I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  “I didn’t get to bed until after four this morning,” I said.

  “No need to inflict your underworld circadian rhythms on me, boyo. All right, it could have been any of them, but let’s assume simplicity. Animal told her. Suppose they’re thick as, you should forgive the expression, thieves.”

  “I don’t think Share is a dyke, if that’s what you mean.” I bit my lower lip. There had been that fond embrace. No, Animal would never go for it, not someone that old, older than me for heaven’s sake. It was a mother Annabelle craved, and Juliet hadn’t been it. Sharon Lesser might make a suitable raffish surrogate. “Animal thinks of her as a step-Mum,” I said hopefully.

  “Of course, which has no bearing on whether Share is a dyke as well, or fucks camels for that matter.”

  I said in a suppressed tone, “Her husband fucked his daughters, according to one of them.”

  “Shit. Christ, sometimes I just want to throw up and leave the human race behind me.” Her face screwed up, and she shook her head. “The now fortunately dead husband, I take it?”

  “Grime Grrl and Animal arranged a vigilante hit from the sisterhood,” I said. “Vagilantes.”

  “Well, good for them! I hope they haven’t been fools enough to be stuck with the murder weapon. Oh. That’s what you started to say. You....”

  “Got stuck with it. Yes. Oy vey.” I lay back on the bed, my throbbing head on her blanketed feet. “It was in my storage unit. Wrapped up to look like dismantled fishing rods.”

  She moved her feet away, perhaps with some irritation. “So the police don’t yet know about this.”

  I thought of Rebeiro and Kirkpatrick, and our adventures in Balwyn and the all-night truck stop grill. No, I’d be undergoing a different sort of grilling if they knew about the shotgun. I shook my head.

  “Well, that’s something. So Sharon Lesser learns that you once doped a horse and decides that you could give her dud camel a shot in the arm.”

  “I don’t think it’s fair to the memory of Nile Fever to call her a dud,” I said indignantly. “She was a perfectly nice camel. Certainly she didn’t deserve to be shot to death by a policeman, or run into by a bus, or whatever it was. Opinions appear to be in conflict. And she certainly didn’t ask to have her tongue cut out.”

  “You actually did mean that. Her tongue cut out!”

  “I have it on ice,” I said. “Dry ice. In an Esky.”

  Juliet looked at me, appalled. “In my kitchen.”

  I shrugged.

  “Oh dear God give me strength,” Jules said. Her Sicilian up­bringing, I imagine, and her convent schooling. She lay back against her decorated pillow and closed her eyes. “An accessory before and after the mutilation of a Camelus dromedarius. Not to mention of a vengeance slaying. And you mentioned a kidnapping, I believe?”

  “I had nothing to do with killing the scumbag,” I said with dig­nity, propped on one elbow. “I’d happily have been involved, mind you, but the grrls failed to take me into their confidence. Their opinion of me can be summed up in one phrase.”

  “Well cut your balls off.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I think it was directed at the dead guy and those like him,” Juliet said reassuringly. “I don’t find your child especially pleasing as a human being, but I think your balls are safe.”

  The context of our merry quips caught up with both of us then, and we winced together.

  “Jesus, what a rotten world,” I said.

  “Look, I’m getting up, this is unseemly, having my husband sprawled on my bed in the fastness of the night. Go downstairs and make some more coffee. You’ll find some beans in the back of the fridge, and the electric grinder’s in the top right cabinet. Yel­low door. Ignore the Esky, I’m told it’s unsavory.”

  “Not decaf?”

  “We need something a damned sight stronger than decaf, Sher­lock,” she told me, and shooed me out the bedroom door.

  §

  I got the percolator perking and sat at the computer screen wait­ing for Juliet to get dressed again and heard music playing horribly from the driveway, through the side window. Was it the theme music from Gone With the Wind? One night when I’d had a bad cold I sat up and watched the damned dreary thing for about five hours on a television screen the size of a bread basket. “Tara’s Theme”, was that it? I went outside and took Mauricio’s mobile out of the glove box.

  “Why is that in your hand and not mine, you bloody ratbag? You were supposed to meet me.”

  “Sorry, got distracted,” I said. “I’m at Juliet’s.”

  I heard an uncouth whooping. “Oh, God be praised, Mama will be able to give up on the perpetual novenas. Got your leg over finally, have you?”

  “This is your sister you’re talking about, you pervert.”

  “I take it the answer’s no.” Mauricio sounded gloomy, and I shared the sentiment. “Listen, I’ve found a place for you to stay. It’ll bring back happy memories of the good old days. Beautiful little unit not far from here in—”

  “Culpepper,” I said. Maybe I growled it. “Sheikh Abdul bin Sahal al Din.”

  A moment’s silence.

  “Don’t fucking bother lying to me, Mauricio.” Through the window and its pale drapes, I could see Juliet coming down the stairs. She was dressed for a night of action, jeans, boots, leather jacket, and her black hair was pulled back and cinched. I tapped on the window. She peered, sent me a sharp salute followed by coffee-drinking motions.

  “Culpepper, Culpepper.” Mauricio tried to place the name. “Aw yeah, the prat me and the boys dragged out of the crypt, right? I saw him drive away in your hearse last night. What a get-away!”

  “You knew him the first time I mentioned his name,” I said an­grily. “Culpepper’s Crypt, that famous gathering place.”

  “I think it was on Burke’s Back Yard.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. Culpepper’s working with the Sheikh.”

  “Yeah, well, mate, these things are complicated.” You could almost hear Mauricio shrug. I saw his sister fetch two steaming mugs of coffee and set them on mats on the table. I started back inside the house. “So anyway, where’s the Esky?”

  “You pissant little shitkicker,” I said. “You set me up with the shotgun. You gave Maeve that poor animal’s tongue.” I heard what I was saying as I went through the front door, and stopped dead on the doorstep. “Son of a bitch, you were the one who cut Nile’s tongue off!”

  “Not me, mate. Sent Wozza back to take care of that task the moment I heard the animal was down. Bloody near missed his chance, the silly prick. Had to carve off a slice and bung it in with a cold slab of Fosters. Just got out with it before the cops rolled up with half the RSPCA and a troupe of TV cameramen.”

  “My brother?” mouthed Juliet. I nodded, beside myself with anger.

  “Wozza called you from his van, I suppose.”

  “‘Course. Was meant to pick up a skin sample for the sheikh but then silly bloody Muttonhead had to fall under a collapsing camel and get more bits busted. Couldn’t very well let his old mate bleed to death or something, could he?”

  “That lying cow!”

  “Who? No, set your mind at ease, mate, your widowed lady friend had nothing to do with it. Innocent as the day is long. All Wozza’s plan. Him and the Mutt, they’re her associates in crime you know. No honor among scam merchants, matey, as you and I both know.”

  “Wozza? Wozza came up with this master plan?”

  “He’s got a degree in Information Technology from an accredited institution. So anyway, where’s the Esky got to, mate? It’s not in the U Store It anymore, and Maeve swears black and blue she never went back for it.”

  I flung the damned phone into the stone fireplace, where it bounced from one of Juliet’s artistic cast iron log-holding construc­tions and lay unhurt, flashing purple light. I followed it across the room and put it on the stone flags and raised my heel and smashed it into several useless pieces of plastic shell and soli
d state innards. I was breathing heavily, like a man who has run a mile uphill with a heavy backpack.

  “That was careless,” Jules told me. She held out one of the cof­fees. “You seem to have trodden on it by accident. I don’t think we’ll ever hear it sing Money, Money, Money again.”

  I drank the coffee and burned my mouth. Now Mauricio knew where I was.

  “Shit,” I said. I raised my voice. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  PART 6

  Since she had no prospect of getting to sleep at this stage, and was dressed for night work, Juliet slid into the passenger seat of the Cobra. The day’s warmth was gone, and I shivered at the breeze coming up from the water. With the house lights off, it seemed curiously dark outside. I looked up at clouds coming in from the south. One by one, without any fuss, the stars were going out as the clouds covered the sky. Typical mercurial Melbourne weather. It was going to be a dark and stormy night. Juliet ducked her head as I raised the roof on the Cobra. At least that still worked and was still graffiti-free.

  I gunned it out of her drive, distressing the hard-working or hard-retired citizens of Willie, and ripped back up the Strand and onto the Freeway system. It can take half an hour or more to reach Brunswick from that corner of the Bay. I filled Jules in on the rest of the current madness, running red lights and worrying about the speed cameras later. We nearly collected one of the great lumbering trams returning toward Moreland depot for the night, but I spun off the slithery tram tracks and my Cobra made the noise a hun­dred hounds might have bayed before they banning fox hunting in England.

  “Tallyho!” shouted Jules, thinking alike.

  I was terrified for my kid’s safety, but the merry shout made me grin. I glanced at the dash clock. Twenty minutes, good going. “Try Vinnie again?”

  “He’s dead drunk somewhere,” she said, but took out her own neat cell phone and clicked a couple of keys. God damn, I thought, she’s still got the number in her on-board directory. A warm glow burned for a moment in my chest, up near the sternum, and I don’t think it was indigestion. “Nope, sorry, still not answering. I don’t have a number for his lady friend.”

  “Bloody Maeve,” I said, and found that my teeth were gritted. “Bloody duplicitous Cleopatra.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s the reborn soul of many of the great and near-great.” “Well, indeed,” Juliet said, “and so are we all.”

  It caused my shoulders to twitch. That was the sort of gibberish Martin Kundalini Richardson and the old farts had taught us out in Eltham when I was an innocent, gullible young cigarette thief.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she added. “Mother Church has declared the doctrine of reincarnation anathema.”

  “The light’s on,” I said, wheeling into the free space as far away as possible from the jumbo Dumpster bin. It stank worse. Maybe they empty them on Mondays. Juliet followed me up the outside steps. You could just see a patch or two of light through the black curtains, probably from where I’d disturbed them.

  “You don’t have a gun,” she whispered in my ear as I bent to peer at the doorknob and lock, “I suppose?”

  “Hate the damned things. You’re right, though, maybe I should go back down and grab a brick or a decomposing cheeseburger to menace them with.”

  “Better still—” Jules pressed something smooth and cool and phallic into my hand.

  “Deodorant? That might unnerve Animal, but I don’t think it’d—”

  “Capsicum spray.”

  It was illegal for her to be carrying that, but then who was I to talk? I shook the container, found the press button, pointed it in the darkness away from us, I hoped. And went back to prodding at the door. I couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside, and no baleful music playing.

  The door was already unlocked, an ominous sign. The kitchen light being on was an ominous sign in itself, the grrls being the grrls they were. I cracked the door, pressed one eye to the gap.

  Sappho made a pweet and tried to get one leg through the gap.

  I nudged her back with my own, reached with a long arm and flipped the switch off.

  Nobody cried out angrily in the new darkness. Nobody blun­dered blindly into the edge of a table. The cat made hungry sounds. I went in and Juliet followed, shining the narrow beam of a penlight ahead of us.

  “Good god, woman, have you taken up cat burglary in your spare time?”

  “‘Be prepared’ is my motto, Thomas. Why are we whisper­ing?”

  The beam went back and forth across the Gothic space, revealed nothing human. The room smelled of strange oils and incense. I turned on the kitchen light, dropped the sprayer in my pocket and grabbed a long knife from the sink drainer. Capsicum spray in a deodorant roller isn’t as daunting as a brandished knife.

  Sappho’s water bowl had been overturned by someone’s blun­dering foot, and her food bowl was empty.

  “Would you mind feeding Sappho, sweetie? The cat opener is usually in the drawer.”

  “Let’s check the other rooms first, shall we?” My delicate wife had picked up a heavy length of chain that some fetishists had left draped across an armchair. Or maybe Grime or Animal were working on repairing a Harley. She wrapped one end around her right hand after covering it with a black scarf and swung the chain speculatively.

  “Try not to smack yourself in the chin,” I said.

  “Still the consummate sexist pig,” she said, and walked into Animal’s room. I shrugged, held the knife firmly at waist height, ready for an underarm blow, and entered Cookie’s bedroom.

  The doors of the robe of robes were wide open. Someone had been looking for the Esky with its portion of chilled camel. Or maybe just collecting some clothing for the recumbent Cookie.

  “Fuck.”

  I sat down on the end of the unmade bed. I’d left it that way. I heard no girlish screams from the other room, and no thud of a body falling to the floor, so I started cleaning my nails with the tip of the carving knife and thinking the whole mess through again from the start.

  Maeve might have come up to reclaim it. But she didn’t know I’d found it in the U Store It. Somebody could have told her, though. Except that she was probably passed out drunk alongside my former father-in-law.

  Culpepper or his thugs might have dropped by looking for a second try at Cookie.

  My thoughts circled and circled through the same possibilities. Perhaps one or both of the grrls caught a cab back from Share’s, from Cookie’s bedside, to retrieve her favorite bathrobe or stuffed animal, or collect her laptop. They’d have been royally pissed to find the computer gone.

  “Taking our ease, are we?”

  “Nothing in the other rooms, I take it?”

  “Correct, and the pussycat thanks you for your thoughts. That was the last can of Cat-O-Meat, by the way.”

  “The grrls will be back in time to prepare her next feast, I hope. Unless they’ve already been here and Culpepper nabbed them, the silly buggers.”

  “Good thing you relocated your gruesome trophy, although I’d rather you hadn’t left it at my place. The thing seems to be a mag­net for mayhem. On the other hand, given Sappho’s enthusiasm for that foul-smelling muck, I think we can safely assume that if you’d left it here....” Juliet paused and struck an attitude. “...the cat would have got your tongue.”

  I stared at her. I narrowed my eyes. I waved the knife in the air. “Just trying to lighten the mood, Sherlock.”

  “Oh dear oh dear,” I said, deflated. “Come and sit beside me, my darling wife. Let us, as someone suggested to me the other day, reason together.”

  “That was Lyndon Baines Johnson, I think. But he’s dead.”

  “So is Nile Fever,” I said gloomily. “I just hope none of the grrls is likewise.”

  A clattering came up the inside steps from the shop, and a door was banged open loudly.

  “Who the fuck’s in there?” a voice shouted angrily from the kitchen. “Come out with your hands up, I’ve got a gun a
nd I’m not afraid to use it.”

  I went to the bedroom door and looked out. “Animal,” I told my daughter, “put that damned thing down. It’s evidence in a mur­der case. Why do you think I left it in Melton? Now you’ve got your fingerprints all over it. Is that the way I raised you?”

  “Dad?”

  “And such a hopeless cliché,” Juliet said, sauntering out with her chain.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  “Don’t sound so glum, Annabelle. I like your hair. What there is of it.”

  “What’s she doing here, Dad? Don’t tell me you’ve been fuckin fucking in poor Cookie’s bed!”

  “No such luck,” I muttered under my breath. Juliet shot me a frowning glance.

  “I fed your cat,” she told my glowering daughter, putting the chain and scarf back where she found them and sitting carefully on a sagging velvet cushion covered in Sappho’s hair. “You need some more cans.”

  Animal twitched a form of thanks and beetled her metallic brows at me some more. At least she wasn’t pointing the shotgun at us. I took it carefully from her and broke it open. No rounds in the breech end of the barrels, luckily. I held it up to the light. Oh.

  “This gun wasn’t fired,” I said. “You haven’t cleaned it since the murder, I suppose?”

  “What? Are you supposed to wash them or something? You think I’ve got nothing else to do with my time? Anyway, it wasn’t murder, it was revenge. You know, an execution?”

  “Please sit down, Annabelle,” Juliet said. She looked relaxed. “You make a person nervous even without waving that shotgun around.”

  Animal opened her mouth. Light bounced off the embedded, spit-moistened metalwork. With a shrug, she sat down on a rickety bentwood chair at the table. Sappho magically appeared to jump up on her lap. She stroked the scruffy thing absently. “What?”

  “You thought you were responsible for the death of Rodolph Lesser,” Juliet said. “Morally.”

  “I woulda tortured the scumbag first.”

  “But you weren’t there yourself, on the spot, right?”