by P. A. Fenton
‘Ouch.’
Ouch was a giggle beside the sick churning in his chest.
All he wanted to do now was apologise to her, and he couldn’t even get her on the phone. He’d been a dickhead about it all, he could see that now. Three weeks of solitude did wonders for his sense of perspective. But now he couldn’t see her, couldn’t speak to her, didn’t know where she was … it was the worst kind of unscratchable itch.
‘So whadja do?’ Papetti said.
‘Huh?’
‘Whadja do? To piss her off? To make her leave? No pressure. But remember, I do have guns.’
Dave prodded the emotional dam in his heart, the steep wall he built to keep any embarrassing emotions inside, where they belonged. He didn’t sense any leaks.
‘She’s pregnant,’ he said. Almost a sigh.
‘Yeah? And so she left? You use an old rubber or somethin’?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Promised her you’d pull out, but didn’t? That’s weak man.’
‘Look, it’s complicated. And I didn’t handle it too well.’ Dave waited for Papetti to make another dig, but long seconds stretched by before he realised she was holding back. She was letting him talk now. ‘Before we could go public with it, I spoke to my publicist. I didn’t mean to tell him, we were just talking about angles for a new sponsorship deal, and it kind of slipped out. Clary — that’s my publicist — was pretty firm in his view. The deal I’m in line for — was in line for — is Weetbix, a breakfast cereal. Big family brand. Anyway, Clary didn’t think Sanitarium, the parent company, would be too keen on their new spokesman being an unmarried father. Clary wanted to keep it all under wraps, have a quick wedding.’
‘And you told him to get fucked.’
‘I, ah. Yeah. Nah.’
‘Nah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Shit.’
Dave felt like an emotional imbecile, hearing himself admit to such a stupid and selfish act.
‘It’s a big deal though, this Weetbix thing. I really need this.’
Papetti looked at Dave with appalled disbelief. ‘Are you saying you need the money?’
‘Well … yeah. I don’t make money playing tennis any more, do I? Almost everything I have is tied up in property and funds, and I’m too scared to call my financial adviser to find out what that’s worth now. And a lot of the property is fairly heavily leveraged, so yeah, I need the money.’
‘What about Jenny? She’s doing OK isn’t she?’
‘Well yeah, but in America.’
‘So go to America.’
‘But I can’t … my market is … by brand is here.’
Papetti rolled her eyes. ‘Me, me, me. Yeah, I’m starting to see what happened here.’
Dave massaged his temples, felt the headache growing in there. He couldn’t think how to explain himself to Papetti without sounding like a dick. If only Clary were able to prep him for his personal life too. As much as you might like to, David, he’d say, try not to be too much like yourself. Keep the good bits, but bite back the rest.
‘What about her car?’ Papetti said.
‘What about the car?’ Dave said.
‘Does she have a car phone?’
‘Well, let me see. Is this the nineteen-eighties?’
Papetti took her eyes off the road long enough to level him with a glare she probably reserved for vermin.
‘No, she doesn’t have a car phone,’ Dave said.
‘What about GPS then? In the car?’
He thought about it for second. ‘She has GPS, of course. But how is that going to help us?’
‘I don’t mean her sat-nav, I mean a GPS tracker. In case the car gets stolen.’
‘Oh, right. Probably, I guess. She must have, right, for a car worth that much. My insurance company made me get one for my car, and that’s just a Jeep.’
‘Safe to assume she has one then.’
Dave slapped himself on the forehead hard enough to rattle his teeth. ‘Oh come on Dave!’ he shouted. ‘Wake up!’
‘So that’s a yes?’
He flipped through pages of icons on his phone, looking for the yellow and black tracking app he installed on there. It was all set up with theft in mind — to his credit, he never really considered using it just to see where Jenny was. He found it, opened it, and was confronted by a login screen. The user name was pre-populated, but the password was empty. Crap. The password.
‘Found it?’ Papetti said.
‘Yeah,’ Dave said. ‘Yeah, it’s just … shit. I can’t remember the password.’
‘So reset it.’
‘Oh wait.’ Dave had a brain flash. He tapped in Jennygotjack3d, a special password just for this app. He let out a long breath when a list of options appeared on the screen. The first was map, and he tapped it. His phone automatically activated its own GPS receiver as it searched for a signal.
Hope briefly flashed in his chest when a map resolved on the screen and the red dot — Jenny’s car — seemed within touching distance of the blue dot — him. Hope turned to heartburn when he saw the initial scale of the map: it was the entire east coast of Australia. He pinch-zoomed on the red dot until the blue dot slipped off the edge of the screen.
Their blue dot was a long, long way from her red dot, hundreds of miles of venous road twisting and stretching between them. She seemed to be just south of Noosa, but not as far as she should have been.
‘Come on Jenny,’ he muttered.
‘What’s up?’
‘She should be a lot closer to Brisbane by now.’
Papetti shook her head. ‘Take a look over to your right. See that?’
The southbound lanes were crawling, stopped dead in parts. The faces of the motorists were slack and stretched, gazes locked on the back of the car in front and praying for a brief burst of speed, something, anything. How long had they been on the road? Was it days?
‘It’s going to be a whole lot worse than that on the other side of Brisbane,’ she said. ‘Most petrol stations are probably out of fuel by now, or close to it. There’ll be more than a few cars broken down, and once you get a few it kinda seems to snowball. Whoa. Hold on there.’
He’d been staring at the southbound motorists, but turned his attention back to the road to see a white hatchback bearing down on them, no more than two hundred metres away. He held his breath, half expecting Papetti to break out the rocket launcher and blast the insolent driver flaming into the guard rail. Instead, she performed one of the more bizarre acts of road courtesy he’d even seen, given their situation. She flicked on her indicator and began to drift slowly into the next lane, as if there were a casual protocol for avoiding head-on collisions.
If there were, he just hoped the other driver was aware of it.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Papetti groaned.
Apparently, the other driver hadn’t read the chapter on how to avoid being killed when driving down the wrong carriageway on a highway, as he began to drift into their path, also signalling his lane change.
‘You in-bred, retarded son of a bitch,’ she said, and moved into the far right lane. ‘Do you want to die?’
Apparently so. The in-bred, retarded son of a bitch mirrored their move, and they had less than a hundred meters of road between them, much less.
‘Rocket launchers,’ he said. ‘Use the fucking rocket launchers!’
‘I’m not Team fucking America. Hold on to something.’
He grabbed the overhead handle with his left hand and braced his legs against the end of the foot well. He couldn’t find any handles for his right hand, so he just gripped the leg of his chinos in a hot sweaty clinch.
They were close enough to see the face of the other driver, and he was stunned to see it was a woman, young and blonde and wearing an expression which screamed I am just so over this. Could she be so far over it that she wanted to kill herself, and them along with her? It wasn’t as if suicides were a rarity. Papetti pulled the Humvee hard to the left,
taking them into the middle lane. Blondie started to mirror the move, and Papetti went a little further left, dragging Blondie with her, and then when the cars were little more than a sneeze away from providing some very colourful entertainment for the traffic-locked travellers over the other side of the highway, she twisted the wheel hard to the right. Tyres screamed on the road, and he felt the Humvee fishtail for a second before it straightened up, and they blew past the white hatchback to the receding howl of its furious horn.
‘Fucken psycho bitch!’ Papetti screamed at the rear-view mirror.
He looked out the back window but the hatchback was already out of sight around a bend in the road. Backs of heads craned out from car windows on the opposite carriageway. He tried to focus his hearing above the low rumble of the Humvee to grab a snatch of screech or crash or thump, but none came.
In that flash of her face and her empty eyes blowing past, he realised with a numb horror that she was willing to die. Perhaps even wanted to. And there was Dave again, standing aside, just letting it happen.
Not his fault.
Hot acid rose in the back of his throat. He needed a distraction, a diversion for his mind. He looked across at Papetti. She was kneading the steering wheel like it was some kind of stress-relief toy, a squeezie figure in mortal danger of evisceration. Her nostrils flared, and he could see her trying to control her heart-rate by taking long measured breaths. On each intake of car-heated air, her chest strained at the khaki fabric of her shirt so tightly he could make out the outline of her sports bra. She flicked her eyes at him, caught him out.
‘Eyes on the road,’ she said.
He could feel the heat in his cheeks. He wondered if it was a military thing, trying to cut down the feminine curves wherever possible. He wondered what else she might be trying to hide. Next petrol stop he’d suggest she go in and pay.
After about a minute he started laughing.
‘What’s funny?’ Papetti said.
‘Nothing, but if I don’t laugh I’m going to scream. Are you worried about what’s around the next bend?’
‘I’m wary of it. Worry won’t do us any good.’
He returned to trying to ring Jenny. At least it seemed to be working, if only she’d pick up. Then he’d stare at the red dot on the GPS app for a while. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but he could see that it had made some marginal progress since he last looked at it. Then he’d go back to tapping the green handset below Jenny’s smiling face, listening to the ringing and praying for a variation on the predictable voicemail message.
When the ring tone cut out, replaced by a voice saying hello, he nearly dropped the handset.
‘Hello?’ the voice said.
‘Hello?’ he said. Words piled up in his throat, threatening to choke him, he only managed to let one out. ‘Jenny?’
The voice sighed. ‘No, it’s Kirsty, Dave. Looks like Jenny misplaced her phone.’
The first emotion off the front of the queue which had suddenly formed inside him was anger, anger at the bloody carelessness to lose something so important at such a dangerous time. She could have lost her wallet or her passport or even her bloody car keys, but her phone?
‘Dave, you still there?’
He felt the phone growing slippery with sweat as he gripped it too tightly. He forced himself to relax, to breathe out. ‘Yes Kirsty, still here. Are you and Doyle OK?’
‘Yes, we’re fine. Jenny was going to be right behind us, she had to pack a few things. I’m sure she’s not far back.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Sitting in a solid unmoving stream of metal somewhere near Maroochydore. Oh wait, we’re starting to move again. Dave, I’m going to have to hang up.’
‘Sure. Be careful Kirsty.’
‘You too Dave.’
He ended the call and scowled at the phone as if it had betrayed me.
‘Look on the bright side,’ Papetti said. ‘At least you know why she wasn’t picking up.’
‘Is that a bright side?’
‘Sure it is. At least we know roughly where she is.’
A loud crash broke through the steady rumble of the Hummer’s engine, rolling over them from somewhere further up the road.
‘Jesus, that did not sound healthy,’ he said.
‘No it did not.’
‘What do you think it was, a head-on?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough. Whatever happened is only a couple of clicks away. Do me a favour, reach around the seat behind you?’
‘What am I reaching for?’
‘A ballistic vest. I want you to put it on.’
‘You don’t think it’s any kind of fighting do you?’
‘I don’t know what it is, but we’re not taking any chances.’
Thick black smoke curled up from the road, not far ahead, and deep at its core was a dark amber glow. He found the vest and put it on.
Chapter 20
Biff lost himself the swirls and whorls of the tiny boat on the blue and red sea. If he stood too close he lost it, but from a few large strides away, it swam into focus. Any further and the riot of colour, the swipes and the spatters, drowned it. He didn’t know the painting’s name, but he liked to think of it as just the boat. The boat was a massive canvas, as big as the side of a shed, perfectly filled by reds and blues and greens and greys and blacks. It was one of the most impressive things he’d seen in his life. He reached out to touch a blue ridge of paint, and he could feel the subtle grooves where the painter’s brush had passed through.
He started to consider how he might be able to take it with him — perhaps cut it away from the frame with a carving knife and roll up the canvas, he’d seen that done in a movie once — when Epoch stepped in front of him, lifted the painting down and angled it between wall and floor. He looked to Biff, then to the painting, and he drove his heel right through the middle of it. Biff felt the blow reverberate through his chest, and a weak grunt slipped out of him.
‘Why?’ he said. He wanted to strike out at Epoch, knock him on his skinny arse and put his foot through him the same way he did to the painting.
‘You can’t fence this shit,’ Epoch said. ‘Yeah? What are you going to do, cart it down to Cash Converters and ask em what’ll ya give me for this? Stick it up on eBay with a buy-it-now of fifty grand? No, unless you’re well connected to an underground art-appreciation circle of millionaires and billionaires, you might as well wipe your arse with it.’
‘But why … but why bust it up?’
‘What did I say as we were leaving the real estate agency? Can you remember that Brendan?’
Biff screwed his eyes tight shut and tried to replay what Epoch had said to him — his eyes always let in too much noise, made it difficult to focus. ‘You said watch out for the broken glass on the way out, there’s no triple-oh to call if I cut myself today.’
Epoch laughed, a short sharp machine gun bray. ‘Yeah, yeah, I said that. But what did I say after that?’
Biff felt around in the cluttered space behind his eyelids, looking for the answer to Epoch’s question. It was relatively easy to find, close to the top and more or less intact. ‘You said we’re at war,’ he said.
‘That’s right Brendan, that’s right. We’re at war. But it’s not a conventional war, is it? What’s happening here is a lot more than that. This is a class war. You know what I mean?’
‘Um, you mean like a school thing? I read The Chocolate War once, they made us.’
Epoch almost kept the smile from creeping onto his face, but he couldn’t quite hold it at bay. It tickled the corner of his mouth, blew lightly into his eyes. ‘Kind of a school thing, in a way, yeah, I suppose, in a way. Yeah, nah, but what I’m talking about is a battle between the rich and the poor. The popular successful kids and the ones who don’t do so well, who get into trouble for mucking up because they can’t follow what the teacher is talking about, because the teacher isn’t really trying. So yeah, a class war.’
‘But why no
w?’ Biff said. ‘With all the fires, and the pamphlets from those QTA guys making people twitchy?’
Epoch leaned in close to Biff, eyes gleaming. ‘Chaos, Brendan. Chaos breeds chaos, anarchy, rioting. That’s what’s starting now, and it’ll probably continue on for at least a few days. Maybe as long as a week.’
Biff rubbed his head. ‘But what’s that got to do with the painting?’
Epoch let the smile right in. ‘The painting,’ he said, ‘is typical of the kind of extravagant spending habits of the bourgeoisie upper classes. It’s typical of the kind of look-how-much-money-I-have attitudes which pervades their ranks, the attitude which they use to try and keep themselves above everyone else. This painting, guys like you and me can’t sell it, can’t make money from it, while they can. Hell, they keep selling them for more and more money, and before long the painting costs more than the house it’s hanging in. But you wait and see Brendan, you wait and see. Over the coming days, this kind of wealth, inequitable wealth, is going to go up in flames. This looting and destruction, it’s all going to be given a label, or a brand. The Queensland Riots, maybe. Anything that happens over that time, which is consistent with the branding, will be given the branding. Fires, looting, property destruction … even the senseless destruction of otherwise valuable art. You see what I’m getting at here Brendan?’
He really didn’t, but Biff nodded anyway.
Epoch probably sensed that, and decided to explain further. ‘Anything we do, Brendan, we want to make sure it’s branded. Because as long as it’s branded, it’ll be harder to single us out and scrutinise what we do.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Brendan, we’re going after the good stuff.’
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