Draw the Brisbane Line (8 page)

Sammo staggered backwards, wiping bile from his eyes.  He tried to speak, probably to call her a bitch, but what came out was a wet croak.

‘Oh,’ she said.  ‘Bit delicate, are we?’

Sammo bent over with his hands on his knees and let out a long gurgling burp trailed by a thin stream of bright orange bile.  Jenny didn’t need to turn around to see that Spaz had lost a hold on his breakfast, she could hear it.  The other two yobs were doing their best to keep from becoming links in the chain reaction, averting their eyes and walking out of the sour wafting stench zone.

Tait was staring at her with his jaw slack and his eyes unblinking.  She stared at him and gestured towards the bush, pointing fingers and tilting her head.  He started to come around, but not fast enough, not nearly fast enough for the twitching nerves in her legs and her over-wound tick-tock heart.

She ran.

She had no idea where she was running to, only what she was running away from.  Let them have the fucking car, she just hoped it was enough of a temptation to make Sammo think twice about chasing her down to exact revenge.

This shit just wasn’t supposed to happen, not in Noosa.  Not in Australia.  She felt like she’d been dropped into a Mad Max film.

Maybe she had been.

She was happy for one thing.  She was happy for her trainers.  They were one of her rare concessions to practicality, as they were the most comfortable driving shoes she owned.  The pedals on the LFA did not like her sandals, and more than once she’d nearly run the thing off the road when trying to take her foot off the pedal, only to have the loose back of a sandal catch on the floor and lock it in place.

She whipped between trees and broke through anything resembling a gap in the bushes and scrub, collecting lashings of cuts and scrapes as she went, but not really caring.  She wanted to be far away from Sammo and his thugs.  Her trainers crunched on layers of dead leaves as she ran, and soon she heard another set of crunching footsteps, though these were crunching and slapping, that unmistakable thwack of rubber thongs smacking off heels.

She risked a backwards glance, and confirmed it was Tait behind her.  His face was bright red with strain, and he was running with the kind of high step you usually associate with people trying to sprint through a shore-break.  It didn’t look as though anyone was following them.  She did a lot of jogging and high-intensity interval running, and she estimated they’d covered a good half kilometre.

She stopped running and leaned against a gum tree.  Her lungs felt like they were burning gas and throwing the flames up her throat.  Tait caught up to her and dropped to the ground, panting and wheezing.  Neither of them was in any mood to speak, but their looks spoke for them.

She looked back the way they’d come and raised her eyebrows. 
Are they coming?

Tait looked back, shook his head. 
No.
  He looked up at her and twisted his forehead into a questioning frown. 
What the fuck was that with the vomiting?

She smiled, shrugged. 
I’m a freak.

They both began laughing between heaving breaths.  She sat down next to Tait, and liking this feeling of being relatively still and rested, she stretched out on her back.  Fuck any ants in the neighbourhood, she was tired and she was pregnant.  Tait dropped back beside her.  They stayed that way for a few minutes, maybe as many as ten. It was hard to get a sense of time in the bush if you didn’t stop to look at your watch.  Without cars passing through sequenced traffic lights or scheduled ad breaks in your programme viewing, all you could really be sure of was day or night.

Cicadas were playing their little washboards all around them, and magpies were heckling from the cheap seats.  They were business-as-usual bush sounds, normal and as reliable as the sunrise and sunset — but then they stopped, replaced by distant cracking and popping and a strange rushing noise.  Half a dozen magpies and some smaller birds all took to the air above them.

Tait sat up and grabbed Jenny by the shoulder, his brown eyes wide like chocolate buttons.  ‘Bush-fire,’ he said.

‘Who are you?’ Dave said.

‘Corporal Pia Papetti, US Army.  We need to go now if we’re going to track down your fiancée too.  Things are moving.’

‘Jenny?  What do you know about Jenny?’

‘I know she’s liable to get caught up in some trouble, and it could get very ugly if we don’t find her.  Soon.’

Dave didn’t ask another question.  Questions could wait.  He led her down the lifts to the parking garage where her ride was waiting for them: a military-spec Humvee.

‘How did you get down here?’ Dave said.

‘Why?  Was it supposed to be hard?’

It was Dave’s first experience in a Humvee.  It possessed an aggressive odour of oil, what might be gun oil if Dave had enough experience of the stuff to recognise the smell. 

Jenny had tried to talk him into getting a Humvee a couple of months before she walked out on him, arguing that in Sydney traffic, he needed the bulk and protection.  She just wanted to push him into making a showy display of wealth, and when she finally got it through that stubborn skull of hers that he wasn’t going to cave, she went and bought that ridiculous bloody Lexus.  Jenny and Tom, always working on him to live a little, but they never understood the responsibility of simply being Dave Holden.  He couldn’t just start flashing the cash.

‘I nearly bought one of these once,’ he said to Papetti.

Papetti wasn’t quite holding him at gunpoint, but she did have her sidearm tucked into a holster on her thigh.  She had that sporty look about her, and reminded him of some of the female players on the circuit. Those girls rarely made it past the first couple of rounds in the majors, often because they simply lacked the power and reach to make the really big shots, the powerful serves. They tried to compensate for what they lacked in size with speed, energy and determination.  Sometimes they succeeded.  He couldn’t quite picture Papetti in tennis whites.  Her short black hair would probably sit in a bob if it wasn’t tied back in a drum-tight stump of a ponytail.  A bob might hide the scar on her temple, an inch-long comet-streak which just touched the edge of her hairline. 

‘Is that right?’ she said.

He smiled.  ‘Not really.  I let Jenny believe I was giving it serious thought, just for a little while, but it was never really on the cards.  Too flashy.’

‘Too flashy?  A Humvee?  The only thing less flashy is an actual fucken tank.’

Before he opened the door of the fucken tank, he tried to quiz her about the purpose of the trip, why Tom had to see his brother and his brother’s fiancée so urgently that an armed military escort was required.  She gruffly muttered classified, which Dave took to mean even she didn’t know herself, not really.

Throughout the coming days, he would question why he had gone so readily with her, so compliant in the face of a soldier with a gun and a very loose mission statement.  The answer would come back the same every time: Because Jenny.

‘It was a civilian Humvee,’ he said.  ‘The one Jenny was trying to push on me.  Black and glossy, with built in DVD and music streaming capability, heated seats and leather trim.  As far as I’m concerned, by comparison, this thing we’re in now
is
a tank.’

‘Fucken A,’ Papetti said.

They passed some men-at-work barriers on the way out, where a council worker in high-vis was trying to wash something off the road with a high-pressure hose.

‘I saw them scraping up the remains on the way in,’ Papetti said.  ‘It was like hamburger had been dressed up and sent to go work in a bank or something.’

His stomach clenched as though the ghost of James Cain had just reached inside and squeezed a semi-vital organ, something close to wherever the bile was kept.  He grabbed at the door and wound down the window, an old-fashioned hand-crank which he silently cursed for being so slow and so inconveniently old-fashioned.  He got his head through the gap just in time to eject whatever beer and coffee was left in there, and what felt like a few pints of industrial-strength acid, the kind that can eat through steel.  Papetti made no comment when he pulled his head back in.

‘So you think a Humvee is flashy, but you live in that joint?’  She gestured over her shoulder with a twitch of her head.

He smiled, but it wasn’t really a happy smile.  ‘I haven’t owned the place long, and I only really bought it as a concession to Jenny.  She wanted me to buy something flashy, so I bought the apartment.’

‘You bought an expensive apartment out of spite?’

‘No, I didn’t … I just … Yes, fuck it, I suppose I did.  Didn’t count as a big spend anyway, according to her.’

‘No?  Seems pretty big to me.’

‘Yeah, me too, but I invest in property.  It’s what I do now.’  He laughed, and added, ‘Did.  She knew I could turn the place over for a profit of a couple hundred thousand in a matter of months, based almost solely on having my name associated with it.’

‘So that’s what you’re gonna do?  Flip it?’

‘Well, no, maybe not now.  Maybe not ever again.  I kind of like living at heights these days.  But the thing is, Jenny wanted me to be honest with my wealth, and she didn’t consider selling property to be honest.’

‘Why not?  Lotta people sell stuff.  My pop sells Japanese motorcycles, I’d call him honest.’

‘Yeah, except I’m not really trading so much on my property market expertise, just my name.  What do you do as a professional sportsman, when your playing days are behind you? Sell, sell, sell.’

‘No different in the States.  Except they’re not shy about flashing the green at home.’

‘Yeah, it’s a bit different here.’

Papetti brought the tank around onto the Eastern Distributor.  Most cars gave them a respectfully-wide berth.

‘We’re going to the airport?’ he said.

‘We’ll fly to Brisbane, connect with Miss Lucas from there.’

‘Commercial?’

‘Charter.  I have special equipment, most commercial flights get nervous about checking it in.’

A cold breeze introduced itself to Dave’s spine, shaking it in greeting.  They were springing for a charter flight?  For him?  People only went to that kind of trouble and expense when they wanted something, and although the US Army wasn’t a private enterprise, Dave couldn’t imagine a scenario where they’d be happy to sponsor a Holden family reunion.

‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ he said.

‘Naturally.  As there are things which I haven’t been told.  I know what I need to know, you know what you need to know. It’s the way of things.’

They came out of the darkness of the tunnel for mere seconds before dipping down again into the long dark tube.  A sensor stuck to the windscreen near the rear-vision mirror blipped as they passed the invisible toll collector.

‘You have a tag,’ he said.

‘The car’s local,’ she said.  ‘We don’t bring our own to this place.  Aussie government makes us buy from a local supply.’

‘Yeah, that sounds about right.  What did you say before?  It’s the way of things.’

They cleared the last of the tunnels at Moore Park and emerged into a slow crawl of traffic, the final run to the airport clogged like a public drain.  Dave could see Papetti was trying to maintain a gap between the Humvee and the car in front, but whenever the gap stretched beyond a car length, some lane-hopping muppet would slide in and fill the gap in an attempt to maintain the illusion of forward movement.

‘Drivers in this country,’ she muttered.  ‘I swear.’

‘I’m surprised you’re so courteous,’ he said.  ‘Thought you’d be all, I’m army, get out of my way.’

‘Yeah, well, you get used to leaving a decent length of stopping space when you see the vehicles ahead of you explode from time to time.’

An electric blue Nissan with vanity plates which read S1CKH1T cut in front of them, suspension jacked up at the rear like a bitch on heat presenting for any dog which cared to take a turn.  Papetti smashed the edge of her fist into the horn.  Dave smiled when the saw S1CKH1T’s head jerk in shock at the volume of the blast. He wobbled in his lane.  Papetti aimed a finger gun at the car’s rear-view mirror, cocked her thumb and pulled the middle-finger trigger.

The five minute drive turned into half an hour.  Dave felt a phantom twitching in his legs, an urge deep within himself to move, move, move.  He wanted to scream at the traffic as if it were some obstructive livestock he could scare away with loud noises.  Jenny was stuck in the middle of looting and God knows what else, and he was stuck in traffic.  He’d been trying to call her every five minutes or so, but it went straight through to voicemail each time.  Same result when he called her sister, Kirsty.

He hoped they weren’t deliberately blocking his calls.  Although if that’s what was happening, at least it would mean she was OK.  Probably.

The airport finally came into view ahead of them, and instead of turning right at the t-intersection with the rest of the traffic, the direction of the terminals, they peeled off to the left. 

They were heading for the small private terminals.  Dave had taken charter flights a few times in his career, usually when he had to travel to small exhibition games in towns without a major airport, but his career-long sponsorship deal with Qantas usually kept him on the flying kangaroo.  Less so these days — when the airline sold its frequent flyer programme, just before it gave up completely, Dave still had use of all his accrued points, but his platinum status didn’t mean a thing to the new owners of the scheme.

They turned into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the BlueStar terminal, though terminal might have more to do with its health than its function.  The parking lot was empty but for a white Toyota LandCruiser which looked like it was over a decade beyond the manufacturing line, and no-one stirred around the white aluminium demountable office.

‘Come on,’ Papetti said, frowning as she shut off the Humvee’s rumble and stepped out onto the gravel.

Dave followed her up the steps of the demountable.  She flipped the handle of the door without slowing and strode into an interior which surprised Dave a little.  He’d always gone straight from car to plane, never lingering long enough to investigate what passed for a departure lounge.  The interior of BlueStar looked like the waiting room of an expensive specialist surgeon, someone who only treated the rich and privileged.

No passengers sat in the Eames recliners.  The coffee bar was fully-stocked but apparently unused, a plate of shortbread cookies still stacked in perfect pyramid formation.  The wide-screen TV monitors, which Dave guessed should have been displaying flight departure times, were instead screening a reality cooking show.  A large chef with thinning curly hair pulled back into a tight ponytail wept as a stern headmistress-type woman took cupcakes from a pile on a plate and threw them, one by one, to the floor. 

A guy in a high-visibility yellow vest over a workman-blue short-sleeve shirt sat behind one of the reception/check-in desks. His feet were propped up on the polished wooden surface.  Dave could see muddy smears on the glossy surface where his black safety boots had dragged a mix of dirt and Avgas.  His fleshy pale cheeks carried about three days of dark stubble, and the grey pallor of his face was suggestive of a diet lacking in several key vitamin letters: A, B, C, maybe even some as yet unclaimed letters, like H or R.

‘Flight’s cancelled,’ he said without looking away from the television.  He took a swallow of coke from a bottle and burped.  ‘Scuse me.’

‘How do you know my flight’s cancelled?’ Papetti said.

‘All flights are cancelled.’

‘All BlueStar flights?’

‘All flights.  You should have been sent a text message.’

‘All flights?  The fuck?’  Papetti pulled a seemingly bomb-proof black phone from her pocket.  ‘I don’t have any texts,’ she said, flipping through the display.

‘Yeah, networks are a bit down at the moment.  On account of the riots.’

‘Riots?’ Dave said.  ‘I haven’t heard of any rioting.’

‘Yeah, nah, police have shut down a lot of the mobile data?  To stop the rioters from, like organising?’

‘But, what riots?’ Dave said.

‘The ones they’re worried about?  They want to prevent them?’

‘Who are they worried about rioting?’ Dave said.

‘Probably airline passengers,’ Papetti said.  ‘Why are the flights cancelled?’

The guy performed a kind of irritated shrugging jig, clearly pissed off that Dave and Papetti didn’t just understand what he was saying to them, that he had to divert his attention from the crap on television to actually think and speak to them.

‘The strikes, OK?’ he said.  ‘Security, baggage handlers, but it’s air traffic control who are really stuffing things up.  No flights are going anywhere in the country right now.’

‘Fucking air traffic control can’t fucking strike,’ Papetti said, and looked to Dave.  ‘Can they?’

Dave shrugged, sighed.  ‘I guess they can.  Fuck!  How are we going to get to Jenny?’

‘Hey,’ the guy said, finally focusing his attention on his visitors.  Dave noticed the ads running on the TV.  ‘Aren’t you Dave Holden?’

Dave nodded, tried to smile but found his face was stuck in neutral.