Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

People expect other people to get carefully out of cars on the non-traffic side and keep to that side of the road, sometimes people have to break that rule or they get dead. I hunkered down in the grass and scrub beside the road and peered into the blackness ahead of me. Nothing to be seen, but that didn’t mean a thing. I took the pistol out and crept forward with it held stiffly in front of me; still nothing visible and not a sound except my breathing and soft scuffling in the bush where some species were doing their best to exterminate others. Very sensitive stuff, I thought, totally in tune with the environment, Hardy. But a waste of talent. Where I’d seen the last flash of the car’s lights was a dirt track running off into the scrub. The grass in the middle had been scythed down between the wheel ruts by the underside of cars and back from the road was a tree with the word HAINES painted vertically down it in white.

My flashlight was at home, corroded to blazes, and the moon had decided to play it coy among the clouds. It was close to pitch black when I started up the track to what was evidently Haines’ weekender. Judging by the distance from the road to the shack and trying to remember when I’d last seen a house light, it was a fair sized block. The house wasn’t much, a fibro and galvanised iron structure with decking around it on three sides. It looked self-built, but Haines had put his main stamp on the place in the garden. When my eyes got used to the dark I could see terraced vegetable beds and trellises with tendrils twining through them. Almost outside the door, hanging over the decking was a huge clump of bamboo, the leaf tips tall and waving just slightly in the night breeze. Water from the roof, a few chickens and a still out the back and the place would be self-sufficient.

I picked my way carefully through the vegetable beds and staked plants and did a circuit of the shack. It had a door in front, one at the back and a single window in each side. The track from the road came up and looped around the house, the Volkswagen was parked on this path at the back. A brick path from the back door led to a fibro dunny and there was a lean-to shed holding what felt like garden tools. An axe was embedded in a chopping block outside the shed. The wood pile was healthy, a big stack of the kind you use in a stove or sealed heater. I crept up to the decking out from the left side window and tested it with my foot. It was solidly built and didn’t creak. I eased the Colt back out of my pocket and moved over the boards to the window which was about: hest height from the deck level, too low to stand, too high to kneel. I crouched and inched my head up to get half an eyeball’s worth of look-in.

The room I saw was the whole of the shack. It had a sink at one end flanked by a refrigerator and a small stove. There was seagrass matting on the floor. The girl was sitting in one of the two Chinese saucer chairs and Haines was sitting on the bed which looked like a pile of mattresses, maybe three, with a tartan blanket over them. I couldn’t see a telephone so Pali hadn’t set anything up here. The girl was nervous and Haines was frightened, they sat like figures in a painting that couldn’t move a muscle until the end of time. Haines’ mouth moved but I couldn’t catch what he said. The girl got up and moved smoothly across the room like a classy featherweight. She slammed Haines in the face with the gun and hit him again across the hands when he brought them up to shield his eyes. Haines collapsed on the bed and the girl moved back and half-turned away from him. From where I was I could see Haines fumbling behind the mattresses There seemed like a good chance he was going for a gun and it was time to move if I wanted anybody left to talk to. I smashed the window in with the Colt barrel and made it to the door in two strides. I kicked it in and was inside the room while Haines and the girl were still interested in the broken glass. Haines had a gun in his hands but it was still tangled in the blanket. He’d never have made it. I pointed the Colt at the bridge of the girl’s broad, flaring nose.

“Put the guns down,” I said harshly.

Haines gave up the struggle with the blanket but the girl held on to her gun. She held it loosely, pointed nowhere in particular. She looked dazed, out of touch with what was happening, but dangerous. I raised my gun to send a bullet over her head and pulled the trigger. It stuck like a wrong key in a lock and I remembered the bang my jacket had made when it hit the iron railing. I threw the gun at her but I was way too slow, she ducked slightly and brought her pistol up so that the bullet would hit me in the throat.

A thin, high voice shouted my name. I swayed out of Pali’s line of fire and she snapped at the trigger as a man appeared in the doorway. The bullet hit him in the eye and he screamed, blood welling out over his face. His hands scrabbled at the broken door jamb but couldn’t get hold, he staggered back over the deck and there was a thrashing, snapping noise as he collapsed into the stand of bamboo. The girl stood still, in shock, with her eyes staring, seeing nothing. I took the gun from her and pushed her down into a chair. Haines had blood dribbling down the side of his face from where Pali had hit him and he didn’t look like giving trouble. I heard a rustling outside.

“Tickener?”

“Yeah, you all right Hardy?”

“I’m fine, come in.”

He came in cautiously through the shattered door. He was even paler than when I’d first seen him and he was shaking as if he needed a drink, a cigarette and a cup of coffee all at the same time. Me standing there with my hands full of guns didn’t help his nerves.

“Couldn’t you put them down?” he said.

“I will, just for you.” I put the pistols on a ledge above the window. I bent down and retrieved my Colt, I freed the action and put it in my pocket. “Thanks Harry, this one was going to shoot me when you sang out.” I pointed at the girl who was sitting stiffly in the chair with her knees drawn up.

“So was Brave,” Tickener said, “there’s some kind of pistol out on the boards. Shit, you can’t move for guns around here.”

“Is Brave dead?”

“Very.”

“You had no trouble keeping up with him?”

“Not much, he went for a fix like you said, then straight up here.”

“It was quite a procession,” I said.

“I know a bit about the girl,” Tickener said, “who’s he?”

“Name’s Haines — bomber, gunman, hit and run merchant.”

Haines snapped out of it and looked across at me.

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m none of those things.”

“What about sending anonymous letters, that more in your line? Harassing women?”

He answered slowly, taking the difference in tone and content of my words seriously. “Yes, I’ve done those things. I had reasons.”

“I know you did. What about blackmail? What about Mark Gutteridge’s files?”

He looked away and clamped his lips and jaw as if trying to give himself strength of character.

“Look boy,” I said sharply, “you’ve lost control of this. You must be able to see that. This bitch was going to kill you, or at least she wasn’t going to cry if it worked out that way.”

Haines looked across at Pali, she was still striving for the foetal position and not making it. Her hands were twisted in the strings of the poncho and she was looking intently at the knots and poking her fingers through the holes. I handed Haines a tissue from a box on the floor which had been heavily trampled in the last few minutes. He dabbed at the cut on his face.

“I’ve got the files,” he said slowly. “I didn’t use them much, I got some money and I kept my word.”