In the wild

I will drive down Highway One
It's the end that's just begun.
And I'm cruising 110,
Going nowhere, the road is my best friend
White Line Fever has got in my blood
I'm a river running full flood.
- Hoodoo Gurus, 1985

The drive from Margaret River up to Perth was three to four hours depending on traffic and time of day, but Chris 'Bear' Sorenson hadn’t been in any kind of hurry on Friday evening. The old ’76 HX Sandman panelvan his brother-in-law had been restoring wasn’t built for speed - three on the tree Trimatic (aka Traumatic) column shift, old 253 V8 which sounded good but didn’t seem to be going anywhere much in a hurry, much like a bunch of bands who’d played on Hayabusa’s undercard over the years. It used fuel like a nuclear bomb, the stereo was a broken tape deck and the aircon settings amounted to how far you wanted to wind the windows down. But it looked cool - courtesy the awesome retro mural job Brett had done on it, busting out the airbrushing skills he rarely got to make the most of in his day-to-day spannering and panelbeating work - and it got plenty of friendly waves from oncoming traffic heading up the highway towards the big smoke, at least until the descending dusk made it just another set of headlights coming the other way. The Bear had one arm out the window, top of the steering wheel nestled into his palm, finger raised occasionally to acknowledge passing drivers paying their respects to the mighty tropic-blue Sandman as it burbled past.

It was, to be fair, a bloody nice evening for a drive. It being a Friday, most of the traffic was leaving Perth for the weekend - those that weren’t still on holidays with their kids, this being the last week before school went back - so there wasn’t that much going his way. As it was, Lena wasn’t getting to the hotel before ten or eleven anyway, so he could afford to take it easy. He’d waited for the heat to go out of the day, and the sun to GTFO so he wasn’t having to squint through the Sandman’s weatherbeaten, sandblasted old windscreen directly into the sunset. Even an hour’s delay picking his way around a highway-blocking crash between Bunbury and Lake Clifton hadn’t particularly bothered him. Not much did. He was in a good place these days.

Bear was all about the casual half-arsed prep, but he’d never rocked up to a gig as casually and/or half-arsedly prepared as this - just an old overnight bag thrown into the back with Brett’s surfboards and spearfishing gear, all of which he’d made good use of while over in south-western WA. No actual rig - not even having played in anger since the Tractorfest gig in December - just the fifty buck acoustic guitar he’d picked up from a local op shop, just to mess about with while on R&R, the day before he’d been told about the mighty Gasket’s sudden need for additional personnel for their final BDO show in Perth, after Angus’ brother The Jeff had decided against playing. He wasn’t even sure whether he’d be playing bass or guitar - Marty had sounded pretty bewildered when he’d called up about it earlier in the week, still deliberating over whether to step up from the back and learn all the guitar parts in place of one or both of Gasket’s usual guitarists. Bear wasn’t concerned - he could play either, so long as someone provided the kit for him (given he had fuck all gear with him), the logistics of which sounded like they were well in hand. Gasket riffs, and McCarthy-Young Gasket riffs in particular, were as much part of his base-level programming as Hayabusa ones. He’d gotten in some practice anyway, so he was pretty relaxed about it. Still wasn’t totally sure about playing live again, in terms of his own headspace, but he figured fuck it, Gasket needed a hand, and Tractor would have wanted him to. No-brainer really.

Bear got to the Crowne Plaza a bit after half-eleven. Lena had already checked in, the girl on reception reported wearily - been a long day has it, sweetie? - but had left a room swipecard at reception for him to collect, which was good because there wasn’t any other way he was getting the Sandman into the underground carpark without one. He left the tired-looking concierge to her ongoing battle with consciousness and headed back out to rescue the Sandman from the clutches of an over-zealous parking officer on the street out front. Pretty soon he was guiding the big old panelvan down the enclosed concrete ramp into the carpark, enjoying the amplfied acoustics of the V8 burbling in the tunnel’s confines. The carpark was fairly tight, particularly with no power steering on the old girl, but he managed to wedge the Sandman in between a Porsche Cayenne and an Audi RS6, where it brought down the tone of the place in a way Bear kinda liked.

He grabbed his overnight bag and his old guitar and made for the passenger lift. Despite being nearly jam-packed with cars - without exception newer and more expensive than his BIL’s panelvan - the carpark seemed to be deserted in terms of actual human activity. Which was probably why he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, the black Commodore Sportwagon in the distance, into which two large men in black were helping a tall girl with dark hair and a guy about the same height in lairy green boardshorts that looked like they’d been modelled off an explosion in a Kawasaki factory circa 1989. He noticed it because it was the only sign of motion in the entire carpark, even though it was across the other side near the goods lifts. And because something about it didn’t quite look right - from the brusque body language of the men in black to the slightly unnecessary pace with which they slammed the doors and took off, tyres chirping momentarily on the polished concrete before the stability control kicked in.

Late for a dinner appointment maybe? At twenty to fucking midnight?

If you’d asked him afterwards, Bear probably couldn’t have told you why he did what he did - slinking down behind rows of cars as stealthily as a 6’5” former Otago University B lock could manage, and dodging his way closer to the exit ramp to get a surrepticious look at the wagon as it came past him, as it was obliged to given their relative positioning to Bear and the exit. Taught him nothing much - the window glass on the wagon was tinted beyond any capacity of the carpark fluoros to penetrate through, and the blank, grim faces on the pair in front gave away very little. But whatever it was which made Bear crouch and watch, was the same instinct which made him jog back to the Sandman, start her up and follow, at as generous a distance as he felt he could get away with. Maybe, if you asked, he’d have admitted the thought at the back of his mind, the vague inkling that tonight’s guest register at Crowne couldn’t have had too many tall, elegantly dressed dark-haired girls who kept company with guys in black rock T-shirts and lairy green boardshorts. Other than the ones he was here to meet up with, of course.

The night concierge, Sarah, was tired. Too tired to be bothered arguing with the girl with the distressed tangle of black hair and the blue fibreglass cast on her wrist who appeared out of the darkness around 1am, presumably off the last flight of the night from the east coast. The girl claimed to be the girlfriend of the guy from Flange Gasket, already knew what room he’d been booked into and who he was travelling with. None of which should have been enough to get her the spare swipecard for the room - Sarah knew the drill, and plenty of groupies, stalkers and paparazzi had been turned away from celebrity room hunting (did the guy from Flange Gasket even count as a celeb these days?) despite having better back-stories than this girl had. But Sarah was tired, and missed her man too - he worked on the mines up in the Kimberley - and somehow the idea of flying across the country to surprise him, like the slightly crazy black-haired girl had seemingly done, seemed wonderfully romantic. So long as she didn’t found him banging the girl he’d checked in along side, of course.

In hindsight, she thought after, maybe it had been dumb - maybe they were banging, maybe she’d flown over to get square with him, maybe that explained the slightly manic intensity in her eyes, if not the broken wrist and the scratches down one side of her face. Or maybe, Sarah thought to herself, she needed to get a job which didn’t fuck with her sleep patterns to the point she started inventing entire soap-opera plotlines around the movements of random pseudo-celebrity guests at the hotel.

Bear hadn’t been quite as lax about security as Sarah. At the first jiggle of the doorhandle in the adjoining suite, he’d grasped the nearest available weapon in case Lena’s captors or friends thereof had decided to make a return. Which explained how he and Beth came to be facing off warily across a Crowne Plaza hotel room with his acoustic brandished by the neck in one hand and the waiter’s friend from the minibar in the other. Sharp pointy bit out.

“Evening,” Bear remarked, feeling about as stupid as you’d expect someone to in his position. “I’m gonna take a stab in the dark.” He realised how that could be misinterpreted, so tossed the sharp pointy thing aside before continuing. “You’d be Angus’s missus?”

“Been accused of worse,” she replied curtly. “And you would be… Bear?”

Bear grinned, despite the black clouds of worry around him. “Been accused of worse,” he echoed. “Bear, Chris, whatever’s fine.”

“Where’s Angus?” she asked carefully.

“Don’t know exactly,” Bear replied. “But I have a fair inkling. And it’s not what you’d call good.”

He tossed the guitar onto the couch and quickly ran through the goings-on of the past few hours. How he’d tripped over Angus and Lena being bundled into a black station wagon in the carpark of the Crowne. Followed their erratic progress to the civilian part of Perth Airport in his car. Watched from a distance through the big fuck-off fencing as they were marched across the tarmac and assisted into a black chopper, which then disappeared into the night sky. Beth’s expression barely changed as she absorbed this new knowledge. Another bloody ice queen, thought Bear. I thought Angus had given them up? Thought he’d given up this one in particular, last I heard…

“I lost visual on them pretty soon after they took off,” he admitted. “Can see why, too. Check this out.”

On his - actually Lena’s - laptop screen was a map of southern WA, with a sinuous path of loops mapped out in dots upon it, like the flight path of a determined blowfly evading a flyswat.

“What’s this?”

“Their flight path over the past couple of hours.” Bear tapped the screen next to the application name in the taskbar, one of the many mobile-tracking apps available for iPhone, but since they declined our publisher’s invitation to stump up for product placement rights, will remain unnamed. “Allows you to track a given phone by their GPS coordinates.”

“I see. Perfect for the next generation of stalkers…”

“And for people like Lena who lose their phone three or four times a week,” he added with an affectionate grin. “Believe me, she’s called me up from the other side of the country more than once in order to tell her that her phone’s under the seat in her car…”

“What’s all this for, then?” she asked, indicating the Mr-Squiggle-on-crack doodlings on the map. “To stop anyone following?”

“Or to disorient Lena and Angus so they don’t know where they’re being taken,” he mused grimly. “Probably a little from column A, little from column B.”

Beth nodded. Of all the things Bear had heard about her, largely second-hand from Lena, not a lot of it matched up with the girl standing in front of him. Frail, clearly injured, yet scarily intense. Sort of Kate Beckinsale in Underworld with less leather and weapons. Still, what she wasn’t doing was freaking the fuck out about her man - if he was her man, of course - being kidnapped from the room they were currently sitting in and flown to fuck-knows-where in a helicopter, inevitably to meet some sort of messy end. The girl had her shit together. Which, given the crisis they’d both been airdropped into, was as positive a result as he was likely to get before sunup.

“I’m figuring this shit will settle itself down eventually,” he said, indicating the entropic flight path, “and they’ll either land, or head off on a more reliable bearing towards wherever they’re heading for. Soon as that happens, I’m keen to get after them.”

Beth paused a beat. “Do you think that’s wise, given the sort of people we’re likely to be dealing with?”

We’re likely. Good sign. “No,” Bear said, “but I don’t really give a fuck at this stage, seeing as though it’s my girl and your boy on that fucking thing.”

She nodded. “Anything you need me to do, just say the word.”

“Maybe get some sleep,” he suggested. “Could be a long fucking night.”

It probably wasn’t the right situation for Beth to admit the last time she’d actually slept was Thursday, and that was mainly because she’d been unconscious at the time. So she didn’t.

Friday had been better than Thursday. It had to be. Thursday was as bad a day could get and still live to remember, even if you tried not to. Friday merely saw Beth with a splitting headache, a metallic-tasting sedative hangover, a profound need to vomit, a wrist in plaster (or blue fibreglass to be more precise) and scratches across her face like she’d lost a particularly violent pillow fight with the drivers-side airbag from a Volkswagen Beetle. It also saw her condition upgraded to ‘we’re pretty sure you’re not going to try and do yourself in any more, and besides we need the space in the observation wards’. Didn’t mean they didn’t think she was batshit fucking insane, Beth knew the drill - there’d be a referral in the works for the clinic in Bardon, as sure as night followed day. Technically she was still being kept in for observation, but that was more on medical than psychological grounds; the phrases ‘concussion’ and ‘minor percussive head trauma’ had been bandied about. As was the phrase ‘if I see that bloody iPhone again it’s being taken away.’ Much like Stalinist Russia, or America under Rupert Murdoch, the screws here sought absolute control over the means of communication. Prisoners of conscience often found it necessary to hide their iPhones between the sheet and mattress. Where they, erm, sometimes got forgotten.

Which was how Beth came to be slinking back into the psych wards later that night, rocking a ‘borrowed’ set of powder blue nurses’ scrubs at least three sizes too big, hiding in plain sight, melting into the background whenever anyone came near. Bit of a risk, but if it went wrong they’d only throw her back in here anyway. Made sense, as much as anything did in her fractured state of mind. She found her name on a cardboard insert on the doorway outside one of the wards - B. Toogood - not at all like this lot to not be bothered getting around to changing the name tags on the doors several hours after the patients had been shunted somewhere else.

Except… this room wasn’t the room she’d been in, as much as she could recall through the haze, a haze she desperately didn’t want to have to delve too deeply into anyway. And there was a warm body in the bed. Who also answered to the name B. Toogood, when he wasn’t sedated to the point of incoherence. Stammering panic rose in her throat. She fought it. He recognised her. Smiled at her voice. And when she squeezed his hand, and asked what had happened, he’d used every ounce of strength and clarity he’d had to focus through the fog and tell her the story of how and more importantly who had done this to him. After which, he’d slept, drained.

And before she could be found, she fled, having raided Brad’s personal effects for his phone (in lieu of having found her own) and wallet, which was largely empty but for a Visa card in the name of BS Toogood with a signature similar enough to her own to be fakeable. Next stop Brisbane airport, and a ticket to Perth. Through the screaming white noise in her head, one beacon of clarity shone through: Perth. She had to be in Perth. Tomorrow, Perth was where the Big Day Out would be. Flange Gasket would be where the Big Day Out would be. Angus would be where Flange Gasket would be. And now, one way or another, Beth Alexander, big sister of Brad Toogood, would be where Angus would be.

One road all around this land,
Like the lifeline in my hand.
Out from nowhere the radio sings
Of distant memories that tug on my heartstrings.
I feel twisted, feeling uptight,
As her face keeps fading from sight...

First light Saturday saw the Sandman thundering along the two-lane blacktop of Highway One, WA style. Beth had Lena’s laptop across her knees, closed for the moment to conserve battery, seeing as though the nonfunctional cigarette lighter wasn’t going to be offering any recharge love this morning. A half-spent four-pack of sugarfree Red Bull warmed itself on the bench seat between herself and Bear, who was grimly focused on the task at hand. He looked pretty shot. Again, she offered to drive. Again, he declined. Again, awkward silence reigned.

“I like your shirt,” he finally offered.

“Yeah?” she replied. “Thanks.” It was a sleeveless light-grey top which bore a black silhouette of a Catholic pontiff rocking out with earbuds, under the logo ‘iPope’.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Erm… Brisbane Airport?” A nervous giggle, the sort you might expect from too little sleep and too many stimulants. “Like, around half-eight last night?”

“What’s open at Brisbane Airport at that hour?” Bear asked. “Maccas?”

“Beach Culture, or somewhere. Flew out of international,” she said. “Emirates flight. Probably just as well, I kinda needed a new ensemb.”

“Why, what did you turn up in?”

Beth seemed to belatedly realise she was oversharing. “Erm, nothing much… I kinda came straight from hospital… Yeah, thought I’d get that reaction…”

“What the hell were you doing in…”

“Had a car crash, OK?” she exhaled. “Nothing too bad. Apart from this,” she conceded, raising her casted arm. “But they wanted to keep me in for observation and I wanted to see my man play his final gig, even if it meant breaking out in my hospital scrubs and surprising him. Well, surprising him so long as Joey hasn’t blabbed. Had to call her to get his hotel details and whatever…”

“Hmmm,” said Bear. He noted the newness of the thongs on her feet - chipped black nail polish on her toes - and of the frayed-hem denim shorts, vintaged by factory rather than by age, which had been paired with the iPope tanktop. It fitted. The clothes did, anyway. Exceedingly well. The rest of the story, not so much.

“What?” she said defensively.

“I thought you two had split,” he finally said. “Big fight. Nasty stuff. Something about photos of him with that newsreader chick...”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Second hand... third hand, really.” He didn’t want to drop Lena’s name into the conversation, in case her woman-scorned routine was likely to involve collateral damage. “Which is why I’m wondering about it.”

“We fight a lot,” Beth said warily. “Most of the time as an excuse for make-up sex… Too much information?”

“Getting there,” Bear nodded. At least she was finally showing signs of life - even if he was struggling, through fatigue and cynicism, to believe two-fifths of bugger-all of what she said.

Midday saw the Sandman in for fuel at a roadside servo, and its occupants likewise. The Sandman dined better than its occupants - 98 octane unleaded with lead replacement octane booster, versus a couple of sad-looking plastic-encased triangle sandwiches, a pie hotter than the surface of Mercury and yet more overcaffeinated fizz. By now Bear couldn’t tell whether Beth seemed to be trembling with nerves, or whether it was his eyeballs which were vibrating the universe around him courtesy stimulant narcosis.

Beth was back on the laptop, updating the position of the chopper. It’d paused for a time near the coast about two hours’ drive away, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, then looped off to the airport of a larger regional centre about a half-hour’s flying time away from there.

“What do you think?” Beth asked.

“Make for the airport,” Bear declared. “Have to assume they’re still with the chopper.”

“Why?” she said. “What’s to say they couldn’t have been dropped off at the coast?”

“Why would the GPS signature still be with the chopper if they weren’t still with it?”

She exhaled. “Isn’t the signal we’re tracking from Lena’s phone?” she replied thinly. “If you were kidnapping someone, surely the first think you’d do would be to take their phone away from them?”

Bear shrugged. “In that case,” he snapped, “all of this is fucked anyway. They could be fucking anywhere.”

“Something was there,” Beth insisted, touching her fingertip to the expanse of coastline. “Something was worth stopping for.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But the fuckers who took them are definitely there,” he added, jabbing his finger into the screen hard enough to make the liquid crystal bulge around the indent of his fingertip. “And if they’re not with them, we’re still going to find out where they are faster by having a friendly chat with them rather than fucking about in the scrub.”

“What makes you think they’ll talk?” Beth said.

“Don’t worry about that,” Bear replied. “I’m a fuckin’ past master at the lost art of conversation.”

The road was straight and dull and monotonous, the air was stifling, the van stank of a bizarre pot-pourri of fishing gear, wetsuits, melting surf wax and Red Bull vapours, and Bear’s mind was wandering. Mostly to the black-haired girl whose thighs, like his, were superglued to the near-molten vinyl of the Sandman’s bench seat. What was it with Angus and getting hung up on sullen ice queens? Seriously? The fact he couldn’t think of a single example of the aforementioned getting hung up on a sullen ice queen before this was beside the point. Maybe there was something there he was missing… otherwise, the way this was going he was tending to agree with Mad Mick’s verdict on her, as he’d heard it reported via Lena, i.e. that she was fucking mad and best avoided. Or an ‘unplayable lie’ as Hollywood would have said. (Bear had always thought an ‘unplayable lie’ was a Milli Vanilli CD.) Given Mad Mick’s polar-opposite-to-reality viewpoint on women, finding yourself in agreement with him was not a good thing, and likewise Hollywood, so he hoped they were all wrong.

Hell, thinking about her took his mind off thinking about Lena, and what the fuck she’d gotten herself into. Speculation did fuck all good, but clearly she’d pissed someone important off, probably with something she’d written, or was writing. Or maybe she was just accidental bykill and they were really after Angus. Which would have been for one reason alone that he could think of, off the top of his head. Blowing up Priddle’s drug operations back in the day - and talking about it in the paper, courtesy Lena - must have finally caught up with him. Fuckers have long memories. Still, a shiny helicopter and a couple of goons in black doesn’t necessarily serve as foolproof business insurance. Not with a pissed-off Bear on the case. As a great philosopher had once put it, cunts were going to get fucked up before the day was out. For the record, the great philosopher in question was Bear, just then.

“They’re coming back,” Beth suddenly barked. “Retracing their flight path.” He glanced across, to where she was indicating fresh markings on the GPS tracker.

“Fucking cunt,” Bear muttered. He’d long since lost the ability to self-censor, that had gone with the fatigue and the stimulant narcosis. Beth didn’t seem to care. She’d dated Angus, she’d have to be accustomed to sweariness.

“Not necessarily,” she said. “I think they’re heading back to the coast, the stop-off point. If they were heading back to Perth, they’d fly direct…”

“Not necessarily,” he replied.

“Why else head back to the coast?”

“Better fuckin’ scenery, I dunno.” Dammit. She was probably right, had probably been right all along. “What if they’ve been dumped at the airport in town? Picked up by a car or a 4WD and driven off into the bush?”

“Then,” she responded calmly, “as you said before, whoever’s flying that helicopter might be able to explain their whereabouts. That whole lost-art-of-conversation thing.”

“Oh, I reckon we’re pretty much covered for that,” he replied sarcastically. He nodded over his shoulder to expand on his point. “Khaki sack.”

She set the laptop aside on the bench seat, slipped her belt aside and leant over the back to investigate. Overnight bag, surfboards, old guitar… large khaki canvas satchel. The satchel was the length of a cricket kit bag, damp and sandy to the touch as she opened the folds. Two spearfishing guns, shiny and menacing. A variety of harpoon barbs arranged in ascending order of Fucking Nasty, compressed air cartridges, and a couple of well-sharpened fishing knives.

“Knew there was a reason I didn’t clear this thing out before heading up the coast. Just didn’t know what it was yet…”

“You should have said,” Beth said gravely.

“What, that we have weapons?” Bear said, waiting for the inevitable girly pacifist tantrum. “Just figured you wouldn’t have the stomach for it.”

“Hardly,” she scowled. “My dad was a Navy diver, and I’ve been spearfishing since I was seven. Dare say I can probably handle one of these better than you can.”

Bear grinned. He’d struck a nerve. FINALLY.

“Good to hear. Long as you don’t have a philosophical problem with shooting at mammals rather than fish…”

“If they’re standing between me and Angus,” she said, “I don’t really care what the fuck they evolved from.”

Also good to hear, Bear thought. In a kinda fuckin’ scary kind of way. Note to self: do not stand between Beth and Angus.

It wasn’t going to come to that, of course. Bear had been in the odd barney, and dodged many orders of magnitude more, and the rules were always the same: speak loudly, transmit intent, pick your moment, give the other mouthy cunt an opportunity for a dignified backdown. Granted, poking a speargun into the kidneys of a hired thug was a bit different to an animated discussion over the no-shooting-backward-from-the-D rule in a rural pub, but presumably the concepts held when scaled up to the big boys’ playground.

The battery had finally given out on Lena’s laptop just as they’d neared the turnoff for the coastal rendezvous, but as it happened, a black speck streeting across the sky had made the GPS tracker redundant. The road marked on Google Maps was just an old, disused gravel track, across old, disused pastoral leases, long since handed back to the Crown - the fences were in place, mostly, but any gates had long since disappeared. Still, it was navigable, just about, even if it threatened to shake the old Sandman to its constituent bits.

On the crest of a little rise, by the ruins of an old farmhouse, Bear pulled up and reached for the tatty old set of binoculars in the glove box, usually used for checking the surf off Margaret River - for quality, quantity and bull-shark fins - before paddling out. He was hoping the dustcloud he’d trailed this far wasn’t attracting attention. Probably not, given the chopper crew were preoccupied bringing their chariot down in one piece and were kicking up a fair mushroom cloud of dust themselves. Landing a chopper tends to be something that warrants your full attention, lest you endo into terra firma and make a smear of yourself thereupon.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Beth was in the back secton of the panelvan, kneeling over Brett’s spearfishing cache, carefully checking the mechanism of the spearguns. She was a leftie, it seemed, which was going to cause problems given her left wrist was in plaster. Couldn’t support the fucking thing, unless she fixed it in place. And there was that roll of gaffa tape she’d seen kicking around here somewhere…

“How are we looking?” she issued, a strip of gaffa tape clamped between her teeth.

“Erm, good… bad… no fuckin’ idea, actually. They’re landed. Rotors are decelerating. One guy’s out checking the landing area. Don’t think he’s seen us.”

“Cool,” she said. “Shall we do this?” She looked ready to bound down the slope and get Rambo-stabby on them.

“Erm, do what?” he said, slightly unnerved by her sudden gung-ho-ed-ness, and possibly by the fact that he didn’t think gung-ho-ed-ness was a real word. “They could be armed, girl. Let’s not be fucking stupid here.”

“What happened to ‘as long as you’re OK with shooting mammals’…”

“Getting shot by them would seem pretty fucking stupid to me. Don’t know about you.”

“I said ‘shall we do this’. I didn’t say ‘let’s get shot’.”

“You’ve got something in mind?”

“Might do,” she said evasively, weighing up the cleverest way to do this. If there ever was a clever way to gaffa-tape the butt of a speargun to a fibreglass cast. “Give me a hand?”

“All good?” called Mr James over the declining roar of the rotors. Mr Smith, shielding his eyes against the whipping dust, signalled a thumbs up. Then frowned, and signalled ‘so-so’ with a wavering hand, palm down. And pointed to the west, back up behind them. Mr James popped the buckle on his harness and jumped out. Through the dust haze he picked out the blue panelvan nosing over the crest of the rise in the distance.

“What’s this then?” mused Mr James. “Visitors?”

Mr Smith shrugged.

“You know Smithy, you’re a hell of a conversationalist since that bullet in the larynx.”

“Yeah, you can get fucked Jimmy,” croaked Mr Smith, near inaudibly. He had a voice that made Darren Lockyer sound like a millionaire voiceover artist.

Mr James laughed. “Has ‘lost backpackers’ written all over it, you reckon? On their way to Wolf Creek probably… I’ll deal with this, you want to wander over to the house and see how things are getting on?

“Whether your sis has talked em to death?”

“Word of advice Smithy… chicks dig the strong silent type. Stick with that I reckon.”

Mr Smith offered his own advice in return, which was to flip the bird with a smirk, before heading off down the path that led towards McCarthy’s place.

“That’s more like it,” Mr James called after him.

The Sandman trundled up to the inert Bell Ranger. A couple of backpackers, or surfers, or itinerant tourists of some description, Mr James assessed. Threat level neglible. On the nearest to him, a small dark-haired girl with silly oversized Gen-Y sunglasses, the rest of her mostly hidden behind the passenger-side door; on the far side of the bench, a big hairy bloke with straggly blond hair behind the wheel. He looked vaguely familiar to Mr James, at least until he spoke.

“Schuse me,” he said. Dutch, figured Mr James. That shocking bloody accent had to be from somewhere anyway. “Is there a through way to beach down thish way?”

“Erm, no mate,” Mr James remarked with a slight laugh. Tourists… “All sheer cliffs around here. Fifty foot drop… Best shot is fifteen, twenty kays up the coast. Head back to the highway from where you came, take a left… turn’s signposted for the national park… you’ll find it.”

“Thanksh,” said the Dutch backpacker, and his rather hot girlfriend offered a winning smile. Behind the door, she had her left arm in an overnight bag, rummaging around in search of something. Drugs, probably. They were Dutch after all. “Tell me, erm, what is it you do here with the helicopter and all?”

“Ah, yeah. We’re a camera support unit, actually,” Mr James fibbed smoothly. “You know, filming?” He mimed holding a Steadicam, and immediately felt like an absolute tool. “We’re working on a surf documentary, just dropped our first unit off on a island just offshore.”

“Ah,” said the Dutchman, “so not the drop-in surfing, like?” He mimed riding a jetski. Or at least that’s what Mr James interpreted it as. For all he knew he could have been miming vigorous doggy-style with Miss Amsterdam here. Hmmm. There was a thought his missus wouldn’t have appreciated.

“Ah, no, but that’s an idea… we could use that.”

“Camera is not here,” the girl declared abruptly, with a frown. Ka-me-rah. Her accent was much harder edged. Eastern European, maybe. Polish or Czech or something. “I look in back.”

“I will do this,” the Dutchman muttered, sounding long-suffering. He popped the creaky old doorhandle and climbed out around the far side, lost from sight for a moment.

“So, you’re visiting Australia?” asked Mr James brightly, all Tourism WA spokesperson all of a sudden. The pretty dark-haired girl with the dazzling blue eyes nodded shyly. “How long have you been here for?”

“Three of weeks,” she said, as her Dutch friend opened the tailgate and started rummaging around.

“And how have you liked it?”

She nodded, with a broadening smile. “I have been liking it, very much,” she said. “The water is so clear! Very much like the surfing… and the swimming…and the snorkel… and the spear fishing…”

“The spear fishing?”

“Yeah, the spear fishing,” said a flat, not-particularly-Dutch-sounding voice over his shoulder. The dirty great big speargun with the dirty great big harpoon in his dirty great big paw underlined his point. Mr James turned back to the girl, to find much the same view looming at him out of the Sandman’s passenger window.

Fuckety fuck fuck fuck. AMATEUR SHIT, JIMMY.

“Mind telling me what this is about?” Mr James asked calmly, internalising his self-disgust.

“Mind telling me where the fuck our mates Lena and Angus have got to?” Bear growled.

Mr James had already made his assessment. He knew spearguns weren’t the most wieldy of weapons. They were long and awkward - the girl must have almost taken out the roof lining trying to manouever the end of that thing through the car window while he had his back turned - and reload was measured in minutes, not seconds. But two of them being waved practically under his nose were going to be a bit difficult to dodge. Odds were, he could probably overcome one of these two - the big bloke was the best option, only because he was more accessible from where Mr James stood - but whether he’d get the weapon off him before he wore the girl’s speargun barb in the guts was a bit marginal.

And, in the bluntest possible assessment, he just wasn’t fucking interested. None of this shit was worth wearing a speargun barb in the guts for.

“You know what?” he remarked. “For mates of Lena and Angus, it’d be my absolute pleasure.”

Shaking Mr James down for weapons took longer than expected, because Bear and Beth took a while to get across one significant point: when he said ‘I’m not carrying any’ he’d actually been telling the truth. Based on that, his claims that neither Lena nor Angus were hurt, or at any risk of being so, sounded almost plausible.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Is that thing taped to your arm?”

“What of it?” she mused, slamming the Sandman door behind with her free arm. “I’m going after the other guy.” And before she could acknowledge Bear’s insistence that she wait, she was disappearing down the track.

“Please don’t shoot him,” Mr James called after her. “His wife wants him back in one piece.”

“Sweet of her.”

“More that he’s our gun at Monday night pub trivia,” Mr James remarked. “Though this is the last bloody time I let him do mission plans. How the hell did you find us?”

“iPhone GPS,” Bear said.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” muttered Mr James. “Of course, if we’d known you were coming…”

“You’d have baked a fucking cake?”

“Something like that,” Mr James observed. “I’m guessing you’re Chris Sorenson?” Bear nodded. “See, we knew you were coming for Big Day Out weekend. We just didn’t know you were… as intimately involved in the situation as you are.”

“Nicely put,” Bear said, sardonically. Chalk one up for stealth relationships. And for Lena not putting his name on the booking at Crowne. “And Beth?”

“Beth?”

He nodded in the direction of the track which lead towards the headland, and on to McCarthy’s place.

“That’s Beth? As in former girlfriend of Angus?” Mr James added quickly. He seemed concerned.

“Yes,” said Bear, intrigued by his choice of words. “There’s a problem?”

Mr James frowned. “There may be,” he mused, “depending on whether she’s read the gossip magazines this week.”

“Aww, she has, don’t worry about that.”

Mr James looked at Bear and Bear looked at Mr James.

“We should probably do something about this, shouldn’t we.”

“Think you might be right,” muttered Bear. “If only to stop your man getting skewered in the crossfire. Even if you’d reckon an ex-SAS black ops dude can handle himself…”

Mr James coughed nervously.

“Yeah, an ex-SAS dude probably could… Unfortunately neither of us ARE ex-SAS. I’m just a chopper pilot and Smithy was a fucking Army mechanic,” Mr James admitted. “The only wet work he ever does is washing his truck…”