Darkening Skies

by Parry, Bronwyn

  Yes, Jenn understood that. ‘What I don’t understand is why you’re involved in this. What you hope to achieve.’

  ‘Cleaning up my ex’s mess and protecting my interests, of course. He’s sloppy and impatient, and he’s always thought with his dick more often than not. Him and his stupid friends.’

  Information. Information meant power, and chained up to the bed she needed all the power she could get. ‘You mean Gerard McCarty?’

  Vanna raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘You have been busy, haven’t you? But Gerard at least has his uses – a sharp brain with finances, despite his predilections for violence. Quite a weakness, really, now that he’s not as controlled as he was. So, just a word between us girls, sweetie – I’d keep cooperating if I were you. Stay useful to me. I could use your skills and give you a luxurious life, if you want it. Much better than traipsing through disease-ridden disaster zones.’

  ‘Work with you?’ She tried to hide her disgust.

  Vanna waved a casual hand. ‘A favour here and there. Nothing difficult.’

  Favours. Yes, so much corruption worked on the twin currencies of favours and fear. At least the disease-ridden disaster zones were honest work.

  ‘I’ll think about,’ she lied.

  Vanna laughed. ‘Oh, Jennifer, you are so like your father, you know. You’re not very good at lying. Which is unfortunate, because I don’t have much use for all that straitlaced honour.’

  Jenn gripped the pen in her hand tightly. ‘You knew my father?’

  ‘Oh darling, yes, I knew your father. He did some landscaping work for me when he was young and brawny and quite delicious, really. But he ran away and met your mother. A pity, because he was actually quite good in bed and I’d rather have had you for a daughter than the stupid lumps of offspring Dan made.’

  Bile burned Jenn’s throat, harsh and bitter, but she wouldn’t give Vanna the pleasure of seeing her throw up.

  ‘Did Dan kill him?’

  ‘Dan?’ She snorted indelicately. ‘Dan didn’t have any say in who I took as a lover. Doesn’t have any say in anything. Oh, I know he swans around like a big man, but you and I, Jennifer, we both know where the real power is. He was never anything more than a tool.’

  Vanna. Vanna Flanagan, nee Russo, sister of key figures in the Calabrian mafia in Sydney. But everyone had overlooked her because she was a woman who lived out in a rural area and ran unthreatening beauty salons. There are far more dangerous criminals than thugs like Dan.

  And Jenn was looking right at her.

  Think, think, think.

  ‘Did you kill them? My parents?’

  ‘Sorry, sweetie, but it had to be done. Your father developed too much conscience and became a threat.’

  Jenn closed her eyes, rage burning red in front of them. She’d have happily killed Vanna there on the spot, if she could have, but she needed to focus. She needed to stay alive.

  ‘What have you done with Mark?’ she asked. A risky question, but if she was going to have any chance of talking her way out of this, she needed to know.

  Vanna smiled, with all the enjoyment of a purring cat. ‘The sainted Mark? He’s busy writing his confession.’

  He was alive. Jenn kept her face still so that her relief wouldn’t show. ‘His confession?’

  ‘Yes. Rather apt to do it here, I suppose. It was an enclosed convent, a silent order, nice and isolated from the world, although I’m sure the priests came to visit and hear whatever tedious sins the sisters confessed. The last one died in the 1960s, though, and there’s been plenty of sinning and little confessing here since then.’

  A silent order, long gone. Would anyone remember the convent’s existence, more than forty years on?

  Yes. Hope surged. Yes, if this building housed the Bohème Club. Caroline Strelitz and the other women she’d identified in the photographs – Steve and Leah and Kris had their names – would know where it is. Steve would have known, as soon as he woke this morning, that she and Mark weren’t where they were supposed to be.

  She could write the damned article Vanna wanted, but not in a hurry. If she could stretch it out, that might give the police more time to find them. And if she knew where Mark was, they’d both stand a better chance.

  ‘If I’m going to write a convincing article for you, it will have to be consistent with Mark’s confession,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll make sure you see a copy,’ Vanna told her with a deadly cold smile. ‘I’ll return in an hour for the draft. Ensure you put your email address and password on it, so that I can deal with any queries for you.’

  The lock clicked into place as they left.

  An hour. She had an hour, a ballpoint pen and a notebook bound with a spiral of wire. A selection of basic weapons, and a burning, powerful anger.

  Vanna allowed Mark a laptop to write his confession – his own laptop, which he’d left yesterday afternoon in the cottage, before the bus accident. He checked for a wireless signal but, as expected, found nothing.

  In the room with the patterned carpet his mother had knelt on, he was instructed to confess to his lies, to his drunkenness causing the original accident and Paula’s death, to knowing that his parents had paid to keep it quiet. Vanna had given him a concise list of other vices to include. A drug habit. A working relationship with Dan, participating with him in bribery, corruption and extortion. Anger with Dan for ruining his life.

  ‘You’re saying that you want me to implicate your ex-husband?’ he clarified.

  Cold, calm and deadly, Vanna crossed one elegant leg over the other in the armchair, two metres from the steel chair he was chained to. ‘Of course. He and his associates have been far too careless. I’m putting a stop to that now. His death at your hands will finally tidy up this mess of his.’

  So that’s how she planned it – for the police to find his confession, and two dead bodies.

  ‘Where is Jenn?’ he asked.

  Vanna smiled. ‘She’s doing some work for me for a while. We’re due to leave in an hour, Mark. If you get that confession polished before then I might let you see her before we go. If you don’t, I might rethink my plans about taking her.’

  Her goon locked the door behind them as they left. Mark balanced the laptop on his knees with his cuffed hands. Jenn was still there, still alive. He began to type. He wrote as he’d been instructed, the confession of a man torn by guilt and addiction, no longer able to bear it. The anger he expressed for Dan Flanagan wasn’t a lie. His sorrow and regrets – yes, there was a core of truth in that. At the end, he typed his full name: Mark Joseph Alexander Strelitz. His parents and Jenn would know, maybe even Kris or Steve would pick the deliberate misspelling of his middle name: Joseph instead of his grandfather’s Josef. He hoped, if he didn’t make it, that it would be enough to raise their suspicions and prompt them to ask questions.

  He closed the laptop, rested his cuffed hands on it, and steadied his breathing. He had to be ready to take advantage of any opportunity they gave him. They had him at a disadvantage now, but Jenn was still there, somewhere, and he’d snatch any chance to fight to save her. Whatever it took, whatever it cost – he’d fight, kill, die if it gave her a chance to escape them.

  Vanna refused to let her see Mark. Not bothering with any further pretence of feeling, she merely took the pages Jenn had drafted and began reading them as she turned to leave the room, pausing at the door to throw an order back to her offsider. ‘Restrain her and take her to the van. He’ll be here soon and he wants her ready to go.’

  The guard grinned wolfishly and opened the door of the cupboard. Fear squeezed Jenn’s lungs when she glimpsed the contents – chains, leather bonds, hoods. She didn’t know where Mark was, even whether he was still alive. She had only minutes before she’d be helpless, stuffed in the back of a van and driven away.

  The guard didn’t notice the scratches on the handcuff as he bent to unlock it, or the coil of wire stuffed under the pillow that she’d used to try to unpick it.

  An
open door, and a pen they’d forgotten about. And Vanna still within hearing, only metres down the passage. Just as he clicked the cuff loose from the bed, she closed the fingers of her right hand around the pen, gripped it tightly, and plunged it into his neck, ramming her left hand over his mouth. He gasped but she covered it with a cry of her own, as if protesting, struggling. Then she rammed his head hard against the wall. If he was faking unconsciousness he was doing it well. She didn’t have to fake her sobs.

  She couldn’t find the handgun he’d had last night, but she took his key ring. She paused at the door, then checked the corridor. No sign of Vanna. Three closed doors like hers on either side of the passage. If Mark was behind one of them … no, Vanna’s heels had only come down this way to her room. There was a door at the end of the corridor behind her, but ahead of her Vanna’s heels had tapped around a bend in the corridor.

  She tried the door and it opened. Fresh air, light, and two cement steps to the overgrown grass of a yard with a crooked clothesline and a small cleared area surrounded by trees.

  The rumble of an engine was coming closer, and she heard tyres crunch on a gravel track. She peered around the corner of the building: one car at the front, and one dark van, plus the car arriving through the scrub. She hadn’t seen or heard anyone except Vanna and the single guard, but this car meant at least one extra.

  Three at least against her. But Mark with her, if she could find him. If he was still alive. He had to be alive.

  The car stopped and its doors opened. Dan Flanagan. Gerard McCarty. Walking into the house like two mates about to have a good time.

  From a different angle she would probably recognise the front door. The scrubby forest surrounding the house beyond the small clearing would provide good cover for a photographer.

  She crept around the back of the building, and stopped when she heard laughter coming from inside. As she came closer to the floor-to-ceiling window she heard Vanna’s voice, and the laughter died.

  ‘You’ve screwed up again, Dan. If you hadn’t brought Franklin back, this whole mess could have been smoothed over.’

  ‘He’s an idiot. Now he’s getting old and careless. And I didn’t tell him to—’ The voice broke off abruptly.

  ‘Didn’t tell him to do what, Dan?’

  Mark’s voice. Mark, alive and in that room. Speaking with complete authority. Even if he were bound and about to die he would still retain the self-control, the natural command. He would not cower before them.

  Dan tried to laugh it off. ‘He always went off half-cocked. That’s what started this thing years ago. He was supposed to give your parents a warning and instead he almost killed you.’

  ‘Franklin sabotaged my car? Loosened the wheel nuts?’

  ‘Oh yes, that was Franklin.’ Vanna sounded bored. ‘And then he panicked when he saw the accident because these dickheads had told him you were not to be touched. So, he thought it was a good idea to frame Gillespie. If he hadn’t come up with that idiotic scheme, you’d have walked away from any charge and I’d have dealt with Gillespie rather more quietly and effectively, instead of having to get Rhonda to pull some blood from an old alky.’

  These dickheads? Was she talking about Flanagan? And who? McCarty? And why the hell wasn’t Mark to be touched?

  Mark’s voice came from close to the window. ‘So, now you’re going to deal with us all to wipe the whole slate clean, aren’t you, Vanna? Just me and Dan or McCarty as well?’

  ‘What?’ Flanagan’s voice, Jenn thought. Rising in volume and tone. ‘What do you mean? Vanna?’

  ‘They’re going to kill you, Dan.’ Mark, still so even and calm. ‘Or at least I am. Before I shoot myself.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Vanna, you can’t.’

  He cried out and Jenn heard a thump. But no gunshot.

  She looked around, desperate for something, anything to use as a weapon. Two bricks on the ground nearby alongside some cracked terracotta pots. She stuffed some pieces of terracotta in her pockets and took a brick in each hand. She drew in a deep breath and flung the first brick at the window as hard as she could, hoping desperately that Mark wasn’t standing next to it. The glass shattered and she followed it with the other brick, aimed at the remaining window. Then she ran as bullets fired from the room. But instead of running to the trees she ran back to the door she’d left through, keeping close to the house.

  Police? Mark thought as he jerked away from the shattering glass. But the brick that landed on the floor inches from his feet probably wasn’t police equipment. McCarty and the guard spun away from him and fired their guns out the remains of the window as Vanna wiped blood off her cheek and swore and Dan gripped the edge of the table and started to haul himself up.

  No orders from police were shouted, no rush of officers, but they’d unchained him from the chair a few minutes before and he was no longer helpless.

  McCarty, with his gun still in his hand, jumped through the window frame and started towards the trees.

  One guard with a gun remained, and Vanna, both looking to the window. Dan was still reeling from the blow to his head. Mark raised his eyes at him. A man scared for his life could become an ally. The laptop sat on the table just inches away but as Mark shifted his feet slightly to find a better stance, he caught a shadow at the half-open door. Jenn? Police?

  He moved, grabbing the laptop and flinging it sideways towards the guard’s head, then leapt after it with his cuffed hands raised to strike. As he hit the ground with the man, he was vaguely aware of Dan moving, of Vanna’s shout, of Jenn rushing in. He rolled with the guard, grappling for the gun.

  Someone screamed and a gun fired. Rolling over the guard, Mark grabbed the guy’s head and pounded it against the floor, and out of the corner of his eye he saw McCarty in the window, gun aimed towards him. McCarty fired once as Mark grabbed the guard’s gun. He squeezed the shot as McCarty fired again, and pain erupted in his side as the man fell.

  ‘Mark!’

  He staggered to his feet, ripping the handcuff keys from the guard’s belt. Vanna had Jenn by the hair but Jenn’s fingers gripped Vanna’s face, digging in near her eyes, and with one hand she dragged a rock down the older woman’s face.

  Mark grabbed Vanna and flung her into the table, following with a hard blow across her bleeding face. She tried to kick away but Dan, on the floor beside his feet, grabbed her leg, dragging it down with his weight as he pulled himself up.

  McCarty was stirring, the guard starting to moan.

  ‘Mark! We have to go!’ Jenn yelled, grabbing his arm.

  Dan shoved him aside and started to pound his ex-wife’s face.

  With all his concern for Jenn and no sympathy for either Flanagan, Mark didn’t hesitate to leave them to each other and McCarty.

  The gun held awkwardly in one cuffed hand, he pressed the other hand against the damp burning at his side and followed Jenn as she darted out of the room and across a hallway to the open front door.

  ‘There’s another guard, somewhere,’ she said, pausing for an instant to check beyond the door. ‘We have to get to the trees.’ She glanced back and her eyes dropped to the blood staining his hand. ‘You’re hurt. Oh fuck, oh shit.’

  ‘It’s okay. Just run. I’ll be right behind you.’

  ‘No. I won’t leave you.’

  He tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans, then grabbed her hand and set off, forcing his legs to run, each hard step on the ground jarring pain through him. The dark blur of trees ahead was the only thing in his vision, and he kept going, because if he stopped, Jenn would stop.

  He heard a shot.

  He couldn’t let her stop.

  In the trees it was cooler, the light not as harsh, and they slowed but kept moving, deeper, deeper into the cover. His side ached, but he was still upright, still walking.

  Jenn breathed heavily and Mark’s own breath rose in gasps. He thought they’d come about a kilometre from the house, and ahead the trees seemed to thin out. The mix of mulga, native c
ypress and eucalypt was dry and scrubby but he steered Jenn towards one of the few larger red gums that dotted through the shorter growth.

  He leaned his back against the broad trunk, grateful for its support. Jenn immediately moved his bloodied hand aside and pulled up his shirt, wiping away blood with the bottom of it.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ he told her. ‘Just caught me on the side. I think the bleeding’s stopped.’

  ‘Not quite yet, it hasn’t.’

  Probably because he’d been running, pumping blood through his body – and out of the wound. She uncuffed his hands, helped him tug his shirt off over his head and then hastily folded it into a pad, wrapping the sleeves around him to tie it on.

  She straightened up, steadying herself with one hand against the tree, and he didn’t miss the catch in her breath.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked sharply. He’d assumed she was, because she’d run without stopping, making good speed, but he had no idea what she’d endured in the hours since their abduction. Her shirt still bloodied from the bus accident and from his blood, her hair dishevelled, she looked like she’d been through hell but he couldn’t see signs of external injury.

  ‘I’m fine. Just a twinge from my ankle and a bit woozy from the drug and no food. Do you know what time it is? How long were we out?’

  He’d bet her ankle more than twinged. Practical, uncomplaining and focused – just as she’d always been when it mattered. His captors had taken his watch and phone but the sun had already passed its highest point before they unchained him. ‘It’s early afternoon. Maybe one or two o’clock.’ And getting hotter, which worried him. Weakened physically by the after-effects of the sedatives, the heat and lack of water would make them even more vulnerable.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ Jenn asked.

  ‘No. I’m guessing west, because of this mulga. West of Dungirri, certainly. West of Birraga, maybe. A lot of the land around Birraga is cleared but there are a few pockets of scrub,’ Mark said. ‘Let’s keep moving,’ he suggested. ‘We might be able to see more once we’re out of this.’