WALKABOUT 2 - The Back of Beyond (Part 18)

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After a few minutes, the shooting became sporadic. Eventually, it stopped altogether. It was over, and I had no idea who prevailed. Not that it mattered to me. After a while, I stopped to rest, atop a pile of rocks that had been excavated from a mine located a quarter mile from the hangar. From my vantage point, lying so as to peer over the top without creating a silhouette on the skyline, I could see people milling about, tending to the wounded, throwing dead bodies onto a trailer hitched to a four-wheel ATV and hauling them away.

Others went about the task of hauling out bags from the overturned truck. What had Simone said? Something about a shipment, and Flynn’s rival going to hijack it.

An hour later, they were gone. Curiosity got the better of me, and against my better judgment, I returned. Approaching the overturned truck, I was surprised to see there was no padlock on the latch. Curious, I rotated the latch counter-clockwise and opened the rear door to take a peek. Caskets, a dozen or so of them, had dislodged from the racks mounted to the wall of the truck bed, and were now scattered about in disarray, lids open. I pulled myself up into the bed of the truck, and opened one of the caskets. There was some white powder on the floor, inside the coffins. Apparently some of the bags had come open. Cocaine, from the look of it This was big money. No wonder Flynn’s rival wanted to hijack it. Overhead, the Cessna Caravan was climbing into the clouds. I wondered if there was enough to make it worth my time to scoop it up and sell it, raise some funds to live on, then asked myself, ‘Have I sunk that low?’ I was about to go when I noticed a small decal on the base rail at the foot end of the casket nearest me, which read:

Winters Casket Company, LLC

Page, Indiana, USA

And at that moment, some things began to make sense to me.

95

Two days later

After watching Dexter Flynn crash his airplane, I walked about a mile in the darkness, and stumbled upon some abandoned motorcycles, and now I was sitting in a bar in Alice Springs, trying to sort things out. Earlier in the day, I went to the public library and rented time on one of their computers. I accessed the email account I had established some time back for my Jared Mulligan identity.

There was an email from Sheriff Bridges

“Call me. Asap” was all it said, along with his number.

An hour later, I located a place in the central business district where I could purchase a cell phone and international calling. I punched in the number. Bridges picked up on the third ring.

“Sheriff Bridges.”

“It’s me, Ty Hamilton.”

“I spoke with April. I know your relationship with Shelby. I have some bad news for you, Mr. Hamilton.”

The formality caught me off guard. This man had tried to kill me. I fought for my life, and drove a shovel into his throat. I assumed that is why is voice was raspy now. And now, he was acting as if none of it ever happened.

He told me how he had been too late to save Shelby. How they had harvested her organs, one by one, selling them on the black market. “A hell of a way to die,” he said, matter-of-factly. I supposed that came with a career in law enforcement, but the girl was his niece. I would have expected a little more emotion.

“How is April? How’s she holding up?” I asked.

“I haven’t told her,” Sheriff Bridges said. “There are . . . complications.”

I could only guess these complications involved his covering his own ass.

“I’m coming back,” I said.

“Not a good idea.”

“I’m not asking your permission, Bridges. I’m telling you, I am coming back. People are going to pay for what they’ve done. If you get in my way, I will destroy you.”

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 I suppose it’s best, the killer and the client never meeting. When you see on the TV news and documentaries where clients are busted, it’s always when the client, say a disgruntled wife, meets with an undercover cop in a parking lot or a motel to arrange to have her husband killed, something like that. It makes sense a real professional would have a better way of doing business. So, I wondered, how did it all work? Did Mulligan have a middleman? Someone who dealt with the clients and sent him the particulars? If so, who would that be? Are there murder-for-hire brokers scattered around the world?

Answers, if they were to be found anywhere, probably would have to be traced through financial records. Follow the money. Where did the deposits to Mulligan’s accounts come from? Who was at the other end? Did I even want to know? Not really.

Australia is an intriguing country. I would have loved to spend time exploring it, under other, more ordinary circumstances. I was out of money, and out of options, save one. I still had the revolver, and one bullet. I’d already gotten rid of Flynn, the son of a bitch.