Page 22 of Down the Track
The woman’s hands were busy tapping a thin peg into the ground. Beside her were neat piles of red soil and rubble and a bucket filled with shovels and chisels and he didn’t know what else. Either she was hard of hearing or she had a no-talking-to-random-helicopter-pilots policy, because she took no notice of him.
A thin, tinny sound drifted up, different to the noises of the busy camp. Of course. Tucked into her ears were the tell-tale signs of earbuds. Hux closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated. Cold Chisel, perhaps? What better music to listen to when digging your way through rocks than rock music?
He took a step to the side so his shadow fell over her workspace, then waited a beat until she looked up.
Brown eyes, even darker than her hair, looked up at him. A smooth curve of cheek; a smattering of red soil across a collarbone where she must have rubbed her fingers; a face that had just imprinted on his writer’s brain as belonging to the heroine in every novel he had yet to write.
He cleared his throat. A thousand words an hour he could write—more, sometimes—but a pretty face in an arid landscape had just swept his mind as clear as the Western Queensland horizon.
‘Er …’ he said. Fortunately, the weight in his arms came to his rescue. ‘Apple delivery. Where do you want them?’
Her mouth went prim for a minute and then relaxed. ‘Are you the helicopter pilot who just blew my marker pegs and tape all over the place and peppered me with dust?’
Not crime scene tape, then. ‘Um. Guilty as charged.’ He set down the box and looked around. A peg lay on its side a few metres away and a strand of tape had anchored itself to a sorry-looking tuft of spinifex. ‘Sorry. What do I need to fix?’
That mouth quirked a little as she spoke. ‘Step into this pit and the site boss will go off her nut. I wouldn’t say no to one of those apples, though.’
‘Coming right up.’
He opened the flaps of the carton and lifted the top layer of dimpled purple cardboard that was keeping the apples from bumping into each other and bruising. Red Delicious. His favourite. Perhaps his day wasn’t going to be the total bust it had felt like a few minutes ago.
He’d flown out from Yindi Creek at dawn feeling very unenthusiastic about another day spotting sheep, delivering supplies and wrestling with the giant hole in his manuscript’s plot. Same old, same old, and most likely he’d get used to it soon because flying and mustering was the only work he knew how to do, only none of it was getting him any closer to his secret goal of making it as an author.
The woman stood up to accept the apple he was holding out for her, and his conviction that she might just be his ideal heroine grew. Was this fate? Was this karma? A byproduct of too many avgas fumes breathed in at the midday refuelling stop?
Whatever it was, as soon as he could remember his own name, he was going to introduce himself.
CHAPTER
10
By the time Hux had explained himself to the police and SES crew and returned his three passengers to the airfield in Yindi Creek (one of them very quiet, the other two very much agog), refuelled the chopper and secured its covers in place, he was positively burning with questions.
TYSON: You and me both, mate. You have been a freaking dark horse about that chick.
Idiot. He was burning with questions about the bloke Charlie had flown out to Woop Woop who had apparently still not been located and whatever rubbish had been printed in theEcho, not about Jo. Yes, sure, she’d been simmering with some emotion all morning, but he had no clue which one. Or why. Maybe she’d just been pissed off that their trip hadn’t found whatever she and the Cracknells were looking for. Or irritated to have the old flame she’d ditched long ago replace Charlie as pilot of the flight she’d chartered.
TYSON: She was worried. And sad. Even a self-centred, emotionally flawed hack like me could figure that out.
Yeah, okay. She had seemed worried. And if Hux had any shits left to give where Joanne Tan was concerned, he’d have wondered about the sad part, too.
As it was, he had those other burning questions to deal with that really did matter, starting with why the hell hadn’t Charlie been at the donger this morning? And where had he been last night? And why hadn’t the police asked Yindi Creek Chopper Charters to assist with the search they were clearly conducting? In days gone by, Merv, the longtime copper of the district, had used their services like they were his own private air fleet. And Sal. This pregnancy was knocking her around and now she was having to be the strong one because Charlie was off his game?
He had to do something, but what? He didn’t like being on the back foot just because he’d been out of town. He liked to know. Everything. All the time. Not because he was a control freak, but because he cared.
TYSON: Like mother, like son, mate.
Rubbish. His mother actually was a control freak, whereas Hux just liked to be in the loop.
He rubbed his chest while he brooded over the other question: What was the likelihood that the missing bloke and Joanne Tan, palaeontologist and heartbreaker, both wanted to visit the exact same destination?
Coincidences happened. Not in a crime plot, of course; crime plots had to be credible and coincidence was the opposite of credible. But in the real world? Maybe.
He was headed over to the donger to get out of the heat for a bit and see if Phaedra had managed to track down a copy of theWestern Echo, when Charlie appeared. Not in a straitjacket, as the expression on Number Four’s face last night had suggested was imminent, but nor was he decked out ready for work in the Yindi Creek Chopper Charter uniform of shorts and short-sleeved white work shirt. He clearly hadn’t been mucking around when he’d scrubbed his name from the roster.
‘Mate,’ Hux said, accepting the slap on the back and giving his own in return.
‘Thanks for coming home,’ Charlie said, in an odd way that Hux couldn’t quite gauge.
