The Tribute

by John Byron

  He drained his glass and looked up through the canopy of the Sydney red gum in the yard behind. Something was still not right. His gut knew what it was, but his brain wasn’t listening. He sat up and grabbed the Lagavulin, tipping the last two fingers into his glass. He nearly dropped the bottle when the realisation hit him.

  Sylvia’s swimming keys were missing from the big marble bowl. The set with Jo’s front-door keys on it. He went over to check, pulling out his own set, with Jo’s back-door key on it, and Sylvia’s big bunch. The pared-down set of keys was definitely gone.

  And he knew with a sickening certainty where they were.

  Sylvia must have used that set to open the front door to Porter. The crime scene team hadn’t found them, so Porter must’ve taken them when he ran. Maybe he’d spotted the university crest and guessed whose keys they were.

  A chill ran through Murphy then. Porter could let himself into Jo’s place at any time. He could be there right now.

  No, that wasn’t right: Porter was there right now. Murphy knew it in his bones.

  He scrambled into action: pulling on his shoes, grabbing his keys, retrieving his revolver from the kitchen drawer and bolting for the front door.

  Fuck, he hoped he’d make it in time.

  Wednesday 16 January – very late

  The lights went out in King’s apartment just before midnight. The policewoman left the building, walked up the hill to an unmarked car and drove away. Porter waited another full hour before creeping across the road and letting himself into the lobby. He glided up the stairs to the top floor. The red key didn’t fit, but the green key slid into the lock and rolled the tumbler on its axis. He opened the door and was halfway inside when he saw Joanna King lying on her couch, not three metres away.

  —

  Murphy drove recklessly fast down Dudley Street, straight over the top of two low-profile roundabouts, police lights flashing. At Beach Street he switched into stealth mode: headlights off, coasting down the hill to park next door to Jo’s block. He looked up at her place three storeys above. Her lights were off, but he thought he saw a brief flash on the balcony ceiling. Probably his imagination. The main thing was there was no mad fucker looking down, watching him arrive. He grabbed a can of graphite spray from the boot, ran down the side of Jo’s block then quickly scaled the external staircase at the back of the building.

  —

  Porter stood unmoving until he was sure King was asleep. He was reassured by a near-empty bottle of red wine alongside two glasses, one half-full and one drained.

  He came completely inside and closed the door silently behind him. He opened his Gladstone bag and eased the keys down inside, all the while watching his quarry. She was utterly still. He donned a pair of gloves, then removed the gauze pad from the sandwich bag, crossed to the sleeping scholar and clasped the gauze firmly to her face. She woke immediately, of course, all struggle and grunting and bulging eyes, but her panic was brief. Once the midazolam took effect and she was out cold, he worked quickly under torchlight to prepare the other pharmaceuticals.

  —

  Murphy waited a moment to gather his breath outside Jo’s door, then squirted the lubricant into the hinges and keyhole. He drew his revolver, thumbed the safety off and pulled the hammer back. He slid his key silently into the lock, turning it steadily, then pushed lightly. The door opened with only the faintest squeak. He looked around the small rear storage room, his eyes adjusting to the darkness inside after the bright moonlight. Empty. He withdrew the key, slid the bunch into his pocket, slipped inside then closed the door silently.

  Murphy held still, trying to tune into the space above the sound of his own pounding heart. He thought he could feel the presence of someone there, sharing the air of the apartment, listening for him. Jo? Porter? His imagination?

  Only one way to find out.

  —

  Porter was preparing Joanna King’s cubital fossa for the sodium thiopental when he registered a tiny sound at the back of the apartment. It might have been nothing – these old buildings shifted constantly – but then he had an uncanny feeling, a heuristic response to a shift in air pressure and in the sounds coming from the street. He switched off his torch and listened. A moment later, the street sound diminished slightly, and a kind of flatness returned to the air around him. There was no doubt about it: a door or a window had opened then closed, somewhere out the back.

  Porter cursed himself silently. He had failed to consider the possibility that the apartment had a back entrance: it was unusual, certainly, but not rare in blocks of this vintage. In his haste he had come underprepared. Losing access to the bank network had robbed him of many resources, but he could have at least found a floorplan online.

  But it was too late for recriminations. Now it was all about survival. He looked around, assessing sight lines and shadows, but his major problem was weapons. He had enough pancuronium bromide to kill a man twice over, and it was even effective injected directly into muscle instead of a vein, but a syringe was a meagre weapon in hand-to-hand combat, no matter its contents. His Gladstone bag held a loaded pistol, but it sat squarely in the line of sight of the hallway, bathed in moonlight: if the intruder had made any progress at all, he’d be looking at it right now.

  My kingdom for a ballpein hammer.

  A floorboard squeaked slightly down the hall. It had to be Murphy. Who else would have a key to the apartment and an inclination to stealth? A boyfriend would not be so sneaky; any other cop would storm the front door.

  It was time to commit to a course of action, right now. The kitchen was his best bet, with the refrigerator providing some cover from the hallway, and an armoury of weapons.

  Holding the syringe of pancuronium bromide, he crawled to the kitchen counter, then slid up onto it. He swivelled across it, quickly but quietly, casting a brief shadow on the rear wall of the kitchen, out of sight from the hallway. He let his body down softly. He set the syringe on the bench, and levered an impressive meat cleaver from the magnetic strip on the splashback. This would be the weapon to finish with, but the first blow demanded something hard and heavy. He found a mortar, identical to the one at Murphy’s house, but with its pestle in place. How poetic. He could still feel the effects of its twin on his jaw. He switched the knife to his left hand and hefted the pestle with his right.

  —

  Murphy crept steadily along the hallway. Jo’s floor was squeaky as fuck – he knew from experience – so he stepped with a wide gait, his footfall hugging the skirting boards to minimise the travel of the ancient floorboards.

  At Jo’s studio he dropped his body, braced his shoulder against the door jamb and his right foot on the far wall, and slid his head around cautiously down at hip height. The theory was you got a quick peek without having your head blown off. In practice, poking your head inside a room occupied by a fugitive serial killer bore a fair degree of inherent risk, and there was only so much you could do to mitigate it.

  But there was no serial killer in sight. There were plenty of places to hide, but the ambush risk was too great for him to go in and clear the room. He played the percentages and pressed on.

  He was creeping forward again when he noticed a vintage leather doctor’s bag just inside the front door. He’d never seen it before. Certainly wasn’t Jo’s. Presumably it was the famous bag of tricks. Then the moonlight on the wall ahead undulated briefly. It wasn’t a shadow, exactly, more like a ripple passing across the surface of water. The trees were on the far side of the street-lighting and Jo’s balcony plants were small. That meant someone was moving around in the living room. He moved quickly up the hall.

  —

  The gun came first, the muzzle poking out of the hallway past the refrigerator. It was tentative, as though sniffing out danger, then came forward again. The barrel just kept on coming, lengthening to an almost comical extent, and in his heightened state of anxiety Porter nearly giggled aloud. Murphy and his pathetic masculinity issues. Eventually there came t
he cylinder, then a finger curled around the trigger, then the butt and the hand. Then the fragile wrist, the point of least stability.

  Porter was tempted to strike now, but the aspect of the gun’s approach indicated that Murphy thought his quarry was in the living room rather than the kitchen. So Porter held out for the decisive head-strike, pestle raised high. Murphy kept coming: too late, he glanced into the kitchen, just as Porter brought the pestle down onto his skull.

  —

  Looking to his left to clear the kitchen, Murphy caught a glint of light on steel just before he sensed the body next to him. He reeled back, but an explosion of pain over his left ear sent him flying. He held his feet somehow and staggered into the living room, taking a blow on his left shoulder then the back of his head. Porter had thrown his club: it would be a knife next, or worse. Murphy caught a glimpse of Jo on her sofa – dead or alive, he couldn’t tell, but definitely out of commission. Too bad: he could do with the help.

  He turned to take a shot but Porter was right on top of him, a meat cleaver in one hand and a syringe in the other. They collided at full pace and crashed onto the coffee table, Murphy catching the edge on the middle of his back with Porter’s full weight on him. His gun flew out into the darkness, and he heard the knife fall as they tumbled together onto the floor. Murphy sat up and punched down at Porter, hard on the side of the face. Porter rolled away, slashing at him with the syringe, tearing Murphy’s shirt and tracing an arc across his chest. Porter pushed Murphy back against the coffee table, then got to his feet and ran for the door. Murphy attempted a diving tackle from his knees, but missed. Porter snatched up the leather bag and disappeared through the door.

  Murphy tried to stand, but his vision swam, so he stayed down for the moment. His head hurt like fuck and his upper body was battered, but at least he could see and move. He held his hand to his clamouring left ear and felt the blood pulsing out of his scalp. There was another nasty gash at the back, but he’d survive.

  He crawled over to Jo on the couch. He put his ear to her mouth and sensed nothing, but with his head still roaring that wasn’t surprising. He hovered an open eye over her mouth until he could feel her breath on his cornea, shallow but regular. Thank fuck. He shook her with one hand while checking her arms for needles and feeling around her head and torso for injuries. She seemed intact. Eventually she groaned and opened her eyes.

  ‘You all right, Jo?’

  ‘Think so,’ she said, her speech syrupy. ‘Gave me mizlam. Tastes awful.’

  ‘He was getting ready to inject you.’

  ‘Fuck.’ She laid her head back. ‘Thanks, Dave.’

  ‘No worries, sis.’ He felt around for his revolver.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Took off. I’m going after him.’ He re-emerged from under the coffee table, gun in one hand, the other moving to a sticky mess of blood congealing on the side of his head.

  ‘Shit, Dave, doesn’t that hurt?’

  ‘Only when I laugh.’ He came cautiously to his feet. He was unsteady, but upright; it was going to have to do. ‘You stay here,’ he said, and stumbled out the door.

  Thursday 17 January – early hours

  Jo was still a bit groggy, but the soporific was wearing off quickly, so she slipped on some shoes, grabbed her keys and followed her brother, closing the door behind her. She raced down the stairs then peered cautiously outside and saw Murphy half-sitting in the passenger seat of his car, his legs poking through the open door.

  ‘Get down, he has a gun,’ he stage-whispered at her. Well yeah, she thought, he’s a serial killer: of course he has a bloody gun. But she crouched behind the bonnet like she was in the ‘Sabotage’ video and scuttled across to him.

  ‘I thought I told you to stay put.’

  She ignored that. ‘Where’d he go?’

  But Murphy was already slithering further inside, his arm up under the driver’s seat, then he pulled out and handed her something compact and dark as he got out of the car. ‘If you’re out here, you’re going to need this to wave around.’ She recognised the police-issue Glock 22, the model she’d fired at the range. Only it was way too light. ‘Don’t fucken use it, and don’t fucken lose it.’

  ‘But, Dave, it’s not —’ she started, but he cut her off.

  ‘Call it in on the radio, then go back inside,’ he said. ‘Tell them he’s gone into the Ladies’ Baths.’ Then he was off, running around the front of the car and across the road, through the playground and into the shadows above the cliff.

  She got into the car and inspected the police radio. One green LED glowed, but it was otherwise dark and silent. Was it even on? There was no obvious power button. She lifted the mic and pressed the button on the side. ‘Hello?’ Not even static. She tried again, more declaratively: ‘Hello.’ Silence. She felt ridiculous.

  She looked across the road at the shadows obscuring the gate to the Ladies’ Baths. Nah, fuck this. She checked the Glock’s chamber was clear then ejected the magazine. She opened the glovebox and swapped the empty for Murphy’s spare magazine, pushing it into the butt until the catch clicked. She pulled the slide back and let it spring forward to chamber the first round. She weighed the loaded gun in her hand. Might not be able to work the stupid radio, but I can load a bloody pistol.

  She got out of the car and closed the door quietly, then took off across the road, keeping to the shadows beneath the tall, straight Norfolk pines. She held to the line of their trunks, curving around to join the footpath, until she reached the gate to the Ladies’ Baths. It was swinging open.

  Okay. They were on her turf now. She went in.

  Jo held the gun in both hands out in front, moving steadily and smoothly down the path alongside a brick wall. She peered around the corner at the end, scanning for movement. She was looking along the front of the change rooms, brilliantly lit by the full moon almost directly overhead. Beyond was the maze of lawn and bushes and paths and rocky shelves of the steep, terraced hillside above the ocean pool.

  She ducked between the rails of a wooden fence, slid down the grassy knoll and leaned cautiously over the proper fence at the bottom. The pool glistened beneath her, an expanse of flatrock and sand with the odd clump of seaweed, its surface riffled by a light breeze. There was nobody in the pool or on the steps below her, although the far steps were mostly out of sight.

  She made her way along the fence, past the top of the pool steps and towards a retaining wall beneath a small grassed terrace. She stopped and looked around: from where she stood, a short flight of steps led down from just beyond the wall to a wide concrete platform that served as the baths’ central intersection. She paused to inventory the various alcoves, platforms, shrub screens and pathways around it that had sprung up over the years. It was a complicated space for such a confined area – Porter and Murphy could be anywhere in there, stalking one another, coming within metres of each other without realising it. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that this was her terrain: she knew these grounds well, while the men had never so much as set foot in here.

  If Murphy and Porter were moving around at all, sooner or later they’d have to come through the concrete plain before her. She moved quickly over to the cover of the retaining wall, leaning her head against the brick for a moment. Her heart was pounding hard and fast. She told herself to calm the fuck down. Listened, for once.

  She looked around the edge of the wall and nearly lost it as she saw Porter standing with his back to her not ten metres away, on the wide expanse of concrete where seconds ago there had been only moonlight. She pulled back to her cover, her heart lurching then restarting in a trip-hammer beat. She peered around once more.

  Porter hadn’t moved a muscle: he was standing in a tense parody of a television gunfighter’s stance, like Elvis in that Warhol silkscreen, aiming an automatic pistol across the expanse of concrete into the shadows beyond. He was utterly transfixed. Jo couldn’t see whatever he was looking at, but it could only be Murphy.

&nb
sp; She took a slow breath to steady herself then stepped out silently from behind the wall, creeping across the path to a small lawn that sat above the concrete platform but was screened from it by a row of banksia. Murphy came into her view through the shrubbery, facing Porter in a more relaxed but equally lethal posture. The two men were as rigid as statuary below her, utterly absorbed by their stand-off. It was clear neither one had seen her through the brushes.

  She moved further to her right, stepping carefully, to gain a better bead on Porter, then secured her stance on the ground. She now had a clear, open shot at his chest. She slid her left index finger inside the trigger guard and pulled cautiously until she felt the trigger safety lever give. One more breath.

  THE EPITOME OF ANDREAS VESALIUS

  his is how it works.

  You open this other book, the Epitome, to the middle pages: to the most beautifully rendered anatomical nudes ever conceived. The man is lean, powerful, muscular, arms spread slightly – his right supinated, his left hand cradling a skull against his thigh – head declined in stern contemplation; the woman is supple, graceful, lithe, modestly arraigned, her left arm opened in reflection of her mate, her right angled demurely to conceal her sex, gazing across the page with a dolorous yet steely expression.

  You work towards the front of the book, leaf by leaf, starting with the external features and their topographical relations, stripping back the layers as you turn the pages, proceeding only once you’ve grasped the dynamics of each tier and their attitudes relative to the layers already comprehended. Stratum gives way to stratum as the muscles are stripped back, deeper and deeper, until you reach ligaments, cartilages, bones. By now the student knows where every tendon attaches; which muscles overlay every process and protuberance; which fibres generate every motion; which line and curve and prominence of the naked human body owes to every combination of sinew and bone.