by Sarah Barrie
Jared charged ahead, finding a break in the trees that looked out over a stunning view of trees and water. So much space. Where were they? ‘I can hear something!’
A scream—Riley. Tess’s shouted plea. He looked across to a ski hut, down to a blur of movement. Saw them.
‘Oh no,’ Indy whispered.
They ran, Indy shouting into her phone. Jared’s pain was forgotten as he pulled ahead of the women, hoping the track would provide the quickest route to the scene. Hold on, he told Tess silently, repeating it like a mantra in his mind until, breathing heavily, body exploding with pain, he spotted the two huts, got his bearings and bounded down the hill.
Aaron was pulling abseiling gear from a pack. ‘It’s going to look like just another tragic accident, Tess. You tried to save someone else. Another stupid, heroic act, this time ending in a double tragedy. So sad. So predictable. You’re reckless, Tess. You don’t follow the rulebook. These things happen.’
Jared ran at Aaron with a fury so blinding his own safety became irrelevant. He grabbed the man from behind and spun him around. Ignoring the pain in his side, he landed one almighty punch to Aaron’s jaw, which stunned him into falling at Indy’s feet as she and Emily caught up. Indy was on him in seconds.
Jared leant out over the edge. ‘We’re coming, Tess! Hold on!’
‘Jared!’ Tess’s voice wasn’t much more than a strained sob. ‘Hurry!’
‘Craig’s group is closest,’ Emily said. ‘Ten minutes off.’
‘She can’t hold on that long.’ He picked up Aaron’s abseiling harness and stepped into it.
‘Jared, you can’t,’ Indy said. ‘Let me try.’
‘Have you ever abseiled?’
‘No.’ She looked worried, but he knew she’d try.
‘I have. Once,’ he said and gritted his teeth—he was pretty sure those ribs might be cracked after all. ‘Okay, so figure eight knot …’ He tried to think, to remember, while all the time his mind was screaming at him that Tess could let go at any moment. That he needed to be down there now. The prusik knot was beyond him; he was going down without it. He locked the clips into place. Tess had said three anchor points. Aaron had only set one. It’d have to do. He walked to the edge, leant out and took a couple of steadying breaths, then tested the rope against his weight. When it held, he started down.
‘This is all because of you!’ Aaron yelled at him. ‘I told you to back off. I warned you so many times to back off! If you had, I wouldn’t have had to do this!’
It’d been Aaron who’d sent those warnings, Jared realised distractedly. That made perfect sense now, but he had to negotiate a tree poking out of the rocks, a gap in footholds. This was not a nice smooth beginners slope, so Aaron’s words vanished from his mind.
‘I can’t hold on!’ Riley screamed.
‘Almost there, sweetheart,’ he promised. He was close enough to see the strain on Tess’s face, the trembling, linked arms, and hell, Tess’s fingers slowly slipping from the tree. He found a place to brace himself, tied his rope off and grabbed Riley, dragging her to his side. She collapsed into him with an ear-splitting scream and clutched at her leg.
‘Tess?’
‘I’m okay,’ she said, but she sounded exhausted. It took her more effort than he knew it should have to struggle back up to a safer spot. Once there she sat and dropped her head back to the sky, breathing heavily and rolling her shoulder. Then she must have gotten a good look at him because her eyes widened in distress. ‘You’re hurt. How did you get down here?’
‘I kind of forgot I was hurt when I saw you two swinging from a cliff.’ He grimaced as his body protested. Now he was starting to remember, but he tried for a reassuring smile. ‘Lucky you gave me that abseiling lesson.’ His gaze swung back to study Riley’s pale features. ‘How are you going?’ he asked gently.
‘I’m okay.’
‘Her leg’s broken,’ Tess said. ‘Make sure she doesn’t pass out and go over.’
‘Not going to let that happen.’
‘I won’t pass out,’ Riley said. ‘Tess. You held on. You didn’t let me go. Thank you.’
Tess smiled but behind it was a flash of pain. She was thinking about Charlie, he figured. He wasn’t sure how she’d even managed to get herself over the edge. He wanted to tell her how incredible she was, get that smile back, but raised voices above them had him turning sharply. A scream. Emily’s body flung out over the edge. She fell a few feet, slammed and rolled and, as his heart leapt into his throat, she wrapped a hand around some foliage and saved herself from a much longer fall.
There was a roar from Aaron, a shot. Aaron fell left of Emily, bounced limply off a jut in the rock and flew past them, almost over their heads. They heard him crash into the scrub somewhere below.
‘Oh my God,’ Tess whispered in horror.
Riley whimpered.
‘Indy!’ Jared called. ‘Are you all right?’
She appeared over the edge, one hand covering her forehead, the other with her gun dangling from it. ‘Bastard headbutted me then tried to strangle me with the cuffs. I had no choice—he was coming down after you, and taking us with him.’
Emily scrambled back up to the top. ‘Well, shit, that was close,’ she said.
He couldn’t have agreed more.
CHAPTER
49
18 months later
Paxton Orvist sat in the prison’s common room and stared at Bryce Cochrane and his entourage. Hate churned in Pax’s gut, his mind demented by rage. He was inside because of Cochrane, but Cochrane wouldn’t have a bar of him. He should have welcomed him with an invitation to his little gang. Instead he’d given him a black eye and a warning to stay out of his way. He’d stuffed up, Cochrane had told him. Was lucky he didn’t get his men to end him for it.
Fuck them. Sitting over there at the big table, thinking they were all such tough arses, thinking they ran the prison and could treat him however they wanted. Nup. Things were going to change. He was in here long enough to make it worth his while to do something about Cochrane’s current leadership. The months of hiding in corners were over.
He fiddled with the shiv he’d paid for with cigarettes. The point was razor sharp.
One of the gang, a big guy named Thug, stuck his foot out as Chesky, a weedy little prick without any real balls, walked past with his steaming cup of whatever it was. Chesky hit the ground, the caramel-coloured liquid bursting into a long, haphazard explosion on the epoxy flooring. Thug laughed, laid the boot in as Chesky righted himself. He went down again.
Pax scanned the room. No one did anything. They never did. Not that he gave a shit. It was just weird. On the outside, some stupid dick or other would have stepped in. Would have cared.
He continued to watch, to wait. At five, like clockwork, Cochrane got up, said something to the other dickheads and headed out to have his shower. Pax waited a few beats, got calmly to his feet and stretched, then took his time wandering out. He passed a guard, a couple of inmates coming in and, with a final glance around, ducked down the hallway to the showers and slipped inside. No one would bother them. Everyone knew Cochrane got the showers to himself at five. No one messed with Bryce Cochrane.
Until now.
Steam billowed from the shower stall as Cochrane lathered his widening girth in soap. He was humming. What the fuck did he have to hum about? Pax slid the shiv out of his sleeve and into his hand. This was gonna be good. He stepped into the cubicle. Hot water spat at his face and the scent of Cochrane’s soap filled his nostrils.
‘Hey, Bryce,’ he said. ‘Owe ya something.’
Cochrane turned in surprise, bellowed as the shiv flew up towards his abdomen. He managed to wrap one beefy hand around Pax’s throat as the other reached out in an attempt to hold off the strikes.
The grip at his throat was blindingly painful, but Pax struck with all the feral determination of the caged animal he had become. Warm blood spilled over his hand and down his arm as he stabbed again, and again, a
nd again into Cochrane’s flabby belly. Cochrane’s grip weakened and Pax managed to drag in an excruciating lungful of air as Cochrane slumped to a sitting position in the corner of the stall, staring down at himself in shock.
‘Die, fuckwit,’ Pax demanded, satisfaction swelling in his chest.
Cochrane looked up from the mess Pax had inflicted on him, his lips working into a twisted smile as his eyes shifted to something behind Pax. He swung around.
The room filled with Cochrane’s men. They spread out and Thug roared. Pax scrambled back from the cubicle, raising the shiv in a useless warning attempt.
It was over in seconds. They left him on the tiles in front of Cochrane’s slumped, naked body, not quite dead. Broken, unable to move, barely able to breathe, Pax held his stomach together and watched his blood mingle with Cochrane’s as it ran into the drain.
His pain dulled, his vision faded out. And then nothing.
EPILOGUE
‘Nearly there!’ Tess said, excitement lacing her voice.
He could have kissed the ground at that proclamation. He scrambled up another narrow area of mountainside, refused to look anywhere but at the hand and footholds immediately in front of him. There was much less of ‘up’ than there had been for the last few hours, and an ever-increasing amount of ‘down’. He pushed the thought from his head, in case he was tempted to look behind him again. Whenever he did, his stomach tipped and his vision swam. He wouldn’t enjoy the view until he was safely on top of it.
‘Step up that bit there,’ Tess instructed. ‘Yep … okay. Come on!’ She offered him her hand out of unity rather than necessity so that they took the last few steps together. ‘You did it!’
‘We did it.’ Legs shaking more from the dizzying height than exhaustion, Jared walked out onto the rocky summit. And wow. It was stunning. The top of Federation Peak. There was more space up here than he’d thought there would be and, without a cloud to be seen, the peak showed off three hundred and sixty degree views of endless, breathtaking scenery. Mountains, lakes, ancient forests, sea. He breathed it in, absorbed it. He’d wanted to climb it for Tess, but now he decided it was one of the best things he’d ever done for himself.
The trek had been beautiful in some places, terrifying in others, and one particular spot he could only describe as insanely suicidal. He’d had a moment, thinking about Tess up there in a Tasmanian storm, in the sleet and wind and rain, talking down a scared tourist. That she was climbing this monster again after all that had happened was unbelievable.
And they’d made it up—together. Pride and a real sense of triumph rose inside him.
‘You were right. It’s incredible,’ he said.
‘It really is.’ She looked at him with a blinding smile. ‘Thanks for this. I would never have thought I could get back up here.’
‘Honestly, it was you who got me up here. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.’ His smile turned comical. ‘I’m already a little scared of the getting-back-down part.’
She pressed her lips to his. ‘We’ll be fine.’ She unzipped her pack and took out her phone to snap a photo of them. Then her smile fell and she pulled up another shot.
‘Hey look, Charlie,’ she murmured, holding up the phone as though showing the image on screen the views. ‘We made it.’
‘That’s a nice photo.’
‘Yeah. I got Indy to send it to the family.’
‘I’m sure they love it. I know if I were his family, I’d want to see his last, happy moments.’
She dragged in an audible breath. ‘It’s been months, but it doesn’t feel like it.’ Then she shook her head a little, brightened. ‘Do you want to sign the book? It’s here somewhere.’ She put the camera down and moved a few steps away to ferret around under a pile of stones, but he followed and pulled her back up to face him.
‘In a minute.’ He smoothed her hair from her face and kissed her, long and slow. He heard the hum of appreciation in her throat, felt the press of her body against his and got caught up in it, wondered what was going on when a rumble of engine noise broke through his consciousness.
Tess broke the kiss to look past him. A light plane was zipping around the side of the peak. It dipped its wings once, twice, in salute. Tourists’ faces were plastered to the windows with large grins.
‘Just about to start their hike,’ Tess said with a smile and a wave. ‘I hope they have a good time. A memorable one, for all the right reasons.’
‘So do I. How about we make this more memorable for us for all the right reasons?’ he suggested, lowering his head back to hers.
The plane looped again and was gone. Neither of them noticed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to say an enormous thank you to everyone who worked with me on Deadman’s Track. My special thanks to …
Shaun Brooks, manager of the Southern Tasmanian SES SAR team, and Charles Smith, longstanding member of Wollombi Volunteer Bushfire Brigade, for kindly providing the information necessary to write many of the more challenging scenes. I couldn’t have done it without your assistance.
Sergeant Tony Jones, who repeatedly went above and beyond to answer or find answers to my very specific police procedural questions.
Jo Mackay, I can’t thank you enough for the dedication you show to your authors and your ongoing belief in my writing.
Nicola Robinson, you’re amazing. It’s been wonderful working with you for the first time.
Annabel Blay, there are moments I’m sure everything would fall apart at my end without your amazing organisational skills and friendly email updates and reminders.
Thanks also to the design team for my fabulous cover and the sales team who take my books out into the world.
A further thanks to Kylie Mason and Annabel Adair for assisting in making the story the best it can be.
Tea Cooper, thanks as always for your brilliant critiquing and forever making yourself available for help and advice.
A very special thank you must also go to the people of Tasmania. You never cease to amaze me with your hospitality, advice and generously shared local knowledge.
And last by not least, to all my readers. Thank you for reading, sharing and reviewing my books.
ISBN: 9781489255303
TITLE: DEADMAN’S TRACK
First Australian Publication 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Barrie
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