by Jaye Ford
‘Oh my God. That’s it.’ His sudden, urgent exclamation made her search the motorway for whatever he’d seen. ‘You’re Miranda Jack. The journo. The one who was all over the news after that accident.’ He was pointing at her – with his hand this time, not the gun – and grinning like it was a victory. ‘Your husband was Nicholas Westing, that investigative reporter. He got compensation for those guys in Afghanistan. He was a fucking hero. I fucking knew your car was the one. I was drawn to it, I could feel it. It’s a sign – we’re connected. Jesus. Miranda fucking Jack.’
Panic rose in her throat. What kind of sign? Was he counting on better media coverage if she died with him? ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re hoping for but I’m not writing now. I haven’t got a job. Not since …’
He wasn’t listening, at least not to her. He was muttering to himself again, nodding and agreeing with his own train of thought.
She held on to the wheel and thought about friends and colleagues who’d pay to be stuck in this kind of drama – ‘Reporter tells: How I survived carjacking at gunpoint’. One or two might even be happy to get shot so long as they could phone in the story before it all turned to shit: news-gatherer to the end. And yeah, Jax hadn’t worked for a year but she was the daughter of a newspaperman, a journalist at heart – and despite the terror of the last half an hour, the intro to the story had composed itself in her head without conscious thought: A gunman forced a 35-year-old woman to drive X-number of hours along the M1 motorway today before shooting/crashing/letting her go. It was training, automatic, like a cop checking faces or a bank teller sorting notes. She could write the hell out of it if she had to. But she didn’t want to be the story. Not again.
In the months after Nick’s death, she’d been dragged into the coverage by his status and her role as former reporter/grieving wife/provider-of-information. It wasn’t her way, though. She was old school. She’d learned her trade at her dad’s paper, well before YouTube and the publicity machine made stars out of reporters. Eustace Jack had worked the metropolitan news early in his career then moved out west and bought into a small country rag. He’d prided himself on being able to fill any role: manager, editor, sub, reporter – even cleaner when he had to. What’s the story? he used to say to her and the multitude of cadets who’d passed through his doors. Write the story. The reporter’s not the story. Ask some damn questions.
In the last year, she’d desperately wanted to lose herself in the comfort of words and details and other people’s experiences but hadn’t been able to sit at a keyboard without feeling the crush of losing Nick. Now, for the first time, she wasn’t sorry she’d lost her craft. She didn’t want to write this. She wanted to be somewhere else.
With Zoe. For Nick.
‘We’ve met before, you know,’ the crazy guy said.
His matter-of-fact, how-’bout-that tone surprised her as much as his words. Did she know him? Maybe she’d been too scared to recognise him. She took a look across the car, tried to imagine him in another context. At the supermarket, the dentist, the gate at Zoe’s school. On a job. Nothing about him was familiar but she’d heard the line before. Interviewees had a better memory for the reporter that talked to them than the journalist taking notes from another person at another story. Should she fake it? Take a guess and spin some generic, Oh that’s right, what story was that?
She didn’t dare try a lie. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t remember.’
‘You wrote a story about my platoon when we flew out to Afghanistan.’
He was military? She thought about weapons training and post-traumatic stress disorder, and felt a new level of fear. He’s calmer now, she told herself. Don’t stuff it up. Talk, don’t ask questions. She forced a smile. ‘That was a few years ago.’ It had to be – she hadn’t written that kind of piece since she’d gone freelance.
‘Five. You came out to the airbase and talked to a bunch of us and our families. We posed for photos and you sent copies to some of the wives, which was appreciated by all the guys. You quoted me in the article, too, which got me some kudos for a bit.’
If she’d spoken to him, she didn’t remember. But she recalled the day. It was one of the first jobs she’d done after coming back from maternity leave – a feature piece on soldiers and their families. No politics, no mention of the arguments for and against the War on Terror. The men and women in uniform had been really clear about why they were going to Afghanistan and candid about how they felt. They’d posed good-humouredly for the photographer, dragging her into some group shots they took on their mobiles. She remembered the kids, too, the babes in arms and toddlers who’d had no idea what it was about – and how she’d sat in the car afterwards and taken a few minutes to sob for them before driving back to the office.
‘I remember now,’ she said.
‘Sorry, I should’ve said. I’m Brendan Walsh.’ He swapped the gun to his left palm and held out his hand. All nice and friendly, as though he hadn’t almost killed her, as though he hadn’t previously told her his name was Already Dead.
Was it a moment of sanity or was he about to grab the wheel and drive them into a truck? She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut and scream but instead she reached across the steering wheel, closed her fingers around his and followed his lead. ‘Nice to meet you, Brendan. I’m Miranda Jack. Call me Jax.’
His hand was hot, dry and strong. It gave hers a quick, firm grip-and-pump. Chummy, no power play in it. No captor–hostage thing, either. Or wheel grabbing. She slipped her hand out of his, resisted the urge to wipe it on her leggings and tried to ignore the bass rhythm of her heart: what-the-fuck, what-the-fuck, what-the-fuck.
‘Yeah, look, sorry about all this.’ He pushed his free hand through his hair, a tad sheepish, as if all he’d done was hold her up in the supermarket queue.
She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say to that.
‘It’s just … you know.’ He shrugged: an apologetic, you-get-where-I’m-coming-from gesture.
Christ, was that it? You know. That was his reason for hijacking her car and holding a gun to her head? Well, no, she didn’t fucking know. All she knew was that she wanted to get the hell away from him and …
And maybe he’d just given her an opening. She tried to arrange her face into some semblance of empathy. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’ She checked his response, made sure he wasn’t about to launch himself across the car before she went on. He was wordless, expressionless. ‘You could let me go. I could pull over and get out and you could go on without me.’ His face, when she looked again, seemed set a little harder, so she spoke quickly. ‘No-one will know. I won’t tell anyone. You take the car and I’ll call someone to come get me.’
He shook his head from side-to-side, a slow, worried, it-won’t-work. ‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘No, really, it’s okay. It won’t be a problem.’ She could hear the edge of desperation in her voice and wondered if it was that or her words that made the agitation start to filter through his body again, flattening his lips, tightening his shoulders. She checked the rear-view mirror, saw a four-wheel drive hitched to a huge caravan on her tail: grey nomads, probably parents, maybe even grandparents; people with plenty to lose if she slammed on the brakes – and with a couple of tonnes of metal to careen into her. Beside her, Brendan Walsh had the gun back in his right hand, was rubbing his forehead with the grip.
Jax forced her words lower, slower, trying for the voice she’d used before, the storyteller tone that had calmed him. ‘I’ve got a friend, another journalist, who won’t ask questions. He did it for my husband. I’ll tell him I was working on a story, that my contact had to get out of Sydney in a hurry, that I had what I needed and didn’t want to go any further. He’d probably be a little pleased to hear it, actually. That I was working on something again. Not just … you know.’ She glanced at him, wondered how he liked his own vague words thrown back at him.
He didn’t. Or maybe he didn’t even hear them because he was swingin
g his head front to back again. Anxious, breathing hard.
‘Brendan, it’s okay,’ she said.
‘No.’ Head to the front, voice taut. ‘No, no, no. We can’t stop. They’re out there. I can’t see them yet but they’re there.’
4
Jax checked the rear-view mirror. The cops? Was he running from the cops?
It made sense. He’d wanted to get onto the motorway fast and she was his getaway car. She eyed the gun in his hand. Had he shot someone? Was she going to be number two? Number three? Christ, she hoped the cops were setting up a roadblock and preparing a tranquilliser for the terrorised victim.
She scanned the traffic around her. The grey nomads were still in her mirror, blocking the view of anything in the lane behind them. To her right, in the centre track, a van advertising pool renovations drove steadily past; a minibus with bored kids in school uniforms eased up behind it. A hotted-up red thing led the charge in the fast lane, going way over the speed limit but only slightly faster than the P-plater in its wake. Nothing remotely cop-like.
‘Oh, don’t worry. They’re out there,’ he said, as if she’d doubted him aloud. ‘And we’re a target. If we stop, we’re easier to pick off.’
Pick off? Did cops pick off? They chased, used sirens, drew firearms and shouted, ‘Keep your hands away from your body,’ and, ‘Drop your weapon.’ On occasion they shot people, sometimes in self-defence, sometimes by accident or negligence. The cops Jax had met in the past twelve months had questionable tactics, but they were ineffective and obstructive, not quick triggered. Back in the day when she’d done her stint on police rounds, she’d listened to the talk, asked all sorts of questions and learned that a lot of officers hoped they never had to fire a weapon in the line of duty. Cops, as far as she knew, didn’t pick people off.
Feeling suddenly hemmed in by other vehicles, Jax checked the road and her mirror again, wondering if the people around her were more dangerous than the man in her car. ‘Who’s out there?’
She didn’t know if it was the question or the answer that he didn’t like, but he reacted like she’d wounded him, groaning as though he was in pain, the muscle at the side of his jaw working hard. ‘They won’t stop,’ he finally ground out. ‘Don’t you get it? They’re trained for it, it’s their job. They won’t stop until they find me.’
Who? The grey nomads with the caravan held the pace behind her. Jax could see the couple: man at the wheel, woman in the passenger seat, both had short, pale hair and sunglasses. Beside Jax was a woman with a child in a safety harness. A bald man in a sleek black car behind that. Jax shot a look at him over her shoulder. Him? Was he one of them?
‘We can’t hide. I tried,’ Brendan said. ‘I stayed out there as long as I could, but they’re everywhere. Fucking everywhere.’ His words got faster, desperate. ‘You can’t escape them, Jax. They crawl and burrow inside you like spiders. Fucking nano spiders. Laying their eggs in your brain, breeding and spreading in your skull. And once they’re there, you can’t get them out. They’re all over us right now. Both of us. And they’re watching, letting us think we’ve got away, but they’re not letting us go, Jax. They won’t. We can’t see them but they can see us.’
He ducked his head, aimed his gaze up through the windscreen as though he might see them overhead. She looked too, the passion of his paranoia making her wonder if there was a chopper up there. All she saw was the clear, deep blue of a cloudless summer sky.
‘I’m sorry it had to be you,’ he said. Anxiously sincere, sincerely anxious. ‘But you understand, don’t you, Jax? It was fate. It had to be you. You get that, right?’ He looked at her like he wanted her to understand. Needed her to.
What she understood was that if anyone was looking for him, they weren’t going to pick him off but pick him up. They’d have white coats – maybe not while they were driving up the motorway – and they’d want to take him to a hospital or a clinic, somewhere he could get treatment. She also understood it was possible no-one was looking for him, that he was running from something in his mind. That he wasn’t even ‘missing’ yet, that he’d tipped over an edge in his lunchbreak. That no-one knew he had a gun.
She thought back to the moment he’d appeared at the traffic lights. She hadn’t seen him approach because there’d been nothing to attract her attention. He’d simply walked to the car and got in. She hadn’t freaked out; she’d turned and looked at him. From the outside, from the perspective of anyone sitting in the traffic around her, it would’ve looked like she knew him, that she’d said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ No reason for anyone to be worried about her, either.
She scanned the traffic again. The bald guy had passed them, the grey nomads were sharing a snack. Every driver she saw seemed to be doing what she did when she drove up the coast: concentrating on the road and the speed limit and thinking about where they were going. Not noticing her passenger with the gun in his hand and no hold on reality.
‘You understand, don’t you?’ Brendan said. It was both threat and supplication.
‘Yeah, of course. I get it. It’s fate.’ What else could she say?
He collapsed against his seat. It seemed like relief. ‘I knew you would. I knew I had the right car.’
Tears welled in her eyes again. Her situation hadn’t changed but the reality of it seemed insurmountable now. He thought there were nano spiders in his skull: there was no reasoning with that.
She wanted to hit the brake, swerve, draw some attention, but last time she’d tried to stop he went nuts – and other drivers had simply swung around her, assuming, like she usually did, that everyone else on the road was an idiot to be avoided. She pressed her lips together, blinked hard and drove. Hands clenched around the wheel, jaw locked, trying to calculate how far she’d have to go before her petrol ran out. She’d filled up just before the turn-off. The Mazda was four years old, serviced about a month ago; it had six cylinders and six gears and newish tyres. Not that any of that information helped – she had no idea how to calculate it, just that she could do a trip to and from Newcastle on half a tank. Which meant she could travel for five hours easily, maybe six or more, before she could claim fuel as a reason to stop. They could be in Coffs Harbour by then. A long, long way from Zoe. From home. From their new house that wasn’t a home yet.
She pushed that thought away, got back to the ones that were holding her together, distracting her from the fear that was surging beneath them. Back to petrol … Stopping and then what? A dash from the car? Shouts for help? A note passed …
‘How old is Zoe?’
Jax swung her head. He’d been quiet, still, the previous conversation exhausting or settling him. Zoe’s name on his lips scared the hell out of her.
‘She’s your daughter, right?’
How the hell did he know that? Had he seen her? Jax didn’t answer, didn’t want him knowing anything about Zoe.
‘She’s, what, six or seven?’
Fear wrapped cold fingers around her spine. He’d chosen the car at random, hadn’t he? He’d been drawn to it, it was fate, he’d said. So when the hell had he seen Zoe?
‘My kid gets his letters backwards, too.’
She noticed his face was angled into the back of the car. Not at the window but at the boxes stacked on the seat. She’d taken the last things from the house that morning, cleared it out, cleaned it up and wandered through the empty rooms one last time before handing the keys over to the agent. There were bits and pieces from the kitchen and bathroom, the sheets she’d slept in, the old photo albums she hadn’t trusted with the removalists, the box of toys that kept Zoe entertained while the truck was loaded. She couldn’t see the carton but remembered the crayons and Zoe’s tongue doing the rounds of her lips as she concentrated on copying the words Jax had written: Zoe’s very precious things.
Brendan hadn’t seen Zoe. He’d found evidence and was using logic. It was a better thought process than the nano spiders and eyes-in-the-sky stuff, she guessed, but she didn’t want to talk about Z
oe, didn’t want him growing ideas about going to get her. On the other hand, his voice was calm, almost wistful, and she didn’t want to lose that either.
‘She’s six,’ she told him.
‘My boy turned seven last week.’
‘It’s a nice age.’
‘How many have you got?’
She hesitated, wondering how much she should tell, not wanting to be accused of lying. ‘One.’
He nodded. ‘Me too.’ Nodded some more. ‘I love my son.’ It was a declaration but it had a question mark: a do-you-understand?
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘He looks just like me at that age.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘I miss him so much.’
She glanced cautiously at him. Did he miss him because he’d been getting treatment, or was he separated from his wife? ‘It must be hard.’
‘I don’t want him to get hurt.’
No, neither did she. ‘No-one needs to get hurt, Brendan.’
And then the angst was back, the pistol hand to his head, scrubbing his brow. ‘You could be my wife, you know.’
Oh, Christ. ‘Brendan –’
‘She’ll be just like you. I’ll be dead and she’ll be a widow and my kid will have no father.’
Jax kept her eyes on the road, heart beating hard, no words to give him. Did he have a terminal disease? Maybe that was why someone had told him he was already dead. Or maybe he just thought he was dying. He didn’t look well, that was for sure.
‘What’s it like?’ he asked.
What was what like? Dying? She had no clue. She didn’t want to.
‘Being a widow,’ he prompted. ‘What’s it like?’
Did he want to know that his wife would be okay or that she’d be a mess without him? ‘Brendan, you need to talk to –’