Murder by Sunshine Read online

  Murder By Sunlight

  Garrett Russell

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Slither

  Double Or Nothing

  Punch Drunk

  Hit the Silk

  Of Pearls and Swine

  Dead Ringer

  Death of a Widow

  Seventh Love

  Copyright Page

  Stories of dark deeds in sunny places

  This is the first time the eight stories collected here have been published in one place, under one title and with one author. Seven of them are tales I wrote over a period of 11 years for the series of anthologies, from Murder Under the Mangoes to The Seventh Book of Sins, released by CrimeWriters Queensland.

  These were books created around the idea that place can be as important as character in crime fiction, and that often the places where the sun shines brightest are also locations of the darkest shadows.

  Queensland, the Sunshine State of Australia, provides plenty of sunny places and dark hearted villains. These stories will take you, in the company of smugglers and murderers, conmen and contract killers, from the city of Brisbane to the beaches and bush, into the air and out on the water. I hope you enjoy the trips.

  And I hope you also enjoy le voyage the one non-Queensland story takes you on. It’s to the Côte d’Azur, where the weather and what happens are both suitably on theme.

  Whatever the weather where you are reading this right now, if these stories add a dash of entertaining brightness to your day, my job will be done. Thank you for sharing your time with me and my shady characters.

  Garrett Russell

  Brisbane

  2020

  Slither

  The Shark scanned the scene of death carefully. It was more like a scene for a postcard – a stretch of beach in late afternoon sunshine, a jet ski lolling in the shore break, the sea breeze ruffling the grasses on the dunes. Nothing more. No sign of a struggle. Not even a single footprint to disturb the sand.

  ‘Rest in peace,’ thought the Shark, and the thought made him smile with satisfaction.

  After all, this was the scene of his own death.

  He ran through the plan in his mind for what must have been the thousandth time, testing and probing for any weak points, any possible holes. And for the thousandth time, he came up with the same result. Perfect.

  He imagined the headline in tomorrow’s Courier Mail. MILLIONAIRE BUSINESSMAN LOST AT SEA. Or maybe, if they were pressed for space, SHARK MISSING. His only regret was that he would not be in town to read it. By the time the paper hit the breakfast tables of all those stockbrokers and investment advisers and security commission snoops, he would be five flying hours away. And, as usual, one step ahead of them all.

  By the time they realised he was gone for good, he would be settling into the security of his new identity. By the time they discovered how much money was missing, he (and it) would be safely established beyond extradition. By the time his old business empire finally collapsed, he would be too busy building the new one to give it a second thought.

  One step ahead. The Shark marvelled at how far he’d come on that one simple ploy, how easily he’d been able to slither through a sea of gullibility to this, his moment of greatest triumph. Even his name was part of the game. He knew, early in his career and well before anyone was brave enough to say it to his face, that they called him the Shark. It was meant as an insult, but he twisted it to his advantage. Like the Rats of Tobruk revelling in the Rommel taunt, the Shark basked in the recognition of his predatory business tactics. He used the name to convince investors they were better off with him than against him, ran ads in the business pages with a sharp dorsal fin logo. And that’s when he really took off.

  He discovered he enjoyed notoriety. His name and smiling face became a fixture in the social as well as business pages, and the money rolled in faster than ever. It was very nearly his undoing.

  The Shark shuddered at the thought of how close he had come to disaster. It was his own fault, of course, for confusing profile with profit. He had been enjoying himself so much, he almost missed the warning signs. If Alice had been able to have her way, he most certainly would have. But something – instinct, he supposed – brought him back to his senses just in time.

  He was less than half a step ahead of the pack when he realised he had to get out.

  The business part, the money part, was easy, even with the securities commission plodding at his heels. The challenge was to get himself out clean and free. He’d been seduced into making himself so damned recognisable.

  The solution, when he finally came up with it, was as brilliant as anything he’d ever dazzled the stock market with.

  And it worked so well: there was no shortage of applicants to the three line classified he ran at the most desperate end of the employment columns. With minimum qualifications required and the vaguest promise of wealth and adventure, he had plenty of men to choose from. It took only seven interviews to hit on his target – same age, similar height, close enough in looks, and most importantly, no living family. John Herbert Smith was the kind of no-hoper no one would miss, and he came equipped with a tax file number.

  He was also gullible. Much easier to impress than the average investor. He bought the story of a top secret mission without once asking why a nonentity such as himself was being interviewed by the CEO. Or even why the interview was conducted in a car park and not an office full of nosy secretaries. He willingly traded his tax papers, driver’s licence, bank account details and a signed passport application in return for a modest cash advance.

  And when his physical presence was no longer necessary, he disappeared with gratifying ease.

  John Smith never knew what hit him on that dark night two weeks ago. His body was now buried deep in the lonely scrub he had been inspecting with his new boss. The Shark wasn’t sure which was more bizarre – the fact that his victim died believing he was working on a hush-hush project to establish a landing zone for trade with intergalactic aliens, or the fact that soon he would be slipping past the noses of the ASC, the Queensland fraud squad and Australian Customs under an alias as fake as John Smith.

  But there was nothing at all false about the passport, licence, credit cards, wallet full of cash and economy class airline ticket that waited for him less than two kilometres away. They were locked in the glove box of the battered old four wheel drive, bought for cash by the original John Smith last month and parked near the southern tip of North Stradbroke Island by the new John Smith last week. Also locked in the vehicle was an old suitcase packed with clothes for a change of climate, and the moustache and hair colour to turn the man on the beach into the man in the ID photographs. He had discovered that, with the right tricks, a face is as simple to disguise as a balance sheet. It all comes down to where you put the lines.

  He mentally ran through the next steps of his plan as he walked away from his jet ski, trudging through ankle deep water (no footprints, he reminded himself) and heading north to the bar. There were no fishing boats out beyond the surf line at this time of day and at this stage of the tide, just as he’d planned. There would be no one to see him paddle the wave-filled gap between the islands – just as there had been no one to see him earlier in the day, when he had gone ashore over there to double check the four wheel drive and pick up the short surf board he’d left locked in it.

  He had two hours for the paddle across the passage and drive to the Dunwich barge, another two hours clear till his flight, and at least an hour and a half before anyone would even think of looking for him.

  Alice might worry at sundown. She’d definitely be on the phone by seven. He smiled as he imagined police torches probing the open spaces of his Boxst
er in the car park of the Runaway Bay Marina. It had hurt to despoil the little Porsche’s lines with a towbar for the jet ski trailer, but it was essential to his plan. Any man who would leave such a prized toy, hood down and exposed to the elements, must surely have intended to return.

  His smile broadened as he imagined Alice, wet-eyed and whimpering, giving the media performance of her life, probably on the front verandah of the house from which the receivers would certainly soon evict her. But for once her performance would be no act.

  Poor Alice. He felt almost as sorry for her as he did for the Boxster. Until the thought of all the new Alicias and Bernadettes and Carolines who’d be waiting for him and his money in his new cruising ground made him hard despite the cool chill of the sea breeze.

  Now he was knee deep in the waves surging around the sandy tip of South Stradbroke Island, with nothing between him and his new life but a short paddle in a gentle surf. He pushed the board ahead of him and plunged into the break.

  The shark scanned the scene of death carefully. He had no plan in his mind and definitely no idea of any headline in tomorrow’s Courier Mail. All he knew was the hunger in his belly and the instinct that told him the dark shape floating above would be easy to take. It was fat in the middle with four clumsy limbs which thrashed the water as slowly as a sick turtle. Which, if there was any thought at all in his mind, was the taste the shark anticipated as he flicked his tail and straightened for the attack.

  Double Or Nothing

  ‘Christ! The snake’s loose!’

  ‘What snake?’

  ‘What snake do you bloody well think? The only one we’ve got on bloody board. The western fucking taipan!’ Devlin was practically crawling up the back of the pilot’s seat in panic.

  ‘Don’t crowd me,’ the pilot shrugged the little man away from his shoulders with more force than he needed and deliberately let his movement translate to the controls. It had the desired effect. Devlin pulled back with a strangled oath as the aircraft lurched through the black night sky.

  If there was one thing Devlin was more scared of than snakes, the pilot knew, it was flying.

  Devlin sank into the seat to the pilot’s right, pulled his legs up off the cockpit floor, dragged the snub nose .38 out from his sweat-stained belt and nervously snicked it off safety.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing with that?’ The pilot glanced sharply away from his instruments at the revolver, resisting the urge to slide his own feet off the rudder bars, out of the darkness under the instrument panel and up under the relative safety of his own bum.

  ‘Soon as I see it, it’s dead,’ Devlin hissed. ‘I don’t care how much the fucking thing’s worth, it gets a bloody bullet.’

  ‘We’ll all be dead,’ the pilot’s voice grew in authority. ‘You’re more likely to hit the fuel than the snake.’

  He tapped the auxiliary tank for emphasis. It was a huge hulk of plastic strapped into the cabin just behind them. A Britten-Norman Islander usually has eight seats for passengers and two for the crew. This one had only the seats in the cockpit. The rest of its cabin, a deep dark cavern beyond the pale green light of the instruments, was crammed with the extra fuel and as many wire mesh cages as could be stacked along the floor and hard against the square sides of the fuselage.

  Inside the cages, packed with far less care than you’d expect for collectible items worth over fifty thousand a pair on the world market, was a sad assortment of reptiles and birds that would never see their native Australian bush again.

  Devlin almost shivered as he looked at the tank and reluctantly slipped the gun back into the sweaty waistband of his shorts. Even a man of his limited imagination could see the danger of firing in a confined space with so much high octane avgas.

  ‘You got any better ideas, captain?’ he snarled, leaning into the pilot’s face.

  His breath stank of rum, thick and sweet as molasses in the sticky cockpit air. It filled the pilot with craving and anger: an exquisite thirst that made his cheeks tingle and his mouth water so much he could taste the sleazy pleasure of the dark liquid that filled his mind, and a seething fury that Devlin had broken the one rule they’d ever agreed on. Devlin knew the risks of temptation better than anyone.

  But Devlin was not normally the one who rode shotgun aboard the Islander, so he wouldn’t normally have to face his own demon fears. The knowledge of this helped strengthen the pilot. Anger, he realised with a sudden insight, was an antidote to addiction. He relaxed a little.

  ‘You sure it’s gone?’ he said calmly, ignoring the sarcasm that dripped off Devlin’s last word. ‘Maybe I should go back and have a look to be certain ...’

  He snapped the buckle of his harness open and noticed with satisfaction the sudden look of horror on Devlin’s face.

  At 150 feet above the coastal forests of the gulf country, the pilot had control, not Devlin. It was the only circumstance in which either man could consider such a radical reversal of their normal relationship, and even though both knew damn well it was the last chip the pilot had left to play, Devlin couldn’t help but react to the bluff.

  ‘Stay put and do the job I fucking pay you for,’ he said, the panic creeping back in his voice. ‘The cage is wide open, for Christ’s sake!’

  The pilot felt the primitive prickle of sudden fear at the back of his neck. So, it was true. The snake would be loose, all right, all two metres of it, probing through the blackness of the cabin and looking for something - anything - to vent its terror on.

  The inland taipan is its formal name, what the academics call it when they’re not speaking Latin. To the bushies, it’s the fierce snake, and the only reason it’s not generally ranked number one in lists of Australia’s most dangerous snakes is that the few people who encounter it are those crazy enough to seek it out in the desert west of Birdsville where it lives. And if they’re stupid enough to get bitten without a supply of anti-venene handy, they always die.

  The pilot was certain taipan anti-venene of any kind was not a standard item in the Islander’s first aid kit, and equally sure that neither Devlin nor anyone else involved in his enterprise would have bothered adding it.

  His mind raced through a checklist of possibilities.

  ‘Maybe it’s not on board. The cage could have been open before we loaded it,’ he said the first one out loud, the one he knew absolutely to be impossible, only for the sake of Devlin’s nerves. Maintaining control was critical now.

  ‘Maybe,’ Devlin hadn’t thought of it himself. ‘And if you’re right I hope it bites that lazy bastard in the balls.’

  The lazy bastard was, in theory, Devlin’s business partner, the only other person in Australia who knew about their flight tonight. He’s the man who normally would have been in the copilot’s seat, keeping watch on their cargo and their hired help, doing the business on the other side of the Arafura Sea.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, but,’ Devlin had brightened at the thought. ‘If it is on the ground, I could get him to catch the bugger. We may as well make the flight with a full payload. With a bit of luck we’d only lose ...’ he glanced at his watch ‘... about half an hour.’

  ‘You’d need all your luck just to get back there,’ the pilot was alarmed at how quickly Devlin’s greed had overcome his fear. ‘A night landing’s like suicide.’

  He knew Devlin knew this. He’d told him often enough, every time he reinforced the limits beyond which he refused to take any aircraft. The one shred of self respect he knew he could never afford to lose was in his own ability in the air.

  He was - is - a damn good pilot. He’d proved it yet again about eleven minutes ago, when he opened the throttles and sent the Islander bumping heavily down the dark dirt strip. Too heavily, he knew, with its overload of fuel and fauna, but within the stretched limits of the machine and the man who coaxed it into the thin black air.

  It was a take off any pilot would call dangerous - landing lights off a moment before he eased back on the yoke and lifted the reluctant n
ose into the sudden darkness, feeling rather than seeing the treetops at the end of the strip slide under the belly with, if they were lucky, twenty feet clear. Once, on one of his early trips, he had landed on their secret little Indonesian island with gum leaves and branch tips jammed in the wheels.

  He’d had more dangerous take offs. Thirty years ago, there would have been Charlie’s machine guns in the trees. But the flights were shorter then. On Devlin’s trips, the take off was the start of an eight hour run. Even if he could find his way back to the property they ran the operation from, even if he could find the thin 1,200 foot strip of dirt in the dark sameness of the gulf country bush on a moonless night, even then the Islander would be too heavy for anything but a madman’s landing.

  ‘I’m maintaining my heading,’ he told Devlin to make sure he got the point.

  Devlin just nodded. His face shone with nervous sweat in the instrument lights, eyes dark as a rat’s, lips as thin as prison soup. He shifted stiffly in the seat. No way was this man going to last all the way across the Gulf of Carpentaria with his legs jammed up under his arse.

  ‘You’ll have to contain the snake somehow,’ the pilot broke the silence.

  ‘Catch the bloody thing?’

  ‘Not catch it, put something between it and us.’

  ‘Like a barricade behind the seats?’

  Devlin was always quick to pick up on an angle.

  ‘Hand me that fucking torch.’

  He moved off the seat as gingerly as a man stepping into a minefield. He slowly crept back into the cabin, his head jerking like a sideshow clown’s, following the beam of the torch and looking for danger in every crack as he started to slide the cages around.

  Devlin had every right to be cautious. He should have been moving into the taipan’s territory, but the pilot knew with a sudden stab of burning pain that it was too late.

  He could already feel the dull throb of the afterbite pumping up from the bare calf of his left leg. He registered surprise at how quickly the rudder bar felt leaden under his foot. But he didn’t cry out and he didn’t panic as he felt the muscular coiling under his seat.