Bitter Wash Road Read Online Free Page B

if someone had been hurt or the bullet had gone through the roof of my car.’ He paused. ‘Think of the paperwork.’
     
    He got a smile from her but it was brief, her upper teeth worrying her bottom lip again. She cast a troubled look at the children, watching closely. They knew some kind of deal was being worked out.
     
    ‘I don’t know the how —I don’t know where the gun was or where they found the bullets or whose idea it was—but I think I know the why.’
     
    A car passed by on Bitter Wash Road, tyres crushing the short-lived paste of rainwater, dust and pebbles. Hirsch heard it clearly, and now he noticed the country odours: eucalyptus, pine, the roses, the grass and pollens, a hint of dung and lanolin. He realised his cut hand was stinging. All of his senses were firing, suddenly.
     
    ‘Pullar and Hanson,’ he said.
     
    Her mouth opened. ‘They told you about the car they saw yesterday?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    Wendy folded her arms. ‘It probably wasn’t Pullar and Hanson, I know that, but the point is, they are scared. Ever since it’s been on the news, Katie’s been keeping a scrapbook. Jack has nightmares. The shooting is self-protection.’
     
    A burst of staticky squawks and crackles issued from the HiLux. ‘Excuse me.’ Hirsch reached in and picked up the handset. Sergeant Kropp, demanding to know his current location.
     
    ‘Poking around, Sarge,’ Hirsch said, watching Wendy Street return to the veranda. ‘No sign of anyone shooting a gun.’
     
    ‘Well, get your arse up to Muncowie. Make contact with a Mr Stewart Nancarrow, on his way down to Adelaide from Broken Hill, driving a white Pajero with New South Wales plates, somewhere on the highway there.’
     
    Hirsch scribbled the information in his notebook. ‘The reason?’
     
    ‘A body beside the road.’
     
    ~ * ~
     
    3
     
     
     
     
    HIRSCH’S FIRST THOUGHT was: Pullar and Hanson, the kids were right, and he felt a kind of dismay mingled with excitement. ‘Suspicious?’
     
    ‘Probable hit-and-run.’
     
    Hirsch made the mental adjustment: not Pullar and Hanson. ‘Nancarrow?’
     
    ‘No. He claims he stopped by the road for a leak, saw a dead woman lying in the dirt.’ Kropp paused and added, ‘Dr McAskill’s on his way up there.’
     
    ‘I’m on it, Sarge.’
     
    Hirsch placed the handset in the cradle. The women and their children were watching him from the veranda. ‘Got to go,’ he called, climbing behind the wheel. He got a nod for his pains, a couple of half-hearted waves.
     
    Pausing at the front gate, Hirsch fed ‘Muncowie’ into the GPS. It directed him not back to the highway, as he’d expected, but further out along Bitter Wash Road, which eventually made a gradual curve to the north, smaller roads branching from it. One of them looped west onto the Barrier Highway a short distance north of Muncowie.
     
    It was a shorter route, Hirsch could see that from the map. Unsealed for most of the distance.
     
    After twenty minutes, he found himself skirting around the Razorback, driving through red dirt and mallee scrub country, the road surface chopped and powdery where it wasn’t ribbed with a stone underlay. Very little rain had fallen here last night; it was as if a switch had been flicked, marking the transition from arable land to semi-desert. Leasehold land, one-hundred-year leases defined by sagging wire fences, sand-silted tracks and creek beds filled with water-tumbled stones like so many misshapen cricket balls. You might find a fleck of gold in these creek beds if you were lucky, or turn your ankle if you were not. It was land you walked away from sooner or later: Hirsch saw a dozen stone chimneys and eyeless cottages back in the stunted mallee, little heartaches that had struggled on a patch of red dirt and were sinking back into it.
     
    Ant hills, sandy washaways, foxtails hooked onto gates, a couple of rotting merino carcasses, a tray-less old Austin truck beneath a straggly