The Worm King (32 page)

Apart from light escaping through the front
door, the only illumination came from a chain of weak bulbs strung along the
awning over the veranda, shrouding the hotel in an insipid glow which failed to
punch far into the darkness. These lights hadn’t been on last time he was outside,
and the mist looked a touch thicker too. No chance of seeing the front gate, or
even the shack on the lawn, but the 4WD remained visible, and he could just
make out the back of the old truck parked in front of it.

A muffled shout echoed from around the side
of the hotel. ‘I think that’s Dick,’ said Astrid with distaste. ‘At least, it
sounded like his voice.’

Snow was everywhere and in all the wrong
places at once. Worst of all, Forsyth had the gnawing feeling the Prime Minister
might know nothing about this new legislation, and Snow’s trying to do a shifty
for some reason. Yet he was so brazen? That other bloke, Harelip, clearly had
something to do with it. Hopefully they were both still around the back of the
hotel, setting rats on fire, which raised a bunch of questions in itself.

‘I’m going to ask him where the twins are,’ said
Astrid irritably, starting down the veranda steps. Forsyth grabbed her sleeve.

‘Wait!’ She tried to pull loose but he held
on. ‘We’ll check the others are okay first, and see what they want to do. Maybe
we’ll go and speak to Snow then.’ If she raced off half-cocked, it’d end up getting
everyone in strife.

‘They have found my truck, and bought it
inside,’ said Francesco, pointing at the vehicle parked in front of the 4WD. ‘There
she is, see?’

Transport. That may avoid having to use the
vodka as a bartering chip, should the need arise to borrow Snow’s 4WD.

Astrid frowned, but eventually saw the logic;
the others didn’t take much convincing either, so two minutes later they made straight
for the shack. The fog could’ve thinned a fraction because the building now shone
faintly through the gloom. Winston was overjoyed to see the pair and wasted little
time giving them an energetic account of his escape from Harelip and subsequent
stay in the rubbish pile. Astrid, like Winston, seemed convinced Snow was in
cahoots with Harelip and up to no good, especially after the disappearance of
the twins.

‘There’s another thing,’ said Winston. ‘When
Murray got back and described him, Scarlett here told us she saw a man with an
eye patch that sounded like Harelip taking petrol from the truck out there,
with a hose.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the vehicles. ‘As soon as
I heard that, I thought, uh-oh, that’ll be Frankie’s truck, so I got her to
show me, and sure enough, it was yours mate. ’ He shook his head.

For Forsyth, that was the clincher. Only one
avenue remained.

Francesco held up his hands in disbelief. ‘So
they take my truck, and we cannot leave except to walk, and we’d still have to
get through the gate!’

‘Yeah, we’re pretty keen to move on if we
can,’ declared Murray. ‘Trouble is, if we run outta petrol half a mile down the
road, I reckon they probably wouldn’t let us back in. Not sneakin off like
that. Then we’d be stuck out there with no car and bugger all tucker. Dunno
which is worse: that or those funny buggers round the back.’

‘We have to go and speak to Dick, find out
what’s going on,’ insisted Astrid.

‘That’s not a good idea. If any of your
suspicions are correct, he’ll just lock you in that room again, probably the
rest of us too, then it’ll be all over red-rover. There’ll be nothing we can do
after that. We’ll be screwed.’ Forsyth paused, letting this sink in. ‘My
suggestion would be to move to a safer spot first,
then
we’ll come back
and ask him about your twins; just you and me, if you like.’

Francesco nodded approval. ‘Yes, and I would
like to come back too, and speak with Snow again. But next time I bring some
friend with me.’ He socked his clenched fist into his palm and it sounded like a
ham being smacked against a wall. Suddenly it dawned on Forsyth that Francesco
and these Kiwis certainly won’t want to go to Duntroon; not after this brush
with authorities. Duntroon had been his obvious backup plan should the need arise
to retreat. More importantly, he’d be mad to return straight to Duntroon too. Not
without better evidence against Snow. It’d be tantamount to deserting his post
and the Brigadier would use it as an excuse to rip him a new one for sure.

He implored the group to hunker down and promised
he’d go and get things sorted, then be back in a jiffy. Furthermore, the
aforementioned jiffy would be no longer than seven, or perhaps at most eight
minutes, and they should all be ready to disembark post-haste on his return. He
smiled reassuringly, and pulled an imaginary train cord.
‘Toot! Toot!’
Scarlett
giggled but no one else laughed. Then, complete with bottle of grog and confident
swagger, Captain Forsyth strode from the shack.

The Brigadier would’ve thought the whole performance
absolutely bang-on.

The Smirnoff swung lazily from his left hand
and the oily liquid contained within sloshed thickly at the bottles throat. He
lifted it high, standing dead centre in the front of the 4WD, right between the
headlights, which were off. Nobody moved on the hotel veranda and the front gate
lights weren’t visible so conditions looked about as perfect as you’d get. The
driver happened to be singing: the Irish ballad
Danny Boy,
which was a
terrible shame because that’d always been one of Forsyth’s favorites and he was
way out of tune, and making a terrible mess of it.

He wouldn’t be able to see a thing. The
windows had completely fogged up, so Forsyth rapped a couple of times on the
hood then moved around to the driver’s door. The singing thankfully stopped,
and the window wound jaggedly down. The man’s bleary, sour face protruded, immediately
focused on the bottle, then a hand emerged, beckoning the vodka over along with
some garbled, slurred instruction.

‘Righto. Here you are.’ He held the liquor out
although not too close, so the driver had to reach through the window but still
found it slightly out of range, so stretched even further, until his head stuck
through as well. Step two: release your bottle. Before it was halfway to the
ground, he’d grabbed the man by the hair with his free left hand and ripped the
head down hard, cracking it against the lower window frame and shattering the
cheekbone into god knows how many fragments. The bottle cracked on the asphalt
with a dull pop. His right hand swung up and around in a tight clockwise loop,
pausing for a moment when the glock was positioned directly over the driver’s
head and pointed straight down, then he shot him once through the temple.

Hold him! Hold him!

Check the veranda: still clear, and the
front gate: zilch. The man’s death passed unobserved. You have to be careful
when you take someone like this because you’re prone to shot yourself in the
foot. Keep holding the head out, so it doesn’t drain inside the vehicle. The twitching
faded to an odd spasm, then nothing. He tried opening the door but it was
locked, so reached inside and fumbled around till finding the latch, then
clicked it open. When he’d opened the door a few centimeters, he released the
head and the corpse tumbled out of its own accord. The lifeless bundle of arms
and legs crumpled to the ground. He knelt, and rolled it underneath out of
sight which made him think that—

Yeah it’s a job, so fuckin what?

Think that it’s always been like this. No
memory existed of anything else. You have to push down what you do so, so deep
that no other memory of anything ever manages to survive. Deeper and deeper and
deeper, right to the bottom, because that’s what they say works best and then
they’ll say the only way
to
bury it that deep, is to whack more on top,
so get back out there soldier! So you do it one more time, hoping this one
won’t be as bad as the last. Eventually, relief emerges from continuation. Keep
pushing it down, go on. The key was still in the ignition. It must’ve always
been like this, surely. But the bags full, sir!

Has it? Always?

He’d figured on walking back to the shack and
fetching the others then simply driving off. Yet, why walk at all? After a
moments contemplation Forsyth bent down and dragged the body out from
underneath, partly so it didn’t get squished, but more so as to take a shoe and
sock off, then use the sock to wipe the splatter off the driver’s door,
although the red paintwork would’ve made detection unlikely anyway. When
completed, he chucked the sock under the vehicle, climbed in and pulled the
door shut.

The seat’s warm!

Who cares. Provided they were ready to go as
instructed, he ort to be able to pull up, collect them and continue on in one smooth
movement. If you’re going to bluff, do it properly old son. The key felt cold and
wet in the ignition. The moisture on the metal must’ve come from the condensation
of the driver’s final breaths. He turned it, and the sound was loud enough to
wake the . . . where are those headlights? There! Dazzling shafts
of light flooded the drive. He ground the gearstick into first, did a u-turn on
the concrete then steered across an abandoned flower bed and over a dead lawn
straight towards the shack, driving by no means fast but steadily, with
purpose.

The passengers piled in surprisingly quickly.
Less than forty seconds all up in the LZ was Forsyth’s guess.
Toot! Toot!
A light went on at the front gate. Francesco finally lurched himself aboard, hauling
his bulk into the front passenger seat, and they were off.

“The pipes, the pipes are call-ing,

From glen to glen
 . . . 
”

Two men stood guard at the gate, one either
side.

Was his singing soothing everyone? He could
feel himself slipping into that strangely narcotic battle calm: where you know
some bad niggle’s possibly looming, and you’re trying to stay relaxed with one
hand on the wheel and the other on your glock, ready to pull it out so fast
it’d make that fucking guard’s head spin, but in the end, it was all completely
unnecessary.

‘Evening,’ said the guard, casually waving them
on. The Captain returned a half-arsed salute and cruised straight through. No
one followed, and for another ten seconds the lights of the hotel gradually diminished
in the rear-vision mirror, until they disappeared.

Dick watched the Captain take the Mulloolaloo
4WD and was actually glad to see it go. They’d finished up at the rubbish pile
because it’d been damp and the fire went out, although most of it’d burnt by
that stage anyway. He stood beside Bob at the corner of the hotel, barely fifty
meters from where the requisitioned 4WD had been parked.

For one thing, it had been red, and he found
red cars ostentatious. Whenever Dick purchased a new car—and he’d bought seven over
his illustrious career—they’d always been green. To his way of thinking, green simply
had a lot more class than other colors. This was partly in remembrance of his
distant Irish heritage, which certainly impressed some people. Also, you could
usually twist it into some “green image” environmental angle. There are plenty
out there stupid enough to make that link. “Global warming? Of course, I jolly
well hate it, but they don’t make this type of Porsche to run on ethanol, so I
got a green one instead.” However the best thing about a green car is you can
park up at rest stops, and on isolated patches of highway, and it’s much harder
for others to see you. Dick far preferred the 1986 V8 Falcon he had parked
around the back under a covered garage. That was green.

They’d be back.

On the subject of green, Bob’s eye seemed to
be getting better because he kept rubbing it all the time, which meant it must
be itchy, and therefore on the mend. Hopefully his obsession with the dwarf
would peter, now the creature had either been fried, or in all probability hadn’t
been there in the first place. The trouble was, people like Bob need a lash or
two themselves every so often, to keep them in line. Otherwise they’re just random
missiles of insanity, and nobody wants to set that off. So you feed them little
treatsies and scraps every now and then: more and more, and then wallop!! As a
training method it couldn’t be beat, but even if it didn’t always work quite as
intended, was usually an enormous amount of fun.

‘Move the twins back into 237,’ Dick instructed.

‘Yeth.’ Bad Bob walked away.

Dick trod like a panther over to the body. A
shoe lay next to it and one foot was bare, but no sign of the missing sock. He
turned the dead man’s head gently, with his boot, and saw the raw hole in the
temple. He got down on his haunches and turned the pale face towards himself, doing
it carefully because he knew the man’s name was Justin, and sure, he’d had a
wee drinking problem, and yes, at times he could be a bit gruff, but he’d only
been twenty-six and was from Perth with a pregnant wife and he got there in the
end, and did eventually do something useful. Never mind that it’d been
twenty-five years, three hundred and sixty-three days of non-stop screw-ups
prior to this; in the end, he made it. Dick
could
say this with some
accuracy, for he happened to know that today was Justin’s birthday. Yes! There’d
been drinks with the boys earlier. A dribble of blood was smeared around his
nose and both eyes were closed. Maybe it’s only a really bad nosebleed, and
he’s just having a nap? He did look almost peaceful, as though dreaming about
something neat he did when a kid on a long-forgotten picnic. Dick stood, and
lifted his steel-cap boot high then STOMPED on the head, so hard the sharp edge
of his heel crunched clean down through skull bone and the top eye popped
rudely open, bulging grotesquely. A jet of creamy fluid squirted out the nose.