Before It Breaks (47 page)

Clement drove blind. Randomly a branch or other debris would skitter across the road or thump into the body of the car. There were no other vehicles on the road now. Earle was following somewhere at a slower pace. Risely had people looking for Bourke but the storm was pulling numbers out for emergency situations, limiting coverage. Still the major roads out south and east were covered and he had managed to raise a couple of vehicles to man the road at Beagle Bay which meant if Bourke didn't turn off he had about ninety minutes before his road ran out. The isolation Clement felt was intense, were it not for the crackle of the two-way it might have been an apocalyptic dream. He was a submarine searching a fathomless ocean, his quarry could be two hundred metres ahead or kilometres either side, there was no way of knowing. It had about it the feeling of a moment undecided, of a continuing balance and a resultant stasis, of walking the line between life and death. If he had snapped awake and found himself lying in a bed in post-operative care it would not have surprised him. The image of a hospital immediately conjured his father as if they were in this moment linked in some pervasive heartbeat, as if this could have been his father's dream, just as it might have been Peter Bourke's, as if this landscape and all his thoughts belonged to something bigger than him and his tiny life. The experience ended abruptly when a large branch cartwheeled directly into his path. He swung the wheel reflexively and felt the broken wood thud and scrape into the passenger side of the vehicle but the escape manoeuvre was bought at the cost of any control over the vehicle and this time it skidded into a broadside he could not right. The car skated across the opposite side of the road before leaving the slippery bitumen and ploughing into muddy scrub where it eventually came to rest. He sat for a second or two, his beating heart at odds with what still felt like the tail end of a transcendental state. His foot slammed into
the accelerator but the tyres spun impotently, mud churned. Each second meant more bitumen between him and Bourke. He threw the vehicle into reverse and punched down again, urging the rubber to grip. Finally it did, hauling him back out as the rain thumped with the heaviness of banshee fists on the glass. He spun back towards the road and then onto it, at least two more minutes lost. Again he pushed his foot to the floor, gripped the wheel and stared into a river fanning across the windscreen.

How long the next void continued he could not compute, perhaps close to an hour, the two-way his lifeline. The signal varied, sometimes he'd thought transmission lost completely but then Earle would crackle back on. His mind drifted sometimes, to Phoebe then Marilyn and past tensions. He'd followed her once, shadowed her in the best tradition of the KGB. She'd driven to a house and he'd watched from up the street as a man had opened the door and welcomed her in. Clement did not remain to time her stay or see if they'd lit out on some new adventure walking to the car with the easy intimacy of lovers, awkwardness of potential lovers or purposefulness of mere friends. He ran no check on the man. It was her secret.

To reveal what he had done would only condemn him further in her eyes. It cut him she was no longer his. Whether that was love or possessiveness he did not know, semantics wouldn't help but the hurt was true and deep even if none of it made sense.

The orange fuel indicator lit up. He believed that meant he had about twelve k to go before his tank ran dry, a thought that turned him concave until he remembered the cars always carried a spare plastic jerry can of fuel. Running out of fuel on the main road would present a fatal hazard to anybody using it so he was forced to pull over in an area of low scrub. He climbed into the back and found the fuel. It seemed the wind had backed off but it was still ferocious and it took him all his strength to force open the door. The rain continued to bucket, the ground a rice paddy, water to his ankles. Within seconds he was sodden, his slicker threatening to split like a spinnaker. Fortunately the petrol compartment opened with a push, he twisted off the cap and it nearly snapped from the cord holding it. The yellow jerry can bucked in his hands as he fought to shield it with his body. He managed to get the nozzle up and then shove it down into the tank but when it had drained the wind ripped it from his grasp and tore it through the air. It reminded Clement of a James Bond film where the villain was sucked from the plane and
spat into the heavens. He fought to get back into the car, the rain smashing into his skin. He called Earle on the radio as he fired up the car and saw the fuel gauge climb.

‘I haven't caught sight of him. He could have turned off.'

‘So what's the plan?'

‘Let's keep going, see if there's any reports. If he sticks to the main road he'll be stopped at Beagle Bay so we can head to there then work back south.'

If he were Bourke he would push his luck, head to Beagle Bay, then assuming there'd be a roadblock, turn off the main road down a track and try and get around it. He doubted he'd go east into the desert. If he got bogged there he'd be a sitting duck. So it would be towards the coast.

About twenty minutes in, the rain having slipped back another notch, he got a report via the station that an hour earlier emergency personnel had responded to a distress call and picked up some fishermen at a creek about ninety k south of Beagle Bay. As they went to turn back on the main road towards Beagle Bay a silver Rav4 passed them at top speed heading north. They swung out after it and a few clicks on a flat stretch of road just managed to spy the car turning west off the main road.

Clement took the coordinates where that had happened and compared his position. It was about twenty k north of him, a no-man's land of mangroves and crocodiles.

When the big four-wheel drive had pulled out from the side track just after he passed, he presumed it was the police. A moment later during a gap in the torrent across his rear window he picked out Emergency Service stickers but it stood to reason they were acting as scouts for the cops. He had already decided he would have to turn off somewhere before Beagle Bay. There was an indigenous community around there and the police would almost certainly ask the locals to keep an eye out for him. He had to go now. He threw the vehicle off road into the low scrubby bush to the side of the highway, heading west to the water. The car dipped and bit into muddy ground. Like limbs smashed by artillery on a field of war, pieces of foliage, ripped by the gale, spun through the air lashing the windscreen. The tyres spun and slid, gripping and churning. He expected the bigger vehicle to follow but it didn't, or at least so far as he could tell it hadn't for he could see no dim headlights battering their way through the still sheeting rain. Perhaps it was simply an emergency vehicle on patrol?

There was no way this car was going to get him far in these conditions. You needed a big tank of a car up here. But this was where he had been led so he would make the best of it. He had his bow and a knife, water wasn't a problem. Maybe he would find some fishermen, take their tinny. He wasn't done yet. If it came down to killing the detective to secure his freedom, he wasn't sure what he might do. His grandfather had been a policeman murdered in the line of duty and so he was on the cop's side in a lot of ways. On the other hand, it had been a cop who had betrayed his grandfather. This detective had taken his little girl to dinner and that had touched Peter, that was how it could have, should have been with him and his father.

The car dropped, the suspension jolted, his insides were shoved up to his ribs. He'd hit a gully and he thought it was the end of the
line, the little car grunting and digging into mud but then he was up and out of it again and suddenly in bush more dense and dangerous but also offering more coverage from any pursuer.

Once Clement left the road, driving became ridiculous. The steering wheel may as well have been an artefact stuck on for show, for control rested in the grooves and angles of ancient ruts. The tyres were a phrenologist's fingers following suggested paths across the terrain's skull by the lightest touch. All the time the water bucketed. This was only the edge of the cyclone which probably barely qualified as a two and he said his prayers it had been no stronger. His chances of finding Bourke were as remote as the location. He slithered and ground his way into denser bush only too aware that a branch could snap and crush the cab and his life. He endured this serpentine rough-ride trying to make radio contact with Earle but this time it seemed they were incommunicado. The last transmission he'd made was that he was turning off to follow Bourke west towards the mangroves but he could only guess whether this was the same track he'd been seen on. Even if it were, Bourke could have left it. In their last communication Earle had estimated he was twenty minutes behind Clement. He'd had his own dramas with a branch smashing the passenger window. Barely perceptibly the rain had eased, the instant of clarity on the windscreen now a fraction longer although Clement was constantly forced to lean out and rip loose foliage from the wiper blades.

It was dark in this denser part of the bush and that meant an orange light shining ahead at two o'clock was that much brighter and caught his attention instantly. He slowed to a crawl to see it better, a regular flashing pulse, a hazard light maybe.

It was more deeply forested here. Slim trees stood like toothpicks on an hors d'ouvres tray, so that he had to drive across, across, then down when a large enough gap presented. And then there it was. A silver Rav4 stopped at right angles, thirty to fifty metres away. Clement edged forward until he was about ten metres shy
of it, rain and strips of leaf continued to whip through the air. He scanned intently but could see no movement. He killed his engine, checked his pistol and fought his way out of the vehicle, the wind having abated more than Clement had realised. From what he could see the front left fender had smashed into a low stump, probably locking up the wheel. Through the howling wind the hazard light continued to pulse. It was only when he was close enough to the vehicle to see nobody inside it that Clement remembered the trap laid for Arturo Lee. Instinctively he pushed to his left towards the closest cover. An arrow fizzed past him to his right but he saw the blur rather than hearing it over the rain.

‘Don't do this, Peter,' he yelled trying to locate where the shot came from. About three o'clock he thought, but all he could see was misting heavy rain and brush. He doubted Bourke would hear his words beneath the hiss of shaking leaves.

‘There's no way out, Peter. We just want Osterlund, we know who he is and what he did.'

If there was any reply he did not hear it. Was Bourke still waiting or had he taken the opportunity to run? Clement was now in the position of waiting for Earle or pushing on. He should wait, but what if Bourke encountered somebody else with a car or a boat that he thought might win him freedom. Would he hesitate to kill another for the chance of escape?

Behind a thigh-high bush, squatting on one knee, Bourke had held the detective in his sights from the moment he had left the vehicle. The cop's words were inaudible in the wind, so powerful it was impossible to hold the bow steady. Water was pouring into his eyes off his slicker, forcing him to blink constantly. He was aiming for the thigh but as he released the arrow the target suddenly moved left. The policeman took cover. The angle was tight in normal conditions let alone this tempest. The man yelled out again. Bourke thought he heard his name, Peter, but couldn't be sure. He could guess the man was urging him to give up.

Peter was desperate to get away and live the life of which he had the briefest taste, yet how could he? The storm was backing off but even had he found a small dinghy it could not survive the ocean. They would be looking for him at every airport. He had no money, no false papers.

The policeman suddenly broke cover and ran towards him. This was not how it should be. He loosed an arrow and, though it could not actually be possible in the bedlam, he fancied he heard the thud as it struck its target. The policeman half-ran, half-staggered to a thicket before sprawling into ankle-deep water, where he lay still.

Fellow cops who had been shot told Clement it was like being punched by a ball of iron. That was all Clement had as a comparison for being shot by an arrow. And it did feel like a punch but more by a long iron finger than a ball. For the first few strides he was able to power on, aware that some foreign object was stuck inside him, the shaft and tail still protruding from his side, under his right arm near his ribcage he guessed, but no real impediment. But then the rhythm in his stride went wrong like a toddler trying to negotiate a downward slope for the first time, and he was stumbling, unable to straighten. He fell into the water without grace, this was no celebratory touchdown but the humiliation of a fall into muck. He was aware he wasn't breathing so well, he started to feel faint and wondered if he was dying. Because of the arrow he lay slightly on his left, gasping, the water getting colder around him, still splashing with heavy droplets, the gods pissing on him. The leaves above shuffled like the beaters of a cheer squad, he indulged himself with a vision of himself as fallen hero, a generic tombstone and Phoebe and Marilyn sad-eyed in black. He was losing it now, the thought, all thought, it was a fog, he was nothing and nowhere.

Peter had not meant his shot to be lethal, but in this gale control was limited. The policeman was lying there slightly tilting up, inert. It was possible he was foxing. He still had the gun so a direct approach would leave Peter a sitting duck. He could not expect the cop to spare him now. The man was his salvation though. The police vehicle was intact. Perhaps he'd left the keys in the ignition. Bourke decided to circle left around to the car, keeping his bow ready. He stopped every few seconds and glanced back at the prone body. The cop hadn't moved.