‘You can drop your hands,’ Danny informed me. ‘I’m not gunna shoot ya.’ The next instant, however, he unslung his rifle in a threatening kind of way – not exactly aiming it, but making sure that everyone knew it was there. ‘Where’dja think you’re going?’ he barked at Sergio, who was heading for Danny’s vehicle.
Sergio halted. ‘I thought – aren’t you taking us away?’ he shrilled.
‘Not yet,’ said Danny. ‘Not until I deal with the bastards who brought yiz here.’ Then he turned back to me, still cradling his gun. ‘So how did yiz both get out, exactly? Gimme a blow- by-blow.’
I licked my lips and lowered my hands. Though I didn’t trust him, there was no way on earth I could avoid giving him some kind of explanation. Not while he was armed with a bolt-action rifle. ‘I squeezed through the bars,’ was what I finally told him, keeping one eye firmly on the dogs.
‘Y’mean the bars in the gate?’ he queried. ‘The gate to the tunnel?’
‘That’s right.’ He obviously knew his stuff; I could tell that he was familiar with the underground tanks. But I didn’t find this reassuring.
On the contrary.
‘And then what?’ he asked.
‘Then I picked the lock on Sergio’s gate.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Danny sounded surprised. ‘How’d you manage that?’
‘With a shim,’ I mumbled. ‘That I made out of a beer can.’
Though I can’t be absolutely sure, I think Danny might have cracked a smile at this. But all he said was, ‘And then what?’
‘Then we took a big steel drum, and I stood on that, and Sergio stood on me. So he could climb out of the pool.’ As I went on to describe the ladder, and the tripwire, and the padlock, the barrel of Danny’s gun slowly sagged towards the ground. He seemed to be concentrating fiercely. At last, when I’d finished, he said, ‘How many are there? D’you know?’
I was stumped. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, who’s in the house? How many people?’ When I didn’t answer, Danny swung around to address Sergio. ‘What about you? Do you know?’
‘We don’t even know if anyone’s there at all,’ Sergio rejoined sullenly. ‘We thought your truck might be them, coming back.’
‘Okay.’ Danny pondered for a moment. ‘So how many have you seen? Since you got here?’
‘Two. No – three.’ When Sergio corrected himself, I stared at him in astonishment. There were three kidnappers? He’d never mentioned that. ‘I only saw one of ’em once,’ he admitted. ‘Not long ago. Maybe yesterday or the day before . . . it’s hard to tell the time, down there . . .’ He trailed off, his head drooping.
‘Mmmph.’ Danny nodded. Then he swivelled around to study the small square of light in the distance. ‘How many cars are parked outside?’ he asked.
Sergio and I stared at each other. We waited. Neither of us, however, could provide that information. ‘We didn’t notice,’ I said at last.
‘Okay. So how many guns’ve they got?’ was Danny’s next inquiry. I was startled when Sergio spoke up.
‘One each,’ he said, after a short bout of mental arithmetic. Then he amended this total. ‘No. Hang on. The third guy was carrying Lincoln’s gun. I remember that.’
‘Which is?’
‘A shotgun. Ten-gauge.’ Sergio seemed to be warming to the subject. ‘The other one’s a handgun. A Glock. Gary told me.’
‘Gary told you?’ I echoed. And Sergio stiffened before muttering, ‘Yeah. When he stuck it in my face and said he’d blow me away with it. That’s when he told me.’ After a long, drawn-out silence, he added, through clenched teeth, ‘I wanna do the same to him. And then I wanna pull the trigger.’
My jaw dropped. I caught my breath. But Danny was completely unfazed.
‘Yeah. I hear ya,’ he remarked carelessly. ‘But we gotta catch ’em first.’ Having shouldered his rifle again, he checked the illuminated dial on his watch. ‘It’s half-past two,’ he went on. ‘They might not check on yiz both until breakfast, if we’re lucky. Which’ll give us a bit of time to get in there. Set up an ambush.’
He’s crazy, I decided. Reuben’s warning popped into my head: Danny’s really messed up . . . he’s a full-on menace . . .
What’s more, he still hadn’t satisfied my curiosity. Okay; so he’d heard about me from Reuben. But how had Reuben found out where I was, if he didn’t know Gary or Lincoln? What if this was all some elaborate plot, to get Sergio and me back in our cages without shooting us?
‘Nuh-uh,’ I announced. ‘Not me. I’m not going back in there. I wanna go home.’
Danny regarded me for a moment. I heard him sniff. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, in faintly scornful accents. ‘You’ll be safe with old Danny around.’
But he was missing the point.
‘So what?’ I countered. ‘Who cares? I just wanna go home.’ Anticipating a sharp response, I quickly went on the offensive. ‘Aren’t you here to take us home? Isn’t that why Reuben sent you?’ I demanded.
‘What – home to Sydney?’ Danny gave a snort. ‘No bloody way. Reuben can do that.’
‘Huh?’
‘Reuben can do that,’ Danny repeated. ‘He’s driving up from Sydney now. Should be about . . . I dunno . . . four hours? Five?’
‘Five hours?’ Sergio butted in. ‘Where are we?’
‘Outside of Cobar. Near Broken Hill.’ If Danny expected some kind of reaction, he was doomed to disappointment. I’d never heard of Cobar. Or Broken Hill. Neither had Sergio, by the look of it. He scratched his head.
‘So we’re in the outback?’ he wanted to know.
‘Miles from anywhere,’ Danny confirmed. ‘That’s why I can’t leave. Not yet. Or they’ll shoot through before I can bag ’em.’
He seemed to realise that I was the one who needed persuading, because all at once he yanked me towards him. Up close, despite the poor light, I could just make out that he was missing some teeth, and that a scar was dragging down the corner of his left eye.
There were other scars too. All over his face.
‘See, if those bastards are in there, and they find out you’re gone, they won’t hang around. They’ll fly the coop. Just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘And we’ll lose ’em for good, because it’s not like they’ll leave a forwarding address.’ When I still didn’t comment, he scowled at me. ‘You want that to happen?’ he chided. ‘You want ’em to kidnap some other poor kid?’
I recoiled from his bad breath, which smelled of sour milk and fried onions.
‘They won’t get away with it,’ I insisted. ‘The police will track them down.’
‘The police?’ spluttered Danny. And Sergio exclaimed, ‘They are police, you moron!’
‘No, they’re not,’ I said.
‘Yes, they are!’
‘Sergio, they were just pretending. So they could get us into their car.’
‘How do you know?’
I didn’t, of course. I just had a hunch. Danny hawked and spat.
‘Forget the police,’ he declared. ‘I got no dealings with the police. Not ever.’
Oh, great, I thought. And aloud I said, ‘There’s no way the police won’t get involved. My mum would have called ’em already. She’ll be frantic.’ The thought of how Mum must be feeling brought tears to my eyes. I was so homesick, all of a sudden, that I wanted to curl up and bawl like a baby. That’s probably why I got mad instead. ‘I need to phone Mum right now!’ I snapped. ‘I need to tell her I’m safe!’
‘Fine. You do that,’ said Danny. Then he jerked his thumb at the house. ‘But you’ll have to use their phone, since I don’t have a mobile.’
He obviously felt that he had said something funny, because he cracked a grin so wide that I could actually see it in the dimness. As for me, I wasn’t amused. Not only that – I wasn’t convinced.
‘You don’t have a mobile phone?’ I asked, in disbelief. ‘You drive around in the outback and you don’t have a mobile with you?’
Danny s
hrugged. ‘No coverage,’ he replied, before abruptly changing tack. ‘See, all I’m gunna do is, I’m gunna make sure those bastards stay put until Reuben arrives,’ he explained. ‘Then we can take it from there. Okay? Figure out what the hell we should do. Sounds good to me.’
I was about to object when he suddenly turned on his heel and headed for the back of his ute. Though I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, all the clinks and clunks and rattles told me that he was searching through a metal locker or toolbox.
The dogs appeared to be even more confused than I was. They certainly stared after him in a lost kind of way. But they cheered up when he called to them.
‘Come by!’ he yipped, then muttered ‘Gotcha!’ as he stuffed something long and thin under his arm. Clang went the lid of a toolbox.
‘Don’t satellite phones work out here?’ I asked, in the belief that Danny and I were still having a conversation. But he didn’t answer. He simply walked on by, moving towards the house – and for a moment I didn’t understand. What was he doing? Where was he going?
The dogs surged after him, silently obedient. That was when I realised: he didn’t intend to hang around any longer. He was off to do some damage instead.
A pair of boltcutters was dangling from his right hand.
‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘What about us?’
‘I’m going with him,’ Sergio decided. And he began to follow Danny.
‘But what about the ute?’ I said feebly. ‘Aren’t you gunna drive?’
‘Oh, sure.’ Danny’s sarcastic retort floated back to me over his shoulder, like a whiff of stale air. ‘I’ll drive right up to the front door with me headlights on, just to give ’em some warning.’ He uttered a honk of laughter. ‘Maybe I’ll ask ’em if they wanna be chained to the floor, as well.’
I stood watching as he marched away, his rifle on his back and his raincoat flapping open. Moonlight glinted off the top of his balding scalp. His big heavy boots thudded and crunched over the parched ground, while his dogs padded along beside them. Sergio, I thought, looked a bit like one of the dogs; he was scurrying behind Danny with his head down.
I suppose I could pretend that I followed them both because I wanted to call Mum, or because I was keen to stop anything really bad from happening. But it wouldn’t be true. The fact is, I couldn’t bear the thought of being stuck out in the middle of nowhere all on my own. As Danny’s dark silhouette receded further and further into the shadowy distance, I became more and more uneasy. Don’t ask me why. It wasn’t as if the guy was going to protect me, since he was obviously trouble on steroids. Maybe I had a pack mentality, back then. Maybe I was programmed to follow the alpha dog.
Not anymore, though. Boy, have I learned my lesson. These days, believe me, I would stay with the truck. You know that old saying, ‘safety in numbers’? Well, it’s not always true. Sometimes the more people there are, the more dangerous it gets.
Anyway, I followed Danny and Sergio back to the pool, even though I was almost screaming with anxiety and frustration. Danny didn’t say anything about my change of heart. He was too busy formulating a plan of attack.
‘What we don’t want is a shootout,’ he declared. ‘But we’ll get one if we storm the front door, or try to crawl through a window. We’re outgunned, so we gotta be careful. We gotta take ’em by surprise and sneak in through the tanks.’ When I pointed out that the house couldn’t be reached from the tanks, because both interconnecting doors were still locked, Danny waved my protest aside. ‘We’ll fix that,’ he promised. ‘Don’t worry.’
Then he insisted that each of us carry one dog down the ladder into the pool, while his fourth dog remained up top, on guard. It was a stupid idea. All of the dogs were big and mean and heavy – American Staffordshire terriers, for the most part – and they didn’t want to be picked up. They certainly didn’t want to be picked up by me. In the end, I dismantled my homemade shoes and tied the strips of mattress ticking through the holes in Danny’s coat, transforming it into a kind of sling that we used to lower the dogs down, one by one. Danny and Sergio did the lowering, while I supported the dogs from underneath.
Afterwards, when Danny descended the ladder to join his dogs, he told me to retrieve Sergio’s mutilated mattress. ‘That has to go back where it came from,’ he insisted, ‘or things won’t look normal.’ He went on to emphasise that, unless everything looked absolutely normal, the ambush wouldn’t work.
So that’s how I ended up in charge of Sergio’s mattress. I had to lug it through the tunnel, manoeuvre it into his cell, and heave it back onto his iron bedstead. Sergio was supposed to help me, but he was shaking too hard to be of much use; the smell of the tanks made him hyperventilate. The only thing he could do was crawl into bed and pull the covers over him, so that the mangled bit of mattress wasn’t visible.
‘Just lie there and pretend to be asleep,’ Danny instructed, very quietly. ‘I’ll be back in a tick.’ He himself was carrying the steel drum, which he’d shouldered back at the pool; his free hand was still wrapped around the boltcutters. In the penetrating light from the overhead bulb, he looked scarier than ever. His nose was so crooked, it was probably broken. His jagged teeth were brown, where they weren’t completely gone. His eyes were the same lifeless grey as his straggly hair, which barely concealed all the dents and scars on his scalp. As for the rest of his scars, they were savage. I’ve already mentioned the scar that was dragging down one eyelid. There was another bisecting his chin, and a hole in his left cheek. It was also pretty obvious that something had been chewing on his Adam’s apple, because a huge chunk of his neck was missing.
I guess I can’t blame Sergio for getting the shakes. I nearly freaked out myself, when I first saw Danny in the fully illuminated flesh. No wonder he lives on his own, I thought, as he shoved the boltcutters into my hands.
‘Hold these,’ he barked.
‘Where are you going?’ Sergio squeaked from the bed. ‘Don’t leave me!’
‘Calm down. Psycho’s gunna stay,’ said Danny, though not with the air of someone trying to offer comfort. It was more of a command. Then he told one of his dogs to lie under the bed, disregarding Sergio’s protests. My orders were to shut Sergio’s gate behind me and make sure the padlock looked as if it was closed up tight.
Next thing I knew, Danny was dragging me towards the cell I’d already abandoned.
‘What we need to do,’ he remarked, ‘is lull those bastards into a false sense of security. We need ’em to come in before they know what the score is. They can’t get suspicious.’ He let me go upon reaching my cell, which looked completely undisturbed. The light was still on. The gate was still locked. The water bottle hadn’t been moved. ‘This hasn’t bloody changed,’ he announced, as if reading my mind. ‘I don’t think they’ve even washed the sheets since I was here last.’
I stood and waited while he positioned his drum beneath the padlock, mutely handing him the boltcutters when he asked for them. I couldn’t quite see why he wanted me there. After he’d climbed up onto the drum – without assistance – it didn’t take him long to snip through the lock. And it wasn’t as if his dogs needed watching; the two that had followed us sat rigidly by my side, panting a little, their gazes riveted to Danny’s every move. He didn’t even hand me the boltcutters when he jumped down again; instead he took them into my cell and hid them under the bed.
Only when he asked me to restore the drum to its proper place did I finally make a genuine contribution. ‘I want it exactly where yiz left it,’ he warned. ‘Everything’s gotta look the same. That’s why I shut the gate back there. Understand?’
I understood, all right. I wasn’t stupid. I also understood why he made the two dogs – Tagger and Mutt – crawl into my bed, under the covers. From a distance, their combined bulk was very misleading. ‘When our friend comes down to give yiz a bite to eat, all he’ll see is a lump,’ Danny said. ‘With any luck, he’ll think it’s you. I’ll hide behind the door and surprise him. And if it’s a stand
off for some reason, the dogs’ll go for this throat.’
It seemed like a workable (thought slightly bloodcurdling) plan, thanks to the cell’s layout. But I could see a possible complication. ‘What if he checks on Sergio before he comes in here?’ I asked.
‘He won’t.’ Danny sounded absolutely confident. ‘Sergio’s not the one with a Rohypnol hangover.’ As I absorbed this chilling comment (Rohypnol? Is that what they used on me?), Danny went on to say, ‘And if I’m wrong, it’s no big deal. Psycho’s hiding under the bed in there, so no one’ll see him. Chances are this guy’ll just dump Sergio’s breakfast before coming straight over here.’
‘What if they both come down, though? Gary and Lincoln? What if one comes in here and the other goes in there?’
Danny shrugged. ‘I can handle two,’ he promised. ‘With three dogs, it won’t be too hard. Not as long as you get the guns off ’em quick enough.’
‘Me?’
‘That’s what you’re here for, mate.’ Danny fixed me with a hard, cold, speculative look. ‘When the first one drops his weapon, I want yiz on it like a dog on a rat. Before the next one arrives.’
‘But I’ve never even fired a gun!’
‘It’s easy. I’ll show ya.’
‘But—’
‘Feel that. Feel the weight. Not too heavy, is it? You can handle that, no problem.’
I can’t count how many times I’ve been warned about guns. My mother once showed me a picture of a patient who’d tried to shoot himself in the mouth. ‘That,’ she cautioned, ‘is the kind of damage a firearm can inflict. Guns aren’t fun, Toby. They’re made to kill people.’ I think she was worried that Fergus might acquire a gun from someone (his brother, perhaps) and do something hair-raising with it. And I can understand why she was so scared, because if Fergus ever did get hold of a gun, there’d be hell to pay. No question.
But the thing is, he’s never even laid eyes on a gun. Maybe guns are more common in the countryside, and maybe there are drug dealers around Sydney who keep guns squirreled away under their beds. In my neighbourhood, though, I’ve never met a kid who’s ever handled a real, live gun. (And believe me, if they’d done it, they would have boasted about it.)