Draw the Brisbane Line

by P. A. Fenton

  ‘Believe what you want, but I’m about thirty seconds away from a serious bashing.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Rosie!’ one of the men shouted, big guy who looked like he had more than a bit of Maori or islander in him. He was wearing board shorts and sneakers but no shirt, which gave Jenny a clear view of his ink-stained torso. His head was shaved bald, and more tattoos swirled around his scalp in distorted and warped loops, as though they’d been penned when his skull was much smaller. ‘Come on out, will ya? We need a little chat.’

  ‘Sammo, I presume,’ Jenny said.

  Tait nodded.

  Jenny shifted into reverse, but just as she turned to look over her shoulder another car came up close behind them, a red Commodore HS. They were penned in.

  Tait sagged in his seat. ‘I’m so sorry Jenny. I should have thought they’d do this. I was kind of hoping they’d bugged out with everyone else.’

  ‘Or were too busy looting the local businesses.’

  ‘Come on,’ Sammo called out. ‘I’m not gunna hurt youse.’

  ‘Like hell,’ Jenny said. ‘Do not get out of this car,’ she hissed at Tait.

  ‘They’ll drag me out if I don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s better this way, trust me. I’ll talk to them.’

  Tait opened the door and the heat of the noon day bustled into the car like an over-affectionate Labrador. They weren’t that far from the beach, but Jenny suspected the cooling sea breeze never made it this far. He stepped onto the road and closed the door, and the air-conditioning quickly re-established dominance.

  Tait stepped up to the three men, his hands held out by his side. He spoke in a low voice, but she could still make out his words.

  Jenny’s stomach performed a greasy backflip.

  ‘Guys,’ he said. ‘What are you doing? We’re just trying to evacuate, like the flyers said.’

  Sammo responded by swinging a hard low right into Tait’s midsection. Tait folded over, and he had to stick a hand out to stop from dropping to the road right there. His other hand clutched at his belly. Jenny could hear him wheezing as he struggled to get air into his lungs.

  Sammo worked out, and judging by the abnormal proportions of biceps and chest and shoulders, Jenny assumed he was lifting weights with the help of some hormonal boosters, if not straight shots of high-dose testosterone. Ten years spent around Hollywood stars in Hollywood gyms had opened her eyes to the reality of how built up a man could get while staying within the structure of his own genetic house. Extensions usually required outside help.

  He stood over Tait, flexing his arms. Jenny slammed the car horn and he jumped, a twitching ball of aggression.

  He looked at Jenny, and a sharp grin settled on his face. He punched down into Tait’s head, catching him on the back of the jaw. This time he went down.

  ‘You cowardly fuck!’ she shouted, and the heat of the day washed over her. She couldn’t recall making the decision to move, but she was suddenly out of the car with her fists clenched by her sides.

  Sammo, still smiling, said, ‘Spaz, give Miss Lucas a bit of a cuddle, please.’

  Calloused hands closed around her arms from behind.

  Oh right. The other car.

  ‘So,’ Sammo said. ‘Is there anything I should know about my new car? Bonus features? Quirks?’

  ‘You are not getting my car,’ Jenny said. Her arms were trembling, and not all of it with fear.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I already have it, little miss Hollywood. Look, it’s right here, delivered to me by our fair Rosie.’

  Tait tried to say something, but he broke into a coughing fit.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘how many of those cars are in Australia? How many of this particular edition?’

  ‘Just the one, as far as I know. If the reporting in the Telegraph is accurate. Don’t look so surprised. Yeah, I can read.’

  His eyes challenged her for a comeback, winking, almost smiling. He stepped away from Tait, moved towards her with measured and deliberate steps.

  ‘Reportage,’ she said, her mouth too quick for her brain.

  ‘Hollywood starlet Jennifer Lucas extended her glamour to the roads with the newest edition of Lexus’s LFA super-car, currently one-of-a-kind in the country. That’s what the article said. That was a couple of weeks ago though. So what?’

  ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Anyone with half a clue about what it is will probably also know whose it is. The cops are certainly going to know. Who do you think is going to be stupid enough to buy it?’

  The smile left those dark eyes of his.

  Crap.

  ‘You want to keep it, don’t you?’

  He stepped up close enough for Jenny to smell sour sweat layered on his skin like a protective coating. His eyes made exaggerated passes up and down her body, from face to thigh. She suddenly felt very naked in t-shirt and shorts.

  ‘What,’ he said, ‘you think the cops are going to track your car down, kick off a manhunt? Didn’t you get the memo? We’re at fucken war, yeah? Rule book’s been thrown out the window, love. We’re back to survival of the fittest.’

  Oh crap, Jenny thought. This moron believed the fliers.

  His breath hit her in the face. It smelled of beer and cigarettes. She turned her head to the side and he laughed. He must have thought she’d moved in fear.

  ‘Do you remember the eviction riots in LA a couple of years ago?’ she said, turning back to face him, looking him in the eye. ‘I was there at the time. A lot of people thought they could get away with pretty much anything as soon as the bricks started going through the shop windows on Rodeo Drive. They thought the big eye in the sky was looking away, or maybe it was closed. It wasn’t though. Sure, they had their fun for a few days of anarchy and looting, but when the fires burned down and the smoke cleared, it turned out that big eye had been watching the whole time — and it was pissed.’

  ‘Do you see any cameras out here? Any big eyes? Big brother don’t go bush.’

  ‘Believe what you want. Doesn’t change the fact that you will be caught.’

  ‘What if I keep you with me?’ he said, and trailed a finger down her arm. She flinched. ‘That wouldn’t be theft then, would it?’

  ‘No, that would be kidnapping.’

  He laughed. ‘Maybe it would be a rescue. I reckon I could sell that. Well, Miss Lucas had fainted in the heat, stuck out on some back road in her car and obviously lost. So I abandoned my own vehicle and drove Miss Lucas out of the danger zone.’

  ‘Yeah, like I’m going to back that story up.’

  He leaned in closer and lowered his voice, and an adolescent glee shimmered in his eye. ‘Unfortunately,’ he whispered, ‘one night when we were getting some rest by the roadside, she wandering off into the bush, just so she could have some privacy to pee. I told her I’d go, and she could stay near the car to do it, but she insisted. God, she was so stubborn. She never came back from her pee. I spent the next two days searching for her, but all I found was one of her shoes, crawling with bull-ants. I keep thinking she’s going to turn up one of these days, bush-dirty and missing a shoe, but part of me knows the truth. I don’t think I’ll ever know what happened to Jenny Lucas.’

  She gathered what spit she could muster and sent it across the short distance to his face. She landed the bubbly goo right in the eyes. He took a step back and wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  ‘You fucking cunt!’ he shouted, then charged back up to her, the tip of his nose flicking her own. His eyes were wide and bugging, close enough so that she could make out the tiny flecks of yellow in his brown irises. ‘Do that again,’ he said. ‘I fucking dare you, do that again.’

  She wasn’t going to spit in his face again. She thought, I’ll do better than that, I’m a fucking Hollywood star. She reached deep into herself and thought of raw mussels, of spattering sausages and tuna casserole. She thought about stuffing a turkey. She thought of all the times, against her better judgement, she’d agreed to just one more teq
uila shot. She thought of her parents engaged in freaky and wet sex.

  It wasn’t hard. Good actors have an arsenal of human emotion at hand, enabling them to shed tears and cry, to laugh with real humour, to scream with a rage of the unjustly wronged. Jenny was a good actor, and she had another weapon in her arsenal now. She had morning sickness. She drew on all her years of experience and skill, all her lessons and training, and she vomited into Sammo’s face.

  Sammo staggered backwards, wiping bile from his eyes. He tried to speak, probably to call her a bitch, but what came out was a wet croak.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Bit delicate, are we?’

  Sammo bent over with his hands on his knees and let out a long gurgling burp trailed by a thin stream of bright orange bile. Jenny didn’t need to turn around to see that Spaz had lost a hold on his breakfast, she could hear it. The other two yobs were doing their best to keep from becoming links in the chain reaction, averting their eyes and walking out of the sour wafting stench zone.

  Tait was staring at her with his jaw slack and his eyes unblinking. She stared at him and gestured towards the bush, pointing fingers and tilting her head. He started to come around, but not fast enough, not nearly fast enough for the twitching nerves in her legs and her over-wound tick-tock heart.

  She ran.

  She had no idea where she was running to, only what she was running away from. Let them have the fucking car, she just hoped it was enough of a temptation to make Sammo think twice about chasing her down to exact revenge.

  This shit just wasn’t supposed to happen, not in Noosa. Not in Australia. She felt like she’d been dropped into a Mad Max film.

  Maybe she had been.

  She was happy for one thing. She was happy for her trainers. They were one of her rare concessions to practicality, as they were the most comfortable driving shoes she owned. The pedals on the LFA did not like her sandals, and more than once she’d nearly run the thing off the road when trying to take her foot off the pedal, only to have the loose back of a sandal catch on the floor and lock it in place.

  She whipped between trees and broke through anything resembling a gap in the bushes and scrub, collecting lashings of cuts and scrapes as she went, but not really caring. She wanted to be far away from Sammo and his thugs. Her trainers crunched on layers of dead leaves as she ran, and soon she heard another set of crunching footsteps, though these were crunching and slapping, that unmistakable thwack of rubber thongs smacking off heels.

  She risked a backwards glance, and confirmed it was Tait behind her. His face was bright red with strain, and he was running with the kind of high step you usually associate with people trying to sprint through a shore-break. It didn’t look as though anyone was following them. She did a lot of jogging and high-intensity interval running, and she estimated they’d covered a good half kilometre.

  She stopped running and leaned against a gum tree. Her lungs felt like they were burning gas and throwing the flames up her throat. Tait caught up to her and dropped to the ground, panting and wheezing. Neither of them was in any mood to speak, but their looks spoke for them.

  She looked back the way they’d come and raised her eyebrows. Are they coming?

  Tait looked back, shook his head. No. He looked up at her and twisted his forehead into a questioning frown. What the fuck was that with the vomiting?

  She smiled, shrugged. I’m a freak.

  They both began laughing between heaving breaths. She sat down next to Tait, and liking this feeling of being relatively still and rested, she stretched out on her back. Fuck any ants in the neighbourhood, she was tired and she was pregnant. Tait dropped back beside her. They stayed that way for a few minutes, maybe as many as ten. It was hard to get a sense of time in the bush if you didn’t stop to look at your watch. Without cars passing through sequenced traffic lights or scheduled ad breaks in your programme viewing, all you could really be sure of was day or night.

  Cicadas were playing their little washboards all around them, and magpies were heckling from the cheap seats. They were business-as-usual bush sounds, normal and as reliable as the sunrise and sunset — but then they stopped, replaced by distant cracking and popping and a strange rushing noise. Half a dozen magpies and some smaller birds all took to the air above them.

  Tait sat up and grabbed Jenny by the shoulder, his brown eyes wide like chocolate buttons. ‘Bush-fire,’ he said.

  Chapter 11

  ‘Who are you?’ Dave said.

  ‘Corporal Pia Papetti, US Army. We need to go now if we’re going to track down your fiancée too. Things are moving.’

  ‘Jenny? What do you know about Jenny?’

  ‘I know she’s liable to get caught up in some trouble, and it could get very ugly if we don’t find her. Soon.’

  Dave didn’t ask another question. Questions could wait. He led her down the lifts to the parking garage where her ride was waiting for them: a military-spec Humvee.

  ‘How did you get down here?’ Dave said.

  ‘Why? Was it supposed to be hard?’

  It was Dave’s first experience in a Humvee. It possessed an aggressive odour of oil, what might be gun oil if Dave had enough experience of the stuff to recognise the smell.

  Jenny had tried to talk him into getting a Humvee a couple of months before she walked out on him, arguing that in Sydney traffic, he needed the bulk and protection. She just wanted to push him into making a showy display of wealth, and when she finally got it through that stubborn skull of hers that he wasn’t going to cave, she went and bought that ridiculous bloody Lexus. Jenny and Tom, always working on him to live a little, but they never understood the responsibility of simply being Dave Holden. He couldn’t just start flashing the cash.

  ‘I nearly bought one of these once,’ he said to Papetti.

  Papetti wasn’t quite holding him at gunpoint, but she did have her sidearm tucked into a holster on her thigh. She had that sporty look about her, and reminded him of some of the female players on the circuit. Those girls rarely made it past the first couple of rounds in the majors, often because they simply lacked the power and reach to make the really big shots, the powerful serves. They tried to compensate for what they lacked in size with speed, energy and determination. Sometimes they succeeded. He couldn’t quite picture Papetti in tennis whites. Her short black hair would probably sit in a bob if it wasn’t tied back in a drum-tight stump of a ponytail. A bob might hide the scar on her temple, an inch-long comet-streak which just touched the edge of her hairline.

  ‘Is that right?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘Not really. I let Jenny believe I was giving it serious thought, just for a little while, but it was never really on the cards. Too flashy.’

  ‘Too flashy? A Humvee? The only thing less flashy is an actual fucken tank.’

  Before he opened the door of the fucken tank, he tried to quiz her about the purpose of the trip, why Tom had to see his brother and his brother’s fiancée so urgently that an armed military escort was required. She gruffly muttered classified, which Dave took to mean even she didn’t know herself, not really.

  Throughout the coming days, he would question why he had gone so readily with her, so compliant in the face of a soldier with a gun and a very loose mission statement. The answer would come back the same every time: Because Jenny.

  ‘It was a civilian Humvee,’ he said. ‘The one Jenny was trying to push on me. Black and glossy, with built in DVD and music streaming capability, heated seats and leather trim. As far as I’m concerned, by comparison, this thing we’re in now is a tank.’

  ‘Fucken A,’ Papetti said.

  They passed some men-at-work barriers on the way out, where a council worker in high-vis was trying to wash something off the road with a high-pressure hose.

  ‘I saw them scraping up the remains on the way in,’ Papetti said. ‘It was like hamburger had been dressed up and sent to go work in a bank or something.’

  His stomach clenched as though the ghost of James
Cain had just reached inside and squeezed a semi-vital organ, something close to wherever the bile was kept. He grabbed at the door and wound down the window, an old-fashioned hand-crank which he silently cursed for being so slow and so inconveniently old-fashioned. He got his head through the gap just in time to eject whatever beer and coffee was left in there, and what felt like a few pints of industrial-strength acid, the kind that can eat through steel. Papetti made no comment when he pulled his head back in.

  ‘So you think a Humvee is flashy, but you live in that joint?’ She gestured over her shoulder with a twitch of her head.

  He smiled, but it wasn’t really a happy smile. ‘I haven’t owned the place long, and I only really bought it as a concession to Jenny. She wanted me to buy something flashy, so I bought the apartment.’

  ‘You bought an expensive apartment out of spite?’

  ‘No, I didn’t … I just … Yes, fuck it, I suppose I did. Didn’t count as a big spend anyway, according to her.’

  ‘No? Seems pretty big to me.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, but I invest in property. It’s what I do now.’ He laughed, and added, ‘Did. She knew I could turn the place over for a profit of a couple hundred thousand in a matter of months, based almost solely on having my name associated with it.’

  ‘So that’s what you’re gonna do? Flip it?’

  ‘Well, no, maybe not now. Maybe not ever again. I kind of like living at heights these days. But the thing is, Jenny wanted me to be honest with my wealth, and she didn’t consider selling property to be honest.’

  ‘Why not? Lotta people sell stuff. My pop sells Japanese motorcycles, I’d call him honest.’

  ‘Yeah, except I’m not really trading so much on my property market expertise, just my name. What do you do as a professional sportsman, when your playing days are behind you? Sell, sell, sell.’

  ‘No different in the States. Except they’re not shy about flashing the green at home.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a bit different here.’

  Papetti brought the tank around onto the Eastern Distributor. Most cars gave them a respectfully-wide berth.