8 Hours to Die

by JR Carroll

  Voula replied angrily in Greek—her English was poor—and husband and wife engaged in a fierce shouting match that was a great embarrassment to Sammy and a cause of much consternation and bemusement to all present.

  Sammy hated school. All he wanted to do was leave, go to work and earn enough money to buy a car. That was his great ambition.

  *

  From about the age of thirteen, Sammy had become obsessed with martial arts, particularly in movies. Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were his role models. He would visit the video store and hire a dozen at a time. He watched Fists of Fury, The Crow and Enter the Dragon countless times; his bedroom walls were plastered with posters of his heroes in action. It wasn’t long before he joined a local full-contact karate school, where he took to the dojo with great enthusiasm.

  The sensei instilled in his pupils the importance of the spiritual and philosophical aspects of karate, but Sammy had no interest in anything spiritual; he just wanted to develop his fighting skills and get his black belt by beating the crap out of anyone he was pitted against. He had an explosive style, always trying to put his opponent out of business straight away in a whirlwind of lethal head kicks. It wasn’t always a successful approach and opponents quickly learned that if they could weather the initial storm they could overpower Sammy with patience and discipline, qualities Sammy lacked, both at the dojo and in life generally.

  At school he would engage in friendly karate fights with his mates in the yard, and hone his skills on lockers in the corridors, smashing them into mangled wrecks with Bruce Lee-style spinning kicks. In the classroom, before the teacher had arrived, he would show off by kicking and demolishing furniture, punching holes in the walls and even smashing windows as he reenacted fight scenes from one of the many movies he’d seen so often and knew by heart.

  On several occasions he was suspended for willful destruction of school property. But Sammy never learned his lesson. He had no notion of ‘school property’. It was just stuff at his disposal, to be destroyed.

  In the end, at age sixteen, he was expelled after kicking a school cleaner who’d told him off for fighting in the yard. The cleaner was hospitalised with a shattered kneecap.

  That was the end of Sammy’s school career. He got a job with his father, menial work, which he hated but at least it put some cash in his pocket. He did the incredibly boring heavy lifting and the fetching and carrying; out on the roads or on a building site he was the lollipop man, holding up the STOP and SLOW sign to the traffic.

  He persisted with karate, working his way through the grades and gaining his brown belt at the age of eighteen. It was no mean feat for someone with such raw, undisciplined skills, but Sammy was ferocious and determined enough to overcome his shortcomings, and if one of his lethal spinning kicks did come off, it was goodnight, nurse.

  He celebrated his brown belt by getting drunk with his mates and on the way home he demolished a whole picket fence and punched the glass out of a public telephone box and a bus shelter. He was in full flight.

  Before his nineteenth birthday, Sammy bought himself a second-hand Holden Commodore SS with sixty thousand on the clock. It became his pride and joy; every spare dollar went into maintaining and modifying this glorious midnight blue chariot. ‘People have to respect my car,’ he’d say. ‘They don’t respect my car, they don’t respect me.’

  Sammy was big on respect. It was a word he used a lot. But always he had to be on the receiving end, not the other way round.

  Often he would cruise the suburbs late at night with his mates, looking for girls or, failing that, someone to beat up. Anyone walking along the street was fair game. They’d slow down to a crawl, taunt the prospective victim, and, if he answered back, that was it. They’d all jump out of the car and give him a thrashing to remember. Teach them a lesson.

  Sammy was questioned by the police after one such incident in St Marys, where the victim suffered brain damage, but charges were never laid due to lack of evidence. Because of his injuries, the victim himself was unable to identify his assailant.

  After that, Sammy believed he was invincible.

  But he was on the police books. He was known to the cops.

  7

  A few clicks down the track, Stav said: ‘Hold up. What’s that?’

  Cornstalk stopped the Beemer and looked across to his left. There was a faint flicker of light somewhere in the scrub. ‘Someone’s shack, maybe. Better check it out.’ Stav opened the door.

  ‘If you run into anyone,’ Cornstalk said, ‘try not to cut ’em up—least till you get directions.’

  Stav gave him a look. He put the tomahawk down the front of his pants and approached the dwelling. There was no path, and he had to beat his way through some bushes to reach the front door. There was one small window. That light must’ve come from there, he thought; but now it was gone.

  He pounded on the door a couple of times. It was quite a solid structure, a hut about the size of a train carriage, only wider and bit shorter. Sort of a log cabin.

  No one answered his knocking.

  He tried again, using the heel of his fist: bang, bang, bang.

  He glanced back at the BMW, idling silently. Puffs of exhaust wafted in a pearly mist around its headlights.

  ‘What’s the fuckin’ story?’ Cornstalk called out through the open car door.

  ‘Nothing,’ Stav said. But his gut feeling told him otherwise. There was a flickering light, a candle perhaps; that meant someone was holed up inside—unless his eyes were deceiving him.

  Christo joined him, and together they went around the back. There was another door, a smaller one, like an escape hatch. Stav banged on it a few times with no result.

  ‘Anyone home?’ Christo yelled against the door. ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. He put his ear to the door: not a sound.

  They climbed back into the wagon.

  ‘Nobody there?’ Cornstalk said.

  ‘I think there is someone inside,’ Stav said. ‘Just a feeling. But they’re too shy to open up.’ He shut the door as they moved off.

  ‘Well,’ Cornstalk said, ‘I’d be too shy to open up for a mad fuckin’ Canuck axe murderer.’

  ‘Yeah, but … he doesn’t know that, does he?’

  ‘Maybe he’s psychic,’ Christo said from the back. ‘Or maybe he heard it on the … whaddayacallit? The bush telegraph.’

  They both looked at him. Christo shrugged.

  After some silence Cornstalk switched on the heater. ‘Getting cold,’ he said.

  ‘You guys don’t know what cold is,’ Stav said. ‘Back home in Montreal, it’d get down to twenty, twenty-five below. During the night she’d snow, and in the morning the sun would shine from a clear blue sky, and the windows would be caked with ice that took all day to thaw out. We’d go tobogganing and snowboarding and stuff. It was magic.’

  Cornstalk said, ‘If you liked it so much, why aren’t you still there?’

  ‘Too many tourists. In summer you couldn’t move for ’em. Got so crowded in the street sometimes, you couldn’t get your johnson out.’

  ‘That bad, huh,’ Cornstalk said.

  Stav was nodding. ‘Like having a bunch of strangers come into your house and take over.’

  Cornstalk thought that was a strange thing to say, given the nature of their mission.

  ‘Why would you want to get your johnson out in the street, anyway?’ he said. He had a vision of Stav exposing himself in downtown Montreal in front of thousands of shocked tourists. That brought a smile to his face.

  ‘That’s just a figure of speech, you nut.’

  ‘Just kidding,’ Cornstalk said.

  ‘Anyhow … wasn’t my call—the old man moved us out here when I was fourteen years old.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Cornstalk said.

  Stav thought about it for a second or two. ‘Why, so I could have a better life, team up with you assholes, wreak mayhem.’

  General laughter followed.

  ‘So … do you spea
k French?’ Cornstalk said.

  ‘Course I do. Everyone in Montreal speaks French. It’s the mother tongue. They teach it in school from day one.’

  ‘How do you say “Go fuck yourself” in French?’ Christo said.

  Stav closed his eyes, opened them again. ‘I could tell you, but it’d be wasted, like feeding strawberries to swine,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you look it up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cornstalk said. ‘Look up “loser” and “dipstick” while you’re at it.’

  Christo said, ‘If I’m a loser, what does that make you? Someone who associates with losers.’

  Cornstalk laughed. ‘You got me there.’ He put on his Jack Nicholson voice, something he did quite well. ‘What can I say, kid? When you’re right you’re right—and you’re right.’

  *

  After a few more kilometres they had gone by a couple of sidetracks. Cornstalk paused to inspect each one before pushing on. The road, which had started off as broken bitumen and loose gravel, had now deteriorated into dirt, with plenty of potholes.

  ‘Luck’s with us,’ he said. ‘We’re gonna find this place, no sweat.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Stav said. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It rained today. See the tyre tracks?’

  ‘Assuming no one else has been down here after him,’ Christo said.

  ‘There’s only one set of winter treads. He’s in a four-wheel drive, isn’t he?’

  No one seemed to know. Cornstalk thought it was a fair assumption. And it seemed unlikely that anyone apart from Fontaine would venture down this road to nowhere.

  ‘Hang on, what’s this?’ he said. The high beams had picked up something by the side of the road. Cornstalk pulled up and got out.

  What he had seen were the legs of a dead kangaroo sticking up in the air.

  ‘Fresh roadkill,’ he said to Stav, who appeared next to him. Christo brought up the rear, taking the opportunity to light a cigarette. Corny didn’t allow smoking in his new Beemer.

  Cornstalk crouched down to inspect the animal’s injuries. ‘Check this out—blood’s still wet.’

  ‘Looky here,’ Stav said. ‘Footprints in the mud—and drag marks.’

  ‘So he’s finished the job and pulled it off the road. Very decent of him.’

  They both gazed ahead into the illuminated darkness—an army of gum trees gleaming white. Cornstalk felt a tingle in his scrotum.

  ‘Not far now,’ he said.

  A bit further on he saw the winter treads make a right down a track you’d probably miss unless you knew it was there. The bush was dense either side, often scraping the BMW’s sides. This annoyed Cornstalk—some of those branches would leave scratch marks for sure.

  After five minutes or so the track widened somewhat. Then he turned a bend. Just ahead was an area of land that had obviously been cleared long ago and a house, about a hundred metres in the distance. It was well lit, and a four-wheel drive of some sort was parked in front of it.

  ‘Gold, gentlemen,’ Cornstalk said. He switched off the lights and killed the motor. He was sure they couldn’t be seen from the property as they were still partly concealed by trees and shrubbery.

  Cornstalk brought up his binoculars. It was a colonial-style farmhouse, spruced up, with old-fashioned sash windows and a veranda. Looked as if Fontaine’d gone up an extra storey, too. The man was definitely serious about his bush retreat, no doubt hoping to enjoy his retirement here.

  Too bad about that.

  Through the silence the throb of a generator could be heard.

  He watched and listened for other signs of life.

  There were curtains on the windows, but they were not drawn. It was just possible to spot movement inside. Number of occupants could not be determined, but Cornstalk was willing to bet there were only two.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Stav said. He was becoming fidgety; Cornstalk could feel it without looking at him. The Canuck was tugging at the leash.

  ‘Plan is,’ Cornstalk said, ‘we approach the house without being seen, without drawing attention to ourselves—maybe around the back of that little shed. Then … we knock on the door.’

  ‘What if they don’t open it?’ Christo said. ‘Then we’ve lost the element of surprise.’

  ‘If so, then we revert to Plan B. But the element of surprise, as you put it, is hardly an issue here. It’s not as if there’s a team of fuckin’ Mossad agents inside. Anyway, my guess is they’ll open up. Most people do, if only out of curiosity. He won’t be expecting the Grim Reaper, will he? Even if they open a bit, just to see who it is, that’ll be enough. All we need’s a foot in the door.’

  ‘Someone knocks on my door way out here, no car in sight, I’d be a bit suspicious,’ Stav said. ‘Night-time visitors appearing from out of nowhere. No way.’

  ‘Is he armed up?’ Christo said.

  ‘That we don’t know,’ Cornstalk said. ‘It’s a possibility—he used to be a cop.’

  ‘He might open the door with a fuckin’ pump shotgun in his hands,’ Christo said. ‘Then we’d look a bit silly.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Cornstalk said. ‘Just play it as I call it. Comes to firepower, we definitely have an edge.’

  ‘What’s Plan B, anyhow?’ Stav said.

  ‘Do it your way. We take the place by storm. Smash our way in.’

  They got out. Cornstalk lifted the rear door and zipped open a canvas overnight bag. Inside was a large bathroom towel tied in a bundle, which he unwrapped. There was a large chrome-plated revolver for himself, a sawn-off Boss twelve-gauge for Stav and a Vietnam-era army-issue Browning .45 automatic for Christo. A couple of spare guns, including a .22 rifle cut down to be used as a pistol, remained in the bag, plus boxes of ammo, various calibre.

  Each man locked and loaded his weapon.

  Cornstalk’s Commandos were about to go into action.

  For backup, Stav shoved the tomahawk down the front of his pants, handle first. And Christo always carried a butterfly knife.

  ‘Last word of advice, lads,’ Cornstalk said, eyeballing Stav. ‘Don’t. Fuck. It. Up.’

  They crept out from the cover of trees and moved towards the back of the generator shed.

  By now it was 7.49pm.

  8

  When Cornstalk was seventeen his father decided he ought to have something constructive to occupy his life instead of just roaming around and getting into trouble. Using a pub contact, he arranged for Cornstalk to do an apprenticeship in spray-painting at a body repair shop. Cornstalk didn’t object—he was certainly fond of cars. During his first week, he was initiated by having his genitals spray-painted and his clothes set alight. Cornstalk didn’t kick up or lodge a complaint—it was simply the way of the world. He accepted it all in the light-hearted spirit intended. And somewhere in the back of his mind was the thought that one day he’d be able to do the same to someone else.

  At no time did it seem possible that he would complete a five-year apprenticeship, but to everyone’s amazement Cornstalk did just that, with the occasional glitch along the way. His absenteeism was an issue and there were heated disputes with his boss and coworkers, but he somehow managed to stick to his guns and emerge as a fully qualified spray-painter.

  His father told him: ‘Now that you’ve got a trade, son, you’ll never want for a job.’

  It was true. There was no shortage of work in the body repair business. Cornstalk stayed on with the firm where he’d served his indenture before moving on. His aim was to own his own business, but that could be years down the track. He’d developed a deep love of cars; loved working with them and seeing the bright, freshly minted product of his endeavours. Nothing gave him more satisfaction than bringing a car’s newly repaired panels to a glossy shine. On top of that, he was now skilled in the use of oxy-acetylene equipment and solvents, which, although he didn’t realise it at the time, would serve well later on.

  By this stage he had a new girlfriend. Her name was Krystal. Like him, she was white trash, living in a shabby house
with her shabby parents on the outskirts of town. But she had an attractive face and a sweet nature. They went steady, and Cornstalk would joke that if they ever got married she would be Krystal Cornstalk.

  At twenty-two, Cornstalk was making decent money, on the straight and also through a scam in which he’d become a player. He hadn’t needed any persuasion. What happened, someone would come in for a quote, an inflated figure would be provided, and when they did the job—for much less—the balance would be split up among those involved. There were three of them in it, including the owner, plus a couple of tame insurance assessors who took their cut too. It was a victimless crime, since only insurance companies finished up out of pocket, and who cared about insurance companies? The scam went undetected for two years. It only came to a halt when the owner of the business died—in a car crash. That was one wreck he couldn’t profit from.

  Cornstalk was renting his own place, where he lived with Krystal. She’d become a lazy, plump little wretch who had a part-time job at a supermarket when she could be bothered getting out of bed. Otherwise she stayed home and watched TV, eating, painting her nails and talking to friends on the phone, for hours at a time. But Cornstalk was fond of her. He liked the idea of having access to her voluptuous body whenever he felt the urge, which was often. Sometimes he would come home and get inside her knickers before she’d had time to realise what was going down, while he still smelled of sweat and solvents and dirty overalls. She would happily slide up and down on his lap with the overalls unbuttoned, sighing softly, her fleshy arms wrapped around his neck. Occasionally she preferred sitting on his lap with her back to him, her breasts cupped in his rough, paint-stained hands, so she could watch TV while he was giving it to her. He couldn’t tell if her mind was on the sex or Wheel of Fortune, but it didn’t matter; in fact, that part of it turned him on. When he’d finished she would twist her head around, smiling, and plant a wet kiss on his lips. He loved that delicate scent of female sweat on her pale skin.

  She also liked him to do her on the floor, on the seagrass matting. That was hard on the knees. She was a child, always wanting her special needs attended to. Krystal was only eighteen, but she was much older as far as her sexual development was concerned. By the time Cornstalk was through with her, she’d had more experience than most women twice her age. But despite the pleasure she gave him, she was a passenger, and Cornstalk didn’t fancy carrying her for a whole lifetime.