Something Fishy (18 page)

Tony's hand moved. Syce turned the page. Tony's hand moved again. Then Syce was stepping away, bending to the light, checking that all was correct. Satisfied, he folded the pages and slid them into his back pocket. Tony was slumped, forehead on the lid of the cooler, motionless, sobbing.

He knew what was coming next. So did I. Transfixed, incapable of action, I watched it happen.

Syce stepped out of the light and vanished behind the tree. Seconds later, he reappeared with a long-handled shovel. A latrine digger. A grave digger. Gripping the handle like a bat, he swung downwards, putting his full power behind the blow. The flat of the blade hit the back of Tony's head with a dull thud. For a brief moment, a metallic reverberation quavered in the air. When it stopped, Tony Melina was no longer sobbing.

Lizards and scorpions crawled up my spine. A python writhed in my stomach. ‘Holy fuck shit Jesus Christ,' I thought.

Syce propped the shovel against the tree and began to unchain Tony's limp body. The logic of the situation unfolded before me. Syce did not intend to merely borrow Tony Melina's identity. He was going to steal it. A plan which wouldn't work if Tony's body was found. At the very minimum, a shallow grave would be required. Hope flared. While Syce was burying Tony, I could make myself scarce.

But instead of dragging Tony out of the circle of light, he was dragging something into it. Something heavy. A roll of chain-mesh fencing. He unrolled it and stomped it flat. Hauling Tony by the armpits, he manoeuvred his limp form onto the wire mesh and straightened his limbs. Grunting and pushing with his boots, he rolled up the mesh with Tony bundled inside.

He disappeared again, moving out of my line of sight. I heard an engine start, the Hilux. He was driving away, leaving the body behind. I scrambled to my feet, legs buckling beneath me. This was it. The moment had come.

But he wasn't driving away. He was driving up the slope from the creek bed, coming the way that Jake Martyn had come, headlights catching me as I stood in the dinghy, poised to spring over the side.

I froze as the beam passed over me, a prison spotlight. The light kept going, sweeping into the campsite. I dropped back to the floor of the dinghy. If this kept up, I might as well send for my furniture, have my mail re-directed. The Hon. Murray Whelan, The Old Runabout, Club Torture, Hidden Location, Otway State Forest.

The Hilux continued. Syce hadn't seen me. Fresh hope welled. He wasn't going to bury Tony near the camp. He was going to haul him somewhere in the back of the utility. Again, it was just a matter of keeping my head down and waiting until he'd gone.

I kept it right down, pressed myself to the floor of the boat. No peeking. Too risky.

The Hilux was reversing, beep-beep-beep. Then the door was opening, engine still running. Feet shuffled. Shuffle, shuffle. Syce grunted and wheezed, exerting himself.

There was more foot shuffling, then a flicker of movement at the periphery of my vision, a writhing in mid-air. It was coil of rope, first ascending, then slithering downwards. Then again. Syce was attempting to toss a line over the branch of a tree.

He succeeded on the fifth attempt. Then the Hilux was creeping forward. The rope went taut and the roll of chain mesh rose into sight. When it got to about three metres off the ground, the Hilux stopped. The mesh cylinder swung on the end of the rope, rotating like the needle of a compass.

Syce's intentions eluded me. Did he plan to conceal Tony Melina's body in the branches of a tree, I wondered, cocooned in fencing mesh? Was this a practice he'd encountered in remote backblocks of the country? Had he got the idea from some sort of aboriginal burial rite? It was certainly not a custom usually associated with the interment of second-generation migrants from Melbourne's inner-northern suburbs.

I heard the ratchet of the Hilux's handbrake above the idling of its engine, then footfalls headed for my hiding place. The bow of the dinghy dipped. It began to move. Syce had the boat trailer by the hitch. He was pulling it forward, steering it towards the dangling bundle. I began to get the idea. The mesh was weight. Tony's body wasn't going up into a tree. It was going down into the sea.

I pressed myself as flat as possible against the floor of the shallow dinghy. One glance and Syce would see me. But he was already back in the pickup, reversing. Beep, beep, beep. Down came the awful package. Thump. It landed right on top of me, pinning me to the floor of the boat.

Syce's footsteps crunched. The dinghy went horizontal and rolled forward a little. With a judder and a clunk, Syce hitched it to the tow-bar of the pickup. An arm reached out and jerked the rope holding the mesh. Its coils slithered into the boat. The mesh bore down on me. I writhed beneath it, discovery imminent.

Then, utter darkness. A covering had been flung over the load.

The door of the Hilux slammed shut and the trailer began to move forward, rocking and bumping. I put my palms against the mesh and pushed upwards, gasping for air. The dog started barking, wondering where the rest of its supper was going. Syce yelled for it to shut up. It did. A tepid, viscous liquid was seeping through the mesh. It dribbled onto my face, pooled in my palms and trickled down my wrist.

The boat tilted as if plunging over a waterfall. The load shifted, slipping towards the bow. As I tried to squirm free, something brushed against my cheek, swaying back and forth. It was, I realised, Tony's crucifix, dangling from the gold chain around his neck.

Fat lot of good it had done Tony. But the way things were going, I'd need all the help I could get.

I closed a sticky fist around it and squeezed tight.

Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Take it from me, he didn't have a clue.

Hell is being pinned on your back to the bottom of a cheap aluminium dinghy by a crushingly heavy roll of fencing mesh containing the mutilated corpse of a murdered trattoria proprietor from Ascot Vale, while being hauled cross-country through a trackless forest in the middle of the night by a criminal maniac with a propensity for gratuitous violence who's already slaughtered your pregnant lover, trapped in absolute darkness beneath a black plastic tarpaulin, drenched in sweat and struggling blindly to get out from under a shifting cargo of metal links and oozing body fluids.

As distinct from having to share your breakfast croissant with Simone de Beauvoir, for example.

Twigs and branches scraped the hull of the dinghy as it bounced along the dry creek bed, plunging down invisible gradients and lurching over hidden obstacles. Desperately, I wriggled free of the pitching, bucking, bitching bale of wire and got my head clear of the suffocating plastic tarpaulin.

For all the bump and grind, our progress was slow. I rapidly assessed the situation. Syce's attention was focused on the way ahead. He was unlikely to notice if I rolled over the side and slipped into the surrounding scrub. With luck, I might even be able to find a phone signal, get a description of the Hilux and boat trailer to the cops, have them nail Syce with the corpse in tow.

I gave my pocket a reassuring pat. The phone was gone. Ducking back under the plastic tarpaulin, I put my shoulder to the mesh cylinder and groped the hull beneath it. As my fingertips found the phone, the load shifted, grinding my digits between steel mesh and aluminium hull. The mobile slithered beyond my grasp. By the time I succeeded in getting a firm grip on the elusive little fucker, the Hilux had found level ground. Shifting up a gear, it accelerated forward.

Hidden by the tarpaulin, I prodded at the touchpad of the phone. No light, no dial tone, no nothing. A shake and a rattle did nothing to improve the situation. The useless piece of plastic was kaput. And my chance of an easy exit had gone west. Or possibly south or even east. The pickup was moving along a proper track now. It was narrow and bumpy but our speed was increasing. A brisk leap overboard was off the agenda.

I was wedged into the gap between the side of the dinghy and the roll of wire mesh, swathed like a papoose in black plastic, the blade of an oar jammed up my kazoo. Branches flashed overhead. My chest rose and fell. The roar of adrenalin filled my ears, overlayed with the hum of the wheels, the squeak of the suspension and an intermittent, almost inaudible groaning.

At first I thought it was me. Gradually, I realised that the groan was emerging from the folds of wire. Sweet Jesus, was it possible that Tony Melina was still alive? I pressed my head against the mesh, all ears. Which was more than could be said for Tony.

Tony was a tosser and a letch, and his garlic bread was mediocre, but those aren't capital offences. So what if he'd fiddled his taxes and done business with crooks? Start killing people for that sort of thing and you'd have to execute the entire Australian corporate community. Apart from the Murdoch family, of course. And the Packers.

The moan became a gurgle. Melina must have been tougher than an overdone veal scaloppine. ‘Hang on, mate,' I urged. ‘Just hang on. We'll get you out of here.'

We? Me and my regiment of crack commandos.

The headlights of the Hilux lit up, sweeping the bush ahead of us. Syce's silhouette was visible in the rear window of the cabin. We moved onto a road, an even surface. No longer pitching wildly, the dinghy was hurtling through the night, speed increasing. The surface firmed, turned to bitumen. We were racing downhill, the cat's-eye reflectors on the roadside posts winking as we flew past. Down, down.

The roadside verge widened. Gaps opened between the trees, then closed again. For a fleeting moment, the sea glinted in the cleft between two humped-back crests, a distant mirror. The pickup's tail-lights flared. On-off-on. On-off-on. SOS.

A radiance lit the horizon, a spreading sheet of lightning. A rocket rose, trailing incandescent showers, then burst into a glittering ball of emerald sparks. Even as it faded, a scintillating yellow cascade took its place, followed by an explosion of vermilion.

The midnight fireworks show in Lorne, I realised, squinting into the dial of my watch.

Happy New Year, Murray. My first resolution was to get out of that fucking dinghy toot sweet. My second was never again to act on impulse.

I thought about Red, imagined him in a sea of youthful faces. Goofing it up to a wah-wah Auld Lang Syne, flanked by a supercilious goth and a clinging pixie. Thought, too, about the festivities at Gusto. Jake Martyn presiding. Barbara Prentice in attendance. Me not.

We were flying now, the boat-trailer bucking and fishtailing. Fingers sunk to knuckle in the steel mesh, I clung for dear life. The tarpaulin flapped and rustled around my ears. If Tony was still breathing, I could no longer hear it.

The Hilux slowed, then jerked to a halt. The load slid forward, carrying me with it. Then we were moving again, turning right, the trailer swinging wide, the load sliding back. I heard the crashing of surf, saw the flash of oncoming headlights, felt the buffeting rush of passing vehicles.

I figured the geography, conjured the map. Sea to our left, hills to our right. We were west of Lorne, heading along the Great Ocean Road. Ahead lay a long stretch of sparsely inhabited coastline.

A car was approaching from the rear. I crawled to the very back of the boat and extended an arm, waving in a way that I hoped would be understood to be a sign of distress. The headlights moved closer and closer, blinding me. I continued to wave, hunched across the stern of the boat. The car veered to the other side of the road and accelerated, beginning to pass. A figure leaned from the passenger window.

‘Whackaaaaa,' he yelled, raising a can of beer in salutation. The shitfaced peabrain in charge of the wheel hit the horn, a doppler wail of appreciation at my daredevilry.

The car picked up speed, overtook the Hilux and disappeared. On we drove, our speed unchanged. Hoping that Syce had not twigged to my presence, I ducked back beneath the tarpaulin.

We were moving fast, 90 k at least. Soon there would be fewer and fewer cars on the road. I needed a more compelling attention-grabber than a wave and a grimace.

The dinghy's outboard motor was held in place by a pair of salt-encrusted wing-nuts. Sprawled flat on my stomach, head down, I went to work on one of them. It was corroded tight. If I got it undone, I could drop the motor into the path of an approaching vehicle. That should do the trick. Or send some poor innocent hurtling off the road into the ocean hundreds of metres below us.

The nut refused to budge. I tried the other one. Ditto. I persisted, wincing with the pain of it. Same result. I pounded the inert metal with my mobile phone. Even as a blunt instrument it was useless.

From far behind us, headlights began to approach. But just then we began to slow down. The Hilux swung off the highway, cut its lights and bounced towards the sea. Dry sand spattered against the trailer mudguards.

I slid back into the gap between the hull and the freight and got my hands around the shaft of an oar. I lay there, staring up at the blackness of the covering tarpaulin. Oar clutched to my chest like a quarterstaff, I awaited developments.

We rocked across broken ground, then stopped. The cabin door opened. It snicked shut. The hitch fastenings of the trailer squeaked and clattered. The trailer moved backwards, bumpity-bump.

Now, I told myself. Go for broke. Toss the tarp aside, jump out of the boat, run, head for the highway. If tackled, clobber Syce with the oar, keep running, find somewhere to hide.