Hell to Pay

THE HAL CHALLIS SERIES

The Dragon Man

Kittyhawk Down

Snapshot

Chain of Evidence

Blood Moon

Whispering Death

THE WYATT SERIES

Wyatt

Port Vila Blues

Fallout

ON A MONDAY MORNING in September, three weeks into the job, the Tiverton policeman 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, on her way to view 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.”

“Could be someone’s idea of a joke,” the sergeant said, “and this is farming country, the sheep-shaggers like to take potshots at rabbits, but you never know.”

I
N 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. 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 in print or in 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 dusty community notices. Hirsch lived in the three rooms behind it: bathroom, sitting room with alcove kitchen, bedroom. He also enjoyed a parched front lawn, 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, and a storeroom at the back, its barred window and reinforced door dating from pre-death-in-custody days, when it had been the lockup. And for all of these bounties the department screwed him on the rent.

Finishing the call with Sergeant Kropp, Hirsch 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 signposted grain dealer down a side street … and that was Tiverton. No bank, chemist, medical practice, 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. In the fashion of the locals, Hirsch lifted one finger from the steering wheel to greet the oncoming cars, all two of them. Nothing else moved. He was traveling through a land poised for movement: birds watched him from the power lines as if snipped from tin, farmhouses crouched mutely behind cypress hedges, and farm vehicles sat immobile in paddocks, waiting for him to pass.

Five kilometers 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 at a fence line, crows rose untidily from a flattened sleepy lizard. The road turned and rose and fell, taking him deeper into pretty but hardscrabble country, just inside the rain shadow. He passed a tumbled stone wall dating from the 1880s, a couple of massive perfect gum trees, a wind farm turbine. Someone had been planting trees up and down one of the gullies, to combat erosion. Then Hirsch remembered to check kilometers travelled since the turnoff, and wondered when he’d come upon the hut his sergeant was talking about.

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.

A gum tree branch the length of a power pole lay across Bitter Wash Road. Hirsch switched off, his heart hammering. Close shave. Beyond the obstacle 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 in a little cleared area inside the fence and alongside the creek, was Sergeant Kropp’s tin hut: corrugated iron walls and roof, mostly rust-colored, and a crooked chimney. He glimpsed trees and the suggestion of a green farmhouse roof on the flat above it.

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

His first and natural instinct was to duck, his second to scuttle around to the lee side of the HiLux, drawing his service pistol, an S&W 40-caliber semiautomatic. 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 earlier, some arsehole had placed a pistol cartridge in his letter box, and 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.

Or the choice had been made for him. The cunts had trapped him 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 kilometers away.

Hirsch’s mind stopped racing and settled on one thought: the shooters were the very officers he hoped might back him up. They were not forty kilometers but forty meters away, up there on the hillside, positioned for a cross fire, 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. They’d mouthed
pow!
as they finger-shot their temples, grinned as they finger-sliced their throats.

Placed a pistol cartridge in his letter box when his back was turned.

Hirsch thought about it some more. Even if he managed to climb inside the HiLux again, the tree was still across the road, there was nowhere to turn around and they’d shoot him through the glass. Discounting a full-on, uphill 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 first have to climb the bank and then tangle himself in a wire fence, and how much cover would the crop provide?

Hirsch began to feel jittery, a strange discordancy of his senses. He might have put it down to fear, but it was more a kind of illness. Some emanation from the wind farm? He was very close to one of the turbines. It sat on the stony hill where the shooter was hiding, the first of a ragged line stretching along this side of the valley, and the blades were cutting the air in a steady, rhythmic whooshing that reached deep in his guts. To Hirsch, it was all of a piece with ending his days where the world was unlovely, at the base of a scruffy slope of grass tussocks, rabbit holes and licheny stone reefs.

He glanced both ways along the road. He didn’t know where the next farmhouses were or how much traffic to expect, or …

Christ, traffic. Hirsch cocked an ear, listening for vehicles he’d have to warn off, or protect, or mop the collateral blood from. Or fear.

Which raised the question: Why would the bastards ambush him here, within
cooee
of town? Why not somewhere more remote, like “out east”—as the locals called it. According to the calendar hanging above Hirsch’s desk, “out east” was a region of undernourished mallee scrub, red dirt, nude stone chimneys, mine shafts, rock art, September wildflowers and one jagged hill named the Razorback.

September school holidays, wildflowers blooming … Hirsch listened again, imagining he could hear a busload of tourists trundling along Bitter Wash Road.

He risked a quick glance over the passenger door’s windowsill.
The radio handset jutted from a cradle on the dashboard. His phone, a Motorola Defy, sat in a drinks holder between the front seats. He wasn’t obliged to call the Redruth station. He could call Peterborough, Clare, even Adelaide …

The next shot came.

Hirsch froze, fingers on the door handle.

Then he relaxed minutely. He analyzed what it was he’d heard. Not a high-powered crack but something flat, puny, small caliber, dampened further by the huge sky above and the whoosh of the turbine blades. Hardly what you’d expect of a sniping rifle, and it had been accompanied by a weak howl as the bullet hit an obstacle—a stone?—and whanged away across the creek.

Nowhere near him.

A
second
ricochet came. He stiffened again, relaxed again. Not a ricochet, nor an echo, but a young voice saying
peeowww
.

Hirsch did what he should have done from the start and eyed the fallen branch. No drag marks in the gravel, no saw or axe cuts, excess foliage still intact. He eyed the tree itself. The wound was halfway up the trunk, and he recalled camping trips from his childhood, the teachers warning the kids not to pitch their tents under gum trees. All that sinewy health on the outside and quiet decay within.