Page 59 of Close Protection

Finally Jacko reslung the rifle over his shoulder and sat. He took out his lighter and cigarettes. He lit himself a smoke and put the lighter in his pocket.

She tried a step forward. The shadow moved too.

Jacko didn’t flinch. She was fifteen feet away now. He leaned back and blew smoke at the sky. She took another step toward him. Toes, then sole, then heel. Placing her feet on the stony beach with the lightest of touches.

Toes, sole, heel.

Another step.

And another.

Until—

A short, sharp stab of perfect pain.

The jagged edge of an old bottle had pierced the skin of her heel.

She bit her lip to stop herself crying out. Her shadow was swaying from side to side, seemingly trying to attract Jacko’s attention. Blinking away tears, she crossed her legs and sat. She was bleeding, but the bottle had not penetrated too deeply. She took hold of the glass fragment and eased it out of her foot. She licked her thumb and rubbed at the wound, and it began to feel better. She took a flat stone and held it against the cut. The bleeding slowed. It would have to do. She couldn’t sit here all day.

She got to her feet again and took a few tentative steps.

Her treasonous shadow was well into Jacko’s field of view now.

Closer.

She could read the writing on the back of his sweat-drenched yellow tank top. There was a red star above the words BINTANG BEER.

She could smell him. He reeked of body odor, cigarette smoke, engine oil.

It was quiet. The echoes of the rifle shot were gone and the only sound was the seawater rushing through the channel.

To her left the last hint of early-morning mist was evaporating in the sunlight. The air was expectant with the coming heat. It was going to be a scorcher. Easily over one hundred and ten degrees.

It was, she remembered, February 14. Funny how the seasons were reversed like that. Back home it would be in the forties or even colder.

Valentine’s Day.

Exactly twelve months ago Tom had come in for his first massage-therapy appointment in the clinic in West Seattle. It had been snowing. When he’d lain down on the table, he still had snowflakes in his hair.

What a difference a year made.

She’d been childless then, on the verge of unemployment, living in that damp apartment near Alki Beach. Now she was married and responsible for two children and about to kill a man she barely knew on a different beach on the far side of the world.

She took three more careful steps and raised the machete.

1

The sign said ALICE SPRINGS 25, TENNANT CREEK 531, DARWIN 1,517.

She took that in for a second or two.

If they somehow missed Alice they would have to go another five hundred kilometers (over three hundred miles) before they could get food, water, or gas. She looked through the windows on either side of the empty highway and saw exactly nothing. The radio had been drifting in and out for the past twenty minutes but the signal, perhaps, was getting a little stronger. She could make out John Lennon singing about “old flat-top” who was “groovin’ up slowly.”

She could identify pretty much every Beatles song from just one or two bars or a snatch of lyrics. Her parents and almost everyone else on Goose Island had worshipped John Lennon, and with only intermittent TV and internet reception, music had been even more important. The song ended and a DJ began his patter. “That was ‘Come Together,’ the opening track of Abbey Road. And before that we had ‘Hey Jude.’ Can anyone tell me what album ‘Hey Jude’ was on?”

The DJ paused for his listeners to reply.

“It wasn’t on any album, it was a seven-inch single,” Heather whispered.