‘Just as well you weren’t about to stick that into me,’ Jack muttered.
‘Yeah.’ The agreement was wholehearted. ‘What on earth was that? It sounded like a gun.’ Fliss knew her shudder was probably visible. ‘I hate guns.’
And anything to do with them. Like the danger they represented.
And the way they automatically made her think of Angus.
‘Probably a car backfiring,’ Jack said casually.
‘Hmm.’ Fliss reached into her kit for a fresh needle. An unlikely explanation. Her car might be parked out on the dusty street but that was because she could be needed in a hurry somewhere else. As a rule, people didn’t bother driving cars on this side of the bridge. Once in the village they could easily walk where they needed to go. Or ride bicycles.
‘More likely it’s those Johnston boys.’ Jack was watching Fliss as she ripped open an alcohol swab. ‘Guy Fawkes is only a week or so away. They’re probably having a test run of their crackers.’
Fliss glanced outside again to where the young Johnston twins had been riding their bikes. Sure enough, two bicycles lay abandoned in the middle of the street, one with its front wheel still spinning slowly. Under one end of the long macrocarpa hedge that bordered the Treffers’ property, a pair of short legs could be seen protruding. A small boy hiding, perhaps—avoiding the potential consequences of an illicit act.
The second crack was even louder.
‘Now, that did sound like a gun,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe Darren’s doing something stupid in his back yard.’
It was quite possible. Darren was a local resident who shot possums in the vast tracts of native bush that cut Morriston off from the Southern Alps. As one of New Zealand’s most destructive pests, the culling was commendable but the way Darren left the carcasses piled in his driveway awaiting his taxidermy skills before being sent to the tourist shops was fairly unpopular with his neighbours.
‘Mind you,’ Jack added when a series of cracks made the windows as well as the doors rattle, ‘that’s no shotgun he’s using.’
Fliss unsnapped the tourniquet as Jack stood up. There was no way she could concentrate on taking a blood sample until they discovered the cause of this disturbing interruption.
They both moved to the glass doors.
‘Look!’ Fliss point towards the river mouth. ‘The whitebaiters are coming in in a hurry.’
Jack picked up a pair of binoculars from the end of his kitchen bench with an ease that suggested it was an automatic gesture. ‘It’s those Barrett boys,’ he told Fliss.
The fact that the Barrett ‘boys’ were both well into their fifties failed to raise a smile. She knew the brothers lived well out of the village, worked sporadically at a sawmill down the coast and relied heavily on the whitebait season to supplement their income. Right now, they were wading ashore with a speed that was at complete odds with the impression of laziness Fliss had gained on the one occasion she had met them.
The speed was enough to see one of them stumble and sprawl headlong into the slow-moving water.
‘Why have they left their nets behind?’
Jack didn’t answer the question. The way his grip on the binoculars tightened was enough to make Fliss catch her breath and it wasn’t just Jack’s sudden focus that brought those hairs up again on the back of her neck.
Her eyesight was more than good enough to see that the man who had stumbled wasn’t getting up again.
He was floating, face down in the water, while his brother continued his dash to the shore.
‘Jack?’ The tone was urgent and Fliss took the binoculars that he handed over in stunned silence.
Now Fliss could see something she would never have seen with the naked eye. Something she had not wanted to see.
A dark stain in the water to one side of the floating figure. Quickly dispersed, of course, only to re-form.
‘Oh, my God,’ Fliss breathed. ‘He’s been shot, hasn’t he, Jack?’
‘Come away from the window.’ Jack took Fliss’s elbow in a firm grip and propelled her back into the kitchen, but not before she took a wild visual sweep of the view closer to hand.
The impressions were momentary. Someone was running past the end of Jack’s street. The boys’ bicycles still lay in the dust and a small boy’s legs could still be seen under the Treffers’ hedge. Bernice was nowhere to be seen and the hose she had been using to water the tomatoes lay abandoned, the nozzle twisting gently due to the pressure of its undirected spray.
‘What’s happening, Jack?’
‘I dunno. But whatever it is, I don’t like it.’ Jack reached for the telephone on the wall beside an interior door. ‘I’m calling Blair.’
The local police officer was bound to be at the Hog at this time of day, having a quiet beer and keeping his finger on the pulse of his district. Luckily, he lived in Morriston and not one of the other scattered villages that he shared with Fliss as part of his responsibility. But Jack put the receiver down a moment later and shook his head.
‘Line’s busy.’
‘Call the emergency services,’ Fliss instructed. ‘We need help.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Someone needs to rescue that man in the river. He’s going to need treatment fast.’
‘I reckon it’s too late for that,’ Jack said heavily. Neither of them wanted to look towards the river mouth and see if the body was still floating. Neither of them could help themselves. Jack made a sound of frustration but then shook his head. ‘Nobody’s going to be crazy enough to wade out there while someone’s taking potshots at people.’
‘But who would be doing something like that? Why?’
Jack shrugged. ‘I’ve heard rumours about the Barrett boys. I suspect they grow more than veggies up there in the bush.’
‘People don’t get shot because they grow a bit of cannabis on the side.’
‘Don’t be too sure. It’s big business in these parts and the police chopper operations don’t find all the plantations by any means.’
‘You think this is deliberate, then? Some kind of patch warfare?’
‘Let’s hope so.’
Fliss said nothing. Jack was right. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate. Far better that Jack was guessing correctly and there was a specific target that would only endanger innocent people if they got in the way.
Jack had entered the three-digit emergency number into his phone.
‘Police,’ Fliss heard him request brusquely. Then he said ‘Morriston’ in response to what had to be a query regarding location.
Then he was silent for what seemed an inordinately long time. Finally he nodded.
‘Right you are.’ The call was disconnected.
‘You didn’t tell them anything,’ Fliss protested.
‘They already know. There’s an armed offender operation already under way. They got the first call about fifteen minutes ago.’
‘But that was before we even heard the first shot.’
‘Maybe someone saw something. Or maybe someone was making threats.’ He gave Fliss a curious glance. ‘You knew, didn’t you? That something wasn’t right?’
‘I wouldn’t have called the police on the strength of a premonition,’ Fliss said wryly. ‘But at least we know help’s on the way.’
‘They