Tristan Bancks - The Fall

For a moment I thought I heard the distant hum of an engine, but then it was gone, muffled by the sounds of a struggle between my father and Kelly. Hands tied, Harry was fighting a losing battle. I wondered what Harry Garner: Crime Reporter would do in this situation. The truth was that I would never have written anything this real. Even when all seemed lost, my readers (that is, me) somehow knew that Harry would get out of it. He was a black belt in jujitsu, a firearms expert, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the human body and its most vulnerable points for attack. My father, my non-comic-book father, was strong, determined, focused, but he was not a deadly weapon.

I’ll try to get us out of this.

But could he?

Kelly shone his torch towards the mouth of a narrow, overgrown track. He shoved me in the back.

Harry tried to say something through the tape.

‘Walk,’ Kelly said over him.

I tried to put my right foot down and take a step. The pain was like a cartoon electrocution. I could almost see my bones through flesh.

‘I can’t,’ I told him, my voice trembling. ‘My knee. I need crutches.’

Harry tried to speak again and Kelly pointed the torch beam directly into his eyes. Harry lowered his head in surrender, squeezing his eyes shut against the blinding white light. Then Kelly’s fat, hairy hand reached out and ripped the tape off Harry’s mouth in one quick movement.

Harry’s face contorted with pain. ‘Don’t do this, Mick.’

Harry knew him?

‘Move,’ Kelly demanded.

‘Cut the strap and I’ll help the kid walk,’ Harry said.

Kelly kept the torch trained on Harry’s face, unmoving. He must have decided that he was better off having Harry help me walk than helping me himself. He took a knife from his pocket, flicked the blade out and said, ‘Turn around.’

Harry did and Kelly cut the wrist strap. Harry flexed his fingers, then rotated and rubbed his wrists.

‘I’m going to need to put his arm around my neck,’ he said. ‘To take his weight.’

Kelly considered this too. In the low light, I thought I saw a hint of a grin wash over his face but he said nothing. Was Harry pushing him too far?

The knife flicked open again and he turned me around roughly by the shoulder and slit the tie on my wrist. He pointed the knife at each of us in turn then flicked it closed, pocketed it and pulled a fat, black pistol from the back of his waistband. Everything inside me turned to water.

Harry lifted my right arm, which ached from being stretched backward for so long. He slipped his left arm around my back, his hand beneath my armpit.

Kelly shoved Harry in the back with the barrel of the gun and we started off slowly into the dark, following the bouncing ball of light cast by Kelly’s torch. I leaned heavily on Harry, hopping on my left leg. He didn’t complain.

I tried to find a flat place for my foot to land each time I hopped but the track was narrow and rough and in the middle of it was a tiny stream, ten centimetres wide, rushing downhill. I could see the bandage on my knee lit from behind. It was soaked in blood. Not just a patch like before. The whole thing was drenched, dark and wet. I needed a doctor. But if Mick Kelly did what I imagined he was going to do, I wouldn’t have to worry about a doctor.

He led us down the track, further from safety with every step. Not that there was safety in a crooked cop’s car, on an unsealed bush road in the middle of nowhere after midnight. I tried to transform the anxiety rising in my chest into clear thinking. Maybe Harry really did have a plan. He had to have a plan. He had been in dangerous situations before and he was still alive. He was known for putting himself in the line of fire to get the story. I wondered if he had experienced anything like this before.

Kelly coughed, made a throaty hoik sound and spat. He took two quick sprays of his asthma puffer as we continued down the track. Harry’s rib cage bumped against mine and he breathed heavily under the weight of me. I waited for him to whisper something, a plan of some kind, but that didn’t happen.

I listened for a river or a creek at the bottom of the gully but the air was filled with frog chorus and the rustle of wind-blown trees. The track became rougher now, rockier, steeper. Water seemed to rush in from both sides forming a wider stream beneath our feet. Does he know where he’s taking us or is he making this up as he goes? Has he been here before? Has he planned this? The idea that Kelly had thought this through, had pre-meditated it with the precision of a high-ranking police officer flooded me in muddy panic. He had done this alone. Maybe he was the only other person in the world who knew where we were.

The bones in my left foot began to freeze as water soaked through my sneakers. Prickly plants and sapling branches scratched and scraped me now and I yowled quietly when a sharp rock poked through the toe of my shoe.

We weaved our way down for another ten minutes over rocks and roots until we came out of the trees and there was a vast, open clearing on our right and trees on our left. Intense, buffeting wind hit me hard in the face.

‘Stop,’ Kelly said, wheezing. Another round of chunky coughing.

I looked down and I could make out the three gently glowing stripes on each side of my sneakers and the rough texture of the sandstone beneath me. Two or three metres beyond that, the rock seemed to disappear and there was blackness, lots of it. We were not standing in a clearing. We were on the edge of a cliff.

I’m not ready to die , I thought. I have things I want to do. Like turn fourteen, because thirteen wasn’t working out as well as I might have hoped.

I looked out across the sea of black to the horizon where a small patch of low cloud glowed pink. The city? I wished I was back there. If I had stayed in the police station, at least there would have been other officers around. Kelly couldn’t have done anything. I had been safe. If I hadn’t freaked out and run, I would have been okay. Instead, we were out here in the shivering wild with him.

Kelly took another two hits on his asthma puffer. What if he made us walk the plank and we fell and animals and insects picked our flesh until there was nothing left? What if a bushwalker stumbled across our bones in three or five years’ time? Forensic experts might identify us if we were lucky. I had seen and read stories just like this. I was fascinated by lost bushwalker stories. But Harry and I were not lost bushwalkers. And this was no accident.

I felt like bawling my eyes out but instead I closed them and breathed slowly, deeply, calming my mind. Margo, my coach, would have been proud. I tried to imagine my anger and fear passing like clouds. Those feelings would do me no good at this point. ‘Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured,’ Margo told me almost every week, quoting the guy who wrote Huckleberry Finn . Fear was the same, I figured. It could only hurt me. I stayed like this, breathing in and out, and the cold and wind and rain and anger and fear seemed to ease. I sent out a silent prayer of love to my mum and Harry and Magic and one to the universe for a miracle.

That’s when I heard the sound of a car engine on the road above us. There was no mistaking it this time. It was up on the road we’d driven in on – quiet, not speeding, then the engine was killed a moment later. Kelly switched off his torch and craned his neck, listening.

I thought of a line they always used in Crime Smashers : ‘We’ve got company.’

‘Stay here,’ Kelly whispered and I heard a distinct ‘click’ from his weapon. I wondered if he’d taken the safety off. Was that how it sounded? ‘Don’t take a single step.’