Kittyhawk Down

by Garry Disher

  So he talked to her mate-to-mate about his bewilderment, his shame, his loss of nerve, and how it was all down to Ian Munro.

  And she listened, mate-to-mate.

  This time Dwayne Venn was there when Brad Pike called round to see Lisa Tully.

  'If it isn't little Bradley.'

  'Gedday.'

  'Come in, son, come in.'

  Two o'clock on Tuesday afternoon and the house was doped up, curtains drawn, air dense, Lisa and Donna sprawled on the floor, high as kites.

  He had a lot of catching up to do, hadn't had a hit of anything since yesterday, and eyed the bowl on the coffee table. You had your speed there, your ecstasy, your hand-rolled joints, even—if he wasn't mistaken—a baggie of coke and heroin in a twist of aluminium foil.

  Plus your bottles of Southern Comfort.

  It all felt right, somehow. All of a piece with the Native American posters and the Confederate flag and Dwayne's Harley Davidson parked in the hallway.

  'Got something to chill me out?' Pike asked.

  'Have we ever,' Venn said, and slowly, over the next hour or so, Brad Pike began to unwind and talk and enter into the spirit of things. The last time he'd had the undivided attention of anyone in this town was when the cops had grilled him about Lisa's kid.

  After lunch on Tuesday Ellen rang her husband and said, 'Alan, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said what I did.'

  He didn't respond and she pictured him there in the kitchen, heavy jaw set hard against her, swotting for the sergeants' exam. It was not that she owed him an apology. It just made sense to apologise. She figured that if she could keep things sweet at home until after the exam, then he'd manage the exam better and life would be easier on everyone.

  Then he coughed and said, 'Okay.' Not 'Thank you' or 'It was all my fault,' just 'Okay,' so she put some brightness into her voice and asked, 'Did Skip call?'

  'No.'

  Overnight, it seemed, Skip had dumped Larrayne. He'd not called her, taken her out over the weekend, or responded to the messages that Larrayne had recorded on the Listers' answering machine. Larrayne was distraught. 'What did I do wrong?' she'd wailed. 'Has he met someone else?' The dialogue out of a bad romance novel, but heartfelt and anguished even so.

  'Okay, just checking in, hope it goes well today,' Ellen babbled, still playing the guilty one, and she hung up, almost banging the phone down.

  And now it was the afternoon and she wanted a word with Aileen Munro.

  She got to the farm in time to see Carl Lister trying to shake off a handful of journalists. He was in his car and looked ropeable enough to ram them but recognised her and called her name. 'Ellen, can't you do something?'

  She got out of her car and approached them. 'Come on, guys, let the man leave.'

  'But what is he doing here?' they wanted to know. 'Is he a friend of the family? Does he know where Ian Munro is?'

  All good questions, Ellen thought. She cleared a path for Carl and was about to ask him how Skip was, had he gone on a trip, Larrayne would appreciate a call, but he sped away before she could get the words out. She gave a wry shrug to the waiting journalists, who mobbed her good-naturedly.

  'Sergeant Destry, any news on Munro?'

  'Any chance of an interview, Sergeant?'

  'Is there a reason why you're calling on Mrs Munro at this time?'

  And so on.

  She grinned and turned away from them. As she did so she came face to face with Tessa Kane, the editor of the Progress. Ellen nodded. 'Tessa.'

  'Ellen.'

  There was a pause; then, to let Tessa know that she sympathised with her position on the asylum seekers, Ellen said, 'Did you hear? They found those poor Iraqi men camping at the tip.'

  Tessa flashed a bleak smile of thanks. 'They'll go into solitary confinement and eventually be deported.'

  Ellen didn't know why, but she said, 'I don't know where Hal is today. Following up something, somewhere.'

  Tessa shrugged. She didn't seem to care. Instead, she said, 'Who was that man in the car just then?'

  Ellen considered the question. There seemed to be no harm in saying, 'Carl Lister. He's more or less a neighbour. Why?'

  'Oh, no reason,' Tessa Kane said, and Ellen knew at once that there was a very good reason for the question.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Challis worked until four on Tuesday afternoon and then drove to the aerodrome, intending to work on the Dragon's cockpit for a couple of hours before he went home. Home these days meant early- or late-evening darkness, his answering machine full of his wife's hysteria, a comfortless instant meal— for he was often too tired to care about cooking—and a barely refreshing sleep before he got up to a chilly morning, the sun weak through the leafless trees in his back yard.

  Home could also mean Tessa's place. The opening was there, but he still felt vaguely disconnected from her. And in today's Progress she'd been scathing about the community's selective hysteria, its focus on the asylum seekers and blindness to the things that really affected the local community, like the increased dealing and pushing of drugs. She was on the warpath and when she was like that, seeing the world in black-and-white terms, he felt that his lack of fire would show, and she'd be disappointed in him.

  Oddly enough, she'd published the Meddler column— probably hadn't had time to pull it before going to press, he thought.

  At the aerodrome he could forget himself for a while. Draw comfort from working with his hands. Maybe Kitty would be there.

  What did he think he'd do—save her from a loveless marriage? Who said it was loveless? He wanted it to be loveless. A big difference. Or they could have an affair. That would suit a man who has good reasons to shy away from commitment.

  But it's all in my head, Challis thought, when he walked into the hangar and saw Kitty Casement and got a preoccupied smile and wave from her and nothing more. 'Catching up on paperwork,' she called, waving an invoice at him, her voice losing itself in the hollow reaches of the high steel walls and oil-stained concrete floor.

  'Have fun,' Challis called back, climbing into his overalls and hauling himself onto the Dragon's bottom wing.

  And slowly he felt better. He managed to forget himself for a while, one part of his mind absorbed in mapping out the stages of a physical task, the other dreaming of a time in history, 1942, when this very aeroplane had helped ferry Dutch refugees, who were fleeing the Japanese invasion of Java, from Broome to Perth. Or earlier, 1934, when a Vacuum Oil Company geologist had flown it over tricky magnetic country in the remote desert region of central and northern Australia.

  That's where the history stopped. Challis had no idea how the Dragon had subsequently come to be a wreck in a barn near Toowoomba in Queensland.

  They called it synchronicity, didn't they? Or something like that. For just at that moment Kitty rapped her knuckles on the fuselage and when he'd uncoiled himself from beneath the instrument panel and poked his head out, he saw her waving a book at him. 'This came in the post,' she said.

  Challis straightened the kinks in his back and climbed out to join her. The book was evidently self-published, everything about it looking amateurish, rough and ready, including the photograph on the front cover.

  'A few weeks ago I got Rex off the computer long enough to search the Internet,' Kitty said with a laugh. 'I couldn't believe it when I found sites devoted to the Kittyhawk. Apparently the man who flew my plane died a few years ago, but one of his friends sent me this.'

  The cover photograph showed a Kittyhawk fighter on an airstrip in the hot sun, a young man in shorts, boots and dogtags grinning at the camera. Challis guessed that he was the author as a young man, Lt Andy H. Ludecki, from New Jersey.

  'Darwin?' Challis guessed, pointing at the photograph.

  'Yes.'

  Kitty couldn't control her pleasure. Her face was wreathed in smiles. 'He even mentions my plane and the man who flew her.'

  But Challis felt only an unwarranted chill. 'I don't understand the title,' he sa
id.

  'Kittyhawk Down? Oh, that's just a quote from a radio transmission the day Darwin was bombed.'

  'Shot down?'

  'Yes.'

  'Kitty,' Challis said, 'be careful, won't you?'

  She looked at him oddly for a moment, touched his sleeve with a brief grin, and turned away, saying she'd better get back to work.

  Shortly after that Challis's mobile phone rang. It was Tessa Kane, sounding less strained now, saying she had some information for him. Challis, feeling an obscure loneliness and pain, suggested a drink and bar snacks at the Heritage in Balnarring.

  Six o'clock. A dewy evening was settling and the moon hung in the skeletal trees. Challis could smell chimney smoke as he got out of his car; good, they'd lit the open fire in the side room. Tessa Kane's car was already there, parked in a corner under a tree. No other cars yet. They'd have the place to themselves for a while. A glass of red and a plate of nachos by the open fire. Get a glow on and forget about Kitty Casement.

  Challis found Tessa on the massive leather couch. She got lightly to her feet and kissed him affectionately. 'Sorry I got mad at you last time,' she said. 'I know you're under pressure and can't always divulge things when you want to.'

  Challis felt a rush of affection and gratitude tinged with guilt: she didn't warrant his neglect. His heart lifted: the firelight, the beautiful woman, the promise.

  'I ordered a bottle of Elan,' she said.

  'Good.'

  'Nachos, and guacamole and chilli dip.'

  'Great.'

  She turned a wicked, full-voltage grin on to him. 'Chilli dip prepared by someone else, you'll be glad to know.'

  Challis snorted, blushed, shifted about, suddenly embarrassed. A few days before Easter he'd prepared a curry meal for them, and was slicing hot fresh chillies on his chopping board when she arrived. They kissed, and found themselves stripping, then making love, and afterwards, prone on the sitting-room rug, had felt a burning sensation in their genitals.

  Tessa laughed. 'Sit, Hal.'

  She swung her slim knees toward him when they were seated, and immediately began to speak. 'Remember I told you about the Easter walk and the men in the four-wheel-drive looking for something on the beach?'

  Challis stiffened, then relaxed. This wasn't an attack. She was generous and forgiving by nature, and this was plainly business. 'Yes.'

  'I saw one of them again.'

  'Where?'

  'The Munro place.'

  Challis watched her carefully. 'Do you know who he is?'

  'Lister. Carl Lister.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Fairly sure. He was the passenger, not the driver, that day on the beach. At the time, I didn't think I'd seen him clearly, but I must have, subconsciously. I remember the scarring on his neck.'

  'How do you know his name?'

  'I was hoping to get an interview with Aileen Munro— you know, local paper, sympathetic hearing, not some hotshot from the Age or the Herald Sun—when this Lister character drives out. Almost ran over a couple of reporters. Anyway, I recognised him as the man in the passenger seat of the Toyota.'

  Challis frowned. Toyota. Ian Munro owned a Toyota. 'But how do you know his name?'

  She touched his wrist. 'Hold your horses. Drink your wine. Eat your nachos.'

  He breathed out, grinned, swallowed his wine.

  'That's better. The reason I know his name is that Ellen Destry arrived at that moment, and she helped Lister avoid the scrum, and told me his name.'

  'Carl Lister,' Challis said to himself. Then: 'But the driver, that day on the beach. Could he have been—'

  'Ian Munro? Yes, possibly, though he wore a beanie and shades and his face was distorted with all the shouting he was doing.'

  Challis stared into the flames, losing himself in them. Lister and drugs, Munro and a drug crop…

  'Hal?'

  He turned to Tessa.

  'What are you thinking?'

  She wasn't asking it as a lover—or only partly—but as a journalist. She had that intent, narrowed gaze. But he found that she was holding his hand, so he told her that he was thinking not about the past but the here and now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Larrayne was subdued, teary, on Wednesday morning. She didn't want to get up, and for the past two days had taken to wandering around with her mobile phone in her hand.

  'Why won't he ring?'

  'Perhaps he's away, sweetie. Studying for exams. Staying with friends.'

  'Well, why didn't he tell me? I'm sick of leaving messages.'

  Larrayne recognised the anguish well enough from her youth. There's nothing worse than waiting for calls that never come, the calls of the beloved.

  'I love him, Mum.' Said frankly and devoutly, as though Ellen doubted it or no one before Larrayne had ever loved.

  'I know you do. It will sort itself out, you'll see.'

  'He's avoiding me, I can feel it.'

  In the end, Ellen told Larrayne to get dressed, go to school, take her mind off Skip.

  Fat chance, but it was worth a try.

  She dropped Larrayne at the school gates and drove to the police station, and Challis nabbed her as soon as she walked in to CIB. 'Carl Lister was seen visiting Aileen Munro.'

  And at once Ellen connected the dots: Lister, his son, Munro, marijuana, and saw good reasons why Skip had suddenly stopped seeing Larrayne.

  Three-thirty that afternoon, just before the four o'clock shift went on, found Pam sitting with John Tankard and Sergeant van Alphen around a table in the canteen. They were full of coffee and someone's leftover birthday cake and disinclined to start work.

  'Get this,' Tank said from behind yesterday's Progress. 'Says here: "With labels like 'illegals' and 'queue jumpers' we demonise the asylum seekers". I'll give her labels.'

  He poked his head around to see that Pam was paying attention. 'Challis's girlfriend,' he explained unnecessarily.

  Pam said sweetly, 'And what labels would those be, Tank?'

  Caught on the back foot, he looked flummoxed, then mustered himself: 'Poser, do-gooder, un-Australian, wanker. That do you? Want me to go on?'

  Pam thought that John Tankard would know all about labels, he who'd been called a stormtrooper. 'What do you think, Sarge?'

  Van Alphen said, 'So long as it doesn't affect his job.'

  She had no idea what he was talking about. Tankard's job? 'Sarge?'

  'Challis,' van Alphen said. 'So long as his work isn't compromised by what his girlfriend thinks.'

  'Hadn't thought of it that way, Sarge,' Pam said, thinking that Challis's relationship with Tessa Kane wasn't the issue here. The issue was the asylum seekers and their reception and treatment. People were funny. Funny and limited.

  As Wednesday evening settled, the sun flattening red over the mangroves and smokestacks of Westernport, Brad Pike's skin crawled with need and loss, and he left his flat beside the strip of used-car yards and drove through the side streets to the cop shop at the roundabout. Plenty of parking outside so he zipped in, braked, turned off the ignition, waited a few seconds while the motor ran on and coughed and died with a rattle, then went in and said that he was being stalked.

  The cop on desk duty—looked like a probationer—called Sergeant van Alphen. Shit, shit, shit.

  Van Alphen came in, lean, dark, a repressive cast to his face. 'Well, if it isn't young Bradley. How's things, Brad?'

  'Not bad. Yourself?' Pike said automatically, then kicked himself for being polite to a cop.

  'So, what weird shit have you been up to now, Bradley?'

  'No need to be like that.'

  'Like what?'

  'I come in here on legitimate business,' Pike said, the word 'legitimate' tangling his tongue a little.

  'Your only business with us is telling us where you buried Lisa Tully's kid.'

  Pike felt his face grow hot. 'The charges were dropped.'

  'But that's not the same as being found innocent, though, is it, Brad?'

 
; Twice lately he'd been told that. Van Alphen was a hard nut, dark and hard, like old leather. They reckon he'd gone off the rails a bit last year, but if that was true then he'd long recovered. He'd been on Pike's case from the start. In some ways he was as fucking bad as John Tankard.

  'I come in here to make a complaint.'

  'Don't tell me, you're being stalked. You said that on Monday, you said it last week…'

  'So how come no one's listening?'

  'Because you're full of shit. You're a slime bag and don't deserve to live.'

  The probationary constable was looking on with his eyes and pimply mouth wide open.

  'It's true, someone's following me.'

  'Constable Tankard,' laughed van Alphen.

  How did van Alphen know that? Had he put Tankard up to it?

  'I dunno who it is,' Pike said. 'I get, like, these phone calls in the middle of the night, these letters. I can feel someone's behind me all the time. I think it's Lisa's sister, maybe Dwayne Venn. When I'm out walking and stuff.'

  'Out walking? You never walked a millimetre in your worthless life.' Van Alphen leaned forward over the front desk, disturbing a pile of brochures. 'You know what I think? It's in your mind, a delusion. The world hates you for what you did to Lisa Tully's kid—hell, you are probably stalking Lisa— so you're twisting it around, pursuing the joys of victimhood.'

  A deep, slow flush spread through Pike. But van Alphen wasn't finished.

  'You're a lonely, isolated, pitiful specimen of humanity. You know it, the world knows it, and you're desperate for sympathy. You're intent on blaming others for your own shitty life. You can't accept any responsibility for that shitty life.'

  Then van Alphen stood back and folded his arms dismissively. 'So forgive me if I'm sceptical, Brad.'

  Pike opened and closed his mouth a few times and turned to leave, just as the station boss, Kellock, burst in, calling, 'We need a couple of cars out at the aerodrome. There's been another shooting.'