by Anita Bell
‘Hooeee,’ Farran whistled, loud enough for Kirk to hear it at the back. ‘You sure don’t look old enough to be a great-grandma.’
Gran MacLeod’s wrinkles all went pink at once.
‘Would you like to have a look then?’ she said, still blushing.
‘Sounds good to me.’
Gran kicked off her slippers and pulled on her yard shoes as Farran followed her down the steps and along a ferny path. Inside he heard the creak of floorboards right where he expected them to be.
‘You run this whole place by yourself?’ he asked loudly so his mate could hear the voices moving down the side.
‘Well, there’s my granddaughter and my grandson, but they’re both a bit light to be handling the big hens. I have a friend that helps me when I need to do that, but he’s up north visiting his mother.’
‘Light? You mean weak?’
‘In the body. Being strong isn’t enough. You have to be heavy so the birds can’t drag you around. Here we are,’ she said, standing at the gate of a long narrow pen that could just as easily have been used to raise greyhound pups.
The chicken mesh was a little above waist height and there was a half-open garden shed at one end for shelter. Behind them, a seven foot clucky hen paced up and down the wires of an old stallion yard. She fluffed out her long white-tipped black wings to look as wide as she was tall and hissed a warning for the humans to stay out of her territory. At the same time she eyed them to see if they’d brought her a feed bucket. In the shorter chick pen, fourteen four-month-old chicks jogged out to investigate the new human. They blinked large bird eyes over the top wire at Farran, but he wasn’t looking at them.
Gran turned her head towards the house, wondering what had interested him.
‘Oh, I better close that,’ she said, noticing that the back door was ajar. ‘Or I’ll have a snake in the kitchen again for sure.’
Corporal Beattie wiped the grin off the guard’s face by stamping down on the Bedford’s accelerator as soon as the boom gate went up. He left the private standing in a cloud of half-burned diesel, probably wondering why a cattle truck had priority access to a military air base.
Beattie pulled up alongside the operations block, feeling eyes on him everywhere, not only from the line-up of officers who waited for him, but from maintenance staff and other personnel who must have wondered why so many officers were interested in a vehicle that wasn’t painted with camouflage.
A young flight lieutenent was sent off to get a bucket of water for the dog that wagged its tail at them from the livestock crate on the back while two groups of officers split off to empty the contents of the tool boxes that were bolted to the undercarriage.
Beattie climbed into the passenger side of the cabin and emptied log books, travel permits and a nine-year-old local street directory out of the glove compartment. He handed everything back to Colonel Chang and the others to inspect while he rifled loose papers from under the seat. He folded the passenger seat down first and found a tyre jack, a tool kit and a short towing chain and behind the driver’s seat, he found a rolled up beach towel with a fancy looking jewellery box inside and a large black travel bag. Inside the travel bag was an army eschelon bag and inside that he found clothing, a change into military colours, a first aid kit and a Browning with its holster and three spare clips.
‘Bingo,’ Chang said, but he wasn’t talking about the weapon or anything else from behind the seats. He held up an A4 booklet out of the glove compartment that had Queensland Livestock Movement System stamped across the front with a picture of a cattle truck.
‘These are all filled out for livestock travelling to and from the same property,’ he said flipping through the dated carbon copies.
Beattie looked at the address and used the local street directory to find it on a map.
‘How long will it take get here?’ Chang asked Squadron Leader Harris, pointing at the map, while Beattie put everything else back into the truck as they had found it.
‘Power-up and flying time? A little under twenty minutes. But that’s private land. We’re required to contact property owners and warn them we’ll be in low, so we don’t scare livestock through any fences, and we can’t land without their permission unless it’s an emergency’
Chang shook his head at the extent of red-tape he had to fight. ‘Excuse me sir,’ he said, as if he was making a phone call. ‘I’m ringing to let you know that we’ll be sneaking up on you today’
Harris wished he could smile.
‘Ah, sir?’ Beattie interrupted. ‘That property adjoins the Wivenhoe Reservoir. I believe that makes it water resources land for a distance of six metres above the high watermark. That makes at least part of it government land.’
‘Can’t land an Iroquois on six metres of ground, Colonel.’
‘No,’ Chang said, ‘but we can use one to get a bird’s eye view to coordinate a ground force.’
‘Agreed,’ Harris said. ‘Let’s get airborne.’
Locklin looked at the traffic jam on the road ahead and behind him and checked his watch as the hour hand moved another notch towards seven. He swore and jumped the curb, cutting through the primary school teacher’s car park to avoid the traffic. He squeezed the accelerator down a little and revved up between the preschool and the grade three block, turned hard right at grade one and hard left at the admin building and burst onto Peace Street doing seventy-five in a forty zone. There was another hard left below the ambulance station that took him straight back into traffic on Main Street. But instead of backing off to turn, he straightened up and squeezed the accelerator a little more. He powered through the town park, skidding round the basketball court and dodging the playground on the other side. He hit the humps below the ladies’ toilets and the Magna learned to fly.
The car came down hard at the intersection above the butcher shop and Locklin felt the clunk of something heavy in the boot. A military vehicle with something heavy in the boot. It couldn’t be weapons, he realised. There were strict controls on those, so he stored the thought as the road straightened up. Ahead he could see road markers like goalposts on either side of a culvert and he nudged the Magna over the centre line and kicked the accelerator straight to the floor.
Kirk crept quickly past the dining table in the kitchen to the tunnel of a darkened hall. He looked down the hall in the middle of the house to the front door, where the dim light of sunset struggled to illuminate the sunroom. To his right there was a small bathroom and down the hall was a lounge room and three doors.
The first door was open, flashing with the blue-tinged reflection of a nearby television. Engines revved and a crowd roared.
‘Ow! That was a close one,’ a commentator shouted.
Kirk peered into the first room and saw a large pink bed smothered by a crocheted rug. A cat slept in a tapestried rocker by the window and beside it on the floor sat a bulging basket of mottled wool that was stabbed with long needles.
He stepped deeper into the hall, treading lightly on worn floral carpet. He steadied his Smith and Wesson and approached the long gap in sunflower wallpaper where a dark green sofa overstretched by a couple of centimetres into the hall. There were two tapestry-clad single sofas on the furthest wall, separated by a coffee table, and Kirk crept further forward to check the darkened room for occupants.
‘Ouch! That’s gotta hurt,’ the TV commentator called and Kirk’s eyes were drawn to the bright screen under the window. The irises in his eyes narrowed to restrict the sudden light and the rest of the room appeared like night. Dazzled briefly, he crept on to the next door.
It was another bedroom. The long rectangular shape under the clothes and the pillow on the floor gave it away. The wardrobe gaped open like a torpedoed sports locker and the engine parts on the chest of drawers made the room look like a garage. There was a small cluttered desk but no computer and he moved on, causing the floor to groan beneath him.
The last door in the hall was another bedroom, tidy except for linen st
acked on the bed. He bypassed it too and burst into the sunroom, scanning left and right quickly to find no-one. On one side of the front door was a covered piano and books on shelves from the ceiling to floor. On the other was a sewing corner, with a headless half-clad mannequin that pointed to a desk.
Kirk frowned and scratched the bald spot in the back of his head. No hard drive, no screen, no keyboard. He bent over to look under the desk and heard the floor creak again.
‘Hey!’ someone shouted as a shape moved in the hall. ‘Who are you?’
Kirk swung up with his revolver and a face disappeared from the door. He heard running and made it to the hall as the back door flung open. He stopped only long enough to aim and fire.
‘Gran!’ a teenager shouted.
Wood splintered into Scotty’s shoulder as a bullet exploded the door jam and he fell. He landed on the concrete pad at the bottom of three steps and blood trickled from the bandage near his ear. It dribbled into concrete cracks to feed the weeds and when he looked up, two Smith and Wessons were pointed down at him.
‘Upstairs. Now!’ Farran ordered.
Scott and Gran were herded to the lounge room and Kirk punched on the light.
‘All right, bandage boy,’ Farran said, pushing Scott and his grandmother into the longest sofa. ‘Where’s the computer?’
The Magna flogged along nicely so long as he kept it out of the potholes along the edge of the bitumen, but on dusk, the bugs splattered onto the windscreen like mini water bombs half-full of pus. They were especially thick through the culvert near the hundred zone where a gully drained into the river and Locklin pulled the wiper stalk towards him, firing detergent onto the glass. He flicked the stalk up and the blades swiped the mess aside but he had to back off speed and peer through smears until they cleared.
A black blur on the footpath became a Mercedes as he passed his gran’s. He threw out the anchors, not too fast, using four hundred metres to pull up so he didn’t sound like a jumbo coming in to land. ABS kept the rubber on the treads but the diff started whining as hd flogged backward in reverse. He braked hard, bringing the car one-eighty and accelerated up the short stretch to land nose-to-nose, silver car to black on the footpath under the fig tree. He grabbed the keys out of the ignition and pushed them into his pocket, then crossed between the bonnets to check the console inside the Mercedes.
Sweet, he thought, seeing three black keys hanging from their ignition too. He pulled them out and pitched them underarm into a patch of prickles beside the carport. Then he hunched low and ran down the side of the house to come out near the back door.
‘What computer?’ Gran said, coughing.
Farran kicked the TV off, silencing the dirt bikes and shook his revolver, as if that made it any more threatening than it already was. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said “what computer”,’ Scotty said. ‘Cause we’ve only got a laptop.’
‘Does your sister use it on the internet?’
‘What sister?’ Scotty said. ‘I’ve only got cousins.’
‘Look, bandage boy,’ Kirk said, sticking his Smith and Wesson at the end of Scott’s nose. ‘Quit being snot-brained or I’ll blow your nose for ya.’
‘In the sunroom,’ Scott said, trying to stop his body from trembling. ‘It should be in the sunroom.’
Farran pulled him to his feet and pushed him towards the hall. ‘Show him,’ he said. ‘And play nice with Mr Kirk, or I’ll turn granny into a chunky stain all over the pretty couch.’ He waved his gun again to make sure he got his point across.
Scott moved down the hall quickly before Kirk could shove him and opened the storage door under the desk beside the mannequin.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Laptop.’
Kirk saw it under the desk, a black carry case with electrical cords sticking out the zip like distended bowels, as if the laptop had put up a fight to go back in its case.
‘Get it,’ Kirk ordered, not wanting to put himself off balance in front of a quick-reflexed smart-mouthed kid. He smiled, enjoying having someone to give orders to and herded Scott back towards the lounge room.
‘You know how to work it?’ Kirk asked.
Scotty shook his head. If it didn’t have a clutch or a tailpipe, he wasn’t interested.
‘What about you?’ Kirk said, waving his revolver at Gran.
She shook her head too. ‘I couldn’t even pack it away.’
Farran checked his watch and paced the hall. He looked up as if he’d slapped himself in the forehead with the answer and pulled the mobile phone off his hip. He punched at its buttons, but nothing happened. ‘What’s up with this now?’ he asked, getting madder.
‘We’re rural,’ Gran said. ‘You can’t expect city services here.’
Kirk walked towards the house phone on the coffee table.
‘Not that one,’ Farran said. ‘The cops might search their phone bill for STD calls after we make ’em disappear.’
‘What do you mean, make us disappear?’ Gran asked, but they ignored her.
‘Get out back and see if you can pick up reception,’ Farran ordered and Kirk nodded, taking the mobile out through the kitchen.
In the lounge room, Farran ripped the house phone from the wall and told Scotty to lie face down on the floor.
Locklin saw the back door from the kitchen kick open. He ducked into the annex beside the washing machine, and watched a tattoed man with a dirty ponytail come down the steps. He was punching buttons on a mobile. The man scratched his head with the barrel of his revolver and followed the crumpled concrete path towards the clothesline, looking at the sky as if something up there might make the reception better.
He stopped under the line and paced like an ostrich waiting for dinner.
‘Yeah, Mr Fletcher. Kirk here. We got the computer, but the girl’s not here. Woman here says she’s in Ipswich having a baby. You want us to go get her?’
He was silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, what about the two that’s here?’ he asked. ‘Yeah, righto. They should fit in the boot,’ he added and hung up.
He walked back to the house, trying to reset a signal lock as he walked up the steps. He didn’t know anyone was behind him until he felt hands grip his cheeks and heard his neck crack.
Farran pushed his knee into Scott’s back and twisted the phone cord tighter around his prisoner’s wrists. Scott cried out as the circulation to his hands was cut and the weight on his chest triggered his asthma. He gasped, knowing his puffer was behind his attacker, and hearing his panic, Gran looked around quickly for something to attack with.
‘Let him go, you ruffian!’ she shouted, coughing as she pushed herself up and hurried to the kitchen. The bread knives hung over the bench just around the corner, and she reached halfway around and was pulled the rest. At the same time, a bullet zinged passed her shoulder and exploded right through the swinging back door.
‘Hi, Gran,’ Locklin said, aiming the tattooed man’s Smith and Wesson around the corner to fire three shots back up the hall. ‘Surprise!’ he said casually, as they heard a body thump to the floor. Locklin put his head round the corner to take a look. ‘Only two of them?’ he asked Gran.
She nodded, more in shock of seeing her eldest grandson than of having a mess to clean up in the hall. ‘Scott’s in the lounge,’ she said, grabbing the knife she’d come for while Locklin cleaned the revolver and tossed it back to its owner to make it look like they’d shot each other. She handed the knife to Locklin and led the way back, stepping over the body like it was a bag of rubbish waiting to be cleaned up. She grabbed Scott’s puffer from the coffee table and helped him take a dose while his cousin freed his hands.
‘Typical to see you lying down, Sport, when there’s work to be done,’ Locklin said as he cut the phone cord. He massaged Scott’s wrists and watched the blood flow back into his fingers as he helped him sit up.
‘Sorry, Gran,’ Scott said, trying to breathe-calmly. ‘I should have done something.’
Gran cudd
led him, inspecting the blood from his wounded shoulder and the fresh blood under the bandage where he’d fallen. ‘Nonsense, boy,’ she said, hiding her tears in his hair. ‘Just so long as you’re alive.’ She looked up at Locklin with fresh fear in her eyes. ‘What about Helen? They were talking about her.’
‘Helen’s fine,’ he said. ‘There’s probably an army guard on her door. Long story,’ he added, seeing that his grandmother didn’t understand.
‘I have to get bandages for Scott,’ she said, stepping over Farran again to get to the kitchen. ‘I thought you were in East Timor.’
‘I was,’ he said, ‘but I’ll explain later.’ He walked to the back door, pushing it fully open as he turned on his own mobile. The phone blipped twice as it logged onto the network and he dialled the local ambulance directly instead of going through 000, which tracked numbers automatically. Then he waved Gran over to do the talking.
‘Ambulance,’ he said, handing her his phone and stepping out of her way in the open doorway. ‘Don’t tell them about the bodies yet, Gran,’ he said. ‘There’s still something I have to do.’
‘Men were looking for you,’ she said as the phone buzzed in her ear. ‘Are you on leave, love?’
Locklin raked his dark hair with his fingers, knowing his grandmother could spot a lie with her eyes closed. ‘Something like that,’ he said, saved as the other end picked up and she identified herself.
‘What is the nature of the emergency, Mrs MacLeod?’ the man asked and she told him. Her grandson had been shot. When she hung up, it was to the sound of sirens winding and she was reassured that help would be there soon. What she didn’t realise as she handed Locklin back his mobile phone was that for reports of gunshots, ambulances never travelled alone.
Corporal Beattie sat in the load section of the Iroquois with the army loadmaster, Colonel Chang, a pair of Airfield Defence Guards and Squadron Leader Harris, and while the ADGies and the others enjoyed what they could of the view, Corporal Beattie was trying to hold his stomach down.
