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They took a load of photos, some of the fossil alone, some with the yellow telephone included, and some of Randy with fossil and telephone.
“He’s got to believe us now!”
“Yeah! Million bucks here we come!”
“Shame that other egg is missing,” mused Randy, fingering the empty socket where an egg must have once been. There was a lot of dirt in the dent, unlike the clean socket from which he had tugged his egg three days earlier.
Piho glanced back towards the fallen tree and shrugged. “Aw, It’ll turn up. Come on, I want to breath some fresh air for a change.” He started up the slope towards where the road had to be, “Hey, nice touch, dude, setting a guard on it.”
Randy though this was immensely funny. He chuckled all the way to the road.
#
THERE WAS NO TAXI WAITING for them.
“There’s no taxi,” said Randy after about ten minutes.
“I can see that!” snapped Piho.
“He should be here by now.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Queensland Time’?”
Randy huffed and sighed and drank the last of their water which seriously annoyed Piho and the day got hotter and hotter but still no taxi came.
“There’s no taxi,” repeated Randy.
“I can see that!”
“Let’s try hitching.”
“Ah, whatever.”
Moments later they heard a vehicle approaching. Randy practised his Aussie-style gesture, swinging his finger at the road. While he was doing that Piho hitched the ride. The vehicle stopped. Randy looked up.
It was Charlie Cobb in his battered 4-by-4 truck!
“Gidday fellas!” called Cobb with delight, “How’ya g'un?”
“We’re good. You going to Cunnundrom?”
“Yep. Jump in.”
“Got your hub on okay?” asked Piho as he scrambled to the middle of the stained and dusty seat beside Cobb.
“Yep. It was a bit of a bastard, but I bodgied it on.”
“Beaut.”
Randy got in last. After hearing Cobb’s highly technical explanation of the recent repair job he wanted to get right out again. He expected the truck to collapse at any moment. They drove on and it didn’t collapse.
“So you turned up all right, mate?” Cobb said across Piho to Randy.
“Yep, no worries,” replied Randy, deciding not to mention his brush with death on Saturday night.
“So, been having a lot of fun with your girlfriend then?”
“Yep. I-I-I mean ‘no!’ Not that sort of fun! Um, Tammy is... she’s not that sort of girl. We’ve been going steady. For like three years.”
“Good on ya, mate. Going to get married then?”
Randy nearly choked on his tongue. Piho quickly came to his rescue by launching into a lengthy story about how his older brother’s first car lost a back wheel while being chased by the police. Cobb laughed and stopped asking Randy life-threatening questions about marriage and the road rolled smoothly under their wheels at eighty kilometres per hour which seemed to be the speed that Cobb preferred. And all the wheels stayed on, much to Randy’s relief.
He glanced out the back window at the battered truck tray. There were still a few fragments of fossil rock bouncing around. He also noticed that the truck had a little hydraulic crane on it. Quite the perfect set-up for getting fossils out of the bush.
“So, ah, you off to do a bit of shopping?” he asked Cobb when the wheel-related conversation died away.
“Not exactly,” replied Cobb, “Got a job on. Quite sudden. Urgent call. But first I’ve gotta go borrow something back from a mate of mine. Then it’s back into the bush. Amazing what you can find out here.”
“Oof!” Randy said as Piho’s elbow did its usual job.
“And I thought I’d drop in on me boy too,” continued Cobb.
“Oh yeah?” said Piho politely.
“Yeah. Funny little nutter he is. Lives with his mum most of the time. Totally mad on ... er ... what’s it called: 'Amniotronics'?”
“Not Winton!” exclaimed Randy.
“What! Don’t tell me you’ve met him already?”
“Who’s this?” asked Piho in the middle, trying to follow the conversation. Randy attempted to explain what had happened with the robot dinosaur. Cobb roared with laughter. Piho was intrigued.
“So where did all this happen?” asked Cobb. And little by little Randy was forced to reveal where they were staying.
“Bloody hell!” laughed Cobb, “It’s a small world, isn’t it?! You going there now? I can drop you off.”
“No, no!” said Piho quickly, “ah, drop us off at the shops. Gotta get a few things done ourselves.”
“Do we?” asked Randy.
“Yes,” whispered Piho, “Photos, remember?”
“Oh right!”
#
THEY ROLLED INTO THE main street of Cunnundrom. It was ridiculously wide, almost completely treeless, and mostly lined with charming old buildings from a hundred years ago. Cobb pulled into a spare parking place and was straight away chatting with someone he knew. The boys jumped out. “Thanks mate!” called Piho, “We’ll catch up with you some time.”
“Righto fellas. Maybe this arvo, eh?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Piho hurried Randy towards the photo shop, growling in his ear, “For Pete’s sake can you stop telling everyone where we live?”
“Why not?”
“He knows Reinhold! Reinhold would love to know where we are.”
“Why?”
“’Cos I don’t trust him, that’s why. He could have us followed until he found the fossil himself. He’d whip it out of the bush sooner that you can say ‘jack-knifed semi’ and we’d get nothing! That’s why!”
“Poop; I never thought of that.”
“Yes, poop. And you’d be in it, mate, deeply. So could you learn to be a bit more discreet in future? Please!”
“Yes. Definitely.”
Glancing nervously over their shoulders they hurried into the photo-processing place. There was one customer ahead of them at the counter getting her photos back. The shop lady was talking, “...oh you took some lovely photos of the party. And the new pool looks so good. And is that young Jeremy...?”
Suddenly Randy felt a hand grip his shoulder and start dragging him out of the store. He turned in alarm. It was Piho.
“Quick! Outside!”
“Why? What is it?” Randy was freaking out.
“We can’t let her do the photos,” hissed Piho, “if this is anything like Kainui it’ll be all over town in minutes!” His voice went like a woman’s, “You know those Kiwi boys who’re staying with the Turingers? Well guess what? They’ve just found a million dollar fossil up in the bush and...”
“Shhhh!” hissed Randy, glancing around anxiously.
“Oh my God,” cried Piho, hand over mouth, “now you’ve got me doing it!”
“Have not! You did that all by yourself.”
“Okay, alright, whatever!” snapped Piho, “So anyway, what now?”
“There’s got to be another photo place.”
Piho glanced up and down the street. “Nope, this is the only one.”
Randy remembered a good stunt he’d once pulled when he’d wrecked something of Beau’s. “Hey, let’s just buy Tammy an identical camera and swap them.”
“Right. Good thinking. Come on.” They hurried back into the same shop and studied the displays. There were no cameras exactly the same as Tammy’s.
“I’ll just go ask if they’ve got any out the back,” said Randy.
“No no no no no! Out, out! There must be another camera shop.”
#
BUT THERE WASN’T. After trekking both sides of the street and buying some expensive bottled water, they slumped in the shade of the street’s only tree to drink and think.
“Okay, now what?” asked Randy. He was all out of ideas and too hot to think.
“We’ll just email him the photos.”
“Except we don’t have his email address,” said Randy glumly.
“Well phone him right now.”
“But he told us not to!”
“He told us not to use it for anything else.”
“No he didn’t. He said...”
“Just phone him!”
“Okay.”
Randy took out the big yellow telephone and the card. He was halfway through poking in the number when Piho suddenly shouted, “Stop!”
“What now?”
“We haven’t got our own computer.”
“We’ll just use Tammy’s.”
“No way! He’ll trace us to her place.”
“You’re getting paranoid.”
“No I’m not. And start walking. I think that guy’s watching us.”
“What guy?’
“Don’t look!” Piho dragged Randy past three shops and into a side street. They ran a dozen or so metres and ducked around the first available corner. Piho peered back carefully. Finally he relaxed. “All clear. It wasn’t him. Come on.”
“Come on where?”
“Tammy’s, where else? We’ll just keep the camera until he’s seen them.”
“But Tammy might think it’s been stolen!”
“Well have you got any better ideas?”
“Yeah.” Randy’s mind was still a blank. All he knew was that he didn’t want to see Tammy getting upset about her missing camera.
“Well then?” challenged Piho.
“Ahhh ...”
Randy thought hard, harder than he had ever thought before: 1# – Take taxi to next nearest town – go to camera shop there – buy identical camera... No. It would take thousands to pay the taxi. Okay; 2# – Buy a computer... no. Idea 3# – Go to an internet café, email Reinhold from there... except no internet café in Cunnundrom. Go back to idea 1# – taxi to nearest town ... no. Go to 2# – buy computer, put in photos, show Reinhold using very long extension cord... wait a minute!
“Laptop!” he shouted aloud.
“Aw,” said Piho snidely, “you’re just reading the sign across the road.”
“No I’m...” Randy looked across the road. “... oh.” The big sign said
PC’s, LAPTOPS, COMPUTER SOLUTIONS.
“Well,” said Randy cheerfully, “I’ve always wanted a laptop.”
“But the cost!” yelped Piho.
“No, it’s brilliant! Load them straight into the laptop, put the camera back, take it to Reinhold, no-one else sees them, perfect!”
“Too expensive.”
“You got any better ideas?”
“Maybe,” replied Piho stubbornly, in a voice that clearly revealed that he did not.
“Listen man, we’re going to be millionaires in a few days!” snapped Randy impatiently, “Come on!” He charged across the street and barrelled into the shop. “Show me some laptops my good man!” he said boldly, as Piho belatedly caught up.
The ‘good man’ turned out to be a woman with short hair. With a wry smile she came out from behind the counter and showed the boys three different laptops. Piho chose the cheapest in the range and started pealing off hundred dollar notes from his big bundle to convince her that they were really serious.
They got a discount for cash.
Then Piho asked about transferring the photos from the camera and she had to call in someone else who advised them that they had to use a special cable connector. Finally it all got sorted. Piho loaded in the photos while holding the instruction booklet over the screen so the two shop people didn’t see anything. Even so they stood back, watching suspiciously. Piho checked that the photos were really in the computer, then wiped them from the camera.
“Done!” he said to Randy. He folded up their new laptop, unplugged the camera, pocketed the cable and headed for the door. “Now let’s get some tucker.”
“Must you talk like an Aussie?” grumbled Randy as he followed.
“Am I?”
“The word is ‘Food’, not ‘Tucker’.”
“Whatever. So anyway, how about some feesh and cheeps?”
“Will you cut it out!”
#
THEY GOT BACK TO TAMMY’S at three that afternoon, hot, bothered, and smelling ever so slightly of dead animal. Tammy was already home. In fact she was in the pool.
“Okay,” whispered Randy to Piho, once he had assessed the situation by peering through a gap in the gate, “I’ll distract her while you slip around the other side of the pool and get the laptop into the sleepout.”
“Done.”
Randy walked in, greeted Tammy and kept moving straight towards her.
“Man it’s hot!” he said cheerfully. He didn’t hesitate. Fully clothed, he walked straight into the pool.
At which point he realised he still had her camera in his pocket.
“Arrrrrgh!”