Bitter Wash Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

gumtree. Weathered fence posts and the weary rust loops that tethered them one to the other. He saw an eagle, an emu, a couple of black snakes. It was a land of muted pinks, browns and greys ghosted by the pale blue hills on the horizon.
     
    That was what he saw. What he didn’t see, but sensed, were abandoned gold diggings, mine shafts, ochre hands stencilled to rock faces. A besetting place. It spooked Hirsch. The sky pressed down and the scrub crouched. ‘It’s lovely out there,’ one of the locals had assured him during the week, waiting while Hirsch witnessed a statutory declaration.
     
    He passed in and out of creek beds and saw a tiny church perched atop a rise. What the fuck was it doing there, this shell of a church? Ministering to other stone shells, he supposed, left by the men and women who’d settled here and failed and walked away.
     
    Hirsch fought the steering wheel, the gear lever, the clutch. His foot ached. Even the HiLux struggled, pitching and yawing inflexibly, taking him at a crawling pace through the back country. You had to hand it to technology, the GPS giving him the shortest route but blithely unaware of local conditions. It would take him forever to reach Muncowie at this rate, longer if he holed the sump or punctured a tyre.
     
    Then he was out on the highway. Muncowie 7 according to the signpost. He made the turn, heading south, the valley less obvious here, the highway striping a broad, flat plain. It gave Hirsch a sense of riding high above sea level, the sky vast and no longer pressing down, the hills a distant smear on either side. Meanwhile the crops, stock and fences were marginally better than the country he’d just passed through, more and greener grass, less dirt, as if he’d passed across the rain shadow again, moved from unsustainable life to a fifty-fifty chance of it.
     
    And then in the emptiness he saw another car. Black. It drew closer.
     
    Not a Chrysler. A Falcon, he saw as it passed.
     
    Hirsch thought about Pullar and Hanson. In terms of timing, geography and logic, it wouldn’t make sense for them to have headed down here. Travel two thousand kilometres in a reasonably distinctive vehicle, away from the country they knew? Hirsch couldn’t see it. But he could see how the men might hunt in a place such as this. They had been preying on roadhouse waitresses along the empty highways, housewives and teenage daughters on lonely country roads.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    IT HAD STARTED AS a local backblocks story, a Queensland story— albeit a vicious one—which quickly went viral when Channel Nine muscled in, giving the killers a voice. Back in August a forty-year-old Mount Isa speed freak named Clay Pullar and an eighteen-year-old Brisbane cokehead named Brent Hanson raped and murdered three roadhouse waitresses over a two-week period. Police tracked the men to a caravan park in northern New South Wales but arrived too late. They found the body of a Canadian hitchhiker roped to a bed. Further sightings placed the men in Cairns, Bourke, Alice Springs, Darwin...Nothing definite until they broke into a farmhouse near Wagga, where they raped a teenager in front of her trussed-up parents and fled north with her to a property across the border and along the river at Dirranbandi.
     
    Feeling pleased with himself, Pullar phoned Channel Nine on his mobile phone. He’d just managed to prove who he was when the signal failed, so Channel Nine dispatched a reporter and a cameraman by helicopter, which set down on the back lawn long enough to leave a satellite phone, and took off again, circling overhead. Pullar appeared. Even through the long pull of the camera lens he looked tall, gaunt, hard, insane. He grinned and waved, showing stumpy teeth, grabbed the phone, returned to the farmhouse, and began to explain himself. An exclusive, a live interview, you couldn’t ask for better. Fuck ethics, the public had a right to know. Fuck sense, too; Pullar made absolutely no sense but was