Headhunters (12 page)

“You all right?” Harry called across to him.

Matty winked.

Milton couldn’t suppress the smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Miles away.”

“Looks like it. This ugly bastard is number twelve. You’re falling behind.”

IT GREW ridiculously hot as noon approached and Harry called out that they would stop for an hour to refresh themselves and shelter from the worst of the sun. Matilda protested, but not too much; Milton could see that she was suffering as much as the rest of them. They revealed their tallies and Harry had forged ahead by four animals. Milton was in third, behind Matty but ahead of Mervyn and Eric. That did not go down well.

They got back to it again. The afternoon dragged on. The heat was oppressive, a crushing weight that lay across them all. Milton’s wide-brimmed leather bush hat offered a little shade, but did nothing to take the edge off the volcanic temperature. His sweat soaked into the leather and, after a while, he stopped trying to deter the swarms of flies that gathered around the squealing animals from alighting on his face. Harry seemed to be struggling with his legs, cursing as he wrestled a difficult ewe into position. Milton marked each shorn animal on the wood, and, when Harry called out that he had just finished his eightieth, he saw that he was five ahead of him. Matilda was still working with steady efficiency, but she was quiet, not announcing her tally, and Milton couldn’t see across Harry’s pen well enough to see her count.

The last animal was ushered into Mervyn’s pen a little before six. The sun was low in the sky, but it was still blazing hot. Milton finished his sheep, shooing it out of the pen and carving the final notch into the wood. He counted and then recounted his tally: he had managed one hundred and eleven animals. His shirt was sodden with sweat and he was bleeding from several small cuts. One particularly obstreperous ewe had bitten him on the wrist and the indentations from its teeth were starting to turn a dark red. He was exhausted and he needed to sit down.

“Done!” Harry called out.

“How many?”

“One hundred and three. You?”

“One eleven.”

“Piss off, Milton.”

“I’m serious. One eleven.”

“Well, fuck me sideways,” he said, shaking his head. “You beat me.”

“By eight. It’s your legs.”

“Fuck off, John. No excuses. You beat me.”

Eric and Mervyn finished and reported numbers of ninety-seven and ninety-nine.

They waited for Matilda. She was finishing her last sheep, stripping the wool away in two neat sections and tossing it aside. She booted the sheep up the arse and watched it trot to the others, bleating its dissatisfaction.

She leaned back against the pen and wiped the sweat from her eyes. When she brought her arm away, she was grinning and Milton knew that he had lost.

“How many?” Harry asked.

“One fifteen.”

“Serious?”

“One fifteen. Money’s mine, boys. Drinks on me.”

MILTON WASN’T quite sure what happened next. The plan had been for them all to drive into the nearest town for food and drink. Then Harry decided he was done in, saying that he was going to pass and get an early night. Mervyn, who had been struggling with a hangover all day, took that as permission to decline the festivities himself, admitting that the idea of another night of booze was not something that he had been relishing. Without his wingman, Eric very quickly backed out, too. Milton knew that he would also have had an eye on the prospect of being an interloper on a night where it was only Matty and Milton to keep him company. The two shearers might not have been the brightest, but it seemed obvious enough to Milton that they had noticed the atmosphere between the quiet pommie and their foreman’s kid sister. Milton let the thought play out: if
they
had noticed it, then surely Harry had noticed it, too. And Harry didn’t have a problem with Milton and Matty going out together. Did that mean he didn’t mind the idea of them having a relationship? Milton shook his head at the way his thinking was leading him. Milton had never been the most empathetic of men, and this was confusing him.

He decided to back out himself. It was a bad idea. He went to find Matty to tell her. She was in the Jeep, the engine running. Before he could even open his mouth, she raised a hand to stifle his protest.

“Relax,” she said. “Just a drink. Well, a drink for me, and whatever you want—water or whatever—for you.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep. That’s it. I’m going out anyway. I’ve got money in my pocket and I need a beer and a change of scenery. You can either come with me and make sure I don’t do something stupid, or I’ll go alone and God alone knows what’ll go down.”

“Fine. I’ll come.”

THE TOWN OF BROKEN HILL was thirty miles away. The road was decent once they got off the station, and they made good progress, heading west on the A32. Matilda was in a good mood, her spirits buoyed by the day’s events. She jabbed at Milton with a little good-natured gloating. He didn’t mind. It was good to see her smiling and, the tension between them at least temporarily defused, he was able to relax. He had no intention of taking a drink, and knowing that he would be sober all night, he was confident that he would be able to deflect her should her new-found resolution when it came to their relationship start to waver.

“I’ll take you to a restaurant I know,” she said. “It’s called the Silly Goat. They do these amazing burgers. My mouth’s been watering all afternoon just thinking about it.”

Milton stretched out his legs as far as he could and allowed himself a smile. His life wasn’t really so bad. He was fortunate enough that he wasn’t driven by material things. He wasn’t ambitious, either. He just wanted a quiet existence, the opportunity to try different things and experience the parts of the world that he hadn’t visited before. He had known that coming here would prove to be a good idea, and he had been right. He had no obligations, no responsibilities, and he could find tranquillity through the medium of hard work. The harder he worked, the more tired he became, and the easier it was to silence the demons in his head. And then, as a pleasant bonus, he had evenings like this to enjoy.

“Look,” Matilda said. “Up ahead.”

Milton looked. It was dark, and the headlights of the car at the side of the road were bright in his eyes. He squinted and saw a silhouetted figure standing in front of them, waving an arm up and down. They drew a little closer and he could see that the hood of the vehicle had been raised. He could see a figure hunched over the engine.

“We better stop,” she said. “This isn’t the kind of place I’d particularly want to get stranded in.”

Matilda flicked the indicator and touched the brakes. They rolled off the asphalt and onto the gravel margin, the tyres crunching. The man at the front of the car straightened up. There was enough vestigial light for Milton to see that he was wearing a suit and a white shirt that looked as if it was damp with sweat. The second man walked to them. He was wearing a suit, too, and he had black hair and glasses.

Milton got out, meeting the man halfway.

“What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. Think it could be the fuel injector.”

The man gestured back at the car. It was a big Nissan Navara. The figure who had been looking under the hood was a woman. She stepped away from the engine, wiping her hands on a rag. She was of average height and slender. She was wearing a white blouse, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and a skirt.

“Where are you headed?”

“Broken Hill.”

“Not a good place to break down.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What you doing out here?”

“We work for BHP.”

Matilda was out of the car, too, now. “Mining?” she said.

“That’s right. Visiting the facility.”

“Where from?”

“We left Dubbo last night.”

“Dubbo?” she said with surprise.

“Yeah,” the man said ruefully. “We thought it’d make a change from flying.”

“That’s miles away.”

“I know it is. And never again.”

Matty went over to the car. “You want me to have a look at it?”

The man nodded. “Sure,” he said, a little uncertainly.

She looked at him with amused disdain. “What? You think I can’t fix it because I’m a woman?”

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t worry. I’m a mechanic. I fix all our trucks.”

The woman stepped aside. Matilda walked across to the open hood and bent over the engine. She poked around inside, muttering to herself.

“Doesn’t look like the carb,” she said. “What was it doing before it packed in?”

Milton realised, too late, that something was wrong.

No, he corrected himself.
Four
things.

First: the tyre tracks on the dusty margin on the other side of the road.

Second: the Nissan was clean. Compared to the dusty Wrangler, it was spotless.

Third: the man said they were executives.

Fourth: the clothes they were wearing were clean.

He connected the deductions just a moment too late.

The tracks suggested that the Navara had originally been travelling east along the A32 before looping across the road and changing direction so that they were pointing to the west, towards the town. They were lying about their direction of travel. They had been coming
out
of Broken Hill, rather than heading
into
it.

Dubbo to Broken Hill was a straight run of 750 kilometres. A marathon drive like that would take eight hours. The truck should have been filthy. It wasn’t. It was clean, as if it had just been driven off the lot of a rental company.

And how likely was it that a couple of executives would drive through the outback, rather than flying? Not very likely, despite what the man had said.

Finally, their clothes were clean. The creases were still in the man’s trousers and his boots looked like they had only been out of their box for a few hours.

Milton looked at the woman standing by the front of the truck next to Matilda. He must have betrayed his suspicion, for there was a flicker of recognition in the woman’s face as her hand slipped into her jacket, right about the spot where a holstered pistol would be kept.

The man had paused while Milton had walked on, and now he was just behind him. Milton felt a jolt of adrenaline, but before he could make use of it, something solid with sharp edges clashed against the back of his head. The impact was sudden and unexpected, and it dropped him to his knees. He blinked his eyes to try to clear his vision, and when he looked up, he was staring into the barrel of a pistol. It was a Beretta. It looked like an M9. The man had struck him with the butt of the gun.

Matilda turned, but the woman next to her had drawn a pistol. She pointed it at her. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said from behind her gun.

Milton was on his hands and knees. He looked down, waiting for his fuzzy vision to clear, and saw spots of blood as they fell down into the dust. They were red against the dirt, visible even in the gloom. He reached up to his scalp and pressed it with his fingertips. When he looked at them, they were stained with his blood.

The man spoke again. “Do anything I don’t like and the first thing I’ll do is put a bullet in your right knee. And then I’ll put one in your left knee.”

“All right,” Milton said. “I get it.”

“What happens next is up to you.”

“I’m not going to do anything,” he said, making sure that his voice was calm and reassuring. He didn’t know what was happening, but he wasn’t about to precipitate something by spooking whoever these two were.

“Very good.” The man took a step back, ensuring that there was more than enough distance between them for him to shoot before Milton could get to him, but not so much that there was any chance that he would miss.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Not just you. Both of you.”

The woman by the car looked over at her companion. Milton saw the unsaid exchange. It was a look of question, as if a decision had just been taken on the fly. The man who had hit him had made the decision. That meant that he was more senior than the woman by the car. Milton filed that little piece of information away. It might be helpful.

The man raised his aim just a fraction so that Milton was looking right into the inky little hole. “Let’s get some ground rules set up right now. You do what we say. No questions. Bad things will happen if you don’t. We clear?”

“We are.”

“Excellent. Now, then—you got a cell phone?”

“No,” Milton said truthfully.

“And you?”

Matilda didn’t answer.

“Give it to her,” the man said, nodding to the woman.

Milton looked to her and nodded that she should hand it over. Her eyes burned with fury as she reached into her pocket, took out her phone and gave it to the woman.

“Thank you. Now—into the car.”

Milton watched the man’s finger on the trigger of the Beretta. It hadn’t moved. Milton kept an eye on it as he edged slowly around to the side of the Nissan. He opened the rear door and held it for Matilda. She got in, sliding across to the right-hand side of the car. Milton looked at the man and woman again. The man gave the pistol a gentle flick, suggesting that he needed to be getting inside, too. Fine. He ducked his head, slid onto the seat and shuffled along. The woman shut the door and went around to the driver’s side. The man got into the passenger seat, arranged himself so that he could look back into the cabin, and raised the pistol again. The driver started the engine, put the Nissan into drive and gently fed in the revs. The car rolled off the margin and onto the bumpy road, turning through one hundred and eighty degrees and gently speeding up as it started to the east.

THE DRIVER, the woman, concentrated on the road ahead and said nothing at all. Her companion covered them both with the pistol. He made them sit all the way back in their seats to make sure that there was plenty of distance between his gun arm and his two captives. Milton would have to lean forward and then stretch in order to get to the gun; the man would be able to shoot him three times before he could get to him. Milton didn’t like those odds. He would play the long game.