Death is Forever

Prologue
    Western Australia
1989
    Abe Windsor better be dead or I’ll bloody well kill him myself.
    Jason Street’s thought was both promise and prayer. He’d had plenty of time for both in the ten hours since the call had come in from his spy at Crazy Abe’s station in Western Australia. Street had spent every minute of the time since then trying to get to the desolate station and the Sleeping Dog Mines. Four hours on a chartered flight from Perth followed by endless black hours behind the wheel of the battered Toyota Land Cruiser, pushing the vehicle at reckless speeds over dirt tracks, racing toward one of the most isolated areas on the continent.
    It wasn’t the brutal drive that fed Street’s fury. It was the fear that more than a decade of his patience and cunning had gone up the spout, wiped out by a savage old man’s insanity.
    Above the land the Southern Cross faded from the sky, slowly overwhelmed by the yellow violence of the rising sun. The daybreak temperature along the southeastern edge of the Kimberley Plateau was 87 degrees Fahrenheit. As the sun rose, so did the temperature. The brutal torrent of light revealed clumps of grasslike spinifex and stunted gum trees, red dust and occasional outcroppings of stone. And over all was the sun, always the sun, the only true inhabitant of Western Australia.
    Stones ricocheted like pistol shots off the undercarriage of the straining vehicle. Lurching, skidding, bucking, the Toyota fought its way over a road that existed more in the driver’s mind than on the dry surface of the land itself.
    Street had no doubt of his course. He’d spent ten years going to and from Crazy Abe’s station, trying to tease and wheedle and cozen the old man’s secret out of him. After all those years Street was certain of only one thing—if Crazy Abe’s secret was still within the reach of pain, Street would have it before the Southern Cross rose above Australia again.
    In an explosion of dust, the Toyota shot over the top of a low rise. Ahead lay Abe’s meager station. The old man’s possessions were spread out like wreckage across several acres of flat, barren land. There was a ramshackle tin-roof house, a few sun-scoured outbuildings, tractors consumed by rust and misuse, broken mining equipment, discarded four-wheel-drive trucks, and the remains of a World War II RAAF Dakota that had crashed within sight of the station a few months before V-J Day.
    Suddenly a glistening, noisy, and very modern helicopter leaped into the sky just beyond the house’s tin roof. Street stood on the brakes, bringing the Toyota to a shuddering stop. When the helicopter banked and passed overhead with its red belly beacon flashing, he searched for identifying marks. He expected to see the shield of the Western Australia State Police, the insignia of the Australian Defense Forces, or even the logo of the Flying Doctor Service.
    The sleek sides of the helicopter were blank, anony mous as an egg. The owners were no more interested in advertising their presence at Abe Windsor’s station than was Street himself.
    Furious and fearful at the same time, he slammed his fist against the steering wheel. Then he rammed the Toyota into gear and drove headlong down the hill. As the vehicle skidded to a stop in the loose red earth near Abe’s shack, he rolled out and dropped to the dirt, a cocked semiautomatic pistol in his hand. Moving with the precision of a commando, he slid from the cover of the vehicle to the shelter of a rusty stamp mill and from there to the protection of a corner of the house.
    He risked a quick glimpse through a dirty window. A single paraffin lamp guttered in the big room of the station house. A barefoot corpse lay beneath a tattered piece of canvas on the long table in the center of the room. The only thing moving was the outback’s customary plague of flies.
    Cursing through clenched jaws, Street discarded caution and used his heavy boot like a battering ram. The upper hinge of the door popped out of the casement, the latch broke, and the door swung open drunkenly.
    The smell of old death rolled out into the sultry yard.
    Street looked at the room over the barrel of his pistol.
    Nothing looked back.
    Gagging at the smell, he walked to the table and flipped up one corner of the tarp, setting off a cloud of flies. Judging by the condition of the corpse, Abe Windsor had been dead for some time. Even allowing for the heat and humidity of the October buildup toward the