Whispering Death

58

At that moment, Galt was trying a let’s-talk-this-over approach.

‘Actually, I don’t think I ever knew your real identity, Neet. According to the title deeds for this place-and that was foolish, by the way, storing them in your bank-you’re going by the name Susan Grace, but-’

Grace dived through the sitting room window.

She hadn’t tested this as a means of escape, but she had planned it and spent money on it, knowing that someone like Galt would come for her one day. Hence, shatter-proof glass on all the windows, secured by beading designed to pop out of the frame when pressure was applied.

Like now. ‘Jesus, Neet,’ Galt said, as Grace’s body described a tidy parabola through to the lawn on the other side. In the three or four seconds it took for him to cross the room and fire her own Glock at her through the empty window frame, she was feinting left and right into a thicket of garden trees and bushes.

From there she scuttled around to the back wall where the land sloped down, leaving a gap under the house. A useful space, somewhere to store timber offcuts, a chewed-up surf board, her extension ladder. And her backup gun, which was a Beretta. Grace located the concrete stump that supported the laundry floor, slid her hand in, felt around for the shallow wooden box she’d nailed there, retrieved the little pistol.

She worked a shell into the firing chamber then extended her arm, sighting along it: the left-hand corner of the house, then the right, then the garden trees and finally the back door, trying to anticipate what Galt would do.

He was here to kill her, of course-but he could have done that without chewing her ear off, so he was also here for his money.

Except it wasn’t his. He and his mates had put her to work, but she had succeeded beyond their expectations. By rights, the money was hers. Not that any of it was left. She’d spent the lot: this house, her car, the guns, the fake ID, the clothes, the travel…

The online poker.

Grace exploded away from the wall, ducking and weaving to the neighbour’s fence, clearing it at a run as the next bullet buried itself in the soft pine beside her, missing her thigh by a whisper. A Tuesday afternoon in spring, nobody around, a wind rising from the sea beyond the dunes.

Grace ran along the far side of the neighbour’s house, an old-style dwelling on stilts, and darted across the street. A sizzling sensation, a tiny shock wave, as a bullet singed the air beside her ear. Grace whimpered, ducked, sidestepped down into a ditch.

Was Galt shooting to wing her? He’d won pistol-shooting awards. She’d seen the trophies in his Bondi flat, seen the loving way he handled his guns, and almost been jealous.

Grace doubled back along the drainage channel, towards the caravan park, which was screened from the road by scraggly trees.

She stopped for a while, listening, wondering what Galt would do. He was generally quite direct. She’d asked him once what he wanted, and he’d said, ‘Simple. I want money, I want you.’

Grace swiped at the perspiration beading her face. Then she jumped, hearing his voice nearby, calling, ‘Anita! I just want to talk!’

She didn’t move. Scarcely let herself breathe.

‘No hard feelings, Neet!’

Sure.

Grace climbed out of the channel and crouched in dense shrubbery to glance both ways along the road. She jerked back: Galt stood on the far side, scanning the undergrowth as if aware she’d come out sooner or later, a half amused expression on his lean face.

How had he known she was here in Victoria? Mates all over the country, she supposed. Keeping their eyes and ears open. He probably knew her MO by now, knew about the Hobart job, the Clare job, all the others.

She saw him tip back his head again. ‘You probably think I want to pop you, do you Neet? Look I just want to talk, okay?’

Grace slithered back into the ditch, his amused face in her head. ‘Pop you.’ They had their own language, Galt and his gang. ‘Chow practice’ was an all-day, all-night drinking session, ‘paying for shoe leather’ was petty pilfering, to recoup what they’d spent on petrol and phone calls.

They’d been untouched for so long, they thought they could get away with everything, but in the meantime had got greedy and careless. All that money coming in, but for Galt it was never enough. Then the market crashed, and he’d say, drunk and mercurial, ‘I need you, Neet’. And, his lean mouth twisting, ‘If I can’t be with you, no one can.’

The road into Breamlea was deserted and Grace, prone on the grass in a thicket of stunted trees, sprang up and darted across. Another sharp noise as the bullet scorched across her shoulder blade. The pain came moments later, then the blood, trickling down to her waistband.

She scuttled back.

‘Anita!’ he yelled.

He didn’t seem to care who saw or heard him. The shadows were closing in, a time for men and women to return from their office jobs in Geelong and Queenscliff. Time to drive up, park, empty the letterbox, walk the dog, drag out the garbage bin for tomorrow morning’s collection. See a stranger with a gun walking down the crown of the road like a character in a western.

Well, he had a gun and a badge, who would challenge him? And the real law was thirty minutes away. Grace knew he wouldn’t give up. He’d kill her. She’d turned on him, transgressed some precious, insane code.

Grace retreated further. Here, between the road and a creek, the soil was marshy. Shallow pools dotted miserably with stunted plants and miasmic with mosquitoes. She was in the open and if Galt came parting the branches he’d spot her immediately.

So Grace sloshed back the way she’d come, welcoming the shadows but wishing she had a pond to hide in. A treacherous marsh, that’s all she had here. She scrambled up to the tree line again, thinking she could be living in happy, witness-protected anonymity instead of fleeing a madman in the mud.

No. Who was she kidding? Galt would have found her somehow; he’d have found a way to get hold of her file. It had made sense to run-run with all of the Galt money and valuables she could scrape together-and create her own new identity.

She would never have tolerated witness protection anyway, even if they could have guaranteed her safety. She needed this; she needed to steal. To climb, bend, flex, balance and coordinate; to visualise spaces, the arrangement of objects, traps and escape routes. She couldn’t have given any of that up.

And now she’d made a stupid mistake and allowed Galt to find her.

As Grace darted across the road again, heading for the houses huddled where the dunes shielded them from the swamping sea, a man shouted at Galt: ‘I’m armed and I’ve called the police.’

Grace hugged the grass, her shoulder blade on fire, her clothing wet with blood.

‘Fuck you,’ Galt said, barely interested, his gaze on Grace and a flat smile showing.

He was standing in the middle of the road again, taking aim, and didn’t care at all about citizens who cried out in fearful, wavering voices that they were armed, citizens who were badly frightened but trying to be brave, who simply wanted the bad guy to go away and not come back. Didn’t care at all, and Grace huddled to make herself smaller on the ground.

‘I mean it,’ the voice wobbled. ‘I have a shotgun.’

When the shot didn’t come, Grace lifted her head. Galt had turned away from her. He’d been challenged, and it irritated him. He stood and faced the man who’d made the challenge and said, ‘Really, really mean it?’

‘Leave us in peace,’ the man said, and Grace recognised him, Kim…Tim? An engineering lecturer who lived most of the week in Melbourne but had evidently decided to stay on for a few days. A duck shooter, she recalled, seeing him kitted out for a trip to the wetlands one day.

She stood. ‘Get back,’ she urged him, ‘go inside, he’ll hurt you.’

‘Damn right,’ Galt said, grinning at the lecturer, grinning at her.

Grace didn’t know how to fire a gun. She’d never tried it. But there was a sudden calmness, a needle-like appreciation of sound, light, colour and texture as she lifted and aimed her little pistol.

She fired as Tim fired.