Heller (20 page)

A soft,
patient laugh in response. “You must always ring me when you need
me, no matter what I’m doing. I don’t mind if it’s you,
Matilda.”

What to say to
that? “Um . . . okay. Bye.” I rang off hastily, taking the coward’s
way out and turning my attention back to my pressing problem.

Fortunately
there was enough foot traffic in the late lunch crowd to provide
Dixie and me with cover, but not enough for Lily to be swallowed
up. She strode determinedly, as if with a definite goal in mind. We
covered a few blocks until we reached the outskirts of the city’s
red-light area. She took a left turn and walked a block further,
then turned left again down into a small lane. She slowed down, as
if looking for a building name or number. Even from this distance,
we could see the wicked smile on her face as she stopped in front
of one building, opened the door, releasing a burst of pounding
rock music, and disappeared inside.

My heart sank
as we casually strolled past the building. It was a squat and
shabby dump, built from grimy scuffed blockwork in desperate need
of a fresh coat of paint. There was a barred window either side of
a blood-red door, the sign above it depicting a badly-drawn and
faded cartoon devil with enormous horns and evil eyes. It was The
Red Devil, a bikie bar, notorious for regular stabbings, shootings
and drug dealing. Raided by the police frequently, it had also been
bombed twice in the last year by rival gangs. We crossed the road
and stood opposite. It was definitely not a nice place for a
married woman to hang out, or any woman for that matter. I would
never have let her anywhere near the joint, which is obviously why
she had ditched me. Dixie and I looked at each other in horror.

“You gotta be
shitting me!” she said. “I’m
not
going in there.”

“Me neither,”
I agreed. I rang Heller again and told him where Lily had gone.

He sighed
heavily. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ve just picked up a
couple of my men who were finishing a job nearby. Stay where you
are. Do not go inside, Matilda.”

I had no
intention of doing otherwise.

We waited
about five minutes. I was on edge, feeling sick, pacing up and down
the footpath, wondering what was happening inside. I hoped that
Lily was all right. She was a pain in the butt but she was not much
more than a kid, after all.

The door to
the bar flew open suddenly and Lily appeared in the doorway. She
was crying, her makeup smeared and her clothes in disarray. Her
face was full of desperation and sheer terror. She screamed, her
eyes searching around wildly for help. A burst of crude laughter
escaped from inside and a hand grabbed her savagely by her hair,
dragging her backwards. She screamed again in fear. The door
slammed behind her.

During those
long periods without any meaningful employment, Dixie and I had
loved to read crime books featuring tough female cops and
investigators. When we were very bored on nights with no prospect
of a date, we would practice our tough chick characters in case we
ever got the opportunity to audition for one of those coveted rare
roles. We would take turns rushing into our bedroom, kicking open
the door, sometimes rolling on the bed and jumping back up, gun
(hairbrush) at the ready, screaming some apposite
bon mot
like, “Don’t move, motherfucker!” The more cask wine we consumed,
the more elaborate the entrances and the more foul-mouthed the
bon mot
. I remember one evening, after quite a bit of
cardboard chardy and trying to do a cool roll into the room, I
bounced off my bed and landed awkwardly on the floor, painfully
spraining my wrist. Dixie had laughed so much at my lack of
coordination that she had almost wet herself, but my hand had been
out of action for weeks afterwards.

Without
thinking, I looked at Dixie and yelled, “Tough chick!”

I ran across
the road, fumbling in my bag. Dixie, game as ever, followed right
behind, loudly cursing me. I violently burst through the door of
the bar, my unexpected entrance not startling the few patrons in
its main bar area who were apathetically playing pool or propping
up the bar. They didn’t even bother looking up.

“Police!” I
yelled out, briefly flashing my library card. I kept one hand in my
bag, firmly on my capsicum spray.

“Police! Stay
where you are! Nobody move!” Dixie bellowed behind me. Despite her
small stature, she had an impressively loud voice that forced the
patrons in the bar to pay attention to us. Nobody moved. They were
used to being raided and knew the drill. Running only earned you
extra attention from the cops.

AC/DC’s
‘High-voltage Rock ‘n’ Roll’ blared from the speakers. The bar was
dimly lit, its windows begrimed with dirt. What we could see of the
decor was uninspiring. The carpet was an indeterminate swirling
maroon pattern, probably useful for hiding bloodstains, and the
walls were painted a depressing dog-shit brown colour. The
furniture was old, mismatched and battered, some of the chairs so
fragile in appearance that I wondered if they were occasionally
used as weapons or projectiles. It was that kind of place.

“Where’s the
woman?” I yelled in the direction of the barman. They are often the
most detached and sober person in any drinking environment. Or so
said Tysen, I recalled from my brief training.

“What woman?”
he asked insolently, resuming his wiping of a grubby rag over a
glass. He was a big slovenly man with long hair slicked back in an
oily ponytail, moving with the slow indifference of someone who
loathes their job.

“Don’t mess
with me, sunshine!” I shouted contemptuously, puffing myself up as
aggressively as possible. “You want to be tasered? Just give me a
reason. Where’s the woman we just saw being assaulted?”

He shrugged,
unconcerned by my threat.

Dixie walked
towards him menacingly. “Maybe you need a little persuasion to help
you remember, fuck-knuckle? I’ve got bad PMS today and I’ve been
looking for a fucking cockroach like you to take it out on. Get
your taser out, Chalmers.”

We both made
moves into our handbags as if we were retrieving something.

“Back off,” he
said nervously, palms up. “I don’t want no trouble. They took her
out the back for a bit of fun.” He wiped his nose on the same cloth
he’d been using to polish the glasses.
Yuck!
I made a mental
note not to stay for a drink. Then he gestured indifferently to a
hallway leading away from the main bar area, as if women got
kidnapped and raped in the place every day of the week. For all I
knew, maybe they did. “She was askin’ for it, flauntin’ herself in
a place like this. She went right up to ‘em and told ‘em she wanted
to party. Stupid slut!”

“Who took her
and how many of them?” I snarled in his face. My arm was starting
to pound with a deep aching pain and I was desperately hoping that
Heller would turn up soon. I wasn’t sure how much longer we could
keep up our charade without any real weapons or skills (or acting
talent, if I’m going to be brutally honest).

He stood back
and crossed his arms. “Just some blokes who come in. I don’t ask
‘em no questions and we all get on fine. You don’t wanna mess with
‘em. Trust me.”

Oh, I trusted
him all right, on that at least, but didn’t think we had a lot of
options. “How many?” I repeated.

“Four, maybe
five. I didn’t count ‘em,” he said sullenly. Great. How were Dixie
and I going to take down five men?

The two of us
had a brief huddled conference and I came up with kind of a plan.
We cautiously headed down the poorly lit, grungy hallway which was
carpeted in the same swirling maroon, painted in the same dog-shit
brown. There were four doors leading off the hallway and a fire
exit at its end, all shut. Two of doors led to male and female
toilets. We briefly listened at the door of each, but couldn’t hear
anything so moved to the doors on the opposite side of the
hallway.

We listened at
the third door and it also sounded deserted inside. With a prudent
degree of chariness, I twisted the knob, opened the door and peered
around it. The room was a combined storeroom/office space, the desk
and computer almost crowded out by the boxes and boxes of alcohol
and other bar necessities stacked up around the walls. There was
nobody inside.

We crept to
the fourth door and listened carefully. Through the door came the
sound of loud voices, harsh laughter and a woman’s quiet sobbing.
We looked at each other. It was time to put our plan into
action.

I hid out of
sight behind Dixie as she fumbled the door open, doing her best
drunk impersonation.

“Oh, I’m
shorry,” I heard her slur, “I thought thish was the dunny.
Shorry.”

She closed the
door quickly, almost all the way without actually shutting it,
before they could react. Hopefully she hadn’t alarmed them. I
couldn’t see inside the room, but Dixie later told me that it was
some kind of private reception room, full of shabby old lounges and
armchairs. Lily had been huddled in a corner, her clothes ripped
badly, while four men (not five, thank God!) appeared to be arguing
over who would have her first.

Dixie gave me
the thumbs-up to signal that Lily was inside the room. We waited a
nerve-wracking half-minute to see if anyone would come out after
Dixie, but they didn’t. Stage one of our plan had been a success.
We quietly high-fived each other before swapping places, ready for
stage two. I took a deep breath and burst through the door, kicking
it back against the wall. I then proceeded to shower capsicum spray
fervently and indiscriminately over everybody in the room,
including Lily.

There were two
things I hadn’t thought about when I formulated my plan though. The
first was the understandable anger that people whose eyes were
stinging in hellish agony feel towards the person who has caused
that agony. Most of the room’s occupants, including Dixie who
grabbed Lily in accordance with our plan, rushed towards a source,
any source, of fresh air, coughing and wheezing, eyes streaming.
But one of the men, a big ugly brute who didn’t look smart enough
to spell his own name, noticed I was still holding the empty
canister of spray in my hand. He took exception to that with a
well-aimed punch to my midriff that winded me and knocked me flying
to the ground in the hallway. While I was lying prostrate,
clutching my abdomen and groaning in pain, he gave me several
vicious kicks to my legs and my back with his enormous work boots
for good measure, before his streaming eyes and choking coughs
forced him to desert me as well, heading for some relief.

The second
thing I hadn’t considered is that capsicum spray is just that – a
spray. And sprays tend to drift in the air with any current. So I
really should not have been surprised, but I was unpleasantly so,
when my eyes also starting burning with a disabling stinging
sensation. The tears began to pour down my cheeks, blinding me as I
lay on the ground moaning. I struggled to get to my feet and out of
this hellhole before those animals recovered and came back for me.
But I wasn’t capable and collapsed back to the floor again. My
lungs felt cloudy with spray and I couldn’t breathe properly. I
managed to haul myself to my hands and knees and crawled back
slowly down the hallway to the main bar area, each movement of my
arms and legs creating stabbing pains of agony in my poor battered
body.

I was almost
at the end of the hallway, nearly back at the main bar, still
virtually blind, when someone behind me seized me by my hair and
brutally dragged me to my feet. I crumpled in agony, but he pulled
me back up again by my hair, which frigging hurts, believe me. I
could smell tobacco and bourbon on his breath. He must have been in
the men’s bathroom while Dixie and I were busy activating our plan.
The barman was right – there were five of them, after all. Stupid,
stupid us for not checking every room.

“Looks like
you spoiled my party, my little whore,” he growled in my ear. He
threw his arm around my neck, pulling it tightly until it
restricted my breathing. There was nobody around to help me –
everybody had made a run for it. I started to panic and kicked
behind at him, hitting his shin. But that only made him tighten his
grip on my throat further, cutting off my oxygen. I stopped
kicking. He used his other hand to feel my boobs, roughly squeezing
and pinching them. “Oh yeah! These are some great tits you’ve got
here, bitch. You can be my new playmate instead,” he declared, his
hot, bad breath making me flinch. Nausea rose in my throat and my
vision began to darken.

Bourbon-Breath
pushed me up against the hallway wall, one hand around my throat
pinning me to the wall. My arms were incapacitated, jammed
uncomfortably behind me. His body pressed up hard against mine and
his free hand groped, squeezed and touched me everywhere – on my
boobs, my butt, between my legs. Despite thrashing around to avoid
him, he tightened his grip on my neck and immobilised my head. He
forced my mouth open and thrust his tongue disgustingly deep
inside. He slid his hand up my shirt, roughly pulling my bra aside,
squeezing my nipple hard and savaging my breast painfully with his
fingernails. I could feel his erection through his jeans as he
rubbed up against me. He moved his hand away from my poor boob down
into the waistband of my trousers, burrowing into my panties, his
digits on my pubic hair, about to ram his fingers up inside me.
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind what his intentions were
towards me and they did not include a lovely bunch of flowers
followed by dinner at a fancy restaurant.

I managed to
free my good arm from behind my back and drove my fist into the
side of his neck. He released his hold on me briefly and I pushed
against him, mustering up every bit of strength I had in my new
muscles. It almost worked, but my arm was injured and he’d been
looking forward to attacking Lily, a pent-up store of misogynistic
rage fuelling his strength. He punched me across my jaw, knocking
me sideways. I would have fallen to the ground if he hadn’t grabbed
my arm. Once he had hold of me, he started to drag me into the room
that everyone had just vacated. Despite my pain and almost
blindness, I fought wildly against him. There was no way I was
going in there with him. He cracked me across the jaw again and my
head lolled backwards. I tried to regroup my thoughts but they
weren’t cooperating.