* * *
I had both hands braced on the trunk of Willy’s Camry. One good hand and one wrapped in bloody dishcloths that screamed at me every time I put weight on it. I shoved the car with everything I had left.
The red dirt track that ran along the top of The Narrows was barely wide enough for one vehicle. Dry creek bed on the left, sheer drop on the right. Two hundred feet straight down to rocks and scrub and whatever else I’d tossed over that ledge over the years. A few things down there would be nothing but dust by now.
The Camry rocked but didn’t move.
I reset my boots in the dirt and shoved again. My R.M. Williams boots slid on the loose gravel, and I went down on one knee.
Christ. Six months ago, I could’ve pushed this thing over with one arm. The cancer had taken more out of me than I wanted to admit.
I took a breath, reset, put my shoulder into it, then my legs, and whatever else I had left.
The Camry rolled forward. Slowly at first, like it knew what was coming. The front wheels caught the lip and hung there for a heartbeat. Then the back end went, and the heap of junk tipped and was gone.
I’d expected a fireball, the kind that would scare the crows out of the gum tree behind me.
But no. The car hit the bottom with a flat metal crunch and a shattering of glass. Then nothing. No flames. No smoke. Just a crumpled gray smudge among the rocks two hundred feet down.
Damn cars these days were built to survive everything except being useful.
I straightened up, and the world tilted. My gut lurched, and I leaned over, trying to spew my guts up. But there was nothing to bring up. Some days were like that. I wasn’t sure what was worse, shitting all damn day or chucking until my throat burned like hell.
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and started walking.
The cave was five miles east, give or take, through country that didn’t give a damn whether I made it or not. I’d been walking this land since I was old enough to keep up with my old man, and it had never been easy going. No shade to take the edge off the sun. Loose stones that shifted under my boots when I stopped paying attention. Heat that came up off the ground in waves even after dark.
But it was my country. Always had been.
Six generations of Bransons were buried on this property. My turn was coming, but it wasn’t going to be on this hike. I wasn’t done yet.
Every time my bandaged hand knocked against my hip, pain shot up my arm like a brand. The dishcloth had soaked through and dried to a stiff brown rag stuck to my skin. I should’ve stitched the wound before I left Willy’s place. It was too late for that now.
My gut was worse. Every step made the cancer feel like a hammer pounding my kidneys to mush.
I stopped twice, once to heave up bile, and once because my legs packed it in for a minute. Both times, I watched a wedge-tailed eagle drifting across the sky above me, its shadow sliding across the rocks at my feet. The patient bastard was waiting for me to keel over and die.
“Not yet, mate,” I said up to it. “Not bloody yet.”
I came up on the cave from the south, the way I always had. The mouth was screened by two boulders the size of tractors and a bunch of mulga trees that had grown thick around them in the fifty-odd years since I’d first found this place. A man could walk right past this spot from any direction and never know there was a cave behind those rocks.
I stepped between the boulders, and the temperature dropped ten degrees the second I stood in the shade.
The cave was bigger than the machinery shed back at the homestead. The roof was high enough that I’d ridden Razor in here more than once. But it wasn’t deep. Fifty feet back, the sandstone closed in, and the bats hung in their roosting clusters like dirty washing.
Filthy fuckers. The stink was something I’d never gotten used to, no matter how many times I came here.
I dropped the duffel of cash by the forty-gallon drum in the middle of the cave and set the shotgun against one of the big rocks we’d placed around the drum to sit on. Then I unpacked everything else. Two boxes of shells. Willy’s carving knife in its sheath, three packs of sausages from Willy’s freezer that were already starting to thaw, and two and a half bottles of Bundy, which was a whole lot less than I needed.
I set everything out on a flat slab of rock like a man laying out his tools before a job and turned to face the drum.
Bob, Donny, and I had dragged that drum out here decades ago with Kat’s body inside it. The rusty thing was black with soot and dented on one side from where Bob had kicked it that night.
We’d just been kids.
After we’d put Kat’s body in the ground, none of us had been able to sleep, so we’d lit a fire in that drum to take the edge off the dark. The three of us had stood around those flames until sunrise. None of us would admit we were spooked. But we fucking were. We couldn’t bring ourselves to leave until there was enough light to show us the way back to the ranch.
That was my first murder. Bob’s, too. Donny only ever did that one, that I know of anyway. He hadn’t wanted any part in Kat’s death either, but he’d had no choice. We’d killed her to protect him, and Bob had told Donny he’d put him in the ground right next to her if he didn’t pick up the shovel and dig.
