Cargo Cult (7 page)

Listening from behind a display of
women's hosiery, Doug reached boiling point. He was here on serious
business and he wasn't going to put up with any of this nonsense.
He tapped Nick on the arm to get his attention then indicated, with
a lift of his head, that he was about to reveal himself. Keeping
his eyes on Nick, he mouthed the word "Now!" and leapt to his feet,
switching on his torch and brandishing his shotgun.

"All right!" he yelled. "Everybody
face-down on the ground. Now! Drop your guns... and..." His voice
trailed off as he took in the crowd of stunned women in front of
him. Loosi Beecham, wearing a brief satin night-dress, stared at
him open-mouthed. Beside her, Loosi Beecham in a towelling
bath-robe, adopted a posture of surprise. As did the Loosi Beecham
in the lilac underwear and the Loosi Beecham in the shiny gold
evening dress. Other Loosi Beechams stared back at him in every
conceivable kind of outfit. There was even a pregnant Loosi Beecham
in a jersey wool sheath dress.

"What the fuck is going on here?"
demanded Nick.

"We are choosing clothes," said a
Loosi Beecham in a white wedding dress and matching pumps, stepping
forward.

"Are you wearing masks?" asked
Doug, still stupid with surprise.

"Should we be?" asked Braxx,
peering at Doug's face to see whether he had one on. “Did anyone
see any masks in here?” he called to the others. There was a
general round of no-ing and head-shaking from the Loosies.

“Shut up!” shouted Doug, his voice
high and tense. “Just shut the fuck up!” He glared around at the
strangely dressed women. “Who are you? What the hell is going
on?”

“We are fellow humans, seeking only
to mark our identity through differentiated clothing,” said Braxx.
“That is normal, is it not?”

“I think they’re all off their
trolleys, mate,” offered Nick.

Doug grasped at the explanation.
“Yeah, like a bunch of Loosi Beecham lookalikes on some kind of
girls’ night out. Probably been to see some male strippers, got
tanked up on cocktails and now they’re... they’re...” Here Doug’s
imagination failed him.

“Robbing Steiner’s and shooting the
dummies,” said Nick, completing the unlikely scenario.

Doug’s eyes roved across the group,
taking in the full, pouting lips, the large, high breasts. “Jeez,
mate. Have you ever seen so many great chicks all in one
place?”

Nick just shook his head in wonder.
Whatever was going on, he was beginning to see that there might be
an up-side.

“Hey, girls,” said Doug, smiling
for the first time. “The party doesn’t have to stop just ‘cos we’ve
arrived. Me and Nick like to have fun too, if you know what I
mean.”

“It’s strange,” said Trugg. “I can
understand nearly all their words but I just can’t make any sense
out of the whole.”

“Perhaps they too are of a
low-intelligence sub-species,” suggested Klakk.

Braxx had to agree. “Subdue them,”
he said. “We will take them somewhere safer and question them.” His
followers surged forward and grabbed the two astonished men before
they had the presence of mind to defend themselves. Too late, Doug
and Nick tried to put up a fight but the Vinggans were surprisingly
strong. In his rage and impotence, Doug managed to get off a single
shot from his shotgun. There was a blinding flash and a deafening
explosion as the gun discharged, firing straight into the ceiling
and taking out one of the water sprinklers. The recoil knocked the
awkwardly-held weapon from his hand, almost breaking his trigger
finger. The Vinggans were startled for an instant but then piled
onto the humans, wrestling them to the floor and stunning them with
their neural dampers. The fire alarm clanged into life and a
torrent of water began to pour down all around them.

Astonished and terrified, Braxx
shouted, “Leave them!” and set off for the hole in the wall as fast
as his lower limbs would carry him.

Rushing down the stairs into the
strange, internal rainstorm, Drukk was just in time to see the
lights of his companions disappearing through the hole in the wall.
He shouted to them but the roar of the sprinklers drowned him out.
Splashing across the soggy carpet, he hurried after them.

Wayne had been asleep when the
thunder of the gunshot woke him and rain began to pour down
accompanied by an insistent alarm bell. Still drunk and more
confused than ever, he crouched beneath the clothes rail as
thirteen bizarrely-clad women raced past him and out through the
hole. He crawled out and stood up to watch them go, instantly
drenched by the sprinklers. They ran out to the old ute he’d seen
on the way in and milled around it shouting, “Where’s Drukk?
Where’s Drukk? Are you Drukk? No I’m Trugg. Where’s Drukk?” for a
while before running off across the loading bay into the night.

That’s when a woman ran into him
from behind and they both went sprawling across the drenched floor.
The woman was on her feet first. As Wayne blinked through the rain
at her, he thought she looked vaguely familiar. She was stunningly
attractive in a short orange dress that clung wetly to her
otherwise naked body and he gaped at her in awed admiration as any
young drunken male would. She pointed a small stick at him and
said, “Come with me at once.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding eagerly.
“Absolutely.”

They ran out to the ute. “Where did
the others go,” asked the woman. Wayne pointed off down the street.
“Can you operate this conveyance?” she asked him.

“Er, yeah.”

“Then do so,” she said and climbed
in.

“Right!” he said, climbing in right
behind her.

Detective Sergeant Michael
Barraclough was a big man. In his early thirties, what used to be
solid muscle was just beginning to turn to flab but, in his usual,
easy-going way, he was happy to let it. Ten years ago, he had been
a formidable forward on the Divisional rugby team. Even now, he was
the kind of man you wouldn’t pick a fight with in a pub.
Fortunately for everyone around him, Barraclough was one of the
most easy-going of men and not one of his colleagues had ever seen
him lose his temper.

Tonight, he was working the
graveyard shift again. As a lifelong bachelor and dedicated police
officer, he was happy to do more than his share of unsocial hours
and let his mates see their families and friends a bit more often.
He was a friendly, sociable man and the relative solitude of the
night-shift sometimes got him down.

In fact, just after 11:30 pm, he
was thinking of wandering down to the canteen to see if there was
anyone around for a chat, when he received the call from uniform to
say there had been a break-in at Steiner's in the city. Pleased to
have something interesting to do, he beamed at the telephone. "Good
on ya, mate," he told the voice on the phone. "Any arrests?"

"Oh you'll love this, mate. We
bagged Doug McKinnock and Nick Phillipousos, both armed and
equipped."

"You got Douggie Mack!" Barraclough
was impressed. "Was anybody hurt?"

"No. That's the queer thing about
it. They were both out cold when we found them. They're awake now
but they look real crook."

"Where are they?"

"On their way in to the hospital.
The paramedics here couldn't see anything wrong with them."

"I hope your blokes are keeping an
eye on them. I've been chasing that bastard McKinnock all over
Brisbane since he was a 15-year-old thug robbing grocery stores for
beer money."

"I don't think they’re up to making
a run for it." The voice hesitated. "They've said some funny stuff,
Mike."

"Don't worry about that. I'll soon
have the bastards talking straight. Look, try to stop everyone
trampling all over the crime scene quite as much as they usually do
and I'll be there in five minutes.” He sighed happily. “What a
night this is turning out to be! Just tell me there’s a beautiful
woman involved and I’m going straight to Heaven."

“Mike, mate, there’s about a dozen
beautiful women in this case already.”

Barraclough laughed heartily. “See
you in five,” he said.

-oOo-

There were still a couple of fire
service officers on the scene, along with the police forensic team
and two constables who had been assigned to guard the hole, when
Barraclough pulled up at the back of Steiner’s department store. A
four-wheel drive, already identified as belonging to Nicholas
Phillipousos, was cordoned off, waiting for the tow-truck to take
it in to the station for more forensic tests. Barraclough looked
around the loading bay and then at the hole in the wall.

The first thing that struck him was
that there was almost no debris. If the burglars had used
explosives to blow that hole, there would be rubble everywhere. So
they either cleaned up after themselves, or they cut or hacked
their way through the wall some other way, carrying off the bricks
and plaster as they worked. He moved closer. There was plenty of
brick-dust on the ground around the hole and some small lumps of
debris. So many people had trampled in and out and the ground was
so wet that, if there had been tracks from wheelbarrows or even
bulldozers, there were no traces left in the dirty, red slurry. He
moved around the outside of the building. It was a warm night. If
anyone had driven or run away from the building before the police
and fire brigade had arrived, the wet trail they would have left
would have long ago dried up.

He chatted briefly to the cops on
guard and then to the firemen, finally to Mr Greer, the store
manager who appeared from the hole, shaking his head in despair.
There had been no fire. The alarm had been set off by somebody
shooting at one of the sprinklers.

“There are clothes all over the
floor,” Mr Greer complained. “It’s like someone went around all the
rails just throwing everything into heaps. What kind of maniac
would do such a thing? And the mannequins! They’ve destroyed seven
mannequins. Blown them to pieces! Why? What’s the point? Were those
men on drugs? Are they insane?”

Disengaging himself, Barraclough
went into the building. The floor was still sopping wet, with soggy
clothes dripping everywhere, making a constant tinkling, like a
light, summer rain. He had to use his torch since the lights were
off. He made his way through the dismal wetness to where portable
lights had been set up for the forensic team. They were just
packing up to go as he arrived.

“This where they found Douggie and
Nick?” He asked.

A slight, craggy man in a plastic
coat turned to him and smiled. “G’day, Mike. How’s it going?”

“Not bad, Jim. What have you
got?”

Jim shrugged. “Not a lot, mate.
This is where they found them, all right. Both out cold. Both flat
on their backs. There were two shotguns lying nearby. One had
discharged one chamber — presumably the shot that set off the
sprinklers.” He showed Barraclough a spent shotgun cartridge in a
plastic evidence bag, then indicated the hole in the ceiling above
them. “No other weapons. Uniform have been over the floor once but
we can have another look in the daylight. No cartridges or shell
cases apart from this one.”

“Then how did they blow up the
seven dummies?”

Again, Jim shrugged. “It could have
been explosives. We found a sports bag over there with some
plastique in it. Enough to blow a safe, maybe, but perhaps they had
some more and were having some fun. The mayhem in here suggests
they ran amok before they shot the sprinkler and passed out. The
M.E. might want to check them for drugs.”

“Was there anybody else
involved?”

Jim shrugged yet again. “No idea.
This is a department store. Hundreds of people walked around here
today, so there’s no point looking for dropped hairs, or fibres, or
even fingerprints. The watering this place got won’t have
helped.”

“Have you checked the edges of the
hole for fibres or blood?”

“That’s where we’re heading now
but, you know, there have been a lot of people through there
tonight. I doubt that we’ll find anything conclusive.”

Barraclough thanked him and
wandered off across the floor. He called the police on duty at the
hospital and asked them to make sure their prisoners were tested
for drugs, then he went back out to his car and sat in it,
thinking.

Something was very wrong with this
whole picture. Douggie Mack was a hard-nosed, serious criminal. He
wasn’t the kind of bloke who would get doped up and vandalise a
department store. Maybe someone had spiked Douggie’s drink. The man
had plenty of enemies. But why would he take out his burglary kit
if he was just off his head and fancied a bit of fun? Could the
drugs have been slipped to him after he’d set out on a raid? How
could anybody do that? It just didn’t make sense.

Then there was that hole in the
wall. What kind of blagger would excavate a hole in a wall big
enough to drive a truck through if all he wanted was to get inside
the building? It must have taken hours to chisel out all those
bricks and carry them off somewhere.

He shook his head vigorously,
trying to clear it. There were two people who knew for sure what
had gone on in that shop tonight and it was time he had a word with
them both.

-oOo-

“Oh great,” Doug moaned as
Detective Sergeant Barraclough walked up to his hospital bed. “The
perfect end to the perfect fucking day!”

“Watch your language, Douggie,”
warned Barraclough, nodding towards the uniformed constable sitting
near the bed. “There are impressionable young people around who
aren’t used to dealing with sewer rats like you. What’s the matter
with you anyway? You don’t look too crook to me.”

“Piss off, cop.”

“You made yourself look like a bit
of a galah tonight, Douggie. Had a few tubes too many, did we?”

“Hey. The only one pissed tonight
was that runt Wayne.”