‘Open the car door, Jack,’ said Cam, nothing different about his voice. ‘Wind the window down. Take the keys out.’
I opened the driver’s door of the Valiant, did as I was told. Cam pulled Chaffee up to the open door, dropped his head on the seat, got behind him, kicked him in the backside with his right boot.
‘Get in, Mr Chaffee,’ he said.
Chaffee crawled in, using the steering wheel to drag himself. Cam helped, gripped the man’s wide leather belt in both hands, pushed him in, slammed the door, a solid thunk.
Feeling his knuckles, flexing his fingers like a surgeon about to operate, Cam went over to the lifter, swung himself up, started the motor, gunned it, reversed, swung the machine savagely, came up to the Valiant.
‘Ricko,’ he shouted.
Chaffee was holding his chest now, his mouth open, blood in it, running over his lower lip. He looked at Cam, fear, wonder, in his eyes.
‘Who’d you lend the Cruiser to that day, the one they sacked you for?’
‘Dunno what you…’ Chaffee coughed blood.
‘You know, bubba,’ Cam said. ‘Ran your own carhire business at the Curtin. Tell me now. Quick.’
‘Know fuck-all about-’
‘Your mates nearly killed a woman that day, know that, Ricardo?’
‘Nah, don’t-’
Cam raised the hopper.
I stood back.
He dumped the full load of stones, big landscaping stones, on the Valiant.
Stones bounced on the roof, one went through the windscreen, stones fell off the sides, rolled onto the bonnet, the boot.
The roof collapsed, the right-hand door pillar buckled, the back doors popped open.
Cam reversed the machine, swinging around, screamed across to a pit of yellow paving sand, dropped the hopper, drove it into the sand, filled it, sand spilling, raised the hopper, reversed and swung, came back.
A last grey volcanic rock toppled off the Valiant roof, rolled down the crazed, opaque, holed windscreen, over the stoved-in bonnet, fell into a puddle.
In the car, Chaffee was making sobbing, wheezing noises, noises of terror. The roof was pressing on his head and he was trying to open his door, jammed by the impact.
‘Jesus, Ricky,’ said Cam. ‘You come through that alive. You’re tough, you WA boys.’
He pulled the lever, dropped most of a cubic metre of sand on the Valiant. The springs sagged, sand poured into the car through the hole in the windscreen, filled the depressions, slithered to the ground.
The Valiant was disappearing under rocks and sand.
Chaffee screamed.
‘There’s more comin, Ricko,’ said Cam. ‘Then I’m givin you the gravel shower.’ He waited. ‘The Cruiser. Who’d you lend it to? Last time I’m askin you, fat boy.’
‘Artie, Artie, I only know Artie.’ Chaffee’s voice was weak, he could barely speak.
Cam revved the engine, calmed it.
‘More, bubba,’ he said, ‘more.’
‘God’smyfuckenwitness, Artie’s all… I’m dyin…’
‘Damn straight,’ said Cam. He emptied the rest of the sand onto the car, switched off, climbed down, dusted his moleskins, hands brushing. He went over to the wrecked Valiant, tested the door handle, gripped the door pillar in his right hand, and jerked.
The door came open. Cam reached in with both hands and pulled Chaffee out, jerked him out, let him fall into the mud. Paving sand was stuck to the man’s blood, blood and sand all over his big chest, it was in his long hair, and he had a mask of yellow sand on his face, new black blood from his nose eroding it, creating thin furrows of blood.
‘Dyin,’ said Chaffee. ‘Help me.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Cam. ‘WA boy like you, Buggerup, the old home town, take more than a few rocks, bit of sand. What’s that word you called me? I forget. Want to say that again? That word?’
Chaffee put his head back, rolled his face away, into the mud, the white of an eye showing. ‘Mate,’ he said. ‘Sorry, mate.’
‘Well, that’s okay then,’ said Cam. ‘Sorry is such a good word. Pity more people don’t use it. Tell me some more about Artie.’
Chaffee groaned.
On the Hume, cruising, listening to Harry Connick again, I said, ‘A really good trip. A short bloke called Artie. Chaffee’s probably going to die back there and all we got was a short bloke called Artie.’
Cam was tapping his fingertips. ‘Only hit him twice, can’t die of that. Short Artie’s good too.’
‘How’s that?’
‘How many short Arties can there be? Short Arties with a Saint.’
Peter Temple
Dead Point (Jack Irish Thriller 3)
The answering machine was speaking to a caller as I opened the door of my office. I took the two steps and picked up the phone.
‘Ignore those words. Jack Irish.’
‘Jack, Gus.’
Augustine, Charlie Taub’s granddaughter. Alarm, a stab.
‘Charlie?’
‘What?’
‘He’s alright?’
She read my anxiety, laughed her sexy laugh. My shoulders and my chest untightened.
‘Never better. He said to tell you he’s staying another week. He’s playing bowls every day, he’s playing in a tournament next week. He said, and I quote, “Tell Jack, hot’s good for one thing.”’
I sighed.
‘Means something, does it, the message?’
‘Yes. Exactly as I feared. Will you marry me? Take me to Canberra with you?’
Charlie’s granddaughter was a fighter for the oppressed workers and, said the gossip, being courted for a safe federal Labor seat. That or in due course Australia’s highest union office.
‘I’m not going to Canberra,’ she said. ‘You’ve been reading that idiot in the Age. Anyway, I don’t think harem life would suit you.’
‘The zenana. We’d sit around, the boys, playing cards, crocheting, waiting for you to come home and pick one of us.’
‘I may need to give this Canberra business more thought,’ she said. ‘Stay close to the phone.’
It was just after noon. Much of the day ahead, much already accomplished: a trip down the bright golden Hume, the witnessing of a man having his nose broken, his collarbone fractured, tonnes of rock dropped on his prized car, followed by a coating of paving sand, enough sand to provide the base for a nice barbecue area.
Moving on. I settled down at my aged Mac and attended to the affairs of my bustling legal practice, to wit, a letter to Stan’s father’s tenant, Andreas Krysis, asking him to desist from storing things in Morris’s garage, which was not part of his lease.
Hunger struck. I went around the corner and bought a salad pita, came back and ate while reading the sports section of the Age. The daily bulletin on all football clubs said that, notwithstanding the team’s atrocious performance against West Coast, the St Kilda club president was standing firm behind the coach. ‘He has our full confidence. We have always said that we are with him for the long haul.’
In football-speak, these sentiments translated as: Full confidence — most committee members want to sack the bastard. The long haul — until the next game. Saturday at Docklands Stadium was Waterloo for the coach.
I rang Drew. He was in court. I rang my sister.
‘So,’ Rosa said, ‘to what?’
‘To what what?’
‘Do I owe this honour?’
‘I’ve been away a bit. I went to see Claire.’
‘I know that. I talk to her every second day. You may recall that I’m her aunt.’
It was hard for me to grasp that people saw themselves as aunts or uncles. I had neither, had never felt a vacuum in my life.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you’ve been back for over a week.’ An edge to her voice, not anger, not the usual exasperation. Worse. Knowingness.
‘Lunch,’ I said. ‘It’s been a while. Your choice of venue after the cruel things you said about mine last time.’
‘Lunch.’ She managed to roll the word around in her mouth, endow it with sinister meaning.
‘What about The Green Hill?’ I said. ‘Very fashionable, I’m told. They know me there at the highest levels, the boss shouted me a tankard of Leprechaun ale the other day, Leprechaun, some name like that, very ethnic.’