Leopard Dreaming (24 page)

‘Living’s not living if she can’t live with herself.’ He guided her into an invisible sofa. ‘Take a break. We have four fishermen ahead checking their crab pots, so we’ll let them clear the area before we get any closer.’

Mira felt the
Liquid Limo
decelerate and drift east slightly further, with just enough power to stay parallel to the coast, as if dropping anchor.

‘You don’t expect me to take you all the way in to the pier?’

Mira couldn’t see a problem with that. The old pier
looked a bit ratty, but sturdy aside from a few boards missing.

‘Open to suggestions,’ Lockman said. ‘But it’s a hike to Point Lookout from here, so best if we can get the bike ashore.’

‘That cove is littered with sunken debris for a reef and the
Limo
is a hundred feet if she’s an inch. Frankly, I’d rather back a bus around the aisles of a grocery store.’

‘We’ve got every confidence in you, skipper.’

Mira heard a clap, as if Lockman had patted the musician’s shoulder.

‘No break for a drink then.’ Darkin rattled a glass of ice cubes, and set it down on the bar. ‘Hey, there’s a rat on my rug!’

‘A joey,’ Mira snapped, defensively. She hadn’t realised the joey had emerged while she’d been training with Lockman, but the timing seemed right. ‘She’s only stretching her legs for a few minutes.’

‘She’s
nibbling
on my fifty thousand dollar shag!’

‘Be thankful that’s all she’s doing.’ Lockman clicked his fingers, and Mira heard the wallaby hop across onto the smoother floor surface. No doubt hugging his leg, or curling up on his foot, as she often did.

‘She’s not hungry,’ he said. ‘She’s playful.’

He squatted beside Mira and spent the next few minutes hand wrestling with the feisty marsupial, helping to strengthen her tail and legs. Mira recognised the scuffling sounds, since she’d hand-raised three other wallabies as a child and played the same game; offering a hand for her to grip, chew and attack with her paws. Balancing on her tail while kicking up with her strong hind claws, a full-grown wallaby could tear the stomach out of a large dingo; and for a female, Pockets seemed more aggressive than usual.

Like Mira, she tired quickly and Lockman soon returned her to the pouch to sleep it off for another
few hours. Much better for the joey if the sling could hang behind a quiet door ashore for a few hours, out of harm’s way, but since that wasn’t an option, and since Mira drew comfort from having her little friend so close anyway, she hugged the pouch again and shrugged the strap up over her shoulder.

‘They’re moving,’ Lockman said.

Outside, Mira heard the spluttering of a small metal dinghy motoring past.

‘Looks like they’re headed for the next inlet,’ Darkin said. ‘Want me to wait until they’re out of sight?’

‘What do you think?’ Mira bit her lip and tried not to sound so ungrateful. ‘… Sorry, I’m not used to dealing with people yet. You’ve been dragged into this against your will too, but I really do appreciate that you’re cooperating now … and that only makes it worse, because I’m the last person in the world who should be compromising anyone’s freedom.’

‘Ah, but now I really am intrigued. Our little Miss Mystery lets me peek into her shadows briefly, while only hinting at how she came to be here.’ He sounded amused. ‘Don’t fret over me, little caged bird. Freedom is a dream. The bars that hold us are only illusions, so fighting our way out may be a nightmare, but always worthwhile. If I didn’t want to be here, then rest assured I wouldn’t be.’

Mira shook her head. ‘That’s a nice thought for a song, I suppose, but the only people I know who really speak and think like that are all locked up in a “health sanctuary”.’

Except for Freddie, she thought, the most cryptic and dangerous of them all, but she’d make sure he returned to Serenity just as soon as she tracked him down. In the meantime, she could only reassure herself that in such a remote place as this bay, so far from Freddie’s course on the cargo ship and after their silence for so long on the water, there could be no way
for the old man to follow her future echoes this way, or to know anything that would ever be said here. The
Limo
veered for the mouth of the bay, then shuddered and jerked as if they’d struck something.

‘Sorry,’ Darkin said, sheepishly. A long screech down the side of the hull made it doubly embarrassing. ‘I did warn you.’

‘Are we sinking?’ Mira fretted. ‘They took your lifeboat. How deep is it here?’ She hated swimming whenever the tide she could see differed in height from the one she needed to tread in order to breathe.

‘Relax,’ Darkin chuckled. ‘That was only floating debris. A dead tree. Didn’t you hear it give way politely?’

‘Politely?’ Mira frowned. To her, it sounded like claws down a blackboard.

‘Doesn’t this thing have warnings?’ Lockman asked. ‘Depth soundings, echo locators or whatever?’

‘Sure, mate. She’s got all that and more, but I had all the bells and whistles switched off up here last year.’

‘Why?’ Mira asked, aghast. ‘That’s like blinding yourself on purpose.’ She’d tried to blind herself more than once to avoid pain, but the consequences rarely outweighed the gain.

‘Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I don’t control baby from here usually, except to tweak her autopilot in open ocean while I’m entertaining. Luckily, the switch also flips the other way. Check this.’

The
Limo
shuddered again, just as an alarm went off.

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m on it,’ Darkin muttered.

Too late to prevent another bump, which caused Mira’s glasses to slip down her nose. As she shifted them back, an invisible wave caught her off-balance as well, and she bumped her hue controls.

‘Damn things!’ she yelped.

The fog of time flipped from violet to sepia, and a mangrove tree at the mouth of the bay shrank to a
sapling. Ahead in the sheltered lagoon, she noticed ghostly movement on the yester-year spectre of a pier. Three men in dark clothes all seemed to be loading crates of black swans, white-bellied sea eagles and golden plovers — all shades of muddy purple through the haze of time. For them, the moon had been high.

Mira hated to see such elegant wild animals caged, but she could hardly go back in time to free them. About a year too late, judging by the filtering hue and the loss of growth in the mangrove sapling.

‘Reverse in to starboard,’ Lockman suggested. ‘There’s a sunken boat to the left of that pier.’

The jetty itself had a mangrove growing up through the deck boards and looked too short for the
Liquid Limo
to pull alongside properly. Mira could judge that much herself, having seen the yacht’s yester-ghost against its home pier at the marina.

She reached to scroll time forward again, intending to see how derelict it had become since then … but ghostly floodlights blazed unexpectedly from the nearby estuary, from the scrubby sand dunes and from a fast-approaching catamaran, with uniformed officers surprising and surrounding the poachers from all three directions within seconds. Not police, though. Mira could see from their sleeves and logos that they’d all been national park rangers, led from the catamaran by one short, stocky female ranger who Mira recognised as a friend.

Gabion Biche. A life-long friend of Ben’s. So smart, funny and kind, Mira found it impossible not to like and admire her.

Lip-reading only, Mira could almost hear Gabby’s French-Australian accent as she leapt from her cat and introduced herself politely to the poachers.
Now get down on your bellies and suck scum!
She helped two of the slower men with the sharp end of her rifle, then proceeded to explain their rights under law for
their formal arrest, which would come later when she escorted them to the local police station.

Reversing the
Liquid Limo
required careful manoeuvring around mangroves and other sunken obstacles, so Mira had time to watch Gabby and her team complete their operation. Impressively efficient. After taking video and still shots of the scene, handcuffing the culprits, confiscating all their equipment, and releasing the poached animals, Gabby removed a fuel can and other non-biodegradable supplies from their vessel, and blasted five holes in their timber hull. A taller male ranger challenged her about it, saying the boat should have been impounded along with everything else.

If they’re timber, they should all be sunk here to rot,
Gabby argued.
Help restore the cove as a reef, the way it was in the 1800s before whalers moved in.

Mira smiled, imagining that she could help her to arrange the sunken artefacts perfectly, but the taller ranger continued to argue.

Gabby shut him up with a wave of her finger.
Oui, boss,
she said with a grin.
Go right ahead. You take it up the line, but I know the minister. He fishes here, and one suggestion from me will have poachers’ wrecks all over the place. We’d call it poetic justice.

No idle boast, apparently. As Mira readjusted her shades finally, she found the cove had been made over just as Gabby prophesied. Beneath the surface of the ebbing tide, more ghostly wrecks became visible.

Mira kept her eyes open as she continued to scroll time forward as far as she could, despite the greater pain, hoping to see if Freddie had somehow managed to track her future echoes this far after all. However, she found no sign of him any time in the last eight days or nights around the lagoon. No sign of Kitching or Garland either; just more poachers, park rangers and an occasional fisherman.

Darkin muttered curses several times as he swung the
Limo
around. He had so many warning sounds going off, and complained about so many flashing lights from his radar, sonar and other warning systems, that he finally walked away from them, snatched up something he called a remote and headed out on deck to reverse in by sight instead.

‘Isn’t it more dangerous that way?’ Mira whispered, knowing Lockman was still within earshot.

‘No different to you without a GPS walking stick.’ He handed over her riding leathers and boots. ‘And the water’s clear enough to see bottom today.’

Zigzagging backwards through the sunken maze, using his remote control for the engines, it didn’t take long for Darkin to reverse into place until the stern reached the end of the pier. Near enough to lower the gangway at least.

Lockman loaded their survival kit into the luggage rack and guided Mira to the Blackbird with the joey’s pouch still slung over her shoulder.

Climbing aboard behind him, she clung to his waist, fearing their destination, but no longer the journey. Two wheels seemed more stable than her own feet, and she felt grateful she didn’t have to navigate the pier with all its holes and missing planks.

Lockman braked beside Darkin, as he lowered the gangway.

‘Sorry about your ship,’ Mira said. ‘If you have no luck billing the detectives, send it straight to General Caroline Garland in Defence. She heads a shadow branch of the military that reports directly to the Prime Minister, so the fact you know she exists at all will get your foot in her door. Tell her Mira sent you.’

‘Mirror. Got it.’

She smiled without correcting him. If that became her codename, so be it.

‘Thanks, mate,’ Lockman added. ‘Keep your head
down for at least an hour before heading out. Make it look like you only came for the inspiration.’

‘Ain’t that the truth.’ Darkin chuckled, and Mira heard the two men shake hands. ‘You haven’t heard the last of me, mate. New album on the way for sure.’

Time seemed almost irrelevant once they found the road. Just one long blur of traffic for Mira. She felt the breeze around her neck and on her hands, but the invisible helmet seemed stuffier than it had before. More constraining. The nearer they rode to Point Lookout and her rendezvous with Kitching, the worse it seemed. Practically suffocating. And she still had over half a day to sit around, waiting.

‘You okay?’ Lockman asked. ‘You haven’t said a word since we hit the bitumen, and now you’re fidgeting.’

Trying to calm herself, she raised her visor and rested her cheek against his back. ‘Just travel sick, I think.’

‘Let me know if you need to stop. We’re nearly there anyway, but I have a plan I’d like to run by you, if you’re up to it.’

She glimpsed the hotel ahead through him, and through the trees — and jolted alert in panic. ‘Stop, stop!’ she pleaded, patting his shoulders urgently. She unclipped her helmet and wrenched it off. ‘I can’t breathe!’

Lockman veered for the next driveway, crossing through ghostly traffic and entering a neighbouring resort on the opposite side of the road. ‘It’s okay, we’re here.’ He braked into a park in the shade, just as she dropped the helmet and leapt off to throw up, but without anything in her stomach since their very early breakfast, she only dry-retched.

The temperature dropped noticeably in the shade but Lockman helped her peel off her leather jacket anyway.

‘Hey, wrong turn, Lieutenant!’ She wiped her mouth and pointed across the road. ‘The colonel wants me at that hotel over there. This place doesn’t even have a view of the beach.’

‘Here’s safer for now.’ He rubbed her back in small circles. ‘Do you still have medications working out of your system?’

‘Probably.’ Her body had begun to cycle properly as a young woman after so many years on compulsory hormone suppressants, but some of the other medications for depression and aggression took a lot longer to flush out naturally. Months, she’d been warned.

Nearby, she heard another car pull in, which kept her on edge and made her feel hot again.

The driver cut the engine behind her, and she heard two male occupants get out, discussing a real estate deal as they headed towards the administration office for the Spa Resort. Yesterday though, the guests she could see going in had been a fat bearded man with two young Asian girls who escorted him to the spa with promises of a massage before checking in. The room was already occupied, they told him, by someone else from their agency.

‘Great,’ Mira said, and glanced across the road again. ‘I get the feeling I’m not going to enjoy this place any better.’