Safe House

Chapter 5

5

Mitchell Simms and Trevor Lowe slept soundly in the small accommodation unit they shared, behind the Ti Tree Roadhouse. A window-mounted air conditioner rattled softly, labouring against the still, humid air.

Simms and Lowe were both veteran Federal police officers with combined service of just over forty years. Assigned to a four-man security team tasked with the job of protecting one of their own, neither man stirred when the entrance door opened, squeaking quietly on hinges in need of lubrication. Both men died where they slept.

Lowe, the junior of the two, was a new appointee to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, having been appointed to the Task Force investigating international d**g syndicates just a month previously.

Lowe was the first to die. A silenced, .45 calibre, soft-nose slug crashed into his head as he lay snoring softly. Just a second later, Mitchell Simms was also shot in the head at close range.

Rodolfo Herrera stood between the two single beds and took a moment to study his handiwork. Satisfied, he stepped back to the door. Impeding his exit, Ignacio Vargas stood in the doorway, smiling widely, craning his head to look around Herrera at the two dead cops. In his hand, he held a large, serrated-edge knife, his personal weapon of choice.

“No,” Herrera said. “There ees no time. We must go. Andale—hurry!”

The lecherous smile on Vargas’s face disappeared. “No time? What ees this ‘no time?’ I do not need a long time.”

“There ees no time,” Herrera repeated. “We go, now.” He stepped close to Vargas, forcing him to step backwards, out of the doorway.

“I need only a few minutes,” Vargas insisted.

“They are already dead. You cannot make them more dead.” Herrera pulled the door closed and stepped around Vargas.

“You wait. I will be very fast.”

“I do not wait for you. Eef you want to stay, you can stay. I go now.” Herrera moved to their vehicle.

“Eef you leave, I have no vehicle,” Vargas complained.

Herrera paused, glanced at his watch, and looked back at Vargas. “Five minutes only. Then I leave. Eef you are not finished, I leave without you.”

The smile returned to Vargas’s face. “I will be very fast.” He opened the door, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind him.

“Pinche joto—fuckin’ faggot,” Herrera muttered as he climbed into the driver’s side of the rental vehicle.

Pete Tomkins had never seriously thought about dying, despite the risks associated with his job. Oh, he knew he would die one day. But he was only thirty-three years old; the day when he did start thinking about dying would be several decades away, hopefully.

Pete had never experienced the effect of a blow torch applied to his testicles either. Had he, he was confident this is what it would feel like. It seemed such an odd, obscure, incongruent thing to think about at this point, so seemingly out of context with what was actually happening; the mind is a complicated and mysterious organ.

Initially, there was no pain, just a sudden, powerful jolt in his groin. Powerful enough to knock his feet from under him and send him sprawling backwards to the hard, dry ground. The pain followed a few moments later. It radiated up through his groin into his belly and chest, and simultaneously down through his thighs to his legs and all the way down to his feet.

It was a paralyzing pain, so bad he couldn’t seem to take a big enough breath to produce even a half-decent scream. He lay on his back in the dirt, hyperventilating with rapid, shallow gasps, his mouth opening and closing like a fish stranded on dry land. He tried to move his legs. Nothing happened. He tried to move his arms. Nothing happened. Now, Pete was thinking about dying. He closed his eyes, opened them, and tried to move his head, relieved to learn he could at least do that. He looked across at his partner.

Craig Dermott, Pete’s Federal Police partner, also lay on his back, just a few metres from him, his arms flung straight out from his sides like a crucifix. Half his face was missing. Where his face used to be just a few seconds ago, was now a mushy mess of blood, mangled flesh, and bone. A pink, jellylike substance oozed from the ugly, gaping hole in his head and pooled in the dirt beneath him.

It should be white, Pete thought, between breaths growing rapidly shallower. That’s his brain flowing out of his head, why is it pink? It should be white…or grey…not pink…brains aren’t pink.

Finally, from a place somewhere deep within him, a place he did not instantly recognise, a pitiful, elongated moan, punctuated by his staccato breathing, escaped his lips and drifted away in the serene silence which was so much an intrinsic part of the surrounding countryside. A solitary tear trickled from his eye and plopped silently into the deep, fine, powder-like dust inches from his face.

In the final seconds remaining of his life, Pete thought of his family, his wife, his son, and his daughter. He was going to see them in a couple of days, when the shift-change crew arrived. He tried to turn his head away from the macabre sight of his partner. Now, his head would not move. He could no longer open and close his eyes; they remained fixed and staring at his dead partner. A darkness, quickly descending into complete blackness, closed around him, and Pete Tomkins died.