here where the gods intended me all along, part of the earth, and the sky and the wind.’ This last word he did shout into the brooding vault above that seemed to grow lower every few minutes.
‘See, I play the spider when I need to be the spider, and the wasp when I need to be the wasp. Three weeks I am watching Schaffer, the dog. I sit behind him at the coffee shop, I watch him park his car, offer weed to young women. The wasp is almost ready to sting … and then one day he calls out to somebody in German and I look across the road and it’s fucking you, the Emperor.’
He directed his gaze down at the loathsome one who had ruined his life. Still those eyes appeared to be laughing at Peter, though like the stung spider, Osterlund was inert.
‘This isn’t the end. The spirits aren’t finished with you. They will eat your gizzards from the inside and even when they are done, when there is nothing left, not one glob of fat or sliver of bone they will make you say his name, the last words you will ever hear: Pieter Gruen.’
48
The wind was picking up every second, rocking his car on the exposed coast road so fiercely Clement’s forearms ached from fighting the wheel.
‘The grandson?’ Even via the tinny phone speaker in this hurtling missile, Risely’s surprise was clear.
‘Yeah. I don’t know if he’s in the file but I should have allowed for the possibility anyway. Name is Peter Bourke.’
‘Now all we have to do is find him.’
‘He works at the Mimosa. I remember the name from the staff list. He’s served me, an Irishman. He was there when the witness informed me about a biker arguing with Dieter Schaffer. I’m guessing he’d been following Schaffer, spied Lee arguing with him, followed him.’
Risely was digesting this. ‘Why’d he kill him?’
‘Probably just to divert us. Or maybe he figured we’d find Lee and Lee would mention the young dude following Dieter Schaffer and we’d start to look for him.’
Clement turned off the main road onto the long Mimosa driveway. ‘Should be able to ask him in person very soon.’ Clement gave him a detailed description for circulation and announced, ‘I’m here.’
‘I’ll assemble a team. Don’t approach him till we arrive, unless you have no choice. And well done, mate.’
Clement cruised into the reception carpark and pulled into a bay. Pieces of broken foliage were whipping through the air. Clement removed his service weapon from his glove box and checked it. Hopefully he would not have to use it but Peter Bourke had proven he was prepared to unleash any amount of force and use any weapon. Even though he had promised poor Mathias and Heinrich he would do everything he could to keep the boy unharmed, Clement wasn’t going to be caught second-guessing with an axe or arrow coming for his head. He forced the door open and stepped out of the car.
The shelter of the Mimosa grounds reduced the wind’s power substantially although the tops of the palm trees were shrieking. In the distance maids ran fast as they serviced bungalows. Loose buckets tore off on their own adventure.
When he had entered reception through the automatic doors the gusty wind swirled briefly through the lobby. Clement caught sight of himself in the mirror, a devil from the netherworld bringing chaos and darkness.
According to the concierge Kate, Bourke’s shift did not begin until midday. In all likelihood he was in
the bungalow he shared with the Brazilian, Arvie, and another young man, Jake Windsor, but there was no guarantee. Arvie was flat out securing the garden from the cyclone so at least he wouldn’t be in there but Jake Windsor was a waiter working the same shift as Bourke and there was every chance he might be with him. The same went for any other staff on the late shifts, especially given the impending storm. It was likely they would be jawing together. There was no phone in any of the bungalows. Kate had most of the staff’s personal mobile numbers but Clement didn’t want to risk trying those. If they were hanging with Bourke and their phones went off he might tumble something was up, so Clement told her to keep staff away from the bungalows and channel them into reception if she could. She could make up some excuse about the bungalows not being safe in the cyclone.
‘What kind of car does he drive?’
‘A white SUV.’ She didn’t have the registration. She was nervous.
Clement reassured her, ‘Don’t worry.’
From her look, it didn’t help. He moved closer to the reception door and called Risely again.
‘He drives a white SUV, rego unknown but it should be on the list you have.’
‘Manners is onto it. We’re suiting up. I’ll bring you a vest.’
It could not be assumed Bourke had acted alone but that was Clement’s instinct. He cursed himself for not considering the possibility of a grandchild as the killer and in the next breath forgave himself. You didn’t expect a grandchild to come avenging his progenitors. Nor did he blame his German friends. Even if they were aware of Manfred Gruen having a child, the image that naturally came into their heads was a little toddler chasing butterflies. The world was moving too fast. In a blink Phoebe would be walking down the aisle, or more likely moving into an apartment with some dude who wore his cap backwards.
His thoughts flitted to his father. Clement still hadn’t called him. Peter Bourke was just a kid when his own father suicided. Was that the point where his life had been irretrievably shunted in the wrong direction? What was he going to do when he was confronted? Sometimes these people didn’t care if you killed them, in fact they wanted it.
Clement automatically gripped the pistol in his coat pocket, its hardness and weight physical reminders of its awful power.
Clement asked himself what he would do if Bourke came at him. They needed him to find Osterlund. Clement had sat under a fan drinking coffee, making polite conversation with the monster who had chopped Gruen to pieces with a chainsaw. Would Clement risk his own life to find him?
He put the question aside hoping he might never need to learn its answer.
49
Daryl Hagan was set up on the Great Northern Highway ten k out of Broome looking for any white SUVs using the road to Derby and the desert. Despite its name, the road actually ran more east than north at this point. The wind had picked up steadily in the three hours he’d been there and now it was whipping through hard. He could smell the rain at its back. Off the top of his head he opined there may be no cars on the road at all with a big storm coming through. His usual partner in crime Beck Lalor disagreed. She reckoned there were plenty of white SUVs especially if you counted cream and even though there was a storm coming she reckoned there’d be a half dozen. Hagan suggested they have a case of beer on it. If between them they stopped more than six white SUVs she won. Being a woman who enjoyed a beer on a hot day, and a bet on any day at all, she agreed. She was set up ten k out of Broome on the road heading north to Cape Leveque. Hagan made her promise she wouldn’t be stopping vans or silver SUVs to boost her numbers. As it turned out he was going to skate through easy on this one. Checking in via the radio he’d learned she’d only stopped one white SUV so far. It was not the one they were after but she had taken details just in case. For his part Hagan had stopped only two white vehicles, one of those, a larger four-wheel drive, out of sheer boredom. Lalor was already trying to wriggle out of the bet though, claiming that the cyclonic conditions were keeping people off the road.
‘It’s a tainted sample,’ she said.
‘Well you would say that,’ he replied. Lalor had done some tertiary studies and she liked to bandy about words and statistics that he kind of grasped without ever being totally sure what she was on about. ‘But you knew that when we bet.’
She agreed that was true. ‘But I reckon they’re going to call us in early, so it can’t count.’
She had a point there but Hagan could shoot back some statistical concepts of his own.
‘So we were talking four-thirty finish, right?’
That would have been the normal time they would work to before somebody else came to take over.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay so we can extrapolate the numbers, right?’
‘Extrapolate? That’s a huge word for you, Hages.’
He was grinning and he imagined she was too. Hagan liked Lalor a lot. If he didn’t already have a cute girlfriend he might have considered extracurricular possibilities.
‘I picked it up from Manners.’
‘The IT guy?’
‘Yeah. So what do you say?’
He could hear her mind computing. ‘Sure.’
Uh-oh. She sounded confident. Had he miscalculated? He thought he had the numbers falling his way.
‘We’ve done three vehicles in approximately three hours,’ she said. It was getting harder to hear her over the wind. ‘Which “extrapolates” to seven in seven and a half hours, so I guess I win.’
‘No, hang on a second, one of those was a big mother that I only stopped because I was bored.’
‘So you’re saying it’s actually two in three hours which would equate to five in seven point five hours, meaning you win.’
‘Correct.’
‘Yes. Unless we get another couple before they call us off, then I win.’
‘Has to be any time. This wind is getting very angry.’
‘It’s worse here.’
‘What happens if we get one more?’
‘I guess that would be a tie.’
‘Take care.’
‘Keep your eyes peeled.’
‘I will.’
As much as they joked about it both were aware that this was not a job to be taken lightly. The man they were looking for had killed two, maybe three people. If a cop stopped him he might start firing, and they were all on their lonesome, not the ideal situation, but neither was having an axe killer running around a small town.
50
‘No car by the bungalow.’
Clement was standing in the small garden at the corner of the last staff bungalow in the set of four before Bourke’s. From this vantage he could clearly see the empty parking bay in front of 12. Wearing a headset Risely stood behind him, looking even bigger in his body armour which they were all wearing. It always felt strange to Clement, the way cricket pads felt strange. Whiteman and Shepherd were next in line with Parker and Hathaway, the biggest guys at the station. Graeme Earle hadn’t quite made it back yet and was ropeable he was missing out. Paxton had two other big guys working to the back. Ryan Gartrell and Jared Taylor were waiting at the driveway in case Bourke came driving in from elsewhere. Risely called through to the men informing them there was no vehicle out front and warning Gartrell and Taylor to call in immediately if they spotted the white SUV approaching.
The radio crackled.
‘Bravo team in position.’
This was Paxton. The bungalows backed right onto bush and though there was no rear door there was always the chance Bourke might try and hightail it out of a window. Paxton and his men would be ready. Risely nodded to Clement, his call.
‘Let’s go.’
Clement and Risely left cover and started quickly down the narrow path, the others close behind, Parker and Hathaway carrying a door ram. Number 12 was the last of the four bungalows. After talking it over with Risely it had been decided the best approach was a simple knock on the door under the guise of emergency services. As soon as they cleared bungalow 11
, Whiteman and Shepherd broke to cover the sides. Clement walked up the step, Risely to his left, pistol ready, Parker and Hathaway behind. Clement knocked loudly to be heard over the wind and yelled.
‘Emergency services. We need to clear the bungalow.’
There was no response from inside. Clement guessed the others were no less tense than him. He knocked again.
‘Is anybody there? Emergency services.’
Still no response. He tried the door knob and was surprised when it yielded, the force of the wind powering it open, almost off its hinges. Clement and Risely entered, pistols drawn.
‘Peter?’
Clement was forced to yell. Risely was running commentary into his microphone. One glance showed the lounge room was clear. The bedroom doors were open. Only the bathroom door was closed. Clement snapped it open. It was empty too. Clement fought deflation. Somebody closed the front door but the walls were still groaning. Clement advanced and studied the bedrooms. One looked cleared out. They were too late.
51
The wind had increased. The desert sand was nasty and careless where it struck. Hagan was forced to shelter his face behind his forearm. Since he’d spoken to Beck there’d been one car, total, tourists getting out of Dodge. His radio went. It was Mal Gross.
‘Yes Sarge.’
‘We’re bringing it in, Hages. It’s coming in faster than they thought.’