Moonlight Downs (27 page)

Rust

I’D SPENT a lot of time soaking up bleak vistas of late, but Moonlight took the damper.

They don’t come much bleaker than this, I thought as I gazed out over the camp from the relative luxury of the ute. The windscreen was like a magnifying glass, concentrating the sun’s rays on the tinder of my unease. Bits of rusty tin rattled and flapped in the wind. Rust was seeping into the soul of the community: the turpentine bushes and blade grass, the scorched scoria, the wire that held the humpies together, the shredded wheels, the wind itself. They were infused, all, with a kind of rust-coloured clarity.

Where was everybody?

I climbed out, called a cautious greeting.

No answer. Not that I’d expected one. If they’d been here they would have come out and greeted me when I drove in. And yet Jangala’s car was parked near the shack.

It was the silence that struck me most. Even the radio, perched on its totem pole in the middle of the camp, had gone quiet. Normally it was rabbiting away non-stop, as people from communities all over the region chatted to each other on the Jalyukurru frequency. The only sounds to be heard right now were the rattle of loose tin, the whisper of wind and the squawk of kite-hawks.

Kite-hawks?

There was a flock of them flapping around the campfire, picking at…Picking at what?

I scattered them with a rock. They hopped into the air, pissed off, and settled a few metres away, scowling out from under their dark hoods as I came to check out their lunch.

It was a goanna: three foot long, as fat as a fencer’s forearm and nearly as burnt. The sense of foreboding tightened its grip on my chest. What on earth would have made the Moonlight mob leave a prize like this for the scavengers?

Cutting across to Hazel’s camp I went past the radio, and decided to put in a quick call to base, in case she’d left a message.

I picked up the mike, but it came away in my hand, the dead leads flopping against my arm. I went to stick them back, but the back plate had been smashed in.

Jesus, I thought, this is seriously weird. Where the fuck is everybody? Has there been an accident? I began to walk towards their shack, and as I drew closer I heard a noise—the creak of metal springs, then a grunt, then another grunt—from within.

I stopped.

Who was shagging who?

Whoever it was and whatever they were up to, they’d made a bloody mess. The shack looked like it had been hit by a whirlwind. Canvases upended on the veranda, paint pots and bottles scattered about, lengths of string—the remains of a wind-chime—blew across the dirt.

‘Hello!’ I yelled.

No answer.

‘Hazel?’

Silence.

I paused in the doorway, my shadow dancing on hessian. Then, with metaphorical kite-hawks tearing at my own heart, I stepped inside.

A gloomy tableau slowly assembled itself in the semi-darkness: dirty cups and saucepans on the bench, a slab of grey meat on the table, an old spring bed. Huge flies crashed against the ceiling. I could smell the fear, and it wasn’t all my own.

‘Hello?’ I whispered, more in an effort to calm myself than in any hope of getting an answer.

A flurry of wind blew the hessian a little further to one side, a beam of light cut across the murk. Landed squarely upon a pair of eyes, staring up from the bed. Bright, possum eyes. Dead eyes. And an open mouth, the teeth a row of riddled fence posts, the tongue blue.

Jimmy Lively.

A movement in the darkness on the far side of the bed caught my attention. Something black and shaggy arose from the upper body. What the fuck was that? For one horrible moment I thought it was a rat, chewing at Jangala’s neck.

Another movement and it revealed itself as the shock of hair on top of a wild, hairy head. I would have preferred the rat.

‘Jesus!’ I exclaimed. But it wasn’t Jesus.

It was Blakie.

He took a hand away from Jangala’s neck and put it across his eyes, peering up into the dazzling light from the doorway. His knuckles were smeared with blood.

He emitted a low, crackling growl and climbed to his feet, came towards me, his eyes full of squirrelly things I couldn’t read. And had no intention of staying around to spell out. It looked like he’d just finished throttling Jangala, exactly the same as he’d done to Lincoln, and was eyeing off his next victim.

I threw the table at him and crashed out through the flimsy back wall.

Which was a mistake, for two reasons. The first was that it led me to stumble over another body. Maggie’s, this one, looking even deader than her husband. The right side of her head was smashed in, a pool of blood coagulating in the dust. Blakie’s carved fighting-stick lay alongside the body. A picture of his blood-stained knuckles flashed before me. At least the poor old girl’s eyes were closed.

The second reason was that it put Blakie between me and my car.

Which could well be the fatal mistake, I realised as he came lurching out at me like a nesting crocodile.

I set off running, into the scrub.

Blakie lurched into a rambling pursuit.

My misspent youth hadn’t given me much, but it had taught me how to run, and I felt pretty sure I could outpace the middle-aged maniac on my tail. I’d shake him off, circle back round to the car.

Yet another mistake, I concluded soon afterwards, as my wild sprint withered to a canter and then collapsed into a desperate, lung-burning scramble.

I thought about the last time I’d seen Blakie, loping up into the hills with a posse of fit young coppers eating his dust. No way was I going to outrun this bastard.

He took it easy for a while, not in any apparent rush to get in there and wring my neck. But, as the years in which my main form of exercise had been rolling smokes and striking matches kicked in, he began to gain ground.

My mouth felt like it had been mud-rendered, my lungs were raked by fire, my guts wanted to give up both the ghost and the goulash I’d had for breakfast. The crash of branches in my face mingled with the crash of blood through my veins. Strange pains began cutting through my ribcage. Thin red scrawls flicked across my forearms. My heart was all pumped up and going like a pub drummer on top-drawer speed.

I lost him for a while in the thick scrub round the Purrapuru Waterhole. Lost myself too. But when I burst out onto the main track he was there waiting for me. Close enough for me to see the Jack Nicholson gleam in his eyes, close enough to smell his raw, predatory breath.

I wheeled around and set off in the opposite direction, westwards. At least I was on what passed for a public road round these parts. An occasional station or mining vehicle passed this way. But I was flailing hopelessly and fading fast.

Christ! I thought, if what was spiralling through my brain could be called thought, what have I done? What was it my father had told me about playing with black fire? What had McGillivray told me about interfering in police business? Okay, okay, I conceded, I’d let this be a lesson to me. All this time I’d been trying to pin the crime onto somebody else, when the real killer was the first and most obvious candidate.

I lost my footing, skidded in the gravel. As I knelt in the dirt I heard something up ahead. Something miraculous, man-made, mechanical.

A motor.

Salvation? I staggered round a bend and there it was, in the middle of the road: a white Hino twin-cab. Just a few hundred metres away.

But leaving me to my fate, I realised in despair as it took off. I yelled feebly, waved my arms. Yes! The vehicle stopped. They’d seen me. No, they hadn’t! A bloke on the back of the truck jumped down and began to examine the ground.

Shit! He waved his mates forward and climbed aboard. They began to move off. The bastards! I gave a yell so pathetic I could hardly hear it myself. The truck crept slowly forward.

Blakie didn’t look too happy at the prospect of my getting away. ‘
Warlukunjumana!
’ he yelled. Come here!

Sure Blakie, no worries.

His face gave new shades of meaning to the word ‘ugly’ as he leapt at me, but all he got was a handful of shirt. The adrenalin rush that followed gave me a velocity I didn’t know I had and carried me all the way to the tow bar.

‘Help…’ I gasped. The bloke on the back of the truck—skinny and dark, with five o’clock spikes and the eyes of a Byzantine Christ—turned round and stared at me in disbelief.

Not that I could blame him, I figured, catching a glimpse of myself in the chrome: denim skirt ripped and ragged, scratches and blood all over the shop, streaks of sweat and dirt, shreds of clothing on muddy breasts.

But he thumped the roof, and I blessed what I took to be his little Mediterranean heart.

‘Hey, Bernie!’ he yelled, not taking his eyes off me in case I vanished back into the desert, ‘pull up!’

The vehicle drew to a halt. The bloke on the back continued to stare. ‘You right there, lady?’

Am I right? I bloody well am now that you’re here. I could have just about leapt in and rooted him on the spot. I sank to my knees, heaving for breath, but kept a tight grip on the tray. They weren’t going anywhere without me.

I glanced back down the track. Blakie stood there agitated and scowling, his nostrils flared, his mouth a mess of snarls and desert dentistry. The prospect of tackling a truck-load of burly miners— there were four of them, and the tray was full of hard hats and hammers, hydraulic hoses, crowbars—was enough to make even him think twice. Presumably they were making their way to town from one of the mines out west.

The driver’s window rolled down and a head appeared: fortyish, fair-haired, covered in dust but vaguely familiar.

‘Madam?’ he asked. ‘Do you need help?’

‘Help?’ I gasped, climbing to my feet. ‘You dunno the half of it! Just gemme the fuck outta here!’

They looked shocked. Shit, I thought, just what I need. Prim miners.

‘Good God,’ exclaimed the driver. ‘It’s Jack Tempest’s daughter.’

It took me a second or two to place him, so scattered were my wits: Bernie Sweet, the miner who’d come to call upon my father. Yet again, Dad and his mates were saving my bacon.

I sucked all the air I could suck, then spat out a scattered explanation: ‘There’s been a killing. Two killings. Blackfeller camp back there. Bloke who did it…bloody madman, on my tail…’

Bernie looked up and back.

So did I.

The track was empty.

‘Madman, you say?’ he asked, clearly suspicious that the neighbourhood maniac was kneeling in front of him. The dirty back window was rolled down and a head like a hairy gumboot appeared, stared at me: ‘If we are gonna give ’er a lift, Sweetie, watch out for your fuckin radio—she’ll flog it if it isn’t bolted down.’

Camel.

I glanced up into his bloodshot eyes and tried to smile. Even Camel looked like a knight in hairy armour to me right now. ‘Look, Camel, I suggest we forget about any little differences we might have had in the past. There’s a killer close behind me and there’s no telling what he’ll do.’

Which there wasn’t. At least he couldn’t say I hadn’t warned him. No sooner had the words left my mouth than something long and lethal came whooshing out of the bushes on the other side of the truck.

The skinny feller on the back gasped, cursed, clutched his chest and looked at the inch of wet wood in his fingers in astonishment. Not that that particular inch was the problem—it had already done its damage. It was the twelve inches still in his body that was killing him.

In the wake of the spear came the madman himself, laying into the poor bastards like a bull with a bullet up its arse. He ripped the back door open with an almighty roar and plucked poor Camel from his perch as easily as he would have plucked a blowie from his beard. Then he speared him into the side of the truck. Head first.

Blakie hit the front passenger door before Camel had hit the deck, ripping it open—just about ripping it off its hinges—with a ferocity that stunned the bloke sitting there, but not Bernie Sweet, who used the intervening seconds to seize a rifle from the rack behind him.

Blakie grabbed the startled passenger by the beard and dragged him out, began stomping his head into the dirt. Kept stomping his head into the dirt until Bernie levelled the rifle, pulled the trigger and blew a great red hole into his corrugated chest.

I was looking into Blakie’s eyes just as he was hit, and such was the fury I saw there that I knew a few grams of lead wouldn’t hold him, knew he’d just keep going, insane and unstoppable, until he killed the lot of us.

But he didn’t.

He flew up and back, arms and legs going every which way, and landed on the wind-row. He did raise his head for a moment, his eyes burning with high-octane hatred, his green teeth twisted into a ferocious grimace.

Then he dropped back down. Lay still.

The silence reverberated as powerfully as the chaos that had preceded it. Somewhere in the treetops a crow called, a long, falling sigh. A dying sigh. Bernie climbed out, cast a measured glance at the body, checked for a pulse. Didn’t find one. Looked up at me.

‘That your madman, Emily?’

He turned back to where his shafted off-sider lay gasping against the sides of the truck.