There was a car on fire up ahead.

Harvey stopped his vehicle, got out, looked all around. Saw the same thing he’d been seeing for the past three and a half hours. Emptiness. One flat black mass, slightly darker than the black mass blanketed over it, peppered with stars and milky galaxies he’d known the name of once. The burning car was just a hazy dome of light rising beyond the curvature of the earth, maybe a minute and a half on. Harvey had seen plenty of cars on fire, from all possible distances. Knew that’s what it was. Petrol stink and menace whispered past him on the wind.

He got back behind the wheel, gripped it and watched the dark, shut his headlights off. A set-up with a burning car was just the right kind of bullshit for the High Wire. The secret track that cut through the Australian Outback from Broome to Sydney had started out as a trucker-only thing; a flat, even, mostly hazard-free route that skirted Indigenous conservation areas, cattle farms and small towns. It was far enough into the dusty forgotten corners of the states that joined hands across it that each jurisdiction liked to think any problems on the Wire weren’t theirs. Satellite coverage was patchy and routine patrols weren’t feasible, so after the truckers let slip about it, the track became party central for drug traffickers trying to move cargo from the south-east corner of Australia to the north-west. And for the bandits who wanted to take advantage of that. Bandits who liked to set cars on fire, draw people in, rob and murder them.

Harvey had two choices now.

Drive on.

Or turn away.

He liked to weigh things. On one hand, he had the knowledge and experience to know that a burning-car ruse was the most basic of all honeytraps, that the kind of idiots who spent their life out here on the Wire trying to ensnare Good Samaritan truckers and hopelessly lost tourists probably weren’t more inventive than that. There was a good chance Harvey would pull up to investigate the fire, only to turn around and find a gun in his face. The bandits would have it in their minds to beat the snot out of him, take what little he had and bury him alive out here. That wouldn’t happen, of course. But Harvey was already in a hurry. He didn’t need to add putting space between him and a pile of dead bodies to his schedule.

He tapped the steering wheel and thought about the other hand; a natural curiosity he’d never grown out of, and the idea that the burning car did indeed belong to one of the Good Samaritans or hopelessly lost tourists he’d just been thinking about, and if he wandered up he might see them in the process of having the snot beaten out of them or the whole alive-burial thing. So, on the scales was him having to live with seeing two grinning backpackers in the newspaper the next day, public puzzlement about where they disappeared to.

Harvey huffed a sigh.

Then he drove on.

The haze became a glow and the glow became a wobbly ball of light. Harvey kept his head on swivel, looking for figures out there in the blackness, his night vision compromised by the fireball. He got within about twenty metres and the figure, standing a good distance back from the car, heard his tyre pop a little stone on the hard earth and turned. She was tall. Ponytail, jacket, jeans. Instead of coming over to the car she backed away beyond the glow of the fire in a way that made Harvey’s stomach turn. Because that told him something. An ordinary citizen with their car on fire in the middle of nowhere would welcome the help, at least come around the driver’s side to get a look at who was offering it. He cut the engine and pressed the cigarette lighter in the console so that a hidden panel in the door popped open. He took his pistol out, opened the door and put one foot on the ground. He kept a hand on the wheel and his gun by his side…

Continue reading the extract here…

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