I LAY AS still as possible, my cheek against the floorboards, my whole body aching. Bella’s foot was by my face, her heel out of the glittery strap, the ankle tendons relaxed. I looked up and saw the phone lying in her limp hand, her thumb on the button. She hadn’t pushed it. The blast I’d heard had come from above. Higher, higher, I lifted my eyes to the second-floor railing where Officer Victoria Snale was standing with her arms hanging over the polished wooden banister. The rifle in her arms was still smoking from where it had dispensed a single shot straight down into Bella’s head.
I shifted up onto my knees, still trying to orient myself. The floor felt like it was tilting beneath me. Kash was there, taking the phone from Bella’s dead fingers and setting it aside. He turned to me, plucking at the tape around my wrists.
‘Get it off me,’ I begged. ‘Get it off.’
Someone handed him a pair of scissors and he slipped them between my sweat-soaked neck and the rolls of duct tape beneath my ear. He peeled the bomb from my throat and handed it off to someone. I could hear Vicky crying. I looked up in time to see a young police officer taking the rifle from her hands.
‘I killed her.’ Snale took in a hitching breath that came out of her in sobs. ‘I’ve never killed anyone before.’
‘It’s OK,’ the officer was saying, taking her hand as he led her down the stairs. ‘It’s all OK now.’
I sat numbly on the stage by Bella’s body and looked at the people around me slowly, uncertainly moving out of the pub, arms around shoulders, some stopping to hug just outside the doorway. In the movies, this would have been the moment for triumphant cheering. For half-humorous one-liners cracked with relief that would lead gently into the credits, the camera panning away from the town and into the night. But the dread wouldn’t lift from my shoulders. I couldn’t find the strength to move. Kash seemed to sense it and crouched beside me, putting a careful hand on the back of my neck.
‘Do you think you can stand?’ he asked.
‘I have to,’ I said, gripping on to his shoulder. He slipped an arm around me and brought me to my feet. ‘I need to get out of here.’
‘What?’ Kash said. ‘Right now?’
I nodded, let him help me to the door. Something deep inside me was telling me that all was far from OK.
Chapter 128
I IGNORED THE instinct still as the sun rose and I pulled the borrowed police cruiser over at the edge of the hillside topped by Jed Chatt’s ramshackle house. I shut off the engine. I hadn’t turned the radio on. I couldn’t bear to hear reports about what had happened in Last Chance only hours before. Neither Whitt nor Tox were answering their phones. As I’d left the town, a couple of people were hounding Vicky as she sat on the edge of an ambulance, drinking water someone had brought her and trying to get over the shock of her first kill. I’d wanted to say something to her, something reassuring about taking a life to save another. That although the memories never leave you, and sometimes late at night the faces of your victims still come, the pain of it dies away in time. I’d killed. It wasn’t the worst thing I lived with every day. But instead I’d left Vicky sitting there in the care of a paramedic. She would be alright. She was stronger than me.
I hadn’t said goodbye to Kash either. He’d run off almost immediately to evacuate anyone in the town who was still in their house, to see if he could locate the device Bella had hidden out there. Her plan hadn’t worked. Zac Taby had been her last victim. As I was loading the car with my belongings, one of Snale’s neighbours got word to me that Kash and the other officers had indeed found an explosive device under a house on the edge of town. The bomb had been located right beneath their youngest child’s bed, under the floorboards. I knew Kash would deal with it. I had one errand left to run, and then I was going home.
It was my Day Zero. I could finally see my brother.
As I walked up the stairs to the porch of Jed’s house, my temples throbbed. I figured I must be getting sick. Just my luck to come down with something the moment I was about to re-enter the fight for my brother’s life. I knocked on the door and a voice inside told me to come in.
There were more advances in Jed’s shack becoming a family home. I looked at the cloth on the table by the window, the newly painted back wall. The tall man was sitting at the far end of the table, shirtless, a pair of checked pyjama pants on his long legs. The muscles in his upper shoulders twisted and tightened visibly beneath his golden-brown skin as he screwed the lid back on a jar of PVC glue. There was a wooden toy on a sheet of newspaper before him. A painted duck with a newly re-attached wing.
The baby was nowhere to be seen. Too early for him yet. I set the small rock on the table carefully so as not to make too much noise. I knew a sleeping baby was a precious thing.
When Jed spoke, his voice was low.
‘What’s all this, then?’ he asked, looking at the rock.
‘This,’ I said, ‘is a ten-gram nugget of solid gold.’
The outer edge of his left eyebrow twitched briefly. Besides that, he gave no indication of emotion. I picked the rock up again and looked at it, rubbed some of the dirt from its exterior and revealed the mustard-yellow metal beneath.
‘There’s a lot of it,’ I said. ‘Last night, Jace Robit and Damien Ponch were killed in an ambush trying to get the last of it. They found a gold deposit in a cave outside Last Chance Valley, and they’ve spent months there extracting the metal in secret and stockpiling it. Two of their friends survived the ambush. A couple of patrol officers picked them up and the men are now in custody, being questioned. The guys estimate they have pulled about two and a half million dollars’ worth of gold out of the cave over the last few months. They were planning to run off with it all. Start again. A new life overseas.’
Jed considered this. We listened to the baby stirring in the next room. After a few seconds the child fell silent again.
‘What’s it got to do with me?’ Jed asked.
‘The cave is on land the government handed back to your family,’ I said. ‘Rightfully, every ounce of the gold that was extracted belongs to you.’
I put the nugget down in front of him. He stared at it, his lips sealed.
‘Two and a half million dollars?’ he asked eventually.
‘It’s a rare find,’ I said. ‘Almost unheard of. There’s probably more in the area that the men were mining. I don’t know about these things. An officer will come out and see you, tell you what’ll happen next.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said.
‘No idea,’ I answered. I walked towards the door. ‘Sell the land to a goldmine. Keep it and mine it yourself. Get rich, buy Last Chance Valley and reduce everything in it to ashes. Buy your niece her own law firm. Throw all the gold they found back into the cave and continue on exactly as you are.’ I laughed. Shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Jed had forgotten all about the gold on the table. He was looking at me in the doorway. I was frozen there. Something was telling me that if I just stayed here inside the threshold, in the cool of this man’s house, everything was going to be OK. This was a safe place.
Jed stood, and his expression made the torn feeling in me all the more real. He looked sad to see me go.
‘You don’t look right,’ he said. ‘Come back in and sit down.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go.’
The baby boy in the other room started crying. We ignored it, watching each other, both wanting to speak. But there was nothing more to say. I made a choice. Perhaps the wrong choice.
I turned and left.
Chapter 129