‘That’s right.’
‘Road still open?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Any damage?’
‘Er…some.’
‘More specific?’ His brow furrowed; he took a step back, scanned the parking lot. ‘Where’s my car?’
‘Ah, yes—your car…’
He followed my gaze, lit on the remnants of Doc’s dwelling, among which could be glimpsed a glimmer of mangled metal, a buckled bumper, a shattered blue light.
‘Fuck me gently.’
The acting superintendent said not a word on the way back in; he didn’t have to—his radioactive ears said it all. But as we walked into the station, he leaned back at me and snapped, ‘Graveyard shift. Tomorrow. Tell her about it Griffo.’
He took a few more steps, then added, ‘And get yourself a proper bloody uniform.’
Graveyard
GRIFFO PAUSED WHEN WE came to the Black Dog, checked his watch, licked his lips. ‘Might just nip in for a bit of cool air.’
I caught the glance between him and Bunter. They’d be nipping more than air, but hell, I couldn’t blame them. How could it be this hot at one o’clock in the morning? My body was closing in on me. I swept a length of sweaty hair from my face, dragged the daggy new uniform trousers out of my crack.
This was my third night on the graveyard shift—so called not because it was quiet but because, if you did it long enough, that was where you’d end up.
The shift itself wasn’t a Cockburn initiative. His innovation was that you did it on foot. ‘Keeping in step with the community’ he called it, which probably sounded impressive in the press releases and memos to Darwin.
For the poor bastards who had to actually do it, it meant wading through a sea of blood without a vehicle to retreat to.
I looked up and down the main street, wondering whether I should follow the boys in.
Megahead O’Loughlin, owner of Bluebush’s leading laundromat, came staggering down the road with a box of chocolates in his hands. Despite the sobriquet, his most prominent feature was his belly: he had the silhouette of a camel on its hind legs. He stumbled, spilled the chocolates, watched in despair as they rolled across the footpath. I helped him to his feet, sent him on his way.
There was a crowd milling about the vacant lot across the road, a woman with a rusty-ball-bearing voice ripping into somebody, but there wasn’t an actual riot going on. That would come later, when the pubs threw out the refuse.
In the gutter sat Benny Springer, rubber eyed and tearing at a rag of meat. He took a pull of his beer and vomited onto his own boots. That decided it for me. I followed my colleagues into the pub.
I glanced at a poster on the door. Strip ’n Prawn Night. So much for Random Andy’s cream de la cream. The star turn was one Miss Lickety Split, who may or may not have been the woman on stage when I entered the crowded, cavernous bar.
I naively assumed, from the fact that she was stark naked, covered in white foam—maybe that was the cream?—and whipping her arse around like a blimp in a blizzard, that the show had reached its climax. But no, there was more to come: a buck-toothed meatworker, who couldn’t believe his luck when she dragged him up onto the stage. She dropped his pants, whipped on a condom, threw him to the floor and straddled him on the spot.
The crowd went nuts.
‘My god.’ I elbowed Bunter. ‘Is that legal?’
He shrugged and grinned. ‘If it isn’t, I’ll let you be the one to break it to em.’ He nodded at the baying mob. They were meatworkers in the main, and even those who weren’t would be working the meat tonight. A gelled fellow in a purple shirt three sizes too small leapt onto the table, hooted and thrust his hips forward. The bouncers adjusted their knuckles and moved in.
Bunter and Griffo settled against the bar, enjoying the show.
I elbowed again. ‘Think I’ll take my chances outside.’
As I came out onto the footpath, I spotted a disturbance among the crowd in the vacant lot. There was an angry bellow, then came the unmistakable thud of a fist thumping into thick flesh, a female moan. Sounded like Ms Rusty Bearings was copping the comeback.
I called into my collar mic for back-up, hitched up the pants, ran across the road, came upon a burly feller kneeling on a woman and punching her into the gravel.
I kept going at full pelt, knocked him off balance, managed to get him cuffed before he knew what hit him. Which would have been a satisfactory conclusion to the incident had not the victim found her feet and turned out to be Cindy Mellow. A fighting stick materialised in her right hand.
The first blow hit my prisoner in the head and he went down. The second hit me in the head and I joined him. The third crashed across my back and I wondered how I was going to get out of this in one piece. The fourth was heading in my direction when Rosie Brambles, clearly intent on picking up where she’d left off last time I saw her, came out of nowhere and launched herself at Cindy.
The rest of the mob automatically aligned themselves according to their family or drinking affiliations. By the time the police vans arrived, there was a full-scale brawl raging, with one traumatised ACPO attached to 110 kilos of comatose blubber huddling under a bench in the middle of it.
When it was all over and the offenders were scattered or canned, I prodded my lumpy skin, found myself surprisingly intact. I hitched a ride back to the station in one of the vans.
‘Town’s fallin apart,’ grumbled Flam, shaking his head and kissing a split knuckle.
Bunter grunted his concurrence. ‘Was it ever together?’
‘Was before you buggers arrived,’ I threw in, a comment to which they reacted with surprisingly good grace.
‘It’s the economy.’ Griffo went all big-picture on us. ‘Town’s dying in the arse; no jobs, no hope, nothing to do all day but sit around and suck piss.’
He had a point; Bluebush had never been so depressed. The cattle stations were being hit by the worst drought in living memory, things were looking lean out at the meatworks. Even Copperhead Mines, the bedrock on which the town was built, had been laying off workers.
There’d been high hopes and a lot of talk around the reopening of Green Saturn, the Copperhead offshoot down on the Gunshot Road, but it had turned out to be no more than that: talk, spin, bullshit. Probably designed to lever up the share price. The deep-shaft gold mine was apparently bringing in excellent dividends for somebody and pumping out press releases full of phrases like ‘high-tech’ and ‘cutting-edge’. But for your battling Bluebush business that translated to a handful of contractors working on a fly-in, fly-out basis. Precious little of their cash found its way into local pockets.
These thoughts were interrupted by an emergency radio call: somebody was being assaulted down at the retirement village.
‘See what I mean?’ Bunter spun the wheel. ‘Even the pensioners are getting into it.’
‘Surprised they got the energy,’ commented Griffo.
Somebody had the energy, if the blood-curdling moan we heard from Fanny Bolt’s flat as we pulled into the drive was anything to go by. I prayed it wasn’t Fanny. Widow of the last mayor but one, record-breaking president of the Country Women’s Association, she’d been a livewire in her prime. Nowadays she weighed in at twenty-eight stone. I didn’t fancy trying to arrest or resuscitate that.
Griffo burst from the car and led the way. I followed, moving quickly at first, then slowing as I hit the veranda and heard a tobacco-cracked basso profundo that could only be Fanny’s growling through the screen door: ‘Ah, why do you always wanta fuck like a dog!’
Because any other position would be fatal, I thought to myself as Griffo burst through the door. He flicked a switch and found himself gazing on the deeply disturbing image of the former First Lady kneeling on the bed, butt-naked and taking it in the rear from Jimmy Windschuttle.
I ducked for cover as Griffo backed out of the room, scraping and bowing and flinching in the face of the blizzard of abuse he was copping from Fanny.
He was still banging his head against the wheel when we got back to the station.
‘Get over it,’ grunted Harley when he heard the story in the staff kitchen. ‘Attention-seeking behaviour, I call it.’
‘You had to see it,’ groaned Griffo. ‘I might need counselling.’
‘Like stubbing a cigarette in a blancmange,’ I threw in.
Harley smirked. ‘Wish I had seen it.’
‘You sick bastard,’ grinned Bunter as he and Griffo went off to do their paperwork.
I fossicked around the fridge, came up with some Weetbix and bananas. Harley nuked a pie, made a murky coffee, sat opposite.
‘So, young Emily, how you enjoying the graveyard?’
‘Not dull.’
‘Shouldn’t oughter go wrecking the super’s Cruiser. By the way,’ he buried his face in the pie, came up with a gob-full, gravy dribbling, ‘that Toyota you were asking about…’
‘The pig’s head?’
I’d shared my theory that the driver of the pickup had an illicit crop out on the Gunshot Road, could have had a motive for killing Doc. Cockburn, still in mourning for his Tojo, paid scant attention. The others had shown even less interest, and I was surprised when Harley came up with a name.
‘Brent Paisley.’
Jet’s ‘Blent’.
‘You know him?’ I asked.
‘Not that many Toyotas cruising around with a boar on the bar. Yeah, we know him. Owns the welding workshop out on Hammer Avenue.’
‘Terry Greenleaf’s?’
‘Paisley’s now. And you’re right about him being out west. Spoke to a mate at Crown Lands—he’s got an exploration lease out on the Gunshot Road. Had a word with Jerker—gonna check it out.’
‘I might just…’
‘Reason I’m telling you this,’ Harley interrupted, ‘is cause Paisley’s an animal. Plus, he hates cops. Couldn’t help but notice you tend to lead with your chin: thought I better warn you to steer clear, case you spot him round town, get more than you bargained for.’
Not what I expected: was I becoming part of the team? God help me.
‘Cockie might not know him’—the first time I’d heard the acting super called that; I bet they didn’t say it to his face. ‘The rest of us sure as hell do.’
‘He got a record?’
‘Long as yer arm. Longer,’ he added, glancing at my arm.
‘Been inside?’
‘More in than out.’
‘What for?’
He polished off the pie, pulled out a bag of iced donuts. ‘Longest? Ten-year stretch in Long Bay—aggravated rape.’
‘How do you aggravate a rape?’
‘Bit off an ear.’ He rummaged through the donut bag. Selected his victim, took a massive chunk out of it.
‘Picked up for a hot car boost when he was thirteen, and it’s all been downhill from there. Assault, armed rob, dealing…Working his way through the book.’
‘Anything local?’
He waved a half-eaten donut at me. ‘Not yet. Only been in the Territory for a couple of years. Worked underground at the Burning Angel, then he bought out Terry Greenleaf. Fuck knows where he got the brass for that, but you can bet it wasn’t anything honest.’
‘You’re well informed.’
‘This town, ya gotta be.’ He popped the last of the donut into his gob. ‘Save yer neck some day.’
I touched his elbow. ‘Thanks for that, Darren.’
A flash of gold among the gums, mustache curling up through the popping pores and blackheads: surely not a Harley smile? ‘No worries.’ My god—it was. ‘Long-term, we’ll nail the bastard; short-term, you just stay out of his way.’
I really was grateful.
Not that I had any intention of staying out of anyone’s way, but at least I knew now to tread warily. Long term?
Bugger that.
Bright spark
HAMMER AVENUE WAS ON the ragged edge of town, out where the bitumen disintegrates and the dogs are heavier than the machines they guard. I dropped round to the workshop later that afternoon.
The sign on the gate: Bright Spark: Metal Fabrications. Droll. I parked out the front, walked in.
The pickup, a Toyota HZ575, was squatting in the parking bay; it had a battery of spotlights, truck radials, more bars than Brunswick Street: roll-bar, tow-bar, bull-bar, nerf-bar.
The grisly head on the bull-bar was saying more in death than it ever had in life; if nothing else, it said that the bloke who put it there was a muppet. Whether he was a dangerous muppet remained to be seen.
From somewhere inside the building I heard the sound of an oxy welder. I walked up to the doorway: arcing sparks, bitter fumes. Rivulets of light flickered across a greasy concrete floor.
The head of the bloke inside, when it emerged from the mask, bore a distinct resemblance to the mascot on the vehicle: full of god-knows-what, ragged about the edges, with a drizzly beard, sunken eyes, dropped cheeks. A hot, red face, maybe in its late thirties.
He stood up, removed his leather gloves: the tip of a finger missing, most of the others scarred or burnt. Whatever crimes Paisley had committed, all those and more, he may have done, but he’d obviously put a lot of muscle and blood into his trade. My old man was a bush mechanic: I recognised the signs.
He proffered a businesslike greeting, but the bonhomie disappeared when I identified myself. You could feel the temperature drop. Suddenly we were in a war zone.
‘I had a few questions about the Gunshot Road.’
‘You can ask. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna answer.’
‘You’ve got a mineral exploration lease out there.’
He picked up a hammer, smashed the off-cuts from the steel frame. Jagged metal clattered onto concrete. ‘Sounds like you already know what you wanner hear.’
‘West of the roadhouse.’
‘There a question comin?’ The more we spoke, it seemed, the surlier he got. The tendons clenched in his neck. Volcanic forces were brewing beneath the surface of that monolithic personality.
‘Go down there often?’
‘When it suits me. When I get sick…’ he delivered a brutal blow with the hammer, ‘…of fuckin jacks breathing down the back of my neck.’
‘They haven’t been breathing that hard. Must be, oh, weeks since your last conviction.’
‘Years. Three.’ Another blow. ‘And they fuckin fitted me up for that. Cunt couldn’t go straight if he tried.’
I took a look around the workshop. Dirty rainbows on the floor, butchered buckets and slabs of metal, burnt slag. It was a building defined by sharp angles and edges: grinders and vices, benches and boxes of welding rods. Paisley and his head were the only blurred things there.
‘The other day I was driving out on the Gunshot Road,’ I said, ‘some idiot ran me off it. Idiot with a pig’s head on his bull-bar.’
‘You oughter be more careful.’
‘What were you doing out there?’
‘Didn’t say I was.’
‘And if you were?’
‘Then I would have been minding me own business.’ He paused. Peered at me, puzzled, sniffed the air, sucked the sweat out of his mustache. His eyes swarmed with a cornered-animal suspicion. ‘What’d you say your name was?’
‘Emily Tempest.’
‘What sort of a cop are you, anyway?’
‘None of your business.’
Suddenly it dawned on him. ‘You’re not a proper pig at all, out here on your own, runnin round out bush. That joke of a uniform. You’re just the fuckin black tracker.’
‘I’m working my way up.’
‘Bugger off and track some blacks.’
He fired up an oxy-acetylene torch, waved it in my face.
‘Careful with that thing.’ I took a step back, stumbled against a broken tailgate.
A rare sighting of what was left of the Paisley teeth. ‘Worried you’ll end up on the bull-bar?’
‘Worried you’ll end up in the back of the van.’
I was tempted to say more, but the look that shot across his face deterred me. Paisley was an over-heated furnace: flip the wrong switch and he’d explode.
The switch? Clearly, the threat of incarceration; he’d been inside, didn’t want to go back.
And there was something weird about his eyes. Something hot-wired, wounded. This guy had done time for dealing, according to Harley. From the look on him now he’d been hoovering up the residuals.
‘What are you?’ he snarled. ‘Some jumped-up little gin from the fringe camp, put on a pigskin jacket and thinks she can come kickin a white man’s door down?’
He lowered the mask, leaned over, flashed a cleavage of Monrovian proportions. The interview was over.
I walked out, noticed another building in the yard, a khaki corrugated iron shed against the back fence. More of a bunker this one: oblong, with a heavily bolted door, a Gothic dog, a row of windows, dark and barred.
The Paisley residence? Not exactly an ivy-covered cottage, but he hadn’t struck me as an ivy-covered kind of guy. I was lucky he hadn’t struck me at all.
Curiosity—that terrible monkey that’s been riding on my back forever—impelled me towards the shed.
I’d only taken a couple of steps when a door on the west side of the workshop crashed open. Paisley’s rusty smudge of a head appeared.
‘Shithouse sense of direction for a tracker.’
‘I’m better out bush.’
‘You’re on private property.’ Aside from a quiver of the nostrils, the face was rigid. ‘Less you gotta warrant, the exit’s over there.’ He jerked his chin at the gate.
‘Zulu!’ he barked, and whistled.
The dog—a cross between a doberman, a Baskerville and a Mack truck—uncurled itself and flexed its teeth. It was chained, but only barely. The corroded links failed to inspire confidence.
I turned round, walked back out to my car. The inside of the workshop was shrouded in darkness, but I could feel Paisley in there, staring, trying to creep me out.
Pretty well succeeding.
I shuddered and got behind the wheel. Drove down to the White Dog for a soothing afternoon libation with the regulars, those who were still kicking. I used to pull beers at the White when I first came back to Bluebush, and I felt at home among those wobbly old gentlemen.
Gunshot Road Page 18