‘To get the wallaby.’ Rick looked at me like I’d just submitted my application to be awarded Moron of the Day. ‘That’s what she came here for in the first place, mate.’
‘But …’
‘The thing’s been caught on a fence between their property and ours since this morning.’ Rick tucked his gun into his waistband. ‘Got its tail hooked up. We can’t just leave it there. That’s cruel.’
The drug lord drew a couple of cable ties out of his pocket and held them towards me, put his other palm out like he wanted my gun. I handed the pistol over, slowly, waiting for the punchline. There wasn’t one. Rick watched as I zipped a cable tie around one of my wrists, looped the other through and zipped it shut as well. He checked the tightness half-heartedly like he trusted me to have done a good job. Bridie was trembling gently, looking at me for confirmation that we weren’t both about to be shot in the back of the head and buried in a hole out here. I met her eyes and nodded.
‘You can watch from the verandah,’ Rick said, taking my arm and leading me forward. ‘Come on.’
We stood on the rickety verandah running along the side of the house, Rick, his men and me, as Bridie and the one named Dan walked across a field that was waist-high with native grass and triffid-like weeds to the edge of a wall of bush belonging to the nextproperty. Matt, my former hostage, who was supposed to be supervising me, forgot about me completely, his eyes and those of everyone present on the lanky girl and her captor approaching the fence line. I could tell from the animal’s black face and considerable size that it wasn’t a wallaby, in fact, but a black wallaroo, a significantly larger animal that would have weighed two-thirds what Bridie did. It rose on its hind legs to her shoulder height when it saw her approaching. We looked on in silence as Bridie handed the huge hessian sack she used for wallaby, wallaroo and kangaroo rescues to her captor. Rick, who was standing beside me, folded his arms and shook his head, marvelling at the task ahead of my child, while in the distance Bridie tied her hair up into a ponytail.
‘They’ll kick ya, those things,’ he said.
I said nothing.
‘They can kill ya, you know,’ he went on. ‘Better her than me.’
I wasn’t doing very well at being conversational. It was the guns. The hostages. The whole having-my-life-weighed-in-someone-else’s-hands thing. My stoicism seemed to be disappointing Rick, who I could feel looking at me. I supposed there was no reason drug kingpins shouldn’t enjoy making friends just as much as the law-abiding citizens among us.
Bridie crept as close to the animal as she could before it started panicking and thrashing, making the fence posts on either side of it waggle back and forth. The animal’s thick tail seemed to be twisted in two lengths of barbed wire. I saw a strip of raw pink flesh. Twisted, rusty, broken coils. Bridie chose her moment then ran up and threw herself at the animal shoulder-first, taking it to the ground like a rugby tackler, while the nation’s most cordial drug crew stood around me and guffawed and cheered and clapped.
They pulled out of the property an hour after that, leaving the house empty, the gate hanging open, and Bridie and me tasked with loading the wallaroo into the back of my Mustang. My former hostage hung around for fifteen minutes before taking off unannounced. The wallaroo had calmed and was lying on its side with the hessian sack encasing its body to the base of its ravaged tail, where a drawstring was pulled tight. Bridie spread an old sheet overthe back seat of my car to save the leather from the skin-stripped flesh of the bottom half of the tail. She was quiet and pale and hard-mouthed, and we hadn’t spoken in all the time we were held captive while the drug goons packed the house, so after she closed the door on the wallaroo I reached out tentatively and touched her hand. For the first time in five years, she fell into my arms.
‘Daaaaad!’ she sobbed against my chest.
‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it’s not!’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Yes, it was! They could have killed us both.They were thinking about killing us both!’
‘Oh, honey. I wouldn’t have let them kill us both.’
‘I’m an iiiiidiooot …’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Can you not tell Mum?’
‘I’ll never tell a soul.’
Bridie dried her eyes, sucked in some deep breaths and let them out hard. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There’s a road back there. I saw it from the edge of the field.’
She pointed out towards the fence where she’d wrestled the wallaroo from its entrapment in the fence. I looked. She went on. ‘Should you go look?’
I fished around in my mind for what she was talking about. Came up with nothing. ‘What for?’
‘Well, these guys are drug cooks, right?’ she said. ‘They don’t want anyone to know they’re out here. So they’ll be using that front entrance, the one we came through, as little as they can. That road might go somewhere. It might go into town, maybe. Avoiding the traffic cameras.’
‘Right.’ I nodded. ‘And they’ve got cameras at the front. Maybe—’
‘Maybe they had them at the back. It’s probably a good idea to check all the secret roads around here, you know? The ones only the locals know about? Because if someone was after Chloe, and it wasn’t, like, a spur of the moment thing …’
‘How long can that animal lie there like that, though?’ I pointed to the ’Stang.
‘He’s okay.’ Bridie put a hand on the car door. ‘He could use the calm-down time in the dark. I’ll stay with him. You just go and don’t, like, make a day of it.’
