Dark Country (28 page)

‘What about the guy you were dancing with before him?’

He’d been watching her. Heck, he might have been watching any number of people, she reminded herself, to squelch the warmth
coiling through her veins. He’d grown up in this town, knew most of its people.

‘Scott? He’s … nice. But he’s also Ingrid Sauer’s fiancée. Did you know her?’

He screwed up his face and thought for a moment. ‘Snotty-nosed blond kid with plaits? Or maybe that was her cousin.’

She laughed lightly. ‘They’ve both grown up a bit, since then.’

The music drifted across to them, muted at this distance, and she leaned against an old fencepost.

He still hunkered by the creek bank, and it struck her how surprisingly at ease in the bush environment he was, for a man
who’d spent the past decade and a half in Sydney’s inner suburbs.

And she couldn’t, for the moment, picture him in the busy streets of the city, because he belonged here, in the dark stillness
of the bush, as natural and untamed and complex as the wilderness around them.

The barking call of an owl echoed somewhere nearby, breaking into the easy silence that had fallen between them.

‘You should go back inside to your friends, enjoy the party,’ he said.

‘I’m not much of a party person. Besides, the company’s fine out here for now.’

He snorted. ‘Not many of them would agree with you.’ He said it carelessly, as if it didn’t matter.

But it did matter, and she dropped the teasing banter and addressed the issue seriously. ‘It seems to me there’s a lot of
question marks over your supposed responsibility for Paula Barrett’s death.’

He was quiet for a moment. ‘How do you figure that?’

‘I looked up a few records yesterday, Gil. It appears there was no evidence other than the blood-alcohol report, to suggest,
let alone prove, negligence or culpability. Which leads me to suspect that there wasn’t any, and that the report was falsified
to nail you.’

He rose, strolled a few steps away to stand with his back to the light coming from the hall, his face in shadow. ‘Cruddy
investigation and record keeping doesn’t change a person’s guilt or innocence.’

He might have been talking about the weather, for all the emotion in his voice. And yet … the controlled stillness of his
silhouette convinced her that the don’t-give-a-damn attitude was merely a hard shell of protection around a core that
did
give a damn.

‘No, it doesn’t. Nor does it make a crime out of a tragic accident.’ The dark, an unlit country road, and a kangaroo leaping
out – she’d seen the results too many times, almost come to grief that way herself, and not just the other night.

He reached for a low-hanging branch, picked a leaf, and twirled the stem in his teeth.

‘People don’t like accidents,’ he said. ‘They always want someone to blame.’

He was right, but it didn’t make the situation right. ‘Sometimes no-one is at fault. Maybe they’ll just have to get used to
that idea.’

‘Don’t go mounting a PR campaign on my behalf, Blue.’

‘Why not?’

He tossed the leaf to the ground. ‘Because it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving here tomorrow. I don’t care what they think. And
because the less you have to do with me, the better. Tony Russo, the Flanagans … they’re dangerous, Blue. They’ve already
threatened you. They won’t hesitate to do more.’

‘Are you trying to frighten me, Gil?’

‘Yes,’ he said, blunt and hard. ‘You shouldn’t have stood up for me, put yourself at risk. You should have run like hell
from me the moment we met, Blue. You should run like hell from me now.’

She held his dark gaze with hers. ‘I’m not running, Gil.’

He stood unmoving in the night, his face still in shadow, his voice, when he spoke again, rough and low. ‘What if I told you
that every time I see you, I imagine you naked?’

His attempt to frighten her with that tactic didn’t work. If it had just been a line, it might have pissed her off, but the
raw honesty only spoke aloud what they both knew and had been avoiding.

And maybe the night and the moonlight were stirring some wild part of her, eroding her usual caution, but she discovered that
she wanted no lies or denials between them, just acceptance of who they were and what they felt. So she answered him with
the same honesty. ‘If you told me that, I’d have to admit that it’s a mutual distraction. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.’

He started, then yanked his eyes away, muttering, ‘Jesus, Blue.’ He dragged a boot heel through the dirt, scoring two furrows
before he stopped, threw her a look that was both question and challenge, and said, ‘Then you’re as crazy as I am.’

The return of the dark humour to his voice let her breathe again. It would be all right. Whatever ‘it’ was.

Still with a metre between them, she inclined her head and watched him, teasing him lightly, ‘That’s a novel approach to sweet-talk,
Gillespie.’

‘I don’t do “sweet”, Blue. Slow, sometimes. But definitely not “sweet”.’

‘“Sweet” is overrated.’

Three seconds passed before he challenged softly, ‘Yeah?’

‘Definitely.’ And she had no idea if she was flying out of control, or totally in control, but right now she didn’t actually
care.

There was nothing slow or sweet or polite about their kiss. Nothing gentle or tentative, just raw and insistent and demanding.

Her initial thought – while she was still thinking – was that she would like to kiss him. Two adults, mutual attraction, a
natural response. But hunger flared instantly, as their bodies touched, a fierce need to take from him and give to him she
didn’t want to resist. She gave up thinking, let the wild heart of herself respond without constraint.

Heartbeat spiralling, her hands explored the contours of hard chest, shoulders and back that she’d dreamed about since that
first night. As bold and possessive as his hands roaming her, heated against her skin and through the fabric of her dress,
drawing them together for total contact from mouths to thighs. Desire and need and Gil became her only awareness.

Until he pulled back. Abrupt and hard, letting her go and twisting on his heel to move several feet away, leaning his hand
against a tree while he dragged in breaths.

She tugged her light wrap around her, the air cool on her heated skin, words and sensations too jumbled in her mind to arrange
in coherent shape.

He gave a hard, bitter laugh. ‘Christ. I need my frigging head read.’

Definitely not sweet-talk, but before she could frame a reply, a crackle of dry leaves warned her of someone approaching,
and she turned to see Mark standing in the moonlight.

‘Everything all right, Kris?’

‘Yes. Fine.’ Oh, yes, fine if she didn’t count fractured breathing and the ground doing a rollercoaster impersonation underneath
her feet. She dragged some semblance of politeness together. ‘Mark, do you remember Gil Gillespie?’

Mark nodded acknowledgment, and the two men watched each other with all the wariness of a couple of wild dogs circling. ‘Gil.
It’s been a long time.’

Her blood pressure, starting to come down, shot up again as she realised the significance of this meeting between the two
men. It
had
been a long time – eighteen years since they’d been in a car together with Mark’s girlfriend, Paula. A night that had ended
with Paula dead, Mark critically injured in hospital, and Gil arrested. No wonder Mark hadn’t stepped forward and shaken hands
with his usual courtesy.

‘Yeah,’ Gil responded eventually. ‘A long time.’ And then he glanced across at her, closed and distant again, as though they
hadn’t just been kissing each other senseless. ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to your party.’

He turned on his heel and headed towards the trees, disappearing into the darkness.

He needed to walk. He passed the pub, took the side road down to the school, crossed the playing fields and jumped over the
creek. Once out of town, the full moon lit the dirt track into the scrub, the shadows of the trees black against the silver
light.

His thoughts scrambled, too many things going on, each strand spinning around and tangling with the others. Marci’s
murder. Vince’s murder. The fire at Jeanie’s. Jeanie hurt, in the hospital. The dead truck driver in the café. The search
of the old place. His mother’s skeleton. Megan. Kris. Kissing Kris and wanting to peel away her clothes and taste her and
feel her and be inside her and forget every other damned thing in the world but the feeling of them together.

He groaned and hauled his thoughts back from that madness. What he needed to do was to sit down, go logically through each
issue, work out a strategy, and then act on it. And those issues did not include getting physical with Kris.

A gap in the trees revealed a gateway, an access into a large, cleared paddock, gently sloping away into the distance. The
gate was old and rickety, but the gatepost solid and devoid of barbed wire, so he hoisted himself up on to it, hoping the
clear space and fresh air might help to bring some clarity to his mind.

As he looked out onto the peaceful, moonlit view it occurred to him how often he’d roamed the night landscape in his youth.
As a kid, escaping his old man, he’d both loved the bush and hated it. Sanctuary and purgatory. Sometimes both at once. But
once he’d learned its ways, grown tall and strong enough to be unafraid, he’d been more at home in the bush than in the dilapidated
shack with his father.

Working long days and nights in the pub, he’d almost forgotten how the moonlight could shine, without the urban lights dimming
it. And how black it could be, without moonlight or starlight, when clouds obscured the night sky. He’d sometimes roamed in
Sydney, too, after close-up and the cleaning had been done, in the quieter hours before sunrise, his ingrained restlessness
not always negated by hard work and long hours.

The wheel has come full circle; I am here
.

The racing in his mind had slowed, and he accepted it now, as a statement without judgment or threat, an acknowledgment that
this place – the bush, Dungirri, the plains beyond – was a part of him. Nothing would change that, no matter what happened,
no matter where he went in the future – assuming he had one.

In order to have a future, he’d need to find some way out of the current problems. Logic. Strategy. Starting with one issue
at a time.

His mother – not much he could do about that now, except arrange a decent burial for her, when the forensic lot finished with
her remains. Maybe he could ask Kris to help him find her relations … No, he wouldn’t be around Kris much longer. He’d track
down his mother’s family himself, have her buried where she belonged, if possible.

But first he had to get through the next few days. Which brought him to Marci’s murder. On the list he’d drawn up for Kris,
he’d written a few possibilities – Marci’s boyfriend, a client, an associate of Jones and crew, and Tony Russo.

He didn’t think it likely that Tony had actually killed her himself. The sex factor didn’t sound like Tony’s personal work.
Violence, yes. Sex with it, no. But Tony was the one common link among all the names on all the lists. Whoever had actually
killed Marci, Flanagan’s network had been used to torch the café and destroy the evidence, and Tony must have called Flanagan
in.

As to who’d killed Vince, Tony had to be a possibility, although presumably his alibi had been checked already.
He was smart enough and connected enough to arrange an assassination, but why now, instead of five, ten, fifteen years ago?
The relationship between him and Vince had been strained for years. Likewise, the Jones gang had always seen Vince as a rival,
but why would
they
act now, when Kevin had been in jail for the last nine months?

If it was either Tony or a Jones associate, then something must have happened to trigger it. Gil cast his mind back to his
meeting with Vince on Wednesday morning, trying to remember if Vince had said anything, indicated anything, that suggested
a problem. He came up with nothing. The meeting had been brief, less than ten minutes, closer to five. He’d handed over the
cash to Vince, explained what it was for, told him – told him, not asked him – to warn Tony off interfering any further with
Marci, and let him know he’d arranged for Marci to go to Melbourne. Vince had asked if Marci had agreed to leave, and Gil
had replied that he was working on it, and then he
had
asked, not told, Vince to speak with Marci and persuade her to go.

That had been pretty much it. Vince had been his usual self, greeting him with a degree of warmth Gil never returned. At the
end, when Gil turned to leave, Vince had thanked him for keeping an eye on Marci, congratulated him on running a good business,
and asked what he planned to do next. When Gil had shrugged and said he had no plans yet, Vince had smiled and said he hoped
Gil wouldn’t need the contents of his safety deposit box.

Which, when Gil came to think about it now, did seem a bit odd. In all the years since Gil had confronted him and
laid out his terms, Vince had never once mentioned the safety deposit box.