Stiff (27 page)

The pain in my shoulder forced me into a forward hunch, pushing me down harder on the screwdriver and bringing tears welling into my eyes. Through the artificial rain I could see the last of the workmen vanishing through the exit. I punched wildly sideways and failed to connect. The sharpened metal bit emphatically into my skin. ‘A word in private, if you don’t mind, son,’ said Gardiner.

He angled me sideways and frog-marched me forward. At every attempt to struggle free or grab at him with my left hand, he twisted my arm to the extremity of its socket until the pain subdued me. ‘This is crazy,’ I gasped, my carotid artery thumping on cold steel. Gardiner shut me up with a jab and propelled me onwards.

Abruptly, with a sideways sweep of one leg, he knocked my feet out from under me. My arm strained at its socket as I went down, and I cried out in agony. As I hit the ground I felt the screwdriver disappear from my throat. It instantly reappeared behind my head, probing the tender spot at the top on my spine. My forehead was jammed hard against the wet floor, my lips kissing the cold concrete, tasting the tomb. Gardiner’s foot was in the small of my back, pinning me down. ‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you that nobody likes a smartarse, son?’

I struggled feebly, immobilised by the pain in my shoulder and the threat of being skewered. The octopus was back, sorely pissed off. This was not what I had expected. But what exactly had I expected, running around a burning building like a chook with its head cut off, not knowing what I was going to do next, all dumb-fuck cunning and rampant glands?

Gardiner on the other hand knew exactly what he was doing. He worked methodically, the necessary materials readily to hand. Pivoting on the screwdriver, keeping its pressure constant, he jerked my arm downwards. The relief was immediate but temporary. He transferred his foot to my neck and I felt the full weight of his body bear down. Then he lashed my wrists with tape, his movements sure and agile.

‘You’re a lucky bastard, I’ll give you that.’ Gardiner liked to chat genially as he worked. ‘When that heap of yours went into the water I was convinced you were a goner.’ He hauled at the tape, dragging me to my feet and propelling me forward again, the screwdriver back against my jugular. We continued down the line of freezers, both now soaked to the skin. Gardiner didn’t seem to mind. I was shivering miserably.

At one of the freezer doors Gardiner again forced me to the ground and planted a foot firmly between my shoulder blades. Keys jingled briefly, then I was hauled to my feet and pitched into the cavernous interior. I stumbled, hit a wall of cartons and spun around. The door was sliding into place behind Gardiner. He already had one arm in the sleeve of a padded parka and was holding the screwdriver in front of him like a bayonet. His eyes never left me as he transferred the weapon to his other hand and zipped the jacket closed. Icy air wrapped itself around me, sending a chill through my damp clothes. At the very minimum I was going to come out of this whole thing with a severe head cold.

I teetered precariously back into balance, tugging at the tape. I succeeded only in digging it deeper into the flesh of my wrists. Apparently unconcerned at my mobility, Gardiner began to tug on one fur-lined glove then another. As he did so he stamped his feet, dancing about in a little boxer’s jig, and waving the steel shaft in small circles, as though inciting me to charge him headlong. I half expected him to suggest I have a go. And so we faced each other, stamping and steaming, dancing partners in a macabre frug.

‘Freezing, eh?’ Gardiner said without malice, the words propelled out of his mouth on puffs of white haze. ‘Thermostat’s all the way down. Turn a carton of boned beef into a slab of granite in twenty minutes flat. Fit young fellow like you, all his juices flowing, a bit longer maybe. But you’ll be out cold well before that. Didn’t take Bayraktar any time at all. But then he was in shocking shape.’

Freezing wasn’t the word for it. The gust of air that had entered with us was a shroud of vapour swathing our feet. We’d been in there less than a minute and already the sodden front of my sweat-top was white with hoar-frost and I was shivering uncontrollably. Shouting would be useless. Even if anyone remained outside to hear above the din of the fire alarms, the freezer walls were thick with insulation.

Gardiner’s intentions were now abundantly clear. Keep me prisoner in the freezer until I passed out from the cold, remove the tape and leave me to die. Or even drag my body out to thaw, closer to the fire. Do that to a chicken and you end up with salmonella. Frozen, baked or bombe Alaska. What a choice.

I glanced about. Aside from being even colder, the freezer we were standing in was identical to the one Apps had insisted on showing me. Corridors of waxed cartons led off into the interior. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Gardiner went on, his mouth pursed against the biting air. ‘You won’t feel a thing, though I daresay it’ll be a little nippy at first.’

As he spoke he unzipped his jacket far enough to thrust a gloved hand down his front and pull a packet of cigarettes and a disposable lighter from an inside pocket. He mouthed a stick from the pack, fumbled the lighter into action, lit up, and zipped himself closed. His eyes never left me. ‘Sad what can happen to someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing when he goes wandering around a place like this.’

I stared at the glowing tip of the cigarette hungrily. It occurred to me to ask for one, a dying man’s request. But breathing was hard enough. Each intake of air was an icy flame, searing my lungs. ‘You won’t get away with it.’ The shivering was close to uncontrollable, my voice a pathetic reed trembling behind clenched teeth.

Gardiner shrugged indifference, clapping his gloved hands together around the screwdriver, making a muffled, decisive sound. ‘Don’t see why not. I did last time.’

My legs jerked spastically under me. The front of my pants was a crackling sheet of ice, a good case for never going out without underpants.

Gardiner was droning on, the words hypnotic. ‘Even if you made other copies of those names Bayraktar was using, they won’t mean anything without the payroll records. And this little bonfire should take care of those quite nicely. Tell you the truth, I’ve been meaning to get around to disposing of them for some time. I suppose I should thank you for hurrying me up.’

This was what Gardiner wanted, I realised. To keep me standing here, listening, until my legs gave out underneath me. If I went down, I wouldn’t get up. I pleaded through the wa-wa pedal of my shuddering jaw. ‘Please. I don’t want to die. Not for some lousy little fiddle.’

Gardiner stopped jogging on the spot and drew back in mock outrage. ‘Lousy little fiddle? That any way to talk about a man’s life work? Best part of a million dollars I’ve pulled out of this place over the years, I’ll have you know. Call that lousy, do you, son?’

I shook my head, or rather it shook me. It was jerking uncontrollably as the intensity of the shivering increased. I was thinking of the escape hatch, wondering how far I would get with my arms tied back, which way to go. It took all my muscular control just to force words out. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’ Except die. I swivelled on my heels, back and forth, preparing myself. If I was going to go, I might as well go going. Swing right, I decided, and see how far I got.

‘You should have thought of that before you tried putting the squeeze on someone like Lionel Merricks,’ Gardiner said.

My instruction to my legs faltered halfway down. Excuse me. What had the man just said?

‘You’ve got some moxie,’ Gardiner went on. ‘I’ll give you that much, son. Ringing up, bold as brass. Off the record. Confidential. That will be fifty thousand dollars, thank you very much, Mr Merricks. Bloody cheek all right. But stupid. Lionel doesn’t like being stood over, especially not at the moment. Fix it, he told me. Tidy up the loose ends. But what do you do when I come around to try and sort something out? You send me packing. Not very civil of you, was it?’

Below the waist I danced on the spot, my legs half rubber, half braced to sprint. The shaking was getting worse. In contrast, my thought processes were slowing down, trudging step by tipsy step across an endless plain of snow. It would be nice, I mused dreamily, to hear the end of Gardiner’s story, hear where this latest twist led. Then lie down and sleep. I gathered a breath from my diaphragm and pushed it out my nose. ‘Wool ship.’

This pleased Gardiner greatly. ‘Bullshit, is it?’ He examined me afresh. ‘I knew it,’ he declared gleefully. ‘I told Merricks you were just flying a kite. Fifteen years we’ve been working together, him putting in lame-duck managers, me handling the day-to-day details. Not a hint of a problem. Even the Yanks thought it was just an innocent mix-up. Buggered if we could figure out how you’d got onto us so quickly. Turns out you hadn’t, after all.’ Then he chuckled, a terrible laugh of self-congratulation, and I knew how far gone he was.

My brain struggled through a blurring haze to make sense of what I was hearing. The only bit I understood was that I was being killed because of a misunderstanding. ‘Let me go,’ I pleaded. ‘We can deal.’ My words were a string of staccato grunts, like a spluttering engine about to stall. ‘Why Merricks fiddle own payroll?’

Gardiner was contemptuous behind his glowing cigarette, like it was my fault that he was being put to the inconvenience of having to murder me. ‘Christ, son, you really don’t know anything, do you? Merricks isn’t tickling the till. That’s just a private little sideline business of my own. Except I picked the wrong man to go into business with, didn’t I? My trusty fucking sidekick Bayraktar got greedy and decided to branch out into drug distribution. Had the stuff coming in from the bush by the truckload. Put our whole operation at risk, the silly cunt.’

I wanted him to know I wasn’t completely ignorant. ‘And extortion?’

This was new to Gardiner. ‘That so?’ he said thoughtfully. He threw his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with this heel. ‘Not any more though, eh son?’ He bent at the knees, his gloved fingers pinching uselessly in an attempt to gather up the scrap of mangled butt. His eyes flickered downwards.

I took off. My legs, loyal lieutenants, jerked me to the right and began to pump. Skidding on icy soles, I veered into a slot between two mountains of stacked boxes. The cold was viscous and resisted my efforts to push my way forward. I moved in slow motion, the air tasting of wet tin and searing my lungs. Wobbling erratically, trying to find my balance, I bounced off walls.

Somewhere behind me Gardiner laughed. ‘Go on, son,’ he shouted. ‘That greedy pig Bayraktar had the same idea. Go ahead. Burst your heart, just like he did.’

I lurched on and turned deeper into the maze of cartons. Muffled applause tracked my progress. As I stumbled forward I sawed my wrists numbly back and forth, dimly aware they had no feeling. Had the tape cut off my circulation, I wondered, or could this be frostbite so soon? The effort of movement brought dizziness. Careening full-tilt against a wall, I pirouetted through 180 degrees and came to rest. Gardiner was at the far end of the aisle, genially ambling towards me.

Jacking my hands up between my shoulder blades, I pushed my elbows outwards with as much strength as I could muster, quivering with exertion. My pulse roared like the ocean in my ears. The octopus reared. Gardiner advanced, the screwdriver circling casually at his thigh, impatience beginning to crease his natty, bedroom-bandicoot face. My arms exploded outwards and sent me reeling. Tape dangled from my wrists. Gardiner showed irritation then disappeared from view and I turned and shuffled through the dangling curtain of beef carcasses, setting the whole rack swinging.

A dead end blocked my path, the back wall. I cast about for the hatch, hearing Gardiner’s footfall moving closer. The hatch was there, chest high. I fell forward and clutched the handle. The catch sprang open and the hatch swung wide, wrenching my palm with it, super-glued to the metal. Outside was an oven of smoke and noise. Balmy air, thick with smoke and chemical stench, hit me in the face. I sucked in at it hungrily, feeding on its warmth.

Gardiner’s arm came around my neck and dragged me backwards. My hand tore free, raw flesh, and I hit the floor. Gardiner kicked me hard in the ribs, one, two. My knees came up protectively, curling me into a ball. Gardiner loomed above, framed demonically against the square hatch, blocking the blast of heat from the fire outside. ‘Good idea,’ he grunted, catching his breath. He half turned and made a facetious show of warming one gloved hand. ‘At my age you really feel the cold.’ Hunching down, he risked a glance outwards. He was impressed by his own handiwork. ‘Spreading pretty fast. No time to waste.’ He turned his attention back to the job at hand.

Never once taking his eyes off me, he transferred the screwdriver to his left hand and reached back with his right, searching for the handle of the hatch. The little door had swung right back on its hinges. He swiped at the air with his gloved hand, the handle just beyond his grasp. ‘You certainly take a lot of looking after,’ he grumbled, demonstratively jabbing the screwdriver towards where I lay.

Rivulets of condensation were already beginning to stream down the wall. Gardiner bobbed swiftly at the knees, ducked his head and shoulders out the hatch, and grabbed the hatch handle. As he did so, I came out of my cringe and jerked myself up into a runner’s starting stance, all my weight on the tips of my splayed fingers. Gardiner twisted at the waist, hauling the trapdoor inwards, half-turned in profile.

That’s when I killed him. Head-butted him in the nuts.

I rammed my skull into his groin with all the force I could muster. The impact caused his whole upper body to jackknife sharply forward. His forehead smashed hard against the outside edge of the hatch. ‘Ommfff,’ he went, and his head whiplashed back towards the fire. By then I had my arms wrapped around his knees and was lifting him up, shoving him backwards out the hole. I don’t know whether he was dead already then or not, because I was too busy anticipating a punctured lung from the screwdriver. But he was already going limp and when he landed on the top of his skull I heard his neck crack, even over the sound of the alarm bells. I stuck my head out the hatch and saw the screwdriver clatter to the floor.