14. Nothing Like Australia
Mangala | 25 July
As he and Skip drove out of the city, Vic called his friend Dario Zanonato in drug enforcement, put him on speakerphone, and asked him for the low-down on Cal McBride. ‘I heard he was pushed out of his little operation.’
‘Why are you fifth-floor guys interested in him?’
‘Short answer, we have a body zapped by a ray gun.’
Dario laughed. ‘Are you still sore about that sting?’
‘No, man, not at all. It wasn’t my case that got fucked up.’
‘But now you are thinking of going at McBride again.’
‘I’m wondering what happened to him, what he’s doing now.’
‘What happened, his meq business fell apart after he was jailed,’ Dario said. ‘His second-in-command was killed in a traffic accident, and everything went to hell. The trappers who catch biochines and bleed them, most of the street-level lieutenants who run the street crews, they went to work for other gangs. And it seems the guy who supervised the lab that cooked the shit tried to defect too. He was found dead a few months ago. Nailed to a wall in a half-built apartment building.’
‘I remember that,’ Vic had said. ‘The crucifixion bit, anyhow.’
‘The guy had been shot in the head, but not by a ray gun,’ Dario said.
‘Yeah. Jerzy Buzek had the case.’ Vic believed that it was still open. He needed to talk to Jerzy, see where he was with it.
Skip said, ‘How does Danny Drury fit into this story?’
He was at the wheel, driving with a light, two-fingered touch, blond hair ruffling in the breeze from the open window.
Dario said, ‘He was sent here by the family to sort things out. When McBride was released, he found himself frozen out. The family decided Drury was doing a better job. Have you guys met Drury?’
‘Briefly,’ Vic said.
‘He’s, what do you say, a piece of work. The son of the family’s accountant back home, good education, several years in the army…Anyway, as I understand it, the family wants to get out of the meq trade here. Go legit. The city’s growing. More money in building work and trading Elder Culture shit than drugs. And Drury is their man for the job.’
Vic said, ‘So they retired McBride rather than kill him?’
‘They wouldn’t kill him. He’s family. But he’s also old school. You know, from the street.’
Skip said, ‘What’s McBride doing now?’
‘Property development,’ Dario said. ‘According, at least, to him.’
‘But guys like McBride never leave the street behind,’ Vic said. ‘You have anything on him?’
‘Not really. The Mayor is breathing down our necks. He wants us to clean up small-time low-hanging fruit to make him look good. You like to go after Cal McBride,’ Dario said, ‘I’m pretty sure we don’t mind.’
Vic thanked Dario, and told Skip, ‘We definitely need to find out what McBride thinks of Mr Danny Drury.’
‘You think, if Drury has something to do with this, McBride might rat him out?’
‘I think we should mention Drury to get under McBride’s skin, then ask him where he was last night. See how he handles himself.’
They drove past the dusty edges of the suburbs, past rows of poured foundations, stacks of construction materials and sections of cast-concrete sewer pipes, a yellow bulldozer scraping at a stretch of ground in a cloud of red dust. Past new factories constructed from prefabricated sections shipped from Earth, a half-built shopping mall, hectares of scrapped cars glinting in the level sunlight. Past all that, turning onto an unpaved road that ran across a stretch of playa staked out for further development. The ghostly outlines of streets and lots laid across red dirt. Whipgrass, low stands of greythorn. Yellow surveyor flags snapping in the wind. Gang signs on the flanks of shiprocks.
A red Mitsubishi Shogun sped past in the opposite direction, peppering their car with small stones, trailing a long banner of dust.
Skip buzzed up the window, said, ‘Know what this looks like?’
Vic said, ‘You mean which part of Australia?’
‘It is a bit like the Outback, but I was thinking it looks like the deserts outside Los Angeles. That’s where the film and TV people went when they wanted to shoot exteriors for sci-fi films. So we think all alien planets should look like Californian desert. Or Death Valley. They shot Robinson Crusoe on Mars in Death Valley. You ever see that one?’
‘I’m not what you’d call a film buff.’
‘It’s an old one, but pretty good. The hero has a gun, but never uses it. Even when the slaver aliens are trying to kill him.’
‘You’re babbling, Investigator Williams.’
‘I mean this looks like the old ideas of what Mars looked like, before they discovered what it really looks like. In the city, it’s easy to forget you’re on an alien planet. But here it is.’
‘Enjoy it while you can. The suburbs keep growing.’
There was a short silence. The car sped along the level dirt road. Red dust powdered the windscreen. Red dirt studded with grey and black vegetation stretched away towards the horizon. They turned along a track that crossed the road at right angles. A cluster of sheds and construction machinery, a hoarding showing some kind of green oasis: Shangri-La: Another Development by CalMac Enterprises.
‘I know you’ll remember this place,’ Cal McBride said to Vic. ‘An old-timer like you.’
They were standing at the edge of a square pit dug into the red earth. It was about half the size of a football pitch, fenced with steel stakes and orange netting. On the far side was a shabby rake of bleacher seats. In the middle distance, a hydraulic drill rig was pounding a foundation spike into a trench, its percussive clang unravelling into the empty playa.
Vic said, ‘I remember a murder investigation here, ten, eleven years ago. There was a strandloper in the pit, somehow the man who owned the place fell in, and the thing ripped him from neck to navel.’
‘Long before I bought the place,’ McBride said. ‘Long before I came up, even. Did you ever find out who did it?’
He was a burly man in his fifties, with a stiff shock of white hair. Dressed in some kind of safari suit — a bright yellow hip-length jacket with patch pockets and wide lapels, a cloth belt buckled over the bulge of his belly. Matching trousers tucked into knee-high brown leather boots. An ivory-coloured claw hung on a silver chain around his neck.
Vic said, ‘Who pushed him in, you mean? Oh, we were pretty sure that it was his business partner, but we didn’t have enough evidence. In the end it was ruled death by misadventure. But it closed this place down, put an end to biochine death matches.’
He remembered the strange pairing that the bodies of the man and the strandloper had made. The man’s clothes soaked in blood and tattered with parallel rips. The biochine’s segments collapsed between a dozen pairs of slender multi-jointed legs, its brittle carapace shattered by gunfire. Strandlopers were mostly harmless, but two individuals from different packs would fight to the death when they were put into the pit. A territorial thing. The main attraction had been fights between matched pairs of jackanapes, the quick, vicious biochines that preyed on strandlopers and other grazers. There weren’t any around Petra any more. The city council had culled the local population after they’d started straying into the new suburbs.
He said to McBride, ‘So now you own the place. Not the first time you’ve benefited from a death, is it?’