Death is Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

over the east coast. He could be talking about a strike near a billabong.”
    “Explain.”
    “A billabong is a deep river pool that becomes a waterhole in the dry season when the shallow parts of the river dry up,” Street said mechanically.
    “Go on.”
    Street’s hand tightened on the telephone. Of all van Luik’s quirks, the one of making someone repeat the same information over and over again was the most irritating. It was also the most effective in preventing lies, a fact Street understood and had put to use for himself with his own subordinates.
    “Abe could have made a strike near a billabong, except that there aren’t any waterholes on his mineral leases or on his station that are big enough to be called a billabong,” Street said in a monotone. “The only reliable year-round water is the well at his station house.”
    Van Luik made a curt sound that could have meant anything. Street knew it was a signal to keep talking.
    “That leaves the bloody ‘dead sea’s bones,’” Street continued tonelessly. “Since we don’t have a billabong for the swans to swim in, it’s no shocker that we don’t have any waterholes sitting on top of a marine fossil bed to point the way to the mine.”
    “Go on.”
    Street smiled thinly. He suspected that van Luik found sex distasteful. Abe hadn’t. The only time he wasn’t stuck in a woman was when he drank too much beer and brewer’s wilt took him down.
    “So Abe tells us to find the mine if we dare to go ‘Where men are Percys and Lady Janes are stone,’” Street said, drawing it out. “Aussies call their cock their Percy. Guess what a Lady Jane is?”
    Van Luik grunted. He didn’t have to guess. He’d heard it all before, many times.
    “So Abe is telling us to go where men have a cock and women have a stone pussy,” Street said succinctly. “Welcome to the outback. That narrows the mine’s location down to a few thousand square miles of uninhabited country.”
    When van Luik would have spoken, Street talked right over him.
    “In the next verse, an ‘amber river’ must be beer, right?” Street said. “You drink enough of it and you’ll ‘piss a yellow sea.’ Then there’s—”
    “Go to the next verse,” van Luik interrupted.
    “Right. ‘Crawl into my bed and onto my Percy,/Bridget and Ingrid, Diana and Mercy,/Kewpie and Daisy and Kelly,/Rooting and hooting about love./Mistresses of lies,/Damn their hot cries.’” Street took a breath and continued sarcastically, “We’ve already decoded Percy, which leaves us with the other names. They aren’t cities, towns, settlements, crossroads, tracks, paths, stations, or any other bloody thing but Aussie slang for pussy.”
    Van Luik made a sound of disgust.
    “Rooting is screwing,” Street continued relentlessly. “Now maybe the old bastard saw mining as a sexual experience or maybe he didn’t. Either way, that verse has sweet fuck-all to tell us about where he found his bloody diamonds.”
    “Go to the ninth verse,” van Luik said.
    “You go to it. I’ve had enough.”
    “Begin with the fourth line.”
    Street gripped the phone so hard his hand ached, while he reminded himself that now was not the time to lose his temper. Even though it hadn’t been his fault, the secret to the Sleeping Dog Mines had slipped through his fingers. If going over “Chunder” one more time was the only punishment he got, he’d be lucky.
    “‘Stone womb giving me hope,/Secrets blacker than death/And truth it’s death to speak.’” Street waited, but van Luik said nothing. “‘Stone womb’ is a mine, right? Didn’t we decide that—oh, six, seven years ago, when he changed ‘woman’ to ‘womb’?”
    Van Luik ignored the sarcasm. “Yes. Go on.”
    “Wombs, women, and mines are dark places, and telling where his mine was would have been the death of Crazy Abe, and he bloody well knew it.”
    “‘But I will speak to you,/Listen to me, child of rue.’”
    Street said nothing, too surprised