Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(33)

My face was burning. I tried to focus on the road.

‘Well, you listen to me, Harriet Blue,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if you have to chain him to the front fence of the town hall. You keep him out there as long as you can. I need a break, you understand?’

‘A break from what?’

‘ From feeling like I’m going to get held hostage every time I walk into a bloody airport!’ She was ranting now. ‘From looking at every person on the bus like their bag might be packed with explosives! From waking up every morning to Voice of the Caliphate on the radio, copies of jihadi recruitment magazines spread all over the kitchen table! My friends think he’s a fucking nutcase. Elliot’s obsession with Islamic terrorism is driving me nuts. I thought I had problems.’

‘Well, it’s his job,’ I reasoned. ‘I mean –’

‘It’s not his job,’ she snapped. ‘It’s his life. When I met Ell he was a laid-back surfer type. He was a bricklayer. Hard hands. Brown as a nut. Then everything changed. He went to Bali on a surfing trip with four of his mates and they all went to the Sari Club on the first night.’

My heart sank. I knew where this was going. In 2002, two hundred and two people, including eighty-eight Australians, had been killed by a suicide bombing in Kuta conducted by an Islamic terrorist group called Jemaah Islamiyah. One of the bombs had gone off outside the Sari Club, which was full of tourists having a good time.

‘Three of his friends died that night,’ she said. ‘The fourth died in hospital the next day. Elliot applied for a fast-track uni degree two weeks later. International relations, security major. Before I knew it he was interviewing for position with ASIO. And ever since then it’s been this.’ I imagined her standing in her kitchen gesturing angrily around the countertops laden with stacks of books and papers, aerial shots of tiny Afghan villages. ‘I can’t keep doing this. Elliot is not going to stop terrorism all by himself. He’s going to end up as their next victim, by destroying everything and everyone he loves with his fixation.’





Chapter 45


I’D TURNED OFF the highway onto the faint tyre tracks in the hard earth that led towards the scary old man’s house. The land was sparsely populated here with spiky desert plants. Inhospitable brush led to distant clumps of trees dotting the horizon like approaching armies, shimmering in the heat. Last Chance Valley seemed like an oasis compared with this endless dead zone of shadowed valleys and hazardous cliffs. There were no landmarks to guide the wanderer. Mobs of grey kangaroos lounged in the minimal shade, eyeing the car as I passed.

Snale had briefed me on Jed Chatt while she stood over the dining room table, marking out the tiny speck that was his house on his vast property in the empty space west of Last Chance. There had been a dispute between Jed’s people and Dez’s nearly two hundred years earlier, apparently over land within the valley that both parties seemed to want. Snale didn’t know much more about it than that, but she told me that the resentment ran deep. Jed hardly came into the town at all, but when he did people shied away from him. He would be dependent on Dez for his mail services, and on the town for his food and supplies, the occasional visits of fly-in, fly-out doctors and dentists. Jed seemed like a hovering black eagle, the townspeople in the valley uneasy mice.

The house sat perched on the side of a low hill facing back towards the valley, only the gentle slope of Last Chance Valley’s crumbly ridge visible in the distance. I got out at the bottom of the hill and looked up towards the property, saw no one. The place was very bare, functional. Shutters closed against the raging sun. A porch that hadn’t been painted in years. There was a small awning where a person might host barbecues, but there were no chairs suggesting anyone ever did. Instead the thing stood rusted, propped up on sandstone blocks. There was a collection of rusty gas bottles under one table.

I walked up onto the porch. Jed was sitting so still that I must have stood in his presence for a good twenty seconds before I noticed him. The man lounged in an old mustard-coloured armchair in the shade of a floral sheet nailed to the rafters, a makeshift screen trying and failing to block the sun. I was wandering along when I noticed him, the gun in his hand trained on me.





Chapter 46


‘THAT’S FAR ENOUGH,’ the man said.

I’d expected someone older, more decrepit looking. But Jed Chatt wouldn’t have been sixty, or if he was, he carried it well. Even from the way he sat, I could see he was a tall, slender man with broad shoulders and strong arms. Black curly hair streaked with grey, dark brown skin. The sawn-off shotgun sitting along his leg was a well-oiled thing with a duct-taped handle.

I put my hands out slightly from my sides, froze with one foot out, the heel up, mid-step.

‘I’m a cop,’ I said.

‘I thought so.’ He nodded to a huge rifle sitting on a table to his left, pointed at my car. There was a long scope mounted on it. ‘I had you in my sights not long after you turned off the highway. Saw you talking while you drove.’

I glanced towards the road.

‘I figured you were either a crazy person talking to yourself, or a sane person talking on a phone. The only person out here

so stressed they’ve got to talk and drive at the same time would be a cop.’

‘Good guess,’ I said. ‘Now put the gun down.’