Harry’s face contorted with pain. ‘Don’t do this, Mick.’
Harry knew him?
‘Move,’ Kelly demanded.
‘Cut the strap and I’ll help the kid walk,’ Harry said.
Kelly kept the torch trained on Harry’s face, unmoving. He must have decided that he was better off having Harry help me walk than helping me himself. He took a knife from his pocket, flicked the blade out and said, ‘Turn around.’
Harry did and Kelly cut the wrist strap. Harry flexed his fingers, then rotated and rubbed his wrists.
‘I’m going to need to put his arm around my neck,’ he said. ‘To take his weight.’
Kelly considered this too. In the low light, I thought I saw a hint of a grin wash over his face but he said nothing. Was Harry pushing him too far?
The knife flicked open again and he turned me around roughly by the shoulder and slit the tie on my wrist. He pointed the knife at each of us in turn then flicked it closed, pocketed it and pulled a fat, black pistol from the back of his waistband. Everything inside me turned to water.
Harry lifted my right arm, which ached from being stretched backward for so long. He slipped his left arm around my back, his hand beneath my armpit.
Kelly shoved Harry in the back with the barrel of the gun and we started off slowly into the dark, following the bouncing ball of light cast by Kelly’s torch. I leaned heavily on Harry, hopping on my left leg. He didn’t complain.
I tried to find a flat place for my foot to land each time I hopped but the track was narrow and rough and in the middle of it was a tiny stream, ten centimetres wide, rushing downhill. I could see the bandage on my knee lit from behind. It was soaked in blood. Not just a patch like before. The whole thing was drenched, dark and wet. I needed a doctor. But if Mick Kelly did what I imagined he was going to do, I wouldn’t have to worry about a doctor.
He led us down the track, further from safety with every step. Not that there was safety in a crooked cop’s car, on an unsealed bush road in the middle of nowhere after midnight. I tried to transform the anxiety rising in my chest into clear thinking. Maybe Harry really did have a plan. He had to have a plan. He had been in dangerous situations before and he was still alive. He was known for putting himself in the line of fire to get the story. I wondered if he had experienced anything like this before.
Kelly coughed, made a throaty hoik sound and spat. He took two quick sprays of his asthma puffer as we continued down the track. Harry’s rib cage bumped against mine and he breathed heavily under the weight of me. I waited for him to whisper something, a plan of some kind, but that didn’t happen.
I listened for a river or a creek at the bottom of the gully but the air was filled with frog chorus and the rustle of wind-blown trees. The track became rougher now, rockier, steeper. Water seemed to rush in from both sides forming a wider stream beneath our feet. Does he know where he’s taking us or is he making this up as he goes? Has he been here before? Has he planned this? The idea that Kelly had thought this through, had pre-meditated it with the precision of a high-ranking police officer flooded me in muddy panic. He had done this alone. Maybe he was the only other person in the world who knew where we were.
The bones in my left foot began to freeze as water soaked through my sneakers. Prickly plants and sapling branches scratched and scraped me now and I yowled quietly when a sharp rock poked through the toe of my shoe.
We weaved our way down for another ten minutes over rocks and roots until we came out of the trees and there was a vast, open clearing on our right and trees on our left. Intense, buffeting wind hit me hard in the face.
‘Stop,’ Kelly said, wheezing. Another round of chunky coughing.
I looked down and I could make out the three gently glowing stripes on each side of my sneakers and the rough texture of the sandstone beneath me. Two or three metres beyond that, the rock seemed to disappear and there was blackness, lots of it. We were not standing in a clearing. We were on the edge of a cliff.
THIRTY-THREE
SILENT PRAYER
I’m not ready to die, I thought. I have things I want to do. Like turn fourteen, because thirteen wasn’t working out as well as I might have hoped.
I looked out across the sea of black to the horizon where a small patch of low cloud glowed pink. The city? I wished I was back there. If I had stayed in the police station, at least there would have been other officers around. Kelly couldn’t have done anything. I had been safe. If I hadn’t freaked out and run, I would have been okay. Instead, we were out here in the shivering wild with him.
Kelly took another two hits on his asthma puffer. What if he made us walk the plank and we fell and animals and insects picked our flesh until there was nothing left? What if a bushwalker stumbled across our bones in three or five years’ time? Forensic experts might identify us if we were lucky. I had seen and read stories just like this. I was fascinated by lost bushwalker stories. But Harry and I were not lost bushwalkers. And this was no accident.
I felt like bawling my eyes out but instead I closed them and breathed slowly, deeply, calming my mind. Margo, my coach, would have been proud. I tried to imagine my anger and fear passing like clouds. Those feelings would do me no good at this point. ‘Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured,’ Margo told me almost every week, quoting the guy who wrote Huckleberry Finn. Fear was the same, I figured. It could only hurt me. I stayed like this, breathing in and out, and the cold and wind and rain and anger and fear seemed to ease. I sent out a silent prayer of love to my mum and Harry and Magic and one to the universe for a miracle.
That’s when I heard the sound of a car engine on the road above us. There was no mistaking it this time. It was up on the road we’d driven in on – quiet, not speeding, then the engine was killed a moment later. Kelly switched off his torch and craned his neck, listening.
I thought of a line they always used in Crime Smashers: ‘We’ve got company.’
‘Stay here,’ Kelly whispered and I heard a distinct ‘click’ from his weapon. I wondered if he’d taken the safety off. Was that how it sounded? ‘Don’t take a single step.’
He moved quietly away from us, back across the sandstone shelf towards the bottom of the track. He walked slowly, steadily, into the dark until I couldn’t see him any more.
Whoever had driven down that road was not someone he had expected. This was good for us, but who was it? Scarlet and her mother? Scarlet was the only person who knew I was in trouble. But how would they have followed us all the way out here without being seen by Kelly?
Can you come get me now? I’m in trouble.
They were the last words I had texted to Mum.
I’ll come right now, she had said. Getting in car. Please text me back so I know you’re okay.
But I didn’t. And I’m not. She would be at Harry’s now. Maybe she drove right past us. I had never in my life wanted so badly to see her.
‘Sam,’ my father whispered, close enough to my ear that I could feel his breath but still only just loud enough to be heard.
‘Yes.’
‘We’re going to run.’
‘What about –’
‘We don’t have a choice. If we stay here, someone’s going to get hurt.’
‘Okay,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘Who do you think was in that car?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know, but obviously he doesn’t either, which is good. We’re on the edge of a steep drop, so be careful. We’re going to slip across into the tree line there when I say.’
I turned and saw that the line of trees began about four or five metres back from the cliff edge. Its tall, sinister outline was even blacker than the sky.
‘Okay,’ I whispered, not knowing if I should act brave or say the next thing on my mind. ‘I’m scared.’
‘Me too,’ Harry said, his eyes trained on the dead dark void to our left that had swallowed Kelly moments before.
I w
anted to cry or puke. It was one thing to be scared yourself but when your father, a crime reporter and your hero, whispers to you that he is scared while being held captive by an armed and dangerous man on the edge of a cliff in the middle of the night, it feels like the end of the world.
Can I outrun Kelly? I wondered. I couldn’t run, let alone outrun. I could hop, but I was fairly sure that I couldn’t hop faster than a police officer, even an outrageously overweight one. And I certainly couldn’t hop faster than a speeding bullet.
I listened hard for Kelly and looked back up towards the road but I didn’t hear a car or people, just fat raindrops falling from nearby trees.
Trying to escape was another risky move that my mother would advise against, but Harry was right. Our prospects weren’t good if we just stood here. I had seen what Kelly was capable of, and he hadn’t driven us to a remote location and walked us through the bush in the early hours of the morning to watch the sun rise.
‘You ready?’ Harry whispered, wrapping my arm tightly around the back of his neck.
‘Yep.’
Now or never. My saliva was thick, my throat sore with thirst. A shiver rippled through me but I kept my body tight, muscles tensed. Adrenaline, rage and fear boiled beneath my skin. All I could do was trust my father. I barely knew him but I put every thread of faith I had into him in that moment.
‘Let’s go,’ he whispered and we limped, top speed, into that dead, black night. Full dark, no stars. Across the rock, through the grass and into the trees.
THIRTY-FOUR
NOW OR NEVER
Kelly sprayed the bush to the right of us with torchlight, casting hundreds of shifting, tangled tree shadows across our path as he gave chase. Then he snapped the torch off again after a couple of seconds. Maybe he was trying to avoid being seen by whoever was in that car.
I waited for the loud bark of his weapon and a sharp explosion of pain between my shoulderblades, a feeling I had imagined many times while writing my comics.
But the gun didn’t fire and Kelly didn’t say a word. He moved steadily through the undergrowth about thirty metres back and to the right of us, hunting us down like deer, or foxes. Foxes, I thought. We needed to be wily, determined, resilient and cunning, not frightened and skittish.
Maybe we should have been screaming for help. Would that make the driver of the vehicle come towards or away from us. Scarlet? I wondered again, but it didn’t add up. Campers maybe. Or teenagers.
I leaned heavily on Harry as we three-legged-raced through the night. I took most of my weight on my left leg, but my right foot touched the ground lightly between hops, propelling me forward. It hurt so bad but we were running for our lives, so the pain seemed a worthwhile investment.
I hoped that Harry could see what was up ahead better than I could. For all I knew we were running towards another cliff. Tree trunks sped towards my face and Harry pulled me right or left before another tree appeared. Ghost gums, I thought. Their tall white shapes appeared from nowhere.
There was a patch of moonlight for a moment, tiny knives of silver light cutting through the tree cover, revealing steeper, rockier ground up to our left before the clouds smothered the moon once more.
‘Up there?’ I whispered, knowing how difficult this would make it for Kelly to follow but not considering how difficult it would be for us to find a way. We veered to the left and up the slope. It was the same hill we had come down with Kelly but about fifty metres further along, away from the cliff. There was no visible track. Just steep, uneven ground peppered with slippery rocks that were carpeted in what felt like moss beneath the soles of my squelchy, waterlogged sneakers.
We came to a very steep section and Harry grabbed hold of a meaty tree root poking from a crack in a slab of sandstone. The rock was as tall as me and, from what I could see, sloped back up the hill at about 45 degrees. I could hear the shiny bottoms of Harry’s smooth-soled city shoes slipping and sliding on the surface. Harry tried to keep his arm around me and drag me up with him but I was slipping behind. I twisted a thin vine around my hand and used every splinter of strength I had to pull myself upwards. My left knee dug into the mossy rock, shredding layers of skin. Harry groaned under my weight then squeezed my upper arm and pulled even harder, heaving me onto the next flattish section of ground, only to face a steeper, rockier incline a few metres further on.
I heard Kelly swear quietly somewhere in the pit of blackness we were climbing out of but I couldn’t tell where it came from or how close he was.
There was another moment when the cloud cover thinned and, squinting into that foggy, dark wild, I made out a diagonal sliver of track up to the left.
‘What about here?’ I whispered, panicky.
The little I could see of the narrow gap was choked with leaves, fallen branches and smaller rocks. Harry scrambled up first, his shoes scratching for grip on anything they could find. He leaned down, grabbing my hand, dragging me up. I scraped and clawed and clambered onto the flat, bashing my injured knee in the process. I sat at my father’s feet and whined quietly, massaging above and below my knee.
‘This is insane,’ Harry croaked, already exhausted. He grabbed my hand again, helping me to my feet, and we stumbled on into the night. Harry steered us left, along flatter ground. It felt like we might be circling back towards the track we had come down with Kelly, back towards the cliff edge.
I heard Kelly again, moving through the bush below. I tried to make out the shape of him but it was hopeless.
Soon Harry and I came across a fallen gum tree blocking our path. It was almost as thick as I am tall and there was no clear way to get past it. To my right it seemed as though its roots had been torn from the ground. They towered over us like a giant claw at the base of the next steep section of the slope. We would have to go up that slope and around the roots, or climb right over the thick trunk in front of us.
Harry turned and rested against its smooth surface for a moment, taking fast, shallow breaths, then he leaned forward, dry-retching.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
He answered by vomiting loudly. I felt it splat around my feet and ankles and I rested my hand on his back. His shirt was soaked with sweat.
Kelly was running through the bush below us now. We were out in the open, sitting ducks.
‘We’ve got to move,’ I whispered. ‘If we get over the tree and keep going across the slope here, maybe we can make it back to the track we came down in the first place.’
‘Give me a minute,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.
Kelly flicked on his torch again for a second and sprayed the bush just below us with light. I saw my sneakers glow for a moment before the torch went off again.
‘We don’t have a minute,’ I whispered.
I bent down and looked beneath the fallen tree. There was a narrow crawl-space beneath the trunk. I grabbed the shoulder of Harry’s shirt and pulled him to the ground. My chin hit hard and I wondered if my face had landed in my father’s vomit.
‘Go under,’ I whispered and Harry slid back along the wet, mulchy earth, slipping into the thirty-centimetre gap beneath the fallen gum tree. I slid in too, my cheek scratching the paper-thin bark and leaf litter on the ground.
I strained to hear Kelly’s movement between the night sounds of insects, a low, mournful bird and the fast rhythmic splat of raindrops. He had seen or heard us, I knew.
I turned my head towards Harry, the tip of my nose scraping the underside of the tree.
‘Can you go right under?’ I asked, hoping we could slip beneath the tree and get out the other side. The trunk wasn’t lying flat on the ground. Roots or branches must have held it up at either end.
‘The gap’s not wide enough,’ he said. ‘I’m wedged in as far as I can go.’
‘Are you okay?’ I whispered.
‘I’m okay,’ he croaked.
Harry will get us out of this, I thought.
But I didn’t believe it any more.
I heard the crack a
nd snap of Kelly coming up the slope. He was so close now I could hear his asthmatic wheeze, and I turned to see the dark, round shape of his head appear above the edge of the rock. He pulled himself up onto flatter ground, pushed up off his gut, knelt, stood and hunched forward, hands resting on his knees. He took three belts on his puffer. His breathing sounded a lot worse than Harry’s.
It was thirty seconds or so before he straightened and moved on, his heavy boots crunching the ground, steps slow and deliberate, drawing nearer and nearer to our hiding place. He pulled up maybe four metres away and stood dead still. My ears felt hot and I could hear my pulse banging away in them. Surely he could hear it, too. Kelly took a few more steps until he was standing right next to the fallen tree – so close I could have reached out and pulled one of the laces on his black boots. I could almost smell the crooked cop through the thick, raw scent of damp earth. He turned around, facing the other way. He must have known he was close but not how close.
He leaned back against the fallen tree, right where Harry and I had been leaning. The heel of his boot was about twenty centimetres from my face. I breathed so slowly and quietly I started to wonder if I was getting enough oxygen. I could feel Harry’s shoulder pressed against mine and there was an electric current that passed back and forth between us like we were two integral parts of a circuit. I had always dreamt of being this close to my father, working on a case together. This wasn’t quite what I had planned but, pressed in on all sides by the wet, night earth, a fallen tree, a broken police officer and my dad, I almost felt like I knew him. All the chasing and wondering who my dad was and whether he cared about me felt like it had been pointless. Here we were, breathing the same air, connected and stuck, all out of choices, and the mystery of him fell away. We weren’t so different. I’d always wondered who he was but maybe I was really wondering who I am. And in that moment I knew. We were two branches of the same tree. He was part of me and I was part of him. Inseparable. All the anger and fear seemed to fall away.
The Fall Page 12
