Richie rose and looked down at me.
‘Here’s what’s going to happen, Bluebird,’ he said. ‘Pete and Andy here are going to drive you to Perth. You’re going to tell your bosses your enquiries led you back there, because you believe the shooter has left the mine. You’ll call your poofter boyfriend Whittacker and tell him to come home, and you’ll call off the support crew. When you’ve done all that, I’ll think about sending you back your service weapon so you don’t look like any more of a complete fuck-up than you already do for having lost it.’
He tucked the gun into his back pocket and turned away, exchanging a look with the blond man. His two cronies came forward.
‘I don’t think I have to tell you what’ll happen to you if you fuck with me, Detective.’ He waved a finger around, taking in the apartment, the bathroom, the bed, the beautiful little trap he’d snared me in. ‘This? This was easier than it should have been.’
‘There’s a problem, though,’ I said.
I rose steadily, and Pete and Andy backed up just slightly, glancing at their boss. Richie stopped in the doorway as I gathered myself.
‘I am a wildcat cop who doesn’t take no shit.’
Chapter 85
IT’S BEST TO conserve your energy when you know you’re fighting for your life. Start small. Keep light. Strike with precision, and don’t waste your swing. The one named Pete smiled and reached for me in the corner of the shower. I slapped his hand away, smiled back. That’s right. It’s all fun and games. Terror sweat was still dripping from my jaw, even as I danced with my attacker. Richie paused in the doorway to see what would happen.
Pete came forward again, and I locked onto his arm with both hands, twisted and shoved. He crumpled slightly against the shower door, making the glass rattle in its frame. I lifted my knee high and shoved my heel down hard on the arm I held, snapping his radius with an audible crack. Pete howled. Andy’s arm came around my neck from behind. I pushed backwards into him, enough to slacken his grip so that his forearm slipped up around my mouth. I took a nice, deep bite.
The sound of Andy’s screaming made my eardrums pulse. I used all my body weight to topple him onto Pete, both men falling through the shower screen and into the cubicle. I half turned to launch myself at Richie in the doorway, but Andy was on me again, trying to bundle me up in his arms. I went with it, let him lift me.
Big mistake, buddy.
I wrapped my body around his head like a cat, digging my fingers into the soft flesh under his jaw, my legs around his waist. We fell into the sink, the tap jutting into my hip, splitting the flesh beneath the jeans. I grabbed fistfuls of Andy’s hair and headbutted him hard in the nose.
Pete sat in the corner of the shower where I’d been only moments earlier, clutching his bent and broken arm. Andy had let go of me and slid to the floor beside the toilet. I sat on the edge of the sink and wiped Pete’s blood off my chin with the edge of my shirt, crossing one wet leg casually over the other as Richie watched.
One of my shoes was off. The shoulder of my shirt was torn, and my hair was in my face. My pants were soaked, and by now all the terror had been burned away by the adrenaline released in the fight so that, as I took a moment to reconsider my position, I found myself more pissed off than I had ever been before.
Richie lifted my gun and pointed at me. The gun clicked. I reached into my other pocket and drew out the magazine I kept there.
‘I never keep it loaded when I’m drinking,’ I said. I beckoned him forward. ‘Come get it. I won’t hurt you.’
Richie dropped my gun on the floor and backed out.
Chapter 86
‘YOUR SKULL MUST be made of lead,’ Whitt was saying. He tapped me hard above my left eyebrow. ‘Days after the killer cracks it open for you, you’re using it as a weapon.’
The nurse was the same humourless woman who’d patched me up outside my donga after I’d almost met my end in the tunnels. I lay on a table in the medical centre while she stitched the Y-shaped split in my hip caused by the bathroom tap.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s a link between frontal-lobe trauma and antisocial behaviour. Do you go around head-butting people often?’
‘I try to keep it to two or three a week.’
‘It’s surprisingly easy to give yourself brain damage.’ She shrugged as she pulled a stitch through. ‘Your frontal lobe houses all the neurons that control your emotions. Mess with that, and you can become violent. Reckless.’
‘Are you advising me to stop headbutting people,’ I said, ‘because I might end up wanting to headbutt people?’
The nurse glared at me.
‘I guess we can cross Richard Lee Machinna off our list,’ Whitt sighed. ‘Why would he bother trying to bundle you off to Perth if he was the killer? He’d have just snuffed you out from a distance like the rest of his targets.’
‘Maybe he likes me,’ I said. ‘Maybe he likes you. Maybe he likes us both, and he wants us out of the way so that he can continue his killing spree without hurting either of us, because we’re so delightful.’
‘No one here likes you,’ the nurse said.
‘I’m not letting him go,’ I told Whitt. ‘Could be that this ritual he’s got going only involves miners, and we’re proving too much of a bother for him. I want to know if we should keep him on the suspect list or boot him off. We’ll find out where he stays and then we’ll know just how serious this guy is.’
‘The whole crew’s got a couple of caravans off the mine, about ten kilometres’ drive,’ Whitt said. ‘I suspect we’ll have the same kind of trouble getting a search warrant for there as we’ve had for here. We can think about it in the morning. Set up a distraction or something.’
‘What about Aaron Linbacher’s criminal record?’ I said. ‘Has it come in yet?’
‘No,’ Whitt said, ‘not when I checked last, which was a couple of hours ago at least. I’ll check again when we get back to the donga.’
My partner stretched in the plastic chair, and I heard his neck crack. It felt good to see him a little less fatigued. At least one of us was operating at an effective level of tension. I knew I was too wound up. But I always had been, even before I’d joined the force. Being this hyper was going to get me into trouble in times of war or peace. Richie had been right. I was wild.
‘Go to bed,’ I told Whitt. ‘I’ll be here a while longer I reckon.’
He agreed reluctantly and slouched off into the night. While my friendly nurse searched for an appropriate painkiller in her outer office, I sat thinking about Danny Stanton.
‘Killer. Hunter. Dark. Vengeance,’ I murmured.
I knew I was close to finding the killer. I could feel his presence on the mine. He was going to give me more of a fight than Richie and his goons – one I wasn’t sure I would survive.
Chapter 87
‘THIS IS GOING to be great,’ I told Whitt. ‘Not a soul around. We’ll be in and out without even having to draw them away from there.’
We lay on our bellies on a ridge in the blazing desert sun, watching Richie’s lot through binoculars. The camp consisted of two battered white caravans and a grey 1980s model Hyundai Sonata up on bricks, the tiny rectangle of shade it provided stuffed full of lantana and desert grass. In the half-hour we’d lain watching, nothing on the camp had moved. I was sure Richie and his crew had at least another couple of hours in lock-up in Perth. I wondered quietly whether he had been worried or relieved when the ‘common assault of a police officer’ charge came down, knowing I could quite easily have taken him up on an attempted-murder charge.
When I told Whitt that morning that Richie had tried to shoot me he’d been horrified, more horrified than when I’d relayed their attempt to roughhouse me in the hotel bathroom. I hadn’t bothered charging Richie with attempted murder, because in all truth I didn’t see it sticking. A good lawyer, which he could probably afford, would argue that Richie recognised the gun had no magazine in it when he picked it up from the sheer difference in we
ight, and only clicked it at me to scare me. As it was, he’d be out on bail before nightfall, and that would give me just enough time to look through his camp and see if he really was a murderer at heart.
I wanted to know if Richie kept the kind of weaponry that the mine shooter would have needed to see, let alone shoot at, Lenny Xavier from the distance he did. I wanted to see if there were camouflage clothes down there. A bullet casing. A map. Anything that would either tie Richie down or set him free from my suspicions.
Whitt and I rose wordlessly and ran in a crouch down the slope towards Richie’s camp, guns by our sides, checking the landscape for movement as we descended. I was reminded of conversations Gabe and I had held in the dark of the desert about how quickly the body adapts to this kind of climate. How readily, under the pressure of the sun and the vastness of the horizon, a person could become like many of the creatures that survived out here – hard and resourceful. The sun had browned and toughened my skin and the constant dust narrowed my eyes. The soles of my feet were rock-hard from walking back and forth to the shower blocks in the dark hours, over the ancient rocks and dirt that led the way. All of my clothes were faded and sweat-stained and my hair was dry with salt. I was becoming a desert creature.
Chapter 88
WE WENT FIRST to a four-wheel drive parked behind the nearest caravan. The door was unlocked but the key nowhere inside. I crawled into the back seats and lifted up the floor mats, ran my fingers over the sides of the car, looking for anything of interest. The storage in the console was stuffed with cigarette butts. Whitt tilted back the driver’s seat, almost crushing me against the bench.
‘Hey!’
‘Oh, wow, check this out,’ he laughed, holding up a huge silver revolver. I got out of the back seat and came around to the driver’s side, took the massive gun from his hands and aimed it at the horizon.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘It weighs a tonne. Smith & Wesson 500. This thing’ll kill a cow.’
‘We should fire it,’ Whitt panted. ‘We’ll confiscate it and fire it a few times. You know. Just for research purposes.’
‘They’ll hear us back at the mine.’ I replaced the gun in the compartment under the seat. ‘And besides, he’s probably got a permit for at least one gun.’
The first caravan was locked, but a loose window at the back gave us entry. The cool, dark space reeked of men’s deodorant and bourbon, and the telltale signs of men living alone too long: wet towels on the floor, sink stacked with filthy plates. I began with the kitchen cupboards and went through all the boxes, moving to the spaces under the sink and above the tiny table. Nothing. Nothing in, under or around the bed. Nothing of interest in the bookshelves. Whitt gave up and moved to the next caravan, and when I joined him I found him similarly disappointed.
I knocked on the walls above the shelf. ‘The amount of drugs these guys would need to service the entire camp – there’s no way they would leave it unguarded out here unless it was incredibly well hidden. But how do you hide something that big here? Why aren’t the walls bulging with it?’
I glanced out the kitchenette window and spotted two figures on the horizon, approaching. My whole body jolted.
‘Who the fuck is that?’
I took out my gun. Whitt bent and squinted at the figures through the grimy lace curtains. Then he lifted his binoculars and looked.
‘See for yourself.’
Across the rocky landscape, a pair of emus wandered, the man-sized birds dipping now and then to inspect the ground under their massive feet.
‘Right,’ I cleared my throat. ‘Carry on.’
We searched the caravan from top to bottom. There were no weapons of any kind. We locked the second caravan behind us and stood in the sweltering sun.
‘A bitter disappointment,’ I said.
‘Maybe not.’ Something had caught Whitt’s eye. He wandered over to the disembowelled car. A huge sand-coloured lizard broke cover from the dry grass and fled towards the rocky ridge.
On one side of the vehicle, the hard grass and shrubs had been cut back so that a person could happily slide beneath the car to what was underneath. Whitt reached through the glassless windows, tried to shift the front and passenger seats, but to no avail. He’d need to get on his belly and crawl under the car. When he did, he started furiously brushing sand away.
‘I’m going in!’ he cried happily.
I listened to the twist and thunk of something opening, and then watched his legs disappear as he shifted around to lower them down a capsule opening.
I grabbed the circular edge of the opening, pushing aside the heavy fibreglass lid of the submerged capsule. When I dragged myself forward and looked down, I saw Whitt standing on the floor of a fifteen-foot deep space, the walls lined with homemade shelves. There was enough room for Whitt to stand alone comfortably. He looked up at me and smiled.
‘Get in here,’ he said.
Chapter 89
I STEPPED OFF the tiny ladder and stood beside Whitt, our chests almost touching. Around us three shelves crowded, stuffed with drugs. The bottom two layers were almost full of tightly packed bricks of what was probably cocaine and heroin wrapped in black plastic and brown tape. The two shelves above them were crammed with boxes of prescription drugs.
‘Wow.’ I took a couple of boxes off the shelves and read their contents. ‘Look at all the steroids. All the antidepressants!’
‘Yeah, I can’t imagine the guys out here being too happy seeing the doctor about their depression.’ Whitt studied the boxes. ‘It’s probably just easier for them to get their meds from Richie. Not so many questions and checks.’
‘Painkillers.’ I moved to the shelf on the left. ‘This whole shelf is all Oxy. There must be hundreds of boxes.’
‘Oh, shit.’ Whitt gave a little excited laugh. He’d dragged a huge vacuum-sealed bag of weed from an upper shelf. ‘It weighs as much as a child.’
On the uppermost shelves were the items the boys needed quickly, things they could lean down from the roof-hole and grab without necessarily having to climb all the way in. I reached up and took down a few stacks of green and yellow bills. Whitt and I smiled at each other, weighing the money in our hands. We were going a bit silly in the presence of so much wealth. I fanned the bills in his face, held them to my nose and sniffed. I’d never held so much money. Not even on the drug raids I’d participated in as a young recruit. It was shocking, and strangely amusing, that people lived like this. Stacking bricks of heroin in an underground bunker like they were preparing for the apocalypse.
The fun was abruptly halted by a scraping sound outside. Whitt and I looked at each other, and I watched the shadow of the bunker lid slide across his face.
‘No,’ he cried, looking up. ‘No!’
Chapter 90
FOR A MOMENT we simply stood there, the two of us, shouting. Shouting at whoever had locked us in. Shouting at each other. In the panic and darkness I was pushed into the shelves behind me, the stitches on my hip pulling tight beneath the bandage. Pill boxes clattered to the floor.
‘Fuck,’ Whitt yelled. ‘Fuck!’
‘You’re deafening me!’ I shouted.
‘You’re deafening me!’
‘Climb up there.’ I shoved at him. ‘Go.’
Whitt took the three ladder steps required to reach the roof opening and pushed hard against the lid. It didn’t budge. I listened in the complete blackness as his fingers fumbled at the rubber rim that sealed the opening tight. My own breath seemed thunderously loud in the tiny space. Though the capsule was submerged and therefore cooler than the desert outside, sweat was already breaking out all over me. There was barely enough room for the two of us to stand. Whitt thumped his fist against the inside of the lid.
‘Help! Help!’
‘Whoever’s done this isn’t going to help,’ I snapped. ‘If they were going to help they wouldn’t have sealed us in in the first place.’
‘Do you think it’s him?’ Whitt asked, climbing down beside me.
‘Probably. Who else would be watching us and know we’re out here?’ I checked my mobile phone, but of course there was no coverage. Whitt did the same. I reached behind the boxes and thumped the walls of the capsule.
‘I think this thing is an old water tank. Which means it’s airtight. We could die in here.’
‘Your constant positivity astounds me, Harry,’ Whitt sneered. ‘You’re always looking on the bright side, aren’t you?’
I frowned in the dark. ‘Who’s this nasty Edward Whittacker? I haven’t seen this side of you. Are you claustrophobic or something?’
‘Possibly.’ His voice was small in the dark.
‘Well, sit down and cover your ears,’ I said, taking out my gun. ‘This’ll help.’
I wedged one of my ears against my shoulder, but there was no saving the other one from the sound of my gun blasting at the ceiling. Light spilled down over us from two perfect holes in the tank lid, illuminating Whitt’s grave features. I climbed back up and pushed against the lid, hoping the holes might have weakened it. But, looking through them, I could see the fibreglass was an inch thick.
I slid down to the floor of the tank in front of Whitt, our legs interlocked. His shirt was already sticking to him with sweat. I looked around, and grabbed a box from the bottom shelf.
‘Valium!’ I shook the box at him.
My partner crunched a Valium quietly, his breath coming in long, even streams. For a while we simply sat together and tried not to panic. We wouldn’t run out of air, not with two holes punctured in the lid of the water tank. But it was possible we’d be killed when Richie and his crew returned. Or if they didn’t return, that dehydration and heat exhaustion would kill us. There were no liquids in the tank whatsoever. Only enough cash to buy us a small island, and enough drugs to kill us many times over.
‘I’ve got to warn you,’ I said. ‘Things get much worse, I’m lighting a joint.’