Beyond Fear (42 page)

The metal box.

Matt moved to the corner of the verandah, inched his face around. The first thing he saw was the blinding flood of light from the top of the truck. Two huge, mounted spotlights cast a dazzling V of bright, white light that lit up the entire front face of the barn like a stage, leaving everything around it in blackness.

The next thing he saw was one of the Andersons. He was standing near the truck, maybe a metre in front of the left-hand spotlight, just within its arm of light. He was half turned, crouched forward, more back view than side view and from that distance, in the glare, Matt couldn’t tell whether it was Kane or Travis.

The third thing he saw was the box. It was at Anderson’s feet, half of its khaki length clearly visible, the rest lost in the darkness behind the spotlights. It was open, its metal lid tipped back against the truck.

Matt stood slowly, pressing himself against the verandah railing, hoping the height would give him a view inside the chest. It didn’t. Then it didn’t matter.

Anderson shouted, the ‘Fuck you!’ carrying clearly in the cold night air. Matt tensed as the man lunged aggressively into the darkness behind the truck. He heard the distant ping of a stone hitting metal. Then a sound that even at twenty metres away rocked through Matt’s body. A rifle shot.

Matt looked up at the barn. Where was Jodie?

He dropped to his knees again as Anderson moved into the light. The same Anderson. He was holding a gun now. Short stock, long barrel. Unmistakable, even at this distance. It was a Steyr. Standard-issue military rifle. Where had that come from?

Civilians couldn’t buy them. The only way to get one was to steal it.

Travis. The weapons racket. He’d kept one for himself. And now the brothers were armed with a powerful, automatic killing machine.

Where the hell was Jodie?

Matt watched Anderson stride to the barn, the sound of his boots on the parking pad making Matt’s pulse pick up pace. Solid crunches in the gravel this time. No hesitation, no looking over his shoulder. Whatever had just happened, Anderson wasn’t worried about turning his back to it.

Matt looked at the darkness behind the truck and felt fear explode in his head. Who was behind the truck?

How long had it taken Matt to run around the barn, get the tyre iron, land back in the garden? Long enough for Jodie’s tethers to be cut, to make her lift one end of the box and carry it to the truck? Yeah, plenty of time for that.

As Anderson reached the verandah, Matt limped out into the darkness that surrounded the bright V of spotlight. Shot doesn’t mean dead, Matt.

Shot was bad.

It didn’t have to be dead.

Jodie stiffened against the tree trunk as the amplified clap of gunfire rang out. Christ, had Travis shot his brother?

Travis had to be the shooter. He had the pistol tucked into his waistband when the two of them went out with the chest.

She stared at the front window, horror dry in her mouth. Is that what Travis had meant when he said he’d ‘handle’ his brother? What kind of fucked-up, dysfunctional family were they? But the disgust didn’t last long. Big, fat tears welled in her eyes and relief crashed through her.

Kane was handled. Whatever that meant, he wasn’t arguing the point or yelling in pain. So he had to be dead. Or unconscious. Or quietly bleeding to death. She should feel bad about that, but she didn’t. He didn’t deserve her compassion. And right now all she cared about was getting the tape off her wrists, getting Lou and Hannah out of the wardrobe and getting the hell away from this goddamn barn.

She braced her feet around the base of the trunk, dragged back on her wrists, felt the tape pull tight. Come on, tear. Footsteps sounded on the gravel parking pad, thudded onto the front stairs. Travis was coming back to release her. No reason for him to leave in a hurry if Kane was out of the picture. Jodie lifted her eyes to the open door, impatient to see him. Desperate for the night to end.

As his shadow moved into the doorway, Jodie felt a swell of emotion. It was over. In ten seconds, she’d be free. Thirty seconds, she’d have Lou and Hannah out of the wardrobe. A minute and they’d be out of the barn, going home.

Then Kane walked through the door.

38

Matt carried the tyre iron low at his side, took loping strides in a deep arc behind the brilliance of the spotlights. He guessed it was a forty-metre straight run across the front of the barn to the truck. With his detour behind the light, call it sixty. It felt like a marathon.

The clearing in front of the barn was anything but clear. In the dark, it was a minefield of loose rocks, old tree stumps and ankle-breaking divots and he stumbled and struggled to stay upright on his bad knee. The pain was unbelievable – like a hacksaw working off his kneecap, his arm trapped in a fiery vice. The only plus was the stage lighting on the barn. It guided his way, turning the Andersons’ truck and Jodie’s car into sharply defined silhouettes, like late-stayers at a drive-in movie.

Matt ran until he hit the gravel on the parking pad, trod cautiously across the rubble beyond the truck then dropped to the ground, keeping the body of the vehicle between him and the front door. Aside from his own lungs gasping for air, the night was silent. No sound from the truck. No sound from the barn.

He crept closer, eyes straining in the dark. He was at the truck’s rear bumper when he saw the dark shape on the ground. In the grass on the other side. Still, quiet, lifeless.

Matt swallowed hard. Worked down the dread that was trying to climb its way into his throat.

Shot wasn’t dead.

Don’t be dead, Jodie.

The hope that had blossomed inside her shrivelled like a bud in a bushfire. Jodie’s knees buckled.

She was going to die.

It was already a fact. It couldn’t be changed.

Kane had shot his brother. Now he was going to kill her. And she was going to wish she was dead long before her heart stopped beating.

‘We got the place to ourselves now, tough bitch.’

Kane stepped further into the room, grinned at her as he held up a rifle by its barrel. ‘Won’t be needing this now.’ He tossed it to the floor. The sharp crack as it landed on the timber made Jodie flinch as though he’d swung at her. Kane pulled the pistol from the front of his waistband, held it with a finger through the trigger guard. ‘Won’t be needing this, either.’ He flipped it onto the floor with the rifle, laughed. The same feral laugh she’d heard all night. Her skin felt like it was trying to crawl off her bones.

He walked to her then, stopped in front of the tree trunk. Just stood.

Panic rose cold and hard in her chest.

‘Got nothing to say now, tough bitch?’

Jodie kept her mouth shut, frightened of the scream that was gathering in her lungs. Frightened of the screaming, powerless death that would await her if she let it out.

Kane’s hand snapped out, grabbed the back of her head and slammed her cheek into the trunk. ‘Come on, bitch. Say something nasty. While you got the chance. Before you
scream
for me.’

Pain bit into her face. Her head filled with the stench of his sweat, the tang of blood from the wound in his thigh. And anger sparked in her belly. She had no chance of beating him. Not tied to a tree. But she was
not
going to scream for him. She lifted her eyes to his, said nothing.

His grin turned hard. ‘What? You want your friends out here to watch? How ’bout I go get them, make them watch you bleed? Would you talk dirty for me then?’

Jodie saw them. Just a flash, a freeze-frame. Louise bleeding in Hannah’s arms. And the hate returned. Hot and angry and heaving. She wasn’t going to get them out. They weren’t going home to their families. Kane was going to kill them all. ‘
Fuck you!
’

He let her go, pushed away from the post, smiling like she’d waved a white flag. ‘Oh yeah. That’s the tough bitch I wanna mess up.’

Hate burned inside her like a furnace, hissing and glowing, forging a will of steel. And as she watched him swagger away from her, strutting like a pimp, like he had a goddamn audience, she waited. Back in the place she’d never, ever wanted to be again – waiting to die, waiting for her friends to die. But this time, she wasn’t going to fear the man who wanted to hurt her. She wasn’t going to give him that power. This time, she was going to make him work hard for his thrill. She was going to fight him every step of the way. She was going to hurt him before he was finished.

And she was going to hate him. She was going to stare him down and hate him to her last breath. It would be her final act of will.

Kane rounded the marble bench, walked through the kitchen to the back wall. To the knife block. It hadn’t moved from where Jodie had seen it earlier. A chunk of pale timber near the stove, a sharpening tool on one side, the two long blades missing, one stainless-steel handle jutting out from its slot. He pulled the paring knife, half turned towards her, made sure she could see as he used his thumb to test the blade.

He shook his head theatrically. ‘Nothing worse than a blunt tool, hey, tough bitch?’

Bile rose in Jodie’s throat. She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut, put her hands over her ears, block out the world around her. But she forced herself to watch him, to listen to the grinding sound as he pushed the blade in and out of the sharpening tool – and nursed her hate.

When he was done, he turned, sauntered back across the kitchen. Instinct made her pull against the tape on her hands, lean away from the tree trunk, try to shield herself behind it.

There was no point, of course. He was free to move wherever he wanted.

She was at his mercy.

And there would be no mercy.

He stopped beside her and held the point of the knife to the tree trunk.

‘You want me to carve your name in the tree? How about “tough bitch bled here”?’ He laughed as he flipped the knife over, held it in a reverse grip, rammed it into the wood.

He was showing her how clever he was, how he could ram that thing into her like she was nothing but a piece of timber. She was meant to whimper, to shriek in terror.

Eighteen years ago she’d been stabbed six times in the abdomen. She never saw the knife. Hadn’t known she was cut and bleeding until after she’d fought off her attacker, run to the road and the headlights of an oncoming car had illuminated the waterfall of blood streaming from her.

She’d had plenty of time to think about knives since then. To see them in her dreams, to wake in fear of the touch of another one. Every time she took off her clothes and saw the horrific scars.

Until this moment, she’d have said without hesitation or shame that the sight of Kane holding the knife he planned to drag across her throat would have crushed her in fear.

It didn’t.

She looked at the point buried in the timber. The gleaming, sharpened edge. The filthy, brutal hand holding it. The double-edged blade tattooed on his arm. The blood-lust in Kane’s eyes. And a flame flared deep inside her. It fed like a starving child on her hate. Grew big and strong. Filled her with a scorching, aching, all-consuming rage.

Kane pulled the knife from the tree trunk and held the edge of it against Jodie’s cheek. ‘You worried yet, tough bitch?’

She locked her eyes on his, let the hate pour out of them. Rage pounded in her head. She made herself smile. ‘Of you?’

He moved quickly, shoved her hard up against the trunk and held her there with the weight of his body, pressing the knife to the side of her neck. ‘How ’bout this,
bitch
?’

His knees dug into her thighs, his breath was hot in her hair, she was surrounded by his stink. And he was too damn close for her to throw her head back and break his nose.

‘Thought you were the kind of guy who’d want to do it from behind.’ She braced herself, hoped she hadn’t pushed it too far, that he didn’t just plunge the knife into her throat before she could hurt him.

She flinched as he drove the blade into the timber next to her face, pushed away from her.

‘Want it rough, huh? Wanna watch while I cut you up, huh? That can be arranged.’ He strutted to a pile of tools by the door, found the electrical tape he’d tied her with earlier. ‘Just so you know,’ he said, coming back, talking to her from the other side of the tree, ‘I like a woman to flail around. Nothing like a good fight to get the blood flowing.’ He held the knife against her wrists, sliced through her binds in one clean cut.

Jodie’s lungs heaved in and out, her pulse pounded in her throat. It was better than she’d hoped.

He held both her hands in a crushing grip. ‘Try anything and I’ll slice clean up your arm.’

She pulled one arm from around the tree, held it out to him, watched with a ghoulish sense of satisfaction as he wrapped them both up in tape again.

Maybe it was the darkness, maybe it was Matt’s desperation, but he was almost to it, already starting to drop into a slide to take him right to the body, before he processed it. The body was too big, it wasn’t in a white sweater. He skidded to a stop on one knee, rolled the body over, saw Travis’s throat ripped apart by a bullet and a pool of thick, dark blood seeping into the gravel around him. Matt spun back to the light.