Draw the Brisbane Line Read online

  Even if there were flights running, Jenny had to admit her preference was the car. It hadn’t been easy to buy in the first place, uncommon as it was, and it represented her defiance of the Way of Dave. And now some kid thought he could take that away with a coat-hanger, her worth-more-than-a-lot-of-houses super-car? She didn’t fucking think so.

  She pulled the apartment door closed, did the same with her eyes, just for a few seconds. One breath, two breaths, think about the mundane. Think about the check-up with Dr Mui next week, the scans and the measurements and the now predictable admission that, no, she didn’t have a birth plan yet beyond "have the baby". Think about the dozens of scripts waiting for her back in LA, scripts her agent is supposed to be vetting, but his selection criteria are based on who sent it, not what’s in it. Think about the interview next week on Good Morning Australia, where she’s going to plug the upcoming movie "Little Park".

  It was her first lead role. Maybe her last, if the reviews didn’t fall on the favourable side. She knew her performance wouldn’t win any awards. She just hoped they’d like her.

  She tried to calm herself, but as she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, the thread of her focus was roughly unravelled by a long grinding hum. Some kind of tinnitus. It started a couple of days ago. She made a mental note to talk to Dr Mui about that.

  The lifts were out of order, probably switched off by the building manager before he hit the road like everyone else, so she had to haul her suitcase down the stairs with an overstuffed tote dragging on her shoulder. She was tempted just to kick the case down the stairs, and decided she might as well give into temptation. She released the handle and gave it a nudge and it tumbled to the landing between the fourth and fifth floors. Nobody’s doors were opened, no complaints were voiced, because nobody was left to complain. She kicked it all the way to the ground floor and stepped out into the car park through the back entrance. Her car was there, apparently unscratched, but the kid was nowhere to be seen. He probably legged it as soon as she closed the window.

  It was only about five metres to the car, in laser-bright daylight, but she still felt her insides clench as she crossed the pavement. She scanned left and right along the length of the street but saw no sign of the kid. The dominant sound on the street should have been the surf’s gentle whisper and the seagulls’ harsh response, but that soothing soundtrack had been beaten down by traffic, by shouting, by the thunder of brute force being brought to bear on windows and doors and security shutters.

  The rioting was in full swing. Jesus, she thought, what had I been thinking, dawdling around the apartment, running through my rituals of applying makeup and testing every outfit available to minimise my belly’s faint swell? Her stupid vanity had dropped her right in the shit this time. Kirsty had made her promise she wouldn’t waste any time getting on the road, and she said sure, sure, like she always said when she didn’t really mean something.

  She hoped Kirsty and Doyle got away before it all kicked off. She thought, at least I hadn’t held her back.

  She blipped the car open and threw her bag onto the passenger seat before carefully lowering herself in behind the wheel. The contoured leather cupped her as she sat back into it. Would it still be able to do that in a month’s time? Two months? Kirsty had expanded all over when she was pregnant with Doyle, like she was suffering some severe allergic reaction, but the two sisters were so different in so many ways. She hit the start button, and even over the sound of the engine growling awake she could hear a fresh and nearby torrent of shouts and crashes. She locked the doors. The speedometer on the LCD dash slid into view and she reversed out of the parking space, careful to keep the revs as low as possible. The LFX was a super-car, a nose-thumbing to Dave and his man-of-the-people complex. No more than three of them in the whole country, as far as she was aware.

  What she wouldn’t give right then for an ugly and beaten old Nissan, something with as much appeal to looters as a VCR. She rolled the car out of the parking space and into the street. She moved slowly, scanning for trouble, and in a couple of turns she was onto the main street. To her left and to her right were men, women, boys and girls, all joined together in an awesome display of hand-to-shop-front fighting. The shop-fronts never stood a chance, not against all those boots and bricks and sledgehammers. Right in front of her as she watched, a man who looked as though he were dressed for a round of golf, stepped out of the wreckage of a jewellery store window with two large shopping bags. Judging by the strain in his arms and on his face, the bags were heavy. He saw Jenny watching him and put down one of the bags so he could smile and wave.

  ‘Hi Jenny,’ he called out.

  She lowered the window. ‘Armen? What the fuck are you doing?’

  He picked up the bag and walked over, a stupid smile shining out from his deep tan. Armen was Dave’s conveyancing solicitor on the Sunshine Coast. He helped with the purchase of the dull apartment she’d just left behind, and also the recent sale of the riverfront house, the one she loved.

  Fucking Dave.

  ‘Just saving what I can before the looters take it. We all are.’

  ‘Armen, you’re looting.’

  ‘Salvaging, Jenny.’

  ‘Salvaging and Rolex aren’t two words I’d normally pair up.’

  Armen opened the bags and looked inside. ‘I’ve got a few Rolex, yeah. Some Breitlings, half a dozen Patek Philippes, Franck Mullers, Longines … oh, and a Glashutte I’ve had my eye on for a while, bloody gorgeous it is.’

  ‘Armen, you broke into the store with a fucking, what? A brick?’

  He shook his head. ‘Pot plant. Big bastard of a palm in this huge square terracotta job. Nearly did my back in.’

  ‘So you threw a large potted plant into the window of a jewellery store, stepped in, and helped yourself to a couple of bags of watches.’

  ‘Well, when you put it like that,’ he grinned at her, and as the sunlight itself seemed to be swallowed by the blackness of his eyes, she had to remind herself that despite the smiles and the cases of Champagne at Christmas, and the presence of his name on Dave’s iPhone contact list, Armen Heck was still a lawyer. He was therefore fashioned in the lower circles of Hell and educated by the shades of Hitler and Mussolini. Not only was such innate evil to be avoided in situations of chaos and corruption, it was also worth remembering that if a man with such an easy grasp of the law and its consequences was cheerily ransacking a jewellery store and calling it fair play, it really was time to get the hell out of town.

  She raised the window on Armen’s insidiously beaming face, and that stupid smile never wavered, not for an instant. As she drove along Hastings she glanced up at the rear-view mirror to see Armen still waving to her. She wanted to give him the finger, but her hands were gripping the wheel so tightly it would have taken electrical current to open them up.

  She had to roll the car down the street a hair’s breadth faster than walking pace, not because of vehicle traffic but because of human traffic. Pedestrian looters. Sunday morning smash-and-grabbers. Kids carrying designer clothes by the armful. Young couples wheeling Kitchenaid appliances and Wedgewood dinner sets in Swedish-designed prams. At one stage she was brought to a complete halt by an elderly couple in matching white tracksuits, crossing the street carrying a piece of framed Aboriginal artwork almost as big as her car.

  She drove on.

  She was half expecting to be car-jacked, but it never seemed close to happening. If people took notice of her as she passed them by, it was only to tip a hat or to wave or to offer her a share of their haul.

  At the end of the shopping strip she braked at a roundabout. God knows why, there was nothing coming from the other direction, and it wasn’t like she was going to get a ticket for failing to pause at a give-way sign during all this madness. A few cars came crawling up behind her, and she knew that at any second they would start honking their horns. Queenslanders might be polite as pedestrians, but the moment you stick a steering wheel in their hands it’s lik
e they have to drop their patience to keep hold of it. Let them honk, she thought. It felt good to stop, just for a moment.

  She was about to drive on when someone knocked on the passenger-side window. She jumped in her seat as far as it would let her, and swore loudly. The kid who’d tried to break into her car not ten minutes earlier now crouched down and pleading with her to open the window, making the universal wind-down gesture with his hand while open-mouthing open the window.

  The first horn honked behind her.

  She lowered the window about two inches.

  ‘I’m not going to say it again. You can’t steal my car today. Look, I’m already in the driver’s seat.’

  ‘You’re in some shit, Miss Lucas,’ the kid said.

  ‘Well, duh,’ she said. ‘Just wait until the reviews start coming in.’

  He frowned. ‘No, I mean … You’re in danger. Potential for like, physical harm.’

  She raised her eyebrows and waited, but the kid seemed to have gotten confused, thought it was her turn to speak. ‘You’re not threatening me, are you?’ she said.

  ‘They’re gunna try for the Lexus, Miss Lucas.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Sammo and his boys.’

  ‘Sammo and his boys want to steal my car?’ Like she knew who Sammo was.

  He nodded. ‘Jack it.’

  There it was. Apparently a car-jacking was still on the cards. A pair of horns blasted from behind, and she could see the queue behind me was now about six cars long.

  ‘Look, can I get in?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ she blurted. She could hear her PR agent Marcie in her ear saying, Hollywood stars do not say fuck off, Jennifer.

  ‘Look, I know where they’re waiting for you, just a few hundred metres from the highway, and in a few other places. They really want this car, Miss Lucas.’

  ‘And what makes you think they can stop me? Do you have any idea how fast this car can go?’

  ‘Nought to a hundred in less than four seconds? That about right?’

  Jenny realised she had no idea. ‘Yeah, that’s about right.’

  ‘So are you willing to drive through a human wall, bust right through it like a big … flesh curtain?’

  ‘Urk, flesh curtain? Really?’

  ‘Are you, though? Because that’s what it’ll take. They’re banking on you not being the type to mow down pedestrians. Because of the bad publicity.’

  ‘Also because it’s wrong? Evil?’

  ‘I can take you on a route which avoids them completely, if you’ll let me in.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that? You tried to steal my car.’

  He rubbed his hand over his face and into his boy-band hair. ‘Only because Sammo pushed me into it. He said they’d burn my house to the ground if I didn’t do it. That was my mum’s house, Miss Lucas. I couldn’t let them do that.’

  God, that sincerity. The damp eyes, the subtle tremble in his bottom lip, the worry lines cut into his beautiful face. If the kid was lying, he could make a fortune on screen.

  ‘But what if someone sees you with me? Won’t they carry through with their threat?’

  He rubbed at the back of his head and scratched a half-smile onto his face. ‘Yeah, probably. But it’s funny how much your priorities can change in a couple of hours. Right now I just want to get the fuck out of town.’

  More horns now, and close to a dozen cars in a tailback a block long.

  ‘If you can get me as far as Brisbane,’ he said, ‘I have family there, an uncle. He’s waiting for me before he leaves. Look, I’m really sorry for trying to break into your car, but Sammo and his lot had me over a barrel. I can help you.’

  ‘Step back from the car for a second,’ she said.

  The groove of his smile slipped away from his mouth and resettled on his forehead in crooked furrows. He thought she was going to drive away from him, but he stepped away anyway, resignation in his sloping shoulders. She looked him up and down: pale blue t-shirt, white board shorts, green Havaianas on his feet. She couldn’t see anywhere he might have a weapon stashed. There was probably a back pocket on his shorts.

  ‘What’s in your pocket?’ I said.

  He reached back and pulled out a thin neoprene wallet and an iPhone.

  ‘That’s all you’ve got with you, a phone and a wallet?’

  ‘It’s all I need,’ he said, the grin dipping a couple of toes in to test the water.

  Fuck it, she thought, I could probably use the company. She unlocked the doors and said, ‘Go on then, get in.’

  He jumped in the passenger seat with a full-beam smile, dimples and all. She felt an urge to ruffle his blond hair, but she restrained herself.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Tait. Tait Rosencrantz.’

  She shook his hand, but its warmth did nothing for the chill now doing laps of her central nervous system. Rosencrantz. God, she hoped that wasn’t some kind of omen. She couldn’t remember the role of the character in the play exactly, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t good.

  She drove through the roundabout, backed by a chorus of honking and cheers.

  Chapter 10

  Tait’s phone was going to overheat and explode, the way he was stabbing and swiping and clicking and swearing at it.

  ‘Fucking come on,’ he muttered every ten seconds or so, always followed by an apology. ‘Sorry Miss Lucas.’

  ‘Just call me Jenny, please,’ she said after about the eighth time. She was starting to feel like his teacher, being called Miss Lucas.

  ‘OK, Jenny. Sorry about the language, it’s just this bloody mobile reception —’

  ‘And don’t apologise for fucking swearing. You’re likely to hear much worse from me over the next couple of hours.’

  ‘I think it’s going to take more than a couple of hours to get to Brisbane in the traffic we’re about to hit. We’ll be lucky to get there before dark. Take a left here.’

  They’d taken a few turns against the flow of traffic and headed back into the low sprawl of suburban Noosa. It felt wrong to Jenny, not like the road out of town but the road to nowhere. The houses soon began to thin the further they drove, before abruptly blossoming again as they turned into an entrance to a small golf course. It was the kind of course created just to sell the property around it for a few hundred thousand more per plot. Tait often played there, he said, and sometimes caddied. He directed them to a small ring road which encircled the estate, separating it from the looming bushland like an optimistic firebreak. They stopped at a metal gate. The gate guarded a narrow road just barely wide enough to accommodate a car. The road disappeared into dense bush, eucalyptus and paper bark and all manner of spiky scrub crowding around the thin ribbon of bitumen. Tait hopped out of the car and swung the gate open and gestured for Jenny to drive through.

  ‘Access road,’ he said. ‘Not too many people know about it. Bit of a detour, but it’ll drop us right onto McKinnon Drive, and from there it’s a more or less straight run across to Cooroy. We can hook up with the highway there.’

  ‘You realise if I hit a big enough pothole on this road, we’ll be utterly fucked. This car might be pretty, but it possesses absolutely zero off-road handling. I couldn’t even take it into the underground garage at the apartment because the angles on the ramp were too sharp.’

  ‘We’ll be fine, I drive these roads all the time.’

  She gave him a quick glance. ‘So where’s your car?’

  ‘Sammo took it. Said he didn’t want me skipping town.’

  ‘Well, that sounds retarded.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s not the sharpest tool, but he’s a violent bastard. Into some nasty shit, drugs and stuff.’

  ‘Taking them or selling them?’

  ‘Both. Shit! This fucking phone.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s your phone, it’s most likely the network.’

  ‘Have you tried your phone?’

  ‘Um.’

  It was a good question. Where was her phone? It wasn�
�t in the front, and she usually kept close at all times like a diabetic with insulin. In all the chaos of riot and departure, she had committed the modern sin of phone neglect. ‘Must be in my bag,’ she said, though she couldn’t remember putting it in there. She last had it when she was helping Kirsty load her car and trying to get through to Dave. There had still been reception then, but he wasn’t picking up.

  ‘I need to call my uncle in Brisbane,’ Tait said. ‘Let him know I’m on my way.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s just the network, overloaded.’

  They rounded a bend and she almost stood on the brakes. Tait lurched forward into his seatbelt with a strangled wheeze and spilled his phone on the floor. A white Holden Ute was parked across the road, blocking the way completely. Three men stood around the tailgate, smoking and staring intently at them.

  Blood filled Jenny’s head, rushing through her ears like an open gas valve. ‘Tait?’ she said, forcing the words from her clenching jaw. ‘What. The. Fuck?’

  ‘Christ,’ Tait said. ‘It’s Sammo.’

  ‘You little fuck.’

  ‘It wasn’t me, I swear. He must have guessed I’d take you around this way.’

  ‘Oh, so now he’s a criminal genius? I suppose he set up the whole steal-the-Lexus gambit as part of a larger plan which led us here … so he could steal the Lexus.’

  ‘Jenny,’ Tait said, and placed a hand on her shoulder. That should have infuriated her, but she found it oddly inoffensive, even calming. His eyes were round and brown and utterly sincere. ‘Sammo might not be a criminal genius, but he is a criminal. No school smarts, but plenty of street smarts, yeah? Don’t underestimate him.’

  ‘So I’m supposed to believe you didn’t lead me here, that this wasn’t part of the plan?’