by Finn Bell
Because there, in the middle of the clearing and lying curled up like a foetus, is Sam Black.
He’s so thin he looks like little more than a child, still in his patient’s gown, thin hospital slippers ripped and muddy, dirt smeared on his hands and body, caked thickly on his soles.
My heart pounding and my hands starting to tremble I stay low, hidden in the cover of the bushes as Tobe moves out into view. He kneels down briefly by Sam before working his way silently around the clearing, pausing finally to look into the dark cavity where the door to the hut used to be.
Only now does he put away his gun and nod in my direction.
Snow is already collecting in the folds of Sam Black’s clothes. The up-turned collar of the big coat he wears, an all-weather Emergency Medic coat he likely stole from the hospital, partially hides his face from us.
As we kneel next to him Tobe carefully lifts the coat away, exposing his face.
It’s not common to find a dead face that still holds an expression but it does happen. Like the final thing they felt lasted beyond them and they’re still feeling it now in death. Whatever Sam felt when he died wasn’t good.
The snow has collected into a small drift that hides one of his eyes, his skin long too cold now to melt it. But against this his tears still puddle wet at the corner of his other eyelid, the lines they follow down his cheek still glisten.
“Why haven’t they frozen?” I ask.
“Tears have salt in them, it lowers the point at which they freeze,” Tobe replies as he starts carefully checking the body. When he shifts the coat we see something clenched in his muddy hands, high up against his chest. Tobe uses the edge of his sleeve to pry it out, careful not to leave fingerprints. It’s a small picture in a frame, old, a black and white moment from long ago. A young, heavily muscled Sam Black smiling behind his three young sons, in front of the hut.
“I can’t see any wounds. My guess would be that he died of exposure, or maybe just from frailty and the exertion of getting all the way out here. He looks so small. I last saw him a few years ago and even then he was still a big man,” Tobe says.
“I think these tracks are all his,” I say, scanning around us in the clearing where several tracks seem to cross in random directions. He was here and alive for some time.
“Looks like he was pacing around, maybe he was waiting for someone,” I guess, but there’s no real way of knowing.
“He doesn’t have anything else on him, nothing in his pockets either,” Tobe says, rising to his feet again.
“Is this it? You think he left hospital just to come here and die like this?” I say, staring down at the body. Thinking back to what Nurse Miha had said: “I hope he gets drunk and laid and dies laughing.”
“It’s possible,” Tobe says, staring down at the picture. “It looks like he was happy here once. Maybe he didn’t see what we see. When the end comes maybe that’s enough.”
I make my way over to the ruins of the hut and use the flashlight function on my phone to look around the sides and back. It seems rotten and ancient, there’s nothing to see here. The dark interior is similarly decrepit but I see now that the entire hut is built around a single tree at its centre, spearing through the roof. And while the hut itself has worn away the tree still looks strong. But that’s all it is, no clue, no leads, just wood and dirt and patches of moss among the cobwebs. Then, as I pan the light up the tree trunk to well above my head, I can make out an area where someone has cleared the bark and carved into the wood below.
It’s a carving of a shark, a hammerhead shark.
“What do you make of this?” I say to Tobe when he comes over.
“It’s a Māori thing. About being a warrior. They have a saying, ‘Die like a hammerhead not like an octopus.’”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“The Māori say when you catch an octopus it becomes passive. It goes limp and doesn’t try to attack you, it just tries to slip away. But when you catch a hammerhead it will fight you to the very end. They say if the meat is fresh it will sometimes still quiver when you cut into it even days after you’ve killed it,” Tobe says.
“There’s nothing for us here. We’ll have to leave the body and call it in from the car. We need to go,” Tobe says, looking up into the falling snow. Even though it is still early morning the sky above us looks dark, like the sun has just set.
“I’ll take some pictures on my phone for the record. Who knows what the scene will look like after the snow melts or it rains,” I say.
“It’s getting heavier,” Tobe says. “Surprisingly heavy for this time of year in fact.”
I straighten up from taking my last of multiple pictures, having done several versions of the standard requirements: original pose the body was found in, surroundings, face, neck, hands and feet.
Tobe has already started back towards the path, with me following behind and checking that the pictures came out clear on my phone, when I spot it.
“Tobe, wait,” I say, stopping in my tracks.
I’m looking at the picture I took of his hands and there’s something about it that makes me hesitate.
There’s something here.
Something somebody said.
What was it?
Then I have it. It was Enid Carson, the retired school teacher, when she was telling us about how some men got obsessed, cursed with the need to find gold. “Touched by the colour,” is what she called it. Because the miners who found gold in their ore would sometimes get that powdered golden glint on their hands.
I couldn’t see it just by looking at his hands in the natural light, but the flash that went off when I used the camera on my phone was just enough that the picture I took clearly shows it. And there’s absolutely no good reason why it should be there.
There, on Sam Black’s dirty, cold, dead hands, is gold.
Sam Black’s been touched by the colour.
* * *
THE TWO MEN IN THE DARK
“It’s taken us longer to get here than I intended,” he says when he finally stops. “But it doesn’t matter, everything will be ok in the end.”
I can’t stop trembling now, my body shakes all over. I’m not sure if it’s from cold or exhaustion or both. I’ve never felt this tired in my life. I try to loosen my hands again but this time he tied them so tight I can do nothing. My fingers went completely numb long ago, all I feel now is a dull ache at my wrists. I flinch in the darkness of the blindfold when his hands are suddenly on my shoulders, pushing me down to my knees, then further down until I collapse. Is this it? Is this where he kills me? And god help me I’m ashamed now, ashamed for my family. I’m so sorry but part of me just wants it to be over. If I’m going to die out here then do it now. Do it.
Instead he says, “From here on you crawl.”
* * *
TOBE AND NICK
“He got it somewhere between the hospital and this hut but I can’t think how, where or why,” Tobe says as we’re both inspecting Sam Black’s hands under the flashlight function on my phone. Even with the wavering light from my trembling hands the faint tint of gold dust shines unmistakably against the dried dirt.
“I didn’t see any other paths branching off on the way we came in, but he could have come from the other direction,” I say doubtfully.
“If he was coming from the city that would be the longer way around. Logic would suggest that he would take the shortest route available to him, which would be the way we came,” Tobe says.
“Well if he didn’t get it coming the way we did, he got it going further,” I say, starting to follow his tracks along the edge of the clearing.
“Here,” Tobe says from next to the stream, pointing to the other side where we can just make out a single foot print leading into the dense growth.
“Decision time,” I say as we both stand staring at that foot print. “I vote go.”
“It’s a risk. We don’t know how far he went. Plus, there’s the snow and we’re in a gorge. This wate
r could rise and trap us,” Tobe says.
“And it could wash away that foot print while we play it safe and wait for reinforcements. Think about this case; whatever is going on, our only chances to do anything about it have come from them messing up. First at the house and now here. We have to go. What if James is still alive? Still out there? Or out here? What if Sam Black came out here to meet Remu and he died waiting for him? James Chen could be coming here right now,” I say.
“Why would Remu have brought James here? His safest choice would have been further south into the wild,” Tobe counters.
“I don’t know Tobe. I don’t know the why of any of this. But there’s a foot print right there and we should follow it. What if something else went wrong for Remu? What if James Chen is, by some miracle, still alive? There’s no one here but us. We have to try,” I say.
“It’s just us two out here. We could be outnumbered,” Tobe says. There’s a moment where I think I’ve lost him and Tobe is going to say we should do this by the book, which means going and calling for back up, but then he gives me a look and I know he’s with me.
“I’ll lead, you flank me. Stay hidden,” Tobe says.
The stream is shallow and easy to cross in gumboots. On the other side we take out our guns again and start following the footsteps. They lead along a broken, overgrown trail and our going is slow. Then we stall completely as we push further into the cold gloom, forcing Tobe to use the light on his phone to find the next foot prints.
This is the wrong way to do it and we both know it, but there’s no other way.
If Remu is somewhere out here he will be able to see us coming from a long way off. I’ve moved well off to the right, trying to stay out of the circle of light Tobe is casting. Gripping my gun tightly to still the constant tremble.
It’s only a few minutes later that Tobe pauses again and kneels down, shining the light low to the ground, not moving. For a moment I panic, frantically scanning ahead trying to see if he’s spotted anyone, but as the seconds tick by nothing happens. Tobe kneels there, unmoving.
Finally I risk edging closer, close enough to again see the small circle of light at Tobe’s feet. Then he silently points into it with his pistol and I see it. Sam Black’s foot prints aren’t alone anymore, someone else came this way.
We’re coming for you now Remu.
The further we go the darker and colder it gets as the gorge closes in on either side of us, eventually spanning only a few paces across at the bottom. And that space is mostly being taken up by the stream. Soon Tobe switches off his light again. We don’t need to follow the footsteps any more, there’s only one way they could go now.
It’s inevitable really, I think as we both stop to look at it.
This whole crazy chase started in a mine and it seems fitting that it should end this way. Because a short distance ahead of us, where the broken trail dies next to the dead end of the gorge and the stream falls from high above, strange as it may seem, is the black mouth of an old mine. Don’t you just love the deep south?
* * *
“Fascinating,” Tobe says quietly as we both kneel down to observe the mine entrance from the cover of the bush. It’s freezing here and the snow is now rapidly coating everything in white, casting the dark opening of the mine’s entrance in sharp contrast. It’s narrow and low, but big enough for a person to enter if they bow low. It looks old; the entrance is overgrown and the wood beams supporting it look rotten and misshapen. It’s a difficult spot because there’s simply no way for us to get from here to the entrance without someone seeing us from inside. And if Remu is the one doing the seeing, we’re dead men. Our only hope is that he’s not looking; at least the falling water should cover any noise we make.
“Assuming we survive the trip across to the entrance, what then?” I ask.
“We go in with flashlights and make lots of noise,” Tobe replies.
“Provocative, given that Remu likes to kill cops. Why?” I ask.
“Because if it is Remu down there, then maybe he’s expecting Sam Black to show up. It’s too unlikely to be a coincidence that Sam disappears on the same night as Remu and that we find other fresh foot prints out here, this close to where Sam dies. There’s no reason anyone else would be out here. It’s Remu, he’s in there. Either alone or with James Chen, hopefully with no one else, and he’s waiting for Sam.
“Judging by the foot prints I don’t think too many people came this way. Something must have happened to them in the wild, delayed them. Sam Black came out here, came to the mine, waited, then finally went back to the hut. I think he died waiting. And Remu’s Māori, if he already found his dad then there’s no way he would have left his body out there in the mud like that. Not even if he was dragging James Chen along as a hostage. No, he’s in there, waiting,” Tobe says. “So we go in with flashlights in front of us, noisy but not saying anything. There won’t be too many places in there to hide. We’ll just keep moving forward. Hopefully Remu will assume it’s Sam and our lights will hide our faces long enough for us to get close. Maybe get us in line for a clear shot. We’ll try to get him to surrender.”
“And if he doesn’t want to?” I ask.
“Then we’ll have to shoot him. Preferably in the head. A lot,” Tobe answers as he calmly checks the slide action on his pistol.
“In that case I’ll go first,” I say. “And either way it will be nice to get out of the snow.”
And this moment, really, is where it all started going wrong.
* * *
Sometimes you can know things without knowing how you do. Like that inkling feeling you get when you just know someone’s looking at you.
For me, that small, persistent feeling that something’s not right started the moment we broke from cover, lights held out in front of us, guns aimed. Crossing the clearing to the mine entrance feels like it takes forever, and then we’re in. My heartbeat thunders in my own ears as I bow low, forcing me to slow down. Everything becomes a blur of impressions; thick mud, walls an uneven jumble of dirt and rock punctuated every few paces by sagging support beams made of old logs. They are thick with splatters of moss and fungus, and their low height forces us to duck even lower under them. Then the tunnel opens up, becomes wider and higher, enough for us to go almost upright. We can now pick up the pace.
From the entrance the track leads downward steadily into the dark. It’s quiet in here, the sounds of our passage seem too loud now. Cobwebs trail across my face and there’s the unmistakable smell of rotting wood every time we pass a support beam. My light picks up no one, nothing but the sides of the tunnel and the darkness in front of us.
Then finally there’s a faint glow ahead and sounds of movement just beyond a sharp turn in the tunnel. It sounds close, only paces away. I go down onto one knee, intending to look around the corner at a low angle so I present a smaller target and hopefully not have my head where someone pulling a trigger would expect it.
I wait for Tobe to come up behind me before pointing up as I turn my own light off and pocket my phone. Tobe quietly taps my shoulder when he’s ready. Then, lifting his light high, he quickly thrusts his arm out, keeping the rest of himself hidden behind cover while I lean out and around the corner, keeping low at knee level, sighting along my gun. Too late. Too slow. Even as I’m completing the move the light ahead of us goes out. They know we’re coming but I can’t stop now.
In fractions of a second I’m barely able to make out two figures in the dim light from Tobe’s phone before a blindingly bright, ragged muzzle flash and a deafening, stuttered bang of gunshots has me reflexively ducking where I kneel. Shotgun I realise, both barrels, as the force of the shots buffets the air above me. At this distance there’s no way I’m missing.
I aim slightly below where I saw the muzzle flash and fire off two shots in rapid succession. In the twin bursts of light I know I hit someone or something because the two flashing images before me don’t look the same before and after my first shot. Then everything goe
s perfectly black and I hear Tobe grunt and fall back behind me.
Completely blind now I hold my breath and stay still, my gun aimed down the tunnel in the blackness, desperately straining my ringing ears, trying to hear if anyone is rushing at us. When I don’t sense anything I move immediately, forcing myself not to hesitate, not to stop or think before I step out again. This time standing and stepping out as quietly as I can, up close to the opposite wall from the corner we’re hiding behind, out into the blackness.
I feel exposed and way too vulnerable, expecting another shot at any moment. I can’t hear Tobe behind me at all. I don’t know if he’s down but I can’t deal with that now. The silence ahead of me lies looming and still, ominous and threatening again. It’s so dark I can’t see a single thing, not even my own trembling arms holding my gun. But he fired both barrels of that shotgun, I know he did. That means he needs to reload and when he does I’m going to hear it. And I still have a lot of bullets.
* * *
At least that was my plan.
Before the mountain fell on us.
It starts as a dull, muffled cracking sound, followed by the gentle susurrus of soil spilling, punctuated by the flat patter of small stones landing in mud. At first I feel relieved, the sounds are coming from behind me. Tobe must be up, he’s ok. I take another quiet step forward, hoping that the noise behind me covers my movements. Still no sound, no movement that I can discern ahead of me.
Then I realise I’m wrong.
I realise what’s happening as the sounds slowly tumble together, swallowed by a deeper vibrating rumble that spreads, building quickly, more sensation now than sound. I can feel it through my feet. The gunshots must have triggered it.
I start to turn, my movements feeling way too slow. The corner, only a pace away from me, seems impossibly far. I came around that corner low while Tobe held his light high. The reason for this is that most gun violence is instinctive; someone sees a target and they fire at it out of reflex, thinking comes later. You have to train cops and soldiers not to do this. Gangsters don’t get that training. So that’s exactly what happened. Remu saw the light and fired. The light that Tobe was holding up high, close to the old, wooden support beam that was holding up that part of the tunnel. And Remu fired both shotgun barrels at it.
