‘Nevertheless-’
‘Listen, Bryce. I could make trouble for you. Bad blue on your part-employing a one-man outfit and not the corporate, suck-up good boy. Know what I mean?’
‘No. I-’
‘I didn’t play along, did I?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do. We should talk.’
I was bluffing, flying blind, but the silence on the other end of the line told me I’d hit a nerve. I pressed harder and Carter agreed to meet me.
Sentinel Insurance occupied several floors of a tower block in North Sydney. I was passed along by a couple of desk jockeys and finally admitted to an office that had the stripped down, bare look favoured by the modern executive. Too efficient to need much paper, too busy to harbour distractions, like paintings or books. Bryce Carter was thirtyish, buffed and polished in dress but worried in manner. He waved me to a seat and went back behind his desk.
I got in first. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘I don’t understand.’
I rubbed the side of my nose. ‘I can smell an outfit that’s in trouble. Like this one.’
‘That’s absurd.’
‘A man like you, with all this behind him, shouldn’t make elementary mistakes. How come you did?’
He shrugged, but stiffly. ‘A slip. You shouldn’t complain. You-’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I think you took your eye off the ball. Or maybe it wasn’t a slip and you were doing what you were told. You’re a worried man, Bryce.’
He stood and touched a button on his console. ‘You’ll receive a cheque in due course. There’s nothing more to say. If you don’t leave now someone from security will compel you to leave. Let’s be civilised about this.’
‘Okay, let’s.’ I got up and strolled around the room. ‘Nice office, this. Enjoy it while you’ve got it.’
He was head down and ignoring me but it was an act and not a very good one. I went out, closed the door behind me and reopened it immediately. He was stabbing buttons on the phone. I gave him a wave and closed the door again.
My car was in a station a couple of blocks away. I went down the ramp feeling for my keys and remembering the days when they used to get the car for you. Labour intensive. The light was poor and I was slow to adjust to it, courtesy of an old eye injury. I squinted, searching for the car.
I heard nothing, saw nothing, but the blow to the back of my head filled the world with bright lights and noise before everything went silent and dark.
A rushing sound, a feeling of movement, a stab of pain, then nothing more. A cough, my own, brought me to the surface. I tried to swim back down but I coughed some more and sneezed and jerked with the convulsions to find myself tied up hand and foot. That woke me up. My mouth was foul and my head felt as if it had been filled with cement. I coughed and spat and my eyes blurred so that I had to work out where I was by smell and feel.
I was lying on a sun lounge and the metal supports were digging into my back. It was night and I felt close to the stars. Crazy feeling. I blinked to clear my vision and worked out that I was on a balcony jutting out from an apartment in which dim light was showing. I swivelled my head and stared out through the railing a metre away. I could see lights in the far distance. Then a plane passed overhead and I felt uncomfortably close to it. I was somewhere up high, very high.
I wriggled but my hands and feet were strapped to the lounge by heavy cord and tight knots.
Someone has to see me here, I thought. Someone up higher. I tilted my head to look directly up. There was nothing higher. I was on the balcony of the penthouse. A chill went through me as I thought about it. Must be a hell of a long way down. I wouldn’t say I was afraid of heights, but mountaineering and rock climbing have never appealed to me. Nor abseiling, hang-gliding or skydiving. I tried to dismiss such thoughts and work out what must have happened.
The back of my head hurt but not as much as if I’d been coshed. A hit to the nerves at the base of the skull then, expert stuff. By going to see Bryce Carter I’d expected to stir the possum somehow but I’d evidently frightened it from the tree. I thought back over the encounter with Carter. It was my remark about his employing me not being a mistake, being something deliberate, that had triggered his reaction. Why? There had to be some connection between Sentinel and the Hartley Agency, or maybe just between Carter and di Maggio. I let that idea run around in my head for a while. I could see certain possibilities… then another plane roared over and I was jerked back to my present situation. First things first, Cliff.
I looked around the balcony, straining my eyes in the faint light from inside and from the stars. I could make out the shapes of a couple of garden chairs, a low table of some kind, some pot plants. The balcony was tiled and had a retractable roof. It looked to be divided into sections marked off by trellises. I tested the cord against the frame of the lounge. I was securely trussed but the frame was light. I could rock it from side to side. Without quite knowing why, I did this until it tipped over and I was lying face down on the tiles with the lounge on top of me like a tortoise shell. I rolled and slid my way to the nearest trellis and, pushing hard against the plastic slats, bullocked myself up into a standing position. I edged along and looked over the rail. It felt like a hundred storeys up and I quickly moved back.
I shuffled over to the sliding door into the apartment but there was no way to get a purchase on the handle. Suddenly I realised that I was cold. My jacket was missing and I was in my shirt sleeves. Cold wind blowing. I tried hammering the lounge back against the glass door but it was laminated, strong as steel, and I only succeeded in wrenching my shoulder. I swore and then my eye fell on the glass-topped coffee table.
I blundered across and shoved hard against it. The glass slid off and smashed on the tiles. I worked at the shards with my feet until I had one firmly wedged between a heavy pot plant and the railing. I stretched out on the cold tiles, rolled into position and managed to saw the cords around my left wrist against the glass. The position was agonising and blood made the going slippery. Praying I wouldn’t cut a vein, I clenched my teeth, swore and sawed. The cord parted and I had one hand free. I held it up and watched the blood ooze from half a dozen cuts. Ooze, not spurt. I wiped my hand on my shirt and got my cramped fingers to work on the knots around my other wrist and feet. I was a bloody mess by the time I finished, but the relief when I shook free of the lounge was like a double shot of Glenfiddich.
I slid the door open and went into the apartment, dripping blood on the snowy carpet. The place was big with a large sitting room, three bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms, I found the front door and slotted the security chain into place to give me some time if anyone happened along. Still dripping blood, I went into the largest of the bathrooms and wrapped a towel around my hand. I opened several cabinets and found antiseptic, cotton wool and gauze bandage. I cleaned the cuts, put thick pads on them and bound them into place. I left the bloody towel and the bits and pieces where they fell.
It had been mid-morning when I’d made my call on Carter, now it was after 9 pm. I realised that my bladder was full and my stomach was empty. I pissed, then prowled in the big, state-of-the-art kitchen for food and drink. There was an open bottle of white wine and several different chunks of cheese in the fridge along with jars and containers-olives, caviar, pickles. I drank from the bottle, tore a hunk from a rye loaf sitting in a perspex bread bin and wolfed it down with some Edam.
I swallowed some painkillers and brewed up a pot of Colombian coffee. Brewed it strong. I followed my bloody tracks back to the sitting room. I’d been too keen to attend to my injuries to take any notice before but now I looked around the room with interest. Scott di Maggio smiled out at me from a series of photographs showing him with celebrities-Sinatra, Arnold Palmer, George Bush Senior.
‘Hi there, Scotty,’ I said.
One of the bedrooms had been set up as a study and I ransacked it looking for evidence of what di Maggio was up to. His story about investigating Sentinel so we could all get paid was obviously a blind for something. If I’d known anything about computers I might have been able to learn something from the flash model sitting on the desk, but I didn’t even know how to turn it on. I went through the drawers and plonked anything that looked interesting on top of the computer. It didn’t amount to much-a notebook with the names and phone numbers of Underwood, Hart, Travers and myself along with several numbers for Bryce Carter. There was a copy of Sentinel
