WHEN SHE CAME into my flat after work, Nat straight away started complaining to me about the other Assistant Manager Fruit and Veg. The bloke was twenty-two, and Nat felt that he saw her as a threat. The overall Manager Fruit and Veg had a few more years’ experience behind him. He noticed the tension, but refused to buy into it.
‘Ah, the cut and thrust among the cucumbers and the tomatoes,’ I consoled. ‘The treachery amid the turnips.’
I would have continued, but I could see that My Cucumber was unimpressed. I should not have been making light of her work hassles.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Why not just tell the jerk to back off? See what he says. If he doesn’t, go see the big boss of the supermarket.’
Natalie looked at me in disbelief at my advice. ‘As if you’d do that,’ she said, while I poured a glass of white wine to calm her nerves.
I conceded Nat’s point. ‘I never said that’s the way I’d approach it. But that’s because of my – how do you usually put it? – stupid code of not dobbing, even if I was lying in a pool of blood and a policeman asked me who did it.’
We’d be a boring lot, I reckoned, if we all lived by the same code. The bloke giving her a hard time sounded like a loser, I told her. He was right to think that Nat, with her obvious talents, was a threat to him. If he wasn’t made to pull his head in, he might end up running the joint, and giving a lot more people than Nat a hard time.
She surprised me by saying I was right. He could end up being promoted, because the obnoxious little prick was ambitious and crawled up to management. For days after a staff meeting, he would repeat the same catchphrases the bosses used. Nat had noticed that, though women well outnumbered men at the supermarket, most of the managers and supervisors were men. She would remember any snide put-downs her rival made, she decided, and record them when she had the chance. And she would go to the supermarket manager, if he kept it up.
‘Good for you,’ I agreed. ‘Just promise me one thing, Nat.’
She looked at me to say what I was asking before she agreed.
‘If you ever do dob him in, please don’t tell me about it.’
She hit me on the arm. Ouch, she had a pretty tidy jab there.
___o0o___
THE EAST BRISBANE HOUSE looked different at nine o’clock at night, but the letterbox was still the same. The mail I had pilfered and returned poked up through the slit. There were no lights on. Flick could be tied up inside. I walked up the concrete path to knock on the front door. I pressed the doorbell, knocked again and waited. I was about to leave when I heard a sound.
It was a voice, varying in intensity, though never loud. It came from the garage. It could have been from a mouth bound by a gag.
I’m not sure whether it was tradition or television, but I felt I should have a baseball bat in the ute for moments like these. Any sporting weapon would have done: a cricket bat or a hockey stick; perhaps not a football, but a football boot might do, at a pinch.
All I had was a large bookie’s satchel, which is usually crammed down under the glove box on the passenger side in the ute. I could swing it by its handles, but it would weigh me down if I had to grapple or run, which would be my first instinct in a confrontation. Well, it was all I had. Satchel handles on shoulder, I went quietly around the back of the garage to have a peek.
There was a small window at the back, just above head-high and with bars on the outside. I stood on tiptoes and gained a partial view of the inside. The noise was coming from a small television set and I saw, above a high-backed chair, someone’s head watching the TV. This could be Felicity’s captor, but I could not see her anywhere in the part of the garage available to my view. I saw another light squeeze through the door of a small portable fridge, its open door only a few centimetres from the brick wall it faced. Satisfied I had seen all I could, I edged around the wall in the dark, feeling along with my fingers, until I came to a wooden door.
I turned the metal knob and pushed gently. It was unlocked. With an unlocked door, George and Phil might be inside. Mecklam’s hapless heavies were just the sort to leave their jail open. The door made only the slightest noise as I eased it inwards, just enough to put my hand inside. I felt around for a light switch, and found it above my head on the wall to my right. I gently closed the door again.
The plan was simple. I would open the door and turn on the light. That was it. What happened after that was out of my hands; I just hoped the person in the chair played fair and did not produce a gun. I was pretty sure Bill Smith had no guns, and I couldn’t think of anyone we both knew who had a gun. Still, quite a few in the racing crowd grew up in the country, and they sure do love their firearms west of the Great Divide.
Enough speculation. I wound the satchel’s handles around my left hand, pushed slowly on the door with my right hand, then clicked on the light and pushed the bottom of the door with my right foot.
‘Jesus!’ a woman’s voice said.
A plastic container hit the floor as I barged in, swinging the satchel over my shoulder and striking myself soundly on the back of the head and right shoulder.
As I fell forward I spotted a set of handcuffs, with one half locked around a large metal hook embedded in a wooden support. A key was in the opened other half of the cuffs. I braced myself to stop my forward momentum as up from the chair leapt a heavily pregnant Felicity Sailor, clutching a wooden dessertspoon in her hand. She looked down at a half-empty litre container of ice-cream on the floor and up at me.
‘Jesus,’ she repeated. ‘Dad’s gunna kill me.’