The Family Cleaner, page 27
The engine made one last sound, ‘pop’, and stopped. David waited but heard nothing.
He staggered back into the bush and collapsed.
Shards of pain stabbed him awake. He opened his eyes and spat out mud and grass, then tried to roll onto his back, but the left side of his body exploded, the pain excruciating. He squeezed his left hand to make a fist. It hurt like hell, but he didn’t think anything was broken. He shivered reflexively; he didn’t know how long he had lain there.
His left leg throbbed, and he gingerly slid his hand down, feeling a sticky, warm, wetness mid-thigh. He brought his hand up to his face but saw nothing in the darkness. He licked his fingers: blood. He took a deep breath and winced in pain.
Fuck, I wished I’d seen him coming.
The effort of rolling over, and the shock of being hit, made his head throb. He passed out again.
He woke with a start, a light flicking on and off.
“Who’s that?” he said.
No one answered.
Struggling onto his right elbow and looking through the treetops, the moonlight flickered as the remaining rain clouds scudded across the sky. The rain that had been sheeting sideways had stopped.
He felt around in the darkness and found his backpack, then dragged out a T-shirt and wrapped it around his thigh, tightening it with his belt. Even that small effort was too much, and he collapsed again. He patted around in the grass for his sat phone and IDs, searching but finding nothing. He panicked, then realised the IDs were still in his jacket pocket.
David mentally kicked himself for dropping them in the first place.
He needed help, and he needed it before they came looking for him. Using his one good elbow and one good leg, he pushed himself back to where he had been hit, grunting and cursing with the effort. He found the Sat phone. It was still working.
Engines rumbled and lights flashed against the valley and reflected off the wet trees. More quads were coming along the trail. He dragged himself back into the bush, close enough to see what was happening, but deep enough that they wouldn’t see him. Hopefully.
The quads halted metres away from where he lay.
“Jesus,” one of the riders said as he walked towards where David had just been. “Thomo’s gone over the edge. Get a rope, I’ll go down to him.”
“Thomo! Thomo!” the officer yelled as he tied a rope to the back of a quad and made his way over the edge.
“How is he?” one of the officers called.
“Nearly there, hang on. He’s not moving. Get on the blower, he’s gunna need an airlift outta here. Must’ve gone over the top flat out, silly bastard,” he yelled out.
One of the quads started and the rider left, yelling something to the others that David couldn’t make out. He bit down on his jacket collar and quietly, painfully, dragged himself further into the bush.
He propped himself up against a tree and called Pav, pausing between numbers as each wave of pain gripped him.
“Where are you?” Pav answered. “Thought you’d be here by now.”
“I’m in trouble, Pav, may have a broken leg. One of the cops hit me with his quad and went over the edge. He’s unconscious, but if he wakes up and tells them he hit me ... You need to come and get me. I’m on the secondary trail, the one that leads off from the main one.”
“Are cops still there?”
“Yeah, they are close, too close. You’ll have to wait. They’re retrieving the injured guy. Get nearby, I’ll call as soon as it’s clear.”
“Da. Hang in, David.”
“I will, but bring some pain meds, and I might need a splint.”
“Da.”
David snapped awake when he heard yelling.
“Take up the slack and we’ll get the quad off him,” called one of the officers from the ravine.
An engine revved hard. “Okay, okay, he’s free. Ange, get down here and help me.”
David peered through the bushes and listened as the officers grunted and manoeuvred their injured colleague back up onto the track.
I hope he doesn’t come to and tell them he hit me. They might come looking.
“I don’t reckon they’ll get a chopper in here until it’s light, we need to get him comfortable and out on the back of one of the quads.”
Slowly the group rigged up a makeshift stretcher across the back of a quad. A two-way radio squawked.
“Tell him we’ll get on with it when we have Thomo secured,” an officer said.
“Who’s that?”
“That dickhead from Geelong asking why we aren’t getting on with the search.”
Eventually, the group left, walking at a snail’s pace back down the track.
David gingerly held the sat phone and called Pav.
“They’ve gone, Pav. Get here quick, I’ve lost a lot of blood and keep passing out.”
“Hang in, David.”
David woke with a start to Pav’s familiar whistle. He pushed up on his good arm, looked around in a sleepy fog, and tried to whistle back. His lips were too parched, and all that came out was a soft puffing sound.
He felt around him and grabbed a rock, throwing it as hard as he could towards the trail before falling back.
Pav squatted and pushed his way through the undergrowth, using a pencil torch.
“Here!” David said a lifted his arm.
“David. You hide good.”
“Thanks, Pav, thanks for coming. I’m in trouble.”
“No more, Pav bring help. Good friend from city,” he said and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
He shone his torch behind him at someone in a uniform, a familiar-looking medical kit slung over her shoulder.
“Hi, David, I’m Ivana. Let’s see what you’ve done to yourself.”
David winced as she undid his makeshift bandage and poked around near the wound.
“Okay, okay. You’re okay, David. I don’t think you’ve broken anything, but that wound looks nasty. What happened?”
“A quad. The cop came around the bend and bang. I think he tried to miss me but clipped me before he went off the edge over there.”
Pav surveyed the trail while Ivana tended to David’s wounds. She had him squeeze her hand while she pushed and prodded his chest.
“Your left side seems to have taken most of the impact. There’s a significant wound on your upper thigh. No broken bones from what I can tell. Pav!”
“Da.”
“How do you think we’re getting him out of here? He can’t walk too far. He has major bruising, and the gash on his thigh will need suturing.”
“They’ll be back soon, we need to move,” David said.
“Do we have time for me to dress the wound on his leg?’ Ivana said.
“Pav looked at his watch, “Ten o’clock.”
“No, we need to go. Now it’s daylight they’ll see us a mile away,” David said.
“We must go,” Pav said.
“We’re above that other trail we looked at a couple of days ago,” David said. “If you can get me down the drop over there, we can go out the other way. It’s rugged but much shorter.”
“Way we came up, that works. You make it down?” Pav asked.
“I’ll have to, Pav. Then you get me to Geelong.”
“No, we should get you to Melbourne,” Ivana said. “I can’t be sure that’s just a flesh wound.” She handed him a green pen-like stick. “Suck on this, it’ll kill the pain.”
Chapter 32
Geelong Police Station, 27th April 2019
“Hi Jim, it’s John, can you talk?”
“Yes, mate. What’s happening?” Brownsill said.
“We haven’t found him, but there’s no doubt he was there. One of the Melbourne Special Ops guys drove over a twenty-metre cliff and smashed himself up. They spent hours trying to get him out in one piece. But when he came to he said he hit someone on the trail just before he went over. We’ll process the scene, but it makes sense it was Carter.”
“So what’s next?”
“The team’s going back in to pick through the area. You never know, he might be lying injured out there somewhere.”
“Or dead.”
“Yes, or that. I want to get to the site myself; I don’t trust these SOG cowboys. I’ll go in on one of the quads and let you know what we find.”
“Hi, Sergeant Terry Sargent,” the SOG team lead said as he approached Prosser and Johnson who were waiting outside the Geelong Station.
Prosser smiled. “Hi, DS Prosser, this is Detective Johnson. Bet you get some stick out of that name.”
“Yeah, looking forward to my next promotion, I can tell you. You sure you’re up for this, it’s pretty rugged terrain.”
Prosser held his arms out and laughed, “What are you saying, Sergeant, this svelte body isn’t up for it?”
“Up to you then, it’ll take us about an hour to get to the entry point for the forest,” Sargent said. “Why don’t you ride with me, Johnson, you go in the other one.”
The two blackened-out four-wheel drives had been stripped out of the usual comfortable rear seats, replaced by a bench seat running down the left-hand side and equipment racks down the other.
“This isn’t where we turned off two days ago,” Prosser said to Sargent as they left the main road.
“No, sir. The forestry guys found another track, it’s a bit bumpier but shorter.”
“Great, more bumps, just what I need.”
Prosser harrumphed and settled back, squeezed in between two large officers sharing the rear bench with him.
Five quad bikes, engines burbling, were lined up when they arrived. The SOG team and two forestry officers waited while Prosser awkwardly arranged his frame onto the back of the fifth quad, much to the amusement of the rest of the team.
“Hey, Pear, there’s a fair bit of overhang from this angle,” Johnson called out.
“Yes, all right, very bloody funny. Now let’s go.”
A cacophony of engine noises erupted, sending birds screeching into the air as the troupe headed off.
After about twenty minutes of violent bumping, including two near ejections of Prosser, they careened around a sharp bend and came to a sudden stop. The lead rider dismounted and examined the trail, then talked awhile with a forestry officer. Prosser waited, grateful for the pause.
The rider walked back to Prosser. “You need to see this.”
“Can’t you just tell me about it?” He answered dejectedly.
“There’s been foot traffic on this trail very recently going the other way.”
Prosser tried to dismount as elegantly as he could and walked, or rather hobbled, to where the others had gathered.
One of the SOG officers said. “See here, these footprints. Looks like three sets, heading that way.” He pointed the way they had come.
“Three sets? Show me.”
The forestry officer squatted and used a stick to map out three distinct sets of footmarks.
“See how these two bigger ones are very close together? I’d say one guy is supporting the other, and this second smaller set is following.”
“Shit! So how come we have three? Your man said he only saw one person last night, correct? Don’t suppose you can tell how old these tracks are?”
The forestry officer placed his finger in one of the footprints and bent over to sniff at the ground. “I’d say in the last twenty minutes, judging from the temperature of the footprint.”
The other officers smirked.
“Okay smartarse, very bloody funny. So here’s what we’ll do. Half of us, including the human bloodhound here, will continue to the accident site and look for anything we can find as planned. The other half double back and see if you can see where they were going. Sound like a plan?”
An hour later Prosser and his half of the troupe arrived at the site. After ten minutes of searching, Prosser was called over to a patch of broken undergrowth.
“Sir, I’d say whoever was hit lay here injured for some time. He’s bled quite a lot, look at these dark stains. There’s a bloodied T-shirt here, and this looks like a wrapping for some sort of medical dressing.”
Prosser squatted and looked through the bushes towards the trail. “So this guy must have been lying here, watching everything going on yesterday when you were pulling the injured officer up. He’s watched the whole thing from here.”
“Sir, we had no idea he was here,” the team leader said.
“I know, I know. It wasn’t an accusation. It’s just frustrating that he was so close and now he’s gone who knows where.”
“He had help, sir. Someone’s come to get him. I found the same sets of prints over there, heading towards the edge. I suspect they went over it to join up with another trail. They must know this place like the back of their hand. From memory, that way cuts out a huge part of the trail ’cause of the long switchback it takes.”
“How’s the injured officer?” Prosser asked.
“Bit sore and battered about but nothing broken. Thanks for asking.”
“Gather up everything you can, bag it, tape the area off, and let’s head back down. Call the others and see if they have anything.”
Two hours later they joined the other half of the team, in an area less than one hundred metres from where they parked.
Sargent and the two other SOGs walked towards a small area off the trail, now surrounded by tape strung between saplings. Prosser caught up, having stretched the kinks out of his back.
“What have we got, guys?” Sargent asked.
“Sir, it looks like a large four-wheel drive was here,” the officer in charge of the second group said. “It must have been covered over with those saplings over there. The tyre prints suggest they headed back out, I’m guessing onto the road towards the city. We also found some bandage wrappings.”
“So they’ve re-dressed an injury. It must have opened with the effort of getting down to here,” Prosser said. “Bag it up, there’ll be good DNA on this.”
Johnson, who had been examining the area where the sapling now lay came over to Prosser.
“Aaron, find out where all the traffic cameras closest to here are, on any roads that head into Geelong or Melbourne in particular. With luck, they’ll turn up if they’re trying to get help for this guy.”
Johnson wandered away from the group to make a call. “They are going to call me back,” he said when he returned.
Prosser stretched and groaned quietly. “It’s going to take a six-pack and a very hot bath to fix my back. Now, who’s going take me back to Geelong?”
Prosser soaked in his bath and had just flicked off the ring pull on his second can when his phone rang. He fumbled for the towel and his phone.
“Yup, what?”
“John, it’s Aaron. A white Nissan Patrol was picked up on camera on the Geelong bypass. Two people in the front, but they could have had someone lying down in the back. The timing looks about right, and it continues up the M1 to Melbourne. We lost contact after it crossed the Bolte Bridge. If it’s Carter, I don’t suppose his mate Pav is back. Should I check with Border Force?”
“Do it tonight and let Jim know. And if you have trouble with the border guys, get him to call Kleinberg. Might as well see if he’s still interested.”
Broadmeadows, 27th April 2019
David, Pav and Ivana arrived at her Broadmeadows residence at five in the afternoon.
“Thanks for doing this,” David said to Ivana. “I hope I’m not putting you at risk.”
“David, it’s okay. Pav asked for help, and in our community, that request is honoured.”
“I take it this isn’t official then,” David said.
“No, I took a day off when Pav called. I’ll treat your injuries here and then he can look after you. Now, let’s get you cleaned up and into bed, you need to rest.”
Ivana cleaned and re-dressed his wound. Before leaving she said, “I need to be back on duty, but I’ll return around midnight. I’ll drop the Nissan back to Petar.”
David shook his head at Pav who stood in the doorway. “I don’t think I can lie around too long. I must get out of Victoria, out of Australia as soon as I can. The cops will have my DNA, they’ll know that was me up there.”
“Da, think we should go Darwin, out to Bali, then maybe where you like.”
“Sounds like a plan, but how? Drive to Darwin?”
“Think flying is risk, many cameras. Da?”
“Agreed. What did Ivana say about this?” He asked, pointing to his leg.
“Rest. But I explain to her, no time. Ivana makes up med pack.”
“We need some sort of van so I can lay flat. Some sort of camper van.” David said.
“I make a few calls, you rest for now,” Pav said.
“Where are we at?” David said when Pav returned several hours later.
“A big van. Cost too much but all I get quick. I get now. Go to Geelong unit for cash and guns. Okay?”
“Thanks, Pav.”
“You okay, David, you be okay.” He said and patted David on the shoulder.
Two short honks of a vehicle horn and a revving engine woke David and he rolled off the couch he had been lying on and hobbled to the door.
A white, slightly worse for wear, Winnebago was standing in the driveway.
“Wow, Pav, we’re going in style. Where’d you pick that up?” He called out to Pav as he walked towards David.
“Good friend.”
“How much?”
“One hundred K. Too much, maybe not such a good friend. But has big tank, good for two thousand clicks he tells me. Engine good. You sleep in back. All good. Maybe we sell in Darwin.”
David poked around inside, opening boxes and cupboards packed with food and supplies.
