Abdul pointed towards the lights. ‘You’re going to take a walk and find someone with a car and ropes to pull us out of this.’ His Australian accent had a slightly foreign tinge.
Ali’s lips formed themselves into a sulky pout. ‘You want me to go there alone? We should stick together, brother!’ He spoke with a full-blown Australian accent, evidence of the more tender age he’d been when their family arrived in Australia from the Middle East, but the words were delivered in rapid-fire Mediterranean bursts.
Abdul flashed him an angry look. ‘My foot’s too sore to walk that far and you’re the dickhead who drove us into this, so you can get us out of it!’
That morning Abdul had stepped out of his tent in bare feet onto an innocuous-looking carpet of ground cover with small, waxy light green leaves. Then he took another step and let loose a yelp of pain. Hopping on one foot, he looked down and saw what he’d trodden on – a pea-sized burr with long, woody spikes radiating out of it. One of the spikes had pierced two centimetres into the ball of his foot. He’d pulled out the Devil’s Thorn (so-called because some people say the spikes look like Satan’s horns) and limped back into the tent to get his shoes – plus the first aid kit.
An hour later, the ute had pulled out of the clearing where they’d spent the night, leaving their campsite littered with empty plastic water bottles, beer stubbies, food cans and other rubbish. Abdul was behind the wheel. He’d been doing all the driving on their outback trip, but as now as he pressed down on the accelerator, there was a jolt of pain in the ball of his injured right foot. He braked the car and turned to Ali. ‘You’ll have to drive. But don’t do anything stupid.’
Cautioning his brother not to do anything stupid was generally a futile exercise. Abdul was aged 35 and Ali was 29, the baby of the family, a position he’d consolidated throughout his life by acting childishly and recklessly – especially when he was at the controls of a car.
But for most of the day, everything went well. They’d crossed a vast plain, the landscape so flat that it wasn’t really flat because you could see the curve of the earth. Ali had kept to a sedate speed on a ‘road’ which consisted of two ribbons of rust-red dirt. Then, in the late afternoon, an emu had run out in front of them. The giant, grey-feathered bird paused in the centre of the track, looking at the approaching car with bulging orange eyes. Then it hurtled into the scrub, putting on an impressive turn of speed, its long neck tilted forward like a jockey atop a horse. Ali steered the car off the track in close pursuit. The ute’s engine roared as he gunned the accelerator, trying to ram the car into the giant bird. Abdul saw disaster looming. ‘Slow down!’ he screamed.
Ali had eased his foot off the pedal slightly, abandoning the idea of slamming the car into the emu, but keeping up the chase. The emu suddenly changed direction, heading to the left towards a hollow of bare dirt. Ali followed – and the ute came to a halt, its wheels churning uselessly in loose sand. And then Ali made it worse by putting his foot down too hard on the accelerator and digging them ever-deeper into the morass. Meanwhile, the emu had disappeared into the scrub.
They’d tried hoisting the car with a high-lift jack but the hollow was filled with light, almost dust-like particles of red dirt. The base of the jack kept sinking deeper as they tried to raise one of the wheels high enough to place some sticks beneath it.
So now they needed to be dragged out by another vehicle. There was no mobile phone reception but the lights in the near-distance would hopefully yield a rescuer. ‘A four wheel drive with good tyres should do the job,’ Abdul told his brother. ‘A tractor would be even better. Tell them they’ll get $100 for pulling us out.’
But Ali was not relishing the prospect of a nocturnal walk through this wild country. ‘I might get attacked by some animal,’ he protested.
Abdul said, ‘There are no man-eating animals in Australia, unless you count dingoes but they usually just go for babies.’
‘I could get bitten by a snake!’
‘Snakes don’t come out at night,’ said Abdul, who had no idea whether this was the case or not, nor whether dingoes only ate infants.
Abdul had considered the idea of camping at the spot overnight. But in the east, dark clouds loomed. Lightning flickered every now and then. They needed to get the hell out of here and make a beeline for the Stuart Highway. The whole area could be flooded by morning.
But Ali did not seem to share Abdul’s sense of urgency. Abdul watched him opening the passenger door of the ute and sitting down. The interior light came on and Abdul’s crow-black eyebrows creased into a frown as he saw his brother opening the glove box.
Ali got out a small zip-lock bag and delved into it with a plastic spoon fashioned from the end of a 7-Eleven Slurpee straw. Then he carefully removed a few flakes of crystal methamphetamine and placed them on the lid of a square metal tin which held the marijuana he smoked when he came down off the ice. He crushed the crystals into a white powder with the end of a plastic cigarette lighter. Then he scooped up the ice with the spoon and transferred it to a glass meth pipe, tapping the drug into a blackened round bowl. He turned off the car’s interior light and sparked the lighter, the flame lighting up his face from beneath in a demonic orange glow.
Abdul limped to the back tray of the ute and got out a fold-up canvas chair. He was very different in appearance from his brother. While Ali was overweight, with long dark brown hair and an unkempt beard, Abdul was clean-shaven, bald-headed and muscular. While Ali’s arms, neck, back and one leg were a writhing mass of tattoos, with a dark blue teardrop underneath his left eye, Abdul had just a single small tattoo, a Cedar of Lebanon, on his right forearm.
He unfolded the chair and set it down in a patch of bare earth a few metres away from the ute, through the open window of which he could see Ali dragging deeply at the meth pipe. Abdul didn’t approve of his brother’s habit, but couldn’t get too self-righteous about it because the pair of them, with their older brother Mehmet, operated an enterprise which made large amounts of money from selling crystal methamphetamine, the proceeds being laundered through Mehmet’s strip club in Sydney’s notorious Kings Cross.
Both Abdul and Ali played pivotal roles in the family business. Abdul sourced the ice from a network of bikie gangs who manufactured the drug. He was Head of Inventory and Supply, if you like. And Ali? He had no official title either but if he had one it would be Chief Enforcer.
Although Ali was fat, he was strong. And quick with the knife. Abdul had once seen him slice open the belly of a man who’d been unable to come up with promised funds. Ali had moved so swiftly that the blade was just a silver blur. The man had looked down to see a Niagara of blood gushing onto the concrete of the McDonalds carpark where he regularly conducted business. The following week, he’d settled his debt in full. Not in person of course, because he was still in intensive care, but a relative paid the outstanding amount.
Another debtor, one who’d managed to get robbed of four ounces of ice supplied by the brothers on consignment, and who’d then insisted that the $20,000 owing should be written off, had paid with his life. On that occasion Ali’s weapon had been a Glock pistol. He hid himself in a thick patch of bushes at the front of the debtor’s house and lay in wait.
Through his screen of foliage Ali saw a black Maserati pulling up. The engine gave a final howl and the night fell quiet. He saw the faint shapes of a man and woman getting out and heard car doors slamming. Ali slipped on his black ski mask as he heard footsteps approaching.
When the couple were less than four metres away, Ali jumped up in the waist-high bushes like a jack-in-the-box and fired five bullets. The man collapsed to the ground and was DOA at St Vincent’s Hospital. Ali had also managed to fire one bullet into the man’s companion – who turned out to be the daughter of Mohammed Khaled, who’d been named in two royal commissions and countless internal NSW police reports as being the head of a crime empire which made their own family business seem like a humble cottage industry. You did not want to get the Khaleds offside, so it had been fortunate for Ali and his brothers that the girl’s wound was superficial, a hole through her shoulder muscle. It was also fortunate that the only description