Harry lifted my right arm, which ached from being stretched backward for so long. He slipped his left arm around my back, his hand beneath my armpit.
Kelly shoved Harry in the back with the barrel of the gun and we started off slowly into the dark, following the bouncing ball of light cast by Kelly’s torch. I leaned heavily on Harry, hopping on my left leg. He didn’t complain.
I tried to find a flat place for my foot to land each time I hopped but the track was narrow and rough and in the middle of it was a tiny stream, ten centimetres wide, rushing downhill. I could see the bandage on my knee lit from behind. It was soaked in blood. Not just a patch like before. The whole thing was drenched, dark and wet. I needed a doctor. But if Mick Kelly did what I imagined he was going to do, I wouldn’t have to worry about a doctor.
He led us down the track, further from safety with every step. Not that there was safety in a crooked cop’s car, on an unsealed bush road in the middle of nowhere after midnight. I tried to transform the anxiety rising in my chest into clear thinking. Maybe Harry really did have a plan. He had to have a plan. He had been in dangerous situations before and he was still alive. He was known for putting himself in the line of fire to get the story. I wondered if he had experienced anything like this before.
Kelly coughed, made a throaty hoik sound and spat. He took two quick sprays of his asthma puffer as we continued down the track. Harry’s rib cage bumped against mine and he breathed heavily under the weight of me. I waited for him to whisper something, a plan of some kind, but that didn’t happen.
I listened for a river or a creek at the bottom of the gully but the air was filled with frog chorus and the rustle of wind-blown trees. The track became rougher now, rockier, steeper. Water seemed to rush in from both sides forming a wider stream beneath our feet. Does he know where he’s taking us or is he making this up as he goes? Has he been here before? Has he planned this? The idea that Kelly had thought this through, had pre-meditated it with the precision of a high-ranking police officer flooded me in muddy panic. He had done this alone. Maybe he was the only other person in the world who knew where we were.
The bones in my left foot began to freeze as water soaked through my sneakers. Prickly plants and sapling branches scratched and scraped me now and I yowled quietly when a sharp rock poked through the toe of my shoe.
We weaved our way down for another ten minutes over rocks and roots until we came out of the trees and there was a vast, open clearing on our right and trees on our left. Intense, buffeting wind hit me hard in the face.
‘Stop,’ Kelly said, wheezing. Another round of chunky coughing.
I looked down and I could make out the three gently glowing stripes on each side of my sneakers and the rough texture of the sandstone beneath me. Two or three metres beyond that, the rock seemed to disappear and there was blackness, lots of it. We were not standing in a clearing. We were on the edge of a cliff.
THIRTY-THREE
SILENT PRAYER
I’m not ready to die, I thought. I have things I want to do. Like turn fourteen, because thirteen wasn’t working out as well as I might have hoped.
I looked out across the sea of black to the horizon where a small patch of low cloud glowed pink. The city? I wished I was back there. If I had stayed in the police station, at least there would have been other officers around. Kelly couldn’t have done anything. I had been safe. If I hadn’t freaked out and run, I would have been okay. Instead, we were out here in the shivering wild with him.
Kelly took another two hits on his asthma puffer. What if he made us walk the plank and we fell and animals and insects picked our flesh until there was nothing left? What if a bushwalker stumbled across our bones in three or five years’ time? Forensic experts might identify us if we were lucky. I had seen and read stories just like this. I was fascinated by lost bushwalker stories. But Harry and I were not lost bushwalkers. And this was no accident.
I felt like bawling my eyes out but instead I closed them and breathed slowly, deeply, calming my mind. Margo, my coach, would have been proud. I tried to imagine my anger and fear passing like clouds. Those feelings would do me no good at this point. ‘Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured,’ Margo told me almost every week, quoting the guy who wrote Huckleberry Finn. Fear was the same, I figured. It could only hurt me. I stayed like this, breathing in and out, and the cold and wind and rain and anger and fear seemed to ease. I sent out a silent prayer of love to my mum and Harry and Magic and one to the universe for a miracle.
That’s when I heard the sound of a car engine on the road above us. There was no mistaking it this time. It was up on the road we’d driven in on – quiet, not speeding, then the engine was killed a moment later. Kelly switched off his torch and craned his neck, listening.
I thought of a line they always used in Crime Smashers: ‘We’ve got company.’
‘Stay here,’ Kelly whispered and I heard a distinct ‘click’ from his weapon. I wondered if he’d taken the safety off. Was that how it sounded? ‘Don’t take a single step.’
He moved quietly away from us, back across the sandstone shelf towards the bottom of the track. He walked slowly, steadily, into the dark until I couldn’t see him any more.
Whoever had driven down that road was not someone he had expected. This was good for us, but who was it? Scarlet and her mother? Scarlet was the only person who knew I was in trouble. But how would they have followed us all the way out here without being seen by Kelly?
Can you come get me now? I’m in trouble.
They were the last words I had texted to Mum.
I’ll come right now, she had said. Getting in car. Please text me back so I know you’re okay.
But I didn’t. And I’m not. She would be at Harry’s now. Maybe she drove right past us. I had never in my life wanted so badly to see her.
‘Sam,’ my father whispered, close enough to my ear that I could feel his breath but still only just loud enough to be heard.
‘Yes.’
‘We’re going to run.’
‘What about–’
‘We don’t have a choice. If we stay here, someone’s going to get hurt.’
‘Okay,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘Who do you think was in that car?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know, but obviously he doesn’t either, which is good. We’re on the edge of a steep drop, so be careful. We’re going to slip across into the tree line there when I say.’
I turned and saw that the line of trees began about four or five metres back from the cliff edge. Its tall, sinister outline was even blacker than the sky.
‘Okay,’ I whispered, not knowing if I should act brave or say the next thing on my mind. ‘I’m scared.’
‘Me too,’ Harry said, his eyes trained on the dead dark void to our left that had swallowed Kelly moments before.
I wanted to cry or puke. It was one thing to be scared yourself but when your father, a crime reporter and your hero, whispers to you that he is scared while being held captive by an armed and dangerous man on the edge of a cliff in the middle of the night, it feels like the end of the world.
Can I outrun Kelly? I wondered. I couldn’t run, let alone outrun. I could hop, but I was fairly sure that I couldn’t hop faster than a police officer, even an outrageously overweight one. And I certainly couldn’t hop faster than a speeding bullet.