Crystal Coffin (33 page)

‘Upstairs. Now!' Farran ordered.

Scott and Gran were herded to the lounge room and Kirk punched on the light.

‘All right, bandage boy,' Farran said, pushing Scott and his grandmother into the longest sofa. ‘Where's the computer?'

The Magna flogged along nicely so long as he kept it out of the potholes along the edge of the bitumen, but on dusk, the bugs splattered onto the windscreen like mini water bombs half-full of pus. They were especially thick through the culvert near the hundred zone where a gully drained into the river and Locklin pulled the wiper stalk towards him, firing detergent onto the glass. He flicked the stalk up and the blades swiped the mess aside but he had to back off speed and peer through smears until they cleared.

A black blur on the footpath became a Mercedes as he passed his gran's. He threw out the anchors, not too fast, using four hundred metres to pull up so he didn't sound like a jumbo coming in to land. ABS kept the rubber on the treads but the diff started whining as hd flogged backward in reverse. He braked hard, bringing the car one-eighty and accelerated up the short stretch to land nose-to-nose, silver car to black on the footpath under the fig tree. He grabbed the keys out of the ignition and pushed them into his pocket, then crossed between the bonnets to check the console inside the Mercedes.

Sweet, he thought, seeing three black keys hanging from their ignition too. He pulled them out and pitched them underarm into a patch of prickles beside the carport. Then he hunched low and ran down the side of the house to come out near the back door.

‘What computer?' Gran said, coughing.

Farran kicked the TV off, silencing the dirt bikes and shook his revolver, as if that made it any more threatening than it already was. ‘What did she say?'

‘She said “what computer”,' Scotty said. ‘Cause we've only got a laptop.'

‘Does your sister use it on the internet?'

‘What sister?' Scotty said. ‘I've only got cousins.'

‘Look, bandage boy,' Kirk said, sticking his Smith and Wesson at the end of Scott's nose. ‘Quit being snot-brained or I'll blow your nose for ya.'

‘In the sunroom,' Scott said, trying to stop his body from trembling. ‘It should be in the sunroom.'

Farran pulled him to his feet and pushed him towards the hall. ‘Show him,' he said. ‘And play nice with Mr Kirk, or I'll turn granny into a chunky stain all over the pretty couch.' He waved his gun again to make sure he got his point across.

Scott moved down the hall quickly before Kirk could shove him and opened the storage door under the desk beside the mannequin.

‘There you go,' he said. ‘Laptop.'

Kirk saw it under the desk, a black carry case with electrical cords sticking out the zip like distended bowels, as if the laptop had put up a fight to go back in its case.

‘Get it,' Kirk ordered, not wanting to put himself off balance in front of a quick-reflexed smart-mouthed kid. He smiled, enjoying having someone to give orders to and herded Scott back towards the lounge room.

‘You know how to work it?' Kirk asked.

Scotty shook his head. If it didn't have a clutch or a tailpipe, he wasn't interested.

‘What about you?' Kirk said, waving his revolver at Gran.

She shook her head too. ‘I couldn't even pack it away.'

Farran checked his watch and paced the hall. He looked up as if he'd slapped himself in the forehead with the answer and pulled the mobile phone off his hip. He punched at its buttons, but nothing happened. ‘What's up with this now?' he asked, getting madder.

‘We're rural,' Gran said. ‘You can't expect city services here.'

Kirk walked towards the house phone on the coffee table.

‘Not that one,' Farran said. ‘The cops might search their phone bill for STD calls after we make 'em disappear.'

‘What do you mean, make us disappear?' Gran asked, but they ignored her.

‘Get out back and see if you can pick up reception,' Farran ordered and Kirk nodded, taking the mobile out through the kitchen.

In the lounge room, Farran ripped the house phone from the wall and told Scotty to lie face down on the floor.

Locklin saw the back door from the kitchen kick open. He ducked into the annex beside the washing machine, and watched a tattoed man with a dirty ponytail come down the steps. He was punching buttons on a mobile. The man scratched his head with the barrel of his revolver and followed the crumpled concrete path towards the clothesline, looking at the sky as if something up there might make the reception better.

He stopped under the line and paced like an ostrich waiting for dinner.

‘Yeah, Mr Fletcher. Kirk here. We got the computer, but the girl's not here. Woman here says she's in Ipswich having a baby. You want us to go get her?'

He was silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, what about the two that's here?' he asked. ‘Yeah, righto. They should fit in the boot,' he added and hung up.

He walked back to the house, trying to reset a signal lock as he walked up the steps. He didn't know anyone was behind him until he felt hands grip his cheeks and heard his neck crack.

Farran pushed his knee into Scott's back and twisted the phone cord tighter around his prisoner's wrists. Scott cried out as the circulation to his hands was cut and the weight on his chest triggered his asthma. He gasped, knowing his puffer was behind his attacker, and hearing his panic, Gran looked around quickly for something to attack with.

‘Let him go, you ruffian!' she shouted, coughing as she pushed herself up and hurried to the kitchen. The bread knives hung over the bench just around the corner, and she reached halfway around and was pulled the rest. At the same time, a bullet zinged passed her shoulder and exploded right through the swinging back door.

‘Hi, Gran,' Locklin said, aiming the tattooed man's Smith and Wesson around the corner to fire three shots back up the hall. ‘Surprise!' he said casually, as they heard a body thump to the floor. Locklin put his head round the corner to take a look. ‘Only two of them?' he asked Gran.

She nodded, more in shock of seeing her eldest grandson than of having a mess to clean up in the hall. ‘Scott's in the lounge,' she said, grabbing the knife she'd come for while Locklin cleaned the revolver and tossed it back to its owner to make it look like they'd shot each other. She handed the knife to Locklin and led the way back, stepping over the body like it was a bag of rubbish waiting to be cleaned up. She grabbed Scott's puffer from the coffee table and helped him take a dose while his cousin freed his hands.

‘Typical to see you lying down, Sport, when there's work to be done,' Locklin said as he cut the phone cord. He massaged Scott's wrists and watched the blood flow back into his fingers as he helped him sit up.

‘Sorry, Gran,' Scott said, trying to breathe-calmly. ‘I should have done something.'

Gran cuddled him, inspecting the blood from his wounded shoulder and the fresh blood under the bandage where he'd fallen. ‘Nonsense, boy,' she said, hiding her tears in his hair. ‘Just so long as you're alive.' She looked up at Locklin with fresh fear in her eyes. ‘What about Helen? They were talking about her.'

‘Helen's fine,' he said. ‘There's probably an army guard on her door. Long story,' he added, seeing that his grandmother didn't understand.

‘I have to get bandages for Scott,' she said, stepping over Farran again to get to the kitchen. ‘I thought you were in East Timor.'

‘I was,' he said, ‘but I'll explain later.' He walked to the back door, pushing it fully open as he turned on his own mobile. The phone blipped twice as it logged onto the network and he dialled the local ambulance directly instead of going through 000, which tracked numbers automatically. Then he waved Gran over to do the talking.

‘Ambulance,' he said, handing her his phone and stepping out of her way in the open doorway. ‘Don't tell them about the bodies yet, Gran,' he said. ‘There's still something I have to do.'

‘Men were looking for you,' she said as the phone buzzed in her ear. ‘Are you on leave, love?'

Locklin raked his dark hair with his fingers, knowing his grandmother could spot a lie with her eyes closed. ‘Something like that,' he said, saved as the other end picked up and she identified herself.

‘What is the nature of the emergency, Mrs MacLeod?' the man asked and she told him. Her grandson had been shot. When she hung up, it was to the sound of sirens winding and she was reassured that help would be there soon. What she didn't realise as she handed Locklin back his mobile phone was that for reports of gunshots, ambulances never travelled alone.

Corporal Beattie sat in the load section of the Iroquois with the army loadmaster, Colonel Chang, a pair of Airfield Defence Guards and Squadron Leader Harris, and while the ADGies and the others enjoyed what they could of the view, Corporal Beattie was trying to hold his stomach down.

‘Takes a bit of getting used to, hey Corporal?' the loadmaster said, grinning.

‘Must have been the prawns,' Beattie said, trying not to be sick in an army chopper in front of their air force associates. ‘I've done thirty hours in rotary wings and never had trouble. What's with the acrobatics?'

‘Pilot's just done three months in a Chinook,' the loadie said. ‘Chinook flies like a double-decker bus with two giant eggbeaters on top.'

‘Oh great,' Beattie said. ‘We put a bus conductor on the joystick to a sports car.'

‘Have you got the BCSS on line yet, Corporal?' Chang asked, just loud enough to be heard across the cramped loading bay and the rotors.

‘Yes, sir,' Beattie said, using his laptop to log on to the Battlefield Command Support System. More compact, mobile, and cheaper than the American satellite communication systems, the Australian BCSS was revolutionary in that it had the flexibility to hook into almost any communications network.

What Beattie liked about it was that it was based on their analogue combat-net radio, which meant it didn't interfere with on-board electronic systems so he didn't have to switch off in the air like he usually had to with a mobile phone. It also meant he could get full access to any resources they had on the ground without having to bug the pilot for use of his air to ground communications. And split windows meant he could access, monitor and manage more than one resource at a time. Right now he was linked to ground radar at Amberley air traffic control, a military communications beacon in Moreton Bay and a Telstra mobile-net engineer who was monitoring the civilian mobile phone network for a specific user.

‘Got him,' Beattie said. ‘He just made a call. Processing coordinates.'

Beattie tapped the keys on his black-and-white keyboard and transferred the data from one window to the others.

‘Triangulating now,' he said, ensuring all three resources on his screen were able to monitor the same live mobile phone frequency. Within seconds, they each confirmed direction vectors to locate direction of the source in relation to their own position and Beattie fed the three sets of vector co-ordinates into a logarithmic algorithm to triangulate a single point of transmission.

‘Rock and roll,' Beattie said, clicking his tongue. ‘Transferring coordinates to the pilot. Assuming he's not moving, this should put us close enough to blow the cooties out of his hair.'

‘Okay,' Chang said, looking at Harris and the two Airfield Defence Guards sitting with him. ‘Let's invite a few more of your ADGies to the party.'

Harris grinned. ‘A field trip under the stars. I'll mobilise two units.'

Fletcher leaned on the packing cases full of worthless paintings and tipped some out. ‘These the ones from the farmhouse?' he asked.

‘Yeah,' Maitland said, still angry at his stepbrothers treatment of him. ‘I was going to swap them back after I pumped the pit out. Not much point in that now,' he added, frowning as Bricker took the lantern off his table.

Bricker waved it around the floor, keen to get the other lantern lit before nightfall. ‘Was it broke when you bought it?' he asked Maitland, rasping his spiky red hair through with his fingers. He surveyed the floor again, chasing skittish shadows from a darker corner. ‘I can't find no valve nowhere.'

‘The light from that one will have to do,' Fletcher said.

‘Just hold it still!' Maitland whinged. ‘I can't see anything with all that flickering.'

‘You're doing all right,' Fletcher said, walking behind him. ‘You might even have the second one done in time.'

‘The oil won't be dry on either of them for days,' Maitland hissed. ‘You'll have to pack them in the plane flat with nothing on top. You can't even use a packing case or the paint might sweat,'

‘They're not going in the plane, Eric,' Fletcher said. ‘We're not trying to rip off our buyers. They're getting the originals from now on. My galleries have the paintings on tour for another four months. There's plenty of time for the copies to dry before the collection has to go back to the Vatican.'

Fletcher looked at his watch and then at the sky. In a little under an hour he expected to see wing lights and he didn't want to hang around long after they left if he could help it.

Bricker saw his boss starting to pace up and down over the trapdoor. ‘You want me to go help Farran and Kirk with that internet pest for ya, Mr Fletcher?' he asked, spinning the load cylinder on his Smith and Wesson out of boredom.

‘No. They got her laptop,' Fletcher said, lighting a cigarette. ‘That's more important. But you can meet them next door to help fetch Nikola and Maitland's wife and kids over soon. He won't fit them all in one car.' Especially now, he realised, with unexpected passengers in their boot.

‘On second thoughts,' he said, imagining the look on his stepdaughter's face when she recognised men who worked for him walk in the front door. ‘I'll go myself.' There were still three of his men to look after Maitland or if the buyers came early — and some pleasures were much sweeter when experienced in person.

‘Where are your keys, Eric?' Fletcher asked.

‘In it,' Maitland snapped.

But they weren't. Fletcher thumped his fist on the bonnet a minute later and kicked the driver's door. He couldn't take the packing cases next door to load the originals without the Landcruiser or making more then one trip.

‘
Where are they!
' he screamed.

One of his men ran from the trees from the south.

‘Need help, Mr Fletcher?'

Fletcher looked the skinny, leather-skinned man up and down and stared at his earring, too angry to remember the man's name. ‘Which one are you?' he snapped.

‘Troy Ricks,' the man said, and Fletcher nodded.

‘Can you hot-wire a car, Ricks?'

‘A car, yes,' Ricks said, knowing he meant the Landcruiser. ‘But that thing's a diesel. They're wired different.'

Fletcher kicked the nearest thing to him, which happened to be the boathouse door. It slammed open against the wall and busted off one hinge as he kicked it three more times.

‘Okay,' he said, holding his hands up as the rage drained away. He swiped his hair back neatly and adjusted his tie. ‘Come with me.'

Ricks shouldered his lever-action Winchester on command and checked that the sixteen-shot magazine was full before slipping into the passenger seat beside his boss. Dust churned from Fletcher's Mercedes as the car took off while inside the boathouse, Bricker played with his revolver.

First the internet thing, then the lantern thing and now the car keys, Bricker thought. He rolled his weapon's loading cylinder for the thousandth time, thinking that if there was an angel of bad luck flying around, then he might just have to shoot its wings off.

Sergeant Knox nodded to Parry and explained the circumstances around the two bizarre suicides at the boathouse at the same time as he accelerated through the culvert. The speed zone here was a hundred, but Parry seemed to think there was need for more urgency, so he nudged the unmarked maroon Falcon up, another twenty.

He saw a black Mercedes parked on Clara MacLeod's footpath, but didn't think anything of it. A lot of her customers had flashy cars. He just wished they'd visit the old woman more often with their wallets open.

‘If you had any doubts they might be homicides,' Parry asked, distracting Knox before he could make a connection between the black car and where they were going, ‘how did they get reported as suicides?' That was a lot more polite than what he was thinking, which was more along the lines of, how could a string of events like that
not
be suspicious?

‘The local paper put that story out,' Knox said. ‘The rag either wouldn't or couldn't say who fed it to them and I haven't had the people or the resources to follow up on it. We're a rural station,' he added, slowing down for a stray chicken at the roadside. ‘We service a growing region of unemployed. Nuisance calls and domestics are getting to the stage that I feel more like a filing clerk sometimes than a sergeant. People come in with a complaint, we stamp them with a case number and yell “next” for next person in the queue. It's not good.'

‘I thought every station was supposed to have at least one detective?'

‘We have. This is his car. But he's taken long service leave and we've had to rely on support from Ipswich, and they're not much better off than we are. Frankly, I'm happy to give you any assistance you need, if it helps close the lid on a few of our cases.'

The police band radio interrupted with a squawk and they heard Constable Davenport call for assistance to an ambulance call-out to Wivenhoe, where the victim had suffered a suspected gunshot wound.

‘Yeah, go Jody,' Knox answered. ‘I'm in transit that way now. Where's the ambo headed?'

‘The ostrich farm on the flats there, Graham. It's Clara MacLeod's place near the culvert, copy that?'

‘I'm on it,' he said, braking hard. ‘Sorry,' he added for Parry as he spun the car around. ‘Duty calls.'

He got there in about the same time as the ambulance and pulled up next to the black Mercedes. He called, the licence number in to Davenport and asked her to run a check on it, but Parry followed the ambos up the front steps and found something more interesting inside the house and at the bottom of the back steps.

‘Two of Fletcher's travelling companions,' Parry said. ‘I saw them at the airport.'

‘Two shots to the temple and one to the cheek on this one and a broken neck on that one,' Knox observed, stepping over one of the bodies on his way back to the lounge room. ‘You've had a busy day, Scott,' he said, watching the ambos check the boy's head and shoulder. ‘Want to tell us what happened?'

‘I'll do that,' his gran said, stepping between them. ‘Those two mongrels came in looking to steal my place like they did with my son's Freeman. One of them took me out the back to kill me and I tripped him on the stairs and he broke his neck. I grabbed his gun and shot the other one,' she said holding her wrists out, challenging them to be handcuffed. ‘And that's the way it happened.'

Pretty good shot for an old girl, Parry thought. ‘Your phone's busted,' he said. ‘How did you call the Ambulance?'

‘His phone,' Gran lied, hoping it was still lying beside the body. ‘I hate mobiles. I chucked it out there with the other rubbish,' she said, pointing to the dead body.

Knox nodded and deputised an ambulance officer to keep the crime scene secure until back-up arrived. Then he nodded to Parry. ‘Let's go see if we can find the rest of them.'