Moonlight Downs (29 page)

Boiling oil

HAZEL WAS staggering now, but still moving. I could feel the terror that was coursing through her veins: something very much like it was coursing through my own.

But then another emotion flared up and through me like a wildfire.

Fury
.

What had I been? Fuckwitted? Blind? Racist, even, against my own people. All of the above and more.

Well fuck em, I thought. Not any more. Not any more. If I was going down I was going down swinging. And kicking, biting, scratching, gouging, raking and making use of whatever came to hand, foot or fingernail. I glanced at Bernie.

‘We couldn’t have found her without you,’ he said, his blue eyes beaming merrily.

‘No,’ I smiled back, ‘don’t suppose you could’ve.’

A blur of movement on his right side.

It was only the fact that I was expecting it that stopped the hammer in his fist from smashing my skull. I rolled with the blow, but it still sent me reeling out over the dropsides.

He thumped on the roof and the vehicle pulled up. I heard him jump down, walk back towards me.

‘Nothing personal, Emily,’ I heard him mutter.

Jesus, I thought, it’s fucking personal to me.

He came closer, and I lay still, my eyes closed but my brain braced and working furiously.

A cry from Mal—‘C’mon, quick! Other one’s pissin off!’—called him away, doubtless to return when he’d taken care of Hazel. I heard the door slam, the truck start up.

I opened my eyes. The truck began to move. No time to think. No options. I threw myself forward and grabbed hold of the tow-bar. The rocks ripped bitter weals into my flesh as I dragged myself up over the tailgate. I collapsed onto the floor, my legs shredded, my skin dancing with pain.

How much time did I have? Bugger all. The truck slowed as it hit the rough ground leading up to Karlujurru, but Hazel was less than a hundred metres away.

I crouched in the shelter of the forty-four and scanned the truck desperately, looking for a weapon. Shovels? Crowbars? Sledgehammers? Fucking pointless. They had a gun in there. Shovels and crowbars? All I’d be doing was providing them with a bit of light entertainment.

The forty-four.

I tapped. It was full. I grabbed the hammer, ripped the bung out. Full of super.

I glanced at the blokes up front. All eyes on the next kill, they hadn’t noticed me.

What could I use for a torch?

I whipped off what was left of my shirt, pulled the matches out of my pocket and tackled the knots that held the drum. Braced myself. I put a match to the shirt. It was cheap crap. Perfect. Went up like a flare. I got a grip on the forty-four, put a foot up on the backboard and heaved.

Thump!

They heard that all right. Felt it, too. The vehicle slammed to a halt. Petrol came surging out onto the floor and I launched myself out over the tailgate.

Somewhere in mid-flight I flicked the burning shirt back over my shoulder.

I hit the ground rolling. Splinters of pain lanced my back. I’d landed on rock. Rock? Shelter, I thought hopefully. I tumbled into a granite outcrop as sheets of metal and screams and a wall of flame flew about me.

I clenched my eyes. Stars exploded, indigo rivers ran down shafts of red and yellow gold. Metal melted, plastic boiled. I squeezed everything that could be squeezed—my eyes into twisted slits, my knees into my tits, my body into a ball as the air shuddered and shook. Rocks burst. My eardrums threatened to do the same. Burning embers and ashes and sparks of glass lashed my bare back. My bones were on fire, my marrow sizzled. I gasped for burning rags of air. I froze, I cried, I screamed until my throat throbbed.

Time warped. I lay for an incalculable span—somewhere between seconds and forever—tumbling in a vacuum.

Then I crawled away, vaguely astonished that I was able to do so.

A dirty black cloud boiled above me. The sun had gone a streaky green, the sky greasy.

I climbed out of the blackened little hollow that had saved my life. Attempted to stand. Wobbled for a while, then made it to my feet. The chorus of pain that screamed from every corner of my body told me I was still all there.

I staggered up to where I’d last seen Hazel, giving the burning vehicle a wide berth and a glance quick enough to ensure there were no survivors. I didn’t hang around—there were some bloody awful odours coming from the inferno and they didn’t all smell like burning oil and rubber. I studied the wreck for a moment, and made out the charred remains of a corpse. I couldn’t tell which one of them it was. It looked as though he’d made it out of the cabin, burning as he crawled, but in his thrashings had rolled back under the truck and been consumed.

Hazel was some thirty or forty metres away, lying face down in the scree on the outskirts of Karlujurru.

I staggered up the slope and put a hand upon her shoulder. ‘Hazel…’

She sprang about, wild eyed and sucking air, her mouth twisted into the beginnings of a scream.

Then she saw who it was and the relief swept across her face.

‘Oh Emily…’

I fell into her arms and we kissed each other’s battered faces.

‘It’s okay, Haze,’ I whispered. ‘It’s okay…’

‘Those
papalurtu
…’

‘We’re safe now, darling. I burnt the bastards.’

‘They killed…them old people.’

‘I know. Took me long enough, but I got it in the end.’

We huddled desperately against one another, then she looked at me and shook her head.

‘Jesus, Emily,’ she muttered, ‘thanks for helping em track me down.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Thought I shook em off till you showed up.’

‘I only just figured em out meself. Took your wind-chime, didn’t they?’

Her eyes crinkled suspiciously. ‘What?’

‘Your wind-chime. That was what they were after.’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘Because they took mine as well. Tried to make it look like the Sandhill Gang.’

‘I was waterin the horses when they come in. Watched em kill the old ones.’ She paused, stared at the west, shook her head. ‘Oh Emily, I don’t understand. That feller went about it as cool as if he was butcherin a beast.’ She shuddered and gagged, resumed her tale with a whimper. ‘Poor
olgamin
, she try to run. That silly little waddle of hers, you know? He got her with a crowbar. And the wind-chime—yeah, one of em was smashin it up in the back of the truck when he spotted me.’

‘I’ve been such a fuckwit.’

‘I don’t understand. Those stones, what are they, gold or something?’

‘The blue band’s labradorite. Pretty, but not valuable. The interesting bit’s the boring-looking stuff at the other end. Olivine, Jack reckoned at first glance. I took a closer look at a chunk of it today. He wasn’t far off the mark. It’s dunite.’

She looked at me blankly. ‘Dunite?’

‘Don’t you remember it from that old mining book we used to read?
Gouging the Witwatersrand
?’

‘Dunite. Maybe I remember the name. What’s it worth?’

‘On its own, nothing. But alongside of it you got norite, labradorite. Band of anorthosite in the upper strata. You beginning to see a pattern?’

‘You always been the pattern part of the outfit, Emily. Me, I never get past the shapes and colours.’

I kissed her forehead. ‘That’s why we fit together so well, Haze. Must admit, though, I probably read about these things more than you do. I was brushing up on my reading just the other day, before they flogged my book. The little crystal on your window ledge is part of the pattern too.’

‘I thought it was some sort of fool’s gold.’ The Moonlight mob had been forever bringing minerals into Jack, hoping they were of value. This one was.

‘It isn’t pyrite,’ I told her. ‘It’s sperrylite.’

She shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, Emmy…All those rites an lites. Might as well be starlight to me.’

‘It’s platinum, Haze. A crystallised form of platinum. Blakie gave it to you, didn’t he?’

‘
Yuwayi
.’

‘That’s what this is all about. Platinum. Worth more than gold. Worth killing for. Or so these scum suckers reckoned. Boss was a South African, too.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Well, some of them have a certain…panache when it comes to working with blackfellers, for one. But they’ve also got…’

‘The Bushveld.’

I nodded. ‘Still the largest platinum reef in the world. Mostly in a dunite matrix. Bloke knew what he was looking at. I reckon I know where he was looking, too.’

‘So do I.’ She waved an arm at the rocks above. ‘Right here. How’d you figure it out?’

‘The painting in the gaolhouse.’

‘The diamond dove?’

‘It’s a map of the area. Should have twigged straightaway, but I didn’t start using my head until I saw the original.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The outcrop on Jalyukurru. I was up there earlier today. Then I spotted the crushed labradorite in their truck and it all came together. Still got a lot of unanswered questions, though. What else can you tell me? Have you ever seen those blokes before?’

She nodded. ‘That boss feller, African one you said…’

‘South African. His name was Sweet, the prick. No sweet sorrow in that parting.’

‘When we got our land back, lotta people come talkin to my father. Wanted to do deals, make money. He was one of em. Come out a few months ago, spoke about lookin for gold. Just a small show, he said. Bit of diggin. Few ton of ore, maybe a few ounces of gold. Never said nothin about no platinum.’

‘No, he wouldn’t. He was sounding you out. He’d want to keep his cards close to his chest, wait until he already had a mine of sorts up and running. If he’d come out and announced a find as big as I think it is, you’d have had lawyers round here thicker than blowies on a hot turd. Better to worm his way in, work his way up. Mill it on the sly. Drip feed a few royalties.’

‘Old man wouldn’t have a bar of that. Not at Karlujurru. No way.’

‘Which is why they killed him. Sweet didn’t want another Jabiluka on his hands.’

‘Jabiluka?’

‘Top End. Another king’s ransom kept in the ground by hardheaded blackfellers. Remember your father disappeared the day he died? This is where he came. Spotted the drill-hole. Trouble was that they spotted him too, followed him back home. Thought they got rid of the problem when they killed him, of course. Freddy Ah Fong wasn’t likely to cause trouble. Massie had told them that much.’

‘Who?’

‘Some government jerk. Sweet went and saw him in March.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I saw his name on a list. Impala Productions. Didn’t mean anything to me at the time, although it should have. He mentioned it to me the first time I met him. Massie probably gave them an unwitting tip or two on how to stage a murder: he’s got a big mouth and a taste for the salacious.’

‘The what?’

‘What they did to…Kuminjayi’s body. Try to make it look like a business killing. They knew Blakie’d cop the blame.’

Hazel shuddered.

‘But things didn’t go the way Sweet thought they would. First you and your mob came back. Then he spotted the wind-chime on my veranda—and a book on my kitchen table—and began to get nervous. Worried somebody’d make the connection. The wind-chimes were fragments of a core sample.’

‘God, the things Blakie picks up.’

‘He must have souvenired it from the drill-site.’

‘Suppose so. He’s always bringin in things like that. They got a fascination for him. Spirit stones, he calls em. Come up out of the earth.’

Blakie. I couldn’t put it off any longer. ‘Hazel, I have to tell you. About Blakie. I’m sorry, I…well, if there are such things as spirits… he’s one of them now.’

‘What?’ She stared at the ground, massaging her temples, her mouth a puzzled O. A slow spasm of despair worked its way across her face. ‘Them whitefellers?’

‘Shot him.’

She shook her head, bewildered, aghast. ‘Jesus! World’s fallin apart!’

I squeezed her hand. ‘We’ll put it together again.’

‘But kill him?’ she rasped. ‘I’m surprised they could even
see
him.’

‘Christ,’ I muttered, unable to look her in the eyes. I ran a hand through my hair. ‘I feel…Hazel, it’s my…I mean, he died trying to save my life.’

She frowned. ‘Tell me.’

‘I come across him in the camp, trying to work a bit of magic on Jangala…got the wrong idea. Like I been doing lately. Well, I ran, he followed. Those fellers picked me up and he attacked em.’

She studied me for a moment. ‘Then he died for me too. He woulda known they was looking for me. He was my friend, that crazy bugger, even if our lingo was more stones than words. He always liked you, Emily, you know that? Said you had a good appetite. Said you an him had that in common.’

An appetite for what? I wondered. But I guess I knew—answers, stones, Hazel, a lot of things. And it made me feel even worse.

Blakie Japanangka. I couldn’t exactly mourn him—I’d never known him. But I did feel racked by the possibilities of what might have been if I’d ever given him half a chance.

Hazel reached out and dragged me into a rugged embrace. I could feel her heart beating through her battered body. Her breath as hot and humid as a Darwin December.