Draw the Brisbane Line (13 page)

Sammo couldn’t believe how stupid they all were, how they followed the rules even when the rules so obviously held them back.  Cars and trucks and motorcycles choked the southbound highway, just keeping pace with the roadkill, while the whole of the northbound side sat there almost empty but for the odd car or semi-trailer.  Not enough traffic, in Sammo’s opinion, to warrant sitting in the heat and the fumes in such a fine, rare automobile. 

He crossed over to the northbound side through the first service lane he saw.  He swung straight across to the slow lane, figuring that might give him more time to avoid a head-on, and he dropped his foot on the accelerator of the LFA. They both screamed in glee.

He knew it wouldn’t be long before more people had the same idea, and the northbound side became just as rammed as the southbound, so he kept his foot down.  A couple of lorries charged past him in the opposite direction, and the car was nearly pushed off the road by their buffeting slipstream.  Neither of them bothered blasting him with their horns.

The speed soon began to feel normal, and he thought driving at the limit would probably be like walking.  Fortunately, that crazy bitch had started off with nearly half a tank of petrol, so he had a good chance of making it to Brisbane before he ran it dry.

When all the looting started to kick off, with everyone pissing off out of town as fast as they could pack, he thought it’d be an idea to stick around Noosa for a while, have some fun.  He changed his mind when the fires started springing up.  He had the car and a few thousand bucks he’d liberated from the tills of the shops along the beach-front, from those stupid enough to leave cash behind, so he thought it might be a good chance to see what was going on in Brisbane.  Maybe head down to the Gold Coast too.

He did think about taking Biff with him, for about five seconds.  The big fucken retard was no doubt wandering around town, looking for someone to latch onto.  He could be useful in a fight, but sometimes he took too long to get going.  And getting him angry?  Too much work.  No, Sammo wanted to stay open to opportunity on this particular adventure, and Biff would probably slow him down.

A white ute travelling north hit him with some horn.  The ute was a pale dot in his rear-view mirror before he even had time to think about showing him the finger, so he laughed and let the LFA’s engine do his talking for him.  The ride was so smooth, he couldn’t be sure the tyres were actually touching the road, or travelling on a thin cushion of air.

He stopped at a house on the way out of town and used his black Spyderco folding knife to cut a couple of metres off their garden hose, figuring he might need a siphon at some point. He had no idea what kind of mileage the LFA got, but he didn’t think it’d be all that economical.

One other thing he should have stopped for before hitting the road: a change of clothes.  His shirt was heavy with the sour stink of vomit, and his body-heat cooked it into a rancid vapour, which was ever-present beneath his nostrils.  Fucken rich bitch.  First she spits in his face, then follows it up with a spew.  Took him by surprise, he had to give her that.

Smoke drifted across the road up ahead from the inside of a steady bend to the right, curling and wavering in the heat-haze above the blacktop.  Sammo lifted his foot slightly from the accelerator, and the car immediately began to pull up.  He felt as though he was holding reins instead of a steering wheel.

God he loved this car.  Wasted on that Lucas bitch, no doubt.

He cleared the bend and saw the source of the smoke, a Commodore halfway up the shoulder with a small fire burning from under the bonnet.   A young couple stood a few dozen yards behind it, their backs to Sammo.  When they heard him, and turned to see him slowing down, they took a few steps further up the shoulder.

He leaned out the window as he pulled alongside them.  They were younger than him, maybe early twenties.  They both wore a lot of Quicksilver and Rip Curl, looked like it was fresh out of the shop.  The car was a black late model HSV, full spoiler and tinting and mag wheels.  ‘What happened?’ he asked them.

‘Fucken truck,’ the guy said.  ‘Bloody thing ran us off the road.’

‘Did it now?’ Sammo said.  ‘Wouldn’t change lanes?’

‘Changed lanes at the last minute.  Backwash blew us out of the lane and we hit a fucken emergency phone post.’

‘Hmm,’ Sammo said as he looked for the remains of the post, and soon saw it a few yards beyond the Commodore.  He rubbed his right hand over his close-cropped hair, feeling it spring back against his palm as he pressed into it and released, pressed in and released.  It had become a kind of habit, a tic, like fingering worry beads or cracking knuckles.  ‘HSV is it?’

‘That’s what it says on the badge,’ the smart-mouthed prick said.  His girlfriend didn’t throw in her two cents, she looked to be in shock.

‘Hmm, right.’  Sammo drove the LFA alongside the Commodore.  It was most likely filled with a premium unleaded.  The flames licking out from under the hood weren’t big, but still, he was going to have to be quick about it.  He turned the engine off and walked around to the boot where he’d stashed the length of hosepipe.

‘Oh you’re fucken kidding me,’ the guy said as Sammo opened the fuel cap on the LFA and went to do the same to the Commodore.  ‘You’re gunna steal our petrol?’

‘Not steal,’ Sammo said.  ‘Save.’  He slotted one end of the hose into the burning car.  If the fuel tank ignited, he’d quite likely be blown to fuck, but what the hell, right?  He started sucking on the hose.  Fumes flooded his throat, burned his sinuses how he imagined napalm might feel.  He slotted the hose into the fuel tank just as the petrol started splashing out.  The Commodore’s higher position off the road meant he might get as much as half a tank out of it, depending on how much was in there to start with.

‘Oi,’ the guy said, plucking up his courage.  Sammo had at least a foot on him, and several kilos of bulk.  ‘If you’re taking our petrol you need to give us a ride.’

Sammo laughed.  ‘Only two seats in this baby,’ he said.  ‘I can take your girlfriend.  She looks good company, eh?’

‘She’s my sister,’ he said, trying to give Sammo a hard stare.

Sammo shrugged.  ‘Fine.  I can take your sister.  She looks good company.’

‘Maybe I’ll just take this car,’ the guy said.

Now Sammo laughed harder.  This guy was really funny.  ‘Mate, I think you should go and stand with your sister over there, before you get hurt.’

He started fumbling around in his back pocket, and his sister came to life.  ‘Jase, don’t,’ she said.

‘Yeah Jase, don’t.  Whatever it is you’re doing there.  Listen to your sister.’

Jase eventually pulled a small wood-handled knife from the pocket, a fishing knife from the look of it.  He waved it back and forth, probably just to disguise how much he was shaking.

Ah, fuck.

Sammo’s senses closed in to a narrow corridor of sight and sound.  A muffled pulse beat away inside his head, throbbing at his temples.  He felt his balls tighten.

‘Put it down Jase,’ he heard himself say.  ‘Last chance.’

He really did hope Jase put it down, hoped he was intimidated enough to let it go.  Sammo didn’t like knives, and if they were being used in a fight, he usually found a reason to be somewhere else.  Blades made him twitchy.  But that didn’t stop him from carrying one.

And where was the knife?  Back in the fucken car.  Genius.

Jase didn’t put it down, and he didn’t back off.  Did he sense Sammo’s discomfort?  He stepped closer, holding the knife at chest height.  ‘Step away from the car.’

‘You don’t know me, Jase.’

Jase came closer.  Surely he couldn’t be thinking of stabbing Sammo.  He was probably hoping to use it as a threat only, but knives don’t work anywhere near as well as guns in that respect.  With a gun, you know it can go off from any distance and do serious damage. But with a knife, you have to get close just to make it seem properly dangerous.  Jase apparently realised this, took a few more tentative steps.  With one long lunge, he could be in striking range.

Sammo whipped the hose out of the LFA and flicked it at Jase, splashing petrol over his head and chest.  Jase shouted and tried to wipe his face clean, but instead of backing off as Sammo had hoped, he came forward, still swinging that fucking knife.  Sammo dropped the hose and stepped forward to grab Jase’s wrist.  He thought he’d be able to give it a twist and make him drop the knife, but Jase was surprisingly strong, and propelled by momentum.  Sammo staggered backwards in a clumsy dance with Jase taking the lead, both of them fighting for control of the weapon.  Sammo tripped and they went down.  Somewhere in the background Jase’s sister was shouting, pleading for them to stop.  Jase’s hands and wrists were slick with sweat, but Sammo gripped them hard, wrenching and twisting them as they struggled on the grit of the roadside.  Sammo twisted his hips and his shoulders, trying to get himself on top.  He succeeded, straddling his opponent cowboy-style and Jase grunted something deep and wet.

His sister was screaming now in throat-wrecking horror.

Sammo looked down at Jase.  The hilt of the knife jutted out beneath his chin and blood was suddenly everywhere.  His eyes were flickering and rolling back and forth, his arms and legs tapping out Morse code on the blacktop.

Run
.

Sammo didn’t look at Jase’s sister.  He got off the body — not Jase any more, just the body — twisted the fuel cap back on the LFA and slid in behind the wheel and drove.  He drove that car as fast as he could straight down the middle lane, heading southbound on the northbound highway, and if any of those other trucks or utes or cars didn’t like it then they could just go fuck themselves.

‘It’s me again.  I hope this is you still being pissed off at me, and.  Um.  It’s OK if you are.  Well, not
OK
, I don’t like it, but … I understand, and I’m sorry.  And I really hope we can sort this out because, you know.  You know.  Anyway, I hope you’re OK, but if you do have your phone, please call me, OK?  Please.  It’s important.  I’m coming to pick you up.’

‘No
love you
?’ Papetti said after Dave ended the call.

Dave shook his head.  ‘Pisses Jenny off, if we’re fighting.  The way I know she’s forgiven me is when she says it first.’

‘How long has it been since she’s said it?’

Dave counted the days in his head, measuring time by the number of nights on the sofa or in the bed on his own.  Twenty-two days since the Big Fight, the one that might have choked off his happiness.  ‘About three weeks.’

‘Ouch.’

Ouch was a giggle beside the sick churning in his chest.

All he wanted to do now was apologise to her, and he couldn’t even get her on the phone.  He’d been a dickhead about it all, he could see that now.  Three weeks of solitude did wonders for his sense of perspective.  But now he couldn’t see her, couldn’t speak to her, didn’t know where she was … it was the worst kind of unscratchable itch.

‘So whadja do?’ Papetti said.

‘Huh?’

‘Whadja do?  To piss her off?  To make her leave?  No pressure.  But remember, I do have guns.’

Dave prodded the emotional dam in his heart, the steep wall he built to keep any embarrassing emotions inside, where they belonged.  He didn’t sense any leaks.

‘She’s pregnant,’ he said.  Almost a sigh.

‘Yeah?  And so she left?  You use an old rubber or somethin’?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘Promised her you’d pull out, but didn’t?  That’s weak man.’

‘Look, it’s complicated.  And I didn’t handle it too well.’  Dave waited for Papetti to make another dig, but long seconds stretched by before he realised she was holding back.  She was letting him talk now.  ‘Before we could go public with it, I spoke to my publicist.  I didn’t mean to tell him, we were just talking about angles for a new sponsorship deal, and it kind of slipped out.  Clary — that’s my publicist — was pretty firm in his view.  The deal I’m in line for —
was
in line for — is Weetbix, a breakfast cereal.  Big family brand.  Anyway, Clary didn’t think Sanitarium, the parent company, would be too keen on their new spokesman being an unmarried father.  Clary wanted to keep it all under wraps, have a quick wedding.’

‘And you told him to get fucked.’

‘I, ah.  Yeah.  Nah.’

‘Nah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Shit.’

Dave felt like an emotional imbecile, hearing himself admit to such a stupid and selfish act.

‘It’s a big deal though, this Weetbix thing.  I really need this.’

Papetti looked at Dave with appalled disbelief.  ‘Are you saying you need the
money
?’

‘Well … yeah.  I don’t make money playing tennis any more, do I?  Almost everything I have is tied up in property and funds, and I’m too scared to call my financial adviser to find out what that’s worth now.  And a lot of the property is fairly heavily leveraged, so yeah, I need the money.’

‘What about Jenny?  She’s doing OK isn’t she?’

‘Well yeah, but in America.’

‘So go to America.’

‘But I can’t … my market is … by
brand
is here.’

Papetti rolled her eyes.  ‘Me, me, me.  Yeah, I’m starting to see what happened here.’

Dave massaged his temples, felt the headache growing in there.  He couldn’t think how to explain himself to Papetti without sounding like a dick.  If only Clary were able to prep him for his personal life too. 
As much as you might like to, David
, he’d say,
try not to be too much like yourself.  Keep the good bits, but bite back the rest.

‘What about her car?’ Papetti said.

‘What
about
the car?’ Dave said.

‘Does she have a car phone?’

‘Well, let me see. Is this the nineteen-eighties?’

Papetti took her eyes off the road long enough to level him with a glare she probably reserved for vermin.

‘No, she doesn’t have a car phone,’ Dave said.

‘What about GPS then?  In the car?’

He thought about it for second. ‘She has GPS, of course. But how is that going to help us?’

‘I don’t mean her sat-nav, I mean a GPS tracker. In case the car gets stolen.’

‘Oh, right.  Probably, I guess. She must have, right, for a car worth that much. My insurance company made me get one for my car, and that’s just a Jeep.’

‘Safe to assume she has one then.’

Dave slapped himself on the forehead hard enough to rattle his teeth.  ‘Oh come on Dave!’ he shouted.  ‘Wake up!’

‘So that’s a yes?’

He flipped through pages of icons on his phone, looking for the yellow and black tracking app he installed on there.  It was all set up with theft in mind — to his credit, he never really considered using it just to see where Jenny was.  He found it, opened it, and was confronted by a login screen.  The user name was pre-populated, but the password was empty. 
Crap
.  The password.

‘Found it?’ Papetti said.

‘Yeah,’ Dave said.  ‘Yeah, it’s just …
shit
.  I can’t remember the password.’

‘So reset it.’

‘Oh wait.’  Dave had a brain flash.  He tapped in
Jennygotjack3d
, a special password just for this app.  He let out a long breath when a list of options appeared on the screen.  The first was
map
, and he tapped it. His phone automatically activated its own GPS receiver as it searched for a signal.

Hope briefly flashed in his chest when a map resolved on the screen and the red dot — Jenny’s car — seemed within touching distance of the blue dot — him.  Hope turned to heartburn when he saw the initial scale of the map: it was the entire east coast of Australia.  He pinch-zoomed on the red dot until the blue dot slipped off the edge of the screen.

Their blue dot was a long, long way from her red dot, hundreds of miles of venous road twisting and stretching between them. She seemed to be just south of Noosa, but not as far as she should have been.

‘Come on Jenny,’ he muttered.

‘What’s up?’

‘She should be a lot closer to Brisbane by now.’

Papetti shook her head. ‘Take a look over to your right. See that?’

The southbound lanes were crawling, stopped dead in parts. The faces of the motorists were slack and stretched, gazes locked on the back of the car in front and praying for a brief burst of speed, something, anything. How long had they been on the road? Was it days?

‘It’s going to be a whole lot worse than that on the other side of Brisbane,’ she said. ‘Most petrol stations are probably out of fuel by now, or close to it. There’ll be more than a few cars broken down, and once you get a few it kinda seems to snowball. Whoa. Hold on there.’

He’d been staring at the southbound motorists, but turned his attention back to the road to see a white hatchback bearing down on them, no more than two hundred metres away. He held his breath, half expecting Papetti to break out the rocket launcher and blast the insolent driver flaming into the guard rail. Instead, she performed one of the more bizarre acts of road courtesy he’d even seen, given their situation. She flicked on her indicator and began to drift slowly into the next lane, as if there were a casual protocol for avoiding head-on collisions.

If there were, he just hoped the other driver was aware of it.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Papetti groaned.

Apparently, the other driver hadn’t read the chapter on how to avoid being killed when driving down the wrong carriageway on a highway, as he began to drift into their path, also signalling his lane change.

‘You in-bred, retarded son of a bitch,’ she said, and moved into the far right lane. ‘Do you want to die?’

Apparently so. The in-bred, retarded son of a bitch mirrored their move, and they had less than a hundred meters of road between them, much less.

‘Rocket launchers,’ he said. ‘Use the fucking rocket launchers!’

‘I’m not Team fucking America. Hold on to something.’

He grabbed the overhead handle with his left hand and braced his legs against the end of the foot well. He couldn’t find any handles for his right hand, so he just gripped the leg of his chinos in a hot sweaty clinch.

They were close enough to see the face of the other driver, and he was stunned to see it was a woman, young and blonde and wearing an expression which screamed
I am just so over this
. Could she be so far over it that she wanted to kill herself, and them along with her? It wasn’t as if suicides were a rarity.  Papetti pulled the Humvee hard to the left, taking them into the middle lane. Blondie started to mirror the move, and Papetti went a little further left, dragging Blondie with her, and then when the cars were little more than a sneeze away from providing some very colourful entertainment for the traffic-locked travellers over the other side of the highway, she twisted the wheel hard to the right. Tyres screamed on the road, and he felt the Humvee fishtail for a second before it straightened up, and they blew past the white hatchback to the receding howl of its furious horn.

‘Fucken psycho bitch!’ Papetti screamed at the rear-view mirror.

He looked out the back window but the hatchback was already out of sight around a bend in the road. Backs of heads craned out from car windows on the opposite carriageway. He tried to focus his hearing above the low rumble of the Humvee to grab a snatch of screech or crash or thump, but none came.

In that flash of her face and her empty eyes blowing past, he realised with a numb horror that she was willing to die.  Perhaps even wanted to.  And there was Dave again, standing aside, just letting it happen.

Not his fault.

Hot acid rose in the back of his throat.  He needed a distraction, a diversion for his mind.  He looked across at Papetti. She was kneading the steering wheel like it was some kind of stress-relief toy, a squeezie figure in mortal danger of evisceration. Her nostrils flared, and he could see her trying to control her heart-rate by taking long measured breaths. On each intake of car-heated air, her chest strained at the khaki fabric of her shirt so tightly he could make out the outline of her sports bra. She flicked her eyes at him, caught him out.

‘Eyes on the road,’ she said.

He could feel the heat in his cheeks.  He wondered if it was a military thing, trying to cut down the feminine curves wherever possible. He wondered what else she might be trying to hide. Next petrol stop he’d suggest
she
go in and pay.

After about a minute he started laughing.

‘What’s funny?’ Papetti said.

‘Nothing, but if I don’t laugh I’m going to scream. Are you worried about what’s around the next bend?’

‘I’m wary of it. Worry won’t do us any good.’

He returned to trying to ring Jenny. At least it seemed to be working, if only she’d pick up. Then he’d stare at the red dot on the GPS app for a while. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but he could see that it had made some marginal progress since he last looked at it.  Then he’d go back to tapping the green handset below Jenny’s smiling face, listening to the ringing and praying for a variation on the predictable voicemail message.

When the ring tone cut out, replaced by a voice saying
hello
, he nearly dropped the handset.

‘Hello?’ the voice said.

‘Hello?’ he said.  Words piled up in his throat, threatening to choke him, he only managed to let one out.  ‘Jenny?’

The voice sighed.  ‘No, it’s Kirsty, Dave.  Looks like Jenny misplaced her phone.’

The first emotion off the front of the queue which had suddenly formed inside him was anger, anger at the bloody carelessness to lose something so important at such a dangerous time.  She could have lost her wallet or her passport or even her bloody car keys, but her
phone?

‘Dave, you still there?’

He felt the phone growing slippery with sweat as he gripped it too tightly.  He forced himself to relax, to breathe out.  ‘Yes Kirsty, still here.  Are you and Doyle OK?’

‘Yes, we’re fine.  Jenny was going to be right behind us, she had to pack a few things.  I’m sure she’s not far back.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Sitting in a solid unmoving stream of metal somewhere near Maroochydore.  Oh wait, we’re starting to move again.  Dave, I’m going to have to hang up.’

‘Sure.  Be careful Kirsty.’

‘You too Dave.’

He ended the call and scowled at the phone as if it had betrayed me.

‘Look on the bright side,’ Papetti said.  ‘At least you know
why
she wasn’t picking up.’