Scarlet flung the door wide. I felt fresh, cool air hit my nostrils. The fluorescent light blinded me after so long in the dark. Scarlet headed for the stairs to the sixth floor.
‘Come!’ she called.
But I knew I couldn’t make it up the stairs fast enough and running up there would mean being trapped in the building. He would follow me, not Scarlet. I had to go down, had to get outside. I could hear the enormous man’s feet lumbering across the apartment already. I thought of the lift for a split-second but it would be slow, a deathtrap.
‘Take Magic,’ I said, pressing the collar into her hand.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Run!’ I said, taking my crutches in my right hand, the dark timber banister in my left, and launching myself down the first three stairs. I landed on my left foot, feeling the deep impact in my ankle, jarring my knee hard, but my body quickly wrapped the pain in an adrenaline bandage and I hopped down to the first landing. The stairs snaked their way down next to the lift. Two flights for each storey. Ten flights to the bottom. I had to keep moving.
I looked up and saw Scarlet’s hand sliding up the banister as she ran.
I leapt down five steps and then another three to the next landing. I caught a blurred glimpse of Mick Kelly coming down the stairs after me, blood smeared across his wide face from Scarlet hitting him with the crutch. He was not in uniform. This was not official police business. He did not deserve to be a police officer.
It made me so angry I felt sparks fly up from my chest and into my brain. The anger drove me on and down the stairs. He would get what he deserved. I would make sure of it.
I hopped across the landing to the top of the next set of stairs, clutched the banister and made two giant leaps down to the fourth floor. Every time I landed I felt the two phones in my shorts pockets, Scarlet’s and mine. Damn. I’d pocketed hers when we’d run for the bathroom.
I saw a fire alarm button behind glass. I tried to stab it with the rubber end of my crutch, but missed and hit the wall. I stabbed again, got it this time, smashing the glass and hitting the button squarely, but no alarm sounded. I pressed the button with my thumb but, again, nothing happened. So I hopped across to the next set of stairs, knowing that I had wasted precious time.
He’s going to get me, I thought. He’s going to get me.
But people would hear the noise of our chase. They would come to their doors. They would know that Kelly was a bad man, chasing a child at midnight.
I jumped and landed hard on my working leg over and over again. Down, down, down, leaping and jarring the staples in my right knee, crunching the cartilage in my left, my foot screaming from the recent attack by the flying elephant. Third floor, then second.
Kelly was halfway down the same set of stairs as me now. I could feel the dark shape of him looming. He was big and slow but I, with my stupid leg, was slower. My breath burned in my chest and sweat spilt from every pore. The sparks of anger were a fire inside now, burning me up and blending with fear to make molten lava. I made it to the first-floor landing, hopped across and launched myself down towards the foyer.
He was three steps behind as I swung myself around the banister onto the final flight. I could see the front door and freedom. I breathed hard, feeling broken. Mick Kelly reached for me and I jabbed the feet of my crutches back at him, stabbing him in the hip, shoving him off balance. I felt such panic that, rather than leaping three or five steps, I made the split-second decision to leap down all eight steps at once. If I could land on my feet, I would almost certainly get away.
I jumped. A strangled ‘Gah!’ escaped my mouth. I swam through the air, spinning my arms for balance like a long-jumper. I realised that I was going to overshoot the end of the stairs. It would be a crash-landing. I had brought this on myself – this fall, this end. Another poor decision.
I hit hard and stopped dead. Blunt pain shot through my feet and calves, into my shins and knees. My hips and back jarred and my spine seemed to collapse like a domino run, each small bone colliding with the one above it. The pain split me in two.
I tried to roll and absorb the forward motion but I fell on my shoulder, flipped, then slammed the front door with the soles of my sneakers with such force that the safety glass shattered, raining down on my legs and torso.
I couldn’t move. I saw the brown-yellow of timber and foyer light above me and felt the pain, complete and deadening. Then there was the shape of Mick Kelly standing over me, shoulders heaving with exertion.
Mum always told me, ‘If you’re in trouble, make sure you never get taken to a second location. If someone grabs you, scream your lungs out, fight, let everyone know you need help. If you’re taken to another, more private place, that’s where bad things can happen.’
So I screamed my lungs out. It sounded to me, in my dazed state, like my scream was coming from someone else. I was pretty sure that screaming for help was not in ‘Harry Garner’s Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’, but none of that mattered now.
I tried to sit up but, before I could, a gloved hand fit roughly across my face. It was clutching something moist and chemical-smelling. I saw his sickly, white, golf-ball-dimpled face and double chin in close-up. He pressed that wet cloth hard over my mouth and nose. I tried to turn my head, to shake off his hand, to hold my breath, but I had no choice but to inhale. His other hand grabbed the front of my shirt and I was dragged out the front door, down the stairs onto the wet street, into the sharp night air, my heels kicking behind me as I faded away.
THIRTY-ONE
BOOT
I woke cold, with a dead-dry mouth and tongue, the smell of fuel and the roar of an engine all around me. My arms and legs and torso itched all over. I tried to sit up and smashed my head hard on metal, then fell back down. Pain ripped at my skull. I went to rub it but my hands were bent back behind me, tied with what felt like a thin wire or strap.
I was in the boot of a car. It slowed abruptly and I slid forwards and smashed my shoulder on something hard and sharp behind the back seat. The car took a left over rougher ground. My tailbone was now jammed against the wheel well. I could feel dirt or mud and rocks pinging up and hitting the metal, vibrating right through me. The back of the car went into a slide as though it was about to spin before the wheels gripped again and we sped forward.
I tried to drink in details. The smell of fuel and old, wet carpet and burnt brake pads. The deep snarl of the V8 engine. It had to be a V8, like my Uncle Chris’s Monaro that he only drove on weekends and that Mum said was a ‘total bogan-mobile’. On the right side, the rear lights made my feet and legs glow red. My feet felt wet, too. A steady stream of water leaked through a crack in the boot. Rain drummed loud and heavy above me.
The dirt road was filled with rough bumps and ruts. Through the engine noise I could hear the familiar guitar and vocal of the Rolling Stones song ‘Brown Sugar’ on the stereo. One of Mum’s favourites. It made me long for home, where I was safe and bored and angry. I made a vow that if I survived this, I would never be angry again. Boredom beat fear any day.
My head felt heavy and my eyes burnt hot. I had never been in a car boot before. I wondered how long I’d been unconscious. Unconscious, I thought. He had done something to me. Chloroform – was that what Mick Kelly had used on me? I’d looked it up when I was writing Harry Garner: Crime Reporter #2: The Case of the Human Skull and I read that it could take a few minutes to subdue someone with chloroform, so maybe not.