DINING WITH DEVILS -- A Tasmanian Thriller

by GORDON AALBORG

  So she worked to dispel their view of her as a heroine, all the while wondering, in her sudden and newfound realization, just how thoroughly intimidated Teague Kendall actually was by her.

  He’d rushed to rescue her once he’d realized her danger, overcoming his own dread of caves in what she had always thought a valiant and truly brave gesture. Not his fault that Stafford had tricked him, trapped him in a deadly sinkhole within the cave system now named for Kirsten herself. Not his fault that, in the end, it had been Kirsten rescuing Kendall, having already saved herself from the madman’s cannibalistic scheme.

  Not her fault, either. But now, reveling in the delights of her unusual but chosen sport, her thoughts couldn’t ignore how it must make Kendall feel. The one and only time he’d willingly gone underground was with her, in the face of great trepidation. His second time underground had almost been fatal and there would not, she instinctively knew, ever be a third time. Not by choice.

  Kendall had been afraid the first time, his second visit had confirmed and exacerbated those fears. And he couldn’t in ten thousand years comprehend why she, too, wasn’t now terrified of caves and caving.

  And he never will. Well, intellectually maybe. But . . .

  And it hurt. She let her gaze wander as the party moved downriver, and because she was half-thinking about Teague, she found herself wanting him there, with her, able to share in the wonders so stupendous she was almost drunk on the visual and tactile experience.

  How can you have a real relationship if you can’t share the most important things in it?

  Around her, in the eerie light of the cavers’ torches, weird and grotesque shapes loomed from the shadows, flowing down the limestone walls in curtains and runnels of calcite with unusual forms, equally unusual colors. To Kirsten it was all strangely beautiful and surreal, but when she tried to see it through Teague Kendall’s eyes . . . ?

  His worst nightmares come true, considering what he endured. I’m not surprised he’s confused about my feelings for caves.

  Kirsten’s nightmares, too, were haunted. Not by caves, but by Stafford’s depravity. He’d killed her sister, probably eaten at least some of her, and come within a whisker of including Kirsten on his menu. But her nightmares of the madman didn’t extend underground. In a cave she had fought him, eluded him, fled from him, and finally escaped him. The cave was a blessing, indeed a sanctuary.

  One sanctuary. And for nearly a year now, she had been hovering at the entry to another one, a sanctuary she deeply desired and one that had systematically, it often seemed, eluded her. Teague Kendall – in her arms and in her bed and in her life. And now she knew what the problem was, or at least some of the problem. Kendall was intimidated by her. She had come out of their shared ordeal stronger. Much stronger. But Kendall . . . ?

  Once he’d left the hospital after his near-death by hypothermia, Kirsten had expected Kendall to return to his pursuit of her. She knew he wanted her, had welcomed his advances, not least because he was a kind, considerate, thoughtful man who tried to understand her. Maybe too nice, too kind. Kirsten’s emotional baggage included the residue of an earlier marriage, an abusive marriage. There were scars. There were . . . issues. They’d been working out those issues, slowly, cautiously, but successfully, she thought, when their encounter with Stafford had turned their world upside down. And now . . . ?

  We’re worse off than when we started, simple as that. I’m stronger than I ever was and Kendall isn’t. That’s his feeling, anyway. Damn all men and their macho complexes!

  Around her, the eeriness of the underground intensified as the cavern expanded. In Kirsten’s mind, the issue that had been building for a year seemed to flower, illogically blossoming in the stygian gloom around her. She and Kendall had become closer, in many ways, drawn so by their shared experience with Stafford, by the horror of it, by the intensity of it. But there was a weird barrier there, too, an invisible but tangible barrier that Kirsten, for the first time, could put a name to.

  Intimidation! She could see it now, clear as day in the pitch-black of the inky world beneath the surface. Intimidation. Of course!

  And it reared its ugly head every time their relationship began to tip-toe, however quietly, toward the bedroom door. He wanted her. She knew that; they both did. She wanted him, and was damned certain they both knew that, too.

  And yet, every time they came even close to anything like real intimacy, Kendall hid behind the very thing that made him attractive – his niceness. He was invariably polite, considerate, aware of her feelings, always ready – too ready! – to back away, to play for time. He, admittedly, had relationship issues of his own. Kendall’s first wife, a Tasmanian woman, had lied and cheated and poisoned their relatively brief marriage before finally dumping him like dirty laundry. He had every right to be cautious, Kirsten thought. She’d never met Rose, a woman Kendall had merely dismissed as a psychiatric nurse; thus, automatically, even crazier than her patients, but Kirsten both feared and disliked her.

  Sure thing, Kirsten. Hate the woman on hearsay evidence, and prejudiced evidence at that. And you wonder why you have relationship problems. Anyway, enough is enough. When we get back from this, now that you know the problem . . . or think you do, you’re going to do . . . what?

  She was mentally stepping from the shower into something slinky, sexy, alluring – had the very thing in her luggage, in fact: an emerald-green peignoir she’d bought with Teague Kendall in mind – when the party got back to their starting point, all still high with excitement, but tired and in need of a rest before they faced up to the arduous climb back to the surface.

  The abseil rope hung there, just as they’d left it, but as they drew closer, everyone’s attention was drawn to something that hadn’t been there when they’d started out, something that shone like a serpent’s tooth in the glow of their cave lanterns and a tiny, single ray of light from above. A gleaming knife blade that protruded from the coils of rope on the cavern floor.

  Everyone stopped, looking at the coils of rope, the now-obvious stock knife snuggled point upward within the coils, then at each other, as if expecting or hoping that someone amongst them would have a simple, obvious explanation. It was an ordinary, folding, lock-blade stockman’s knife . . . the sort carried by farmers and graziers throughout Australia. Less than four inches long when closed, far too shiny and clean to have been there for any length of time. And they didn’t need to consult to know it hadn’t been there when they’d descended into the cave.

  Kirsten felt her stomach knot, an icy, dreadful feeling she knew only too well. She had felt something similar when she had found her sister’s ring in the cave Kirsten had discovered on Vancouver Island, a cave to which she and her caving party were genuinely believed to be the first visitors ever!

  That phenomenon was later explained, at least in theory, when Stafford’s lair was discovered high on a ridge above the cave itself. The madman had been using an abandoned mine shaft to dispose of the remains and personal effects of his victims, and although it could never be totally proven, it was logical enough to assume that Emma’s distinctive ring had somehow been washed down and into Kirsten’s cave system by the heavy rains so common in the region.

  Now, staring in shared silence at the stock knife, which also shouldn’t have been there, had no business there, but logically had arrived, somehow, from above, where their abseil rope was secured, Kirsten felt a tremor of déjà vu, and with it a shadow of dread.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Even as he squeezed the trigger, Ian Boyd knew he’d just shot the wrong man. But it was too late to correct the mistake. This was a time for getting the hell out of it, not for risking discovery with a second, better-aimed shot.

  The retrieving trial judge hadn’t struck the ground before Ian, Finnish Vaime SSR in hand and the spent shell-casing in his pocket, was on the move away from his sniper’s hidey-hole in the ridge-top ferns. And away from the jack-jumper’s nest his Blundstone boot had disturbed as he readied
himself for the shot. The angry bull ants had swarmed quickly to the defense, and the first bite was like a red-hot needle thrust into his bare, bony ankle at the instant of trigger squeeze. Not even the drugs in his emaciated body could counter the sudden thrust of pain, nor the flinch that followed.

  Even had anyone been watching, the seasoned poacher’s limping passage through the scrub was as elusive as the autumn breeze. By the time Charlie Banes had the crime scene secured, Ian was in his battered old bush utility and on the highway headed east toward Fingal with an open tinny of Fosters nestled between his thighs.

  Ian reached the small community just as the first police vehicles, headed west, whooped their way past him in response to the emergency cell-phone call from the trial site. He almost waved at the passing police vehicles, then thought better of it, exhibiting unusual discretion for a man whose contempt for authority was legend.

  At Fingal, he turned north into the maze of back roads and forestry tracks that meandered through paddock and scrub and rugged timber country along creeks and over ridges, angling always north and east before he finally turned back northwest to reach his destination, the Pub in the Paddock at Pyengana. It was a route Ian could have driven dead drunk or half asleep, and often had. He knew every back road and track in the northeast of Tasmania, courtesy of a lifetime spent thieving and poaching. The northeastern quarter of this small island south of Australia proper was Ian’s spiritual home, one he’d left only once in his sixty-plus years of rough, hardscrabble existence.

  He’d joined the Australian army during the Vietnam years (it was, in the magistrate’s words: “Join the army or it’s off to gaol, boy!”) and found his shooting and bush skills highly enough valued – usually – to compensate for his incorrigible insubordination. He already knew about killing. There was hardly an animal or bird species in Tasmania that Ian Boyd hadn’t shot at one time or another. He’d shot possums for their skins while still just a boy, and wallabies and Forester kangaroos for dog tucker, fallow deer for the table and the sheer thrill of poaching them, bandicoots and wombats and even, once, a platypus, just to see how they’d cook up. And he’d killed feral cats and the ubiquitous Tassie Devils and, occasionally, other people’s dogs and livestock just for the hell of it.

  The army taught him to kill humans. As a sniper. From ambush. Ian took to it well, seeing no real difference in what sort of animal fell to his accurate shooting. The only real difference, he’d decided early on, was that people were a lot more noisy about their dying if the fatal shot wasn’t quite perfect.

  The army experience in ’Nam also taught him about hashish and cocaine and heroin and a barrage of other abusive substances his body and mind came to crave. His history and heritage provided the means to finance his addictions once the army had used him up and spit him out, sending him back to Tasmania with diagnosed but untreated posttraumatic stress disorder and a taste for anything that would placate the demons in his mind. From the day of his discharge to this, the day of his first unsanctioned murder, he’d seldom drawn a breath untouched by drugs or alcohol.

  Ian was the last (“Thank God!” said those few who knew him well) in a long, long line of thieves and poachers and ne’er-do-wells that traced back to those ancestors who’d come off a convict hulk in chains when Tasmania was still Van Diemen’s Land, been flung into the living hell that was the Port Arthur penal colony, then eventually released into bonded servitude or groveling poverty and a return to the noxious habits that had seen them transported from Britain in the first place. Now, past sixty and far more interested in abusive substances than sex, he was probably incapable of furthering his branch of the Boyd line, and unlikely to try.

  He paused on a quiet, isolated stretch of road and stowed the Finnish rifle with its built-in sound suppressor carefully beneath the truck seat, and tucked away the spent casing for eventual reloading. Then it was on, to the Pub in the Paddock, nearly fifty kilometers as the crow flies away from the murder scene, and nearly as much again by convoluted, twisting, often barely passable bush tracks.

  Ian had no idea if the woman who’d ordered the shooting would be at Pyengana, waiting for him, waiting for a full debriefing. Nor did it matter. She would find him, if not at the Pub in the Paddock, then at some other of Ian’s regular watering holes, perhaps in St. Helens, on the coast. She’d found Ian there before, after all. She had strode gracefully into a St. Helens pub with unique familiarity, for a stranger, but greeted Ian with the warmth and intimacy of an old mate.

  Or so Ian remembered, vaguely, as he sipped on his first of many draught beers at Pyengana. He’d been both drunk and high at the time, and had only flitting recollections of how she had bought them both beers, then sat across from him at a corner table and begun to speak in that strangely familiar velvet voice, a voice both deep and mellow, smooth and seductive as Bailey’s Irish Cream. It was the voice that had triggered Ian’s reactions, offsetting the unease he first felt at not recognizing the woman immediately, out of uniform as she was, then his confusion when he did recognize her.

  The one thing he did recall was that somehow the woman knew him, seemed able to read his mind, to know what Ian was going to say before the words had passed his yellowing, tobacco-stained teeth, knew his very thoughts, and knew also the inner demons that provoked those thoughts, that fueled his reactions.

  Certainly she’d known all about his almost paranoid hatred of anything and everything American. Had even asked, Ian vaguely remembered, if he still went about kicking the doors of the Ford F100 pickup trucks that were becoming increasingly common in Tasmania. Or had she asked? He had to think about that, but decided it didn’t matter. She might or might not have asked the question, but she’d known the answer, just as she’d known that he had once shot out his own television set at the sight of Australian Prime Minister John Howard snuggling up to American President George W. Bush as the two conspired to send young men out to die in Iraq, as young men from both countries had died in Vietnam, and for as little reason.

  It seemed to Ian that the woman had known everything about him, not that she’d come at any specific issue directly. Instead, she’d punctuated their discussion with gentle swirls of the nurse’s-style upside-down pocket watch she dangled from its fob, letting the timepiece spin in a pendulum-like, hypnotic pattern.

  At Pyengana, as he sat nursing a beer and watching the tourists en route home from St. Columba Falls, a few kilometers to the south, Ian found himself wondering just how much the damned woman did know. Did she know, for instance, that now, as the alcohol brought him down from a fierce cocaine high, he was certain sure that he’d actually shot the wrong man?

  At Pyengana, he learned for the first time that in addition to missing his shot, he’d actually killed someone. It was all over the television news and everyone was talking about it. Everyone but Ian; he was already seriously into the grog, but not so drunk he couldn’t break with tradition and keep his mouth shut for a change. He would have to talk about it eventually, but that would come later.

  It was the jack-jumper’s fault, anyway, but try to explain that to the woman who’d offered such good money for a simple shooting. Selecting his target had been easy enough; even amongst the crowd at the gundog trial, and even at the extreme range, it had been easy to distinguish the features of the man whose photo graced the dust jacket of the book he’d been shown. An American book, an American author. And, according to Ian’s new employer, a Republican . . . a distinction that meant nothing to Ian except that it meant the man was a George W. Bush supporter, and therefore deserved shooting, whether for five dollars or five hundred, which was what Ian had been promised along with copious quantities of what he craved even more than the money – enough drugs to keep him going for months.

  Easy identification, an easy shot even at that extreme range. So why had he allowed himself to be distracted so much that he’d missed seeing the ant nest? He didn’t know the answer, only that he was on the edge of being, in the vernacular, pissed as forty cats
, and would have to take to the back roads in order to get home without risking a breathalyzer check. He’d already gone without his driver’s license twice in recent years, and wasn’t quite so drunk that he wanted to risk losing it forever. Besides, there was the Vaime SSR under the seat – an illegal, unregistered firearm even before Little Johnny Howard had forced through the most draconian anti-firearms legislation in Australian history and made criminals of the country’s honest farmers, shooters, and bushmen just to placate the growing numbers of city people who knew nothing about guns but were insistent on removing them from society.

  Bad thoughts for a freedom-loving renegade already drunk. The next thing Ian knew, he was raging about the Iraq war to a couple of tourists he assumed were Americans. They were actually Canadian and would have agreed with his views if he’d been sober enough to make any sense at all. But Ian was in one of his “eyes closed, arms waving” episodes, and wasn’t making sense even to himself. Nor to the publican, who eventually got sick of the disturbance and sent Ian packing. The Canadians, who’d seen far worse behavior in watering holes throughout their own frigid north, thought it something of an overreaction, then put the incident into their mental scrapbooks and ordered another beer.

  Ian, for his part, managed to drive his battered vehicle a few kilometers back into the scrub, where he found a convenient and secluded side track where he could unroll his swag and try to sleep away the memory of his mistake. He’d had a long day, traveling first to Launceston to find his target, then having to follow the man south and east to the dog trial site. Easy enough work but damned long hours, Ian thought. The sleep part now was easy; he was out cold almost before he reached the horizontal.