White Knuckle Ride

by Alan Carter

  Cato grabbed a Ziploc bag out of the Land Cruiser glove box, hauled the esky off the back seat, and kick-closed the car door, planting his heel dead centre of the bull’s-head logo. He popped the bullet in the bag and crammed the head into the esky. A mobile buzzed in his trousers. It took Cato by surprise; he hadn’t expected a signal out here.

  ‘That you, Cato?’

  ‘Detective Senior Constable Kwong speaking, who’s this?’

  ‘Hutchens.’

  DI Mick Hutchens, his old boss from Fremantle Detectives. Now with Albany Detectives, enjoying a south-coast sea change in Bogan Town. He’d fared better in the fallout than Cato had.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

  ‘Cut the crap, it’s me, Mick. Where are you?’

  Cato looked around at the parched, blistered landscape.

  ‘Somewhere near Katanning.’

  Hutchens chuckled. ‘Enjoying life with the Sheep-Shagging Squad then?’

  ‘Not sure the Commissioner would appreciate your cynical tone, sir.’

  ‘Right. That fuckwit Buckley with you?’

  ‘Want a word with him?’

  ‘No. Listen up. Got some real work for you. A body, well, half a one anyway. Human though; would make a nice change for you.’

  Cato’s pulse quickened like it hadn’t done for a long time.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Down in Hopetoun; maybe three hours drive for you.’

  Cato racked his brain — Hopetoun, south coast, fishing spot? Other than that, the place meant nothing to him.

  ‘Why aren’t your mob onto it? I’m supposed to be banished to Siberia, remember?’

  A momentary uncomfortable silence, then Hutchens cleared his throat.

  ‘Three are on suspension, two on sick leave, two on holiday. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. Thought of you immediately.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  The faintest whining hint of desperation crept into Hutchens’ voice. ‘Cato mate, I need you. For the next few days anyway.’

  Cato couldn’t shake the thought that there was more to this than met the eye. Was Hutchens really scraping the very bottom of the barrel before he thought of his old mate Cato? The sun scorched the back of his neck, flies worried his face, and the headless three-legged cow was starting to smell really bad. The road out of Katanning shimmered in the heat haze. Who was Cato Kwong to look a gift horse in the mouth?

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Washed up this morning. Looks like a shark attack but the local doctor reckons our bloke might have been dead before he hit the water. He’s a country quack so probably talking through his arse.’ Same old Mick Hutchens, thought Cato, Zen master of the sweeping generalisation. ‘I need you to take a look, confirm or deny. No hassle, no fuss. Fill out the paperwork and file it, Cato. Home by Friday.’

  Cato had lost track of time — then he remembered, today was Wednesday. If it really was that simple and clean-cut he’d still be home in time for the weekend. It was his turn to have Jake. They could have a family weekend together, just the two of them. Yeah right.

  ‘Who’s the officer-in-charge down there?’

  ‘Senior Sergeant Tess Maguire …’ Hutchens paused, no doubt for effect. Cato didn’t miss a beat, didn’t give Hutchens the reaction he wanted.

  ‘Taser Tess?’

  ‘The very same.’

  After her ordeal at the hands of the mob up north, the Commissioner had made taser stun guns standard issue for all officers in the optimistic belief that the outcome might have been different had she been ‘suitably equipped’ with a fifty-thousand-volt zapper. Cato had his doubts about their effectiveness in that kind of situation, particularly if they fell into the wrong hands. Scepticism aside, it had made Tess something of a folk hero among her colleagues right around the state. She had been more than that to him, once.

  ‘I thought she’d left the job.’

  ‘Sent to Hopetoun. Same thing. Look, take Buckley with you to make up the numbers but mate … keep him away from those sheep.’

  Hutchens signed off with a ‘baaaaaah’. Cato sighed and snapped his phone shut. Then it came to him, Merit Cup for perfect roast.

  Merit Cup: an anagram, ‘Prime Cut’. It was enough to turn a good man vegetarian.

  Jim Buckley was hunched over by the wing mirror, mouth pursed, using a Kleenex baby wipe to try to get the bloodstains off his Stock Squad shirt. Cato coughed politely for attention.

  ‘Sarge. Something just came up.’

  They should have been in Hopetoun by early afternoon but Jim Buckley had insisted on backtracking to put the cow’s head into storage in the freezer at the Katanning cop shop. The local boys weren’t happy. They’d have to find somewhere else to store the snags and steaks meant for this Friday’s sundowner barbie.

  ‘Use some initiative,’ Buckley had snapped at them, rather ungratefully.

  Then they’d stopped along the way for a late lunch: two meat pies, a Mars Bar and a Coke for Buckley; for Cato just the one pie, a floury bruised apple and an orange juice, having caught sight of himself in a window and seen what just half a week on the road can do. Then there were the four smokos and two piss stops. Then they’d pulled up a couple of speeders and issued tickets, Buckley getting his stats up, Cato getting his blood pressure up. He was impatient to get to the body. He wondered if Buckley ever felt the thrill of stuff like this — a possible case, a mystery: was the body dead before it went into the water? That kind of thing. Probably not. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror — flecks of grey at the temples but, at two months short of thirty-eight, he was in as good a shape as he had been for years. The banishment to Stock Squad left him with extra time on his hands and he used some of it to get fitter. Swimming, cycling, and avoiding the kind of junk he’d eaten when he was doing normal cop hours — whatever they were.

  Recently Cato didn’t seem to be able to get enough sleep. There was a time when he buzzed along on four or five hours. Nowadays he usually got the full eight, often more, but still sometimes woke up exhausted and lethargic. Today? Today he saw a flicker of energy in his eyes that he hadn’t seen for a long time.

  It was midafternoon by the time they crested the rise that would drop them down into Hopetoun. The suffocating heat of the interior had eased as they neared the coast. The hot easterly had become a fresh south-westerly and Cato was beginning to feel halfway human again. As they rolled down the Hopetoun main drag — Veal Street it was called — Cato reflected they were having a big meat-themed day. Cows’ heads, gift horses, barbies, pies, even the crossword solution. And now Veal Street; that’s life in the Stock Squad.

  Two telephone boxes stood outside a cafe where a handful of people drank coffee on a pine deck. In one of the booths was a man with his back to them, wearing dusty blue and fluoro-yellow work overalls and holding one hand over his free ear trying to block out the wind noise. He turned to face them and Cato saw that he was Chinese. Their eyes met for a moment as Cato rolled past.

  ‘More than just the one of you in town then,’ Buckley observed.

  Cato continued looking at the man through his rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Well spotted. That must be why you’re the sergeant and I’m a mere constable.’

  ‘Senior constable: don’t put yourself down, mate,’ Buckley corrected him.

  Cato had phoned ahead and got through to Hopetoun second-in-command, Constable Greg Fisher. Greg told him to meet them at the Sea Rescue hut beside the skate park. He had forewarned them: the hut was the cop shop until the new whiz-bang multipurpose emergency services building was finished. It might take a while, he’d said, ‘chronic labour shortage’. From what Cato could see — a big pile of sand inside a temporary wire fence — there was little evidence the new cop shop had even been started. He pulled up onto the rust-coloured gravel. The Sea Rescue hut was a faded and peeling olive-green and about the size of a shipping container — but not quite as pleasing to the eye. The door was open so Cato w
alked in. Greg Fisher was sitting at a desk talking on the phone. He looked up and acknowledged the visitors with a wink. Senior Sergeant Tess Maguire stood by a recently cleaned whiteboard, the smell of cleaning fluid hung in the air. She had a red marker pen in her left hand and Cato noticed her bare ring finger. In the centre of the whiteboard she’d given the body a name, ‘Flipper’, and drawn a question mark beside it. Over to the right-hand side, a short list of names and telephone numbers.

  She turned. At first glance she still looked the same Tess to Cato but, on closer inspection, her eyes seemed darker and sadder. She was using them to measure him up too. Cato sucked his stomach in a little bit and lifted his head to give his neck more of a chance but Tess seemed to be more focused on the bull’s-head logo on his Stock Squad breast pocket. Cato winced inside; he really needed to change back into civvies at the first opportunity.

  ‘Nice uniform; heard you were coming to town.’ The light seemed to have gone out of her voice as well. ‘How’s things?’ she inquired idly, like the answer didn’t matter.

  ‘Good. Good.’ He said it twice as if to reassure himself.

  Cato introduced Buckley who was, after all, the senior officer. Tess filled them in on what little she knew: teacher, sharks, torso, doctor, head (lack of).

  ‘Why Flipper?’ Cato nodded towards the whiteboard.

  Greg Fisher failed to smother a grin. ‘The teacher who found him thought it was a seal at first, thought the arm was a flipper.’

  ‘Do you get many people dropping in here?’

  Cato could see Tess bristling.

  ‘There’ll be a room divider up by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘No member of the public will see the board.’

  Cato wondered how you could divide such a small space any further. Callous nicknames aside, as the days went by there would be plenty of other reasons why the information board would need to be blocked from public view.

  ‘So tell me about the doctor’s take on this.’

  Jim Buckley clearly thought it was about time he asserted his presence. ‘Yeah, has he been watching a bit too much telly, or what?’

  Tess summed up what she’d been told, finishing with the news that the body had been carted up to Ravensthorpe, fifty kilometres away, and put into cold storage in the hospital there.

  Cato swore. They’d had to come through Ravensthorpe to get to Hopetoun; he could have checked out the body on his way through — if somebody had bothered to let him know. Now they’d have to waste time backtracking. Greg looked uncomfortable. Cato could see that Tess didn’t give a hoot: this was her patch, her rules.

  ‘A pathologist is coming over from Albany; he should be at Ravensthorpe in a few hours. You can meet him there. Anything else you want to do while you’re waiting?’

  She had addressed the question to Buckley, letting Cato know who was boss. Buckley looked over at Cato. Detective Kwong took his sunnies out of his Stock Squad shirt pocket.

  ‘Let’s go to the beach.’

  The beach at Hopey didn’t offer any major new insights but Cato enjoyed the squeak of the brilliant white grains under his Stock Squad blundies and the sparkling clarity of the water rolling and crashing onto the shore. For him it was as much about getting a feel for the place, the lie of the land and all that. First impressions? Small. The tour of the town had taken about five minutes; there seemed to be about half a dozen streets either side of the main drag. East of Veal Street were mainly older holiday shacks; to the west, the newly built Legoland — as Tess called it — courtesy of the mine. At the south end of Veal Street, the town centre — three shops, a couple of cafes, a park, a pub, the beach, the ocean. At the north end, Veal Street became the Hopetoun–Ravensthorpe Road. Hopetoun was the original one-horse town and, at first glance, a beautiful and peaceful place to die.

  Cato had asked Tess and Greg to find out tide and weather conditions for the last few days to see if that would tell them where the body might have entered the water. He also suggested following up any missing person reports from the last few weeks or so. Tess had given him a ‘No shit, Sherlock?’ look. Obviously, in both instances, she was already on the case. Cato should have expected the hostility from her but it still bothered him.

  It was at least twelve or thirteen years ago but it was clearly a sore that had never properly healed. And why should it? Cato was fairly fresh out of the academy and four years her junior. They had been partnered up, working nights out of Midland, Perth’s bandit country, in the souped-up unmarked Commodore. Cato Kwong — Prince of the Mean Streets. High-speed chases through the suburbs, domestics, prowlers, break-ins. Routine stuff but still usually more a thrill than not in those days. And the adrenaline had fed the spark between them. It all seemed natural and inevitable and it was good, great at times. All over each other like a rash. Until he walked out on her.

  It was nearly dark as they drove into Ravensthorpe. Just a few pale strips of sky lay in the west, sandwiched between the silhouette of distant hills and a blanket of ink-black clouds. Ravy, as it was known locally, was bigger than Hopey, only just. The main street was dark and deserted except around the two-storey red brick Ravensthorpe Hotel where an array of utes and four-wheel drives were angle-parked in anticipation of the Wednesday night pool competition. Some of the utes bore mine company logos. Cato had seen the lights of the mine off in the eastern distance as they passed the airport turn-off halfway between the two towns. You couldn’t miss it, a patch of brilliant daylight in the surrounding dim dusk. They’d had to pull into the side of the road while an ambulance, with lights flashing, sped past.

  Cato pulled into the hospital car park and killed the radio. According to the eight o’clock news the Australian stock market just had its worst day in twenty years. Jim Buckley snorted and muttered something to the effect of ‘Boo-fucking-hoo’. It was deadly quiet, not many lights on. Like many country hospitals, Ravensthorpe was little more than a glorified nursing post, kept open by the skin of its teeth, the marginality of the electorate or, as in this case, the persuasive power of the mining company. The ambulance, having deposited its patient, was swinging back out onto the road; the driver and Cato exchanged a relaxed hand-flick wave.

  Cato and Buckley approached the front entrance expecting the automatic doors to slide open. They didn’t. Except for emergencies, the hospital operating hours had recently been cut back to an eight to eight shift. ‘Staff Shortages’ said the handwritten notice blu-tacked to the door. It was 8.05. Cato rang the bell and they waited. And waited. Cato cupped his hands to the door and peered through the glare for any signs of life or movement inside. Nothing. He swore loudly and pressed the bell a tenth time. Finally an elderly woman in a pink dressing gown floated into view with a cup of something steaming. She almost dropped her mug as she saw Cato’s face up against the glass. He pressed his ID against the door mouthing ‘POLICE’. It didn’t help; in fact she seemed even more determined to hurry back to her bed and hide under the covers.

  Jim Buckley stepped forward with a kindly smile, a cheery wave, and a non-Asian face. That seemed to do the trick. The old woman poked a button on the inside and the doors slid open. With a bedside manner that was a complete revelation to Cato, Buckley got directions to the operating theatre at the rear of the hospital as well as learning all he needed to know about her hernia and cataracts.

  ‘Thanks Deirdre, and you take care of yourself now, love.’

  ‘Are you coming back tomorrow, Roger?’

  ‘Yes love, ‘course I am.’

  Buckley gave her a last little wave and led Cato down the corridor. Cato wondered who was meant to be looking after Deirdre overnight when he spotted a grumpy-looking woman with angry red hair knotted up in a bun. She was coming out of the ladies. She didn’t give either of the men a second glance, as if strangers wandering the hospital corridors at this hour was an everyday occurrence. Instead she thumped through a set of double doors behind which Cato could hear muffled cries and commotion. Dear Diary, remind me to avoid needing an overnigh
t stay in Ravensthorpe General and to never whinge about city hospitals ever again.

  The lights were at least on in the operating theatre, a good sign. They pushed open the doors and walked through. A short wiry man paused, scalpel in hand. Behind him an assistant sat on a stool at a steel bench in the corner taking notes with one hand and eating a sandwich with the other. She didn’t pause or look up from behind her curtain of black hair. In the other corner stood Tess. She looked at her watch meaningfully and smiled mock-sweetly.

  ‘So you found the place okay.’

  Cato’s patience was stretched paper-thin. ‘Had a bit of trouble getting in.’

  The man with the scalpel was obviously keen to get on with it. ‘Evening gentlemen, you must be the detectives. I’m the pathologist. Harold Lewis, Harry to you. Forgive me for not shaking hands. Shall we proceed?’

  All this addressed in a fey voice to Jim Buckley who nodded. His attention was elsewhere.

  ‘That’s Sally,’ said Harry waving his scalpel in the general direction.

  It was a kind of low-rent Silent Witness, silent except for Sally munching on the sandwich and the scratching of her biro on a notepad. The body lay on a shiny steel table. Cato edged closer. His eyes travelled over the skin, the wounds, the stumps and the handless arm. Flipper. It didn’t look human any more. But it — correction, he — once was. This shapeless lump of meat had a family somewhere. Cato would try to hold on to that thought. The smell was like an extra presence in the room. Sally seemed oblivious to it, wiping a wholemeal crumb daintily from the corner of her lips.

  Dr Lewis got to work. The subject was a medium-sized male probably in the twenty to forty age-range. No obvious indications of any disease or illness. No scars, tattoos, or distinguishing birthmarks, and no obvious indications of racial origin. ‘Going by the general slippage and flesh deterioration I’d estimate he’s been in the water for up to a week. Sorry I can’t be more precise.’