Marked

by Denis Martin

  Kat scrambled to her feet beside me, and I understood how she felt. Somehow you don’t face this sort of danger sitting down. We stood there together in that tiny space, listening. Two men talking, but they were some distance away. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and then they faded altogether.

  “I think they’ve gone into Jed’s shack,” whispered Kat.

  Moments later, a door slammed somewhere, and I felt Kat tense, breathing in sharply. Footsteps. Right outside. “You checked in here?” A loud voice with an Aussie accent, almost on top of us.

  “Yeah, nothing.”

  The outside door scraped against concrete as someone pushed it open. I could hear them moving around inside, but the blood thumping in my ears seemed even louder. Our tiny cubbyhole was suddenly like a coffin, dark and suffocating. Dust-laden air tickling the back of my throat. Am I going to cough? What if I sneeze? Kat clutched my arm, and I swallowed, fighting the urge to clear my throat.

  “What’s all this shit?” The clinking of glass.

  “Home-brew. Seems our friend was a hophead.” A much softer voice, English, and now I recognised it. Last time I’d heard it, he’d been standing on the track just above us with a radio.

  “Yuck!” A bottle smashed against the floor and then the door scraped again as they pulled it shut. But they were still right outside the shed.

  The Aussie was clearly in charge. “Rastas’ll be here soon. He’s got Bruno with him – take one of them with you and search the track, properly this time. If you can find the bike, they shouldn’t be too far away.” He paused, as if listening. We could hear it too, an outboard motor. “That’ll be him now. We’d better get down to the beach. And don’t forget, mate, we haven’t got time to piss about. Not with the court hearing being brought forward. We need that girl, and we’ve only got about forty-eight hours. And we want her alive. She’s no use to us dead.”

  “What if things go wrong? If she ends up dead?”

  “Let’s make bloody sure she doesn’t. But … if she does get wasted, we’ll have to keep it quiet – keep the body hidden till it’s over. Her old man won’t nark on us if he doesn’t know where she is. Just remember, if she gives us the slip, we’re in deep shit, mate. Deep shit.”

  “And the other kid?”

  “If he gets in the way, take him out.”

  I listened to their footsteps fading away towards the beach.

  If he gets in the way, take him out …

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The murmur of the outboard grew louder and we could hear waves swishing beneath the hull as it approached the beach. Then it throttled back and a few moments later died altogether. Rastas and Bruno had arrived.

  I knew things were happening down there, but I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about the Aussie’s last words – the bit about what to do with the kid if he got in the way.

  “Did you hear that?” Kat whispered. “The court case must be in the next couple of days. After that it’ll all be over. Dad won’t testify if he thinks they might’ve snatched me. Got to get away. Got to get word to him. Let him know I’m okay.”

  “Jeez, Kat. It’s only a court hearing. Not worth dying for.” I just wanted to stay hidden in that cubbyhole – wanted to wait safely until it was all over.

  “Tell that to Mum,” she whispered bitterly. “A bit too late for her.” Her grip on my arm tightened, fingers digging into my flesh. It hurt more than it should’ve, and I remembered Burger had been hammering away at me. Same day, but a lifetime ago. “I want those bastards to go down,” she hissed. “If Dad doesn’t testify, they’ll get away scot-free. But it wouldn’t end there – he knows too much. They’d get him in the end just to shut him up.” She slid her hand down to my wrist, squeezing it urgently. “Come on, Cully. We can’t stay here. Got to get help.”

  I didn’t know what to do. The idea of leaving this safe little hiding place terrified me, but I knew if I didn’t help her, she’d try something on her own. And if I let that happen, I didn’t think I could live with myself. Jed had died because he cared – and I needed to show her that I cared too. Prove Leatherman wrong. But I didn’t want to die.

  I placed my other hand over hers and pressed. “We’ll get away,” I muttered. “We’ll make it.”

  But how? Enough light filtered in from above to tell us it was still light outside, and there were at least four men out there looking for us. All of them probably armed. It seemed hopeless. Finally, we agreed to wait for darkness. She wasn’t happy, but really, we had no choice.

  We settled ourselves as comfortably as we could on the floor. When you’ve got nothing to do except think, time passes like a dead hedgehog on the road. Every time you look it’s still there, unpleasantly, in exactly the same place.

  The silence got to me in the end. “What did you mean when you said Blissy’d heard stories about Jed?”

  Kat turned her head, and in the gloom I could see her looking at me. “Nothing,” she whispered at last. “Forget it. I was just being silly.”

  “Come on, you can’t leave it there. He was my friend too, a bloody good mate. And I want to know what people were saying about him. Don’t have to believe it, but I want to know what they’re saying.”

  There was a long silence while she thought about it and I waited. “It’s mostly what Blissy told me,” she said eventually. “Kreigler knew about it too.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Well, when he was at Cooksville High, as a teacher, he got into a bit of strife.”

  “Yeah, he told me there’d been some trouble, but I didn’t think it amounted to much. D’you know what happened?”

  Another pause. She didn’t want to badmouth Jed, and I could understand that. Then she sighed. “They reckoned he was too friendly with some of the kids … some of the older girls. And sharing weed around. Things like that.”

  “And was he?”

  “Sharing weed? Wouldn’t surprise me. You could get high just by sticking your head inside his shack.”

  “Okay, but what about the girls?”

  “Don’t know. I think it was only one girl, but–” She stopped, tilting her head, listening.

  Someone was coming up the path towards us. Voices again. Footsteps passed the shed and carried on, but one of them must’ve paused, because he called to the others. “I’ll take the wagon back up to the top. Then I’ll meet you on the track. And stay awake – you know roughly where the bike went over. Reckon they’ll still be somewhere near there – probably hurt. But don’t forget they could have the gun.” The footsteps from the track faded. “Bloody kids,” muttered the voice just outside the hut. It was the Australian. We heard him making his way back to the beach, and a minute or two later a car door slammed. A murmur of voices, and then the engine coughed into life. The shrillness of gears screaming, and I pictured the heavy Pajero wheels spinning in the soft sand. But then it began grinding its way up past the shack towards the road.

  “Shit,” I said. “They found the bike. It must’ve gone right down to the beach.”

  “Yeah.” We were talking quietly, but we weren’t whispering any more. Pretty sure no one else was in hearing distance. “There must be more of them out there than we thought. You heard that bit about the gun? They must’ve sent someone back to my house. Must’ve found the guy you clobbered and seen his gun was missing.”

  We crouched together in silence for a few moments. Trying to make sense out of what we’d heard. “D’you think there’s anyone still around outside?” Kat asked at last.

  I thought about it. “There’s gotta be. We didn’t hear the boat go out again and they wouldn’t leave it on the beach by itself.”

  “But what if they did? What if they’re sure we’re lying mangled somewhere up there in the bush?” She gripped my arm, facing me. “We’ve got to check. If there’s no one down there …”

  I stared at her, trying to control the slipperiness squirming heavily through my gut. She was right. “Yeah,” I said hopelessly. “I
suppose we’ll have to.”

  At least it was starting to get dark.

  It was an alloy runabout with a low dodger screen at the bow and pontoon tubes along each side. The prow rested on the sand with the stern facing seawards, and a light rope stretched from the fairlead to an anchor that someone had sunk into the sand. The only thing that stopped us from shoving it off the beach and doing a runner at full throttle was the man sitting on the foredeck. He was smoking, his feet dangling over the side. The tide was going out and, as we watched, he slid off his perch and pushed the boat a couple of metres into deeper water. Didn’t want to be stranded by the falling tide.

  We were watching from beneath an ancient pohutukawa, not far from the old boatshed. The roots of the tree reached out onto the sand like the legs of a massive spider and, for the moment, they sheltered us from the man’s view. Behind us, in the bush, a tui was singing. How could anything sound so happy on a day like this?

  “We ought to head for the boatshed,” whispered Kat. “We need to check Jed’s boat anyway.”

  “We won’t get anywhere near the door without him seeing us.”

  “We can sneak round the other side. Get in there.”

  “Dunno, wouldn’t want to be trapped inside. What if he decides to have a look around?” I wasn’t keen on the idea.

  “Should be able to get out again – we’d see him coming.”

  That was true. The boatshed had plenty of gaps in the walls. It looked about as old as the pyramids, built mostly of stone, like the hut we’d hidden in earlier. Same builder, I guessed – the old codger who’d lived out here with his whisky still and a boat. In the good old days, before they’d spoiled his fun by putting in a road. But its life as a boatshed was nearly over. The upper walls along each side had been timbered, and most of the boards were rotting. Some had fallen off completely, and I didn’t think we’d have any trouble finding a hole big enough to squeeze through.

  I was wrong though. Kat slipped inside effortlessly, thudding softly to the floor and then scrambled back to her feet. I didn’t think I was much bigger than she was, especially around the chest, but I had a hell of a job getting in. And once I was halfway through the gap I couldn’t back out, so I had to carry on, Kat heaving and pulling. That was the worst bit because the racket we were making would’ve woken the dead, and while she was helping me she couldn’t watch the man on the boat. I half-expected him to burst in the door, like the noise-control police at a party.

  Kat left me to recover, peering through a crack in the wall to check on the man outside. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “He hasn’t moved.”

  “Good.” I was sucking deep, struggling to sort myself out. The last few hours had been tough. I’d been pummelled in the ring, smashed against the fridge by Leatherman and nearly killed in a motorbike crash. I’d literally stumbled over the body of a really good mate and I could still smell his blood on my hands. Sprawled on the boatshed floor, with my head and shoulders against the stone wall, I’d just about had enough. Scrambling and clawing my way through that gap in the wall had goaded every tiny pain back into life. My knee throbbed, my upper arms ached and every breath sent shards of glass spearing into my chest. The tender swelling on the back of my head felt about the same size as the fridge handle that had caused it.

  The man lounging on the bow of his boat barely a hundred metres along the beach wasn’t helping either. A thug with murderous mates and, probably, a gun.

  If he gets in the way, take him out….

  “Come on.” Kat took her eye from the crack. “You look like you’ve been through Burger’s shit shredder. But wallowing down there in misery isn’t going to help.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Burger’s shit shredder? Where’d you hear about that?”

  She grinned. A flash of teeth in the gloom, and it must’ve taken a bit of effort. “He threatens everyone with it. It’s the kind of guy he is – friendly.” She paused. “You gonna check out the boat? See if it’s okay to use if we get a chance?”

  “Yeah.” I struggled to my feet and made my way along the side of Jed’s dinghy towards the stern. The cover was off the outboard. It was resting upside down on the back seat, and that wasn’t a good sign. “I think it’s been got at.” The light was fading fast, and I was finding it difficult to see. I thought they might’ve cut the fuel pipe, but when I squeezed the rubber bulb to prime the motor, everything seemed to be working and petrol dripped from the carburettor when I pressed the plunger.

  That cheered me up. “It might be okay.” Then I saw something else. “Damn!” The white enamel of the spark plugs showed up clearly in the dimness. There were two of them, one above the other. But no leads. Someone had torn them both out and without them, we weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. Not in this boat.

  “Plan B,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Plan B. They’ve buggered the motor.”

  “We don’t have a plan B.”

  “No.”

  She was still watching the beach, standing behind me with her eyes pressed to the wall. “We weren’t going to get away in it anyway,” she said. “Not while he’s out there. We’ll have to wait. Maybe when it’s really dark we can sneak along the beach. Hell of a long way to go to get any help though.”

  “There’s no one living round here.” I wiped my palm across my forehead. At least the smell of blood had gone. Now my hands stank of petrol.

  Kat took her eye from the peephole. “Got a better idea?”

  “No, but if we could get that bastard out there to bugger off and leave the boat …”

  “Sure. That would be good. Wish I hadn’t lost the gun.”

  I stared at her. “Jeez, Kat! What would you do with it? Just walk up to him and shoot him?”

  “After what they did to Jed?” she asked viciously. “Yes, I bloody would! Give me half a chance!”

  I shuddered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  She wasn’t going to let it rest either. “There’s got to be a weapon of some sort in here.”

  “Bloody hell, Kat.” I took my eye from the crack I’d been peering through and stared at her. “That arsehole out there – he’ll have a gun. What are you going to do? Wander over and smack him in the nuts with a boathook?”

  “Don’t be such a prick! We’ve got to do something. Anyway, he looks bored as hell. What if he decides to have another look in here? You’re not going to get through that hole again in a hurry. Let’s see what we can find before it gets too dark. Even a fishing knife.”

  I shuddered once more, imagining it. Fronting up to a person – a real person – with a fishing knife. I knew I couldn’t do it. But Kat wouldn’t give the idea up, and I began poking quietly around the boatshed.

  Most of Jed’s snorkelling gear was stacked in the bow of the dinghy, and I rummaged through it. Nothing. Feeling around under the seat was a bit more fruitful – I pulled out a wooden pole with a steel hook on one end and held it up.

  “What is it?” whispered Kat.

  I handed it to her. “It’s a gaff … for lifting fish into the boat when you’ve caught them.”

  She hefted it like a club. “Better than nothing. Anything else?” She leaned it against the wall beside her and took a quick peek through the crack, checking on our friend outside.

  “There’s this.” I picked one of Jed’s diving spears out of the bilge. It was a steel rod, nearly a metre long with a fluked arrowhead screwed to one end. A length of cord was attached to it, hanging from a sliding metal ring. “It’s for his spear gun. I reckon you’d be better off with the gaff though. But, hell – not if you’re fronting someone with a gun.”

  “What about the rest of it? The bit that fires the spear?”

  I felt under the seat again. Didn’t like the way things were heading. Kat seemed set on starting a war, and it wasn’t one we were likely to win. I pulled the spear gun out, cringing as it scraped against the alloy hull.

  “Jeez, keep it down!” She was watching throug
h the crack. “I think he heard that. He’s looking … looking this way.”

  I froze at the panic in her voice. Just stood there helplessly, clutching the spear gun. Needed to act, needed to move, but I couldn’t.

  “I think it’s okay,” she whispered. A long pause and then she turned her head briefly towards me. “He’s lighting another fag. God, I thought we’d had it then.”

  “Me too.” I turned back to the spear gun. I’d been crushing it in a death grip and my fingers were aching. Forced myself to relax, but my heart was still pumping like a jack hammer. “Sorry, that was bloody silly.”

  “Wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve done today.”

  I placed the spear gun carefully on the floor and found the crack I’d been peering through earlier. It was darker now, but the man out there was still easy to see. An eerie red lit his face as he sucked on his fag. He was gazing up the hill towards Jed’s shack.

  “How long d’you think till it’s properly dark?” I whispered.

  “Don’t know. Maybe half an hour.”

  “We’re probably safer in here while it’s still light. But if we hear the Pajero coming back, we’d better try and get out. Make a run for it along the beach. Don’t want to be trapped inside. Not if they decide to make another search.”

  “No. What about that spear gun? Can you get it to work?”

  I picked it up again. I remembered Jed showing me how it worked. It was the day we’d been out in the dinghy together, fishing. He’d promised to take me to the offshore islands for a dive sometime – but that wasn’t going to happen now.

  “It’s not too hard,” I said. “You just slide the spear down here until it clicks into place. Like this.” I fed the spear into the groove on the top of the shaft and heard it lock against the trigger pin. “Then you pull the rubber back and hook it into the slot on the spear. But Jeez. You’re not going to use it, are you?”