Page 86 of Down the Track


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Yeah, okay, whatever. He could get a grip later. For now, for some reason he couldn’t quite—

TYSON: Us investigative legends call it intuition.

—fathom, something about this jump-up was calling his name.

The breeze rolling over the top of the jump-up hadn’t been noticeable in the southern lee, where he had his helicopter parked and where Jo had set up her little camp.

From the top, he could see her as she wandered in and out of the little square patch of shade she’d created under a grey tarpaulin. Possum had his nose up and his tail up, and his posture suggested his missing leg would’ve been cocked up if he’d still owned it.

‘You smelling bacon on the breeze, buddy?’ he asked him.

The breeze was coming in from the west and it already carried heat from the desert. It rolled over the plateau and found a few wildflowers to ruffle on its way past. The surface of the jump-up was an elongated oval about the size of the Yindi Creek showgrounds, and it looked dead flat. A geographical wonder.

Hux turned his attention away from the little campsite and inspected the view. He couldn’t see the homestead, but he could see sheep clustering at the base of a small wind turbine in the near distance. Bore water and a pump, he figured. He’d check with the police if they’d been there. Looked for boot prints, which would be a miracle to find under the hoof prints, but worth asking about. When he turned to inspect the view to the south, he could see the nearby fence line and the dry creek bed the fence line followed. Jo’s four-wheel drive was in view, the sun a white glare on its roof and bonnet, and behind it, the track she’d followed coming in from a gravel road.

The rest of the view held nothing but red ground and blue sky, and sparse clumps of vegetation. He was standing in a Fred Williams painting, looking down over a Pantjiti McKenzie Tjiyangu landscape.

Turning back to the jump-up, he knelt to feel how hard this silica cap was that Jo had been lecturing the Dirt Girls about the other day in the helicopter. It felt like any other outback dirt to him, dry, gritty and well baked. But—He frowned. What was that mark?

Ahead of him on the baked earth was a streak of darker soil. A divot, in fact, where the lighter topsoil had been pushed to either side as something heavy had bitten into the ground and been dragged forwards. But how heavy?

Hux did an exploratory scrape of his boot heel and barely shifted the grit. Somethingveryheavy.

His phone was at bare bones battery until he connected it to his charger, but he’d try a photo or two. The divot was long—a couple of metres at least—much deeper at the eastern end and wider than his boot was long. He put his foot into it and took a photo from above.

There was a matching divot, he noted, a few steps over. Same length, same width, same depth, and a smaller one to his left that continued for a length of five or more metres before he could no longer see it.

Were there more? He walked a circuit and zigzagged his way through the centre, but found nothing more of note.

Three divots and a beer bottle top. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he’d had this time yesterday.

TYSON: We’ve scrabbled together a whodunnit with less, Hux.

Yeah. But then he could bend the facts to suit the outcome he wanted. Then he had a direct line to whatever the police had found through Tyson’s complicated relationship with his sometime-ally and sometime-nemesis Lana Saachi.

What were the chances Acting Senior Constable Petra Clifford would be willing to share?

Somewhere between zero and nothing.

CHAPTER

33

Chicken, chicken, she was a total squawking chicken.

She and Hux could have had a talk, like he’d suggested last night. She could have dealt with all these feelings of guilt and inadequacy that were weighing her down in a nice remote patch of paddock where Luke wasn’t likely to overhear them. But no, she’d gone and allowed herself to be distracted by a beer bottle top of all things, and the fact that Hux’s insistence on knowing how she’d really felt about him back in the day seemed to have dissipated.

No wonder. Her dumbstruck response last night, followed by a high-speed departure for her swag, had probably made him realise what a bullet he’d dodged.

And now, through cowardice, she’d missed her chance. Hang on, rephrase that. She wasn’t looking for ‘a chance’. That sounded like she hadplans, orhopes, or—

‘This way,’ said Ethel, jangling a large bunch of keys and marching up the rickety front stairs of the Corley homestead. She announced it much the way, Jo imagined, she’d ordered mobs of sheep around back when she worked the land: loudly.

Dot was waiting in the car’s aircon. ‘Just catching my breath, pet.’

Cockatoos watched them from a perch on an old bore tank, but flew off with a giant screech as Ethel hauled open a timber-framed door whose hinges complained in a pitch that would have woken the dead. Jo followed her in and noted the dust growing like grey fur on the skirting boards and the strong smell of mouse coming from somewhere deep within the house. She could see a separate kitchen beyond the living room through an old-fashioned servery. There was no furniture save a piano that was leaning a little drunkenly. It had made a dent in the painted fibro wall behind it.

‘This is soooo creepy,’ whispered Luke behind her.