I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  “There they are,” Rebeiro said. “Just getting out. I think we’ll wait and catch them red-handed.”

  “Frozen-handed is what they have in mind,” I told him, but he didn’t know about the camel tongue on ice and I didn’t feel this was the moment to explain my small perfidies. I opened the door and rain hit me in the face.

  “We’ll stay here, I said,” the cop told me in a hard hissing com­mand. I ignored him and started to walk toward Juliet’s home. Mine, too, once.

  I skeddadled across the road, then, getting drenched, as enor­mous lights boomed toward me around the angle of Nelson St. The Mack truck was doing sixty through the downpour. Mauricio knew exactly where he was headed, he’d been there plenty of times before, it was his sister’s home after all.

  In the rushing dazzle, Culpepper and his thug stared, and I saw them leap in panic from the verandah into shrubbery. The Mack twisted like Sappho ridding herself of a flea and slammed into the limo with a scream of metal upon metal. A light pole in the street shook and went out. The hood of the limo jerked forward into sol­id brick, shattering Juliet’s favorite sandstone facings. The Mack truck mounted it from behind like some sex-mad steel dinosaur stupidly screwing an early mammal, or trying to. The long back of the limo, to the extent that I could see it as I ran along the street peering about in terror for Juliet, shrieked and collapsed into junk. I was kind of glad Annabelle and I were no longer sitting there.

  Hatless in the rain, the chauffeur was belting away up the street when the other cop car spun around the corner and hit him with full bring-down lights and high head beams. He stumbled, slid in the water, went down on one knee. Cops piled out shouting, doors flung wide, approximations of human voices blaring from their speakers. Evidently the patrol cops were not favored with Rebeiro’s snazzy technology. The thug got to his feet and put his hands on top of his wet hair.

  Culpepper was still trying to disentangle his bespoke suit from the bushes. He stepped aside from his mangled car as Mauricio swarmed down out of the Mack truck cabin howling for his blood, then moved in a sprightly way toward the protection of law and order.

  “Officer! I demand that you do something about this atro­cious—”

  The detective ignored him. He moved to block Mauricio.

  “Mr. Cimino, isn’t it? I want to have a word with you.”

  “I dunno who you are, mate, but get out of me way. I want a piece of that little shit.”

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble recognizing me,” Rebeiro said. He kept his hand by his sides. “You and your loutish brothers were found hanging around a murder scene. So was this arsehole.” It took me a moment to realize he’d pointed with a jerk of his head to Culpepper rather than me.

  “I won’t have you speaking in that manner,” Culpepper said, trying for his best manorial manner.

  “I’m placing you under arrest as soon as I’ve seen this pest off, and his damned truck with him. Get out of here, Cimino. Next time—” He left the threat hanging but it was obviously not idle.

  “Aargh,” said Mauricio. He looked at me. “G’day, mate. Listen, I need to talk to you about a—”

  “Off,” said Rebeiro. “Now. And try not to break any more mo­tor vehicles before dawn.”

  Grumbling and mutinous, Mauricio climbed back up into his truck and slowly, noisily, withdrew from the ruined limousine. Rebeiro was going through the motions with Culpepper. I heard blustering and threats, the name of Frank Stonecraft, Q.C., was deployed, Culpepper’s close friendship with the chief of police. I tuned it out and went back across the street.

  §

  Juliet was huddled under a tee-tree, dripping in the dark night. I couldn’t see the Holden.

  “He made a mess of the pointings,” I said.

  “He hasn’t got the McGuffin, that’s the main thing,” she said with a radiant smile that gleamed in the multihued lights from the cop vehicle where the chauffeur was helping police with their enquiries.

  “By god, that’s what I need right now,” I told her. “An Egg Mc­Muffin. Where’s the closest Big Mac joint?”

  Juliet shuddered. “They wouldn’t be open yet, thank heavens. Once this lot are gone we can take the Esky inside and have a good old chinwag. There are things you haven’t been telling me, husband dear.”

  “I keep getting interrupted,” I said. “What about a toasted cheese sandwich and a glass of champers? You have some Moet et Chandon, I hope?”

  “On ice,” she said. “Like Nile Fever’s tongue.” Both the police cars were turning back toward town with a thrum and hiss of tires. I saw Culpepper sitting stiffly in the back of Rebeiro’s Fair­lane. The cop gave me a hard nod, and was gone in a slither of wet tail lights.

  “Not quite that cold,” I trust.

  §

  A car came around the angle of the road as we crossed to the house. Its headlights gleamed off the shiny fallen muffler of the crushed limo. We hurried to get across but the Porsche pulled in on the wrong side of the street. Something tugged downward in­side my hungry gut.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Relentless.”

  “Come on now, matey,” said Wozza O’Toole, baccalaureate in Information Technology and Sharon Lesser’s right hand person. “You have something of ours. That’s not very nice, is it.”

  Muttonhead Lamb got out the other side, pushing his noseless face at us. He really wasn’t a pretty sight at three or four of a Monday morning. Neither of them looked at if they’d had any more sleep than Juliet and I. She gave me a look of submission and utter despair, walked with her hands extended to the Mutt’s side, lifted her right booted foot and drove it into his crotch with a measure of force that took all of us by surprise. Muttonhead went down puking into the gutter, and she slapped him in the head with the edge of the Porsche door.

  “Well, come on, man, do your stuff,” she hollered at me. I was already in action. I jumped at Wozza, took his gun hand by the wrist and broke it across my knee. Christ! That hurt. So did my damaged hip. But it’s true that you don’t feel pain as acutely when you’re in danger. I reached into the Porsche, tugged the keys from the dash, flung them into the gutter. They glistened for a moment in the rush of rain water, fell away into the drain inlet at the corner of the street. I whacked Wozz one across the back of the neck as he leaned over to nestle his wrist, and let him fall on the concrete.

  “The Holden’s this way,” Jules said. She was already running across the street.

  PART 8

  The Holden one-tonner was getting on a bit, but serviceable, with twin bucket seats that were worn and smelled of metal dust. I found the Esky under a folded blanket in the storage space behind the seats. It hadn’t been tampered with.

  “Get me the keyboard, will you?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I can’t type on a mobile in the car. I need the QWERTY board.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Jules, I’m not going to sit here while you simul­taneously drive and msm your internet pals.”

  “Of course you’re not.” She spun into a side street, pulled into the kerb, jumped out. “Scoot over, big man. You’re driving. Here, let me.” She was delving behind me for the keyboard as I unplugged the seatbelt and heaved my bulk into the driver’s seat. Normally I’m the spirit of sleek agility but my hip really was kill­ing me. She ran lightly around behind the load tray, strapped in, found her Palm Pilot in the glove box and plugged the keyboard in, balancing it on her lap. It lit up like the lights on a cop car as she put on her reading specs.

  “Good Christ, you can talk to the internet with that thing? No wires?”

  “You’re a real master of twenty-first-century technology, aren’t you, Tom? Yes, Virginia, there is a telecommunications revolution.”

  “Yeah? How come I can’t read my favorite Robert Parker novel on some downloadable sheet of paper that I can roll up and stick in my back pocket, and it’ll run for days without a recharge, and—”

  “Any day now,” my wife promised me. “Now don’t distract me
for a moment, dear. Do you have any idea where we should go, by the way?”

  “If Share is in jail, and the girls are in Balwyn,” I said, “s’pose that’s the obvious destination.”

  “Okay.”

  §

  Rain was easing a little, but the wipers still strobed droplets into the night. It was too early for the first dawn light. Not many other cars were on the road yet, but huge container trucks hurtled along the highway, exciting explosions of white light and crimson ringed with rain haloes. They were being driven by junkies insane with chronic speed. It cripples your brain, amphetamine does, something I learned by observation in the joint. It eats holes inside the parts of your head that are supposed to give you pleasure, something I learned on the Discovery Channel. What a pisser, eh. You throw the white pills down your throat year after year in the line of duty and profit until you’re a crazed zombie, moving cargo for the men in neat shirts in bright large offices overlooking a kingdom of glass and steel. You drive hard for sixteen or twenty hours a day, you tear up and down vast endless lines of white in the bright sun and the dark of night, and all you get for it in the end is a pile of money you can’t gain any value from because the soul’s been eaten out of the middle of your head.

  I shuddered. Drugs was something I’d never done, not much. Thank fuck for that, at least. I really needed to have a little talk to Animal before too long. Before it was entirely too late. If I could find some way to broach the topic without being a hideous old fart.

  “Camel, camels,” Juliet crooned. I glanced across at her intent face, lit by the pixels of the small handheld screen. There was a smile on her lovely unattainable face. “They wasted that poor camel, you know.”

  “Well, it was an accident, I heard. A bus load of nuns—”

  “No, no, I mean the cops or the animal protection authorities or whoever it was. They just hauled the carcass off into quarantine and then buried it. Let it rot.”

  “Well, really, love, what do you suppose they should have done? Raffled it off in the local pub?”

  “They could have cooked it.”

  I jerked back. “What, cut off its steaks and chops?”

  “No, silly. Baked the animal. I have a recipe here.”

  “For a whole camel?”

  “Yep. It’s an old Saudi delicacy.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “True dinks. Listen. It’s in the International Cuisine Cookbook. Published by no less an authority than California’s Home Eco­nomics Teachers.”

  “If you can’t trust them, you can’t trust anyone. This is some lunatic Intelligent Design outfit, right?”

  “Certainly not.” She was tapping and scrolling and chortling to herself. “Pay attention, Purdue. Keep this in mind for next time. You’ll need to get in a bit more than your basic camel.”

  “Well, there’s the stuffing,” I surmised. We were bypassing the central city now, and light rose into the sky from hundreds of empty buildings. The sheer waste of electricity was staggering.

  “Correct, M. Giradet. One lamb, large, cleaned, to shove inside the gutted camel. Twenty chickens, medium sized, featherless, to deposit within the lambkins. Sixty eggs, possibly from the same chickens.”

  “Great Scott. The mind reels. This is a feast fit for a...a....”

  “A caliph,” my bookish wife said. “The Saudis swear by it.”

  “It sounds rather weighted toward the protein end of the menu. Didn’t Dr. Atkins die, though?”

  “It’s not really.” Her thumb stroked the cursor. “There’s the twelve kilos of rice and a couple of kilos each of almonds and pis­tachios. A well-full of pure water. Five pounds of black pepper.” She burst out laughing suddenly.

  “What.”

  “Salt,” she said, eyes dancing at me in the mirror, “to taste.”

  I sniggered, although my attention was mostly on the road as we headed back into the suburbs. “You’d be eating leftovers for months.”

  “Well, it serves eighty to a hundred guests.”

  “I don’t think I know that many people, Jules. Not well enough to invite them round for a lash-up baked camel.”

  “Poor boy.” She patted my hand on the steering wheel. “See, if you’d stop hitting people and breaking their arms, you might have more friends.”

  I was gloomy, thinking about it. “I don’t hit that many people. And they usually deserve it.”

  She fell silent, but I felt that she didn’t really disagree. But then Juliet has a deep distaste for violence. Mauricio was stabbed next to the heart when she was twenty years old, before we met. She found him late at night after a drunken country dance on the raw soil outside their phoneless holiday shack, stretched out in a widening puddle of blood. Being the person she is, Jules failed to scream and faint and fall to the floor like the idiot women in movies, even though she’s pretty enough to play one of those roles. Instead she plugged his wound with her scarf and ran half a mile to the nearest homestead, beat on the door until the old farmer opened up, tore through the house to the phone and called an air ambulance. They got her brother into emergency about ten minutes before his heart stopped. I’d heard the story more than once. It was a Cimino family favorite. Juliet had watched through a small observation window as they tried hopelessly to bring Mauricio back to life. Weeping, contained, she made a pact with God: let him live, and I will take a vow of celibacy. Her faith was powerful but not totally beyond reason. A moment later, she appended a codicil to her prayer: let him live, dear sweet Virgin Mary, and I will forego the joys of sex and parenthood for ten full years.

  Through the glass, then, she’d heard a gurgling gasp from the table, a grunt from the doctor. Mauricio was back. God and his Mother had done their bit. Grimacing, she set about doing hers.

  I met her a year later, when Mauricio was well and truly on his feet and up to his old tricks. Her beauty and intelligence dazzled me, sent my reason tottering. She revealed her quaint vow and I didn’t care, not at the time, not for a time. There must have been something about me, and maybe my adorable little motherless girl, that appealed to Juliet as well. We married within the year, and slept celibate in separate beds until I couldn’t stand it for one day more and moved away.

  §

  Something nibbled at my brain, and elsewhere.

  I looked down furtively. I had an erection. I hunched deeper in the bucket seat and frowned at the road. Juliet, oblivious, ham­mered at the keyboard on her lap and peered through her glasses at the small Palm screen.

  Something buzzed in my pocket.

  “Yes, detective-sergeant?”

  “You stole my phone, you light-fingered prick!”

  I put on an aggrieved Cockney accent, while one sorrowful part of my mind tried not to imagine Juliet lightly fingering my prick. “It weren’t me, guv. Guv’nor, I never done it!”

  “Shut up, you retard. Division has reported a GBH at your last known location.”

  “No! Grievous bodily harm, that’s terrible. Not at all the sort of thing you expect in a nice up and coming suburb like William­stown. Oh, and I take it, therefore, that you’re not totally bereft of phone links back to headquarters.” I heard a strangled noise, like a walrus surfacing. “You should count yourself lucky, Rebeiro. No man should covet more than one telephone, it says so plainly there in the Ten Commandments and I speak as an authorized feng shui authority.”

  “A fractured wrist, Purdue. And a man with no nose—”

  “I tell ya, I din’t do that!”

  “I know you didn’t, you incorrigible arsehole. Muttonhead Lamb had his nose bitten off by a horse named Long and Cool at Flemington three years ago.”

  “‘Incorrigible’? Have they sent you on a course recently?”

  “A man without a nose who might end up without his balls. That was one brutal assault, Purdue.”

  “He rudely attacked a wife of mine. She defended her honor, and I applaud her initiative.”

  “You’re not taking the fall for her? What
happened to chivalry and good manners?”

  Beside me, Juliet gasped.

  “What?”

  “Get off the phone, Tom. Cookie’s sent me something extraor­dinary.”

  “The badinage is charming, Detective Rebeiro, but duty calls. Don’t hesitate to contact us at a later date.”

  “My fucking phone—”

  I clacked it shut, dropped it back in my pocket. “I intended to call Cookie earlier,” I said, “but I forgot the number.”

  “You really have a deplorable memory, Tom. You should con­sider a course in Pelmanism.”

  “In what?”

  “Damned if I know, it was one of the books I shepherded through Pen Inc but I wasn’t going to waste my time reading it, was I?”

  “Quite right. You mentioned Cookie. At this rate we’ll be at the Lesser residence before I find out.”

  “She’s weaseled out the source of the satellite images.”

  “I thought they scanned the whole planet.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Sherlock. Those things are moving fast, they go around the whole planet in an hour and a half. Besides, they only capture a narrow swathe. No, some human operator was directing the lens. Cookie thinks she knows who.”

  “Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe Google or something found those frames because she lucked out with the right search terms.”

  I was gratified by Juliet’s glance of guarded approval.

  “Not bad for a defrocked gumshoe. Nope. She managed to use much more powerful search engines to pull up the whole set. She and her pals in a great and powerful friendly nation.”

  “Shit, speak English, Mrs. Sherlock, wouldcha?”

  “The opening frames show a paddock somewhere in the Dan­denongs, judging from the positioning coordinate data. Stables, gravel drive apparently.”

  “Shangri-La,” I said.

  “Well, hardly that, but—”

  “No, that’s what it’s called. What Share called it, anyway.” “Used for ajistment of horses, Cookie tells me.”

  “A home away from home for tired nags. Hence the stables.” “Just so. It’s owned by House of Saud Investments, Ltd.”