The tension crackled and jumped between the two men as if the air were filled with goong den, dancing shrimp. Jimmy Jack kept telling Rick to pull over and swap seats so he could drive and Rick kept on refusing. Jimmy Jack shouted something and Rick swore back. Rick turned and yelled at the girls to shut up. His eyes were netted with red veins, his pupils wide as satellite dishes. No one had said a word.
Jimmy Jack raked through the bag at his feet and produced his mobile phone. ‘Pull over now fucker, or I’ll call the Mamasan, tell her what an arse-wipe you are.’
He’d already called the Mamasan, several hours ago; Mai knew that, she’d heard him talking to her on his mobile phone during their last stop.
‘Don’t be a jerk, JJ. She just wants us there fast, doesn’t give a flying fuck how,’ Rick said.
‘We won’t be getting there at all at this rate.’
‘And we’ll be arriving a day late with you driving like a grey nomad—what’ll the Mamasan say when she finds out she’s lost a day’s income?’ Grey nomad was the name the men gave to the old people who towed caravans and held up traffic. Mai had heard them say the phrase a lot since the beginning of the journey and it was usually accompanied by much swearing.
To prove his point, Rick surged forward, almost nudging the caravan crawling up the road in front of them. Leaning on the horn, he swung into the middle of the road to overtake, only just missing the gravelly shoulder and deep drop on the other side.
Jimmy Jack swore, the girls behind screamed. The open road stretched before them once more across the desert, smooth, straight and empty. Rick laughed and turned to them. ‘Scared youse, did I, girls? Don’t worry little darlings, you’re in safe hands with Uncle Rick.’
With disgust, Jimmy Jack threw his phone to the floor of the bus. ‘Out of fucking range. Pull over arsehole,’ he said. He put his knife to Rick’s throat and buried the blade in his beard, stopping just before it reached skin. Mai’s stomach lurched. Pepped up with speed, she knew Rick’s reactions would be unpredictable at best.
‘You’re a pussy, JJ, you wouldn’t dare,’ Rick growled, keeping his bleary eyes fixed on the road ahead.
Mai leaned over and placed her hand upon Jimmy Jack’s shoulder. It was all very well for her to dream about doing this herself, but JJ doing it now was a crazy idea. With her other hand she covered his on the knife and carefully tried to ease the blade from Rick’s throat. ‘Please...’
Jimmy Jack shrugged her off, swore and kept his grip tight upon the knife.
Rick slammed a heavy foot onto the accelerator. The sudden jolt of speed made Jimmy Jack drop the knife and lunge with both hands for the dashboard.
‘You want me to pull over, JJ?’ Rick shouted as he gave the wheel a sharp left turn. ‘You got it!’ The bus careered off the road, smashed through the safety barriers and commenced a flight path across a deep ravine.
Everyone screamed. For several seconds they flew through the air.
Hung there.
And then they dropped.
They hit the ground, catapulted around the bus in a tangle of arms and legs, loose luggage and shattered glass. Mai’s head hit the roof of the bus. Something slammed into her leg. The snap of bone, jarring pain, she felt as if her leg had shattered into sharp splinters. Her screams joined those of the others as the bus rolled into darkness. (Image 25.1)
Image 25.1
SATURDAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Stevie gritted her teeth against the pain in her shoulder as Monty pulled her into a hug. She speared her fingers up his neck and into his russet hair and massaged his scalp in the way he liked. They stayed like that for some time until she felt the cold begin to leave her bones. As he continued to hold her she marvelled how almost everything that was precious in her life came from this man: Izzy, the life they shared as a family. The house didn’t matter. What mattered was that Monty had pulled through the operation and within a few months he would be as good as, if not better than before his health problems had started.
‘Are we going to have to start all over again?’ Monty asked.
Stevie avoided the soft brown eyes that seemed to stare straight through her. Pressing her cheek into his neck she breathed his scent, surprisingly untarnished by hospital odours. ‘I don’t know, Mont, I really don’t know.’ Who gives a stuff about bricks and mortar? she said to herself. It was only a house. She would not read anything more into it.
Nevertheless she’d still not told him about the explosion or her trip to the emergency department, only told him about the fire, what she’d told her mother and Izzy too.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said when they finally pulled apart. ‘I should have taken that first electrician’s quote instead of farting around for the cheapest. If I wasn’t such a tight-arse the wiring would all be done by now.’
Stevie forced a smile. ‘You’re a Scot. You recycle dental floss.’
‘How’s Izz taking it?’
‘She’s furious, blames me because we weren’t there when it happened. If we were, she thinks we could have put the fire out and saved your fish, our computers, her toys—she doesn’t give a stuff about anything else.’
‘Thank God you weren’t there.’ He hesitated, unusual for him. ‘I don’t seem to have much luck with fish do I?’ His last fish had been ‘murdered’ a couple of years ago by a couple of thugs who’d broken into his flat. ‘Maybe I should find a new hobby.’
She knew he felt the same as she did about their house. The flippant comment, meant to trivialise their predicament, was contradicted by a look in his eyes she couldn’t meet. Was he thinking about their relationship too?
Surely not practical, pragmatic Monty.
She slipped off the bed and kissed his cheek. ‘I can’t stay. I need to get to Dot’s for a shower and a rest before meetings with the architect, the engineer and the insurance guy.’ And the arson squad, and Inspector Veitch and Angus, and... She wondered when this nightmare would end.
So much for the best laid plans: Stevie headed toward the MCI car yard, having only minutes ago been torn from Dot’s soft spare bed by the trilling of her phone. Col hadn’t said much; only that she was to meet him, Fowler and Tony Pruitt asap. Her stiff shoulder objected with every turn of the wheel as she pulled into a parking spot. Pushing through the unlocked gate, she found the men grouped around the battered remains of a Nissan minibus.
‘Sorry to get you out of bed, heard you had a hard night,’ Col said as she approached. ‘But I thought there’d be even more trouble if I didn’t call you about this.’
Stevie nodded a greeting to Pruitt and Fowler. ‘What’s all this about, Col?’
‘A horror bus crash south of Newman—six dead and two in the ICU, brought down here by Flying Doctor. No one was wearing seatbelts.’
Stevie regarded the concertinaed hunk of metal and wondered how anyone could have survived at all. ‘You got this wreck down to Perth quickly—when did it happen?’