Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(8)

Snale drove us over the edge of the crater and down towards its depths. I looked up at the other edge of the valley, rocky and pointed against the burnt-orange light.

And as I looked across the crater I saw the explosion.

The sound it made took seconds to reach us across the distance. A bass thump I felt in the centre of my chest.

The sky lit up with a fireball directly across from us, on the steep rise.

‘Oh my God!’ Snale swerved, gripping the wheel.

I shoved the papers aside and sat bolt upright. ‘Get there. Get there now!’





Chapter 11


THE EXPLOSION ON the other side of the town seemed to have ignited the brush there in flames. I kept my eyes on the dim glow as we raced up the main street and between the fields beyond. Small houses. Fences. Snale’s jaw was set. She squinted at the dark rise before us.

‘Might have been kids with fireworks,’ she murmured. ‘The kids around here, they’re pretty feral.’

‘Those are some pretty big fireworks,’ I said.

We took the winding road up the slope at a roaring pace. I gripped the door of the vehicle as Snale took the corners. Country driver. She’d been taking these roads at breakneck speed since girlhood.

We could smell the blast zone from the side of the road as we parked. Snale was no athlete but she bounded into the bush ahead of me, agile as a rabbit, her gun drawn. I had no torch, but followed the bouncing white light of hers, razor-sharp desert plants slicing at my jeans. The fire was burning itself out in the tough grass and the oily leaves of the eucalypts above us.

The smoke seared my eyes. We split up. I almost tripped over a plastic chair, or what remained of it. Three of its metal legs were buried in the dirt, and the back had melted to a black husk, sharp, sticking upwards like a dagger. Snale came back to me, huffing, winding her torch beam across my face, then to where I was crouched, examining the chair.

‘Can I?’ I grabbed the torch and swept it over the chair, found the crater where the bomb had gone off. There were bodily remains here, tangled in the dirt and grass. The blackened and burned slivers of flesh of something or someone blown to bits.

‘Oh no,’ Snale was saying gently, following close behind me. ‘Oh no. Oh no.’

I zeroed in on a shiny object – a hand wheel valve. There were splinters of metal shining in the dust. Entrails, blood everywhere. Hair. An animal? I nudged the valve with my boot, didn’t have evidence bags with me.

‘Propane gas bottle,’ I said.

‘Oh man,’ Snale gave a frightened shudder, taking the torch from me with her cold fingers. ‘Oh maaaaan!’

I followed her. She’d noticed something hanging from a nearby branch, swinging gently in the breeze. It was a man’s hand and forearm, blackened and charred, held there by the remains of a shred of melted duct tape. The tape wrapped around the wrist seemed burned to the flesh.

I was just beginning to wonder how on Earth it was still hanging on when it fell, slapping to the ground at our feet. Snale yelped in terror. She grabbed at me as a new fear rushed through her; the sound of a large vehicle leaving the roadside back near where we’d parked.

We could hear it crashing through the undergrowth towards us.





Chapter 12


DEER HUNTING LIGHTS. Eight of them. They pierced the night around us, blasting through my vision, making me cower behind my arm. It was like an alien ship landing. Snale cocked her weapon, but in seconds she seemed to relax.

‘Oh. It’s only Kash,’ she said. There was a slight upward lilt to her voice, like she’d just been given good news. I was still blinded. I stumbled forwards, grabbing the back of her shirt to guide me through the painfully illuminated blast zone.

‘Jesus, those lights!’

‘Hands up!’ someone bellowed. ‘Identify yourselves!’

‘It’s me!’ Snale put her hands up. I didn’t bother. ‘It’s us. Vicky, and my new friend Harriet.’

I thought ‘friend’ was going a bit far.

An enormous man emerged out of the light like an over-excited dog, a flurry of hard breath and wild gesturing. Incredibly, he had a torch in his hand.

‘Vicky. Right. Have you seen the suspect? Where’s the suspect? Any signs of where he went?’

‘ The what?’ I tried to see his face, glimpsing a chiselled jaw, black curls. ‘What suspect?’

‘You,’ Kash pointed at me, ‘head down the hill and sweep south-east in a standard second-leg search pattern. Snale and I will take south-west. Give it a K, maybe a K and a half. We’ll meet back here in twenty.’

‘A search?’ I yelled. ‘Using what? I’m not sure I’ll ever see again.’

‘Double time! Let’s go!’

The muscled goliath took off into the bush, crashing over plants and shrubs like a tank. I jogged, confused, in the general direction he’d indicated.

There was nothing to indicate that a suspect was on the loose. But the big man in the dark had overcome my decision-making abilities with his barking voice, like a slap to the side of the head. I was annoyed and bristled, but I did what he said. There was no one south or east of the blast zone.

Snale and the big man, Kash, were there when I returned. She was searching the remains again with her torch beam. Kash was standing uselessly with his hands on his hips, looking generally ‘in charge’ of whatever might have been about to happen. In the light of the enormous truck I saw an action-figure body and Clark Kent glasses on a head as square and thick as a sandstone block. When I came back into the light, he walked towards me, hand extended.