I was trying to decide why Whitt would lie about something so strange and cruel when I spied the corner of a familiar box poking out from beneath his pillow. I stood and slapped the pillow off the bed, snatching up my packet of diclofenac.
‘What the fuck?’ I said slowly.
Whitt was standing in the doorway, watching me. ‘Wh–’
‘Don’t,’ I said, putting up a finger. ‘Don’t play dumb. You knew I’ve been looking for these. I told you to keep an eye out for them. You knew that I needed them.’
‘Harriet,’ Whitt said, ‘I did not put those there.’
I found that my fists were clenched, the box squashed, the pill packet crackling. Through the throbbing fury, the blood rushing through my head, the alert for Amy sounded again in the distance.
‘We’re going to go and look for Amy,’ I said. ‘And then we’re going to talk about you fucking off back to Perth and leaving me here to handle this myself. I don’t trust you. And if we can’t trust each other, we’re wasting our time out here.’
‘Harriet, I –’
‘Shut it.’ I pulled my hiking boots on. ‘Just shut it, Whitt. You can only make it worse.’
I glanced at the wreckage of the spider as I walked past him out of the demountable, letting my eyes flick to his for the briefest of seconds. He looked mortified. He was a great liar.
Chapter 47
OK, I REASONED. So it’s possible your partner is not only a spy for Homicide back in Sydney, but also some kind of mind game–playing weirdo.
I trudged through the desert, Whitt a few metres behind me, sweat rolling down my temples and along my jawline.
Weirdoes, I could handle. It was weirdoes who liked games of power, brutality and submission that made up most of my caseload back in the Sex Crimes department. The controlled, buttoned-up type like Whitt who liked to mess around with a woman’s confidence was admittedly in the more dangerous category. They were the husbands who put GPS sensors on the bottom of their wives’ cars. The boyfriends who turned a woman against her friends with complex secrets and lies, who cut her off from her support network. The ones who took and hid her personal items so she’d wonder if she was going crazy, so she’d be on edge, so she’d be easier to control.
They were the ones who hurt animals, to demonstrate to her what might happen if she crossed the line.
A squished spider was a very subtle message. But it meant something, or he wouldn’t have left it there for me to find.
The dry desert heat seared in my throat. I stopped and let Whitt catch up, looking at the rough map Gabe had drawn me. As we were leaving the camp, the alert for Amy was sounding. She’d not responded in the twenty minutes it had been active. I knew the message was echoing in the sound system deep underground, over handheld radios and through speakers on the ceilings in the rec room, the admin building, the chow hall. It was playing across the truck yards and throughout the sun-scorched pumping stations.
She wasn’t answering.
I swallowed hard and wiped my brow.
‘It’s pretty serious out here.’ I took off my cap and fanned my face. ‘It’s not even midday yet.’
‘Look at the heat haze.’ He squinted into the horizon. Great mirages had opened up on the desert flats, looking like wide black lakes. Sweat was running into my eyes. I crouched on my burning legs.
‘They get camels out here, you know,’ he said. ‘There is something like half a million feral camels in the Outback. The British brought them over during colonisation.’
‘I’m sure they fit right in.’ I folded the map. ‘This way. We’ve got to cut through a valley up ahead.’
A massive gorge swelled before us, sloping sides covered in crumbling yellow rock. We descended carefully, dropping down cliffs sometimes taller than ourselves.
‘Fossils!’ Whitt paused ahead of me as we hit the bottom, pointing with his water bottle. ‘There must have been a river through here at one time.’
‘Hurry up.’ I walked past. ‘This is a missing persons hunt, not National Geographic.’
Whitt’s water bottle flew out of his hand with a loud pop, smacking against the flat rock behind him.
The sound of the gunshot came second, thundering around the valley in a series of echoing claps.
We both stopped, Whitt with his hand still extended, trying to decide what had happened. More gunshots hit the dry clay around us, sending up great puffs of smoke.
‘Get down!’ Whitt dove towards the nearest rock, leaving me to scramble behind him. The shots pattered the ground at my heels, the whole valley now filled with deafening blasts overlapping, shuddering in my eardrums.
‘Jesus!’ I panted. ‘Where is he? Can you see anything?’
Whitt peered through a crack in the boulders, looking at the upper edge of the valley. There was no telling what direction the gunshots were coming from. I huddled close to the warm rock, my hands and knees aching, scraped raw as I had clambered along the ground to safety. I looked behind me and saw that all that was left of Whitt’s water bottle was a cap and a fragment of charred plastic. Big calibre weapon, with a pretty serious scope. The gunshots ended, leaving only the painful ringing of our traumatised eardrums in their wake.
We were pinned in direct sunlight.
My hands were shaking as I gripped at the rock.
Chapter 48
THE TREMBLING IN my limbs wore off after fifteen minutes, but tension remained, making my muscles ache. We were crouched behind a rock that was merely waist high, but when we tried to shift sideways to a bigger shelter the gunshots started up again, sending shards of clay flying.
‘It’s not the activists, surely,’ Whitt said.
‘Only Gabe Carter knows we’re out here,’ I said. ‘Unless someone has been watching us this whole time.’
‘Maybe the same someone who stole your pills,’ he said.
I snorted sand and dust from my nose. I wanted to snap at him, but I couldn’t fight with Whitt now, not while both our lives were on the line. If we were going to get out of this alive, it was going to have to be a team effort.
The sun crept overhead, baking my uncovered forearms and the back of my neck. We sipped from the remaining water bottle and reapplied sunscreen, but we were in direct light, and our body temperatures would send us into heat stroke if they kept rising. In twenty minutes, we were both breathing through our mouths in short inhalations, our clothes drenched with sweat.
I slid back against the rock and Whitt followed.
‘Well, this is pretty shit,’ he said suddenly. I couldn’t help but laugh. It was so out of character for him. I couldn’t stop for a minute or so. When I looked up, there was a sort of relief in his face that the strain between us had eased again, if only briefly.
‘I’m not a threat to you,’ Whitt said.
‘Whatever.’
‘No, really. My coming out here to the mine has nothing to do with you.’
‘So why lie about it?’
He wiped his face on his T-shirt, hid there for a while in the dark folds. When I’d decided no answer was coming, he lifted his head and spoke.
‘I wasn’t in Drug squad in Perth,’ he said. ‘I was in Homicide.’
I watched as he struggled, looking at his hands in his lap. ‘Couple of years ago I was on the case of a murdered kid. Seven years old. Some long-haul trucker found her body in a ditch. All the leads in the case pointed to these three brothers who had child pornography links. It was grim, the whole thing. It just ruined me for a while there. I went through two partners. No one could take it. The nightmares.’
‘I’ll bet,’ I said.
‘I had nothing on these guys. They were slippery as eels. Every time I thought I had something to pin them with, they just seemed to wriggle out of my hands. Their father was a lawyer. A very imaginative one. I chased them for a year, totally obsessed. I used to pick one and follow them around on my days off, just hoping they would lead me to something. They were all I talked about, the Cattair brothers.
A few months of that and my friends started turning away from me. I got lonely. And, you know,’ he said, smirking bitterly, ‘there’s one friend who’ll never leave you.’
‘The bottle,’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
‘What a mess.’ I found myself smiling sadly.
‘It gets messier,’ he said. ‘My whole life was collapsing. My apartment was a wreck. I wasn’t showering or eating for days at a time. It felt like my whole success or failure as a human being was tied up with these three guys. So I just . . . I went for it. I planted evidence.’
I couldn’t believe he was telling me this. I’d almost forgotten all about the valley around us, the gunman. The heat was making everything surreal. White lights flashed at the corners of my eyes and my head pounded.
‘It didn’t work, of course,’ Whitt said. ‘It was such a colossal disaster, in fact, that the Feds came in and threatened to lock me up for it. There was a giant cover-up, which is the only reason I was able to keep my job. But the Cattair brothers are well beyond our reach now. They’ll never be tried for what they did.’
He chewed his lip, searched the huge blue sky.
‘I’m very particular now,’ he said. ‘The obsession is almost reversed. If my life isn’t totally organised, totally prepared, I feel like everything is falling apart. Something as small as an unironed shirt can set me off, make me feel like I’m coming off the rails. When I planted that evidence, Blue, I let go of everything. My morals. My self. My grip on reality. What if I do something like that again? What if I do something worse?’
I understood what he was saying about having a firm grip on the steering wheel of life. I’d felt, for days, like I was losing mine. Maybe my suspicions about Whitt had been that obsession he was talking about – that desperate need to hold on tight.
‘I don’t watch the news because I don’t want to see anything about them,’ he said. ‘The Cattair brothers. They’ll kill again. I know they will. And when they do, it’ll be my fault. They’re out there in the world right now because of me.’
‘You were trying to do the right thing.’ I reached for his hand. ‘I’m a cop.’ He shifted away. ‘There are no excuses.’
Whitt was thumped forward suddenly, and I heard the telltale crack of the gun. He gasped and scrambled up into a crouch, gripping his arm. He fondled at the torn fabric. A graze.
‘He’s circled around,’ Whitt said, looking up at the valley wall. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
Chapter 49
WE MOVED, MAKING a run for a group of rocks that blocked us from where we guessed the shooter was. Only a few gunshots split the air. The rocks were bigger, and I felt instant relief as their shade fell over me. Every muscle in my legs throbbed. Whitt peered over the top and a bullet popped into the rocks behind us, spraying dust.
‘This almost feels like a game,’ I said. ‘He could easily have taken us out on that run.’
‘I’ve heard about stuff like this from a colleague who served in Afghanistan,’ Whitt panted. ‘He’d seen Black Ops snipers training in the desert using the villagers as game pieces. You wait until they wander out into the plains, then you see if you can drive them where you want them to go. He saw guys force some teenagers off a cliff, herding them with gunshots.’
‘So we won’t move,’ I said. ‘We’ll refuse to play. When it gets dark we’ll make a run for it. Unless . . .’
‘What?’
‘Unless he has night vision.’ I’d started shaking again. ‘We’ve got to get out of here, Whitt. If Gabe sends someone out to find us we’ll be leading them right into a trap.’
‘Then we’ll have to keep moving.’ He glanced up towards the valley wall. ‘We might find a tunnel or something. Those rocks over there. You ready? Let’s go.’
As brave as he sounded, Whitt hesitated for a second, rocking on his heels, before sprinting across the distance to the next pile of rocks. I ran after him, and it was only when I had cleared the shade of my hide-out that the shooting began.
I slid in the gravel as the gunshots hammered the ground before me. There was no choice but to dive into a shallow depression, flat on my face. I tucked my body up against the side of the tiny ridge. A golden scorpion, driven up through the sand by my landing, scuttled away from me, its tail curled.
Whitt was crouched behind the rocks we’d been aiming for, his eyes wild. Now that the shooter had split us up, we couldn’t collaborate. Whitt covered his face for a few seconds, thinking. The sun burned on the back of my neck, searing already scorched skin.
When I looked up, Whitt was tapping his chest and pointing down the valley, mouthing words.
I’ll draw him away.
He pointed to the lip of the valley above us, the slope leading to the sky. He pointed to his own eyes.
You run up there. Try to get a look at the shooter.
I raised my middle finger. Fuck you. I’ll draw him away. You run up the ridge.
I knew I was the better runner, and with my background in the ring, I’d be the more sure-footed of the two of us on the loose rocks. Yes, making myself the target was the more dangerous job. But I didn’t have time for any of Whitt’s outdated, chivalrous bullshit. I wanted to get out of the valley alive.
Whitt sighed. When he looked again, I smacked a fist into my palm.
I’ll hurt you.
Whitt bit his lip, weighing his options. Before I could offer more threats, he ran.
‘Arsehole,’ I snarled.
I turned and sprinted up the valley wall, my thigh muscles locking on, screaming in pain as I dashed up the rocky stairs. My feet slid in the sand but I gained height quickly, the lip of the valley within my reach.
I could hear gunshots peppering the valley below.
I grabbed the last ridge and slid onto the earth, flattening beside a group of rocks. I could see Whitt bolting along a row of rocks, shots smashing through the gaps in the boulders, sickeningly close to his head.
I searched for the ridgeline and caught a glimpse of a man’s shoulder as the shooter shifted his aim, a long arm covered in desert-camouflage fatigues. His face was hidden in the shadow of a large rock.
There was a pause, and then a single shot echoed through the valley. I heard Whitt yell and he seemed to slide, disappearing from my view.
‘Whitt!’ I screamed. The ridgeline before me exploded as the shooter sprayed bullets my way. I could only lie with my face in my hands, waiting for the noise to stop.
It did. When I looked up, the arm and the shape in the shadow were gone.
I started clambering down towards the bottom of the valley. There was no sound from where I’d last seen Whitt. No gunshots pocked the earth before me.
‘Whitt!’
I ran hard through the sand. The ground beneath me sloped down, and I skidded to a halt before a huge crack in the desert.
Whitt was dragging himself up from where he’d fallen on a narrow shelf right beside a colossal drop. Wind rushed past me from the black depths. My partner was grazed or banged up on every inch of skin I could see. Blood ran down his cheek.
‘You alright?’
Whitt examined the torn shoulder of his shirt, the missing left cuff. His grazed palms left bloody prints in the dirty fabric.
‘Ruined.’ He threw up his hands, a smile in his eyes as he looked up at me. ‘Fucking ruined.’
Chapter 50
OUR ENTRY TO the EarthSoldier camp was announced long before it occurred. A piercing whistle sounded. People were standing about in groups, watching us. In the struggle in the valley I’d twisted my ankle, and Whitt looked like he’d been in a car accident. But none of the bedraggled group came to help us.
There was silence until a tall woman with long grey braids stepped forward.
‘I’m Ocean Devine of the EarthSoldiers International Collective,’ she said. ‘We’re on Indigenous land, and we have the permission of the elders to be here.’
‘Calm down, Gandalf,’ I said. ‘We haven’t come here
to challenge you. We’re state police detectives investigating some disappearances connected to the mine.’
‘What happened to you?’ Shamma, the girl with the purple dreadlocks, piped up. A big guy wearing only tattered jeans pushed her back.
‘Someone shot at us,’ Whitt said. ‘We need your equipment to report the incident to the authorities. If you’ve got any of your people in the area, I’m going to need you to call them in. It’s not safe.’
‘And we need medical attention,’ I said. I snatched a bottle of water out of the hands of the nearest hippie. ‘Jesus Christ, I thought you people were all about helping out your fellow man.’
‘We’ll grant you entry to our camp if you surrender to a search,’ Ocean said.
‘Knock yourself out. Whitt’s clothes are about to fall off his bones anyway.’ I trudged to the mouth of the great cave where they’d formed their camp and flopped onto one of the blankets on the sand. I spread my arms and legs out on the cool, soft wool. ‘Everything hurts. You’ll have to search me from here. I’m not moving.’
While I lay quietly dying on the rug, some men searched Whitt and a couple of girls came over and gave me a halfhearted pat-down. Whitt sat nearby and Shamma opened a medical pack.
It didn’t escape me that one of these people might have been the shooter. I observed them carefully as another girl knelt beside me and started fiddling with my grazed hands. The outfit was not amateur. Three of the high-tech four-wheel drives ringed the face of the cave, and similarly expensive equipment was spread out everywhere – hard-cased laptops and satellite phones, radar equipment and power generators. For a bunch of environmentalists, they were packing some serious gear.
I came back to my senses when the girl who was seeing to my hands snapped a twig in front of me and started rubbing it into a bowl.