Dead Heat (36 page)

“Take a crash helmet with you, then.”

Margaret wore specs and a voluminous dress the color of strawberries. Margaret hadn’t spoken to Des since their divorce a
year ago, after she’d found out about his affair with Price’s Supermarket’s big-bosomed manager, but she’d taken one look
at Georgia tottering across her backyard and swept her inside.

Des had taken the precaution of parking at the rear of his ex-wife’s house, and so far as Georgia could tell, nobody had seen
them.

Margaret didn’t say a word to Des, simply popped Georgia into a bath clouded with Dettol, rebandaged her finger, then put
her to bed. Heaven, Georgia thought, is a bed of feathers and cotton swirling over skin like cold milk.

Hushed voices. Des sounded worried, Margaret irritable. Georgia drifted. She wanted to sleep for a week. Margaret made murmuring,
soothing noises. It reminded her of the time she’d had chicken pox when she was six. Her mother had brought her into her own
bed and sung her to sleep with her own soft version of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz.” So comforting, so loving. Georgia fell
asleep praying to a God she didn’t know that her mother was still alive.

Twenty-four hours later, she was half propped up in bed with a cup of Lipton’s on her bedside table that she hadn’t the strength
to reach.

“I’m sorry. We haven’t found your friend,” Des said. He looked depressed. “We won’t give up yet, but it doesn’t look good.”

She was so tired, her body so weak, it was a monumental effort just to talk, let alone feel much emotion.

“The coast guard’s going to search for him until tonight and then, well, it’ll have been four days . . .” Des trailed off
and wouldn’t look at Georgia, but she knew what he meant. After four days in an ocean of baking heat with no water, no food,
and just one life jacket, he’d be dead. Des was telling her there was no hope, not really, but they wanted to do their bit.
The newspapers were full of photographs of her empty life raft and coast guard boats and helicopters, and an old picture of
herself with hair that hung between her shoulder blades, probably dug up from her housemate or the office. Were they grieving
for her? They felt a lifetime away. Her booksellers, her surfing. She tried to drum up Maggie’s face but could barely picture
her boss, or her life in Sydney.

Her life had shrunk to a pinpoint of nothing but survival.

Everything else was superfluous.

She watched Des leave. She didn’t say anything, didn’t cry. She simply lay there, an aching hollowness inside.

Five
AM.
Dawn was an hour away. Margaret’s house was dark and silent.

Georgia padded for the phone on the hall side table and dialed.

“Yes?” the voice answered on a half-yawn.

“It’s me. Georgia.”

Silence.

Georgia fingered the little lace doily on the table and congratulated herself for probably being the first person in the universe
to stupefy India Kane.

“Christ, what the
hell . . .” India said in a choked tone. “Where
are you? Are you okay?”

“Fine, India. I’m at a friend’s. Miranda Street. In Nulgarra.”

“
Nulgarra?
You’re kidding me! You must have nine bloody lives! Jesus!”

“Can you collect me?”

“Can’t. Sorry. I’m in Cairns, looking for you actually, but I’ll send someone immediately, he’ll be there—”

“No! Just you!”

“Trust me, okay?” There was a long pause and she heard a small beeping sound, then India’s muffled tones, like she was talking
on another phone. “He’s in Nulgarra and on his way as we speak, okay? Sit tight, he’ll be there soon as poss.”

She was about to ask who when India said, “Shit, Georgia, you’d better know the syringe you nicked tested negative. As in
negative for an antibiotic. They were just vitamins. Great idea, but no show.”

Mind scrambling, Georgia managed to say, “Right. Okay. I’ll wait at the end of the street. Next to a public phone, okay?”

“Hang fire, Georgia, he’s on his way.”

Tucked in the shadows behind a sago palm, the phone box a couple of yards away, Georgia waited for India’s friend. The temperature
was in the upper seventies, the air still and humid, and people would be sleeping without bedclothes, their fans whirring.

She’d left a note for Margaret, telling her not to worry and that she’d call her later. Signing the brief message, she had
added a line of crosses along with a big circle, indicating a hug.

She hadn’t had a decent hug in an age, she thought. Not since Yumuru’s nearly a week ago, when he’d checked her finger. She
couldn’t believe Yumuru’s vitamins really were just that. She’d honestly believed that Yumuru wanted Suzie dead so he could
keep his miracle cures to himself. If it wasn’t Yumuru, who else would have sabotaged the airplane? And for what? It had to
be the Dragon Syndicate, enraged at Lee for botching their plans to join with the RBG. She couldn’t think of anybody else.

The soft glow from a porch light across the road threw orange across a woodchip garden and the spread of asphalt between the
houses, but otherwise it was dark and noiseless aside from the musical chirrup of insects. She found an enormous comfort knowing
India was on her case, that she’d sent someone to collect her. No drawn-out questions about
Songtao
’s demise or how she’d survived, just, Are you okay? And, Someone’s on the way.

As she sat there, mozzies droning around her wrists and ankles, Georgia wondered how India had found her vocation. Georgia
wished she had a job she felt so strongly about. She didn’t think she could return to being a book rep, not after what she’d
been through this past week. She knew she would never be the same again, and that her life had changed irrevocably. She needed
to do something completely different, that absorbed her. Like Daniel and the PST. He loved his job and, like India, was addicted
to the chase. Her mind jumped. She should have been having dinner with him tonight. It was Tuesday today and she should have
been looking forward to the Pier, to white-tableclothed luxury with Daniel . . . Oh God, what about Tabitha? What was going
to happen to her now that her father was dead?

An emotion inside her belly, and her heart began to balloon into a great black ache.

No, can’t think about Daniel or his daughter. Mustn’t, can’t, won’t.

Resolutely she thought of India, and asked herself why, in her job, full of stress, the reporter didn’t have a single gray
hair. This kept her occupied for quite a while and eventually she glanced at her watch.

Even if India’s friend was coming from the other side of town, he should be here any minute. Nulgarra wasn’t that big.

She touched the soft glossy leaves of a large cycad, her bandage gleaming white in the dark and covering her repulsive stump,
and turned her mind to consider the fact that these prehistoric plants grew a little less than an inch a year, meaning this
specimen would be roughly twenty-five years old. Which meant the sixty-five-foot monster cycad at Lamb’s Creek would be around
a thousand. Not bad for a fern.

An engine started up a few streets away, and Georgia jumped to her feet. She listened to the engine note gradually fade as
the car went through the gears. Someone off to work bright and early.

Three minutes later, a pale-colored Mitsubishi came barreling down the street. Lee, she thought, her heartbeat doubling.
I don’t believe it. It’s Lee.

The Mitsubishi swung with a screech of rubber for the public phone. The passenger door was flung wide. A single blip of the
horn.

Georgia erupted from behind the sago palm, flying for Lee’s car and leaping inside. “Where the hell have you been?” she gasped
without looking at the driver. The car immediately surged forward, and she slammed the door shut, pushing the lock in place
as she spoke, “Christ, I’ve been so worried. You didn’t ring me, dammit—”

“How on earth could I ring you when I didn’t know where you were?”

Her stomach and heart and entrails swooped, as though she’d been thrown out of an airplane without a parachute.

“For God’s sake, Georgia, I didn’t even know you were
alive.
”

Slow motion. Tick-tick-tick, her head clicking around to the driver’s seat. Not believing it. Unable to believe it.

The Mitsubishi was rocketing down the street, engine roaring.

His hands were steady on the wheel. Lean and strong and brown. He was looking dead ahead. His skin was clean and healthy.
He was tanned and wearing a rumpled shirt and creased pair of shorts the color of charcoal.

She was sunburned and flaky-skinned and wearing Stevo’s oversized shorts and sweatshirt.

She hit him full on the side of his face. The car slewed sideways. She hit him again, and again, and he was yelling, “Hell,
Georgia, Christ, hang on a minute, just hang on a minute, will you?” and she was hitting him with all her strength and he
was pulling the car to one side and she was still thumping him but he was out of the car and she leaped out and sprang for
him, pummeling madly, out of control, and he was trying to soothe her—“It’s okay, I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry”—and she was
sobbing and hitting him hard as she could, she was so angry and relieved. She could
kill him.

“I’m sorry, Georgia, I got it all wrong, okay? I got a call from India saying to get here for you, and fast, and I couldn’t
use my car because I don’t want anyone to know I’m around, okay? So I borrowed one from the guesthouse . . . I thought India
told you how she requisitioned a chopper and got me winched out of the sea just before the storm hit.”

She was standing with her arms hanging by her sides, crying.

“You shit, Daniel Carter,” she said, her words muffled with tears. “You complete and utter
shit.
”

T
wo hours later they were breakfasting at Mick’s and dawdling over their coffee. She asked him how the helicopter had spotted
him in acres of ocean but failed to notice her bright orange raft, and he looked away.

“It was night, remember? Your raft could have been any color you chose and we still couldn’t have seen you. Everything goes
monochrome out there without light . . .”

She’d used all her flares almost immediately and then all she’d had was her little waterproof flashlight. Scrabbling around
in the cold wet darkness inside the raft, trying to set the drogue. Not much of a light in the middle of an ocean.

“Waves look like anything you want them to,” he added. “I saw the flares and then kept seeing your raft. I swam for it, but
it was never there. You know what it’s like.”

She remembered rising on the crest of a wave, paddling furiously for his torso bobbing in the sea, and knew what he meant.

Taking a gulp of coffee, she put her mug down. Thought a while, then said, “But you were just a single person. I was—”

“Your light.”

“What light?”

“My life jacket had a self-igniting light.”

She didn’t think she could feel much horror after what she’d been through, but her body gave a sudden chill.

Her voice trembled as she said, “The raft was sabotaged too.”

“Yup.” He nodded. “I discovered it was serviced last week. I’m betting the Chens took the opportunity to disable what they
could. I’d say they left the one liter of water as a sick joke.”

The Chens seemed to have thought of everything. Removing the sat phones. Blowing
Songtao
apart within minutes. But they hadn’t tampered with Daniel’s life jacket, thank God. They’d reckoned sabotaging the boat
and the life raft would be enough to wipe Lee clean from their slate. And it would have been, had it not been for Des and
Stevo. And India.
You must have nine bloody lives.

“India and I searched for you in the helicopter as long as we could. The pilot wasn’t too happy, we ran dangerously low on
fuel, and by the time we’d returned to base, the storm was up. We couldn’t fly for thirty-six hours, and by then you were
way off the course we’d plotted.”

They sat in silence a while, and she stroked a finger over her bandaged stump and wondered when she’d get the courage to discard
the gauze. Given Des and Stevo’s horrified reactions, probably never.

Finishing his coffee, Daniel asked her a bunch of general questions about her life in Sydney, trying to regain a sense of
normality, she guessed, and she was glad for the change of subject. She told him a bit about her repping job and her surfing,
her housemate Annie. As she spoke, she felt disconnected and peculiar, as though she was talking about someone else, a person
who was dead, or a character in a movie she’d once seen.

They settled their bill with Mick and headed outside. The second her feet hit the pavement her pores opened and sweat streamed
from her skin. She felt as though she was walking through a bubbling casserole of mangrove roots and was glad of the air-conditioning
in Daniel’s borrowed Mitsubishi.

They headed for Nulgarra’s police station, where Chief Inspector Harris was waiting to talk to her. The chief had flown up
especially for a chat, but the thought of the oncoming interrogation didn’t make a dent in her sensation of well-being. Staring
death in the face a couple of times certainly polished life’s little marvels to a high sheen: being able to drink water whenever
she wanted; feeling Daniel’s hands on her shoulders, albeit extremely briefly, and when she was thumping him half to death;
being alive.

“When the chief’s done with you,” Daniel said, “you’ll leave town?”

Not until I know what’s happened to Mum, she thought. She was alive, she had to be. “Any word on Lee?” she asked.

“Rumor is he’s left the country.”

“Not dead?”

He glanced across at her. “No, not dead. Unfortunately.”

She felt a rush of horror that Lee might have abandoned her mother to the Chens and another illogical rush of emotion that
Lee wasn’t in a morgue somewhere. Which meant . . . God, she didn’t know. Just that he was probably alive. But where was he?
He wouldn’t have left her, she just
knew,
like she was sure the sun rose in the west and set in the east. Was he hiding in a safe house somewhere? Was he all right?