Dangerously Placed

by Nansi Kunze

  ‘Oh, I’m sure Robbie thought you were lots of summer fun,’ Nix told her, still grinning like a madman.

  ‘I think the fact that Sky dresses to suit her mood rather than in the manner prescribed by her peers indicates an innate wisdom and appropriate self-esteem,’ said Ki.

  I waited for Nix to say ‘You would!’, but suddenly he went tense.

  ‘Quick – get out of sight!’ He pushed me behind a cut-out of Sasha the Sea Lion, Aqualand’s mascot. Sky and Ki hurried after us. Nix peered out over Sasha’s flipper.

  ‘What is it? The stalker guy?’ I asked.

  Nix shook his head, making room for me to look.

  There at the entrance, clearly looking for someone, was Dale.

  I stared up at Nix.

  ‘How did you know Dale was going to be here? Wait – how do you even know what he looks like?’

  ‘You told me his name and suburb, remember?’ Nix put his head next to mine so he could keep Dale under observation. ‘Yesterday I looked him up – there’s only one phone listing for McCarthy in Blackwood Heights. So I took a train up there to get a look at the guy, and before long he came out of his house and went down the street, checking over his shoulder and generally doing the whole suspicious character bit.’ He glanced at me, and I saw a glimmer of Friday’s anger back in his eyes. ‘Your man Dale isn’t well-versed in subtlety.’

  ‘He’s not “my man”,’ I muttered.

  ‘So naturally I followed him,’ continued Nix, apparently ignoring me. Dale was still standing in the gateway looking lost. ‘He went to a park and got out his phone. I listened in from behind a tree.’

  ‘You stalked him?’ I gaped at Nix, trying to decide whether to be impressed or horrified.

  Nix grinned.

  ‘Hey, he may not be subtle, but my skills in that area verge on ninja-like.’

  ‘Says the man who scored a week’s detention for painting his buttocks in school colours and mooning the Under 15 football team,’ snorted Sky.

  ‘Showing school spirit isn’t meant to be subtle, Miss Cynic. And I’ll have you know I managed to hear his whole conversation. He told the person on the other end of the phone that he had more information to hand over and that he’d meet them here at three o’clock today. The other dude must have been pressuring Dale, because he started whining on about how it was difficult to get any more info and how someone in the office was getting suspicious of him.’

  ‘He must’ve meant me,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I think so too.’ He turned worried eyes on me. ‘At the end, he said: “No, I couldn’t do that to her!”’

  I gulped. Surely Dale wouldn’t hurt me? It was hard to believe, but it was also hard to believe he’d be giving information about the office to some dodgy character – and that was obviously true. I’d known Nix a long time. He could be juve at times, but he never lied. Even when the truth could get him into trouble, as it often had.

  ‘He’s on the move!’ Nix grabbed my arm, pulling me after him as he shot out from our hiding place. Sure enough, Dale was striding towards the shark pool, his phone pressed to his ear. I stumbled after Nix, looking back for the others. Ki was keeping up, holding her long skirt bunched up in one hand, while Sky tottered along behind in her platform heels.

  The hourly shark show had just started, and latecomers were still jostling for seats on the concrete steps that rose up around one side of the pool. Dale made his way to the far end of a row near the front, where a grey-haired man with a moustache was sitting next to a small girl with pigtails. Dale sat down beside them and shook the man’s hand.

  ‘Okay, we need to get closer so we can find out what they’re up to,’ said Nix.

  ‘We might be able to hear them if we conceal ourselves at the side of the steps,’ suggested Ki, pointing. She was right – Dale was only a couple of metres away from the edge of the concrete, where a rail protected spectators from the sheer drop to the pavement below. There was space for us to crouch down beside the wall. We hurried over, keeping low.

  ‘Sheila, the oldest of our great whites here at Aqualand, is over four-and-a-half metres long,’ the shark show presenter was saying over the loudspeakers. I sneaked a look up over the edge of the steps. Dale and the moustachioed man were talking, but there was no way I could hear them over the noise of the crowd and the commentary.

  ‘Can one of you guys go up there?’ I asked, ducking down again. ‘There’s a free spot between us and Dale – someone could sit there and try to listen in.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be me,’ said Nix.

  ‘Why not?’

  Nix looked a little chagrined.

  ‘He spotted me behind the tree yesterday after he put his phone away. I pretended I was taking bark samples, but I’m not sure if he bought it.’ There was a pause while Sky and I stared accusingly at him and Ki rolled her eyes. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘Even ninjas get caught occasionally!’

  ‘Okay, so it needs to be Sky or Ki,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Sky.

  ‘Excellent. The way you’re dressed, I doubt they’ll object to you sitting nearby,’ said Nix. Sky looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to be offended or flattered.

  ‘Here – take this,’ said Ki, pressing a button on her phone and handing it to Sky. I felt my own phone buzz in my pocket. ‘Try to hold it close to Dale so we can hear what’s going on through Alex’s phone. But be as unobtrusive as possible, okay?’

  ‘Of course,’ nodded Sky. She set off as quickly as her platforms would allow around the front of the steps. I glanced at Ki and saw she was thinking the same thing as me: being unobtrusive didn’t really come naturally to Sky.

  I pressed ‘Speaker’ on my phone, holding my hand over the microphone area so Ki’s phone wouldn’t give us away, and the three of us huddled down to listen. At first we could only hear the clomping of Sky’s enormous shoes, then a rustling as she sat down.

  ‘As you can see, a great white is an extremely fast swimmer, reaching speeds of nearly seventy kilometres an hour,’ echoed the phone as the presenter spoke again. Then there was a scraping sound and suddenly I could hear Dale’s voice.

  ‘… the last of the footage,’ he was saying. ‘And I managed to see a couple of documents about Grody’s plans for the Avatar deal, but I don’t think I can get anything else useful.’

  ‘You’ve got another week, don’t you?’ said another voice, presumably the man beside him. ‘You never know what might come your way. And there’ll be gossip around the office.’ The man chuckled. ‘I never saw an office that wasn’t rife with people out to stab each other in the back. You’ll hear something, my boy, and when you do, send it straight through to me.’

  ‘And here comes Barry! At nine years of age, he’s almost all grown up,’ blared the loudspeaker, drowning out all other sounds.

  ‘… not that easy,’ Dale was saying as the noise died down.

  ‘No one said investigative journalism was easy, Dale.’

  ‘Daddy! This is boring!’ whined a small voice – the pigtailed girl, I assumed.

  ‘All right, Mia, we’ll go in a minute. Dale, I understand it can be hard to get used to at first, but you’ve done a great job. It’s inside information that sells, my boy, not interviews – remember that. Keep this up and you’ll have your own column before you know it.’

  So that was it. Dale had been gathering information to sell to a newspaper. No wonder he’d been terrified of anyone finding out he was in another Virk Room – if the truth had been revealed, he’d have been thrown out of Simulcorp Marketing and probably sued as well. Maybe this was where all the rumours about Grody and Simulcorp had been coming from.

  ‘That little weasel,’ muttered Nix, grinding his football into the concrete path.

  ‘Well, we’d better be going,’ said the unknown man’s voice. ‘Say hi to your mum and dad for me, won’t you?’ There was a scuffling noise as he got up. Nix stood too.

  ‘Maybe I should follow – get a picture of them
or something,’ he said.

  Before I could answer, the loudspeaker flared into life again.

  ‘And it looks like Sheila’s coming up for the bait, folks!’

  Screams erupted from the crowd. I turned just in time to see a huge, gaping pair of jaws launch upwards. Then the shark plunged back into the pool, sending a great sheet of water over everyone in the bottom three rows.

  And any fool who happened to be crouching next to the bottom three rows.

  Gasping, I raised a dripping face to Nix and Ki. As the closest to the pool, I was completely drenched, while Nix’s main problem seemed to be his wet fringe covering his eyes. Ki looked as if she’d merely been caught in a brief rain shower.

  ‘The moustache dude!’ exclaimed Nix, unsticking a patch of wet t-shirt from his chest and peering over the steps. ‘Damn it, he’s gone!’

  I risked a peek too. Sky was clutching Ki’s phone protectively and examining her precious platform sandals for water damage. Nix put a hand over the edge and tapped on the concrete to get her attention.

  ‘We should go after the moustache guy,’ he hissed.

  Sky nodded and made to stand up, but she slipped and her bag came crashing down, scattering her gear all over the step. Nix and I just managed to duck out of sight as Dale looked around and bent to help Sky pick everything up.

  ‘Oh! Thank you … I mean, you don’t have to bother,’ came Sky’s voice from my phone.

  ‘It’s my pleasure,’ we heard Dale say.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ I muttered. He had to be getting quite an eyeful of Sky from down there.

  ‘My licence …’ There was a series of clunks – presumably Sky had stuck the hand holding the phone into her bag to dig around. ‘I can’t find it …’

  ‘Oh! Sorry, I was standing on it,’ said Dale. ‘Here you are, Miss …’ There was a pause, then Dale’s voice again, sounding incredulous. ‘Skydreamer Tranquillity Pedersen? That’s genuinely your name?’ And that’s when he made the fatal mistake of laughing.

  ‘Okay, that’s it.’ I heard a thud. Had Sky dropped her bag? ‘I’ve had about all I can stand from you, you spying, thieving, girl-misleading piece of –’

  ‘Aaaargh!’

  I shot upright. The scream was Dale’s – Sky had stamped on his foot with one of her platform sandals.

  ‘What the hell?’ he exploded and made to grab her, but Nix was too fast for him. He hurled the mini football straight at Dale’s head, smacking him right on the nose. I darted around the rail and ran up the steps, Nix and Ki close behind, prompting shouts of ‘Hey!’ and ‘Down in front!’ from nearby spectators.

  ‘Alex?’ Dale shrank back against the steps, his hands cupped over his nose, his eyes wide.

  ‘We heard everything, Dale,’ I told him, glaring down at his cowering figure.

  ‘Will you kids sit down?’ yelled a man behind us. ‘We’re trying to see the sharks, here!’

  ‘Our apologies,’ said Ki. ‘We were just leaving.’ She nodded at Nix, who grabbed Dale by the arm and yanked him up off the step.

  Over by the dolphin pool, where the shark show commentary was just a dull drone, Nix shoved Dale against a wall and let go of his arm.

  ‘So it was you who leaked all the rumours about Grody’s deals and what was going on at the office,’ I said.

  Dale stared defiantly into the distance. His nose was already turning an ugly purple.

  ‘You’d better answer her,’ growled Nix, shaking his still-dripping hair out of his eyes, ‘or that nose is going to look a whole lot worse.’ I was surprised to see how powerful Nix looked beside Dale. Somehow, Dale’s fair, chiselled good looks seemed a little weedy in realspace.

  ‘All right, all right,’ muttered Dale. ‘There’s no need to get violent.’ He turned to me, looking sheepish. ‘I’m sorry, Alex. I wanted to tell you, but it was too late – I’d already sent the first reports to Uncle Geoffrey.’

  ‘That guy’s your uncle?’

  Dale nodded.

  ‘He’s the editor of The Business Report – it’s a newspaper.’

  ‘I know what The Business Report is,’ I said. ‘What I don’t understand is what that has to do with your placement.’

  Dale sighed.

  ‘Uncle Geoffrey wanted an inside scoop on Simulcorp’s deal with Avatar. There were rumours about it going around, but no one had been able to confirm that they were true. Uncle Geoffrey helped me get my placement, on condition that I found out more about Grody and Avatar while I was there and passed it on to him.’

  ‘And what about the footage?’ demanded Nix. Dale looked up, startled. ‘You gave him footage of people in the office.’

  ‘It’s nothing – just a few shots of Virk Rooms,’ stammered Dale.

  ‘So you’re telling us none of it was taken at the time Grody was murdered?’ I asked. ‘It seemed to me you knew something about that.’

  ‘I don’t! I swear I don’t!’ Dale began to sweat as Nix clenched his hand into a fist. ‘It won’t make any difference if you hit me – I don’t know anything about the murder.’

  Nix seemed to weigh that up for a moment. Then he unclenched his hand.

  ‘What about Alex?’ asked Ki quietly. ‘Did you give your uncle any information about her?’

  ‘I …’ Dale swallowed. ‘Only one piece.’ His eyes swivelled from Nix to me. ‘It’s only a few seconds of footage, Alex. I’ll make sure he doesn’t use it.’

  ‘Show me,’ I said grimly.

  With shaking hands, Dale took out his phone.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding it out. I took the phone and the others crowded around me. The tiny screen showed a shaky video of a Virk Room door opening – obviously Dale had actually sneaked into my entry room to take the footage. I saw a figure in a padded suit standing in the middle of a big, bare room. Me. As we watched, I bent over as if to pick something up. The screen zoomed in on my butt.

  ‘I … uh …’ gulped Dale as four angry stares honed in on him at once. I flung the phone at him, my face fiery. Suddenly conscious that my soaked shirt was sticking to my body, I folded my arms in front of me.

  ‘What exactly was it your uncle asked you to do to Alex?’ asked Ki. ‘Nix says you told him you couldn’t do it.’

  It was Dale’s turn to go red.

  ‘He wanted me to make you like me. Kind of … seduce you. Not that … I mean, I –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ I turned my head away, anger and humiliation burning in my chest. Some small part of me had wondered from the start why a guy like him was so interested in me. But it still hurt to hear that it had all been an act.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alex.’ Dale sounded near tears. ‘It was all Uncle Geoffrey’s idea. He said he’d give me a job at the paper if I did well. I just wanted to get a head start. You wanted to do well at your placement, too – you understand, right?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I say we haul him down to the police,’ said Nix.

  ‘No! Please, Alex!’ Dale reached out towards me, pleading. ‘I’ll never get another placement if Inge and the others find out what I did. And my uncle could get sued – they might even have to lay off people at the paper!’

  ‘Should’ve thought of that before you went around spying on people,’ said Nix, grabbing him again.

  ‘Let him go, Nix.’ I looked at Dale. ‘If you promise to make your uncle delete everything you’ve given him and not to try getting any more, we won’t turn you in.’

  Dale breathed out.

  ‘I can do that. I’ll ring my uncle straight away – you can listen in if you like. And I promise I won’t do any more spying.’ He gazed around at the four of us, desperate to make us believe him. ‘I won’t even come to work this week, okay?’

  I nodded. Nix let go of Dale’s arm.

  ‘Make the call,’ I told Dale, watching him fumble with his phone.

  ‘Uncle Geoffrey?’ he began nervously.

  I didn’t bother to stay and listen. I turned and walked away, feeli
ng cold – and not just because of the breeze blowing on my wet clothes. I’d met Dale in realspace at last … but now I wished I could go back to the time when all I’d known was the virtual version. The real Dale wasn’t someone I wanted to know at all.

  If I’d thought life would be quieter in my second week of work experience, I was wrong.

  The whole way from my house to AU-3 on Monday morning, I was sure I was being followed. I tried looking back over my shoulder at lightning speed a few times, but after my second collision with a parking meter, I realised all I was going to gain from that technique was the kind of nose Nix had given Dale with his football.

  I was soon snapped out of my stalker worries, however. Budi, who was dressed head to toe in bright orange, told me that Dale had called in sick again, citing glandular fever and saying that he probably wouldn’t be able to return before the end of the placement.

  ‘You haven’t been meeting him in realspace, have you, Peaches?’ Budi grinned. ‘You know what they call glandular fever – the kissing disease!’

  I made a lame attempt at a smile. Budi’s grin disappeared.

  ‘Hey, it was only a joke! Don’t worry, Alex, I’m sure he hasn’t really been out kissing other girls.’

  ‘It’s none of my business what Dale does!’ I tried to look earnest, even though I knew I was blushing. ‘There’s nothing going on between us, Budi.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Budi, but there were clearly many layers of meaning in that one syllable. I decided not to bother exploring them and sat down at the computer in my cubicle instead.

  ‘Should I work on the Impression proposal this morning, or can I go and visit the CGI guys?’ I asked, keen to turn the conversation back to business.

  ‘I shouldn’t think you’ll have much time for either to start off with,’ said Budi. ‘Isn’t your school supervisor supposed to arrive in a minute?’

  I looked at Budi’s watch and gasped. Of course I should have known today was that day. Before we started our placements, we’d all been given an appointment time for one of the teachers to visit and see how we were doing – by using the guest Virk Room at AU-1, in my case. But that was almost two weeks ago, which seemed more like a million years ago after all that had happened.