Page 24 of Down the Track
‘Mate, I’m not an idiot. Yes, for his mate’s genset. They had the bayonet cap, locking pin, anti-corrosion, up to standard. We’ve got the same red ones out there in our shed.’
‘And, what, this guy—does he have a name?—asks you to drop him off then pick him up at the same spot two days later, but he’s not there. Is that the gist of it?’
‘Yep.’
‘His name’s Dave,’ said Phaedra.
‘Dave who?’
She cleared her throat. ‘Yeah, that’s where it gets a bit sticky. We don’t know. My bad. He paid cash, like I said, and I gave him a form to fill in with his deets and whatever, but he was keen to set off. Wanted to get to his mate before his pies got cold, and I didn’t take the time to check the form real close when he handed it back, and Charlie was tinkering with the R22—’
‘Hang on. So he didn’t bother filling in the form? Or he filled it out with rubbish, or what?’
TYSON: The old ‘evasionary tactics on the customer form’ trick, hey? A classic. I’ve used it myself.
Hux told his inner voice to shut up; not everything was a mystery.
‘Illegible scrawl, mostly, and a lot of the boxes left blank,’ said Phaedra. ‘It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.’
‘Until he was a no-show,’ said Charlie, ‘and I had to report his name and details to the police station.’
‘When was that?’ said Hux, trying to count backwards. He didn’t bother himself much with what day of the week it was when he was at the coast. Or ever, now he thought about it. One of the perks of not working nine to five.
‘Friday morning I took him out. Sunday morning at ten was the agreed pick-up. Same place as the drop-off. There was a cairn of rocks that made a good landmark.’
‘He wanted to go out to Corley Station?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘Where? No. He wanted to go to a turn-off off Doonoo Doonoo Road.’
It was a pity Hux hadn’t known that this morning before he flew a group out to the same general direction; he would have travelled a more southerly route to Corley Station along the roads rather than cross country, kept an eye out for signs of people.
‘You know of any mining leases out there?’ Hux asked.
Charlie shrugged. ‘It’s sheep country, mostly, but there’s some Crown Land parcels out that way. A few mining leases turn up a few opals from time to time—but they’re scratch-in-the-dirt jobs. Old bushies who’d rather live under a sheet of iron than follow rules and regulations in town. You know the type.’
‘This bloke, Dave. Did he look the type?’
‘Nope,’ said Phaedra.
‘And what was the mate like, the opal miner?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘I didn’t see him. In fact, I didn’t see the camp, not properly. Dave got me to fly along the Matilda Way—said that’s the way he usually went when he visited, so that’s the way he knew—then the turn up Doonoo Doonoo, then a narrow dirt track headed west that looked pretty grown over. Then he wanted me to land away from the camp because his mate would go apeshit if we blew dust all over his setup.’
‘So you drop him off, you come back here, and that was that until Sunday.’
‘Not quite. I dropped him off, then I did a flyover to watch where he went. It was hot as hell last Friday, like it is today, and I wanted to make sure he made it to his mate’s camp.’
Of course Charlie would have checked.
‘This’d be the caravan that turned out to be a piece of junk?’
‘I didn’t take the time to check it out better. I saw a caravan, some stuff scattered around it. Dave was nearly at it by the time I flew over and he gave me a wave, so I peeled off down to Winton to pick up some freight that had come in for the Harper property.’
Everything sounded like a regular day, other than the incomplete passenger details. Nothing Hux had heard yet explained the look on Charlie’s face, but at least he was talking.
‘Fast forward two days to Sunday,’ he prompted.
TYSON: Listen to you, getting your inner Detective Saachi on.
