Draw the Brisbane Line (22 page)

Dave felt better behind the wheel. Looking at the road, concentrating on aiming that Everest between the white lines, it occupied his mind. Papetti — Pia, he reminded himself — sagged in the passenger seat, the rigid military posture broken down as if it had been held together by magnets and glue.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered, chewing her nails and any loose skin curled more than a knife’s edge away from her fingers.

‘What for?’

‘What
for
?’

‘I’m not suggesting you have
nothing
to apologise for. I’m just unsure of which thing in particular you’re sorry about.’

‘You think I should be sorry about Shirley Temple?’ Pia said, nodding and chewing her finger up to the knuckle. ‘You think I was wrong to shoot him, don’t you? You would have liked it better if I just let him shoot you, wouldn’t you, you fucking martyr?’

‘Hey. Did I say that? I know it wasn’t your fault. I know he forced your hand.’

‘Then what am I fucking sorry for Dave? What am I apologising for?’

The road was long and straight ahead as far as the high-beams could shine, so he risked turning his head away from it for a few seconds to look her in the eyes. She stared back at him with a fighting gaze, anxiety and fury fuelling her nervous energy in equal parts.

‘Your potty mouth,’ he said.

Her anger melted in a grin and a giggle. That, Dave decided, was the most worrying thing of all: her recovery speed. There was no depth in a recovery like that.

Two cars blew past them, heading south. The second one, a small Nissan SUV, opened its horn. The receding Doppler whine sounded like a whinge.

‘You think that was meant for us?’

Pia shrugged. ‘Maybe. Like an
abandon all hope
kinda thing.’

They drove, and Dave’s eyes kept flicking over to the glove box in front of Pia. He wanted her to put the gun in a bag in the boot, or at least the back seat, but she refused to leave it far from reach. The glove box was a compromise, but it was still too close for his comfort. He had a lot of questions for her, but he didn’t want to risk another brain-snap.

He chose to risk it anyway, but he took the Tom Holden approach to information-gathering: sideways and roundabout.

‘So where have you been, um … working?’

‘Working?’

‘You know. Fighting.’

‘Oh. Middle East in general, you know. Bit of Iraq, bit of Afghanistan. Syria towards the end.’ Her voice dropped to a mumble on
Syria
.

‘So you like, finished your tour?’

‘Something like that.’

The way she talked about her time in the Middle East reminded Dave of the way
he
sometimes talked about his failed tilt at Wimbledon. He had match point in the fourth set, and Radan Jovanovich dropped his return of serve right on the edge of the baseline, a fly’s wingspan beyond his racquet.  Dave saw the puff of chalk dust as it clipped the white line.  The linesman called it out, but Dave overruled it without stopping to think what he was doing.

Dave.
Overruled
it.

It was a reflex, the outcome of intensive coaching sessions. Not his tennis coach, but his PR agent, Clary White. He was so used to being liked that he threw away a perfectly good major title, just to maintain his image. He went on to lose in five, but his reputation as the nicest guy in professional tennis would endure. That’s what he traded on, his nice guy image. Not his success.

He wasn’t a loser.  No, it was important to make that distinction — or to engineer it.  Dave Holden was a
good sport
.  And not just good, but the best.  And he had to
love
that.

Clary went to great pains to emphasise just how successful that loss was. His name might not have made it onto that beautiful famous silver cup, but it would be inked on product endorsement contracts again, and again, and again.

His mood darkened when he was safely away from the camera, with friends or acquaintances.  If they brought up the inevitable subject of his painful legacy of failure, the muted response he gave them sounded a
lot
like Pia’s did now.  All her military bravado and confidence was packed away somewhere.  Maybe in the glove box.

‘You, ah,’ he said.  ‘You must have seen some action.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she groaned.  ‘Is this it?  Is this your idea of subtle conversation steer?  Are you gonna ask me my favourite colour next? And when I say
blue
, you’ll say
mine’s red
?  And then I’ll break down weeping because red reminds me of all the blood I saw spilled in Afghanistan, and I’ll tell you everything about everything because, like, the floodgates have opened?’

She just about shouted the last word, and Dave found he couldn’t help but angle his shoulders away from her ever so slightly.

‘I was going to ask you how many people you killed,’ Dave said.

‘Oh.  Oh, right.  Nine.’

‘Only nine?’

‘What do you mean, only nine?  That’s more than you’ve killed.’

Dave let that one drift to the floor with the dust and the dirt and the tiny fragments of shit which inevitably found their way onto everything.  A grey nomad motor-home rumbled past them going the other way, and Dave caught a brief glimpse of happiness, a husband and wife team laughing at some shared joke.  They were followed closely by a BMW X8 which looked desperate to overtake them.  It might have been Dave’s imagination, but the traffic had been steadily increasing in the opposite direction.

‘I thought you might ask me about the scar,’ Pia said.

‘I assumed you picked it up in a trampoline accident.’

‘Close.  An IED outside of Tabqa, in Syria.  I was running a scouting mission, and my spotter, Brittain, was ahead of me, looking for somewhere to take a leak.  Fucken thing took him to pieces.  I just got grazed by shrapnel, never did find out if it was from the IED, or rocks.  Or part of Brittain.’

Dave winced.  Pia drew patterns on the window with her finger.

‘It knocked me on my ass.  Lost consciousness for a short while.  Woke up with guns in my face.  Couple of kids with AK-47s.  Turns out, they were the ones who set the IED.  When I came to properly, they had my hands tied, sitting on the floor of some dusty little shack.  One of them held a video camera, and the other one had a machete.  Looked like they were arguing over who was going in front of the camera and who was behind it.  I started working at the ropes behind my back, got half a hand free before the cavalry arrived.  The kids apparently didn’t stop to consider that I could be tracked by my own people.’  She giggled.  ‘What happened to those guys, it didn’t get video-taped.’

‘Fuck,’ Dave said.  ‘When did that happen?’

She rubbed at the scar.  ‘About eight months ago.’

‘And they just threw you back into it?’

‘No, I was put on leave.  Medical first, then stress.  I’m on kind of administrative leave at the moment.’

Dave let that roll around in his mind for a moment, then asked, ‘Do soldiers on administrative leave normally travel around fully armed?’

‘Not as a rule, no.’

A five car convey zipped past them on the right, four impatient speedsters trailing one obstinate Honda.

‘Pia?’

‘Yes Dave?’

‘Are you … AWOL?’

‘No Dave.  You can’t be AWOL while on leave.  That’s what the L stands for.’

‘Oh.  Right.  Of course.  But you’re breaking the law?’

‘Oh yeah, sure.  All kinds of ways.’

‘Right.  Great.  Can I ask you another question?’

‘Don’t stop now.’

‘How long have you been sleeping with my brother?’

‘About six months.  What tipped you off?’

‘It’s a twin thing.’

They drove in silence for the next five kilometres, the distance measured by the markers to the next town, somewhere starting with T.  Dave tried to imagine his brother with this violently attractive woman — this unbalanced, damaged girl with the ability to kill him several times over — and he found it wasn’t much of a stretch at all.  She was exactly the kind of girl Tom would go for.

Dave’s stomach growled and clenched like a fist.  He tried to remember the last time he had an actual meal.  Half a bag of Twisties the night before was probably it.

‘Why did he send you?’ he said.

Pia twitched her right shoulder, an almost timid shrug.  ‘We have an understanding.  He trusts me.’

‘But why does he want to see me?  Why not come to me himself.’

‘Now, that I can’t tell you, Tom was very strict on that point.  I wasn’t even going to do this whole urgent escort thing, not really.  I mean, unless you wanted to.  I was just going to set up a secure phone call between the two of you.  Then, if you wanted to, you could have come back with me.’

‘So why didn’t he just call me?  He has my number.’

‘Because your phone is tapped.  Also, your apartment is bugged.  Did you know that?  Probably not.’

‘My, my … fucking
what
?’

‘That’s why we had this little change of plans, this road trip.  As soon as I heard about the —’ Pia wiggled her fingers from the roof of the car and slapped them into her palm.  She made a wet
splat
sound with her mouth.

Dave’s spine and blood and skin all dropped to the temperature of an old corpse.

‘We had to expedite things.  Tom told me to get you the fuck up there right away.  That’s what he said. 
Pia, get my brother the fuck up here right away
.’

‘Tapped?’ Dave said, barely louder than a whisper.  ‘Bugged?’

‘Yep, fraid so.  Let’s just hope none of that stuff gets leaked, hey?’

Someone had taken a dump in Dave’s chest, a big one.  Not
on
it, but
in
it.  He felt like he might throw up.  ‘So what … what do we do?’ he said, not feeling the words as they stumbled out between his numb lips.

‘We stick to the plan. Find ourselves some QTA good old boys, see if we can get them to help us draw a bead on your fiancée.  They seem to know something about her whereabouts.’

‘Where?  How?’

She nodded to the radio. A reporter was shouting over the racket of breaking glass and shouting from Tweed Heads. Somewhere in the background, a man’s voice shouted
Queenslander!

‘There,’ Pia said. ‘In the shit.’

Wikileaks
@wikileaks

New evidence that @daveholden assisted the suicide of Commerce Bank of Australia CEO James Cain.  US complicit in cover-up, reasons unknown.

It was both terrible and relieving, finding Lily bloodied and beaten but still breathing.  Still in the land of the living, but sprawled on the white carpet of the living room amidst the stains of her own filth and fluids.

Did that make him a bad man, feeling that way?  Nero knew he wasn’t a good man, not in the father-of-three, conscientious-voter sense. But he was good to his wife, that much he could say without even a gambler’s glimpse of a lie.  He valued Lily’s life more than his own, which is why he kept her safe in the Brisbane apartment, away from the violence and infighting of his business interests up north.  He knew he was taking risks with his own people, trying to segregate his own business activity, which is why he kept Lily in seclusion.  He even kept the marriage itself a secret.

Or at least he tried to.  Apparently, some secrets just wouldn’t stay kept.

So he felt a small measure of relief when he found her damaged but not dead, because he’d really been expecting the worst.  The feeling of relief didn’t last long though.  It never did, in Nero’s experience.  Relief was just the precursor to more serious, meaty emotions.  Confusion, irritation.  Anger. 
Rage
.

Rage.  That one really stuck.

She was cradling her left forearm in her hand.  It looked broken, slightly askew just above the wrist.  Her black hair was matted with blood and vomit from where she’d been left sprawled on the floor.

The boy had stood back after they rushed into the apartment and saw Lily on the floor.  He waited while Nero went to her and crouched down, shaking with a tremor harder than anything possibly caused by drugs or fatigue.  It was a good thing he’d kept his distance, because Nero thought if he was close enough, he just might have beaten him to death for no other reason than he was there.

Her face.  God, her
face
. It was like a child’s recreation of a favourite cartoon character in clay, but they ran out of beads to do
all
the teeth.

Nero spotted a small white kernel trailing a thin red comet tail, just near his bent knee.  He picked it up and turned it over in his fingers, feeling the sharp wet underside and the smooth knobbly topside.  He wasn’t sure what to do with it next, having picked it up, so he slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.

Her
jeans, he noticed, were still on and zipped up, thank Christ.  And again, was it wrong for him to feel such disproportionate relief at his wife being possibly close to death, but at least remaining sexually unmolested?  Maybe, but death might not yet be far off for her if he didn’t get her some medical attention soon.  He tried emergency services, but no-one was picking up, just a recorded message about unusually high call volumes. 

She groaned, and Nero brushed a hand as lightly as he could against her shoulder.  She flinched at his touch and let out a short hoarse cry of pain.

‘It’s OK, Lily love,’ he said.  ‘I’m here.’

‘Ooo,’ she said.  ‘Ooo.’

‘Don’t try to speak, love,’ he said.  ‘We’ll get you some help.’  He looked back over his shoulder to where Sammo was frozen to the spot.  ‘There’s a phone on the kitchen counter,’ he said.  ‘You see it?’

Sammo nodded.

‘I want you to call the number six speed dial.  When they pick up, tell them there’s a game on at the tower, right now.  You got it?’

Sammo nodded, and moved over to the phone.  He maintained some distance between himself and Lily, as though she might be booby-trapped.

‘Ooo,’ she said again.

‘Shh.  Quiet love.’

He thought he knew what she was trying to say. 
Book
.  Of course that’s what Blinky was after.  If he knew about Lily, then he knew about the book.  The bang book.  It was the key to one of his most profitable enterprises: arms dealing.  It used to be difficult to get firearms into Australia, often with components shipped separately and then reassembled once collected.  But of course, sometimes parts went missing.  Nero could fill an open-pit mine with useless, incomplete rifles and handguns.  These days, border patrols were often more than happy to take a healthy payoff to turn a blind eye.  With wages what they were, folks needed every spare bit of cash they could just to get by, and Nero always paid well.  A lot of the sales went to small businesses and landholders, simply looking to defend themselves. Some went to private security firms who were unable to tool themselves up within the confines of the law.  But their single biggest customer at that point in time was this paramilitary, farmyard soldier outfit, the QTA.  He always thought those boys were paranoid nutters, arming themselves against foreign invasion.  Nero knew a few of them personally, the ones he dealt with — he thought they must be pissed about the Yanks dropping into their backyard.

So, Blinky had the book.  That meant he knew where the stockpiles were, who the customers were, what the sales pipeline looked like, the whole business.  Lily ran a lot of the admin for him, and he entrusted her with the bang book.

Sammo was talking to someone on the other end of the phone, but Nero had tuned out the conversation.  When he hung up, he said, ‘Someone’s coming.  Ten minutes.’

Nero nodded.

‘You want me to clean that up?’ Sammo said, nodding back at the door to the apartment.

Nero had to turn around to see what he was talking about, and then saw the writing on the door, a message smeared in hand-high capitals in something brownish-black: INDO CUNT.

‘What the fuck is that?’

Sammo approached the door and took a couple of tentative sniffs.  ‘Smells like Vegemite,’ he said.

Nero started laughing, he couldn’t help it.  ‘Blinky, Blinky, Blinky,’ he said with a hoarse chuckle.  ‘You are going to die a horrible, painful death.’

Doc Byrne arrived fourteen minutes later.

‘You’re late,’ Nero said as he opened the door.

Doc, a mostly slight man with the exception of a few dozen pies stored in his middle-age paunch, shuffled past Nero into the apartment.  His shoulders sloped naturally into the weight of the paramedic case he lugged at his side.  ‘Traffic,’ he grunted.  ‘Roads are stuffed.  I thought you were dead.’

‘Yeah?’ Nero said.  ‘Who’d you hear that from?’

Doc waved away the question with his left hand, like he was shooing away a bothersome fly.  ‘Stevie told me.  Dunno who he heard it from.’

Stevie supplied Doc, and numerous others, with a dependable supply of black market medical supplies.  Doc was a practising GP, but he ran an off-book business to help prop up his bottom line.  Stevie could have heard the news about Nero from anyone, via who knew how many perpetually-spinning rumour-mills.  Nero wondered just how far news of his untimely demise had travelled.

‘Who knows you came here?’ Nero said.

‘It’s one in the morning,’ Doc said.  ‘Who am I going to tell?’

Nero nodded.  ‘Let’s keep it that way, OK?’

He had very few advantages, damaged as he was.  If being dead was all he had to work with, it’d have to do.

Doc went to work on Lily, cutting away her shirt and jeans and cleaning away the blood and the vomit.  Nero told Sammo to find them something to eat as he walked around the corner to the bedroom.  He closed the door behind him and opened the blinds of the floor-to-ceiling windows.  Brisbane stretched out below him in an uncommon buzz of activity and traffic.  He’d never seen so many cars on the roads in the city, in the country, all at one time.  The noise of it reached him even through the thick windows of the apartment, far above everything but sound and violence.  The occasional helicopter passed over the mess below, noisily bragging about its freedom of movement.

He sat down on the side of the bed and the plush covers sighed under his weight.  God, it would feel so good to just put his feet up and rest his head on the pillow.  He tried not to think about it.  He tried to ignore the smell of Lily on the sheets, on the pillows, and he lifted the slim white telephone handset from its cradle on her bedside table and pressed speed-dial number three.

He closed his eyes as it rang, tried to slow the flow of anger pushing its way through his central nervous system, setting fire to his heart and pounding drums in his head.  He needed some of the anger just to keep him going, but if he let too much in it might tip him over the edge.

Red picked up on the third ring.  ‘Yeah?’

The sound of idling motorcycles receded in the background, and the heavy crunch of footsteps told Nero that Red was walking somewhere quieter to take the call.

‘Red,’ Nero said.  ‘It’s me.  You alone?’

‘I am now,’ Red said, his voice lifted half an octave by evident surprise.  ‘Didn’t think you were with us anymore.’

‘Yeah, well … news of my death, and so on and so forth.  What did you hear happened?’

‘Heard you went nuts up north, Blinky had to put you down.  Thought it was bullshit when I heard it.  Blinky couldn’t put down a beer, let alone big Nero.  Not on his own, anyway.’

‘Yeah, well, he didn’t have any trouble imposing himself on a woman.’

‘Ah, fuck.  Not Lily.’

Red was one of the few members of Nero’s inner-circle who knew about Lily.  He was Nero’s best man at the small ceremony in Bali.  He was also the only member of Nero’s organisation with whom Lily had any contact.  Nero knew Red wouldn’t have anything to do with Blinky or his bullshit power grab, which could only mean someone in Red’s crew had found out.

‘Who in your crew, would you say, gets along with Blinky?’

‘Fucking Noonan,’ Red said immediately, apparently thinking the same thing.  ‘I’ll kill the little prick.  Blinky’s on his way down here, with the rest of them.  He called me a couple of hours ago.  Claims to have the reins, wants to assess the business.’

Nero thought he’d do that, once he figured out what the bang book was.

‘What do you want me to do when he gets here?  Top him?’

It was tempting to say yes, go on and put a bullet in his head.  Even more tempting though was the idea of doing it himself.

‘Stall him if you can,’ Nero said.  ‘Keep him hanging around there.  I’m coming down there.’

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep him waiting.  If he starts to get suspicious, it might get ugly.’

‘Mmm,’ Nero grunted.  ‘Then you better prepare for ugly.’

‘Brother I’m
always
prepared for ugly,’ Red said.  Nero could hear the grin in his voice.  ‘But do you think you can get here quick enough to … to do what you need to?’

Nero looked at the gridlocked traffic, lighting up every motorway and side-street, like radioactive dye running through some giant’s circulatory system.  Then he lifted his eyes to the helicopters buzzing around, some of them media choppers and some of them emergency services and some of them no doubt military.

‘I’ll find a way,’ he said.