The Tattooed Man (19 page)

‘You can’t drive with those hands. Tell me where to go and I’ll drive.’

‘I took a couple of tablets a little while ago. They’re still working. If it gets too bad, I’ll let you take over. But I’m not going to sit around. I’m not having all this turn me into something useless.’

Before they left, Harrigan rang through to local police asking for backup. He needed an escort to bring a woman and her three children into Coolemon, he said. They would be on their way as soon as possible, the duty sergeant said: half an hour to assemble and hit the road. Harrigan told them to hurry.

Outside in the yard, Harrigan stopped to look at the garage, next to Rosie’s enclosure, where he had left his car. The door had a lock, but one that was so easy to break it wasn’t worth securing.

‘Harry, that car you heard earlier,’ he said. ‘Is there any other way it can get on to your property from where you think it went? What about the road Stewie put in?’

‘Yeah, they could come in that way. But that’d just take you up to the Cage. You’d still have to know how to get from there to here across my paddocks.’

‘What if he came back here through the main gate while we were gone?’

‘We’d see him if he had his lights on. He couldn’t be that close. I’d have heard him if he was. You can hear things for miles around here.’

Uneasily, Harrigan got into the ute. Rosie’s disappointed barking followed them out into the night. They drove directly across Harold’s pastures. The roar of the engine and the glare of the headlights must have carried for miles.

‘If anyone’s out there, they have to see us coming,’ Harrigan said.

Harold grinned in a way that surprised him. He realised how angry the man was. ‘Maybe we’ll scare them off,’ Harold said.

They pulled up at the back of Ambrosine’s cottage. The lights had been turned off. A sense of urgency took hold of Harrigan. Without waiting, he was out of the cabin and pounding on the back door.

‘Ambro? It’s Paul Harrigan. Are you in there? Open the door. Open it now or I’ll break it down!’

The back door was opened. Ambrosine stood there, dishevelled and sleepy-eyed. A smell of dope wafted past her.

‘What the fuck are you doing out here at this time of night?’

Harrigan pushed past her into the kitchen. Harold followed him, carrying the shotgun.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What are you doing with that? What’s going on?’

‘It’s okay, mate,’ Harold told her. He spoke to Harrigan. ‘I’m going back outside. I’ll keep a watch to see if that car comes back.’

‘What fucking car?’

‘Just wait,’ Harrigan snapped.

Used plates, the remains of a meal, were stacked on the bench. A tiny mouse scurried down to the floor and out of sight. Harrigan looked around at
the walls covered with Ambrosine’s paintings. Their luminescent colours and obsessive details crowded in on him. One of them showed the cottage isolated between a vast sky and a bare red ochre foreground. Harrigan felt the sense of vulnerability powerfully. Out here, there was nothing to protect a person other than the huge distances. He should never have brought Ambrosine and her children here in the first place.

‘What do you want?’ Ambrosine interrupted him. ‘For months you don’t fucking bother getting in touch with me or coming to see me. Now you turn up in the middle of the night talking about some fucking car! What is it?’

‘I’m taking you all back into Coolemon now. Get your kids and let’s go.’

‘You don’t think I’m safe here any more? Why?’

Leaving her unanswered, he walked into the hallway. The front room had its door open. He could see it was her bedroom. There was another room opposite with its door shut. He guessed this was where her children slept. He looked through into the lounge where the moonlight cut silver-white patches onto the cracked linoleum. It was empty. He went to the front door and opened it. The dark tree line of Naradhan Creek was visible on the other side of the road. He walked outside and looked along the lane but saw nothing other than the curve of the empty road, whitened to grey by the moon. He went back inside to the kitchen.

‘Did the Ice Cream Man find you out here before he went missing?’ he said. ‘I asked you that question once before and you said no. You can tell me the truth now.’

‘It’s a story, mate,’ she said. ‘If you’re in a hurry, you don’t have time for it now.’

‘Did anyone follow him here?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because right now, I think he’s out there. He didn’t come here for you, he came for me. I’ve got something he wants. But now he’s here, he won’t mind finishing you and your kids off as well.’

‘Fuck!’
She hit the table. Her fingers were stained with nicotine. ‘I knew he’d fucking come back for us.’

She pushed past him, opened the door to the second room and switched on the light. There were the confused sounds of children crying.

‘Get up, all of you. Get your shoes. We’re getting out of here right now. Laurie, get your little sister. Come on, hurry. No, Little Man, don’t pick that up.
Come on!’

They tumbled out of the room, still pulling on their clothes and shoes. Laurie, a boy of eleven; Jen, a tiny girl of eight; and the youngest, Little Man, five years old and golden-haired like a cherub. They were sleepy and frightened. Most of their lives, they had been pushed from one bit of makeshift accommodation to another. Quickly, Ambrosine took them outside. Harrigan sat them all in the cabin of the ute.

‘Mate,’ Harold said quietly, ‘I didn’t hear or see a car on the Creek Lane. But I did hear something in the distance. Sounded like it was coming from the north. On the other side of the house. I thought I heard Rosie barking as well.’

‘We’re all getting out of here as soon as we can,’ Harrigan said. ‘I’ll take us to Coolemon in my car. Drive straight back to your garage, Harry. Give me your shotgun. I’ll ride in the back.’

He climbed onto the tray of the ute and pounded on the window for Harold to go. The ute roared
across the paddocks, bouncing over the ground, forcing Harrigan to hang on for dear life. They had driven through the last open gate before the house when the ute suddenly lurched to the right, almost upending itself. It shuddered to a halt with its right front wheel snagged deep in the ground. Harrigan was rolled hard against the side of the tray. He lay against it for a few moments getting his breath, then scrambled out, the shotgun in hand. They were on the edge of the old garden beds at the front of the house.

Immediately, Harrigan went to the cabin door on the passenger side. Before he got there, it was pushed open by Laurie. The boy climbed out. Harrigan leaned the shotgun against the ute and lifted out the other two children. Little Man was bawling loudly enough to wake the dead. Jen tried to comfort him but he pushed her away. Ambrosine was next.

‘You’re heavy,’ Harrigan said.

‘I’ll be heavier if I’m dead.’

Harold had got out the other side and was leaning on the vehicle for support.

‘We’re lucky we didn’t go all the way over,’ he said, one hand on his forehead. ‘I cracked my head.’

‘Cracked your head?’ Ambrosine laughed loudly and went and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Fucking Christ, Harry. Can’t you drive?’

‘It was my hands. They were hurting too much.’

‘Keep it quiet! Get your kids in the house now.’ Harrigan spoke as quietly and urgently as he could. ‘Harry, take your shotgun. I’m going to get my car out of the garage. I’ll drive it to the back gate and pick you all up there.’

Harold took the shotgun and went towards the front door with the others. Harrigan walked quietly to the kitchen end of the house, past a thick-trunked
old sugar gum whose branches extended above the veranda over the roof. Suddenly, he heard a scuffle behind him and turned to look back. Harold was gesturing to him. Before Harrigan could work out what he meant, he laid the shotgun on the edge of the veranda and sat down abruptly as if too shaky to stand. Ambrosine began to help him to his feet. Harrigan waved at them to get into the house as soon as possible.

The night air was warm. Harrigan stepped up on the veranda, staying close to the house and moving carefully in case the wooden boards creaked. Just before the corner, he stopped and took out his gun. From here, he could see Harold’s ancient rotary clothes hoist, the house fence and beyond that the garage and the yard. Everything was still. It was deeply silent. Too silent. At once, he realised what Harold had been trying to tell him. Rosie wasn’t barking. She should have been barking from the time the ute had arrived at the house. It should have been the first thing they heard. Silence is death. Someone had found a way of silencing her.

In the darkness, Harrigan almost stopped breathing. He turned off his phone in case it rang in the silence. How could you find me? Standing there, tense to every sound, he became aware of a small nugget of pain near the strap of his shoulder holster. He touched it, then reached into his shirt pocket to take out the thick gold badge he had been given at Life Patent Strategies that morning. When the ute had nearly overturned, he must have rolled onto it, pressing it into his chest. Until now, he had forgotten about it. What better way of smuggling a tracking device into his car than by pinning it to his shirt? He put the badge on the window sill beside him. Thought.

Assuming it was Grace’s gunman waiting for him somewhere out there, he would have found Harrigan’s car in the garage, which meant Harrigan was coming back. Unless he was blind and deaf, he would have seen and heard Harold’s ute coming across the fields and heard them all arrive, no trouble. He must have worked out that somehow the ute was no longer functioning.

The scenarios were these. He would either ambush Harrigan’s car on its way back to Coolemon or sabotage it beforehand so that it broke down in the middle of nowhere. In the isolation, he would pick off as many of the passengers as he could. If his purpose was getting hold of the tape, then he would try and take Harrigan alive, although not necessarily in one piece. If he was winged in the shoulder, the way the Ice Cream Man had been, he would be much easier to deal with. Or he might shoot everyone here in the backyard just as soon as they walked out of the house to the car. Leave the bodies to be found by whoever, whenever. Again, disable Harrigan so he could be dealt with more easily. An experienced gunman with the right weapon could do it.

Either way, this person would be waiting where he could see Harrigan approach the garage to get his car. In the pepper trees that lined the south-western side of the house. That vantage point would give the watcher a full view of the yard and enough of the back door to see anyone going in and out.

Leaving the LPS badge behind, Harrigan turned and silently made his way down to the other end of the house. From the front veranda, the ruined gardens were ghostly in the moonlight. He moved towards the pepper trees, the bulk of the house water tank providing him with cover while he crossed to the open space. There was too much leaf
litter under the thick line of trees to walk silently. Very carefully, he moved through them to the bare ground on the other side, waiting for a shot or a blow to the head, even for Death to touch his shoulder and say ‘Time, please’. Nothing happened.

On the other side of the trees, he saw a white car parked where it was invisible to the house, under the grove of coral gums that had once been part of Mrs Morrissey’s gardens. It was too far away for him to get its registration number.

Slowly, Harrigan moved along the line of pepper trees, keeping close in to the shadows and stooping to get a view closer to the ground. Then he saw who he was looking for. On the other side of the water tank, a man was crouching in the trees where he had a clear view of the back of the house and the yard, his firearm at the ready. It had a scope, presumably with night vision. Harrigan raised his own gun. Whoever this man was, he wanted him alive.

Very carefully, he moved forward into the pepper trees, getting closer. Suddenly there was an earsplitting screeching, a furious scratching and scattering of the leaves. The man jumped up immediately, turning and firing in a single action. Harrigan dodged down and sideways, slipped on the litter and smacked his left shoulder against a tree, just escaping falling into the dirt. The bullet thudded instantaneously into the tree trunk on his right, barely missing his shoulder. It was a soft sound, a quiet gun. Harrigan fired back, a loud crack in the night. The bullet scored across the man’s lower left arm. He dropped his gun with a curse. Immediately Harrigan was there, kicking it across the dirt.

The man was on Harrigan before he could fire again, gripping his right wrist. The grip was painful,
tight as a vice, relentlessly digging into a nerve. He was trying to numb Harrigan’s hand and make him drop his gun and at the same time crash him backwards against the nearest tree. With his other hand, he punched Harrigan hard in the stomach, smacking into the soft tissue over and over. Harrigan gasped, tried to yank his right hand away but couldn’t shake off the grip. He’d always had a strong left as a boxer. With his bare fist, he cracked his left hard on the man’s upper arm, then smacked him in the face and neck repeatedly. They grappled silently. His right hand was growing numb, the gun slipping from his grip.

Harrigan levered himself forward, overbalancing them both, pushing the man to the ground between the trees and the house, landing on him heavily and winding him. The force of the fall knocked the gun from Harrigan’s nerveless hand. The man tried to grab at it but it was on the wrong side for him and Harrigan managed to twist and skitter it out of reach with his foot. Still the man did not let go of his wrist. He had a powerful supple strength, it was like wrestling with an angry tomcat. Gripping his hand in Harrigan’s hair, he tried to force Harrigan over onto his left side. Harrigan knocked the man’s head hard onto the ground. The man punched his face and tried to gouge his eyes. Then Harrigan’s hand was released. It was numb. The man pushed away from Harrigan with all his strength, kicking at him and rolling back out of his grip, tearing his shirt. He staggered to his feet and ran for his gun. Harrigan rolled back and went for his own gun with his left hand. Then in the night there was the roar of a shotgun.