And into the park we went.
Everybody’s parents said the same thing. Never go into Centennial Park after dark. Of course, we did sometimes, the three of us. One is a coward, three a little braver. Never far, though. Not to the centre, not after dark. We were heading to the centre now. Over Grand Drive, downhill, down Dickens Drive, then into Parkes, towards the centre of Centennial Park.
Your mind races in this kind of situation. When there are a couple of Magnum 747s pointed at you. The first moment the gun is pointed, your brain freezes, like your heart is pumping liquid nitrogen. Then it thaws, then it’s off. In all directions, all at once. My mind had raced straight to someone called Sallie-Anne Huckstepp. Floating face down in Busby Pond in the park all those years ago. The last person murdered there, as far as I knew. It’s a pretty good suburb, after all.
So there we were, walking and wheeling towards the middle of the park in the middle of the night, the smell of faeces firmly and unavoidably in the air, and I’m thinking of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp and what a good suburb it is. Busby Pond is on our right, though, and we are not heading towards it. Then I’m thinking about running. Running would mean me leaving Toffee and Jack. Running would mean tripping over, being belted, then being shot. On the other hand, running could be a good idea.
I kept thinking about running, and then Kava. Kava was our hope. He was here somewhere. About to save us. He had heard them, found a place to hide, kept quiet, and was about to save us. He was not lying unconscious on the floor somewhere, snoring off a hangover, dreaming of a carpet of Randwick Gourmet Special. He was about to save us.
While my mind was racing, while I was thinking these things, we were suddenly told to turn left at the Duck Pond. We instinctively stopped. ‘Keep walking,’ Cement Voice said. Walking meant heading towards Lachlan Swamp.
‘Where are we going?’ I wondered who said that. Then I realised it was me.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Cement Voice said. I did. I walked on, gut churning, blood pumping, toward Lachlan Swamp.
Centennial Park had all been swampland once. Then they sent the unemployed in during the 1880s and turned the place into a 220-hectare park for the well-to-do to celebrate the Centenary of the Colony. Work for the dole is not such a radical plan after all. There was slavery back then, too. Lachlan Swamp itself is a small nature reserve in the park now. Named after the early nineteenth-century governor whose progressive views on convict rehabilitation would these days see him struggle for the factional support needed for a pre-selection. Still, walking into the swamp, I was coming around to the tough-on-crime position. Zero Tolerance. Truth in Sentencing. Thank God almighty, I can see the light at last.
Guns weren’t new to Lachlan Swamp. It was the site of the last duel in New South Wales. Between two politicians. They really should bring some things back. I was thinking that, getting all nostalgic for the good ol’ days, and simultaneously hoping that we were merely going to be witnesses to Cement Voice and Metro-Goon’s fatal duel. Then we were told to stop. It was looking like pistols at dawn, but not what I was hoping for.
And then I was thinking, what the hell are they going to do? Shoot us? It made no sense. They had stopped us right in the middle of the swamp, on the edge of a wooden walkway. The walkway was about five metres long, and ended overhanging the water. The swamp was three foot, four foot deep at most, the size of a couple of Olympic pools. It ran into Lily Pond, stretched around a grassed picnic area, but where we were standing was the middle of the swamp forest, surrounded by paperbark gums, ferns and native plants. I could smell green dankness, moss, wet earth. I could smell Jack too. It was dark amongst the trees and bushes, but with the moonlight I could see the walkway clearly, and the water beyond it. Maybe we were going fishing.
‘What are you going to do?’ It was me again.
‘I’ve already told you once. Shut the fuck up.’ Cement Voice was not a great conversationalist. Out of the two of them, I’d say Metro-Goon would have been the better bloke to have a beer with.
My brain had raced towards a drowning. It was the obvious choice. A shooting might give the game away. Then again, a triple drowning in Lachlan Swamp in the middle of the night wasn’t a great way of disguising murder either. I had to ask. ‘You have instructions from someone, right? This is meant to be disguised as an accident, isn’t it?’
‘Shut up,’ Cement Voice said. He looked at Metro-Goon. ‘Hurry up. Get it done. The smell’s making me sick.’
‘I’ve written to the cops,’ I said quickly. ‘They know about the other murders. They’re already investigating. This is a set-up. Other people know.’
‘I’m shit scared,’ Cement Voice said.
‘How are you going to do this? Just tell me that. How do you think you’ll pull this off?’
Cement Voice shrugged. He put the gun down by his side. Then he pointed it at Jack. ‘This poor stinking fuck accidentally falls in. He drowns. You go in after to save him. You drown too. Happy?’
I absorbed what he said in silence. I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming. ‘The water is only three feet deep here. And what’s he done, wheeled himself in?’
‘It’s four feet,’ Metro-Goon said. ‘We checked yesterday.’ Nothing had been left to chance.
‘It’s muddy at the bottom,’ Cement Voice said. ‘Accidents happen. It’s dark. He rolled in. Misjudgment.’
‘It’s dark,’ I said, ‘because it’s four in the morning. The time of death will be 4 am. How’s that going to look? What are we doing in the park wheeling around here at 4 am in winter?’ I had the shits now. The flight or fight response, I guess. I’d headed off flight, and I was getting angry. This was insulting. My murder had been given no proper thought at all by these bozos.
‘He can’t sleep,’ he said. ‘You go for a walk. Shit happens.’
I stood silently for a while, looking at him. ‘No one pushes a disabled person around Centennial Park at four in the morning.’
‘You do,’ he said. Just like that. The answer that solved everything. Whoever was behind this, Barry Hardcastle would not be pleased with this plan. The finer details left a lot to be desired.
‘I’m trying to tell you, I’m not who you think I am. Neither is he. There’s nothing wrong with him. Apart from the missing leg.’
‘Mate,’ Metro-Goon said, sounding entirely reasonable, ‘we don’t make the orders up. We just follow ’em.’ Fair enough, then. Drown away.
I pointed at Toffee. ‘What about him?’
Cement Voice scratched his head. ‘He’s not meant to fucking be here,’ he said. ‘This was a double job only.’ How inconvenient. Complain to the union.
‘So?’
‘So he’ll be coming for a ride with us later.’
‘Going nowhere,’ Toffee said. ‘And no fucking drowning.’
‘Oh, there’s no drowning? Then there’s fucking shooting,’ Cement Voice said, holding up his gun.
These morons. ‘If there’s a shooting,’ I said, ‘One: there’s a loud bang. Two: there are bits of someone all over the gums and bushes and the blue-tongues and the possums. You’re going to clean that up? Three: the bats will go absolutely apeshit. I promise, you won’t get out of here alive.’ Cement Voice just stood there looking at me. Expressionless. ‘Your plan is moronic,’ I said. ‘Fucking moronic.’
Ever felt like you’ve pushed your luck?
He was on me in a stride. He grabbed my hair, then dragged me with him. As I flew through the air, I saw a blur of Toffee out of the corner of my eye, and a flash of steel against his head. Something fell to the ground, like a hundred-year-old oak.
Then my head was underwater. I struggled. Every sinew. When it’s life or death, you don’t submit. Your brain is overloading, focused on the struggle, but at the back of it, at its core, it knows when it’s useless. It knows when you’re a gazelle in a lion’s jaws.
At first you fight not to breathe. You know that breathing, swallowing, means death, as surely as in a gas chamber. So, you hold
on, hold on, struggling still, until the urge to swallow becomes overpowering. Then your brain tells you that you can breathe. Swallowing the water won’t kill you, it will save you. You’re willing yourself not to die, knowing that you will. You’re going to sleep with the fishes. Or, in Centennial Park, you’re going to sleep with the eels.
And you don’t want to die. You really don’t want to die. And you’re crying underwater. Crying. Then you can’t hold it. You can’t stop it anymore. You swallow. You have to. An order from the brain you cannot stop. So you are dying. And you must be dead. Dead. Water is all through you. Through your arteries. Through your veins, your capillaries, your bones, your marrow, your spine, your heart, your brain. You have water on the brain. And your brain fills and fills and fills with water. There is pressure, pressure. Then your head explodes. Water blows everywhere. From your ears. Your mouth. Your nose. You explode.
And the water keeps coming out. You have died. You have died and come back as a fucking fountain. Water is everywhere. You’re a Centennial Park fountain. Then it stops. You swallow.
You expect water, but it’s air.
Thirty-Seven
Kava had done the twelve-to-two shift in front of the monitors, and was asleep upstairs when they broke in just after three. He’s a light sleeper, though, and they woke him. He would have jumped them, but he heard them threaten Toffee and Jack with a bullet each. So he knew they had guns. He hid instead. The attic. Dusty, but empty.
He went downstairs not long after he heard the back door shut. He crept outside but didn’t see which direction we had been taken. He didn’t need to. It was soon obvious. He ran back inside, called Bill and Gabby on their mobiles. He noticed the men with guns had left some bags behind. Tools to remove the locks they had taken out of the side servants’ door they had come in through. No doubt the plan was to put the locks back in place after completing the Lachlan Swamp multiple drowning.
Bill and Gabby both arrived about ten minutes later. Kava was already gone. Following his nose. Bill did the same. It was quick thinking by Jack. He wasn’t scared. Not of these dipshits. He had walked around jungles in South East Asia and faced far worse.
He had opened his colostomy bag. Just enough to leave a trail of himself for others to follow. An ex-soldier and a Samoan native had no trouble picking up the scent.
Jack’s below-the-belt twist on Hansel and Gretel was exhausted about one-third of the way down Dickens Drive. We could have been anywhere amid more than 200 hectares of Norfolk pines, Moreton Bay figs and eucalyptus. Bill Doyle guessed where they would be taking us, though. Duck Pond, or Lachlan Swamp.
The first thing I saw when I was breathing air again was Gabrielle. Dark jeans, and only a dark singlet on top. Her hair was all over the place, but all over the place in an erotic, as distinct from erratic, kind of way. I had nearly been drowned, but I had the wherewithal to register that. Like I said, men are never really free.
Gabby was standing astride Metro-Goon. She owned him. She was holding the spear gun I’d had in my bedroom the way Stallone holds an AK-47. She held it between Metro-Goon’s legs. He didn’t look like he was planning any sudden moves. Jesus Christ. Lara Croft’s turned gay. I was thinking this when I gagged again on something in my mouth. Hot liquid, trickling back down my throat. Warm iron and salt. Blood. I spat, coughed, nearly vomited again.
‘You’re okay, son,’ I could hear Bill say through some kind of fog, like it was a dream, like I was still underwater. ‘Just a bloody nose.’ I gently felt between my cheekbones. Someone had attached a large overripe avocado to my face.
Which was when I noticed Cement Voice’s nose. It did not appear to be firmly attached to his face anymore. It was dark, the moonlight filtering through the paperbarks, but at a guess, I thought his nose was now structurally attached, loosely, to his right earlobe. He was covered in claret, and his breathing suggested he might be in need of a tracheotomy.
So, this is the scene I took in when I came back from the nearest thing I had ever had to forty winks with the short-finned eels. It was all good news. I was alive. My team was winning. We had the guns, we had the spears, we had the fists. And, from what I could tell, there was an unspoken consensus to use all weapons at our disposal, in no particular order.
I wasn’t thinking straight when we arrived back at the house. I was euphoric. I was still alive when I should have been dead. I was ready to take on the world.
Toffee and Kava took care of the two goons in the library. Tied them up, taped their mouths. Kava, the softie, suggested taping Cement Voice’s nose back in place, but Toffee overruled him. ‘Fuck him,’ he said, firmly. Which pretty much summed up my feelings on the matter too. We’d hold the maxillofacial surgery for the time being. The rest of us then went into the living room, where I began to set up my interview equipment.
‘What do you think you’re doing now?’ Bill stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips, King of Siam again.
‘I have to set this camera up,’ I said.
‘And?’
‘They confess. On tape.’
‘They confess, hey? What makes you think they’ll do that?’
‘We torture them until they do.’
I wasn’t certain if I was serious. I was in pain, suffering shock, and mildly concussed. I was not feeling charitable towards Cement Voice.
‘Torture? You’re going to perform it?’
Me? Well, I was pissed off, but torture is not really my thing. ‘I was thinking one of you bigger blokes might like to try the persuasion thing,’ I said. ‘Or the girl with the spear gun.’
Bill shook his head. He looked at Gabby, then looked back at me. ‘You thought we’d take care of it, did you?’
I nodded. I had nearly died. I’d made my contribution for the morning.
‘When do we call the cops?’
‘Later. Not yet,’ I said. ‘After we have what I want on tape. If not, Plan B first.’
Bill shook his head again. He turned back to Gabby. ‘You look a lot more sensible than him at the moment,’ he said. ‘Come with me. Let’s have a chat.’ He tapped Jack on the shoulder as he turned to walk out. The three of them left me. I was alive, but I was out of the loop.
Kava entered the room moments later to keep me company. He had a VB can in his hand. It was 5.05 am. He held it up to me. ‘Get you one, mate?’ They never stop thinking of you, these Samoans. I shook my head.
‘Are they tied up?’
‘Nice and tight,’ he said. ‘Toffee keeping an eye on them. His evil eye. Not happy being hit.’
Toffee had been pistol-whipped, or cannon-whipped. He needed stitches, but had made do with a blood-soaked tea towel and packaging tape. Sporting this new headwear, he did not look like someone the Australian Government would go out of its way to give a visa to.
‘He’s all right?’
‘He’ll be good,’ Kava said. We were silent for a while. I could hear the others conspiring outside, then Kava added, ‘Hey, Chris, mate?’
‘Yes.’
‘That Bill. Got a punch on him.’ He smiled.
‘I know,’ I said. And I did. ‘You should see him with real estate agents.’
Ten minutes after they left me, Bill and Gabby burst back into the living room with military urgency. Decisions had been taken. ‘Kava,’ Bill said, ‘I need you to go somewhere. A butcher in Clovelly Road. It’ll be closed, but someone will be there at six. Knock at the door, tell them Bill Doyle sent you. Give them this note. Everything’s to go on my tab.’
A butcher. In Clovelly Road? That’s nice. We’re having a fucking barbecue.
Bill looked at me. ‘I’ll be back in twenty minutes.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m getting some plastic. And some other gear.’
‘Why is Kava –’ but Bill was gone.
I looked at Gabby. She was still doing a great Lara Croft impersonation. Just as sexy, hold the collagen, the implants, and the Billy Bob tattoo. ‘Chris,’ she said calmly,
‘we think you’ve been concussed. You need to take it easy. We’ll handle this now.’
We’ll handle this now. What is she? MI6? 008? Fuck, give a girl a spear gun and a violent male-induced situation and she turns into a female Bruce Willis. Without the conservative sympathies, of course. And almost certainly not the same taste in women.
She must have realised she was a touch Thatcherite in the way she spoke to me. She took me out to the kitchen, examined my nose, which was far more centrally located than CV’s, gave me some painkillers and a glass of water. Then she told me roughly what the plan was. I was annoyed I only had a small part – a walk-on, really – but I was feeling a bit vague. Being seconds off drowning can do that to you. And I did like the plan. Not the glass of water, though. It tasted like frogspawn and eel skin. Then again, for days afterwards, so did everything else.
Thirty-Eight
Bill returned as promised within twenty minutes. He had driven back in one of his gardening vans, full of all its usual equipment. He carried a roll of plastic into the living room, then started getting organised.
Kava arrived five minutes later. It was 6.30 am. Toffee met him at the car, and the two of them carried in four large plastic trays, their contents covered with what looked like old tablecloths. Kava then carried inside one more item, a white plastic bucket, lid on, its viscous contents sloshing about inside as he walked. I was then ordered by Gabby to go and sit with the prisoners in the library, wait until I was called. I obeyed. I had set the equipment up. Just the tripod camera. No need for hidden cameras now.
Fifteen minutes later, Toffee walked into the room. He grabbed hold of Cement Voice, put his hand easily around his substantial bicep, squeezed it like putty, and dragged him out of the room. We shut the door and took him into the downstairs bathroom. Once in there, Toffee threw him in the bath, tied his legs together, checked the knots on his hands and the tape on his mouth.
For just a second I was tempted to turn the bath on, fill it up, give CV a taste of what it’s like to have your head held underwater.
The Ambulance Chaser Page 32
