Bitter Wash Road

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Bitter Wash Road

Garry Disher

No copyright 
 2014 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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1

ON A MONDAY morning in September, three weeks into the job, the new cop at Tiverton took a call from his sergeant: shots fired on Bitter Wash Road.

‘Know it?’

‘Vaguely, Sarge,’ Hirsch said.

‘Vaguely. You been sitting on your arse for three weeks, or have you been poking around like I asked?’

‘Poking around, Sarge.’

‘You can cover a lot of ground in that time.’

‘Sarge.’

‘I told you, didn’t I, no dropkicks?’

‘Loud and clear, Sarge.’

‘No dropkicks on my watch,’ Sergeant Kropp said, ‘and no smartarses.’

He switched gears, telling Hirsch that a woman motorist had called it in. ‘No name mentioned, tourist on her way to look at the wildflowers. Heard shots when she pulled over to photograph the Tin Hut.’ Kropp paused. ‘You with me, the Tin Hut?’

Hirsch didn’t have a clue. ‘Sarge.’

‘So get your arse out there, let me know what you find.’

‘Sarge.’

‘This is farming country,’ the sergeant said, in case Hirsch hadn’t worked it out yet, ‘the sheep-shaggers like to take pot-shots at rabbits. But you never know.’

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Wheat and wool country,
in fact, three hours north of Adelaide. Hirsch’s new posting was a single-officer police station in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it town on the Barrier Highway. Tiverton. There were still a few of these little cop shops around the state, the department knowing not to call them one
-man
stations, not in this day and age, or not within range of a microphone, but it didn’t place female officers in them all the same, citing safety and operational concerns. So, single guys were sent to Tiverton—the wives of married officers would take one look and say no thanks—often, or especially, guys with a stink clinging to them.

Like Hirsch.

The police station was the front room of a small brick house right on the highway, where flies droned and sluggish winds stirred the yellowed community notices. Hirsch lived in the three rooms behind it: bathroom, sitting room with alcove kitchen, bedroom. He also enjoyed a parched front lawn and a narrow driveway for his own aged Nissan and the SA Police fleet vehicle, a four-wheel-drive Toyota HiLux mounted with a rear cage. There was a storeroom at the back, its barred window and reinforced door dating from the good old days before the deaths-in-custody inquiry, when it had been the lockup. For all of these luxurious appointments the department screwed him on the rent.

Hirsch finished the call with Sergeant Kropp, then he located Bitter Wash Road on the wall map, locked up, pinned his mobile number to the front door and backed out of the driveway. He passed the general store first, just along from the police station and opposite the primary school, the playground still and silent, the kids on holiday. Then a couple of old stone houses, the Institute with its weathered cannon and memorial to the dead of the world wars, more houses, two churches, an agricultural supplier, a signpost to the grain dealer’s down a side street...and that was Tiverton. No bank, chemist, GP, lawyer, dentist, accountant or high school.

He drove south along the floor of a shallow valley, undulating and partly cultivated hills on his left, a more dramatic and distant range on his right—blue today, scarred here and there by scrubby trees and shadows among erupted rocks, a foretaste of the Flinders Ranges, three hours further north. Following the custom of the locals, Hirsch lifted one finger from the steering wheel to greet the oncoming cars. Both of them. Nothing else moved, although he was travelling through a land poised for movement. Birds, sitting as if snipped from tin, watched him from the power lines. Farmhouses crouched mutely behind cypress hedges and farm vehicles sat immobile in paddocks, waiting for him to pass.

Five kilometres south of Tiverton he turned left at the Bitter Wash turnoff, heading east into the hills, and here there was some movement in the world. Stones smacked the chassis. Skinny sheep fled, a dog snarled across a fence line, crows rose untidily from a flattened lizard. The road turned and rose and fell, taking him deeper into hardscrabble country, just inside the rain shadow. He passed a tumbled stone wall dating from the 1880s and a wind farm turbine. Someone had been planting trees against erosion up and down one of the gullies. He remembered to check kilometres travelled since the turnoff, and wondered how far along the track this tin hut was.

He slowed for a dip in the road, water running shallowly across it from last night’s storm, and accelerated uphill, over a peak and around a blind corner. And jammed on the brakes. Slewed to a shuddering halt in a hail of gravel.

A gumtree branch the length of a power pole lay across Bitter Wash Road. Hirsch switched off, his heart hammering. Close shave. Beyond, the road dipped again, bottoming out where a creek in weak, muddy flood had scored a shallow trench in the gravel, then it climbed to another blind corner. And there, in a little cleared area inside the fence and angled alongside a bend in the creek, was Sergeant Kropp’s Tin Hut: corrugated iron walls and roof, mostly rust, and a crooked chimney. On a flat above it he glimpsed trees and the suggestion of a green farmhouse roof.

Hirsch got out. He was reaching to drag the branch off the road when a bullet snapped past his head.

His first reflex was to duck, his second to scuttle around to the lee side of the HiLux drawing his service pistol, an S&W .40 calibre semi-automatic. His first
thought
was that Kropp’s anonymous caller had got it right. But then, crouched there beside the grubby rear wheel, Hirsch began to have a second thought: two days ago, some arsehole placed a pistol cartridge in his letterbox. It occurred to him now that it hadn’t been a joke or a threat, but a promise.

He weighed his options: call for backup; tackle the shooter; get the hell out.

Options? They had him trapped where the road dipped between a canola crop and a stony hill. As soon as he showed himself—as soon as he got behind the wheel or clambered uphill to find the shooter or climbed the fence to run through the canola—he’d be shot. Meanwhile, police backup was in Redruth, forty kilometres away.

Hang on. Like fuck it was. The shooters were the very officers he hoped might back him up. They were not forty kilometres but forty metres away, up there on the hillside, positioned for crossfire, their radios conveniently switched off. Redruth was a three-man station, Kropp and two constables, and when Hirsch had called in to introduce himself three weeks ago, they’d called him a dog, a maggot. A silent
pow!
as they finger-shot their temples, grins as they finger-sliced their throats.

Placed a pistol cartridge in his letterbox when his back was turned.

Hirsch thought about it some more. Even if he managed to climb back in the HiLux, the tree was still across the road and there was nowhere to turn around. They’d shoot him through the glass. Discounting a full-on, up-hill assault, that left a zigzagging escape into the canola crop, a broad yellow swathe stretching to the smoky hills on the other side of the valley—but to reach it he’d have to climb the bank and then tangle himself in a wire fence. And how much cover would the crop provide?