“That’s right mister. I got nothing to lose now. I been waiting for you. Saw you last time – who are you anyway?”
“Let’s go inside and talk about it.” I tried to get balance and a better foothold but I was kidding myself. There’s something about a couple of feet of rifle barrel and the black hole at the end that stiffens your muscles and throws your hand-eye co-ordination to hell. I just stood there. All I could do was talk.
“We have to go inside,” I said. “You can’t shoot us here. How’s James? How’s Bert?”
He ignored the remarks and made his decision.
“Go out through the back door and up to the fence. I swear I’ll blow your head open if you try anything. Sorry Pen, you too.”
We went. The yard at the back of the shop was a rubbish heap – bottles and deadly missiles by the hundred – but I believed he’d do what he said and I tried to look as innocent as a man on a golf course. The back fence was missing palings and there were plenty of places for a person to step through it.
“That’s far enough,” Ricky snapped. “Perce!”
He yelled the name again and the man I’d seen before came out the door carrying a sawn-off shotgun, double-barrelled. The stock had been cut back too and was wound around with black insulation tape. It wasn’t for rabbits.
“Get through. You first, Pen. Nice and easy.”
Penny slipped through and I bent and followed her. This brought me to within a few feet of the man with the shotgun. He was fiftyish and every day of it showed in his face which was lined and creased like an old boxing glove. His body was thick, still strong-looking but with the mark of thousands of measures of alcohol on it. His hands seemed to be shaking slightly and that was even more frightening than Ricky’s steely strength. I shot a look at James’ car. It was dusty and travel-stained; its bright cheerful yellow was dimmed but still incongruous in the surroundings. I wondered what had brought the owner here and how he was coping; how his stagey manners were standing up to the real-life situation.
I half turned and spoke to Ricky who’d come through the fence with the rifle still nicely poised for use. I nodded at the car.
“Why’s he here?”
“Christ knows.” It was the first indication that he wasn’t in total control, with everything figured out. Maybe that was a good sign, maybe not. I told myself it was. Perce moved aside and we went out of the fading sunlight into the near night of the workshop. Before we went inside I saw close-up what had disturbed me during my earlier, apparently incompetent, surveillance. By the door there was a cut-down oil drum with a crank handle sticking out of it. A cloud of flies buzzed around the metal shaft and the top of the drum.
I wasn’t prepared for her; I’d chased her up and down the coast and looked at her picture and talked to a dozen people about her, but I still wasn’t ready for the impact of her. She was taller than I expected, leaning against Bert’s workbench, and somehow more vivid. Her hair was a dark blonde tangle and she had one of the most passionate faces I’d ever seen. The high cheekbones were startling and the mouth was a wide, sensual slash. Her face was pale with the imprint of tension and lack of sleep. Her eyes were dark, shadowed pools. She was wearing a white dress, street-length and cut very low in front. It was spattered all over with something dark and I thought I knew why the flies were gathering outside. She took a few steps towards us as we came into the garage and her movements were like something from an adolescent’s daydream. I could understand the depth of Penny’s hate and the quality of Madeline Tarelton’s feeling about Noni. She wasn’t a woman’s woman.
If she was a man’s woman she certainly wasn’t Saul James’. He sat on a chair a few feet away from Noni. He had on his usual beige outfit and his beige look. The girl washed him out completely; his eyes were fixed on her as she moved, but you had the feeling that he could disembowel himself there and then and she wouldn’t notice.
“Well, well, well. Little Penny the La Perouse picaninny.” Her voice was husky, edged with tiredness and maybe fear, maybe something else. “I always said you’d end up with a nice white man. Who’s your handsome friend?”
The remark seemed to be directed at Ricky as much as Penny and I didn’t like that one bit. She was pure trouble. Penny glared at her but didn’t speak. I broke the silence.
“Hello Noni. Hello James. Everything under control?”
James raised haunted eyes and looked at me.
“No, it’s not.” He pointed to the younger dark man. “He’s going to kill us.”
I studied Ricky in detail for the first time. He was several shades lighter than Perce, hardly darker than a Latin. His face wasn’t heavily influenced by Aboriginal ancestry either. It was craggy rather than Ikshy and his ears stuck out a bit. A few gloved fists had hit and moved it around but hadn’t diminished the intelligence and character in it. Not that it was a nice face. It was a dangerous face and it scared me more than a little. He wasn’t tall, I had that on him, but right then I’d have traded a few inches for my Smith amp; Wesson.
“I don’t think so.” I tried to make my voice sound calm and confident although my throat was dry and my tongue felt like a bit of old rope. “He only kills when he has to and there’s no point in killing any more people. Three’s enough. Where’s Bert?”
Noni let out a high laugh that cracked and ran down to a sob. “Ricky didn’t kill him – I did.” Her eyes flew off to the shadows near the front door, past the truck which stood near the middle of the floor, over the pit. Ricky didn’t say anything or move, he just kept that rifle steady. I went over and looked down at the shapeless heap on the floor. I twitched back the hessian covering. Bert’s heart wouldn’t trouble him any more. Nothing would. The side of his head was caved in; a dark, soggy-looking mass like molten chocolate covered it from above the ear to the collar of his shirt. It hadn’t been done with just one blow of the crank handle, or two.
Penny shot me a look that could have been triumph, then the impact of the whole thing reached her.
“Who did Ricky kill?” she said softly.
“The boy at Bare Island, to give him the cover for this big play.” I waved my hand to take in all of us, including Bert, and the truck. “Only it’s gone a bit sour, eh Ricky?” I turned to look at the older man.
“How about you Albie, who have you killed today?”
He put the shotgun down, leaning it on the running board of the truck which was an old Bedford, and began to roll a cigarette from makings he kept in a tin. He glanced across at Ricky.
“Might have to be you,” he growled.
Ricky looked puzzled, glanced at the man smoking and then stared at him as if trying to find answers to a hundred questions in his face. Noni was standing by the bench, only a few feet from me now, and running her hand over the smooth, artificial surface of the airline bag. The money bag.
“You’ll never spend it Noni,” I said quietly, “not now.”
“Shut up,” Ricky snapped. “Fuckin’ shut up. You can’t tell the bloody future. We’ll spend it, we’ll go…”
“You won’t go anywhere, even if you got this rig fixed up.” I pointed at the Bedford. “You’re blown. There’s half a dozen people in Sydney know about you now. How far do you think you’d get, you and her? You’d have to live in a cave, what good would money be then?”
Ricky was looking agitated. He shifted the weight of the rifle in his hands and looked speculatively at me. It was dodgy talking to him like that. If he felt too hopeless about his prospects he might feel like going out in a welter of blood. Why not? I wanted him desperate, off balance, but not crazy desperate. I had to offer him something.
“I suppose you might get away somehow. Up north you could get a boat perhaps. Risky as all hell…”
Ricky clutched at it. “We’ll make it. Shit, there’s boats leaving Australia all the time. We’ll make it.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” James wailed, “not a word. Noni, you can’t go off with this… killer. I love you, you’re mine.. .”
The words must have sounded ludicrous, even to him. Noni let out a hoot of derision. She spun around and advanced on James waggling a finger in his face.
“Poor Saulie,” she crooned, “poor baby Saul.”
It didn’t throw James, he must have been used to it.
“You’re sick Noni,” he said sharply. He’d said it before – maybe it had worked. Not this time. She broke into a crazy, jerky dance.
“Ricky, oh Ricky baby,” she sang, “we’ll go to Thailand, we’ve got enough money there for a thousand fixes, ten thousand fixes, big fixes, lovely fixes.”
