GRACE DUCKED BEFORE the Barossa cop could spot her, crouching hard against the flank of the ute.
She heard Adam’s bewildered voice: ‘Neet?’
‘Get in,’ she hissed. ‘Unlock my door.’
The old Holden rocked on its springs as he settled behind the steering wheel. As soon as her door was open, she piled in, first removing a daypack from the footwell and tucking herself under the dashboard. ‘Go!’
Adam turned the ignition key. ‘Like to tell me what’s going on?’
She looked up at him, wondering what story to give. The sun, still high, angled across the windscreen and lit up his face and torso. He looked skittish, intense, his gaze switching from her to his windows and mirrors as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘You saw someone?’
‘Just go,’ she said. ‘Turn right at the roundabout.’
When they were off the main street, she climbed into the passenger seat and strapped herself in. It’s over, she thought. She’d been daring to hope…Never dare to hope. She checked her side mirror, then turned her head to peer through the back window. A silver SUV followed by a tradie’s van, but no red Saab. Had the cop spotted her? Was he putting the word out? Was he following them, in fact, at a distance? He’d tracked her down as she’d feared he would. He’d approach Erin, advise the local police. After that, her prints would be lifted and checked for sure.
Adam said with a tense laugh, ‘Should we be worried?’ There’s no ‘we’ about it, Grace thought. She was just tired of him now. He’d come here looking for justice, and she was atoning, but she resented it. All she wanted to do was pay him off, watch him drive away, then—old story—pack up her gear and run. She felt bleak. The lonely months and years ahead.
‘Neet? I said—’
‘Nothing you need to worry about.’
‘Someone’s after you?’
Grace checked again: no red Saab. The silver SUV was still there, but the tradie’s van was turning off and she saw a black Range Rover and a yellow Beetle loom up in its place.
‘Grace?’
‘Later,’ she muttered, directing him downhill to the leisure centre, then around the little stretch of parkland and into the industrial estate. She pointed. ‘Keep going to the end, then turn left at JB HiFi and park outside Officeworks.’
‘You’re the boss,’ he said.
She didn’t want to be the boss. She didn’t want any kind of relationship with him. Little waves of feelings lapped at her insides: the comfort of her life here; the security of solitude and the open road. She tensed as Adam made the turn, passing a Spotlight and Vacuum City on the left, an Aldi and a Colonial Furniture Barn on the right. Plenty of cars, plenty of tired people shopping at this time of the day, early afternoon. Now they were approaching the Officeworks. Beyond it, behind a high cyclone fence, SecureCo Storage.
‘Park here.’ She pointed to an empty space between a dusty white van and a small dead tree inside a concrete border, one of many scattered around the centre’s carparks. More people entering and leaving the nearby businesses.
She checked the windows and mirrors again—no red Saab—then upended the contents of Adam’s daypack into the footwell.
‘Jesus, Neet!’
‘Wait here.’ She reached for her door handle.
He grabbed her arm. She looked into his face, her door half-open. Saw, eventually, pain and acceptance. ‘This is it now,’ she said gently. ‘We’re done.’
He let her go. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay then.’
With a strap of the daypack on one shoulder, she walked the hundred metres to the storage yard, which sat at the end of a broad, mostly empty parking area. She keyed in a code at the gate. It swung open and she walked through; heard it click shut behind her. The larger storage units—some containing vintage cars or enough furniture to fill a house—were at the front and down the sides. The smaller units—Grace’s was the size of a bar fridge—were at the rear. She knelt, unlocked it, and saw that she’d never fit it all into the daypack. Choose, she told herself. Cash, the gold bar, Adam’s beautiful watch, the icon, the Klee painting and two sets of ID. Leaving Jason Britton’s iPhones, Chagall and lesser coins and stamps, she locked up again and returned to the front gate.
Come back for the rest a few months from now, she told herself, and was halfway across the paved area, her gaze flickering from Adam’s old ute to the many nearby vehicles and bag-carrying pedestrians, when she saw a tall man with a hooked face step out of a black Range Rover. He advanced on Adam’s side window, a pistol held down against his thigh. She changed direction slightly, cut away from Officeworks and across to Vacuum City. She was thinking, irrelevantly, that the shop’s Miele needed a new brush head, when she heard a shot. She froze, ducked, scuttled away. Was she going to be next?
Then everything erupted. Shouts, more shots—a short, sharp fusillade—and a swarm of tactical response police. Where had they come from? Confused, badly rattled, Grace huddled behind the rear tyre of the nearest car. Or should she put the engine block between her and the shooting?
A policeman yanked her to her feet. He was padded, masked, helmeted, bristling with belts, pouches and metal. ‘I need you to come with me,’ he said, his voice harsh with anonymous authority.