Chapter 32
EVAN
‘Rus? Rus?’
I went up the verandah steps and stopped outside the front door of the ragged little house in the bush, put my shoulder to the wall.
Fry leapt the steps in one bound and arrived beside me.
There was shouting in the distance, but beyond the verandah rail all I could see was blackness.
I’d heard seven gunshots inside the house, rifle and pistol.
Now there was a silence so thick it made my ears ring.
‘Russell!’
‘Yeah,’ my brother said from somewhere at the back of the house. Fry let out a short but heavy sigh of relief. ‘He’s down. I’m coming in through the back door.’
‘We’re at the front,’ I said. I kept an eye through a glass panel in the front door on what looked to be a kitchen.
Garbage bags, plastic tubs filled with items, a dead brown plant sagging over the edges of a pot, dry leaves curled around the rim like witchy fingers.
Russell appeared in the doorway, paused, looking through it into another room.
He was covered in blood from head to foot, a bright red mask of it, forearms running long streams that dripped off his fingers.
The nice white business shirt was filthy with sweat and blood and dirt.
I was fairly bloody myself from pushing through the blackberry, but nothing like this.
He looked like a horror-movie extra, turning his fierce, adrenaline-pumped eyes on me as he opened the unlocked front door and I came into the house.
‘Why the hell did you come onto the property?’ Russell shook his head at me. ‘I thought I must have clipped you when I heard your voice out there.’
‘You were pretty close.’ I showed him the tear in the shoulder of my T-shirt.
‘I thought you were him.’ Russell’s voice was intensifying. ‘I could have—’
‘Don’t leap down my throat too fast.’ I put a hand up. ‘You went in long before I did.’
‘I was following that pudding-brained, cretinous gastropod Louis Dodge,’ Russell said, turning to Fry in a way that made the smaller officer wince.
Russell put an arm out and pointed into the dark.
‘He’s off in that direction, lying in the bottom of a hole with a bear trap on his leg.
Go and see if he’s all right, Fry. And if he is all right, bring him here so I can strangle him. ’
‘Yes, sir.’
Fry went off. My brother eyed me for a moment in silence, with blood dripping off his chin onto the front of his shirt, trying to decide, perhaps, whether he should go ahead and re-launch into berating me for coming onto the Branch property anyway.
Then he said, ‘I’m somewhat pleased that you’re not dead right now, Evan. ’
I gasped, clutched at my heart, did a little mock stagger back. ‘My god.’
‘Don’t,’ he warned. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘That’s the nicest thing I think you’ve ever said to me, Russell.’
‘Get in here and look at this place with me.’
‘Who is this new, emotionally vulnerable, deeply sensitive Russell Powder?’
‘Do it quietly,’ he snapped.