Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

She pulled away. ‘You must be joking. I’m pissing off.’

‘No. If you leave here they’ll track you and you’ll be dead meat.’

‘They’ve already tracked me down,’ she said. ‘Fat lot of good you people are. Look at them sitting there, large as life.’

‘Coincidence,’ the cop said, forcing her to go with him.

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘I checked. They’re both getting off in Auckland.’

‘But they’ll know I’m going on to Australia,’ she said. ‘They’ll come looking.’

‘Australia’s a big place.’

‘Not big enough.’

‘Look, for all they know, you’re going on to Europe.’

She had glanced back. One of the two men was standing now, watching her. She saw him tap his temple, grin, and flap open a mobile phone with a neat gesture of his wrist. He was flashily dressed, like they all were from that corner of her life: shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, expensive baggy suit, costly Italian loafers, oiled hair scraped back over his scalp.

‘He’s calling someone,’ she said.

‘Let him.’

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘We’ve got a backup seat reserved for you on another airline. It leaves in fifteen minutes.’

Six-thirty, early evening, a dinner flight, a seat in first class. Clara ate steak and salad, and palmed the knife and the fork. They weren’t much, but at least in first class they were stainless steel, and they’d give her an edge if she needed it, the kind of edge she’d come to rely upon in her short life.

That had been eighteen months ago. She had herself a new life in a quiet corner of south-eastern Australia, close to the sea on a peninsula where nothing much happened. The locals accepted her. She had answers for their questions, but there weren’t too many of those. Her nearest neighbour in Quarterhorse Lane was half a kilometre away, on the other side of a hill, a vineyard and a winery separating them. If she walked to the top of that hill she could see Westernport Bay, with Phillip Island around to the right. She lived on a dirt road that carried only local traffic and half a dozen extra cars to the little winery on days when it was open, the first Sunday of the month. No-one knew her. No-one much cared.

So how had she been found? Was the fire a signal? And why a signal in the first place? Why not just barge in and finish her off? Unless they wanted to wind her up first, a spot of mental cruelty. Her hands were shaking. God, she could do with some coke now, just a couple of lines, enough to ease the pressure in her head. She stared at her fingers, the raw nails. She clamped her left hand around her right wrist and dialled the number of the Waterloo police station. Above her the ceiling fan stirred the air. God it was hot; 35 and not even Christmas yet.

Danny Holsinger, twisting around in the passenger seat, peering back along Quarterhorse Lane, said, ‘Burning nicely.’

Boyd Jolic felt the rear of the ute fishtail in the loose dirt. ‘Baby, come and light my fire,’ he sang.

Danny uttered his high, startling, whinnying laugh. He couldn’t help it. He swigged from a can of vodka and orange, then stiffened. ‘There’s one, Joll.’

Jolic braked hard, just for the sensation of lost traction, then accelerated away. The mailbox outside the winery was a converted milk can, all metal, not worth chucking a match into. Not like that wooden job back down the road.

They came to an intersection. ‘Left or right, old son?’

Danny considered it. ‘Left, you got a couple of orchards, couple of horse studs. Right, you got another winery, a poultry place, some bloke makes pots and jugs and that, let’s see, a woman does natural healing, some rich geezer’s holiday place, then you got Waterloo and the cops.’ He giggled again. His day job was driver of the shire’s recycle truck and he knew the back roads like the back of his hand.

‘Left,’ Jolic decided. ‘Right sounds too fucking crowded.’

He planted his foot and with some fancy work on the brake and wheel, allowed the ute to spin around full circle in the middle of the intersection, then headed left, away from Waterloo.

The first mailbox was another solid milk can, but the next two were wooden. The first didn’t take, kept starving of air or something, but the second went up like it was paper. Sparks shot into the sky, spilled on to the other side of the fence. Soon they had themselves a nice little grass fire going.

‘Where to now, Joll?’

Jolic blinked awake. He realised that his mouth was open, all of his nerve endings alive to the dance of the flames.

‘Joll?’ Danny tugged him. ‘Mate, time to hotfoot it out of here.’

They climbed back into the ute, slammed away down the road just as torchlight came jerking down the gravel drive from a house tucked away behind a row of cypresses.

‘Mate, where to?’

‘Other side of the Peninsula,’ Jolic decided. ‘Well away from here. New territory.’

Danny settled back in his seat. This was ace, out with his mate, a bit of damage by night-but that’s all it was. He couldn’t say the same for Jolic. The bastard was pretty flame happy. Maybe it came from being a volunteer fireman for the Country Fire Authority.

The Peninsula was deceptive. There were places, like Red Hill and Main Ridge, where the earth was composed of wave after wave of deep gullies and folds and knuckles of high ground. Later on in the new year the vines on the hillsides would be encased in fine bird mesh, like long, slumbering white slugs at night. Jolic drove them to a twisting road above the bay. Suddenly pine trees swallowed the moonlight, the headlights boring into funnelling darkness as they roared down the hill toward the coast highway.

At the roundabout inland from Mornington they turned right, into a region of small farms, then right again, on to another system of back roads.

‘Check this.’

A large wooden mailbox, mounted on an S-bend of welded chain, the number 9 on it in reflective enamel. Jolic slowed the ute. Glossy black paint job; small brass hinges; a sticker stipulating ‘no advertising material’.

‘Fucken A,’ Danny said.

They got out, stood a while in the windless lane, listening. Only the engine ticking. It was a long night, and very hot, and Danny began to wonder why he was out here with this mad bastard and not slipping one to Megan Stokes, in her bed or in among the ti-trees down the beach, with a plunge into the sea to cool down after. Well, he did know: she was pissed off with him because he’d forgotten her birthday and it was going to take plenty of sweet-talking and presents to bring her around. ‘Mate, let’s just pack it in, call it a night.’

It always caught you unprepared, the way Jolic could explode, if explosion was the right word for a fist gathering a clump of T-shirt, choking you, and a face hissing in yours, so close you got sprayed with spit.

‘You’re not wimping out on me, are ya?’

Danny coughed it out: ‘It’s just, I’ve got work in the morning. Start at five. I need sleep.’

‘Piss weak,’ said Jolic, shaking him. Danny was small, skin and bone, and felt himself rising to the tips of his runners as Jolic absently lifted him by the bunched T-shirt. Jolic was built like a concrete power pole, slim and hard. He wore grease-stained jeans that looked as if they’d stand unaided if he stepped out of them, a red and black check shirt over a blue singlet, and oily boots. Tattoos up and down his arms, and a bony skull under crewcut hair. Danny had been hanging around Jolic ever since primary school, needing-so Megan reckoned-the big cunt’s approval all the time.

‘Mate, I can’t breathe.’

Jolic released him. ‘Piker.’

Danny rubbed his neck. ‘Gis the matches. I’ll do it.’