It was thirty seconds or so before he straightened and moved on, his heavy boots crunching the ground, steps slow and deliberate, drawing nearer and nearer to our hiding place. He pulled up maybe four metres away and stood dead still. My ears felt hot and I could hear my pulse banging away in them. Surely he could hear it, too. Kelly took a few more steps until he was standing right next to the fallen tree – so close I could have reached out and pulled one of the laces on his black boots. I could almost smell the crooked cop through the thick, raw scent of damp earth. He turned around, facing the other way. He must have known he was close but not how close.
He leaned back against the fallen tree, right where Harry and I had been leaning. The heel of his boot was about twenty centimetres from my face. I breathed so slowly and quietly I started to wonder if I was getting enough oxygen. I could feel Harry’s shoulder pressed against mine and there was an electric current that passed back and forth between us like we were two integral parts of a circuit. I had always dreamt of being this close to my father, working on a case together. This wasn’t quite what I had planned but, pressed in on all sides by the wet, night earth, a fallen tree, a broken police officer and my dad, I almost felt like I knew him. All the chasing and wondering who my dad was and whether he cared about me felt like it had been pointless. Here we were, breathing the same air, connected and stuck, all out of choices, and the mystery of him fell away. We weren’t so different. I’d always wondered who he was but maybe I was really wondering who I am. And in that moment I knew. We were two branches of the same tree. He was part of me and I was part of him. Inseparable. All the anger and fear seemed to fall away.
I sat with this strange feeling for a minute or more before Mick Kelly straightened up, took two more hits on his puffer and moved slowly away from the tree. He started to climb the next steep part of the hill, dissolving into darkness.
Harry and I lay silent and still for another few minutes, my breathing falling into rhythm with his, our arms still pressed together. I turned my head back to him, scraping my nose on the tree again and whispered, ‘Should we go?’
‘Do you think he’s gone?’ Harry asked. ‘I can’t see.’
‘I think so.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do what you said. We’ll go over the tree, head back towards the cliff, find that track.’
I started to slide out and Harry wriggled out after me. I struggled to my feet.
‘Let me go over first,’ Harry muttered, groaning and holding his lower back as he straightened and stood. ‘Then I’ll pull you over. Give me a boost.’
I locked my hands together and he put his left foot between them. I balanced on my left leg and boosted him up onto the tree that had saved our lives. He straddled the wide trunk then reached down for me. He grabbed my wrists and I grabbed his and he pulled hard. I tried to get a foothold but my sneaker skated off the slippery surface. He gripped my wrists tighter, yanked me upwards and, this time, I reached my left leg on top of the fallen tree and grappled my way over. Just as I made it to the top I stopped and listened: heavy footsteps crunching through bush further up the slope.
‘Get down!’ Harry tore me to the ground, slipped his arm around me and we ran as best we could, dodging thin saplings and wide gums, raindrops bombing us from above. Panic coursed through us as I leaned again on the surprising strength of my father’s tired, twisted body. The pain in my right knee beneath the blood-soaked bandage was nuclear, but Kelly was coming. He must have found a way up and around the tree.
We drove forward, on and on, searching for any sign of the track we’d come down but nothing looked familiar. Moments later we came out of the tree line and Harry stopped sharp. A knife-like wind carved through us. We were standing just a metre or two from the cliff edge. We had missed the track somehow. Behind us, slightly further up the hill, Kelly stormed through the undergrowth.
‘Let’s go.’ I pulled Harry but he wouldn’t move.
‘I can’t.’
Kelly’s footsteps were charging diagonally down the hill towards us.
‘Yes, you can.’
‘No. I can’t,’ he said.
‘Please.’
Then Kelly was upon us. He materialised from the darkness, wheezing, exhausted, and pointing the gun directly at us.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE FALL
Mick Kelly clipped me so hard across the face, the side of my head lit up like a firecracker. I was thrown down onto the rough sandstone. My ears rang and my vision danced with tiny, magical specks of white.
Kelly punched Harry in the stomach and I felt it in my own stomach, felt the air evacuate his lungs as he doubled over. Kelly grabbed Harry’s shoulder and straightened him up.
‘Thanks for that,’ Harry said, stifling a cough.
Kelly stood back, pointing the weapon at us. His hand was shaking. His breathing sounded like someone had their hand wrapped around his lungs, squeezing tight. I stood and looked behind me. There was a metre of sandstone before the cliff dropped away into that bottomless chasm below. The wind rushed up, turning my wet clothes to ice. Kelly wiped the rain and sweat off his face with the soaking sleeve of his long white shirt.
You’re not a police officer, I thought.
‘What are you doing, Mick?’ Harry asked.
I wondered how much history there was between them. Has Kelly always hated my dad? Is that what this is about? And what about the other reporter, Merrin?
‘Taking care of business,’ Kelly said.
‘You don’t need to.’
‘You don’t think so?’ Kelly asked.
‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’
This was not a question. Harry was confirming with Kelly, like he knew. Kelly held my dad’s eye.
‘We’ve got video of the whole thing,’ Harry continued. ‘Sam’s not the only one who knows what you did. Silencing us won’t achieve anything.’
Kelly didn’t speak.
‘We’ve looked at the footage,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it, did you? To push him?’
‘Don’t try to be pals with me now.’
‘I haven’t done anything to you,’ Harry said.
‘Outwitted,’ Kelly muttered.
I knew what he meant right away. It was the title of the article my dad had written a few weeks back about cops being outmanoeuvred by young, tech-smart gangs.
‘I know what it’s like to feel like you’re past your use-by date,’ Harry said. ‘I feel the same way but this isn’t–’
‘Every day, one of you guys writes something about how useless we are and it just makes it harder. You’re s’posed to be working with us, not against us.’
‘So you think if you kill the messengers the news will stop flowing? That’s not how it works, Mick.’
There was a sound further up the slope behind Kelly and he swung around to look, shining his torch again for a couple of seconds before snapping it off. He kept his gun trained on us. In Harry Garner: Crime Reporter my dad would have delivered a swift jujitsu chop to the neck and disarmed Kelly.
The sound could have been a loud rain-splat or a possum or bird, I figured. Kelly must have thought the same. He turned back to us. The clouds parted for a moment, making everything silvery-edged. Kelly’s hair shone brightly.
‘Let us go, Mick,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve known you twenty-five years. You’re a good bloke. You pushed him in a struggle. You’ll do some time but it’ll be worse if you follow through with this. They’ll put you away for life.’