I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  I sat back in silence, watching the two. My daughter’s hand moved to and fro on the cat’s head and back. Sappho started to make a sound like a small industrial machine, but less noisy than a foundry.

  “We’re not stupid, Juliet. We knew the cops’d suspect us first off.”

  “By ‘us’ you mean you and, uh, Cookie, and um—”

  “Ruby,” I said.

  “Grime Grrl,” said Annabelle.

  “Especially since Cookie had disappeared.”

  “Why was the sheriff looking for her the other day?” I said. “Who told you that?”

  “You did. Had she been making threats against Lesser?”

  “Shit no! Evasion of jury duty or some bullshit. Failing to no­tify the court. Willful disregard. Blah blah. Can you imagine poor Cookie stuck on a narrow chair in a court room listing to some boring lawyers droning on?”

  “She would have been excused from jury duty. All she had to do was—”

  Annabelle shook her nearly bald head in confusion. I remem­bered her long hair and could have wept. “That fucking Culpep­per! Why did he hafta choose now for his threats and demands?”

  “Mere coincidence?” I said. “I think not.”

  “Ha ha,” said Juliet.

  “If the lady vigilantes didn’t use this gun,” I said, “how did Maeve get hold of it?”

  “Uncle Morry gave it—”

  “Uncle!” I said in outrage.

  “Morry?” Juliet said, appalled.

  Lights bounced at the edges of the blackout curtains. “Uh-oh, cool it, people,” I said, and pointed the twelve-gauge to one side of the door. It was unloaded but the intruder wouldn’t know that. These things throw an ounce of lead shot with every shell. A rifle is far more accurate, but a rifle slug is only a quarter as heavy, and from one side of the kitchen to the other you didn’t need accuracy. If I had any bullets, I could really put the fear of God into them. “You expecting Grime Grrl back?”

  “She’s staying with Cookie at home. I mean the Lesser house, with Share. The cops let them stay after the body was taken away and they dusted downstairs.”

  They dusted? I was too tired, my brain wasn’t up to it. Finger­prints, obviously. And forensic photographs and all.

  A car door banged in the night. Culpepper and his brutes, I thought.

  “Go into Cookie’s bedroom, okay?”

  Both women looked disgusted but I made a shooing motion with the butt of the shotgun and they shooed.

  Light clatter of feet on the outside steps, not brutish. A key went into the door and Share came in, pushing the key chain back into her pocket. Grimes’ key, presumably. She saw me and jumped.

  “For God’s sake, man, don’t point that thing at me! Really, you’re little better than a thug.”

  “You’re not much better yourself,” I said. “Possibly you’re worse. You’ve abused the trust of everyone you’ve had any deal­ings with, including Culpepper.”

  Points of red flared in her pale cheeks. “You’re not going to shoot me, Purdue.” She took a careful look at the shotgun. “In fact, I don’t believe that’s even loaded. Your daughter doesn’t know one end of a weapon from the other.” She started toward the bedroom and called out, “Annabelle, are you all right? Has this prick been threatening you?”

  My daughter held her tongue, for a wonder. I said, “The Esky was in my storage unit, Share, but now it’s gone.”

  She turned back. Sinews worked in her jaw. “Jesus Christ. What have you done with it?”

  “It looked so tasty,” I said, “I soaked it in brine for a couple of hours and ate it. With fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

  “Culpepper,” she said. “That lying shit. That double-faced—”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Sit down, Share. No, not on the one with the bike chain, it might tempt you into doing something reck­less and painful.”

  She placed her padded but quite nice buttocks on the cat-furred velvet cushions where Juliet’s even nicer buttocks had rested a few minutes earlier. She sat forward, knees and heels pressed tightly together. Sappho kept her distance.

  “Anyone waiting for you downstairs in the car?”

  “No.”

  “You know, I’d have sworn Mauricio had totaled your car,” I said. “No, actually, I thought the cops had carelessly rolled the Mack truck back over the top of it. No, wait,” I said, “how silly of me, the Lessers are bound to own more rides than one. I’m sure the dead child molester must have kept an attractive company ve­hicle in the Balwyn garage. A Mercedes? BMW?”

  Tears spurted and started running down her eyes. It was entirely surprising, and quite shocking. Mascara smeared on her cheeks. “It’s an imported Lincoln,” she said in a choking voice. “He had it changed to right-hand drive. Jesus Christ, I didn’t know. You can’t really think I knew about it, Tom? It was when she was little. Both of them. Before I married the vile bastard.”

  Maybe so.

  “They didn’t tell me. They were ashamed. I think he threatened them.”

  “Until when?” I said. “When did they tell you?”

  “Two weeks ago,” Animal said, emerging from the bedroom with a hockey stick clutched in her hand. I think she’d forgotten she was holding it. How touching, I thought, that poor obese Jon­quil should keep something so defiantly athletic in her room. Like posters of girl-group pop stars, maybe—something to aspire to, however hopelessly? I thought I heard the faintest clacking or tap­ping coming from the half-open door behind her. Juliet was lying low, and I didn’t blame her.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Sharon Lesser told me. “It’s none of your business.” She looked haggard.

  “Suits me,” I said. I found a chair myself and sat down, hold­ing the shotgun by my side pointed at the floor. “Let us reason together, Share, as you suggested a while back.”

  “You’ve sold me out,” she said bitterly. “Why should I—”

  I stared at her. “We had no deal, Mrs. Lesser. You hornswoggled me into doping your poor camel and then left me high and dry when it was killed.”

  “Not just you,” she said. “You and your sleazy pal Mauricio Cimino. Mafia son of a bitch.”

  “Hey!” yelled a voice from Cookie’s bedroom.

  For the second time in minutes, Share jumped. “Christ! What is this, a convention?”

  “Never mind that,” I said, and waved the business end of the shotgun vaguely at her. “Culpepper and his cronies have been dining and possibly wining the sheikh, it’s been in all the social pages.”

  “Felix Culpepper works very hard to keep his name and picture out of the social pages,” Share informed me.

  “What are you talking about, his family crypt featured recently on Burke’s Back Yard.”

  “You spend your time watching home improvement shows?” “Me and Mauricio, we put a lot of effort into home improve­ment. As you witnessed on Friday night.”

  “Oh, you’ve decided now that it wasn’t Thursday after all?”

  “Dad, what’s all this crap? If you and her want to have a big lover’s fight, how about fucking off out in the street and letting me get to sleep?”

  “I’m not his lover,” Share said furiously, just beating me to it. I imagined Juliet pausing in her computer searching with her ears pricked up. The only thing that would be pricked up if this kind of blather were allowed free rein.

  “So Culpepper and his Melbourne Club mates,” I said force­fully, “showed Sheikh Abdul bin Sahal al Din and his wives a good time, and discussed camel breeding, I surmise.”

  “Surmise all you like.”

  “Then he puts you up to a scam. He’s not going to sell live cam­els to the Saudis, that’s far too tedious. Import and export licenses, veterinary medical certification, checks for syphilis and ingrown toenails, expensive air charter arrangements, months of loitering in quarantine, Islamic sharia restrictions of an unpredictable kind, Christ knows what-all.”

  I heard tired footsteps on tim
ber and the door from the shop downstairs creaked opened. My hair stood on end. Vinnie put his own bald head in. “Sorry, girls, thought I’d see if the pussycat had been fed. Ah, Tom, good, I see you’ve got my gun back.”

  Sharon lunged at me, and I felt the bite of her nails. I really hate to hit a woman, especially a woman I might just conceivably have screwed a few nights ago, but reflexes took over. I clocked her with the butt, and she staggered back a few steps. I’m a gentleman. Had it been a bloke coming at me, he’d have stayed stretched on the floor for a few hours. Share just shook her head in disbelieving indignation and touched the side of her head.

  “You’re not bleeding, Mrs. Lesser,” I said. “There’ll be a bit of a bruise though.” Animal was shrieking in outrage, and Vinnie said hoarse things along the lines of I say, steady on, that’s no way treat a—

  “Shut up, Annabelle,” I shouted very loudly. Vinnie withdrew his head. “This is serious.” My fatherly advice astonished her into muteness. I wondered if I’d been too lax in her upbringing. “So Culpepper put you up to the whole thing, Share,” I said. “The question on my mind is this.”

  I paused, searching through my jumbled head to see exactly what the question was. Or the answer.

  “He did it, and do tell me if I’m right because it seems right and I love being right,” I said, “he put you up to it because he wanted payback. Cookie was working the same side of the internet betting street as him. But she’s just a kid, and you’re Jonquil’s mother, or that’s what he assumes. Her flesh and blood. So the debt comes out of your flesh. As it turns out,” I said glumly, “out of Nile Fever’s flesh.”

  “Nobody wanted the animal to die,” Share said in a flat, re­luctant voice. “Stupid bastard went nuts and ran off, what was I meant to do?”

  “Not have it shot to death.”

  “A cop did that. For the public safety.”

  Could be. In fact the whole thing could be a series of coinci­dences after all. Except for shithead Culpepper jamming Jonquil in a casket and burying her for a few threatening days in a lightless crypt, to teach her a lesson. Boundary patrol. Border restrictions in gamblers’ nation. What a stupid prat. The business was global now, that was the whole point of the internet. If it wasn’t a fat grrl in a Melbourne suburb today, it’d be a room of Ph.D.s with a Triad operation in Macao tomorrow, if not yesterday. Or some Nomen­klatura gang in Moscow, or the CIA. Felix Culpepper thought he was a world-class player because he could wear a Melbourne Club tie and swan around with Saudi princes. Malevolent little prick.

  “Speaking of camels,” said a light voice from the far bedroom.

  “Who is that, Purdue? The last thing we need right now is some­one else yapping away about all this.” Share seemed to have put her guilty sorrow behind her. She followed me and Animal into Cookie’s gothic den.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing with Cookie’s computer?”

  “Examining the scene of the crime,” Juliet told my daughter coolly. She leaned back in the huge padded office chair with a look of satisfaction. A series of thumbprint images were hard to make out even on the big flat screen.

  “How the fuck did you get into it? Cookie has that password protected!”

  “Well cut your balls off,” I said.

  “Shit, you rotten sneak, Dad.”

  “Ah, and this is the lovely Sharon Lesser,” Jules said. Her face was bland. “Camel scammer and hot screw, I take it.”

  “Tom and me are business associates, nothing more,” Share said, affronted. “Who’s she, Purdue?”

  I gestured with the shotgun. “Share, meet my wife Juliet.”

  “I thought your wife was dead,” Share said.

  Speaking sharply over the top of her, Juliet said, “For fuck’s sake put that hogleg down!” And then, “Not this one.”

  “‘Hogleg’? Good Christ, Jules, have you been editing bad crime fiction on your days off?”

  “Must have been a movie I saw. Just don’t point it at me.”

  “It never came up in your heart-to-hearts that you had an actual stepmother?” I said to Animal. I heard a certain resentment in my tone.

  “Get her off the computer, dad. That’s Cookie’s private stuff.” Animal’s mouth and eyes widened in speculation, then narrowed at Juliet. “Shit! You’re the stalker!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Culpepper’s the stalker, you idiot, or some nerd hireling of his,” I said. “What are these pictures, Jules, your latest stamp collection?”

  “Watch and learn.” Her red-lit mouse clicked, moved, clicked, moved, clicked. A .jpg image expanded to fill the screen, flicked away, replaced by another, and another.

  “I can’t tell what I’m—Oh, good grief. What were these taken, from a bloody plane?”

  “Resources survey satellite,” Jules told me with satisfaction. She wasn’t expressionless now, she was beaming. “Good, aren’t they? Cookie the ace hacker at work. Not to mention your tax dollars. Somebody’s dollars, anyway. Or Riyals.”

  Or what? I shrugged it away, agog at what I saw on the monitor.

  You heard about things like this on the TV news. Those industrial surveillance satellites were a couple of hundred kilometers up, weren’t they? Scanning the planet day and night. Searching for il­legal crops and escaped terrorists when they weren’t hunting min­eral deposits and greenhouse gas emissions. Talk about a needle in a haystack. But then think of the shots those space probes send back from Mars and Saturn and Neptune. You could plan your holiday on Titan from some of those images, if Titan wasn’t all frozen methane and a billion kilometers away.

  A slight haze blurred the sharpness, looking down through a hundred klicks of atmosphere and wisps of cloud. Still, the ma­chines had done some neat clean-up processing on the raw image, by the look of it. You could tell it was a camel, even gazing straight down from near-earth orbit. But then we already knew it was a camel. Maybe someone studying this frame without our prior and privileged knowledge would take it for a very sick horse, or an overstuffed sofa that had fallen off a removalist’s truck.

  “Oh, the poor thing,” Animal cried. Under all the metal and black velvet, she was tender-hearted.

  Had Cookie just now stumbled by accident upon these records, sitting propped in her Balwyn bed recovering from her visit to Culpepper’s crypt? Impossible, the odds had to be millions, bil­lions to one against. Had she taken control of the damned satellite and steered it in her search? That also struck me as impossible, or wildly improbably. The owners would fall on you like a com­mando raid. Anyway, no, hang on a moment, she’d been in a nasty dark place under the ground while this was going on. Maybe she and her scriptkiddie pals had scammed some black program code able to do any fast search you wanted, using the existing records. Had to be commercial rather than military, surely. It made me shudder. The whole planet under such detailed surveillance? Para­noiaville. Yet apparently so. Fuck.

  The camel had clipped a bus and staggered off the road. In the next shot the bus was pulled over to the far side of the road and the camel was down. You could see its legs stuck out to one side. Ungainly creatures. A van was bearing down on the bus. Next shot: two human figures decamping from the van. Next: one distracting the driver of the bus, was my guess. The other—

  “Can you blow that up a bit more?”

  “Yeah, but it’s going to degrade the image even more.”

  The crouched human was doing something to the head of the dead camel. At least I hoped it was dead.

  “Aw, that’s so nice,” Annabelle said. “He’s comforting the poor thing in its hour of death. Eee-ew!” Expanded another 50 percent, the next shot showed something gray-brown and indistinct but somehow meaty in the man’s hand. The two men returned to their van and in the next shot it had gone, headed toward Melbourne.

  “Wozza,” I said. “Your personal secretary for behaving badly.”

  “And Muttonhead,” said Share, white-lipped with betrayal. “Those dogs. All of you, no honor amongst a
ny of you thieves and rogues.”

  I ignored her blithering. “You’re a marvel, Juliet. How did you dig this out of Cookie’s machine? You’re not moonlighting for the National Security Agency?”

  “I deserve no credit,” she told me. The mouse clicked, and a message screen re-opened. “I’ve been chatting with Cookie and Ruby.”

  “Her name’s Grime Grrl,” Animal said sulkily. “Are you saying Cookie knows you’re using her machine?”

  “Of course she does, Annabelle. All her machines are wi-fi net­worked so she’s got instant access to all her files.”

  I think that’s what she said. Whatever it meant.

  “Tell them to get the hell out of that house at once,” I said, “and go to a hotel. One they’ve never stayed in before.”

  “Woz and Lamb wouldn’t hurt those girls,” Share said, but you could tell she was doubtful.

  “Their charming associate Culpepper has already subjected Cookie to a premature burial,” Juliet said. “I think Tom’s right.” “Who cares what you—”

  “You should get right back there yourself, Share, keep an eye on them,” I said. “Those young women became your responsibility when you married Lesser.”

  She looked at me. I matched her angry, thwarted gaze until she dropped her eyes and shook her head.

  “I’m going to be in deep shit with the prince,” she said, and a moan came up from far down inside her well-stocked chest. “He advanced me a lot of money for the cell biopsy.”

  “He’ll get it one way or another,” I said, guessing. “Assuming any of us finds the Esky. I left it here a few hours ago.” No need for anyone except Jules to know I still had it. I went to the ward­robe, flung the doors wide. Nothing but Goth garments and some old Cherry Ripe wrappers. “The place wasn’t tossed. The door wasn’t broken down.”

  “Vinnie, I suppose,” Animal said. “Or Maeve. She’s the one who gave the shotgun to Uncle Morry, and he gave it to me.”

  He’d been in my U Store It after I’d left. The prick! Maybe the stalwart fuckwit at the gate had tipped him off with a quick call. At least he hadn’t got his paws on the Esky. I tried to remember exactly where I’d left it at Jules’ place. He knew I’d been there. He’d called me on his borrowed phone, after all, before I put my heel on it.