DINING WITH DEVILS -- A Tasmanian Thriller

by GORDON AALBORG

  “Don’t be stupid,” was the old man’s sneering reply. “Not that I haven’t thought about it. A nice little laptop would be nice. I could write me own book about my dog’s adventures. Or my memoirs, maybe.”

  Charlie struggled to hide a grin. The old man was reputed to have spawned children all over Tasmania and even on the Australian mainland during his younger, more productive years, although he maintained no familiar association with any of his descendants or the women who’d birthed them. He had the paternal instincts of the average tomcat, and any memoirs he might produce would be likely to get him lynched . . . or worse.

  “I didn’t even know you could read,” Charlie said, the words out before he could stop himself. And could have kicked himself. Old Viv appeared genuinely wounded by the sarcasm. But before he could reply to the jibe, a question far more serious popped into Charlie’s head.

  “You mind where we found the abandoned shaft that solved the Specialist case?” Charlie asked, now abrupt in his own manner as niggles of bad memories plagued his mind. “I don’t suppose you’ve been up that way recently?”

  “The place where me lovely dog, here solved your case for you? Not for a while. Why?”

  “And no unusual activity up there on the tier above you? No strange lights, or things going bump in the night?”

  “Jeez, Charlie. Have they put you on UFO patrol now? There’s been nobody at all up my way except me and Bluey and the usual mob of devils and roos and wallabies. Oh,” he added, slyly wrinkling his lips over such teeth as remained, “and the Tassie tiger I saw the other night.”

  Normally, Charlie would have granted the old man a smile at that remark. Viv, like an amazing number of old-time bushmen in Tasmania, remained firmly convinced that isolated pockets of the allegedly extinct Thylacine – the Tasmanian tiger – still existed. Most claimed sightings of their own, and each year in Tasmania somebody would claim to have seen a tiger on some isolated bush road. Viv was good for such a claim about every two years, in Charlie’s experience, and the veteran policeman wasn’t about to tell Viv he thought it was all bull dust. Partly, because he wasn’t sure if such reports mightn’t be more real than not. Charlie didn’t know if the Thylacine was extinct, but he did know that he wanted it to still exist, despite the odds. There was something comforting about the thought, however ridiculously romantic.

  But now wasn’t the time. Now that he’d asked about Stafford’s killing ground, his mind did a U-turn back to the fingerprints, and he was suddenly impatient to make the requisite phone call and get it over with.

  “Is there anything else, Viv?” he asked. “I’ve got a lot on my plate this morning, and—”

  “What about me book?”

  It was the last question Charlie could have anticipated, and it took him a moment to bring it into context.

  “Kendall’s book, you mean? I know he’ll have one for you, Viv, but he’s not likely to be down this way until—”

  Old Viv interrupted him. “He hasn’t stopped to see you, then?”

  “I told you – he’s in Launceston. There’s a bloody great manhunt going on up that way, Viv. Or was. Somebody’s snatched Kendall’s girl. Why would you think . . . ?” And suddenly he realized that Kendall wasn’t in Launceston. Kendall was . . . somewhere. With . . . ? “You’ve seen Kendall, then?” Charlie demanded, and focused his attention on the old man with the intensity of a spotlight.

  “Last night. Thought I told you that,” the old man replied in a tone that told Charlie that Viv knew damned well he’d mentioned no such thing. “He was with that really beaut-looking nurse from the nuthouse . . . the one that Dave Birch is shagging, the one with the big tits.”

  “You saw Kendall and Rose Chapman? Together? Last night? Where, for God’s sake?”

  “On the highway, headed toward town here . . . I thought. ‘Twas this side of Goshen . . . nowhere else they could have been headed. Going real slow, they were . . . probably looking for a place to pull off and have a bit.” The old bushie snorted an evil laugh. “That’d be right. His girl’s gone off and left him, so he’s consoling himself with his ex-wife.”

  Christ on a bloody crutch! Talk about knowing who’s up who and who’s paid the rent! Is there anything you don’t know about anybody, old man? You’re a wonder . . . a fair dinkum wonder.

  Charlie didn’t know why he was surprised. Old Viv quite regularly astonished him with his encyclopedic knowledge of things he had no business knowing anything at all about. On his own patch, Viv was the grand master of gossip.

  “You’re a dirty old man,” Charlie said. “And you’re sure about this? What the hell were you doing up that way . . .” He paused to consider the time frame, couldn’t compute it in his head. “. . . at that time of night?”

  “None of your business.” In point of fact, the old man had been en route home from the pub at Pyengana, got caught short by his geriatric bladder, and had to make a pit stop. He was a touch sensitive about mentioning it, then condescended. “I was taking a slash, if yez must know. And of course I recognized him. Seen his picture often enough, haven’t I? And yez couldn’t miss her. I might be old, Charlie, but I’m not dead yet. Half his bloody luck, I say. “

  Charlie’s head was spinning with the effort to process this new information. None of it made any sense, at least on the surface, but he had alarm bells going off all through his subconscious.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now listen – you’ve got my number. If you see them again, if you see either one of them, I want you to ring me up straight away.” He paused, then rushed in with his next thought, knowing he might well regret it, but knowing also he might regret not asking, even more. “And keep your eyes and ears open up your way,” he said. “Let me know if you run up against anything . . . weird. Okay?”

  He gently but firmly hustled old Viv out of the place, then poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and started formulating the words of his apology speech to the fingerprint techie in Hobart.

  ~~~

  “There is no need for any sort of apology, Sergeant Banes.” The techie cut Charlie off in mid-speech. “Or at least not from you. I should be thanking you, actually, because without your hurry-up these prints could have sat here for days or even weeks, and, well . . .”

  “Well what? My boss was fair beside himself when he called last night,” Charlie replied.

  “Perhaps. But last night I hadn’t completed my tests. Today . . .”

  Charlie sighed, then forced himself into the game. “Today . . . ?”

  “Oh,” said the techie. “I guess you haven’t got the latest.” And she snorted, audibly. “Typical that you’d be the last to be informed. The Brass here are all over the moon about it. Imagine – having a chance to get one up on the famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Not often a little force like ours gets that, I can tell you.”

  I don’t give a shit about the goddamn RCMP. Tell me something that makes some sense.

  “You’ve lost me, love,” he said, forgetting about rules involving sexist protocol in his haste to try and make some sense of this discussion, to force the woman to just get to the point!

  “You’re the one who broke the Specialist case, aren’t you? And they haven’t told you yet? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “Haven’t told me what?” But Charlie knew what. He knew it in his very soul, knew it by the shiver of dread that flowed down his spine, by the quaver of disgust he could feel knotting like a mob of worms in his guts. He knew! And wished he didn’t.

  “It’s all about the prints, Sergeant. I only finished up my tests this morning, and believe me, I double-checked – triple-checked – just so as to make damned sure. But those prints are fresh, Sergeant. And they’re not a hoax, either; I’m staking my career on that.”

  “They’re real? So Stafford is still alive. And here in Tassie?” Charlie blurted out the questions, already knowing the answers. Worse, already knowing the common thread that somehow, insane as it appeared, seemed to bind together
all the disparate incidents of the past few days.

  He heard the techie’s reply, but his mind was already racing ahead of it, making lists of things he must do, and do quickly. If he wasn’t already too late.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Kendall didn’t regain consciousness by late morning, Kirsten began to seriously worry. He lay on the camp cot so totally still that if she couldn’t see him breathing it would have been all too easy to imagine him dead. Especially under these conditions.

  “He’s fine. He’ll come out of it in his own time,” Stafford said after a cursory glance at his other captive. “The sedative affects different people differently, dear Kirsten. That’s the truth of it.”

  “The truth of it is that bitch probably wanted him dead,” Kirsten replied, trying to hold her voice calm, knowing she wasn’t doing so at all well. “You’ve already said she tried to have him shot!”

  “It was a mistake. Ian was only supposed to frighten him, not actually hurt him.”

  Whereupon Stafford pointedly ignored them both and returned to his perusal of Kendall’s book, studiously underlining passages and occasionally muttering to himself in undertones she couldn’t follow.

  It was utterly, totally maddening, because she couldn’t do anything until Kendall recovered consciousness, and was now starting to worry that Rose, or Ian . . . or both . . . would return before that happened. If she and Kendall had any chance to get out of this, it had to be under circumstances that would somehow allow them to take Stafford by surprise.

  And Kirsten was starting to question her own effectiveness when and if such an opportunity arose. She was haggard with exhaustion after a night in which the little sleep she managed had been fraught with nightmares and broken by the squabbling of Tasmanian devils right outside the door. Or so it had seemed. The screaming of the ugly little scavengers could have been coming from half a mile away, for all she knew, but it had been enough to bring her bolt upright, wide-eyed in terror.

  And it must have disturbed Stafford’s rest, too. She’d seen him ease out of his chair when the chorus of devils started out, and he’d left the cabin and stayed outside somewhere until the devil feast was over.

  You were probably out there hand-feeding the damned things. Is that what you did with the remains of your victims here in Tasmania – hand-fed selected morsels to the devils before you ate one of them, too?

  The thought was a torment, the mental picture it created even worse, not least because it all seemed quite plausible, totally believable. Ralph Stafford was clearly crazy as a loon and slipping further and further, Kirsten was certain, from any semblance of reality or normal thinking.

  By mid-afternoon, even he was apparently concerned about Kendall. Or so she thought. He came over several times to inspect Kendall, take his pulse, raise an eyelid to check for . . . something.

  “Isn’t there something you can give him?” Kirsten asked. Only to be ignored, at first. Stafford looked up from his inspection of Kendall, looked at her with eyes that held no expression she could read. And he smiled, a slight smile so cold it could have frozen hell, she thought. It made her shiver.

  Then he slapped Kendall across the face so hard it nearly tipped him off the camp cot. A brutal, solid, open-handed slap that left a quickening red mark on the cheek of the man she loved. Kendall never moved, never so much as changed the pace of his slow, steady breathing. But Kirsten was forced to hold her rage, to subdue the urge to retaliate somehow, any way she could. Because Stafford was expecting that, waiting for that. She could tell by the way he poised to step quickly out of range, the way he broadened that icy smile into an even worse smirk.

  “He’s not faking it,” Stafford said. Almost sadly, she thought. “I rather thought he might have been.”

  And Stafford smiled again, only this time it was the warm, soft smile of his mine host persona. The abrupt change was incomprehensible, and all the more fearsome because of it. Stafford’s mood swings were becoming, she thought, more and more erratic and more and more severe.

  “He should come right fairly soon, now,” the doctor said. “Not in time for lunch, unfortunately, but we’ll have an early dinner. He’ll be ready for that, I expect, and so will you. I know Rose will be.” And again there was that beaming smile, the voice that fairly dripped bonhomie.

  “Speaking of which, I’d best go and check on a few things, if we’re going to be dining early.”

  As soon as the door closed, Kirsten knelt beside Kendall’s cot. She was shaking with pent-up emotion, and knew it, but couldn’t stop the shivering, couldn’t keep the tears from welling out. All she could do was stare down at his unconscious figure. And worry.

  “Is he gone?”

  The words were barely audible, and at first she thought she’d imagined them, because there was no movement of Kendall’s lips, no sign of movement from him at all.

  “Is he gone, Kirsten? Talk to me, dammit!”

  “You’re okay?” She had to ask that first, could hardly believe the relief she felt when he opened his eyes and then, magically, smiled at her. His smile somehow lit up the room, dispensing the gloom of the dying daylight, instantly restoring her sense of hope, her belief that somehow, some way, they could survive this. Now that Kendall was awake, there was renewed hope.

  “I’ve been better. Now, quickly . . . fill me in on what the hell is going on.”

  Kendall was rolling over even as he spoke, so that he sat slumped on the camp cot, his bound hands between his knees and his head bowed as he listened to her outline the situation.

  “Okay,” he said when she’d finished. “I think we have to wait until we can somehow overpower the bastard before we try anything at all. No sense getting loose in here when he’s outside there with a gun. But how loose is that eyebolt? Could I yank it out of the wall?”

  And this time he didn’t wait for an answer, but stood up, grabbed the chains linking them to the wall, and tugged. Hard. And with no discernible result.

  “Dammit! Okay . . . let’s try it this way.” Kendall spoke over his shoulder as he knelt and grasped the eyebolt in his hands, twisting it entirely free, then thrusting the eyebolt back and forth to loosen the fit of the threads within the wood of the wall. It took only moments for him to make the eyebolt appear solidly in place while actually loose enough to snap out of the wall with ease.

  Kirsten, her attention focused on the doorway as he’d demanded, listened then as he outlined The Plan.

  “Which bloody well better work,” he said, “because I haven’t got a better one.”

  *

  “Ah . . . you’re awake at last. Good. Dinner will be ready soon.

  Stafford smiled hugely as he entered the cabin to find Kendall sitting slumped on the camp cot, elbows on his knees and his head resting against his bound wrists.

  Kendall’s breath was labored and he was moaning softly, his entire upper body swaying in tune with his moans. Kirsten stood beside him, her hands on his shoulders. She turned to look at Stafford, her own bound hands outstretched in supplication.

  “You have to do something,” she said.

  Stafford had stopped just out of reach, but – as they’d prayed – he wasn’t carrying the rifle, nor any other obvious weapon. But he was free, unfettered, and fit. And in psychological control, which was what they were banking on.

  Kirsten saw his gaze flicker from their bound wrists to the loops of chain behind them to the eyebolt in the wall. Stafford paused briefly, as if to assure himself that his preparations still held good, then stepped toward them. One step, only. Not enough.

  One more, damn you. Just . . . one.

  As Kirsten tried to will Stafford into taking that extra step, Kendall swayed upright, his moans louder, now. He didn’t look up, didn’t seem aware, even, of Stafford’s presence. From his throat emerged a horrible, choking, gagging sound, then he staggered forward a single step, collapsing to his knees as he did so, his outstretched wrists, bound together with cable ties, barely halting his f
all.

  Stafford reached out to halt Kendall’s fall, both hands extended to grasp Kendall’s shoulders.

  Kirsten stepped forward too, as if to try and halt the fall, but even as Stafford reached forward and down, she was turning, reaching behind her, her fingers groping for a decent grip on the twin chains that held her and Kendall to the eyebolt.

  Kendall’s fists clenched and his moaning changed to a mighty roar of anger and anguish as he thrust upward to smash with hands and wrists at Stafford’s testicles. Once. Then again and again.

  Stafford gasped with the first impact, his eyes widening in pain. By the third blow he was swaying over Kendall’s shoulders, his mouth open in a soundless cry. He found his voice as Kirsten swung herself around, the chains a flexible, clumsy metal lash that she whipped forward to snap around Stafford’s head and neck. The chains themselves had a serious impact, but the eyebolt added to that, especially when she dragged the improvised whip back for a second blow.

  A line of blood opened across Stafford’s forehead as the chain ripped loose for Kirsten’s second blow, which almost hit Kendall, too, as he flung up his head to smash against the doctor’s chin with an audible, solid, thunk. Then he thrust a shoulder into Stafford’s gut and heaved upward, lifting the doctor up and back to slam against the cabin wall before they fell in a twisting, writhing heap on the floor.

  After that, she didn’t dare try to strike at Stafford because Kendall emerged on top of the doctor, his voice a roar and his hands locked, now, on Stafford’s throat as he slammed the man’s head against the floor.

  “Bastard . . . bastard . . . BASTARD!” Over and over again as Kendall, kneeling on his opponent, tried to throttle Stafford and smash his head open at the same time.

  Kirsten could only watch, horrified and fascinated at the same time, as the man she loved did his best to kill the man she hated and feared so much. Until . . .