Heller

by JD Nixon

  Chapter 16

  My heart sank as we casually strolled past the building. It was a squat and shabby dump, built from grimy scuffed blockwork in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint. There was a barred window either side of a blood-red door, the sign above it depicting a badly-drawn and faded cartoon devil with enormous horns and evil eyes. It was The Red Devil, a bikie bar, notorious for regular stabbings, shootings and drug dealing. Raided by the police frequently, it had also been bombed twice in the last year by rival gangs. We crossed the road and stood opposite. It was definitely not a nice place for a married woman to hang out, or any woman for that matter. I would never have let her anywhere near the joint, which is obviously why she had ditched me. Dixie and I looked at each other in horror.

  “You gotta be shitting me!” she said. “I’m not going in there.”

  “Me neither,” I agreed. I rang Heller again and told him where Lily had gone.

  He sighed heavily. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ve just picked up a couple of my men who were finishing a job nearby. Stay where you are. Do not go inside, Matilda.”

  I had no intention of doing otherwise.

  We waited about five minutes. I was on edge, feeling sick, pacing up and down the footpath, wondering what was happening inside. I hoped that Lily was all right. She was a pain in the butt but she was not much more than a kid, after all.

  The door to the bar flew open suddenly and Lily appeared in the doorway. She was crying, her makeup smeared and her clothes in disarray. Her face was full of desperation and sheer terror. She screamed, her eyes searching around wildly for help. A burst of crude laughter escaped from inside and a hand grabbed her savagely by her hair, dragging her backwards. She screamed again in fear. The door slammed behind her.

  During those long periods without any meaningful employment, Dixie and I had loved to read crime books featuring tough female cops and investigators. When we were very bored on nights with no prospect of a date, we would practice our tough chick characters in case we ever got the opportunity to audition for one of those coveted rare roles. We would take turns rushing into our bedroom, kicking open the door, sometimes rolling on the bed and jumping back up, gun (hairbrush) at the ready, screaming some apposite bon mot like, “Don’t move, motherfucker!” The more cask wine we consumed, the more elaborate the entrances and the more foul-mouthed the bon mot. I remember one evening, after quite a bit of cardboard chardy and trying to do a cool roll into the room, I bounced off my bed and landed awkwardly on the floor, painfully spraining my wrist. Dixie had laughed so much at my lack of coordination that she had almost wet herself, but my hand had been out of action for weeks afterwards.

  Without thinking, I looked at Dixie and yelled, “Tough chick!”

  I ran across the road, fumbling in my bag. Dixie, game as ever, followed right behind, loudly cursing me. I violently burst through the door of the bar, my unexpected entrance not startling the few patrons in its main bar area who were apathetically playing pool or propping up the bar. They didn’t even bother looking up.

  “Police!” I yelled out, briefly flashing my library card. I kept one hand in my bag, firmly on my capsicum spray.

  “Police! Stay where you are! Nobody move!” Dixie bellowed behind me. Despite her small stature, she had an impressively loud voice that forced the patrons in the bar to pay attention to us. Nobody moved. They were used to being raided and knew the drill. Running only earned you extra attention from the cops.

  AC/DC’s ‘High-voltage Rock ‘n’ Roll’ blared from the speakers. The bar was dimly lit, its windows begrimed with dirt. What we could see of the decor was uninspiring. The carpet was an indeterminate swirling maroon pattern, probably useful for hiding bloodstains, and the walls were painted a depressing dog-shit brown colour. The furniture was old, mismatched and battered, some of the chairs so fragile in appearance that I wondered if they were occasionally used as weapons or projectiles. It was that kind of place.

  “Where’s the woman?” I yelled in the direction of the barman. They are often the most detached and sober person in any drinking environment. Or so said Tysen, I recalled from my brief training.

  “What woman?” he asked insolently, resuming his wiping of a grubby rag over a glass. He was a big slovenly man with long hair slicked back in an oily ponytail, moving with the slow indifference of someone who loathes their job.

  “Don’t mess with me, sunshine!” I shouted contemptuously, puffing myself up as aggressively as possible. “You want to be tasered? Just give me a reason. Where’s the woman we just saw being assaulted?”

  He shrugged, unconcerned by my threat.

  Dixie walked towards him menacingly. “Maybe you need a little persuasion to help you remember, fuck-knuckle? I’ve got bad PMS today and I’ve been looking for a fucking cockroach like you to take it out on. Get your taser out, Chalmers.”

  We both made moves into our handbags as if we were retrieving something.

  “Back off,” he said nervously, palms up. “I don’t want no trouble. They took her out the back for a bit of fun.” He wiped his nose on the same cloth he’d been using to polish the glasses. Yuck! I made a mental note not to stay for a drink. Then he gestured indifferently to a hallway leading away from the main bar area, as if women got kidnapped and raped in the place every day of the week. For all I knew, maybe they did. “She was askin’ for it, flauntin’ herself in a place like this. She went right up to ‘em and told ‘em she wanted to party. Stupid slut!”

  “Who took her and how many of them?” I snarled in his face. My arm was starting to pound with a deep aching pain and I was desperately hoping that Heller would turn up soon. I wasn’t sure how much longer we could keep up our charade without any real weapons or skills (or acting talent, if I’m going to be brutally honest).

  He stood back and crossed his arms. “Just some blokes who come in. I don’t ask ‘em no questions and we all get on fine. You don’t wanna mess with ‘em. Trust me.”

  Oh, I trusted him all right, on that at least, but didn’t think we had a lot of options. “How many?” I repeated.

  “Four, maybe five. I didn’t count ‘em,” he said sullenly. Great. How were Dixie and I going to take down five men?

  The two of us had a brief huddled conference and I came up with kind of a plan. We cautiously headed down the poorly lit, grungy hallway which was carpeted in the same swirling maroon, painted in the same dog-shit brown. There were four doors leading off the hallway and a fire exit at its end, all shut. Two of doors led to male and female toilets. We briefly listened at the door of each, but couldn’t hear anything so moved to the doors on the opposite side of the hallway.

  We listened at the third door and it also sounded deserted inside. With a prudent degree of chariness, I twisted the knob, opened the door and peered around it. The room was a combined storeroom/office space, the desk and computer almost crowded out by the boxes and boxes of alcohol and other bar necessities stacked up around the walls. There was nobody inside.

  We crept to the fourth door and listened carefully. Through the door came the sound of loud voices, harsh laughter and a woman’s quiet sobbing. We looked at each other. It was time to put our plan into action.

  I hid out of sight behind Dixie as she fumbled the door open, doing her best drunk impersonation.

  “Oh, I’m shorry,” I heard her slur, “I thought thish was the dunny. Shorry.”

  She closed the door quickly, almost all the way without actually shutting it, before they could react. Hopefully she hadn’t alarmed them. I couldn’t see inside the room, but Dixie later told me that it was some kind of private reception room, full of shabby old lounges and armchairs. Lily had been huddled in a corner, her clothes ripped badly, while four men (not five, thank God!) appeared to be arguing over who would have her first.

  Dixie gave me the thumbs-up to signal that Lily was inside the room. We waited a nerve-wracking half-minute to see if anyone would come out after Dixie, but they didn’t. Stage on
e of our plan had been a success. We quietly high-fived each other before swapping places, ready for stage two. I took a deep breath and burst through the door, kicking it back against the wall. I then proceeded to shower capsicum spray fervently and indiscriminately over everybody in the room, including Lily.

  There were two things I hadn’t thought about when I formulated my plan though. The first was the understandable anger that people whose eyes were stinging in hellish agony feel towards the person who has caused that agony. Most of the room’s occupants, including Dixie who grabbed Lily in accordance with our plan, rushed towards a source, any source, of fresh air, coughing and wheezing, eyes streaming. But one of the men, a big ugly brute who didn’t look smart enough to spell his own name, noticed I was still holding the empty canister of spray in my hand. He took exception to that with a well-aimed punch to my midriff that winded me and knocked me flying to the ground in the hallway. While I was lying prostrate, clutching my abdomen and groaning in pain, he gave me several vicious kicks to my legs and my back with his enormous work boots for good measure, before his streaming eyes and choking coughs forced him to desert me as well, heading for some relief.

  The second thing I hadn’t considered is that capsicum spray is just that – a spray. And sprays tend to drift in the air with any current. So I really should not have been surprised, but I was unpleasantly so, when my eyes also starting burning with a disabling stinging sensation. The tears began to pour down my cheeks, blinding me as I lay on the ground moaning. I struggled to get to my feet and out of this hellhole before those animals recovered and came back for me. But I wasn’t capable and collapsed back to the floor again. My lungs felt cloudy with spray and I couldn’t breathe properly. I managed to haul myself to my hands and knees and crawled back slowly down the hallway to the main bar area, each movement of my arms and legs creating stabbing pains of agony in my poor battered body.

  I was almost at the end of the hallway, nearly back at the main bar, still virtually blind, when someone behind me seized me by my hair and brutally dragged me to my feet. I crumpled in agony, but he pulled me back up again by my hair, which frigging hurts, believe me. I could smell tobacco and bourbon on his breath. He must have been in the men’s bathroom while Dixie and I were busy activating our plan. The barman was right – there were five of them, after all. Stupid, stupid us for not checking every room.

  “Looks like you spoiled my party, my little whore,” he growled in my ear. He threw his arm around my neck, pulling it tightly until it restricted my breathing. There was nobody around to help me – everybody had made a run for it. I started to panic and kicked behind at him, hitting his shin. But that only made him tighten his grip on my throat further, cutting off my oxygen. I stopped kicking. He used his other hand to feel my boobs, roughly squeezing and pinching them. “Oh yeah! These are some great tits you’ve got here, bitch. You can be my new playmate instead,” he declared, his hot, bad breath making me flinch. Nausea rose in my throat and my vision began to darken.

  Bourbon-Breath pushed me up against the hallway wall, one hand around my throat pinning me to the wall. My arms were incapacitated, jammed uncomfortably behind me. His body pressed up hard against mine and his free hand groped, squeezed and touched me everywhere – on my boobs, my butt, between my legs. Despite thrashing around to avoid him, he tightened his grip on my neck and immobilised my head. He forced my mouth open and thrust his tongue disgustingly deep inside. He slid his hand up my shirt, roughly pulling my bra aside, squeezing my nipple hard and savaging my breast painfully with his fingernails. I could feel his erection through his jeans as he rubbed up against me. He moved his hand away from my poor boob down into the waistband of my trousers, burrowing into my panties, his digits on my pubic hair, about to ram his fingers up inside me. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind what his intentions were towards me and they did not include a lovely bunch of flowers followed by dinner at a fancy restaurant.

  I managed to free my good arm from behind my back and drove my fist into the side of his neck. He released his hold on me briefly and I pushed against him, mustering up every bit of strength I had in my new muscles. It almost worked, but my arm was injured and he’d been looking forward to attacking Lily, a pent-up store of misogynistic rage fuelling his strength. He punched me across my jaw, knocking me sideways. I would have fallen to the ground if he hadn’t grabbed my arm. Once he had hold of me, he started to drag me into the room that everyone had just vacated. Despite my pain and almost blindness, I fought wildly against him. There was no way I was going in there with him. He cracked me across the jaw again and my head lolled backwards. I tried to regroup my thoughts but they weren’t cooperating.

  A horrible crunching noise sounded nearby and Bourbon-Breath grunted loudly in pain. Unexpectedly, he released his grip on me and I fell heavily to the floor, trembling too much to remain standing. I lay on the disgusting carpet, breathing heavily, seemingly somehow caught up in the middle of a brawl between two men. I didn’t know who the other man was or where he had come from, but I wanted to marry him and have a million babies with him. He had just saved me from an unimaginable experience. There were feet flailing everywhere and a choking, gurgling noise coming from someone as I scrabbled quickly in the direction of the bar.

  “Fuck off, shithead,” Bourbon-Breath spluttered, between groans. “This is none of your fucking business. My bitch and I were only trying to have some fun together.”

  “That was my woman you had there,” said the other voice, quiet and controlled, and I almost cried with joy when I recognised those accented tones. Heller! And boy, I could tell he was really angry from the strength of his accent. “You’re going to regret messing with her, my friend. And with me.”

  Bourbon-Breath laughed with blustering derision through his grunts of pain. “Fuck off back to your own country and leave our sluts alone. Don’t need no help from no soft dick pretty-boy foreigner like you to deal with them.” And as if to express his furious hatred against all the women he’d ever met in his wretched life, he twisted in Heller’s arms to kick out at me violently with an on-target blow to my hip as I blindly crawled to safety. I moaned softly as I fell to the carpet again, pain cascading through my body.

  “Matilda, get out of here!” Heller shouted, and I didn’t need to be told twice. I dragged my poor, bruised body out of the way to the safety of the main bar, gasping for air, wiping my eyes and nose on my shirt, and rubbing my bruised throat and jaw. I tried to ignore the horrible screeching sounds coming from one of the fighting men. I suspected they weren’t coming from Heller. Something or someone crashed into the wall and I could hear the repeated dull sickening thud of someone getting a vicious beating.

  I turned back anxiously to check on Heller, but I didn’t see what happened next because I was forcefully hauled into the air by a pair of burly arms. I screamed in terror, kicking out wildly, until I recognised the gold logo on his black shirt. It was one of Heller’s men!

  He half-carried, half-dragged me out of the murky bar into the sunlight. I gasped and choked, my eyes and nose streaming, drawing in huge grateful gulps of fresh air. He pulled me over to Heller’s Mercedes parked across the road. There was another black 4WD parked directly behind it and inside that I glimpsed Dixie and Lily, a pitiful couple of refugees, blubbering and clinging to each other. Another of Heller’s man-mountains stood protectively next to the second vehicle, arms crossed aggressively, reeking of just-let-me-at-‘em attitude.

  I leaned over Man-Mountain One’s supportive arm and indiscreetly vomited on the road. I couldn’t stand up, in ten kinds of pain and Man-Mountain One propped me on the back seat of the Mercedes, pouring bottled water in my eyes and down my throat. I snatched the bottle from him and drank it greedily, only to have to hurriedly lean out of the vehicle to throw up again. I fell back on the seat in agony. My stitches had split open and my injured arm was bleeding again, my back and legs were aching where I had been kicked, my stomach was painfully tender and my throat an
d jaw were killing me. Dixie tried to come over to me, but Man-Mountain Two wouldn’t let her exit the second vehicle.

  After about five minutes, Heller emerged from the bar, slipping something back into one of his cargo pants pockets. With my limited vision it looked like a switchblade. He stretched his arms above his head and rubbed his jaw. He seemed fine. Later, when I could see properly again, I noticed that he had cuts on both sets of knuckles, a gash on his bottom lip and some faint bruising to his jaw. I wondered how badly Heller had hurt the other man, because I had no doubt that he had won the fight. Much, much later, after I knew more about him, I wondered if Heller had even left that man alive.

  As he walked away from the bar towards the vehicles, the thug who had first attacked me launched himself out of an adjacent dingy alley into the middle of Heller’s back, knocking him flying to the ground. Faster than any of us thought possible, Heller was upright, dragging the man to his feet, brutally twisting his left arm behind his back and slamming his head viciously and repeatedly against the front blockwork wall of the bar. The man’s face was crushed up against the grimy stucco and a trail of blood poured from his nose that I was pretty sure had now been broken. Heller spoke aggressively in the man’s ear, an absolutely terrifying expression on his face. We couldn’t hear what he said. The man shouted back something defiant over his shoulder, something which Heller obviously didn’t agree with, because he snarled before jerking the man’s arm upwards so violently that, even across the road, we could hear the crack of his bone breaking. The man screamed in pain as Heller slammed him into the wall a final time, then dropped him in revulsion and walked back towards us, wiping his hands on his cargo pants. The man slumped to the ground and lay there moaning noisily, his arm at an abnormal angle, blood on his face, tears pouring down his cheeks, a dark urine stain spreading across the front of his jeans.