Dead Heat

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Dead Heat Page 18

by Peter Cotton


  ‘I’m investigating a murder,’ I said. ‘In the process, I stumbled on Bynder and his mate last night. It looked to me like they were up to no good, so I moved in for a closer look, and clearly I got too close, because here I am.’

  ‘Not too close at all, Detective,’ said my inquisitor, getting down on one knee. ‘Just close enough, I’d say. In fact, having you here is more than convenient. It’s useful. Saves us some trouble. You know what they say? About getting two birds with one stone? Well you’re the pigeon who fell into my hands without a single stone being thrown. So, this works. Believe me, it does.’

  ‘How does it work for you, exactly?’

  ‘In some contexts, you would be an inconvenience. An unnecessary complication. An extra task on an already full job sheet. But I don’t see you that way. On the contrary, you represent an opportunity. Someone who could enhance our work here — give us another way of making our point. That has to be a good thing.’

  ‘And what point are you trying to make?’

  ‘Now that is a complicated question. A partial answer will be evident within the hour, but I don’t think you’ll be in any state to appreciate it. Sorry about that. Anyway, enough idle chatter …’

  He got up and turned his back on me, and guided one of his men to the vacant corner of the wheelhouse. He whispered in his ear. The underling nodded and whispered a reply. The boss’s head went back and swivelled from side to side as he laughed. The underling came over and squatted next to me. He pressed down hard on my knees so that I was totally immobilised. Then one of his colleagues grabbed the front of my jacket and pulled me away from the pipe. He applied new zip ties to my forearms and wrists and pulled them tight. Then he took a fat Swiss army knife from his belt and cut the ties that connected me to the pipe.

  ‘We haven’t got long,’ said the head guy. ‘So. Mr Bynder. We’re here to execute a plan, not babysit your wayward niece. She’s distracted you enough already, and you’ve put her welfare ahead of our interests. She’s not one of us, so the question is, why did you bring her here? Answer: because you lost perspective. She should not be here. She’s got to go.’

  ‘Go? Go where? In what?’

  ‘With Detective Glass. In our little boat.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? What do you get out of that?’

  ‘A little more compliance from you, perhaps. That would be no small thing.’

  ‘I think you’re forgetting something here. We’re on the same side. At least, we’re supposed to be.’

  ‘Yes, but for someone who’s supposed to be on my side, you’re not much of a team player, are you? Now, be quiet. I’ve got things to decide.’

  ‘What’s there to decide?’

  ‘Your fate, Mr Bynder. That’s one of the things I need to decide. You’ve played your role well till now. But like everyone involved in this enterprise, you’re eminently expendable. Especially when you turn into a liability. Now, behave yourself to save yourself. That’s my advice. You’ve jeopardised your standing with this niece thing of yours and you have much to do to retrieve it.’

  He gave a nod, and the goon next to Jade cut the ties securing her to the chair. He then grabbed one of her hands, twisted her arm, and pulled her from the cupboard. She cried out in pain. He caught her other hand as she flailed at him and held both her hands behind her back.

  ‘No!’ said Jade, trying in vain to pull her hands free.

  ‘What’re you doing with her?’ said Bynder, leaping at the goon manhandling Jade.

  Two other men blocked his way and shoved him back against the console. They jostled with him for a few seconds, then one of them whacked him in the head with a pistol. Bynder fell heavily into Manassa and slid to the floor.

  Manassa grabbed the bloodied barrel of the pistol and pushed it towards the ceiling. But as he drew back his fist to hit the goon holding the gun, the other one jabbed his pistol under Manassa’s chin and pulled the trigger twice. Clack-clack. Manassa was dead before his punch got halfway to its target.

  ‘No!’ said Bynder, grabbing at his friend’s twitching body. ‘You didn’t have to do that to him! You’re a pack of fucking animals!’

  ‘This is what happens when people don’t listen,’ said the head goon, now showing naked contempt for Bynder. ‘Things go off the rails; bad feelings reach the point of no return; people get hurt and die. You jeopardised our mission. You challenged my authority. And now your man is dead because of you. It makes me wonder why you’re still alive. Take my warning: do as I say, or you’ll join him.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Bynder, fingering the open wound on his forehead. ‘I get it. I get it.’

  I got it, too. They were going to kill all three of us. And soon. They’d killed Manassa on the slightest pretext, and their leader wanted Jade dead, too — she’d distracted Bynder, somehow threatening their operation. I’d stumbled in on them, so I had to go. They weren’t exactly rushing to kill me, so maybe I was a curtain raiser for whatever ‘action’ they were planning. That’d leave Bynder as a loose end, and from the looks of the leader, he abhorred untidiness of any kind.

  Two of the men picked up Manassa’s body and carried it from the wheelhouse. Another one familiarised himself with the controls on the console. Manassa’s body made a moderate splash as it hit the water outside. The leader stepped to the console and whispered to the guy studying the controls.

  One of the men bent over me and cut the ties on my ankles. Two of them then lifted me to my feet and turned me towards the door. One jabbed me with his pistol, and I stumbled forward on numb ankles that I could barely flex. I leant against the doorframe for support and peered down a short, timber-lined corridor. Naked bulbs glowed in the low ceiling. The open doorway at the other end of the corridor framed the rolling deck, dark water, and the night sky. I stumbled along the corridor with a pistol pressed to my neck and stepped through the doorway onto the deck.

  Navigation lights shone from the rigging of the big trawler we were on. The wheelhouse and a few smaller rooms filled the front of the vessel. The back deck was flat with a couple of tall booms hanging over the stern for hauling in the catch. A gentle breeze came off the water. Lights twinkled on boats in the near distance. The streetlights in the far-off bay towns burned brightly. The residents slept safely in their beds. I would’ve given anything to be one of them.

  Bynder straggled out onto the deck, shadowed by another one of the goons. Jade’s man was a pace behind her as she stepped out. Standing in the light from the corridor, she looked to have lost all hope, as if the extreme nature of our predicament had hit home.

  The engines suddenly turned over and fired up. The men took that as their cue to herd us towards the back of the vessel, where a medium-sized launch pitched gently in the chop. The leader emerged onto the deck with a couple of his underlings in tow.

  ‘You get off here,’ he said, pointing at the launch.

  The guard half-helped, half-pushed Bynder down onto the deck of the launch. They lowered Jade into Bynder’s arms. Finally, two men handed me down to him. He tried to get hold of me, but I slipped from his grasp and fell half a metre onto the deck, landing on my stomach.

  Bynder ushered Jade into the open wheelhouse and sat her next to the console. He quickly ran his hand over the panel.

  ‘No keys,’ he said, confirming what we all knew.

  I felt extremely exposed, lying on my stomach on the open deck, so I rolled onto my side and started to worm my way towards the wheelhouse. The head goon studied my progress for a few seconds, then turned his attention to some whispered advice from one of his men.

  Ominously, the four men standing on the trawler above us raised their AK-47s up to the ready position, fingers on triggers. The atmospherics were unmistakable. I figured the only reason they hadn’t killed us earlier was to save turning the trawler’s wheelhouse into a slaughterhouse. And it had been easier for them to
escort us to our place of execution, rather than carry our dead bodies from the wheelhouse. The firing squad swayed on the rolling deck, all keyed up and ready to kill. So why was their boss waiting?

  Someone took hold of my collar and dragged me across the deck. It was Jade. She pulled me under the cover provided by the roof of the open wheelhouse and helped me up into a seated position. I caught my breath and watched Bynder empty the storage compartments on either side of the steering wheel. He placed everything carefully into a pile on the deck, including a fishing line on a spool, a rusty stapler, various pieces of cutlery, and four old life jackets.

  Jade grabbed the only steak knife among the cutlery and told me to turn around. I did as she asked, and she inserted the knife between the ties on my forearms and wrists and sawed until the ties snapped.

  ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ said Bynder, pulling two flare guns from a small locker under the steering wheel.

  He squinted as he tried to read the instructions by the light of the moon.

  ‘Can’t see a thing,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘Ahh well. We’ll give it a go anyway, heh?’

  He picked up the stapler and threw it underarm towards the back of the trawler. It bounced off a metal boom with a clang. As the firing squad turned towards the noise, Bynder stepped from the wheelhouse and fired-off both flares. The fiery projectiles whizzed past the goons’ noses and sent them sprawling backwards onto the deck, but they quickly recovered their feet, and within seconds were reassembling above us.

  Then, two surprising things happened almost simultaneously. The trawler clunked into gear and took off at full throttle, throwing the members of the firing squad back onto the deck again. And as the vessel surged away, I stuck my head up over the gunnels and heard the distant sound of small-arms fire. A rapid smattering of pops quickly built to a full-on firefight. There were a number of small explosions, then a throaty weapon blew the shit out of something highly flammable and the resulting fireball lit the clouds over the southern shore. It was Creswell! The naval base was under attack!

  A spray of bullets whizzed over the top of the launch and forced me down onto the deck. The next spray raked the wheelhouse, and bits of fibreglass flew everywhere. The fight at Creswell continued to build with another series of explosions and such a chorus of automatic weapons fire that it was hard to distinguish individual bursts.

  ‘They’re stopping,’ said Bynder, peering at the trawler. ‘We’ve got to get into the water.’

  He handed Jade a life jacket.

  ‘You ready?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t put the jacket on, yet,’ said Bynder. ‘Throw it over the side, then dive down as deep as you can. And stay under as long as possible. I’ll be right behind you.’

  Jade threw her life jacket over the side and dived in after it. Bynder and I stuck our heads up over the gunnels and took a look at the trawler, now about forty metres away.

  ‘This is it,’ he said, and he threw his life jacket into the water and followed it in.

  I pocketed the steak knife, which had a sharp point, grabbed one of the remaining life jackets, and threw it overboard. As I turned for a final look at the trawler, a flash on the deck of the big boat illuminated the handful of men standing there. A belated thud followed the flash, and a flaming object hurtled across the water towards me.

  15

  I was a few metres under the water and still diving when the shockwave from the exploding launch sent a jagged force through my eardrums and innards. I stopped and absorbed it, and allowed my body to slowly invert till my feet pointed at the bottom of the bay. I stretched my arms and flapped my hands to maintain my depth, and I concentrated on holding my breath.

  Big bits of the launch wobbled down through the water around me, leaving trails of luminous bubbles in their wake. Pieces of black debris bobbed on the surface. Smaller bits were still splashing down. If I surfaced too quickly, there was a good chance I’d get burnt, either by falling debris, or by breathing air that’d been superheated by the explosion. So I stayed where I was and fought the impulse to breathe.

  When my lungs felt close to bursting, I scrambled for the surface and pushed through a thin layer of sooty stuff. The air had cooled off in the minutes since the explosion, and I caught my breath as I looked around for the trawler. I spotted it about four hundred metres away, trailing a slew of smaller fishing boats racing for the open ocean. An explosion on the bay would normally have drawn plenty of would-be rescuers to the scene, but after witnessing the attack on Creswell, every skipper had one priority: to get as far away from any fireworks as possible.

  Another firefight erupted at Creswell. It featured weapons of various calibres and ended with three explosions. The fight subsided into periodic bursts of fire from weapons of the same calibre. The sailors were mopping up. Like popcorn being cooked in a microwave, irregular pops at the end meant the thing was almost done.

  Then a thought crashed through my consciousness. Bynder and Jade! I spun around and saw two bobbing forms about fifteen metres away. It was Jade, with Bynder immediately behind her.

  I paddled towards them. On the way, I stopped to extract a life jacket from the middle of some debris. I took off my leather jacket and let it sink, and slipped on the life jacket and secured it.

  Jade was dry-retching when I reached them. Bynder held her from behind. They were both in life jackets. I took hold of her, and he dropped his arms and caught his breath.

  ‘I kept her down too long,’ he said, the water lapping at his chin. ‘But she’ll be right, now. The real problem’s this cut on my head. If the sharks get a whiff of the blood, they’ll be all over us, so I’ve gotta go. Right now. For her sake.’

  ‘You’ll never make it,’ I said, eyeing the blood oozing from his head wound. ‘You’re clearly stuffed, and sick as well. And there’ll be a boat here any—’

  ‘Say what you like,’ he said. ‘I’m going. No point in us all being eaten alive.’

  He took Jade’s hands, unclipped her bangles, and let them sink. He undid her watch and let it go, as well.

  ‘Lose everything shiny or metallic,’ he said, nodding at me. ‘Sharks can always see ’em, for some reason.’

  Bynder took a few deep breaths. I had to delay him. A rescue boat would come soon. I couldn’t let a key actor in this conspiracy do a bunk before help arrived. I grabbed the cord on his life jacket and pulled him in close.

  ‘Before you go,’ I said, our three faces inches apart, ‘why were you so desperate for Daisy and Jade to leave the bay? This attack was no threat to them. So, what was it?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Bynder.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Call it family business.’

  ‘Okay, then. So why did Sheridan and Kylie have to die?’

  ‘He had information we wanted,’ said Bynder, ‘and Kylie got him down to Murrays for us. Then his nibs, that guy on the trawler, he brought them out here and pumped Sheridan full of water. To bleed him of what he knew.’

  ‘Information for this attack?’

  ‘Yep. Entry codes. Physical defences. Stuff like that.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Too much to go through.’

  ‘Why kill him?’

  ‘Sheridan? He’d said all he was gunna say, so his value was gone.’

  ‘And why Kylie?’

  ‘I wasn’t there, but apparently she got upset over what they did to Sheridan. And you saw them tonight. Kill you for nothing, that lot, and make you pay for the bullet. Now I’m going.’

  ‘Who was the guy on the boat? “His nibs”, as you called him.’

  ‘You think I’m a dog?’

  ‘You looked like a leader up in the desert, but that guy didn’t treat you like one. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here with me.’

  ‘We’ve all got a use-by date. Like t
he buggers who just hit Creswell. But at least their deaths will mean something. Not like ours, if we get eaten by sharks.’

  ‘Why did the boat take off like that? When they were about to shoot us?’

  Bynder grinned. ‘I heard his nibs tell the driver to take off as soon as he saw flares go up, so I brought things forward a bit.’

  ‘What’s the cause, here? What’s all this murder and mayhem supposed to achieve?’

  ‘To punish you cunts, that’s what. For taking our land. For fucking our lives. For always knowing what’s best.’

  ‘So, New Land Rights?’

  ‘They’re part of it, but there’re plenty of us who hate you just as much. And we want more than compensation and fine words. Those Catholics had one thing right. The sinner can repent, but he’s got to do penance. And that’s what this is all about. Good old-fashioned penance for you and your lot. You’re going to be punished.’

  ‘How’s it going to happen?’

  ‘The only thing I’ll say is, when the dust finally settles around here, that’s all that’ll be left. Dust.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s enough. I’m pissin’ off-skee. Not for your sake. For hers. Now, do me a favour, will you? Get her back to her mum.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ I said. ‘But what was that about dust?’

  ‘Enough!’

  His hand swept across the top of Jade’s head and his fingers smoothed her face. She studied him, her eyes reflecting confusion.

  ‘It’s best to stay with the wreckage,’ I said. ‘Like when your car breaks down in the desert. It ups your chances of being rescued.’

  ‘Don’t think badly of me,’ Bynder said, cupping Jade’s chin. ‘I did this for us. For our people.’

 

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