Dark Country (Dungirri)

by Parry, Bronwyn

  Gil took a sip of his beer, then stretched out his legs, and leaned back in the wooden seat, closing his eyes. He let his body relax, tired muscles appreciating the cessation of activity, his mind slowing down enough after the bustle of the evening to begin unravelling the multiple strands of worry that were still unresolved. One action was clear – when Liam returned, he’d tell both of them they were leaving in the morning.

  He could hear Deb shifting in her chair, the muted clunk of her glass on the table each time she took a mouthful and set it down again. Still on the post-cooking buzz, she didn’t slow down easily, either her hands or her mind.

  Another swallow of beer, another clunk of the glass, before she broke the silence. ‘The police sergeant seems okay.’

  He didn’t bother opening his eyes. ‘She’s not your type.’

  ‘Oh, jeez, I know that. She’s as straight as they come. But she’s smart, attractive, and has the sense to know you’re no murderer.’

  ‘Deb?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He only needed to open one eye to give her a warning look. ‘Do not even think it.’

  Instead of shutting up, she laughed. ‘You need to get yourself a life, Gil. Or a woman. Or both.’

  ‘I have a life.’

  She snorted. ‘A life? Until three days ago, you worked eighteen or twenty hours a day, seven days a week, for years. That’s not what I call a life.’

  Only three days ago? Yeah, that was all, despite everything that had happened since then. And facing down the current threats wasn’t what he’d call a life, either.

  ‘When was the last time you slept with a woman?’ She looked at him over her glass, her grin daring him to answer.

  He could have told her to mind her own business, but they’d known each other for enough years that she probably could hazard a good guess at the answer, anyway.

  ‘Not that long ago.’ A few weeks. A month or two. Maybe more. He couldn’t really remember when. Some brazen, brunette lawyer who’d come on to him at the bar, hot and strong, and hung around till after closing and so he’d taken what she’d offered, hard and fast against his office door.

  ‘The verb in that sentence was “slept”,’ Deb retorted, as if she’d read his mind. ‘Not “screwed”. Tangled limbs, under the covers, nice, slow, waking up together in the morning … that sort of thing, you know?’

  Did he know? He dug around in his memory, came up with nothing. Sex, oh, yeah, he knew that. Healthy, uncomplicated, uncommitted sex. Anything else …

  He reached for his beer, the liquid sliding down his throat smoothly. ‘Anyone ever tell you that grilling the boss about his sex life is usually a sackable offence?’

  ‘You’re not my boss any more.’

  ‘No, I guess not. Just your future business partner. The one with the money.’

  She grinned cheekily. ‘And a truckload of empty threats.’

  Liam came out of the pub, a soft drink in his hand, and joined them at the table.

  Gil straightened up, leaned his elbows on the table, hands clasping the schooner.

  ‘Speaking of threats,’ he said, ‘I need to tell you about this afternoon. And first thing tomorrow morning, both of you are leaving here.’

  They objected, of course. They objected, and argued, and discussed, in low tones, that it had to be Tony responsible and how he might be exposed, and insisted that if Gil stayed, they should too.

  ‘Listen, you two,’ he said finally, ‘Tony Russo isn’t the only person with a vendetta.’ He rubbed some condensation off the glass with his thumb, and then told them the worst. ‘Last January, I informed a senior police officer about two bent detectives working with Kevin Jones. That info led directly to the arrest of the coppers and most of the Jones mob. The only person who knew it could have been me was Marci, and it’s likely she leaked that before she died. If she did, then my life expectancy is now pretty darned short.’

  ‘Jesus, Gil,’ Deb said, ‘you informed on Kevin Jones? Shouldn’t they be putting you in a safe house or something?’

  ‘No. Going into protection means too many police would know, and it only takes one bent copper to leak that information. If I’m here, in the open, then they’ll target me directly, and not use others to get to me.’

  For once, there was no sign of a smile on Liam’s face. Despite his upbeat nature, he knew, even more so than Deb, the brutal realities of organised crime and the punishment for informing. As a boy he’d been forced to witness the execution of his mother and sister, a bloody message for his brother, caught between rival Vietnamese drug lords.

  ‘That’s why you want us out of the way.’ Liam spoke flatly.

  ‘Yes. I’d prefer you left tonight, but you both look ready to crash, so first thing in the morning gives you a chance to get some sleep, and be more alert.’

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ Deb insisted. ‘Not just leave you in this shit by yourself. We’re not useless.’

  ‘Disappearing for a few days will help me. Head out east in the morning, withdraw as much cash as you can from the first ATM you see, and keep your phones switched off. If they do look for you, they’ll think you’re heading back to Sydney. Go north or south instead, and only use cash.’

  Reluctantly they agreed, and after a few minutes arranging methods of contact, he left them to discuss which direction to travel.

  Some people might think it strange how well the three of them got along, with no blood relationship and no romance. Confident now in her career and herself, Deb was hardly recognisable as the bashed-up, runaway teenager he’d found on the pub’s back doorstep, ten years ago. And ever since Liam had shown up five years back, offering to work in exchange for a meal, Deb had been one of his champions. Liam had returned the friendship with loyalty, and plenty of brotherly cheek. So, they’d look out for each other, those two, Gil had no doubt about it.

  Which left him to look out for the other two people at risk through association with him. Convincing Kris to go would likely be impossible, and as for Megan … he had to hope that if no-one knew their connection, she’d be safe.

  He left the pub through the side gate, avoiding the bar. Through the windows he could see Sean Barrett and a couple of mates at the pool table, a formal ball with the old folk obviously not their style. Although he could imagine them raising hell and getting smashed at a Bachelors and Spinsters ball.

  He needed to stretch his legs, get some air and find some space to think. He could have taken the Birraga road, or turned on to Showground Road and headed out of town on one of the tracks into the scrub, but the music floated from the hall, and without consciously making a decision, he turned towards it.

  Through the open door, Kris glimpsed a shadow moving among the trees on the bank of the creek beyond her place. The dark shape of a man, dropping down into a relaxed, comfortable bushman’s crouch, watching from a distance.

  Gil Gillespie. The one man in town who could never walk into this ball as if he belonged.

  The hall suddenly seemed too crowded, too stuffy, and the cool night air beckoned. Kris murmured an excuse to the people she’d been talking to and slipped out the open side door, the skirt of her long dress brushing her legs as she crossed the rough grass between them.

  ‘Quite the belle of the ball, aren’t you?’ That laconic tone of his drifted through the darkness as she approached.

  ‘Give me a pair of jeans and a T-shirt any day,’ she retorted, although, just now, she did for the first time actually feel good in the unaccustomed sensuality of the evening dress, with the light breeze brushing skin not usually exposed. And she wasn’t planning on examining that feeling too closely.

  She couldn’t see his face clearly. With a nod towards the hall, he asked, ‘So, are you and Strelitz an item?’

  ‘Me and Mark?’ She laughed out loud. ‘A politician and a cop? Not a good combination for anything other than friendship, believe me. Diplomacy isn’t my thing. And I’d want to arrest half his colleagues.’

&nb
sp; ‘What about the guy you were dancing with before him?’

  He’d been watching her. Heck, he might have been watching any number of people, she reminded herself, to squelch the warmth coiling through her veins. He’d grown up in this town, knew most of its people.

  ‘Scott? He’s … nice. But he’s also Ingrid Sauer’s fiancée. Did you know her?’

  He screwed up his face and thought for a moment. ‘Snotty-nosed blond kid with plaits? Or maybe that was her cousin.’

  She laughed lightly. ‘They’ve both grown up a bit, since then.’

  The music drifted across to them, muted at this distance, and she leaned against an old fencepost.

  He still hunkered by the creek bank, and it struck her how surprisingly at ease in the bush environment he was, for a man who’d spent the past decade and a half in Sydney’s inner suburbs.

  And she couldn’t, for the moment, picture him in the busy streets of the city, because he belonged here, in the dark stillness of the bush, as natural and untamed and complex as the wilderness around them.

  The barking call of an owl echoed somewhere nearby, breaking into the easy silence that had fallen between them.

  ‘You should go back inside to your friends, enjoy the party,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not much of a party person. Besides, the company’s fine out here for now.’

  He snorted. ‘Not many of them would agree with you.’ He said it carelessly, as if it didn’t matter.

  But it did matter, and she dropped the teasing banter and addressed the issue seriously. ‘It seems to me there’s a lot of question marks over your supposed responsibility for Paula Barrett’s death.’

  He was quiet for a moment. ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘I looked up a few records yesterday, Gil. It appears there was no evidence other than the blood-alcohol report, to suggest, let alone prove, negligence or culpability. Which leads me to suspect that there wasn’t any, and that the report was falsified to nail you.’

  He rose, strolled a few steps away to stand with his back to the light coming from the hall, his face in shadow. ‘Cruddy investigation and record keeping doesn’t change a person’s guilt or innocence.’

  He might have been talking about the weather, for all the emotion in his voice. And yet … the controlled stillness of his silhouette convinced her that the don’t-give-a-damn attitude was merely a hard shell of protection around a core that did give a damn.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. Nor does it make a crime out of a tragic accident.’ The dark, an unlit country road, and a kangaroo leaping out – she’d seen the results too many times, almost come to grief that way herself, and not just the other night.

  He reached for a low-hanging branch, picked a leaf, and twirled the stem in his teeth.

  ‘People don’t like accidents,’ he said. ‘They always want someone to blame.’

  He was right, but it didn’t make the situation right. ‘Sometimes no-one is at fault. Maybe they’ll just have to get used to that idea.’

  ‘Don’t go mounting a PR campaign on my behalf, Blue.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He tossed the leaf to the ground. ‘Because it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving here tomorrow. I don’t care what they think. And because the less you have to do with me, the better. Tony Russo, the Flanagans … they’re dangerous, Blue. They’ve already threatened you. They won’t hesitate to do more.’

  ‘Are you trying to frighten me, Gil?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, blunt and hard. ‘You shouldn’t have stood up for me, put yourself at risk. You should have run like hell from me the moment we met, Blue. You should run like hell from me now.’

  She held his dark gaze with hers. ‘I’m not running, Gil.’

  He stood unmoving in the night, his face still in shadow, his voice, when he spoke again, rough and low. ‘What if I told you that every time I see you, I imagine you naked?’

  His attempt to frighten her with that tactic didn’t work. If it had just been a line, it might have pissed her off, but the raw honesty only spoke aloud what they both knew and had been avoiding.

  And maybe the night and the moonlight were stirring some wild part of her, eroding her usual caution, but she discovered that she wanted no lies or denials between them, just acceptance of who they were and what they felt. So she answered him with the same honesty. ‘If you told me that, I’d have to admit that it’s a mutual distraction. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.’

  He started, then yanked his eyes away, muttering, ‘Jesus, Blue.’ He dragged a boot heel through the dirt, scoring two furrows before he stopped, threw her a look that was both question and challenge, and said, ‘Then you’re as crazy as I am.’

  The return of the dark humour to his voice let her breathe again. It would be all right. Whatever ‘it’ was.

  Still with a metre between them, she inclined her head and watched him, teasing him lightly, ‘That’s a novel approach to sweet-talk, Gillespie.’

  ‘I don’t do “sweet”, Blue. Slow, sometimes. But definitely not “sweet”.’

  ‘“Sweet” is overrated.’

  Three seconds passed before he challenged softly, ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Definitely.’ And she had no idea if she was flying out of control, or totally in control, but right now she didn’t actually care.

  There was nothing slow or sweet or polite about their kiss. Nothing gentle or tentative, just raw and insistent and demanding.

  Her initial thought – while she was still thinking – was that she would like to kiss him. Two adults, mutual attraction, a natural response. But hunger flared instantly, as their bodies touched, a fierce need to take from him and give to him she didn’t want to resist. She gave up thinking, let the wild heart of herself respond without constraint.

  Heartbeat spiralling, her hands explored the contours of hard chest, shoulders and back that she’d dreamed about since that first night. As bold and possessive as his hands roaming her, heated against her skin and through the fabric of her dress, drawing them together for total contact from mouths to thighs. Desire and need and Gil became her only awareness.

  Until he pulled back. Abrupt and hard, letting her go and twisting on his heel to move several feet away, leaning his hand against a tree while he dragged in breaths.

  She tugged her light wrap around her, the air cool on her heated skin, words and sensations too jumbled in her mind to arrange in coherent shape.

  He gave a hard, bitter laugh. ‘Christ. I need my frigging head read.’

  Definitely not sweet-talk, but before she could frame a reply, a crackle of dry leaves warned her of someone approaching, and she turned to see Mark standing in the moonlight.

  ‘Everything all right, Kris?’

  ‘Yes. Fine.’ Oh, yes, fine if she didn’t count fractured breathing and the ground doing a rollercoaster impersonation underneath her feet. She dragged some semblance of politeness together. ‘Mark, do you remember Gil Gillespie?’

  Mark nodded acknowledgment, and the two men watched each other with all the wariness of a couple of wild dogs circling. ‘Gil. It’s been a long time.’

  Her blood pressure, starting to come down, shot up again as she realised the significance of this meeting between the two men. It had been a long time – eighteen years since they’d been in a car together with Mark’s girlfriend, Paula. A night that had ended with Paula dead, Mark critically injured in hospital, and Gil arrested. No wonder Mark hadn’t stepped forward and shaken hands with his usual courtesy.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gil responded eventually. ‘A long time.’ And then he glanced across at her, closed and distant again, as though they hadn’t just been kissing each other senseless. ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to your party.’

  He turned on his heel and headed towards the trees, disappearing into the darkness.

  He needed to walk. He passed the pub, took the side road down to the school, crossed the playing fields and jumped over the creek. Once out of town, the full moon lit the dirt track in
to the scrub, the shadows of the trees black against the silver light.

  His thoughts scrambled, too many things going on, each strand spinning around and tangling with the others. Marci’s murder. Vince’s murder. The fire at Jeanie’s. Jeanie hurt, in the hospital. The dead truck driver in the café. The search of the old place. His mother’s skeleton. Megan. Kris. Kissing Kris and wanting to peel away her clothes and taste her and feel her and be inside her and forget every other damned thing in the world but the feeling of them together.

  He groaned and hauled his thoughts back from that madness. What he needed to do was to sit down, go logically through each issue, work out a strategy, and then act on it. And those issues did not include getting physical with Kris.

  A gap in the trees revealed a gateway, an access into a large, cleared paddock, gently sloping away into the distance. The gate was old and rickety, but the gatepost solid and devoid of barbed wire, so he hoisted himself up on to it, hoping the clear space and fresh air might help to bring some clarity to his mind.

  As he looked out onto the peaceful, moonlit view it occurred to him how often he’d roamed the night landscape in his youth. As a kid, escaping his old man, he’d both loved the bush and hated it. Sanctuary and purgatory. Sometimes both at once. But once he’d learned its ways, grown tall and strong enough to be unafraid, he’d been more at home in the bush than in the dilapidated shack with his father.

  Working long days and nights in the pub, he’d almost forgotten how the moonlight could shine, without the urban lights dimming it. And how black it could be, without moonlight or starlight, when clouds obscured the night sky. He’d sometimes roamed in Sydney, too, after close-up and the cleaning had been done, in the quieter hours before sunrise, his ingrained restlessness not always negated by hard work and long hours.

  The wheel has come full circle; I am here.

  The racing in his mind had slowed, and he accepted it now, as a statement without judgment or threat, an acknowledgment that this place – the bush, Dungirri, the plains beyond – was a part of him. Nothing would change that, no matter what happened, no matter where he went in the future – assuming he had one.