Warrior in the Shadows (25 page)

He needed a vehicle and he was going to have to get one soon. Alfie Woodard wouldn't go far in that truck and the closest place that might offer him shelter was Jay Burrell's home on the outskirts of Cairns.

3.13

Alfie took the truck for a few blocks, neatly avoiding the arriving police, then abandoned it where he and Stevie had left the Toyota minivan. He forced Kativa into the vehicle and then drove the short distance to Jay Burrell's house.

Jay sat in his front room, his bathrobe open over bare chest and boxers, when Alfie forced Kativa into the room and down into a couch.

"What are you doing?" Jay said. "Why did you bring her here?"

"We're not staying long," Alfie said. "Her fella will be along shortly to try and collect her."

"What am I supposed to do?" Jay said. "He'll bring the cops right to my door."

"Not this bloke. He wants me for himself, doesn't he, dear?" Alfie said to Kativa.

"Now she knows me," Jay said.

"Don't matter, mate," Alfie said cheerfully. "She's going north with me."

"Don't hurt me," Kativa said.

"Wouldn't let it happen, dearie," Alfie said. "You wouldn't hurt the lady, would you, Jay?"

"Get her out of here and tell me what you expect to do about Payne."

"I'll let you work that out, mate," Alfie said. "Since our working agreement is over. That was a nasty little surprise you set up with our boy Stevie, who unfortunately didn't last the night. Not much on the uptake, that one… he seemed a little too eager to show me up a bit… before he blasted my head off."

Jay stood there for a moment, then edged slowly toward the end table beside the couch.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"Sure you do," Alfie said. "You had it all thought out. Me and Stevie do these two, then Stevie does me. Leave all three of us there for the coppers to find, makes a nice neat ending to a proper puzzle here and in the States."

Alfie's eyes gleamed as though he were suppressing laughter; he looked as though he was enjoying himself.

"Not nice, Jaybird, not nice at all," he said. "A bad way to end our relationship, mutually beneficial as it has been all these years. And it reeks of amateur hour as well. Did you think I'd let that lad backshoot me?"

Jay made the move Alfie had anticipated: a sudden lunge for the end table and the gun hidden in the drawer there. The suppressed machine pistol made a barely audible pop and the subsonic 9mm round took out Jay's knee, punching a smooth white hole that became bright red and left a massive exit wound in the soft flesh back of his knee. Jay toppled to the floor, clutching his ruined knee, his mouth open in a soundless scream of pain.

"I expect you and Charley Payne would have a lot to talk about, mate," Alfie said. "You could tell him all about what's been done and what's not. A real good heart-to-heart chat."

He stepped over Jay, paused for a moment, then put a bullet in his head.

"Wouldn't want you to have any ideas about comeback, mate," Alfie said in a gentle tone. "Sorry about the chat. I do know how you looked forward to that. Ta, mate."

Alfie pulled Kativa, shocked into silence and submission, along with him out to the garage.

3.14

The abandoned pickup truck was empty and worse than useless; the bullet-shattered windows and perforated body had drawn a crowd of gawkers and then finally the police, who swarmed the area like angry wasps whose nest has been disturbed; two dead officers left them angry and intense. Charley stood on the edge of the crowd. He'd dumped the shotgun in a trash bin and took stock of what he did have: the policeman's .38 revolver and two reloads stuck in the back of his pants beneath his shirt, a folding Emerson fighting knife in his right front pants pocket. That was the total stock of his armament. He was dressed and in shoes but his wallet with all his spare cash was on the floor of the shot-up truck and being busily gone through by responding police, one of whom came through the crowd, holding the illegal High Power between two fingers as though he were carrying a turd.

Not good.

He stepped into a fish and chips shop, well away from the crowd, and asked to use the telephone for a local call.

"No worries, Yank," the grease-spattered cook said. "Right there behind the counter."

Charley dialed Fredo's contact number from memory. The phone rang for a long time before Fredo answered it.

"Hello?"

"Fredo, it's Charley."

"Wondered when I'd be hearing from you. I've been watching the telly; they broke in special with news of that mess down your way."

"Things aren't great."

"What do you need?"

"Transport."

"Mate, we've got to be careful. I've got my directions here, too."

"I need a vehicle right now, Fredo."

There was a long sigh from the Australian.

"Right then," he said. "I saw your small friend being taken away by the police; I suppose you'll need another?"

"If you've got one to spare I won't say no."

"Where are you now?"

Charley got directions from the chip cook.

"In half an hour, be in the parking lot behind Milly's bar, just down from where you're at," Fredo said. "I'll pull up and leave the keys in the car. I'll be in the bar having a few till closing, then I'll take a taxi. When I wake up tomorrow, I'll be looking for my car. Will that work?"

"It'll do, Fredo. Thanks."

"Remember to look under the seat before you drive off. There will be a little package there for you. If anything comes back to me, I'm saying it was all stolen— you're on your own with this, mate. Sorry, but that's how it goes."

"Understood. Thanks again. I'll be there."

"Auto break down?" the chip cook said.

"Right," Charley said. "Somebody lifted my wallet as well."

"Bloody hell, probably the fucking backpackers."

"Would you advance me some chips?"

"No worries, mate."

The cook pulled fresh hot french fries from the deep fat fryer, tossed them in a bin with salt, and then scooped them up into a cone made of newspaper.

"Hot and fresh and on the house, mate."

"Thanks, friend. Appreciate the use of the phone."

"No worries. Come back by when you've found your wallet, Yank."

"I'll do that," Charley said.

He went back out into the street, munching the french fries, grateful for the carbohydrates and the quick energy they represented. He stood outside Milly's bar, a lively place where a number of patrons stood out in the street and watched the crush of police cars heading for the Radisson.

It was almost exactly a half an hour to the minute when he saw Fredo pull into the unmanned parking lot in a battered old Subaru station wagon. Fredo saw him, nodded, then scanned the parking lot for any witnesses. He turned off the engine, shut off the headlights, and levered his big frame out of the small station wagon. He came up to Charley and said, "Here's your ride, mate. Remember what I said."

"Do you have any money, Fredo?"

"Wondered if you'd ask that. Look in the package. This is my personal car, so mind it. Plenty of spares and a full tank, should get you where you need to go. Doesn't eat much gas, burns a little oil. There's spare of that, too. Anything else?"

Charley held out his hand. The big man hesitated, then shook it.

"Luck, mate," Fredo said. "I got the feeling you're going to need it. And I've got quite a bit of cleaning up to do."

"I'm sorry for that. Couldn't be helped. Let our mutual friend know I'm sorry and I'll be talking to him soon."

"I'll do that, mate. Good hunting."

The big man went into the bar. Charley watched him go, then got into the station wagon and pulled out into the crowded street.

3.15

Alfie forced Kativa into the trunk of a battered Alfa Romeo sedan. She tried to resist, but Alfie stunned her with a single vicious slap across her face, then shoved her in beside the spare tire and some loose tools.

"Be real careful now, woman," Alfie said. "We've got a long way to go at a hard drive. If you're not cooperative, you could end up at the bottom of the Laura or the Mossman River. The crocs will make a fine meal on you. Of course, you'll be drowned anyway, so that won't matter, will it?"

Kativa turned her head away as he shut the trunk closed over her, the last glimpse of his face shaded under his bush hat, his dark brown eyes, flecked with yellow in the faint light, gleaming like a feral cat's in the dark.

She was jostled and bounced as the car took off; the bad springs in the suspension gave her no rest. The smoother stretches of paved highway eventually gave way to the grind and dust of a gravel road and she knew now where he was taking her: she was on the road to Laura.

Huddled in a ball, she fought her fear. In the dark, phosphenes swam before her eyes like little dots of light. They were like the fireflies she'd seen when she visited a friend in Indiana and watched when the children gathered them up into jars and took them into the darkened houses to light up their play. After a time she began to hallucinate; stress, fear, a blow to the head, and the darkness conspired to create a series of images before her eyes: the picture of Anurra drawn in blood in the crime scene photographs; herself as a child playing in the walled-in yard of their home outside Johannesburg; the face of Charley Payne and then the figure of Alfie Woodard, the quiet figure in dusty khakis who was so very dangerous.

Dreaming, Kativa, you're dreaming now,
a voice came into her head.
Dreaming of what once was and what will be again. The Laura country, the hills dotted with trees, color of sand and brown and faded green dancing in the heat of the midday sun, the feel of dry grass and dirt beneath her bare feet, and if she kept it a dream she'd walk away from this like a dream… she is walking through the thin forest of tall trees that give way suddenly to a clearing where the trees have shriveled down to bare broken stubs grasping like bony fingers at the sky, row upon row of clay termite mounds, each as tall as a man, and she is being prodded from behind, but each time she turns her head she can't see anything but a glimmer of something dark at the corner of her eyes, something that stays behind her with malevolent ease and glee, always behind her, prodding her forward with something large and hard and with a sudden stab of fear she realizes it's a gigantic penis, erect and hard, prodding her like a spear from behind.

She moves forward reluctantly, the sweat of her body trickling to pool in the liquid heat that grows in her womanhood, sweat mingling with something else, a dim-edged vision of lust, Charley over her in the hotel, easing himself into her and rocking himself into a frantic eye closed and gasping orgasm, her grasping at him and feeling his body and Charley's face changing even as she came beneath him, transforming into the shadowed face of Alfie Woodard, his eyes gleaming with lust and a dark malevolent glee.

"That's right, my lovely," he said. "That's how I want you to be."

She turns to push away the hard prodding from behind, but now there's nothing there, only malevolent laughter and then the sharp Wonk! Wonk! she remembers from the parking lot, so she runs and stumbles before a termite mound. Before her eyes the mound top begins to stir, long rivulets of dirt breaking free, a small cloud of dust and then a big chunk of the mound breaks away and exposes the face of Charley Payne, his eyes black and the flesh of his face swarming with termites that take sudden wing, filling her eyes, her nose, and her mouth with the stale bitter tang of rotten flesh and she cries out "No! No!" and behind her the prodding becomes more insistent and she is forced forward over the mound, her naked breasts pushed against the rotting face of Charley and then she's entered from behind with something unbelievably large and painful and it feels as though she is being split wide open and she cries out "No! No!"

And the trunk opens and in the dim glimmer of the earliest light of the day she sees the face of Alfie Woodard looking down on her and saying, "Cheerio, Kativa. Time to get home and soon to bed, I think."

3.16

Charley drove fast and hard, racing through red lights after stopping only long enough to ensure there was no other traffic coming. The events at the Radisson had drawn every patrol officer downtown and left none on the outskirts of the city. No cops between him and Jay Burrell; nothing but road between him and Kativa and Alfie Woodard. He forced himself to mind his driving and pay attention to the road.

The small friend Fredo had given him was small indeed: a customized Walther PPK .380 automatic with a AWS suppressor on it, a quality assassination piece that would put him in prison forever if possession of a slain police officer's revolver didn't. The suppressor would give him a tactical advantage if he could take Alfie by stealth, but he had only two magazines of eight rounds each to do what he needed to do. He didn't want a gunfight; what he had in mind was a straight-up and simple execution. All he had to do was get close enough. But first he had to get through whatever security Jay Burrell had round his house.

He drove down Burrell's street and as he approached the house he dimmed his headlights and cruised by slowly. The lights were on in the house. He drove to the end of the street, where the beach parking started, and stopped the Subaru. He slid out and chambered a round in the tiny Walther. The suppressor was longer than the pistol, but when firmly gripped it balanced in a decent enough fashion. Charley held it in his hand low at his side, and walked along the beach toward the brightly lit house. From the beach, he looked into the living room and kitchen; the rest of the house was hidden from his viewpoint. He decided on fast and hard from his options; he didn't have time for stealth. He walked from the beach directly to the kitchen door and tried the handle.

Unlocked.

He eased open the door, the Walther held ready. Once inside, he left the door slightly ajar, brought the weapon up at the ready and inched through the kitchen, the sights of the silenced weapon tracking wherever his eyes went. His ears strained for any sound, his eyes preternaturally keen, even his sense of smell was heightened. There was a scent of something… what was it?

Blood and urine.

He eased around the corner into the living room and saw the body of Jay Burrell curled on the floor. There was no doubt he was dead; he could see the open cavity of his skull from where he stood. There was a massive wound on the dead man's knee; Alfie had crippled him before he killed him. Charley cleared the room as he came in. No one else was there, at least no one still living. The room didn't look as though there had been a struggle.

Charley went through the front room into the study that opened out onto the ocean. There was a big desk there. Charley looked into the drawers, starting with the bottom one first. He found a .32 Colt automatic, one of the old ones, and replaced it in the drawer. There were some surfer magazines, some correspondence, financial statements and spreadsheets. In the top drawer, as if hastily put away, was a box of Zip disks. Charley looked at the unlabeled disks, then at the expensive Macintosh PowerMac G-3 with a big Studio Display monitor set up on a separate table beside the desk. There was a Zip drive in that machine. He set the Zip disks on top of the table and thought about Terry Walker and the help he'd given him.

Time for that later.

He went quietly out of the studio and went quickly and efficiently through the rest of the house. There was no one there.

That told him exactly where Alfie Woodard would be.

He stood in what was Alfie's room and wondered at the difference between this room and the bare cave in the Laura foothills. This was a way station for a man between two worlds. A closet held motorcycle leathers, a variety of stylish shirts and leather pants, heavy black boots. On one side, segregated by bare space on the hanger bars, were two sets of identical khaki clothing, battered and worn and slightly frayed, shirts and matching pants with beat-up chukka boots beneath them. He found a battered canvas carryall in the back of the closet and took it with him. In the washroom he found a flashlight that still gleamed bright, the batteries still fresh, that and a coil of rope went into the bag. He looked around in the other rooms and grinned fiercely at his good luck when he found a Mossberg 590 Police/Military shotgun and two boxes of buckshot. Now he could reach out a little farther.

He went back to Jay's office and looked at the computer. He shoved the Zip disks into the carryall, then took down the side of the mini tower computer's main compartment. It only took a few minutes with a screwdriver to remove the hard drive and stash it in the carryall. Then he spilled a few buckshot shells out and loaded the shotgun with nine rounds in the tubular magazine and six on the sidecar ammo holder. He took three of the six rounds and carefully scored around the plastic hull of the shell a quarter inch above the brass base. Those he set in the last three slots of the ammo sidecar. Then he filled the pockets of his coat with spare shells.

Properly geared up, he looked outside to make sure no one was watching, then he took a set of car keys from the rack beside the back door and went to the car parked outside. This one had only half a tank of gas, but there was a space in the garage where a car had been recently parked. Charley went out and got back in his Subaru and drove it in and parked next to the remaining car. He cut a length of garden hose and siphoned gas from Jay's car into the Subaru. Topped off and properly gunned up, he was ready to go north.

Charley drove fast and skillfully. He'd done the route once in the light of day and he had a Queensland map book in the car. He made good time. There was a long stretch of coastal highway, and he looked out at the ocean glimmering off to his right, the hint of waves, the distant lights stretching across the water. In another time, he would have liked to have stopped the car and waded out into those waters for a quick swim to wash away his tensions and his worry and all the things he kept bottled up inside him.

But that would have to be for another time.

He made the turnoff from the paved highway to the gravel that led toward Laura and the shaman's cave. In the dizzying fatigue he carried with him, it seemed as though images rose up spontaneously, like a movie beamed into his head:

Kativa bent forward over a termite mound, savagely mounted by a squat, dark man; Charley struggling from within a termite mound, his mouth full of dirt and gasping for air as light disappeared as though he were being buried alive; maniacal laughter around him, in him, through him, permeating his head and punctuated by a rhythmic Wonk! Wonk! Wonk! Like the ringing of a great bell only inches from his head; Charley floating above Upton Street, looking in the window of his tiny apartment and seeing Mara lying alone in his bed, looking at the walls with tears in her eyes; Bobby Lee and Max and Nicky, all holding hands and Bobby Lee waving frantically at him, Nicky jumping up and down and Max holding her hands to her mouth as though to hold back a cry; and it seemed as though Bobby Lee was coming to him and he was there and he said, "Partner, slow down. He wants you to drive fast in the dark and hit something, get bogged down or killed, that would make it easy for him, you've got to slow down and take it easy, you'll get there in the daylight and that's what he's worried about. If he goes to ground and you're around in the day. If you damage your vehicle you won't get to the cave until dark and that's his country out there, he wants you on foot and alone out there in the dark with him… slow it down and you'll make better time, drive through the night and get there in the day and you'll be able to take him, you'll be able to find him… slow down, Charley, slow down…"

Charley shook his head violently to clear it and looked down at the speedometer. He was going too fast, driving faster than the reach of his headlights on the gravel roadway. He eased off the gas and brought the car down to something that felt like forty-five miles an hour; he was too tired and too rattled to try to translate the kilometers on the odometer to miles.

In the farthest reaches of his headlights there was something in the road.

Charley pressed on the brakes, lightly at first and then harder as the Subaru swayed from side to side as it slowed. Two kangaroos stood in the middle of the road, fixed in his headlamps, staring as if fascinated by the sight of the car bearing down on them out of the dark. Even after Charley came to a complete halt, the two kangaroos stood there. They were big, at least up to his chest in height. If he'd hit them at speed, it would have been like hitting two big deer at seventy miles an hour. He'd have had them through the windshield and trashed the engine compartment for sure. He inched the Subaru forward, almost touching them before they moved in long bounds out of his way to the side of the road. They stood there and looked back at him. One lingered and stared with eyes that gleamed red in the light of the headlamps. He could swear he heard something that sounded like a faint wonk, wonk, in the distance.

He continued on more slowly and the hours slipped by in a slow, steady stream. There were more animals he slowed for, dim figures at the side of the road or hurrying across the middle, but none that stopped and stared at him as the two kangaroos had. There were many gleaming eyes on the side of the road, feral red and some of them nearly at the height of a man. This wasn't his country he moved through, this landscape of night, and he felt some hostile presence lingering, as though he were watched every inch of the way.

He continued to make good time. The pale fingers of dawn light wrinkled the night sky. It wasn't long before he drove in full light, and it seemed as though he were waking from a dream when he pulled into Laura and parked the Subaru across the street from the Quinkin Hotel and Bar. Charley sat there for a moment. His forearms trembled from holding the wheel for six hours on gravel roads and the sudden silence made him aware of a faint humming inside his head.

It was early in Laura. No one was up and about. A black dog crossed the road and went right down the center of it. Birds made an intermittent cacophony, punctuated by stretches of silence.

Everything was very still.

Charley got out of the car, stretched his back muscles, and leaned against the car while he worked the kinks out of his legs and lower back, finally putting his hands on his hips and rotating them with a series of satisfying clicks until his vertebrae settled in place. When he felt ready, he took out the canvas carryall. The shotgun would be a problem till he got out of town. He solved that by wrapping it up in a nylon tarp he found in the tire boot of the station wagon. The shotgun made a neat bundle and the carryall was slung across his back.

Then he set off.

The black dog watched him with curiosity. Nothing else stirred in the town. He stepped off quickly, walking past the old buildings and making his way up toward the foothills, following the old dirt road that passed the shanties and battered trailers of the Aboriginal settlement. Birds seemed to herald his coming, passing along a series of cries as he went past the trees where they flocked.

It took him over an hour to get to where the dirt track narrowed into the footpath that wound up into the sandstone hills. He wondered briefly if he should have brought the car this far, but coming on foot seemed more flexible; at least this way he could see and hear better. Despite his fatigue, he felt switched on. The walk had done him good. His blood was pumping and his chest rising in a steady rhythm of strong breathing. He judged himself to be far enough away to break out the shotgun. He unwrapped the weapon and chambered a round, then tucked the tarp into the carryall. He continued on, the weapon carried loosely in one hand. The hills slowly grew as he got closer. Soon he would go off the trail to parallel the path while taking advantage of the concealment of the trees and bush. He had to balance his need for speed against concealment.

Charley found his thoughts going in all directions from fatigue. It wasn't the same as last night, in the dark, when he felt as though he'd been the unwilling star in some malevolent movie. The track he walked on seemed more familiar than it should, and that thought nagged at him, the sense that he'd been here before. Of course he had been with the two Aboriginal elders, but since then he'd been plagued with sudden visions, little remembered insights that guided his feet exactly where they needed to go, guided his vision to exactly what he needed to see.

He looked ahead and saw small in the distance the sandstone outcropping and the hill where Alfie and Kativa would be. He knew that they were there right now, he could sense them in some way that he couldn't explain but just had to accept. Just as he had to accept his sudden knowing that he wasn't alone.

Around a turn in the trail, standing beside a tall tree that provided shade against the brutal heat, were Robert and his gap-toothed companion. Both men were nearly naked, dressed only in loincloth and with paint daubed and drawn on their skin, both leaning on short spears with wicked metal points. Robert held a broad-brimmed bush hat in one hand.

"G'day, mate," he said to Charley.

"What are you doing here?" Charley said, wiping perspiration from his head onto his sleeve.

"Put this on before you bake your brain," Robert said, handing Charley the old hat. "You know better than to be walking out here without cover for your head."

Charley put the hat on. "How long have you been waiting?"

"Long enough to see you," the gap-toothed elder said. He seemed taller in the light. "Saw you coming in the Dreaming last night, been waiting for you to show up. Walking our songline we been, singing the song of you and this Quinkin."