Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(6)

She reached out towards me, and I realised a creature was walking up my bicep, an enormous brown grasshopper covered in the patterns of the desert, spots and stripes in red and brown. I didn’t scream. But it wasn’t easy.

Snale plucked the creature from my shirt and tossed it into the wind. It fluttered into the dark.

‘Oh great,’ I said, brushing off the place where the thing had been. ‘This is great.’

‘They bite, but it’s not that painful.’

‘And what exactly will I be working on out here?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Turns out somebody’s planning to kill us all.’





Chapter 10


WE SAT IN the car together and Snale took a package from the glove compartment. It was a notebook secured in a police evidence bag, a sheaf of photocopies, which she handed to me. She started the car but kept the overhead light on so I could read as she drove.

‘A trucker found this diary in a backpack on the side of this highway, at a rest stop.’ She pointed over her shoulder. ‘Back the way we came, about five kilometres. He spotted it sitting there when he stopped to pull a dead roo from his front grille. Brought the diary into town and handed it in to me. It contains detailed analyses of spree killers, weapons, massacre plans. We think someone is, or was, constructing a plan to kill as many people in Last Chance Valley as possible.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two days ago.’

‘And you vetted the truck driver?’

‘Yeah, I let him go.’

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I looked at the photocopied pages before me. My eyes breezed over the tight, small writing and fell upon the hand-drawn images, sketches of a person in a hood running towards fleeing groups of people, mowing them down with a huge rifle. There were diagrams of the layout of the town below, lists of names and addresses. I examined the notebook in the evidence bag, turned it over. Of course, there was no name on it. That’d be too much to hope for.

The thing that struck me immediately about the pages I was looking through was the sheer weight of preparation that the diarist had gone to. Every page was filled on both sides with either illustrations or notes, or with excerpts from books that had been copied and pasted onto some pages. It was all very calm and methodical. Where there were illustrations, they were very well done. More like scenes of war than the macabre scribblings of a maniac. There were photographs of buildings, I assumed areas of the tiny town below us from different angles. This was more than a speculative work. This was serious.

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.