Silence, followed by a single word. “Street?”
“What.”
“Find them. Make certain they discover nothing before the monsoon makes it impossible to prospect. Failing that, destroy the mine.”
“What if it’s the size of bloody Argyle?”
“We think not. We have reason to believe it is a pothole placer deposit of the sort that could be destroyed quite easily.”
“What makes you think so?”
Van Luik grimaced and counted his heartbeats in the violent pain behind his eyes. “You have your faults, Mr. Street, but geological incompetence isn’t one of them. Do you really believe Abelard Windsor could have hidden something the size of Namibia’s beach deposits from you for the past ten years?”
“Not a chance, mate. Not a bloody one.”
Grimly van Luik pursued the main point. “The wet may be enough of a delay for our purposes. Many things can change in the span of five months. Important things. Things that are crucial to maintaining the balance of power within the cartel. Keep Blackburn off the station.”
“That could be real tricky, mate. Accidents happen. I might end up killing the girl trying to stop him.”
“What is the English saying, beggars cannot be choosers?” Van Luik pinched his nose. “Whatever happens, make certain it looks like an accident. If you end up killing her, it would be far better if the body disappeared. I will be waiting for your call.”
Street started to speak, heard the click as the connection was broken, then hung up hard. After a moment he dialed another number, waited, and spoke again.
“G’day, luv. You got any Yanks asking after your Rover?”
“No Yanks, just a Canadian pair wanting to see Windjana.”
Street hesitated. “Canadian?”
“Right.”
“Man and a woman?”
“That’s right. Name’s Markham.”
“When did they make their reservation? Last month?”
“Called from Perth a few hours ago. They’re catching the Ansett flight. Why?”
Street thought quickly. He could assume it was simple coincidence that a pair of Canadians got a sudden urge to see Western Australia’s bleak outback wilderness. He could assume it was simple coincidence that Windjana Gorge was in the direction of Abe’s station. He could assume Blackburn and Erin were still hiding out in Darwin, nursing a wound.
Street could assume all those things, but he’d be a fool not to at least get a look at the couple.
“Luv,” he said, “I’d really like them delayed. Say until tomorrow morning.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Eight inches of the best you’ll ever get.”
“Cocky bastard, aren’t you?”
“You should know.”
“When you going to pay up?” she asked, laughing.
“I’ll be there before dark.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Street hung up smiling and feeling an anticipatory ache in his crotch. Nora was the prettiest single girl in Derby, which meant that she was only as plain as a termite mound rather than as ugly as a burned stump. But she had her oddities in bed, which put most men off. Not Street. He found her inventiveness stimulating.
Whistling softly, he began packing a small rucksack, hoping Cole Blackburn—if it was him—chose the overland route instead of flying in. There were very few roads between Derby and Crazy Abe’s station.
Jason Street knew every foot of them.
21
Derby
Derby had the feel of a town on the downhill slide from exhaustion to extinction. The buildings perched unevenly on stilts, as though the wide plain at the edge of the ocean flooded regularly. Although Derby’s street was wide enough for multiple lanes of traffic in both directions, only one lane in each direction was paved. The parkway between the lanes was planted with grass and baoboab trees, with their huge trunks and spindly branches that resembled roots. The patchy asphalt was soft from the heat. No cars, trucks, or buses were moving. The climate sapped people of everything but the ability to sweat.
Darwin had been hot, air-conditioned, and modern. Derby was hot and primitive.
Cole and Erin had been waiting eighteen hours for a vehicle that had been promised seventeen hours ago. When the Rover finally appeared, it was as unimpressive as the town itself. The vehicle looked like what it was—a well-used, shambling, rattling sort of reliable wreck, filled with junkyard odds and ends, toolboxes and tarps, spare tires and jacks, metal mesh, and God knew what else, all of it stored in cabinets held shut by nails stuck through hasps. A railed cargo platform ran the length of the top. The fenders were loose, but the steel mesh that separated cargo from passengers was securely fastened and strong enough to hold back a bull.
Even though Cole had waited a long time for the Rover, he still insisted on giving it a thorough vetting before they left town. Between Derby and Fitzroy Crossing several hundred kilometers down the Great Northern Highway, there were no towns, no settlements, no service stations, no crossroads, no tow trucks—nothing but the spinifex, gum, and wattle wastes of Western Australia.
Erin stood in the miserable shade cast by the overhang of a tin roof and watched Cole check out the Rover’s engine. If his wound bothered him, he didn’t show it. Nor had he shown it that morning, when he had awakened her with kisses and touches that had melted her until their bodies were joined in an intense pleasure that made pain impossible.
Smiling at the memory, she ignored the sweat that gathered beneath her sleeveless, scooped-neck T-shirt and trickled down toward the shorts that had already begun to turn an unappetizing shade of brown. Despite Derby’s incredible humidity, the air was thick with a rust-colored dust. Flies descended in the pause between gusts of sultry wind. Automatically she waved the persistent insects away from her face.
Cole did the same as he bent over the Rover’s grimy engine. The gesture was known as the “outback salute.”
The heat kept taking Erin by surprise. Now she knew why Cole had insisted on having shorts, tank tops, bikini underwear, and thong shoes for the car. The only concessions to Western dress were socks and sturdy walking shoes.
The floppy cabbage-leaf cloth hat Erin wore, her nearly black sunglasses, and the crisp nylon travel bag at her feet were all new. Even the Canadian passport in the bag was new, at least to her, although it had a well-used look about it. Cole had produced it, along with one for himself, after they’d arrived in Perth. Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Markham of Nanaimo, British Columbia.
There had even been a well-worn gold wedding ring for Erin to wear. It was inscribed with her mother’s name. The realization that she was wearing her mother’s wedding ring unsettled Erin. Family photos had arrived with the passports, photos of Erin’s grandmother, Bridget McQueen Windsor. When Erin first had seen the photos, passports, and ring, she’d wondered if Nan Faulkner knew what Matthew Windsor had done, or if her father was putting his lifelong career at risk in order to make up for the misjudgment of seven years ago.
There had been no answer to that question, simply a note from her father that had said:
This is all I could find of my father’s life in Australia. Be careful, Erin. I love you.
Dad
The gold ring smoldered in the tropical light, reminding Erin of the photos tucked within her nylon bag, photos that she hadn’t really looked at. She leaned over into the sun, rummaged in the duffel, retrieved the envelope, and stood upright in the shade again.
She went quickly through the photos, then more slowly.
They dated from the time when both Windsor brothers were young and exploring Australia’s wild outback together. The black-and-white images showed a land that was sparse, spare, bleak. Yet the men were always smiling, especially when Miss Bridget McQueen was in the photo.
One picture in particular held Erin’s interest, a photo of the young Bridget wearing an old-style dress and standing on a rocky rise with thin, peculiar trees and strangely shaped rocks a
ll around. Bridget was radiant, mischievous, and impudent as she looked up from beneath long lashes at the invisible man who was taking her picture. Off to one side was a man with dense, straight eyebrows, unkempt hair, and a look of raw longing on his face as he watched the young woman whose unbound hair lifted on the breeze.
On the back of the photo was written Some love for silver, some love for gold,/We love for the heat that never runs cold.
The writing was even, elegant, and old-fashioned. Perhaps bad poetry and careful script had run in the Windsor family.
“That’s it,” Cole said, slamming down the Rover’s hood. “Let’s hit the road.”
Erin stuffed the pictures back into their envelope and put it in her camera case. As she bent over, her head poked beyond shade into sunlight.
The heat was suffocating. She had to force herself to drag the thick air into her lungs. It felt like she was sucking oxygen through layers of used sauna towels.
And this was spring, not summer.
Erin tried to imagine what Derby would feel like under the full weight of a summer sun. She couldn’t. The heat would be unbearable, unspeakable.
The interior of the Rover seat was as hot as it was dusty. The engine fired quickly on the first try. Erin sat and sweated.
“You were right,” she said.
“About what?”
“Sweating. It doesn’t help.”
Cole smiled a bit grimly. “I’d rather have been wrong. I hate this bloody place during buildup.”
As the Rover began moving, the steady flow of air from the open windows helped to cool Erin. After fifteen minutes the heat and humidity no longer seemed remarkable or shocking to her, simply exhausting. Derby disappeared in the side mirror, a sorry group of low buildings strewn across the flat landscape like God’s afterthought.
The alien quality of the land was more subtle in its impact than the heat, but ultimately more powerful. To Erin, accustomed to Alaska and California, the area around Derby was like being on another planet. The land was utterly flat as far as the eye could see. No mountains rose in the heat-hazed distance, no hills, not even hummocks. The trees were few and stunted. If grass grew at all, it grew in sparse clumps. The iron-red soil showed through the spare veneer of plants.
Slowly she became captive to the alien land, absorbing its shapes and textures, its heat and humidity and flatness, the strangeness that was both subtle and overwhelming.
Cole’s restless glance flicked to the rearview mirror. The heat haze made it impossible to be certain, but he thought there was a vehicle behind them. As no side roads had come in, the other car must have come from Derby. He frowned, looked in the side-view mirror, and picked up the speed so subtly that the average driver wouldn’t notice and would gradually be left behind.
Scattered termite mounds began to appear, sometimes thickly, sometimes not. There was no obvious reason for difference between many and few. Most of the mounds were knee-high spikes that looked like the air roots of mangrove trees. The bigger mounds were six feet or more tall and wide at the base. The great dry blobs of reddish earth looked for all the world as though miniature castles had been built of rust-colored wax, only to have the punishing weight of tropical sunlight warp the wax until nothing remained but the slumped ruins of the original design.
The air simmered with heat and moisture. To the right and to the left of the Rover, the sky was a heat-misted blue. Directly behind was a distinct river of clouds of every color, from white to blue-black. As it moved, the river widened until it resembled a huge, barely opened fan laid across the empty sky. And still the clouds came on, churned out by an invisible source.
“There aren’t any mountains or storms, so where are the clouds coming from?” Erin asked finally.
“The Indian Ocean.”
Absently she plucked at the tank top that had become a damp, faithful shadow over her body from neck to waist.
Cole caught the motion from the corner of his eye and turned for a better look. She’d taken his advice and kept her clothes to a minimum. That minimum didn’t include a bra. The damp cotton top clung to the full curves of her breasts and peaked unmistakably over her nipples. The temptation to slide his fingers between cloth and skin was so sharp that he looked away.
More sensed than seen beneath the brilliant sunlight, lightning danced behind the Rover. No rumble of thunder followed.
“I thought this was the dry season,” she said after a time, looking over her shoulder.
“It is.”
“Then why is it raining?”
“It isn’t.”
She blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes with unnecessary force. “Not here.” She waved a hand over her shoulder. “Back there.”
“Just a tease. When the wet comes to stay, clouds and lightning go from horizon to horizon and the rain comes down like high-mountain thunder.”
“A tease.” She sighed and pulled at her damp, clinging tank top.
“Don’t do that. It’s too hot to think about what I’m thinking about.”
She gave him a sideways look and a remembering kind of smile.
“Quit distracting me and get familiar with the country,” he said, handing a map to her.
But he was smiling too.
She opened the map against the sixty-mile-an-hour wind coming through the open windows. Holding the paper across her knees, she matched the map with the landscape of sparse trees and thin grasslands that flashed by on either side.
Finding where they were on the map was easy. The Great Northern Highway was the superhighway of Western Australia, linking Darwin and Perth through almost five thousand kilometers of uninhabited land. The road was only one lane wide. It was better than the only other road that penetrated the interior of the vast western state.
Out beyond Derby the road divided. The Gibb River Road went north. The Great Northern Highway went east. Once that basic choice was made by a motorist, there was nowhere to go but forward or back. There weren’t any other through roads. The Gibb was also one lane wide, but that lane was dirt. It ran north, up onto the Kimberley Plateau, where it dead-ended. There was nothing but scattered stations and mineral claims from one end of the Gibb River Road to the other.
When the time came to make the choice, Cole turned onto the Gibb River Road. Dust began to boil up from the tires.
“I thought Abe’s station was closer to the Great Northern Highway,” Erin said.
“It is. But we’re tourists going to Windjana, remember?” What he didn’t add was that it was a lot easier to spot a tail on a dusty road than on a paved surface.
She went back to studying the map. Every thirty to fifty kilometers, the map showed spur roads taking off from or merging with the two highways.
“What are these dirt roads named?” she asked. “I haven’t seen any signs, and there aren’t any numbers on the map.”
“They don’t have names or numbers. Most of them dead-end out at some station or mine.”
A boil of dust ahead caught her eye. Gradually a car appeared in the emptiness ahead of them. It was the first vehicle they had seen since Derby. She held her breath as the two cars rushed headlong at each other on the single-lane road.
Two vehicles hurtled forward, each driver holding the single lane until the last possible moment. Neither one slowed in the least. A glance at the speedometer told Erin that the closing speed of the two vehicles was at least 120 miles per hour. At some unseen but mutually understood signal, each driver turned his left-hand wheels out on the shoulder, making room for the cars to pass with inches to spare.
As the vehicles raced by, each driver lifted his right index finger from the steering wheel in recognition.
At first Erin thought it was all sheer luck that no one was killed. By the third time an oncoming car roared past in a boil of dust, she realized that she was participating in a bizarre Aussie ritual.
“This has to be the world’s longest-running game of Chicken,” she said distinctly.
He smiled, to
uched her cheek with his fingertip. His smile faded as he glanced in the mirrors, then concentrated on the road in front again.
“Why is the roll bar on the front bumper?” she asked after a time of silence.
“It’s called a bull bar out here and a ’roo bar in the rest of the outback. Most outback vehicles have one.”
“Why?”
“Cheaper than fenders,” he said. “A bull bar also keeps whatever you hit from getting under the wheels and flipping you over.”
“What can you hit besides termite mounds?”
He tilted his head toward a handful of rust-colored, bony cows grazing in the limited shade of the stunted trees. “Kimberley shorthorns.”
“They’re hardly bigger than mule deer,” she said.
“They’re big enough to kill you, and they’re not the only thing running around. This country isn’t fenced. Everything roams—kangaroos, feral donkeys and horses, bush bulls. Any one of them could be big enough to get in underneath the front wheels of a Rover.”
“Does that happen often?”
“If you drive these roads at night, sooner or later you’ll hit something big enough to matter.” His eyes narrowed as he looked in the side-view mirror. “That’s why a short-barreled shotgun is part of my outback equipment. You can’t be certain of killing an animal outright in a collision. Especially a bush bull.”
She looked at the cattle again. They were slat-thin, pony-size, and ragged. “Is one of those a bull?”
“Probably, but that’s not what a bush bull is. A bush bull is a feral water buffalo.”
She looked dubiously at the sandy, dusty country. “Water buffalo?”
“Up around Darwin they get at least sixty inches of rain a year. Most of it comes in a four-month stretch. Monsoon season. It gets plenty wet then.”
“Fifteen inches a month?”
“More in January. Less in other wet months. That’s when all the dotted lines on that map turn into huge muddy rivers and every little crease in the land runs liquid.” He watched the rearview mirror for three seconds and then forced his attention back to the road ahead. “The fords are impassable in the wet, and the few bridges that have been built are under water. The unsealed roads and station tracks are useless.”
Death is Forever Page 18
