Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(79)

It was my Day Zero. I could finally see my brother.

As I walked up the stairs to the porch of Jed’s house, my temples throbbed. I figured I must be getting sick. Just my luck to come down with something the moment I was about to re-enter the fight for my brother’s life. I knocked on the door and a voice inside told me to come in.

There were more advances in Jed’s shack becoming a family home. I looked at the cloth on the table by the window, the newly painted back wall. The tall man was sitting at the far end of the table, shirtless, a pair of checked pyjama pants on his long legs. The muscles in his upper shoulders twisted and tightened visibly beneath his golden-brown skin as he screwed the lid back on a jar of PVC glue. There was a wooden toy on a sheet of newspaper before him. A painted duck with a newly re-attached wing.

The baby was nowhere to be seen. Too early for him yet. I set the small rock on the table carefully so as not to make too much noise. I knew a sleeping baby was a precious thing.

When Jed spoke, his voice was low.

‘What’s all this, then?’ he asked, looking at the rock.

‘This,’ I said, ‘is a ten-gram nugget of solid gold.’

The outer edge of his left eyebrow twitched briefly. Besides that, he gave no indication of emotion. I picked the rock up again and looked at it, rubbed some of the dirt from its exterior and revealed the mustard-yellow metal beneath.

‘There’s a lot of it,’ I said. ‘Last night, Jace Robit and Damien Ponch were killed in an ambush trying to get the last of it. They found a gold deposit in a cave outside Last Chance Valley, and they’ve spent months there extracting the metal in secret and stockpiling it. Two of their friends survived the ambush. A couple of patrol officers picked them up and the men are now in custody, being questioned. The guys estimate they have pulled about two and a half million dollars’ worth of gold out of the cave over the last few months. They were planning to run off with it all. Start again. A new life overseas.’

Jed considered this. We listened to the baby stirring in the next room. After a few seconds the child fell silent again.

‘What’s it got to do with me?’ Jed asked.

‘The cave is on land the government handed back to your family,’ I said. ‘Rightfully, every ounce of the gold that was extracted belongs to you.’

I put the nugget down in front of him. He stared at it, his lips sealed.

‘Two and a half million dollars?’ he asked eventually.

‘It’s a rare find,’ I said. ‘Almost unheard of. There’s probably more in the area that the men were mining. I don’t know about these things. An officer will come out and see you, tell you what’ll happen next.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said.

‘No idea,’ I answered. I walked towards the door. ‘Sell the land to a goldmine. Keep it and mine it yourself. Get rich, buy Last Chance Valley and reduce everything in it to ashes. Buy your niece her own law firm. Throw all the gold they found back into the cave and continue on exactly as you are.’ I laughed. Shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Jed had forgotten all about the gold on the table. He was looking at me in the doorway. I was frozen there. Something was telling me that if I just stayed here inside the threshold, in the cool of this man’s house, everything was going to be OK. This was a safe place.

Jed stood, and his expression made the torn feeling in me all the more real. He looked sad to see me go.

‘You don’t look right,’ he said. ‘Come back in and sit down.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go.’

The baby boy in the other room started crying. We ignored it, watching each other, both wanting to speak. But there was nothing more to say. I made a choice. Perhaps the wrong choice.

I turned and left.





Chapter 129


REGAN SHIFTED IN the driver’s seat. His wet clothes were sticking to the seat cover, the heat of his body fogging the windows. He had almost passed out in the darkness behind the service station as he sat binding the gunshot wounds in his shoulder and stomach, shoving wadded fabric he’d ripped from a blanket in the back of the car into the blood-soaked flesh. He’d tied pieces of the thin blanket awkwardly in a loop under his arm and around his neck, rolled it tight around his gut. The dizziness, the pain didn’t matter. He needed to keep ahead of the roadblocks before they came into place. He’d go to ground later and think about getting his wounds treated. One step at a time. He’d survive. He always survived.

Getting away from the officer in the water had been easier than Regan imagined. He’d felt the impact of the bullets and fallen into the waves, and in the confusion, the rushing people and the bouncing lights, he’d simply slipped away. Dived low, come up shallow, dived again. Let the sucking current take him.

The swirling panic he’d felt as he crawled out of the river on the opposite bank to the police had reminded him of that night long ago. The last time he saw Sam.

It had been a starless night. Low clouds slithering across the sky above the tops of the black pines, reflecting the dull orange glow of the power station. It was almost as though no time had passed at all. He’d been seventeen years old. Sam about the same. Two idiot teens walking in the dark together, talking over each other, trying to get through it all, everything that had passed in the time they’d been separated. There had been so much to say.