Chapter 18
Frank
The blackened sausage came off the wire half raw, but I ate it anyway. Cold meat and burnt skin. I chewed slowly, carefully, hoping I didn’t chuck up after it. Three weeks ago, I’d have wolfed it in two bites and gone back for another. Now, I was just trying to keep the damn thing down.
My guts twisted hard halfway through.
I dropped the wire, pressed my good hand flat against my belly, and breathed through my nose. The cave smelled of bat shit and dirt, old smoke from the drum, and the sour reek of my own sweat.
I waited for the spasm to pass.
It did. Just.
I shook four Panadol into my palm and chewed them dry.
Bitter as hell. The chalky paste stuck to the back of my throat, and I had to wash it down with a swallow of warm water from the canteen.
Wished it was rum. But I couldn’t have rum.
Not yet. Not at this hour. The sun wasn’t even high yet, and I’d promised myself I’d hold off till midday at least.
I’d been promising myself the same thing every morning for a week, only to break it by ten.
But today, I needed my gaze clear and my hand steady, even if neither was obeying.
I held my good hand out flat in front of me and watched it shake.
Christ.
I’d woken up at first light with the cancer raging in my kidneys like they were on fucking fire. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Couldn’t get comfortable. Couldn’t do much except sit against the cave wall with the shotgun across my knees and listen to the country wake up outside.
Birds first. Then the bats coming home above me, settling in their stinking clusters at the back of the cave. Then the wind picked up and whistled through the mulga.
No boots. No engines. No Bob.
Just me, the rocks, the bats, and the pain.
I’d started to wonder if I’d called it wrong. Maybe Bob wasn’t coming. Maybe he’d cut his losses and pissed off. Gone to Bali or Thailand or wherever crooked bastards went when their luck ran out.
Maybe I’d die in this cave for nothing.
Ahead of me, through the gap between the boulders at the entrance, a wedge-tail eagle worked a slow circle against the blue. Riding the morning thermals. Patient as my sweet Ingrid had been, before the guilt had gotten to her, that was.
“You’ll get your turn,” I muttered up to the eagle. “Just not yet.”
My voice came out rough and small in the ancient cave.
I leaned my head back against the cool rock and closed my eyes for a moment. Just a moment. Just to rest them. The pain in my kidneys was a damn fist tightening around my middle, squeezing harder with every breath, and I didn’t know how many more days my body could take it.
This body might not last another night.
It might not last ‘til sundown.
Bob better get his fucking ass here soon, so I can get this thing done while I still got the strength to pull a trigger.
The bottle tops jingled.
I snapped my eyes open.
The sharp metallic jingle inside the cave meant something had tripped the fishing line I’d strung between the mulga trees.
I went still.
Damn Panadol was still half-dissolved on my tongue. I couldn’t swallow.
The bottle tops jingled again. Just once. Then nothing.
A roo maybe. Big red could have come down from the ridge looking for shade. Or it could be a feral pig, snouting through the scrub. Bloody pigs were everywhere this year. Or a dingo. Plenty of dingoes out here, too.
Could be any of them.
Could be Bob.
I swallowed the Panadol paste and rolled onto my side. My stitched-up hand stung like a bitch as I pushed off the ground, and I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. I used the pain to focus.
Up. Move. Now.
I scrambled across the cave floor in a half crouch, knees screaming.
The empty service revolver dug into my hip, and the shotgun felt heavier than it should.
I made it to the rock outcrop at the back of the cave that I’d picked out as my fallback the first night.
I dropped to a knee behind it and rested my shoulder against the stone.
My breath sawed in and out of me.
Forty feet of cave stretched between me and the entrance.
The drum sat right in the middle, dead ahead.
Bats hung in their roost behind me, jittering and clicking as always.
The duffel full of cash was against the back wall to my right, zipper open, the bricks of notes stacked inside catching what little light came in from the front.
I braced the shotgun on top of the rock, lined up on the cave mouth.
I waited.
Everything went quiet. The kind of quiet that spelled a fuck-ton of trouble was on the way.
A small sound echoed in. A boot scuffing gravel, or a stone kicked loose somewhere outside. The wrong kind of sound for a roo. Roos didn’t kick things. Pigs didn’t either.
Men did.
My damn heart drummed so hard I couldn’t hear past it. Each thump was its own roar in my ears, drowning out anything else that might’ve come through the gap between the boulders. I forced myself to breathe slow … slow … slow.
It didn’t help.
Come on, you bastard. Come on. Show your face.
If it was Bob, I had him. I’d worked this out a hundred times in the last two days. He’d come through the gap between the boulders, silhouetted against the morning light for half a second, and that half second was all I needed.
If it wasn’t Bob, I’d be putting buckshot into a roo, using up a shell I couldn’t spare, and feeling like an old fool.
I’d take the foolishness.
A long stretch of nothing. Long enough that I started to wonder if I’d dreamed the bottle tops, too, the way I’d dreamed boots on gravel half a dozen times last night.
“I know you’re in there, Frank.”
The blood went out of me.
That voice. That fucking voice. The one that told me to dig a grave fifty years ago, while a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen lay in the dirt at our feet.
The one that laughed at me through cigarette smoke when I’d told him I was gonna marry Edith.
The one that leaned across the desk at his cop shop and told me he’d fixed Kayden’s army application and that I owed him.
Nearly fifty fucking years of hearing that voice and hating every word that came out of his mouth.
I closed my eyes for one beat.
“So, come and get me, asshole,” I called back.
My voice came out steadier than I’d expected. Better than I felt.
Bob laughed. A short, dry bark of a laugh. The evil one. “Figured you’d say that.”
He didn’t come through the gap.
Smart bastard.
A heartbeat of silence followed. Then the crack of a service pistol and a round whined into the cave and clanged into the drum. Hit it square. The metallic note rolled around the rock walls and faded out, and my whole body locked up.
I didn’t fire back. Two boxes of shells and a shotgun were all I had between me and the rest of my life, and I wasn’t burning a shell on a man I couldn’t see.
Boots crunched fast over gravel, then went quiet again. He’d shifted position outside, probably to one of the boulders to the left of the entrance. He knew this cave, too. Knew where to stand to keep me from getting a line on him.
Decades of using this place together. We’d buried bodies and other shit here. We’d camped out here, shooting the breeze, drinking rum, and acting like we liked each other. Decades of him learning every rock and shadow, same as me.
That was about to bite me in the ass.
“You alive, you bastard?” Bob called.
“You won’t kill me that easily.”
Another laugh. This one tighter.
“Where’s my money, Frank?”
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” I smirked. I knew. Just wanted to hear him say it.
“Don’t fuck around. Where’s my damn money?”
“Just took what I earned.”
“Like fuck you did. You took the damn lot.”
What? I went quiet. Let him sweat on the silence.
“I went to the fucking outstation, Frank. Every wall was stripped clean. I know it was you, you bastard.”
My breath hitched. What the hell?
I’d taken one bag full of cash. One. Maybe three hundred grand all up, four if I was lucky. It was all I could carry. I’d patched the wall back up with the same plasterboard, just like I had after every batch I’d nicked.
“Tell me now, Frank, or I’m gonna tear the answer out of you, one body part at a time.”
Who took that cash?
Somebody who knew where to look.
He obviously told someone, ‘cause I sure as hell didn’t.
A laugh burst out of me. Short. Sharp. Hurt like hell coming up, making me wheeze.
“What’s so funny, you old prick?”
“Seems like I’m not your only enemy, Bob.”
His gun went off again.
The round cracked off the rock wall, and a chunk of sandstone the size of a fist exploded outward. Shards rained down on my shoulder and into my hair. A sliver opened up a fresh cut across my ear, and warm blood trickled down my neck.
He’d fired wildly and recklessly. I’d hit a nerve.
I wiped the blood off my ear with the back of my good hand and kept my head down. Time to move.
I’d picked out a second spot the first day I’d gotten here, tucked behind a sandstone shelf about fifteen feet to my left, closer to the back tunnel, with a clean line to the cave mouth and a rock formation between me and any round Bob put through the gap.
It took me four breaths to crawl there with the shotgun cradled in my good arm and my stitched hand screaming every time I put weight on it.
I made it. Settled in. Got the shotgun up on the shelf.
Better angle. Bigger field of view.
A shadow moved on the right side of the entrance.
A man darted from boulder to boulder out the front. Quick, low, but clunky. Not Bob. Bob moved like he had all the time in the world. Whoever this was moved like a kid running across an open paddock at night, hoping nobody shot him in the back.
I caught a glimpse and lost it.
Then he popped up again, edging out from behind the right-hand boulder with a rifle held wrong, holding it like the thing weighed more than he did.
Scrawny. Greasy. Mouth half open.
Ah, hell.
“Ahh, fuck me, Lyle. What the hell are you doin’ here?”