Something Coming Through

14. Nothing Like Australia

Mangala | 25 July

As he and Skip drove out of the city, Vic called his friend Dario Zanonato in drug enforcement, put him on speakerphone, and asked him for the low-down on Cal McBride. ‘I heard he was pushed out of his little operation.’

‘Why are you fifth-floor guys interested in him?’

‘Short answer, we have a body zapped by a ray gun.’

Dario laughed. ‘Are you still sore about that sting?’

‘No, man, not at all. It wasn’t my case that got fucked up.’

‘But now you are thinking of going at McBride again.’

‘I’m wondering what happened to him, what he’s doing now.’

‘What happened, his meq business fell apart after he was jailed,’ Dario said. ‘His second-in-command was killed in a traffic accident, and everything went to hell. The trappers who catch biochines and bleed them, most of the street-level lieutenants who run the street crews, they went to work for other gangs. And it seems the guy who supervised the lab that cooked the shit tried to defect too. He was found dead a few months ago. Nailed to a wall in a half-built apartment building.’

‘I remember that,’ Vic had said. ‘The crucifixion bit, anyhow.’

‘The guy had been shot in the head, but not by a ray gun,’ Dario said.

‘Yeah. Jerzy Buzek had the case.’ Vic believed that it was still open. He needed to talk to Jerzy, see where he was with it.

Skip said, ‘How does Danny Drury fit into this story?’

He was at the wheel, driving with a light, two-fingered touch, blond hair ruffling in the breeze from the open window.

Dario said, ‘He was sent here by the family to sort things out. When McBride was released, he found himself frozen out. The family decided Drury was doing a better job. Have you guys met Drury?’

‘Briefly,’ Vic said.

‘He’s, what do you say, a piece of work. The son of the family’s accountant back home, good education, several years in the army…Anyway, as I understand it, the family wants to get out of the meq trade here. Go legit. The city’s growing. More money in building work and trading Elder Culture shit than drugs. And Drury is their man for the job.’

Vic said, ‘So they retired McBride rather than kill him?’

‘They wouldn’t kill him. He’s family. But he’s also old school. You know, from the street.’

Skip said, ‘What’s McBride doing now?’

‘Property development,’ Dario said. ‘According, at least, to him.’

‘But guys like McBride never leave the street behind,’ Vic said. ‘You have anything on him?’

‘Not really. The Mayor is breathing down our necks. He wants us to clean up small-time low-hanging fruit to make him look good. You like to go after Cal McBride,’ Dario said, ‘I’m pretty sure we don’t mind.’

Vic thanked Dario, and told Skip, ‘We definitely need to find out what McBride thinks of Mr Danny Drury.’

‘You think, if Drury has something to do with this, McBride might rat him out?’

‘I think we should mention Drury to get under McBride’s skin, then ask him where he was last night. See how he handles himself.’

They drove past the dusty edges of the suburbs, past rows of poured foundations, stacks of construction materials and sections of cast-concrete sewer pipes, a yellow bulldozer scraping at a stretch of ground in a cloud of red dust. Past new factories constructed from prefabricated sections shipped from Earth, a half-built shopping mall, hectares of scrapped cars glinting in the level sunlight. Past all that, turning onto an unpaved road that ran across a stretch of playa staked out for further development. The ghostly outlines of streets and lots laid across red dirt. Whipgrass, low stands of greythorn. Yellow surveyor flags snapping in the wind. Gang signs on the flanks of shiprocks.

A red Mitsubishi Shogun sped past in the opposite direction, peppering their car with small stones, trailing a long banner of dust.

Skip buzzed up the window, said, ‘Know what this looks like?’

Vic said, ‘You mean which part of Australia?’

‘It is a bit like the Outback, but I was thinking it looks like the deserts outside Los Angeles. That’s where the film and TV people went when they wanted to shoot exteriors for sci-fi films. So we think all alien planets should look like Californian desert. Or Death Valley. They shot Robinson Crusoe on Mars in Death Valley. You ever see that one?’

‘I’m not what you’d call a film buff.’

‘It’s an old one, but pretty good. The hero has a gun, but never uses it. Even when the slaver aliens are trying to kill him.’

‘You’re babbling, Investigator Williams.’

‘I mean this looks like the old ideas of what Mars looked like, before they discovered what it really looks like. In the city, it’s easy to forget you’re on an alien planet. But here it is.’

‘Enjoy it while you can. The suburbs keep growing.’

There was a short silence. The car sped along the level dirt road. Red dust powdered the windscreen. Red dirt studded with grey and black vegetation stretched away towards the horizon. They turned along a track that crossed the road at right angles. A cluster of sheds and construction machinery, a hoarding showing some kind of green oasis: Shangri-La: Another Development by CalMac Enterprises.

‘I know you’ll remember this place,’ Cal McBride said to Vic. ‘An old-timer like you.’

They were standing at the edge of a square pit dug into the red earth. It was about half the size of a football pitch, fenced with steel stakes and orange netting. On the far side was a shabby rake of bleacher seats. In the middle distance, a hydraulic drill rig was pounding a foundation spike into a trench, its percussive clang unravelling into the empty playa.

Vic said, ‘I remember a murder investigation here, ten, eleven years ago. There was a strandloper in the pit, somehow the man who owned the place fell in, and the thing ripped him from neck to navel.’

‘Long before I bought the place,’ McBride said. ‘Long before I came up, even. Did you ever find out who did it?’

He was a burly man in his fifties, with a stiff shock of white hair. Dressed in some kind of safari suit — a bright yellow hip-length jacket with patch pockets and wide lapels, a cloth belt buckled over the bulge of his belly. Matching trousers tucked into knee-high brown leather boots. An ivory-coloured claw hung on a silver chain around his neck.

Vic said, ‘Who pushed him in, you mean? Oh, we were pretty sure that it was his business partner, but we didn’t have enough evidence. In the end it was ruled death by misadventure. But it closed this place down, put an end to biochine death matches.’

He remembered the strange pairing that the bodies of the man and the strandloper had made. The man’s clothes soaked in blood and tattered with parallel rips. The biochine’s segments collapsed between a dozen pairs of slender multi-jointed legs, its brittle carapace shattered by gunfire. Strandlopers were mostly harmless, but two individuals from different packs would fight to the death when they were put into the pit. A territorial thing. The main attraction had been fights between matched pairs of jackanapes, the quick, vicious biochines that preyed on strandlopers and other grazers. There weren’t any around Petra any more. The city council had culled the local population after they’d started straying into the new suburbs.

He said to McBride, ‘So now you own the place. Not the first time you’ve benefited from a death, is it?’

‘I bought it from the city, fair and square,’ McBride said.

He was building a resort, a cross between a country club and a casino, had insisted on giving Vic and Skip a tour of the construction site. He’d made expansive gestures as he’d strutted along, pointing to the stony stretch of ground where the eighteen-hole golf course was going to be, pointing to the stakes that outlined the extent of the dome under which the main building and guest cabins would shelter amongst a landscaped arboretum.

‘Know the Hotel California?’ he’d said. ‘Of course you do. This will be six times the area, semi-tropical. Palms, banana plants, that kind of thing. Imagine staying in a place where you can pick oranges or bananas right off the tree. I’m going to bring in animals too. Once my lawyers have cut through the red tape. Monkeys, parrots. Tigers. White tigers in their own enclosure. Paradise.’

Saying now, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if I could get around that stupid law, get the old pit working again? Revive some of that rough, tough pioneer spirit. I always wish that I’d been here at the beginning, before the UN started imposing its rules and regulations. Before the fucking corporations started coming in. There’s a McDonald’s drive-through now, you believe that? I couldn’t, when I saw it. Shopping malls, for Christ’s sake.’

‘And golf courses,’ Vic said.

‘If you want to survive, you have to go with the flow. See where things are going and try to get ahead.’

‘Is that something you thought up in prison?’ Vic was trying to needle the man, make him annoyed and careless.

But McBride was smiling. ‘Fuck, no. I’ve been diversifying my portfolio for some time now. Set up my own company, everything legit and above board. This project stalled while I was away, but I’m getting it back on track. And I have some serious interests in the Elder Culture artefact business. We haven’t explored five per cent of the planet yet, not properly. We don’t even know everything about the territory around Petra.’

‘So you’re starting a new life,’ Vic said. ‘Trying to go legit.’

‘Trying? No, that’s what I am now. A businessman. Plain and simple. I was trying to remember where I saw you,’ McBride said to Skip. ‘And now I remember. You were with the Mayor at some do. I have a memory for faces.’

Skip said, ‘We met the new boss of your old business. Danny Drury. Interesting bloke.’

Vic detected the slightest hesitation before McBride said, ‘He’s a smart boy. Should do well for himself. With my blessing, of course.’

‘So no hard feelings between you and Mr Drury,’ Skip said.

‘He has his business, I have mine. There’s plenty of room out here for all kinds, after all.’

‘You just gave up on the drug business,’ Skip said. ‘Walked away from it.’

‘You want to see what prison can do, how it can put a man on the straight and narrow, here I am,’ McBride said.

Vic said, ‘You’re talking about the good old days you know nothing about, talking about starting up the pit again…’

‘Which will probably never happen. Thanks to the fucking conservation regulations.’

‘So I have to wonder,’ Vic said, ‘if you haven’t entirely let the past go.’

‘Oh, now we’re getting into it, huh?’

‘You thought it was a courtesy visit?’

‘As soon as I saw you, I knew you were trouble.’

Skip said, ‘And what kind of trouble might that be, Mr McBride?’

‘If this is about those three dealers killed last night, I told you, I’m out of that game. Well rid. Leave it to the Serbs and the French and the fucking Turks, I say,’ McBride said, his face perfectly blank. Impossible to tell if he was playing them, or if he really didn’t know why they were there.

Vic touched his ear, the signal to change up the game. Skip said, ‘Where were you two days ago, around nine in the evening?’

That was the time the security guard had spotted the van speeding away from the murder scene.

‘You mean Landing Day?’ McBride smiled. ‘I was at a restaurant. Area 51. It had a special tasting menu.’

Skip said, ‘Would you mind telling me who your dinner companions were?’

‘You mean who could give me an alibi? Jesus fucking Christ. You think, just out of jail, getting back on my feet, I’m going to do something stupid?’

‘If you didn’t do anything,’ Skip said, ‘there’s no harm telling us who you were doing it with.’

McBride stared at him; Skip stared back.

‘All right,’ McBride said impatiently. ‘Just to get you off my back. I was with my good friend Eva Winkler. And I said hello to a couple of dozen acquaintances, too. Ask anyone who was there, they’ll remember me.’

Vic said, ‘We will. By the way, talking of Elder Culture artefacts, I hear you know something about ray guns.’

‘That old shit? All kinds of accusations were made, but none of them were ever proved.’

‘Because you went to jail. And while you were there, Danny Drury moved in. Took your house and your business. I was wondering if he also took your ray gun.’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about it.’

‘But I bet you’d like to see Danny Drury go down, maybe get your old business back.’

‘If you think I’d grass him up, you got the wrong idea about me,’ McBride said. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I have to get back to work. Paradise doesn’t build itself.’

Vic eased into the passenger seat. He felt old and cranky. The car smelled of stale sweat and the disinfectant someone had used recently to rinse off the back seat.

Skip said, ‘They both had their alibis ready.’

‘I hate to say it, but I think McBride might be telling the truth. Hard to sneak out of a restaurant, kill someone, and come back as if you just went for a piss.’

‘But easier, maybe, to sneak out of a big party.’

Vic smiled. ‘We both like Mr Drury for this, don’t we? But we can’t put him at the scene, and we have no reason for him being there.’

‘I guess we should check their alibis.’

‘Why not?’

As they drove back to the city, Vic thought the playa looked nothing like Australia, and nothing like Mars, either. No, it looked like the world had looked before people had started in on it.