Cargo Cult Page 5

  They set off in Nick's four-wheel, Nick and Doug in the front, Wayne in the back with the gear. It was beginning to dawn on Wayne that thinking of Doug and Nick as friends had been maybe a bit unrealistic. As he sat and sulked, it became clear to him that the true nature of their relationship all along had been more that of business associates. He tried to remember how he’d got involved with them in the first place but it was all a bit hazy.

  He’d been doing a gig in a sleazy club on the Gold Coast and it had gone well. The clientèle had been a bit rough and he remembered thinking the room must have been full of gangsters. Knowing that the audience was largely thugs, thieves and drug-runners, he was strangely delighted when one or two of them congratulated him on his set afterwards and had bought him drinks. He’d probably had one or two too many because he found himself sitting at a table with a group of blokes he didn’t know, laughing and joking with them and thinking that maybe organised crime wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  So, when one bloke, Doug, had started talking about needing to get a team together for a job he was planning, Wayne had said he’d like to have a go. Everyone had been highly amused but Doug had taken him seriously and had asked him what he thought he could contribute to the team. It had struck Wayne as surreally like a job interview at some big multinational. So he had answered in the same spirit, explaining his drive to achieve, his commitment to team goals and his ambition to climb the ladder of promotion and success. He had been a big hit and many tough men had been weeping with laughter but Doug had pressed his job applicant for more, wanting to know just what skills Wayne could bring to the business of burglary. That’s when Wayne had explained that he had trained as a jeweller for a couple of years and had discovered he had an uncanny knack for telling a good stone from a poor one.

  A thoughtful silence had descended on the table and then Doug had jabbed his finger at one of the women’s necklace. “Do that,” he’d commanded and the woman, looking just a little narked, had taken it off and handed it to Wayne with a pout. Wayne had taken the necklace and held it under the light of a nearby lamp. “It’s real,” he had said. Then it had dawned on him how much it was worth. “Bloody hell! This is real! Diamonds and emeralds. The diamonds are so-so. The emeralds are quite good.” Doug had made him do it again and again around the table, the grin on his tough, ugly face getting broader and broader all the time.

  A lot more drinking had followed and, when Wayne had woken up the following afternoon, he really couldn’t remember any more of the evening. However, Doug had called for him a few hours later and they had begun planning in earnest.

  Now he was here, in the back of Nick’s four-wheel, too drunk to think clearly, on his way to assist two thugs in the execution of a crime. As a nauseating anxiety gripped Wayne’s innards, he asked himself over and over why he was here and how could he be somewhere else without getting himself killed.

  It had all seemed so exciting—being a member of a gang, planning a heist, casing the premises—like being in a cop show. No-one would get hurt, the victim would be insured, the stupid cops would never catch them. It was fun. And the best part was hanging out with Doug and Nick. For once in his life, people treated him with respect and a bit of fear, seeing he was with such well-known villains. In his fantasies, he had made organised crime his career. He would rise to power and prominence, he’d wear Armani suits and Gucci loafers, and his family would tell Sam how well her little brother was doing and ask her why she wasn’t more like Wayne. So much for being a dole queue bludger and a wimp loser!

  Yet somehow, the reality wasn’t shaping up quite as he’d expected it. If only Doug hadn’t bashed him. It was impossible to maintain the fiction that you’re a well liked and respected member of the team when the boss belts you in the stomach.

  They pulled up at the back of Steiner's as planned and it was immediately obvious that things were not about to go well. An old ute with a concrete mixer in the back was parked haphazardly in the cargo bay and a large hole had been blown in the red-brick wall.

  Doug was furious. "Someone's done the place already! I can't believe it! I'll kill the bastards!" He seemed about to leap out of the car and attack whoever it might be with his hands and teeth but Nick put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  "Hang on a minute, mate. Let's think about this. There's no police, right, and there's no alarm, right, and we don't have to get through the windows, right, 'cos there's a bloody great hole in the wall, right?"

  "So what're you saying?" Doug asked, not wanting to hear anything that didn't involve tearing someone's head off.

  "Well, I dunno," Nick confessed, not having thought that far. "Why don't we go and see who it is, break their arms and tell 'em to piss off? Then we just do the job like before."

  Doug liked the breaking arms bit. "Right. Come on then." He turned to Wayne, who had been dozing quietly. "Hey you! Bring the bag." Wayne grabbed the sports bag, which was heavy and clanked metallically as he hefted it, and climbed out into the still night. "Give it here," demanded Doug and took it from him. Then, to Wayne's horror, Doug and Nick each pulled a sawn-off shotgun from the bag.

  "Oh now wait a minute!" Wayne complained. "I don't think we need guns." With an expression of pain and sorrow, Doug stepped up to Wayne and pushed the muzzle of his gun into the young man's face. Immediately, Wayne could see the mistake he'd made. "You're right, of course," said Wayne, talking around the hard, cold steel. "I'll just shut my mouth and do as I'm told."

  Doug seemed to consider giving himself the pleasure of inflicting some hideous injury on his young protégé but, in the end, decided against it. Turning away with, "Get the bag," he led the group towards the hole in the wall.

  The plan had been simple but brilliant. Steiner’s department store shared an internal wall with Brisbane Diamond Imports Pty Ltd, which, they were well informed, did a high volume of trade in low-grade diamonds with the East Coast jewellers. It also handled a small number of high-grade stones on behalf of a major outlet in Sydney. These were the stones Doug was after and the ones Wayne was going to identify. All they had to do was break through the wall and get Nick to blow the safe. The security system at Steiner’s was nothing compared to the one at Brisbane Diamond Imports, Doug had said, so that was the best way in. Wayne didn't suppose that even Doug had expected Steiner’s to be quite so easy.

  Doug and Nick grabbed torches from the bag and moved cautiously into the building, guns raised. Wayne followed behind, his heart thumping. It was immediately apparent that they were not alone. Lights flickered in several places around the floor and strange chirrupy noises could be heard, as though someone was playing arcade games.

  "It's bloody kids!" hissed Doug. "I'll bloody kill 'em!" There was a sudden flash and a distant mannequin exploded into fragments. Doug and Nick threw themselves to the floor. "Jesus! They’ve got shooters!”

  Wayne, standing above them, was confused. “What’s going on? What was that noise?”

  “Guns, shithead!” snarled Doug, getting into a crouch and heading off into the racks of clothing like a big-game hunter stalking his prey through the African jungle.

  “Guns?” said Wayne, watching Doug and Nick disappear into the darkness. “Oh, guns!” He ducked down, looking around himself in sudden alarm. Then he got onto all fours and crawled under the nearest clothes rail.

  As Doug and Nick crept through the maze of hanging dresses, they could see that the groups of lights were coming together. Nearing the gathering point, the strange chirruping noise suddenly started to make sense, as if they could suddenly understand the language of birds. Doug poked his fingers in his ears and wiggled them vigorously to make it stop. Yet, when he removed them, it was still there.

  "What about this one then?" said one of the voices.

  "That's good," answered another. "No-one else has chosen anything quite that small. You should be very noticeable. Who are you, by the way?"

  "I am Klakk."

  "Klakk! It's me, Trugg. I'd rub slime gl
ands with you if only we had some."

  They both laughed merrily.

  “You'll need some of these,” said Trugg, holding out a pair of court shoes. Klakk took them and sniffed them. “They're clothes for the feet! See?” Trugg lifted a foot to reveal a strappy, satin sandal with a three-inch heel. “Braxx said that all the humans in the pictures are wearing them so we should too. It makes the balancing a bit hard but you get used to it.”

  Listening from behind a display of women's hosiery, Doug reached boiling point. He was here on serious business and he wasn't going to put up with any of this nonsense. He tapped Nick on the arm to get his attention then indicated, with a lift of his head, that he was about to reveal himself. Keeping his eyes on Nick, he mouthed the word "Now!" and leapt to his feet, switching on his torch and brandishing his shotgun.

  "All right!" he yelled. "Everybody face-down on the ground. Now! Drop your guns... and..." His voice trailed off as he took in the crowd of stunned women in front of him. Loosi Beecham, wearing a brief satin night-dress, stared at him open-mouthed. Beside her, Loosi Beecham in a towelling bath-robe, adopted a posture of surprise. As did the Loosi Beecham in the lilac underwear and the Loosi Beecham in the shiny gold evening dress. Other Loosi Beechams stared back at him in every conceivable kind of outfit. There was even a pregnant Loosi Beecham in a jersey wool sheath dress.

  "What the fuck is going on here?" demanded Nick.

  "We are choosing clothes," said a Loosi Beecham in a white wedding dress and matching pumps, stepping forward.

  "Are you wearing masks?" asked Doug, still stupid with surprise.

  "Should we be?" asked Braxx, peering at Doug's face to see whether he had one on. “Did anyone see any masks in here?” he called to the others. There was a general round of no-ing and head-shaking from the Loosies.

  “Shut up!” shouted Doug, his voice high and tense. “Just shut the fuck up!” He glared around at the strangely dressed women. “Who are you? What the hell is going on?”

  “We are fellow humans, seeking only to mark our identity through differentiated clothing,” said Braxx. “That is normal, is it not?”

  “I think they’re all off their trolleys, mate,” offered Nick.

  Doug grasped at the explanation. “Yeah, like a bunch of Loosi Beecham lookalikes on some kind of girls’ night out. Probably been to see some male strippers, got tanked up on cocktails and now they’re... they’re...” Here Doug’s imagination failed him.

  “Robbing Steiner’s and shooting the dummies,” said Nick, completing the unlikely scenario.

  Doug’s eyes roved across the group, taking in the full, pouting lips, the large, high breasts. “Jeez, mate. Have you ever seen so many great chicks all in one place?”

  Nick just shook his head in wonder. Whatever was going on, he was beginning to see that there might be an up-side.

  “Hey, girls,” said Doug, smiling for the first time. “The party doesn’t have to stop just ‘cos we’ve arrived. Me and Nick like to have fun too, if you know what I mean.”

  “It’s strange,” said Trugg. “I can understand nearly all their words but I just can’t make any sense out of the whole.”

  “Perhaps they too are of a low-intelligence sub-species,” suggested Klakk.

  Braxx had to agree. “Subdue them,” he said. “We will take them somewhere safer and question them.” His followers surged forward and grabbed the two astonished men before they had the presence of mind to defend themselves. Too late, Doug and Nick tried to put up a fight but the Vinggans were surprisingly strong. In his rage and impotence, Doug managed to get off a single shot from his shotgun. There was a blinding flash and a deafening explosion as the gun discharged, firing straight into the ceiling and taking out one of the water sprinklers. The recoil knocked the awkwardly-held weapon from his hand, almost breaking his trigger finger. The Vinggans were startled for an instant but then piled onto the humans, wrestling them to the floor and stunning them with their neural dampers. The fire alarm clanged into life and a torrent of water began to pour down all around them.

  Astonished and terrified, Braxx shouted, “Leave them!” and set off for the hole in the wall as fast as his lower limbs would carry him.

  Rushing down the stairs into the strange, internal rainstorm, Drukk was just in time to see the lights of his companions disappearing through the hole in the wall. He shouted to them but the roar of the sprinklers drowned him out. Splashing across the soggy carpet, he hurried after them.

  Wayne had been asleep when the thunder of the gunshot woke him and rain began to pour down accompanied by an insistent alarm bell. Still drunk and more confused than ever, he crouched beneath the clothes rail as thirteen bizarrely-clad women raced past him and out through the hole. He crawled out and stood up to watch them go, instantly drenched by the sprinklers. They ran out to the old ute he’d seen on the way in and milled around it shouting, “Where’s Drukk? Where’s Drukk? Are you Drukk? No I’m Trugg. Where’s Drukk?” for a while before running off across the loading bay into the night.

  That’s when a woman ran into him from behind and they both went sprawling across the drenched floor. The woman was on her feet first. As Wayne blinked through the rain at her, he thought she looked vaguely familiar. She was stunningly attractive in a short orange dress that clung wetly to her otherwise naked body and he gaped at her in awed admiration as any young drunken male would. She pointed a small stick at him and said, “Come with me at once.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding eagerly. “Absolutely.”

  They ran out to the ute. “Where did the others go,” asked the woman. Wayne pointed off down the street. “Can you operate this conveyance?” she asked him.

  “Er, yeah.”

  “Then do so,” she said and climbed in.

  “Right!” he said, climbing in right behind her.

  Chapter 8: A Baffling Case

  Detective Sergeant Michael Barraclough was a big man. In his early thirties, what used to be solid muscle was just beginning to turn to flab but, in his usual, easy-going way, he was happy to let it. Ten years ago, he had been a formidable forward on the Divisional rugby team. Even now, he was the kind of man you wouldn’t pick a fight with in a pub. Fortunately for everyone around him, Barraclough was one of the most easy-going of men and not one of his colleagues had ever seen him lose his temper.

  Tonight, he was working the graveyard shift again. As a lifelong bachelor and dedicated police officer, he was happy to do more than his share of unsocial hours and let his mates see their families and friends a bit more often. He was a friendly, sociable man and the relative solitude of the night-shift sometimes got him down.

  In fact, just after 11:30 pm, he was thinking of wandering down to the canteen to see if there was anyone around for a chat, when he received the call from uniform to say there had been a break-in at Steiner's in the city. Pleased to have something interesting to do, he beamed at the telephone. "Good on ya, mate," he told the voice on the phone. "Any arrests?"

  "Oh you'll love this, mate. We bagged Doug McKinnock and Nick Phillipousos, both armed and equipped."

  "You got Douggie Mack!" Barraclough was impressed. "Was anybody hurt?"

  "No. That's the queer thing about it. They were both out cold when we found them. They're awake now but they look real crook."

  "Where are they?"

  "On their way in to the hospital. The paramedics here couldn't see anything wrong with them."

  "I hope your blokes are keeping an eye on them. I've been chasing that bastard McKinnock all over Brisbane since he was a 15-year-old thug robbing grocery stores for beer money."

  "I don't think they’re up to making a run for it." The voice hesitated. "They've said some funny stuff, Mike."

  "Don't worry about that. I'll soon have the bastards talking straight. Look, try to stop everyone trampling all over the crime scene quite as much as they usually do and I'll be there in five minutes.” He sighed happily. “What a night this is turning out to be! Just t
ell me there’s a beautiful woman involved and I’m going straight to Heaven."

  “Mike, mate, there’s about a dozen beautiful women in this case already.”

  Barraclough laughed heartily. “See you in five,” he said.

  -oOo-

  There were still a couple of fire service officers on the scene, along with the police forensic team and two constables who had been assigned to guard the hole, when Barraclough pulled up at the back of Steiner’s department store. A four-wheel drive, already identified as belonging to Nicholas Phillipousos, was cordoned off, waiting for the tow-truck to take it in to the station for more forensic tests. Barraclough looked around the loading bay and then at the hole in the wall.

  The first thing that struck him was that there was almost no debris. If the burglars had used explosives to blow that hole, there would be rubble everywhere. So they either cleaned up after themselves, or they cut or hacked their way through the wall some other way, carrying off the bricks and plaster as they worked. He moved closer. There was plenty of brick-dust on the ground around the hole and some small lumps of debris. So many people had trampled in and out and the ground was so wet that, if there had been tracks from wheelbarrows or even bulldozers, there were no traces left in the dirty, red slurry. He moved around the outside of the building. It was a warm night. If anyone had driven or run away from the building before the police and fire brigade had arrived, the wet trail they would have left would have long ago dried up.

  He chatted briefly to the cops on guard and then to the firemen, finally to Mr Greer, the store manager who appeared from the hole, shaking his head in despair. There had been no fire. The alarm had been set off by somebody shooting at one of the sprinklers.

  “There are clothes all over the floor,” Mr Greer complained. “It’s like someone went around all the rails just throwing everything into heaps. What kind of maniac would do such a thing? And the mannequins! They’ve destroyed seven mannequins. Blown them to pieces! Why? What’s the point? Were those men on drugs? Are they insane?”