Chapter 52 (Filler 4/4): Debt Repaid
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As they waited at a set of traffic lights, Leslie noticed the people in the cars alongside them were staring. At first it unnerved him because there was a dead man sitting in the car, but then he realised they were only admiring the shiny new Rolls Royce and were probably wondering who the rich people were inside. This is the style, Leslie thought, winking at a young girl sitting in the front seat of a battered old car propped alongside; she giggled and said something to her pimply-faced boyfriend, who scowled back jealously at Leslie. Rossiter was still propped up next to him staring straight ahead, looking calm and relaxed. A few tiny bubbles had formed around one corner of his mouth, and even though he was completely motionless his face still had plenty of colour in it. At one stage, Leslie thought he saw him blink.

"Hey Seraph," he called out, a little apprehensively as they pulled away from the lights. "Is he dead or what?"

Seraph laughed quietly to himself. "Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

Seraph smiled back at him in the rear-vision mirror. "I'm sure."

They continued cruising at a nice leisurely pace, almost as if they were going for a pleasant Sunday afternoon drive in the country. Rossiter was still gently rocking from side to side, but as they pulled up at another set of lights his neck gave a twitch. In the reflection of the passing cars, Leslie thought he saw Rossiter blink again.

"Hey Seraph," he called out. "I don't think he's dead, y'know."

 "Don't worry, he's dead."

"Yeah, I dunno," said Leslie, still staring at the motionless Rossiter. "I don't like the way he keeps lookin' at me. I reckon we ought to have a meetin' about this."

Seraph let out an exasperated sigh, and as soon as the lights turned green he switched on his blinkers and pulled over on the side of an empty road. He turned off the motor and left the parking lights on. He swivelled around in his seat and faced Rossiter. "Are you dead?" he asked. Rossiter just sat motionless, staring straight ahead.

"I doubt if he's gonna tell you whether he's dead or not," said Leslie. "Not even Houdini could tell you that. I just don't reckon he is meself. That's all. Look at the colour in his face. He don't look dead to me."

"Hmm..." Seraph murmured, curling his hair with a finger. Then, he reached down to his sock and pulled out a small switchblade knife. As he brought it up, he thumbed a catch on the side, and a glistening silver blade about ten centimetres in length shot straight out of the handle. He reached over to the backseat and rested the point of the blade over Rossiter's chest, just where his heart was. Without saying so much as a word, he plunged the blade up to the hilt in Rossiter's heart. Leslie expected a great torrent of blood to start bubbling out, but not a drop came through. Rossiter just sat still, staring vacantly into space. The bubbles on the side of his mouth started to solidify and turned into a trickle of saliva that glistened as it ran down his chin, but there was hardly a sign of life.

"There," said Seraph, pulling out the knife and showing Leslie the dark red, almost black blood still clinging to the blade. Seraph then wiped the blood off on Rossiter's coat, reset the blade, and put the knife back in his sock.

"Well I'll be fucked," said Leslie. "He's dead alright. What did you to him in the first place?"

"One minute," Seraph said. "I want to check something first."

He reached over and removed Rossiter's glasses and wore them for himself. A tug at Rossiter's grey hair proved it to be a very expensive, well fitting wig. Seraph took the wig from him and set it loosely on his own head. He then undid the buttons on Rossiter's coat to reveal a gun in a shoulder holster tucked neatly under his left arm, and pinned with four large safety pins to the inside of his coat were four hand grenades.

Leslie let out a long, low whistle. "Have a go at that," he said.

"Yeah," Seraph said, carefully unpinning one of the grenades. He adjusted the glasses on his face and studied the grenade in his hand. "M203 fragmentation grenades? Where'd he get these?"

"Jesus. Imagine what would have happened of he dropped one of them in the club tonight."

"We wouldn't be worrying about it if he did." 

Seraph unclipped the rest of the grenades, placed them gently on the floor and covered them with a large beach towel that he had on the front seat.

"Will they be alright there?" Leslie asked, a little nervously.

"As long as you don't pull the pins out."

"Not much chance of that."

Seraph removed Rossiter's gun which turned out to be a Walther PPK.32 automatic. Seraph chuckled as he looked at the shiny, blue-black pistol for a moment before placing it back in his coat. "He must have been watching the old James Bond movie marathon last night on TV. Like a drink, Mister Bond?" Seraph said, slapping Rossiter lightly on the jaw. "Vodka martini? Twist of lemon, shaken not stirred?" Rossiter just sat staring obliquely into eternity. The only movement was his jaw, which began to drop slightly. Seraph slipped his hand into Rossiter's inside coat pocket and came out with a fat wallet. He enthusiastically opened the wallet and counted the money quickly. "Two grand!" he counted. "Here. Have half."

"Grouse," replied Leslie, slipping the wad of notes into his back pocket.

Seraph shoved the empty wallet back into Rossiter's pocket. "Okay... Just shove him down on the floor and sit in the front," he ordered. "I mean... I-If you want..."

Leslie pushed Rossiter's body, which had started to stiffen a little, onto the floor. Then he walked around the car and sat in the passenger seat. As soon as he closed the door, Seraph started the motor and the big Rolls cruised off majestically towards the airport.

"Well kid," said Leslie. "I've got to give it to you. That was pretty neat whatever you did to him in the club. You gonna tell me what it was?"

"Oh! Right... I used this." Seraph reached down between the two front seats and showed Leslie the circle of wood with the sharpened screw sticking through it, wrapped in a handkerchief. Leslie went to take a hold of it. "Careful," Seraph warned. "Hold it by the wooden bit. You'll die if you touch the pointy bit."

Leslie held the little object delicately between his index finger and thumb, examined it carefully and then handed it back to Seraph who flicked the handkerchief back over it and put it back between the seats.

"What is it anyway?" Leslie asked.

"A mini punji stick."

"A what?"

"A mini punji stick; it's like a punji stick, but mini."

"That doesn't help."

"It's a punji stick, Leslie! In the Vietnam war, the Viet Cong used to dig these little holes in the bush and they'd put sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom which they'd smear with human shit then cover the holes over. A soldier would come walking along, step into one of the holes and he'd get a stake through the foot. The shit makes your foot blow up like a balloon, and if the CASEVAC unit doesn't get you, you can lose your foot. Sometimes your leg."

"Sounds lovely."

"Yeah. So, there's this plant called the 'viper's heart' that grow everywhere on the edges of ponds, and its root contains the deadliest poison on earth. It causes instant paralysis. I just crushed up the root, smeared it on the punji stick and stabbed him. The trick is to get them in the spinal cord. It stops them dead, but you can generally walk them a few metres and put them down somewhere. They just sit there, nice and quiet and dead."

Leslie looked at Seraph for a moment, with the lights from the dashboard reflecting on his disfigured face. He couldn't help but shudder slightly at the matter-of-fact manner in which this child discussed one of his sinister killing methods.

"But how did you know for sure it was Rossiter?" Leslie asked. "I thought I saw you say something to him when you stepped up behind him."

"Oh, uh..." Seraph mumbled. "Well, when I saw him coming up the stairs, I thought he was in good shape for an old man."

"Yeah. I thought that myself," Leslie said.

"Yeah... I saw the dip in his shoulder when I saw him walk towards Mister Perry, so I walked up behind him and wished him and his brother a happy birthday. He gave himself away then, so I killed him."

Leslie shook his head slowly. "Well fuck me dead."

Seraph looked at Leslie in the corner of his eye, confused. "...No."

By now, they had just driven past the airport and were heading towards a nearby bay. It was nearing ten past one, and there weren't many cars on the road as Seraph slowed down the car and looked in the rear-vision mirror. "Please don't let there be any cops," he prayed as he spun the big car up over the median strip and did an illegal U-turn to bring them over on the side of the freeway facing back to the city. He cruised along a few hundred meters, driving slowly and looking out Leslie's window. "Here," he said. He pulled the car up off the road and switched off the motor.

Leslie put his head up against the window and peered out into the darkness. All he could see was brush and other scrub growing up against a corroded, cyclone-wire fence that ran off in the shadows on either side of the car. Just in front of his face the brush cleared away to reveal a gate with a chain and padlock holding it.

"You see that gate there?" Seraph asked, pointing out the car window. "I'm going to go open it. You get Rossiter out and drag him over. Let's go."

Pulling a small key out of his pocket, Seraph got out of the car and lamely trotted over to the gate. By the time he got the lock open, Leslie had Rossiter out of the Rolls. After a quick check for passing cars, Leslie took the corpse firmly by the collar and dragged him across to where Seraph was waiting with the gate open. He whipped the body straight through as Seraph closed the gate and draped the chain loosely around the bolt. Seraph took a grip on Rossiter's collar alongside Leslie, reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a torch, which he switched on. Dragging Rossiter toes-up, Seraph led them up along a narrow, sandy trail which led off into the bush.

After about a few hundred meters of half stumbling, half jogging in the darkness lit faintly by the bouncing beam of Seraph's torch, the bush started to clear. About the same distance in front of them, Leslie could make out a group of construction workers pouring concrete underneath a bank of arc lights. Their voices and the sounds of cement mixers and other heavy machinery were quite audible in the still of the night. They proceeded about another fifty meters and Seraph called a halt. Leslie let go of Rossiter and got down on his haunches, noticing they'd stopped up against one of  six wooden piers, formed up with scaffolding, ready for pouring. They were a little wider than a phone booth and a couple of metres higher, but went down another eight metres into the sand. They were to be part of a row of concrete piers supporting a new airstrip running out over the bay.

Seraph stood Rossiter up against the scaffolding, keeping it between them and the workers. Rossiter's body had stiffened a little more by now, and in the moonlight his face had turned a ghostly, chalky white. Seraph scrambled up the metal pipes of the scaffold a few metres as silent as a spectre, reached down and took Rossiter by the collar. 

"Mister Leslie, can you pass him up?" Seraph whispered. Leslie stood back up, took a firm grip of Rossiter's ankles and lifted him up to shoulder height. He then switched his grip to beneath Rossiter's feet, got his chest under him and heaved him straight up. Seraph tilted Rossiter's head back over the side of the empty scaffolding and gravity did the rest. Vince Rossiter's body tumbled down the shaft to land with a dull, almost inaudible splash in a couple of metres of muddy rainwater. Seraph jumped down and they both ran back to hide in the darkness of the bush. "Just wait here a minute," Seraph said, sitting in the shadow of a tree.

They crouched in the shadows, silently wiping sands and picking twigs from their clothes. Before long a huge, rumbling cement truck, its load spinning slowly round on the back, started backing up to the pier containing Rossiter's body. When it got close enough, the foreman blew his whistle. The truck stopped and two men came around and unshackled a short metal chute from the back of the truck, which they swung over the empty shaft. A third man wet the chute with a hose, then at the signal of one of the other men, the foreman blew his whistle again. The truck driver waved his arm out the window and hit the tilt button. fifty tonnes of wet cement splattered down on top of Vince Rossiter, entombing him there forever. After witnessing the completion of their job, Seraph picked up the trail with his torch, and the two of them headed back for the car.


"I'm gonna call Mister Perry," Seraph mentioned, picking up the radiotelephone from between the two front seats of the Rolls.

"Yeah righto," replied Leslie gruffly, his door still open. "I'll get some of this bloody sand out of my shoes. You'd think I just come through the Simpson fuckin' Desert."

While Leslie removed his shoes and socks, Seraph hit the buttons and got through to the Prince Club. "Hello? Mister George? It's Seraph. Can I speak to Mister Perry right now?"

"Hold on a sec mate. I'll get him," replied George. In a few moments, Perry was on the phone.

"Hello Seraph. How did it go? Everything sweet?" Perry's voice was quiet, but it was obvious he was in a state of great excitement.

"Yes sir," replied Seraph.

"By Jesus, that was smooth work son," Perry chuckled into the phone. "So listen. There's a briefcase in the boot with twenty-five grand in it. Give that to Les. Tell him he has the rest of the night off. You can consider your father's debt to me paid. Actually, get down here and I'll give you fifty grand as a thank you."

Seraph was left dumbfounded. He couldn't believe it. "A-Are you sure?"

Perry burst out laughing. "Am I sure? Seraph, you're not gonna believe this. You know Jilly Mantella who runs Voguish Feel?"

"No."

"Well, her and one of her best girls walked in here just after you left with two Arab oil sheiks. Prince Waddi someone or other and his cousin. They haven't been here an hour and they've already dropped half a million!"

"Seriously?"

"Oh mate, you've got no idea. And they're laughing they're silly bloody heads off. I'll end up takin these two glorified bowser boys for a million before the night's out." Perry burst out laughing again. "It's the Rossiter twins' birthday I get all the presents. Happy birthday to you - happy birthday to you. Oh, listen, I've got to go. I've got to keep at these two camel drivers while they're on the boil. And besides, I don’t know what you did to that bloody bastard, but I don’t want to risk you doing that to me. Say hello to Les for me. I'll pay you when you bring the car round."

"Right..."

"Goodbye, Seraph. Thanks for everything mate. Go do something with your life."

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