Thrill City

by Leigh Redhead

  ‘Fuck happened to you?’ said the blonde. ‘Look like you just run the four-minute mile.’

  I’d always worked well under pressure, necessity being the mother of invention and all that. I shook my head, held the bridge of my nose, tipped my head back and sniffed deeply.

  ‘Faaaark.’ I winced. ‘I have just done the biggest line of the strongest fucken Louie I’ve had in my life. I’m peakin’, mate.’

  ‘You still snort speed?’ the blonde asked, incredulous, just before she took another hit from the ice pipe.

  I nodded, wiping my nose with the back of my hand as she handed the pipe to the brunette and leaned back on the mattress, eyes closed, enjoying the rush.

  ‘Old school,’ the brunette said, shaking her head. ‘That shit’ll kill you.’

  The door opened and Channelle entered, naked and stinking of beer. Trev popped his head in.

  ‘Youse are on now,’ he told Arizona and Tulsa. ‘Right now. I mean it.’ He smiled at me before he closed the door and his small, even teeth made the grin look like that of an impish child—completely at odds with the beard and waistcoat.

  ‘Great show,’ I said to Channelle as she pulled a fluffy pink towel from her suitcase. ‘Uh, can I borrow someone’s mobile? Mine just ran out of juice.’

  The others just stared, but Channelle said, ‘Sure, love, use mine. Just make sure you give it back when I get out of the shower.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No worries.’

  I fiddled with the pink flip-out phone until she went to the bathroom, waited till the other two gathered their lube and dildo and left, then slipped through the workshop again and underneath the roller-door. I stuck close to the wall, out of sight of the cameras, I hoped, and my hands were trembling as I fumbled in my bag. Past the cold metal of the gun I found my wallet and slipped out Talbot’s card. No time to wait for the cabbie.

  The line went straight to her messagebank. I rang three more times but she wasn’t picking up. I left a message:

  ‘Um, Detective Talbot? This is Simone Kirsch. You have to come save me. I’m being held captive at the Red Devils clubhouse in Broken Hill.’ Not exactly true but I was sure it soon would be. ‘I know where Nick Austin is,’ I added. Another lie, but it was sure to get her attention. If she ever checked her goddamn messages.

  Just as I was dialling triple 0 I heard a familiar mechanical scrape. The front gate was moving. My god. I couldn’t believe my luck. Maybe some dude on a bike was coming in and I’d be able to slip past, run like hell to the taxi and escape.

  I crept around the side of the clubhouse, staying in the shadows close to the wall, and peered around to the front. The gate slid open and the black van I’d seen at the pub began nosing in. I didn’t know what to do. Wait for Talbot? Try to call triple 0 again? Channelle would be looking for her phone soon, Trev and the boys searching for me—expecting a thousand bucks’ worth of depraved acts and getting awfully shirty if I didn’t put out. The van’s headlights were illuminating the empty car park, but I really needed to get out of there, and if I was fast enough . . .

  I sprinted for the gate, heading straight for the metre gap between it and the van. Headlights blinded me, but just as I passed them I glanced up and saw the scooped-out rat face behind the wheel. Watto.

  It was the last thing I saw before he swung open the driver’s side door and I crashed into it, head first.

  chapter fifty-two

  I came to on a metal floor, unable to move, head throbbing. My hands were taped behind me and my feet were bound and I smelled diesel and road dust. Music pounded below the roar of the van’s engine. Bon Jovi? No, something else. A song about being on a plane, snorting coke, getting all lit up. I’d stripped to it a few years back and remembered the pub with its tiny stage and red and yellow spotlights, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember who sang the song.

  The van turned a corner, I slid across the floor and my bare arm touched a motionless body. I felt fabric, but it was too dark to make out anything except indistinct shapes, or tell if the person was dead or alive. Nick? The road was dirt now, horribly rutted, and when we bounced across a pothole my head thumped on the floor and I was out again.

  Next time I woke it was still dark and bumpy and my mouth was crunchy with grit and dust. The van stopped, and under the relentless pounding of cock rock I heard a door open and the whine of a rusty gate. The door slammed, the van jerked forward and we drove some more, stopped for another gate, and finally came to a halt, tyres munching gravel. The music cut off.

  The side door rolled open and I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be unconscious. I’d done the same thing as a kid so my mum would have to carry me from the car. No one carried me that time, just grabbed me by the ankles and slid me out of the van so I whacked the stony ground with my shoulders, then with the back of my already aching head. I was being dragged by the ankles, top riding up, rocks ripping into my back and tearing into my hands and arms. I heard Watto’s voice, a small way away. It wasn’t him had my feet.

  ‘Not the fucken house, you dickhead. The pen. And pick her up under the arms so you don’t rip the gaff off her wrists.’

  As the dragging continued I opened my eyes a little and saw a vast velvet sky studded with stars so numerous and swirling they seemed fake, like something from a film set.

  Watto swore and muttered as he dragged the other person, then the sky was gone and I smelled tin and more dirt and dogs: old fur, stale urine, ancient, rolled-in cow dung. Watto dropped the other body beside me. After the scrape and clatter of a door being closed and padlocked, I heard the captors confer outside.

  ‘Smoke, mate?’ Elvis Mask.

  ‘Not unless it’s weed, need to kip for a few hours. Long drive.’

  ‘You’re fucken soft.’

  ‘Who gives a shit? He won’t be here till light, anyway.’

  Their footsteps crunched as they walked away.

  The body groaned.

  ‘Nick?’ I whispered. ‘That you?’

  ‘Simone?’ He coughed.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You tied, too?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Where are we?’ His voice was a rasp. ‘Last thing I remember is that fucker king-hitting me then injecting me with something. What the hell are you—?’

  ‘Long story. I finally figured you were giving yourself up to Rod Thurlow and got it in my head to save you.’

  ‘Christ. That’s why I did this, so no one else’d get hurt. You stupid . . .’

  I’d thought he might at least be grateful so I manoeuvred myself around and kicked my legs in his general direction. Got him in the shins.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Enough with the self-sacrificing shit and the insults. We’re here now and we have to find a way out.’ My voice was a harsh whisper.

  ‘My head’s fucking killing me.’

  ‘Mine too, and I’m cold, starving, thirsty and I really need to pee. They said he’d be here when the sun came up. Wonder what the time is now?’

  ‘I have a watch with a light. It’s pushed up my arm so I don’t think the tape’s covering it. I can reach the button with my other hand.’

  I heard him rustle and then a blue light came on, faintly illuminating the tin shed we were held captive in. It was about eight by five feet and not high enough to stand up straight.

  ‘Roll over.’

  He did as I said and I wormed my way towards him, twisting and straining to check out the face on his expensive-looking watch. ‘Four thirty. What time’s sunrise around here?’

  ‘Where’s here?’

  ‘Middle of fucking nowhere, couple of hours out of Broken Hill.’

  ‘I don’t know. Six, maybe?’ he suggested.

  ‘Then we’ve got an hour. Hour and a half, tops.’ I shuffled to the door and tentatively pushed at it with my feet, trying not to make too much noise. It wouldn’t give. ‘They locked it.’ The ground beneath my feet was hard-packed earth. The walls of the shed were tin. �
��Maybe we can dig our way out?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Nick said. Resigned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told you the deal. A million and they leave everyone else alone.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I am. You’re welcome to escape yourself, but I’m not going anywhere. Besides, where is there to go? They’ve taken our guns, we’re in the middle of the desert. You run into that scrub with no water you’re as good as dead by the end of the day. Your best bet is to beg your way out of it. Swear secrecy. Maybe Rod’ll help you. He’s always had a soft spot for the ladies.’ Nick uttered a bitter little laugh that made him sound like he was choking.

  I backed up to one of the tin walls and tried to dig my fingers into the ground, but it was no use. The earth was too hard, and from what I could feel, the tin walls were embedded a long way down. Of course. If a dog couldn’t dig its way out, what hope did I have? I quietly, involuntarily started to cry and when the tears ran onto my lips I tasted salt and dust. I felt along the wall behind me. A small nail was sticking out and I began to rub the gaffer tape that bound my hands against it, just like in the movies.

  Unlike in the movies, Watto had wound around what felt like layers of tape and it was heavy duty shit. I might’ve had a chance if I’d had all night, but an hour? And then what? Overpower him with some judo moves I didn’t possess? My shoulders cramped from lifting my wrists up to the nail but I kept going. Nick just lay there. Outside the sky was turning from black to grey. The half-light peeked through small holes in the tin. His acceptance made me want to kill him, but somebody else would do that soon enough. And not just to him, but to both of us.

  ‘There’s no begging, swearing myself to secrecy or throwing myself at Rod’s mercy,’ I told him. ‘They’re going to kill me too. Watto already had a go with a chainsaw and was going to video the whole thing.’

  He sighed. ‘I tried to make you go back to Melbourne. I told you to go to the cops in Broken Hill.’

  ‘Why does he want to kill me, Nick?’

  ‘That’s the thing, I don’t know. You don’t have anything to do with what happened.’

  ‘What did happen? Shit, you may as well tell me. There’s not a hell of a lot left to lose.’ I thought of the Red Devils’ motto, ‘Dead Man Riding’. We were Dead Men Sitting in a Dog Shed. I almost laughed.

  ‘The bikies want the million because it’s pretty much what we stole—well, when you add up all the drugs as well. Not that we got that much for them . . .’

  ‘You stole a million in cash and drugs from a bikie gang. I’m sorry, but that has got to be the dumbest—’

  ‘Hey,’ he hissed. ‘I already told you we didn’t know it belonged to the bikies. And we didn’t know about the drugs. I didn’t want to take them, but . . .’

  ‘Sorry, dude, you’re losing me. Can you start at the beginning?’ I kept worrying away at my bindings. ‘Where did it start? On the writers’ roadshow?’

  ‘Yeah, in Broken Hill, funnily enough, same place me and Isabella fell in love. God, who am I kidding? I was in love with her the first time I saw her, trying to stuff that ridiculous old-fashioned steamer trunk into the back of the fucking Tarago van. We had our first kiss at the Demo Club and that same cover band, The Rogues, were playing “Fairytale of New York”. Sorry, other people’s romantic stories are just vomit-worthy.’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I admitted.

  ‘We had a ball on that writers’ trip. It was always me and Izzy and JJ sitting up late in pubs and hotel rooms, drinking red wine, laughing, talking shit. One time we even got stoned. It was like being a teenager again. No. It was like being the teenager I’d never been. I thought that she and JJ would get together for sure, and it’s not like he didn’t have a crack, but she chose me. I couldn’t believe that someone like her would want me. JJ was cool about it. You’ve seen him in action. By the end of the trip he had a girl in every port anyway. It was a running joke between us. Sorry. I’m raving on.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  I’d never heard Nick talk so much. For all these weeks this was the story I’d wanted to hear and now it was too late: the information wouldn’t make any difference.

  ‘It was a joke at first. A stupid joke. We were all staying in the pub where the poetry slam was held, sitting out on that veranda, drinking wine. Nerida—I could never call her Desiree—had shown up for her life-writing workshop and we were grilling her for sick stories about her clients, trying to figure out who they were. She told us about this investment banker who was a real perverted arsehole, high on drugs most of the time, and who liked to do it in sight of this enormous stash of cash he always had hanging around the house. She said it had to be at least a hundred thousand, and he wouldn’t even tip.

  ‘I remember Izzy asked her why she didn’t just steal some of it, and Nerida got a bit offended and said high-class callgirls never stole from clients and they never named names. It was sort of like a code, being a priest or a doctor or something. So then of course we really wanted to know who he was and started this sort of twenty questions thing—we were pretty drunk by this stage—and Izzy got this strange look on her face and asked, “Is he from Melbourne?” And when Nerida said yes Izzy said, quite calmly, “It’s Lachlan Elliot, isn’t it?” Nerida got this surprised look on her face so we knew Izzy was right, not that me or JJ knew who the hell she was talking about. Turns out that Izzy used to go out with his friend.’

  ‘James,’ I said. The friend of Victoria Hitchens’ sleaze-bag husband Hamish.

  ‘Shit, you really have been investigating. Then, I don’t know how it happened, but we started talking about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, especially compared to being a high-class callgirl. We’d all missed out on Australia Council grants that year and—’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘They’re government literary grants, anything from five to thirty thousand dollars. I’d applied for twenty so I could take a year off just to write, didn’t get it and knew I’d have to go back to full-time teaching, which I hated. And then we were railing about how it was so unfair that all sorts of mindless, unprincipled cocksuckers had so much money and we were so damned honourable, artistic and deserving, yet struggling to make a crust—JJ wasn’t a lecturer then, he’d just started his PhD—and even though my books were doing well it still wasn’t enough to live on. I don’t know who suggested it first—JJ or Izzy, probably—that we should steal this Elliot guy’s money and start up our own grant system. The Robin Hood foundation or something ridiculous like that. Nerida was just shaking her head, but Izzy was really getting into it, saying, “You’re a crime writer, Nick, you could totally plan this thing,” and we actually made up this—Jesus—heist plan then and there.’

  ‘You weren’t serious.’

  ‘Hell no. Like I said, it was a joke. I’d forgotten all about it by the next morning. Never even crossed my mind until a long time later, when Izzy brought it up.’

  ‘What was the plan?’ I asked.

  ‘It was that stupid and clichéd I’d never even try to get away with using it in one of my books. Izzy was gonna play the femme fatale, get invited back to his place for a tête-à-tête and slip the guy a Mickey, disable the alarm system or unlock the front door or whatever, and then me and JJ were gonna come in. Why we all had to be there, I don’t know. Maybe to beat him up if the drugs didn’t work? I can’t remember. Then we were going to steal all the cash and go off on our merry way and just write and not have to work.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Elliot have known who’d stolen the money?’

  ‘We were gonna give him some sort of drug that induced amnesia—not that any of us knew if one existed, or how to get it. Like I said, it was a drunken fantasy, not serious.’

  ‘But Isabella brought it up again?’

  ‘About a year after I left my wife and we’d moved in together. I regret that, by the way. Not leaving Jenny, because the relationship had well and truly run its course, but the way I d
id it. Sneaking around, having an affair. I should have just come out and said it. I’ve met someone, I don’t love you anymore. Clean break. Instead, I took the easy way out. Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe I liked the excitement of the deception, gave me a thrill. And there I was saying Elliot was an immoral bastard. The whole thing with the article in the Sunday glossy, that was horrible.’

  ‘Your ex-wife told me it appeared really soon after you broke up. You and Isabella playing happy families. I wouldn’t have picked you to do something like that.’

  ‘I didn’t—well—the article was Isabella’s idea. Her second book was being released and it’s hard to get publicity and, shit, I didn’t think it’d come out so soon. And you have to remember I was so fucking in love with Izzy, infatuated. It was like a drug and I’d have done anything—hell, if she’d asked me to run naked down Bourke Street singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” I would have stripped off then and there. Only thing was, I could tell Izzy wasn’t happy with our life together, which scared the shit out of me. I was terrified of her leaving, because I couldn’t believe someone like me had ended up with someone like her in the first place and I knew I’d never get over her, even then.’

  Sounded to me as though Isabella had done nothing to assuage his feelings.

  ‘Were you paranoid she didn’t love you?’

  ‘Yes. No. I dunno. Looking back on it now I think she always loved me. Sounds pathetic? It was just the money situation. I was doing occasional relief teaching and we were both living on that and we thought I’d get half the money from the house Jenny and I bought but it didn’t work out that way.’

  ‘Didn’t the article say you were broke ’n’ happy ’n’ living on love?’

  ‘That was a load of shit. Izzy could never be happy being broke. She seemed to have a mortal terror of it. Probably why she always ended up with so many rich pricks. But then rich men and beautiful women always seem to go together, don’t they?’

  ‘So she was a gold digger?’