Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(45)

‘If we stayed together, though, it’d be eighty,’ he mused, a smile playing about his lips.

‘Oh, right,’ I smirked. ‘I see. You and me, a dusty old convertible, running away across the country together. Staying in dodgy hotels, escaping our problems in each other’s arms.’

‘Hell yes!’

‘Please,’ I sighed. ‘I’m old enough to be your mother.’

‘Isn’t that kind of hot, though?’

I slid a leg out from under the blanket and kicked him in the side.

‘Shut up, idiot boy.’





Chapter 60


THE BOY FELL asleep quickly, undisturbed by the pig’s snores. I lay on my side in the dark, eyes open, staring at the wall. Soon enough, I sighed and picked up my phone, sent a text.

If you refuse the magazine interview, I’ll pay you fifty thousand, I wrote. I can’t let you sabotage Sam’s defence.

I waited. In time, the phone vibrated in my hands and the screen lit my face.

How soon can you get it? my mother asked.

I’ll transfer it tomorrow, I wrote.

I’d prefer it in cash, she replied.

I’ll bet, I thought.





Chapter 61


I DIDN’T KNOW I had fallen asleep until the sound came, a wailing, blaring siren that rang in my skull. I shot up and shoved the laptop and phone aside, almost stumbled over the pig on the ground next to Zac’s empty mattress. Kash’s bare feet thudded on the polished boards of the living room as he rushed out from the front of the house in only boxer shorts, struggling with his glasses. Lights flickered on.

‘What is it?’

‘A car horn.’ He was actioning his pistol.

‘Where’s Zac?’

‘What’s happening?’ Snale ran out of the bedroom in pink pyjamas covered in smiling, dancing pigs.

I sprinted through the house and out the front door, my partners in tow.

Zac was sitting in the driver’s seat of Snale’s four-wheel drive, leaning on the horn, flashing the high beams. His huge eyes followed me, front teeth locked together.

‘What is it?’ I called. ‘What? What?’

I reached for the driver’s side door beside him but he screamed before I could pull the handle.

‘Don’t!’ he cried through the glass, hands flat, palms out, surrendered. ‘Don’t touch anything! Look! Look!’

He grabbed a sheet of paper from where it had been stuck with tape to the steering wheel. He pressed the paper against the glass.

The words were handwritten. They read ‘DON’T GET OUT.’





Chapter 62


THEY SAT IN Whitt’s car on the edge of Parramatta Road, the hammering of rain on the roof the only sound they could hear. Though the engine was off, Tox’s hard hands gripped the steering wheel. His head was bent forwards and his jaw set, his eyes focused on the patterns the rain made on the windscreen. Whitt watched him. He could hardly see the man breathing. His own heart hadn’t stopped pounding since they’d stood in the little park inside the university. With the camera in his hands, the sound off, he sat watching the green sedan emerge from the car park driveway at the edge of the footage. There was only a shadow behind the wheel. A pair of white hands pulling the steering wheel sideways calmly, turning the vehicle left towards the science district.

‘It could be nothing,’ Whitt warned. ‘When the lab traces the phone’s serial number they might find it just belongs to some other student. Someone who dumped it there on purpose or dropped it as they were getting out of their car.’

‘ It’s Caitlyn McBeal’s phone,’ Tox insisted. ‘It’s broken because she broke it in the struggle as she was being abducted.’

Whitt sighed.

‘The green sedan,’ he continued. ‘It might just be a student leaving for the day.’

‘It’s the killer,’ Tox said. ‘Leaving with Caitlyn McBeal.’

A search on the green sedan’s registration had found it was stolen. Whitt told himself that didn’t mean anything. Students could drive stolen cars. Buy them, sell them, steal them, trade them – students and old cars had a chequered relationship. It could just have been a coincidence that the sedan was leaving the lot mere moments after Caitlyn was allegedly abducted. As much as he tried to tell himself they were probably onto nothing, Whitt couldn’t help but feel a flutter inside him that maybe that was wrong. When Tox’s phone chimed, the two men grabbed for it at the same time.

‘They’ve got the car,’ Whitt said, motioning for his partner to start the engine. ‘It’s outside the old Pinkerton Hotel. Let’s go.’





Chapter 63


CAITLYN HEARD HIS footsteps near her. Shuffling, despondent, probably relieved that she had finally expired quietly and without mess. He’d won. His game hadn’t been a fast, violent, painful end for her but a drawn-out one, one in which she would have had to actually give up, cell by biological cell, and let death take her. Now he had her remains to leave here or dispose of as he pleased.

His foot against her shoulder, shoving experimentally, once, and then again. She was limp. It wasn’t hard to relax her limbs completely. Just to stay awake was an effort, had been for weeks. She let the darkness take her, little by little.