Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(49)

The woman on the game show was up to a hundred thousand dollars. A heat rash was creeping up her neck and cheeks. She wiped at her eyes, breathless. Kash watched her.

‘From then on, that’s how I saw it,’ he said. ‘I thought there were evil people, demons, walking around on the Earth, plotting to open up the ground and unleash their world on us. I had to fight them. Because if I didn’t fight them, what was the point of it all? I dropped everything. I went after them. I devoted my life. It was like my wife and my job and my family and my friends had never existed. I had a clear mission, with clear enemies, and that was all that mattered. And then last night …’

He seemed to drift away. I waited.

‘Yesterday I was right back where it all started. Feeling the blast. The pressure wave. Staring at the flames.’

‘It’s not …’ I struggled to find the words. ‘That time hasn’t been wasted. You’ve fought a good fight. There’s no way of knowing how many lives you’ve saved through your work.’

‘But I wanted to put a stop to the badness,’ he said. ‘In my mind, it would have all been over by now. There would be an end, and everything I had sacrificed would have been worth it. But badness is everywhere. There’s a little bit of hell on Earth, and you never know when you’re going to see it next.’





Chapter 74


‘TALK TO TENACITY,’ I said. I reached over and grabbed his hand. ‘Call her.’

We watched as the woman on the screen battled her emotions, trying to decide whether to risk her hundred grand for what was hidden inside the last briefcase. She was pulling on her neck, tugging her ears down, the weight of the decision seeming to physically force her downwards. She picked the mystery briefcase. Animated sad clown faces flitted and flashed across the screen as a ten-dollar note was revealed, taped to a board on the inside of the case.

Kash took out his phone and left me watching the woman crying on the screen.

Hell on Earth. I’d seen slivers of that place myself, seen its flames flicker in the eyes of bad men I’d sat across from in the interrogation room, listening to them confess their crimes. I’d seen evil intentions in the eyes of foster fathers who’d welcomed my brother and me into their damp, cluttered homes, television light glaring on the walls, the blank faces of other abandoned children peering from shadowed corners. I understood the realisation Kash had experienced as he stood watching Zac Taby’s body burn in the driver’s seat of Snale’s car, a decade and a half after he’d watched his friends burn among the remains of dozens of others on a terrible night in Kuta. Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in this job, to think that you’re getting on top of evil. That in some wonderful distant future there will be no terrorists. No killers. No rapists and fiends. A dream like that is worth sacrificing everything for. Love. Friends. Marriage. Kids. It seems worth the fight.

And then you realise that no matter what you throw on the flames, they keep on burning, mighty and unquenchable. The fight would in fact be eternal. Like Kash, I’d given my life over to my job. I breathed it. I obsessed over it, nurtured it, the way I should perhaps have been nurturing friendships, relationships, maybe children. That sort of stuff hardly occurred to me. And yet it was all other people lived for. Was that what had so strangely drawn me to the baby in Jed Chatt’s arms? I’d defied logic, crept close to a man who’d only minutes before held a gun on me, so that I could see a child’s eyes. Was something inside me whispering of things I was losing because I refused to believe the world needed to be as bad as it was?

Kash had lost his wife because of his commitment to the eternal fight. He needed to get her back.

I lay in the hospital bed and held my broken arm against my chest and wondered if I’d be happier if I stopped fighting.

I pulled out my IV, pushed aside the blankets and started untying my hospital gown. Two nurses were standing just outside my cubicle, chatting at the counter. As I tied my shoelaces, they wandered on. I snuck past them and made for the car park.

Fighting was all I was good at. I couldn’t stop now.





Chapter 75


KASH WAS STANDING by a police cruiser loaned from White Cliffs to get us home. He was leaning on the driver’s side door, talking gently into the phone. He straightened as he saw me.

‘My partner’s here,’ he told the caller. ‘I gotta go. Love you, too.’

‘Love you too, huh?’ I said.

‘Force of habit.’ He watched me approach. ‘But it’s the first time in a long time there were no raised voices. I’m assuming the nurses have not signed your official release.’

‘They have not,’ I said. ‘So let’s quit the small talk and get out of here.’

On the road in the darkness, the cruiser sailed over the asphalt between oceans of featureless desert sand. The sun was just beginning to light the horizon. I looked at my phone. There was a text from my mother telling me she’d got the money I’d transferred. No mention of her disappointment that it was not in cash. A call came through as I was looking at the screen. It was an unfamiliar number. I answered with trembling fingers.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Tox.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Tox was notoriously difficult to get on the phone, and even harder to converse with once the connection was made. His already-poor people skills seemed halved by the distance. My heart sank. ‘What’s happened?’