by Tim Buckley
“Get your stuff,” he said, again, and this time there was a menace in his voice. “I just heard Cooper talking to his mate. He told him he killed the sheep, Wilde. It was that bastard that slaughtered the sheep. And he said he’s going back out to the vineyard. Tonight.”
It was like a bucket of iced water in the face and I looked over to where Cooper had been sitting. His mate was there, drinking on his own, but Cooper was gone. I darted back to where the others were welcoming another pitcher of beer.
“Sorry, fellas,” I said, “bit of an emergency, I’ve got to run. Don’t let my share go to waste now, will you?”
I winked at Robbie and forced a smile, then whipped my jacket off the back of a chair.
“Everything OK, Wilde?” Nathan said, looking at Mitch with a wary eye. “Need any help?”
“No thanks, Nate. It’s nothing, I’ll explain in the morning.”
I nodded to Mitch and we ran out the front door.
Mitch had his pickup parked outside the pub and he drove in silence out to the vineyard like a man possessed. I had never seen this side of him, this single-minded fury. I’d seen Mitch lose his temper before, but that had always been over something stupid or over some perceived slight. He would usually calm down as quickly as he had lost control and within a few minutes he would have forgotten the whole thing. I had never known him to be as deeply angry about something as he was about what had happened at the vineyard and, more importantly, about what had happened to Karl. I knew from what Bobby had told me that the young lad was still unnerved about the attack and that he was still nervous being at the vineyard on his own. In Mitch’s eyes, a line had been crossed and somebody was going to pay.
I could see the silhouette of the farmhouse up ahead when Mitch killed the headlights and slowed down to a crawl. We passed the gate and peered inside but there was no sign of life. There were no lights on in the house, I guessed Emily had long ago gone to bed. He carried on around the bend for a hundred and fifty metres or so and pulled into the bushes by the side of the road, out of sight of the house. He got out and went round the back, taking a small holdall from the trunk.
“Here,” he whispered, taking something else from the back and handing it to me, “take this.”
It was a baseball bat, heavy and ominous.
“Aw listen, Mitch, I don’t…” I started, handing it back to him.
“Just take the fucking thing, Wilde!” he growled, shoving it back into my chest, and I knew better than to argue. “And take off that jacket, it’s too bright!”
He set off across the narrow road and over the fence onto our property, keeping low and tight to the trees that bordered the plot. I struggled to keep up with him but finally he stopped in a little copse of bushes about thirty or forty metres from the stoop with a view over the machinery shed and the sheep pen. The remaining babydolls were lying quietly in the pen, bleating softly from time to time, and seemed not to have noticed us. He looked around carefully and, satisfied that we were the only ones there, settled in to wait.
“Mitch, we should call the police,” I whispered. “This is getting out of control.”
“And then what, Wilde? Cooper arrives and they cut him off and he says he was just out enjoying the night air. They’ll send him home and he’ll be back next time he feels like trouble. Except we might not be there next time.”
“Well, then I have to warn Emily,” I said. “I don’t want her here if it’s going to kick off.”
He shook his head.
“She’s not here. Karl said she’s gone up to Perth to some trade fair. Just settle back and sit tight, Wilde. He’ll be here soon enough.”
There wasn’t much else to do and I couldn’t argue with his logic. If Cooper’s vendetta was going to be stopped, we were going to have to do it ourselves. It was lucky that Emily happened to be away and we might not get as good a chance again to put a stop to all of this. As long as Cooper didn’t show up with an army, at least. So we sat there and we waited. And we waited.
An hour passed, then two, and there was no sign of Cooper. I was getting stiff and, without a jacket, I was getting cold. We talked about Stevie and then we talked about football and about his trip to New Zealand but eventually that dried up and we sat there in silence.
“Are you sure, Mitch?” I said, looking at my watch. “Are you sure you heard him right?”
“He might be a while. He’ll have had to hitch a ride out here, or walk maybe. He doesn’t have a car.”
“You seem to know a lot about him?”
“Yeah, well I’ve been asking around.”
“I don’t know, Mitch. This all sounds a bit airy to me. Let’s pack up and get back. We might even get one last beer in at the pub.”
He said nothing, but a brief cloud of indecision passed over his face.
“All right, Wilde,” he said, “I might not have been entirely straight with you, OK? Cooper didn’t exactly say he was coming out here – I laid a trap for him and he fell for it. He’ll be here, I know it.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned.
“Fucking hell, Mitch! What did you do?”
He thought for a moment then decided to come clean.
“I set it up with my mate, Vic. I told him I couldn’t have another beer because Karl had called to tell me he forgot to lock the machinery shed and there’s a load of expensive shit in there. I made sure Cooper could hear me. I told him there was nobody here tonight, the place was empty, so I had to come out later and lock up. I’d teed Vic up to say I could do it tomorrow, nobody would be out that way anyhow and it’d all be right. I let on I was convinced, tomorrow would be fine, and he got me another beer. A few minutes later, Cooper left.”
“You knew Emily was away?”
He nodded.
“And the shed?”
“Locked up tight as a nun’s knickers. You know Karl would never forget.”
In spite of myself, I laughed and Mitch broke into a reluctant grin.
“Fuck it, Mitch,” I said, “you’ve been watching way too much TV!”
“Nothing else to do, mate, do I?!”
“But you did hear Cooper saying it was him that killed the sheep, right?”
He hesitated, and I groaned again.
“Shit, Mitch, you mean it might not even have been him?”
“It was him, Wilde,” he said, all of the humour suddenly gone from his voice. “That much I know. I have a few mates who know Cooper – they don’t like him, but they know him. And he’s been talking too much around town, telling people how you fired him but he put you back in your box. Turns out, before he got a job on a building site, he worked as an agricultural labourer and he knows his way around farms. He’s been boasting about how it was easy for him to do it, to kill the sheep. He reckons he could do other stuff too, do some real damage. If Willis and his blokes had half an ear to the ground, they’d know it was him by now. But they can’t be arsed because they’ll get no brownie points in town for helping you. This isn’t a game, Wilde, I’m not just shooting in the dark here. I want the bastard that messed with my lad and trust me, it was Cooper.”
I’d discounted Cooper as a threat to the farm, I thought he was more likely to have a go at me or try some sabotage up at the lighthouse. I hadn’t given him enough credit, or he hated me even more than I thought.
In some parts of the Far East, people don’t have burglar alarms in their houses. It’s not because there’s no crime nor because people are not afraid. Rather it’s because if an intruder ever tries to break in while they’re asleep in their beds, the cicadas stop chirping and the silence is deafening. We’d been sitting there for another ten or fifteen minutes when everything went quiet. The wave of silence started out by the gate then rolled slowly towards us until a man, dressed all in black and carrying a small backpack, appeared round the side of the house. He crept along by the shee
p pen, stopping to look in.
“Hello, boys!” Bryce Cooper said to the babydolls, with a malevolent laugh. “Good to see ya again!”
He looked around and his gaze stopped at the shed. He walked over to the door and tried the handle, but it was locked. He swore and punched the door in frustration. He rattled the handle and tried kicking it in, but to no avail. I made to stand up, but Mitch put a strong arm across my chest and a finger to his lips. Cooper stood back from the door, clearly figuring out what to do next. He’d come out to do damage and he wouldn’t want to have wasted the trip. Eventually he walked back over to the sheep pen.
“Right,” he said, and there was only rancour in his voice, “it’ll have to be another one of you then!”
He dropped the backpack and started to climb the fence that ran around the pen. I’d seen enough. I burst out of the bushes and ran at Cooper. He spun around, still standing on the fence, when he heard me coming. That second of surprise was enough and as he jumped down I crashed into him, sending us both sprawling on the dirt. I dropped the baseball bat but at such close quarters I wouldn’t have been able to get a clean swing at him anyway. We grappled for a few moments but he was much stronger than me and soon he’d gained the upper hand, rolling us over until he was sitting on my chest. We struggled but he grabbed hold of my shirt collar and pinned me down by the neck. With his free hand, he pounded the side of my face with a punch that I could see coming from behind his shoulder. It was like being hit by a brick and my brain bounced around inside my skull like a pinball. Blackness enveloped me and, as it cleared, I could see him lining up to throw another punch. I closed my eyes and waited for it, but it didn’t come and I opened my eyes just in time to see Mitch hurtling headlong through the air, catching Cooper with his shoulder and throwing him five metres across the ground. They tussled on the floor and although Mitch was a lot stronger than me, he was no match for Cooper either. Soon, Cooper had rolled him over too and was laying into him with punches to the head that Mitch was desperately fending off with his arms.
I shook myself to clear the fog in my head and that’s when I saw the bat lying only a couple of metres away. Cooper was still pounding seven shades of shite out of Mitch, whose resistance was flagging. I pulled myself to my feet and picked up the bat, stumbled over to where they were wrestling and swung the bat as hard as I could at Cooper’s head. He turned just in time to see it coming and his eyes opened wide as the bat smashed into the side of his face with a crack that sounded something like a sledgehammer on roof tiles crossed with a boot stepping into a mud pool. He slumped over and Mitch shoved his limp body off him. Mitch lay back down and put his hand to his bloodied face, pulling it away at the sting. Then he just lay there, me sitting beside him, the two of us panting and groaning.
I don’t know how long it took us to come to, but eventually Mitch sat up and looked at his watch.
“It’ll be light in a couple of hours,” he coughed, “we need to move him.”
“What do you mean? What if he wakes up?” I said.
Mitch looked at me with a confused frown.
“He’s not waking up, Wilde. Ever.”
It took a moment, but then it dawned on me what he meant. I stood up gingerly and poked Cooper’s body with my foot so that he rolled over onto his back. The right-hand side of his face was… well, it was gone. I poked him again with my toe as though that was going to wake him, then I bent down to check his pulse.
“Jesus Christ, Mitch,” I said, “I think he’s dead!”
“No shit, Sherlock!” he said. “And we need to get him out of here!”
He hauled himself to his feet and brushed the dirt off his arms and legs.
“Right,” he said, “we’re going to need a sack or a tarpaulin to wrap him in and we’re going to need some rope to tie him up in it. You reckon you’ve got any of that round here?”
“Wait a minute, Mitch,” I said, trying to get my head round what was happening. “We should call the cops. We should have called them a long time ago, but we should definitely call them now. This is way out of our league. Anyway, I’m the one who killed him. This isn’t your mess.”
He weighed up in his head whether I was stupid or just suffering from a few blows to the head too many, and decided to explain it me gently.
“Now just listen, Wilde. I don’t know if the bloke he was with in the pub heard me talking, but I’d have to guess he did. So he probably knows Cooper was coming out here, or could put two and two together. If it gets out that we topped him out here, the cops could make it look like we led him out here to give him a kicking, or worse. Plus there’s the trouble you had with him at the lighthouse, everybody knows there was bad blood, and enough people know about him and the sheep to make it look like you could be holding a grudge. My reputation round here won’t help so, bottom line, it’s not going to look good, is it?”
I could see he was right and even though this was a first for me in all kinds of ways, I had to admit it wouldn’t look good.
“So what do you suggest?”
Mitch already had it all worked out.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. A mate of mine has a little fishing boat down in Leewara and I’ve got a key. We’re going wrap this bastard up and take him out to sea, drop him off and let him sink. Hopefully the sharks will have him for breakfast and we can forget about him. Cooper’s a lone striker. Nobody knows where he came from and he’s got no real mates here, anybody that knows him will just think he’s moved on. Nobody’s going to expect him to leave a forwarding address, are they?! If he has family back home, they probably won’t be surprised not to hear from him, not for a while at least. From what I hear, he’s not much of a family man.”
“We’ll have to clean up here, too,” I said, looking around at the aftermath of the scrap. “If anybody does figure out that he came here, it wouldn’t take a policing genius to spot the blood. I’ll get a hose and clean up. We can’t make it forensically clean, but we can take away the obvious signs of a fight.”
And so we set to the task of hiding the evidence and getting rid of the body. If someone had said to me years before, sitting in the café in Dalkey or in the pub off St Stephen’s Green, that I’d know drama in my life, I could never in my wildest imaginings have conjured a scene like this. And yet, in the moment, it felt as normal and as mundane as cutting the grass or feeding the sheep. I hosed down the quadrangle and raked over the whole area so that, I hoped, it would just look like we’d been sprucing up the land near the house. Meantime, Mitch got some sacking and rope from the shed and set about wrapping up Cooper’s body. When we were done, he backed the truck into the driveway and we loaded Cooper into the back.
Leewara is a fifteen-minute drive but Mitch did it in about eight, careering through the darkness, bouncing the truck off potholes and throwing it around blind corners. We got to the little harbour and took Cooper’s body from the truck to the berth and then onto the boat. Mitch went back to park the truck out of sight and then we set off out to sea. The night was, thankfully, calm and dark and after twenty minutes or so, Mitch cut the engine.
“Is this far enough, do you think?” I asked him. “No chance he’d drift back in? Or get caught up in fishing lines?”
Mitch shrugged.
“Don’t know, mate,” he said, pulling the body over to the side of the boat. “But if we don’t get back soon, it’ll be light and there could be people round the harbour. So best we get this done now. Come on, give me a hand.”
We hoisted Cooper onto the guard rail, he sat for a brief second on top, then we pushed him over. The rocks that Mitch had tied into the tarpaulin pulled him down and in a flash there was no sign left of him other than a few bubbles. Mitch fired up the engine and we brought the boat back to Leewara. We didn’t waste any time once the boat was docked. Nobody could see us together at that time of the morning without it raising eyebrows, at the very least, and so
Mitch had to drop me back to my place before Clovelly was awake. My truck was in town from the night before but nobody would be surprised that I’d left it there after being in the pub. I might have to explain how I got home, but I’d cross that bridge later. The first glimmers of light were appearing to the east when Mitch pulled up at the apartment.
“If anybody asks – and they will – then this is the story,” he said. “We left the pub, we had a row because I owe you money and there was a fight. That’s why we’re all beat up. We figured it out and it’s all OK now, we’re best mates again. Got it?”
I just nodded. There was nothing else to say.
“Remember,” he said, as I climbed out, “just be cool. There’s no reason for anybody to suspect anything else because nothing else happened, right?”
I nodded and he pulled away.
57
The longer we’ve been together, the shorter Emily’s tantrums have become and Bobby’s not long gone when I hear the sound of the car in the yard. I’m sitting on the floor in Cara’s room, my eyes closed. Too much red wine is helping, but I can feel her in the room. I can smell her sweet baby’s fragrance, I can hear her talking to her toys and telling them off for being bold. I can touch the silky curls of her hair, the cool softness of her skin. I can see the little freckles on her nose and the gap between her two front teeth. Like nowhere else, I feel like I can be with her here.
The front door opens and closes and I hear Emily’s footsteps in the hall. I hear her put her bag down on the kitchen counter, the familiar clatter of the buckles and straps.
“Wilde,” she calls. “Where are you?”
“I’m up here,” I say, almost in a whisper and she doesn’t hear me.
I hear her walk around the kitchen, hear her open and close the door out onto the stoop.
“Wilde?” she calls out again.
This time I don’t bother to reply.
Then I hear her footsteps on the stairs. The door is ajar and she pushes it open, ready to chide me for not answering her. When she sees me, the irritation melts from her face.