“This is a wind up, right?” Dace said, grinning.
Sasha shook her head. “Nah. Unless my dad was winding me up. He told me it was all true, John McFarland got drunk that night and spilled it. Says he still feels guilty for how that kid got fucked up. I mean, he’s a grown man now, must be around forty or something, but he is fucked up.”
“Did he ever extend the land?”
Sasha laughed. “Nope. Said he went back the next day and put all the fence back up. Said no way he wanted that creek on his land, it could stay in the bush. And that’s not even counting for whatever his dad said was out there beyond the creek.”
They nodded along to Blind Eye Moon for a moment. Dace thought maybe he didn’t want to consider too deeply what lay beyond the McFarland’s creek. Or what he might have seen up on the cliff top.
“No sudden moves, you two!” snapped a gruff voice somewhere behind them.
Dace spun his chair around to see another boat not five metres from theirs. Two men were in it, one at the wheel, the other standing on the prow pointing a shotgun at him. Both wore balaclavas concealing their whole face except the eyes. They must have cut their engine and coasted in under cover of the music.
“What the fuck?” Dace said.
“Who are they?” Sasha asked, eyes wide.
“Turn that shit off,” said the man with the gun. “Slow and easy as, yeah?”
Dace nodded, reaching cautiously for his phone. Blind Eye Moon stopped mid-riff and the night was heavy with silence but for the slap of low waves against the hulls of the boats.
“Give it to us then,” the man with the gun said.
Dace swallowed, stomach cold, legs shaking. He was glad he was sitting down. He felt as though his bladder would let go any moment. This was bad. Really bad. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t fuck with me, son!” the gunman said.
Son? Dace was thirty-four next year and the guy pointing a shotgun at him didn’t look old. What did that matter? His mind was rambling.
“Give us the fucken shipment!” the man yelled.
“Jesus, Dace, whatever it is, just give it to them!” Sasha said.
“Whatever it is?” the other boat driver said, his voice strangely high. Then he laughed. “You don’t know what your boyfriend here is doing?”
“He’s not my–”
“Just give us Carter’s weed, you fucking loser,” the gunman said.
Sasha turned a shocked expression to Dace. “Carter’s fucking weed?” she exclaimed. “You idiot, why do you have anything to do with that guy?”
The gunman laughed, loud and deep. “S’a good fucken question, dickhead! But don’t answer it now. The stuff, quickly.”
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Dace muttered, trying desperately to think of a way out.
The shotgun boomed into the air and he flinched. Sasha screamed and dropped to the floor behind the dash and low windscreen, curled up tight.
“All right, all right!” Dace shouted. He moved to the back and pulled out a 30-litre plastic storage tub with a clip-on lid. It was lined with newspaper, concealing the contents. But Dace knew it held around seven and half kilos of high-quality bud, grown on Carter’s farm above the south side of The Gulp.
“Just put it on the front,” the gunman said, gesturing.
Dace hefted the tub over the windscreen, shoved it forward. The driver of the other boat started his motor and nudged in. The one with the shotgun hopped over and grabbed the tub, the shotgun held one-handed, but trained on them the whole time. If he fired it like that, Dace thought, he was liable to lose it from the recoil. But he’d still have fired it and no way would a shotgun miss at this range.
“Can’t believe you made it so easy for us,” the gunman said. “We were going to run you down before you got to Enden, then here you are floating about like a pair of complete fuckwits.” He dropped the tub into his boat and jumped down behind it, the shotgun still aimed right at Dace.
The driver lifted a hand in a wave as he gunned the motor. “Don’t you fucken follow us,” he said. “You let this end here and no one gets hurt.”
No way does this end here, Dace thought. He had to go back and tell Carter he’d lost the shipment. Carter would kill him. He needed something, some clue to give over so they might make this right.
But before he could say or do more, the other driver carved a tight turn, spraying Dace as he roared away, back towards The Gulp. There wasn’t a single identifying mark on the boat, the whole thing plain white with a Yamaha outboard like a hundred others. He might recognise it again, but it was entirely likely he wouldn’t.
They bobbed in the wake of the thieves and Dace stared, dumbfounded. Then he tipped his head back and yelled, “FUCK!” at the indifferent stars.
Sasha got up from the floor of the boat, looking daggers at him. “You can take me the fuck home right now.”
Dace nodded and sat down on the driver’s seat, started the engine. He had to go right back to Carter anyway. No way he could put off telling the man. He pointed the boat back towards The Gulp wondering what the hell he was going to say when he got there.
Twenty minutes later he tied up at Carter’s point on the harbour. Sasha hopped straight off the boat, glared down at him.
“I was looking forward to the gig tonight,” she said. “Thought you’d be fun to hang out with.”
“I would be. Still can if Carter doesn’t kill me.” The dick wants what the dick wants, he thought to himself.
Sasha shook her head. “No way, man. I’m having nothing to do with anyone connected to Carter. You’re fucking mental to think it’s worth dealing with that psycho.”
“You were happy to come out with me in his boat.”
“I thought it was your boat, you fucking moron.”
Dace stopped, stood up to yell at her. “Yeah, so you only looked twice at me when you thought I had money, that it?”
Her mouth fell open. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t be after my money, you cunt. Half the blokes ’round here see a girl with a job and expect to mooch off her. I thought maybe you wouldn’t be like that.”
“Well, I’m not. I’ve got my own money.”
She laughed and shook her head. “Nah, you take Carter’s money. That’s entirely different. Anyway, best of luck. I’ll keep my eye open for the ‘Have You Seen Dace’ posters to start going up.”
She turned away and stalked off before he could reply. He hoped to hell she wasn’t right. He needed to get in the car and up to Carter’s place right away. Come clean and figure out a way to make it right. He wouldn’t say the bit about stopping for a joint and getting snuck up on. Those arseholes had said they intended to run him down. And they had a shotgun. That’s the story he’d tell Carter.
Once he was sure the boat was secure, he walked across the small car park to his battered old Mitsubishi and climbed in. It started first time, something it never usually did. Dace decided to look on that as a good omen.
He drove south out of town, up the hill where the houses got a little bigger and spaced further apart. He passed the industrial area where big aluminium sheds housed mechanics, a metal machine shop, half a dozen other blue-collar industries, then he turned onto a narrow road with a No Through Road sign at the start. A couple of larger properties had their drives left and right, then the road climbed even steeper, switching back on itself, and became a dirt track. Carter’s battered post box stood on a weathered wooden post beside a cattle grid, his name stencilled on the side. Dace’s hands shook as he gripped the wheel and pointed the car up the track. It doubled back on itself a couple times as it rose through thin bush, The Gulp falling away behind. Then it levelled off onto a natural geological shelf that housed the Carter property. Some two hundred acres, if he recalled correctly, cleared and farmed right when The Gulp was first settled, before it even had its name. Ostensibly a cattle farm, Carter kept cows and horses, but made his money in variety of other ways.