The drivers on the Great Western Highway were by now well aware of the sudden and alarming presence of the tan-and-brown Oldsmobile, which moved erratically as the driver and his passenger turned around repeatedly to mark the progress of Billie’s roadster. Her car was a faster one, lighter and with a larger engine, and Billie knew it to be in far superior condition, despite its age. Both vehicles wove around the traffic, speeding up from thirty-five miles per hour to forty. By the time they approached Medlow Bath they were doing near to fifty, dodging around cars, using the shoulder as the road narrowed. The Hydro Majestic hotel, where they’d triumphantly spent much of their afternoon, flew past. If the thugs wanted a chase, they had it.
“The roads are becoming less familiar. They’ll try to lose us along here,” Billie predicted. “We can’t let that happen.”
One of the two small sloping rear windshields of the Oldsmobile shattered with a bang as they sped through the intersection at Blackheath and passed Gardners Inn, scattering glass over the road outside the pub, where three men were perched on wooden benches, enjoying an afternoon beverage. Two of them stood with a start, shouting and waving their arms, and in a flash were far behind them. They certainly had the attention of the locals. Now the armed passenger in the motorcar ahead sat low, wind whipping his hair, the muzzle of his weapon falling temporarily from view.
“Keep the gun down when we go through the villages... if you can,” Billie shouted. “The cops are bound to catch up.” Though she wondered if that was true, considering the speeds they were hitting. This was not Sydney, where the police might meet them from any direction. “They shot out that window so they can hit us next,” she warned, watching one of the men crawling toward the back. “We have to stop them, fast.” They came around a bend, buildings falling away and the bush taking over. “Try the tires now!” Billie shouted above the roar of the wind and the engine. If Sam could get one wheel, they would end up on the side of the road and this reckless chase would be over. As they passed between a railway line and an old cemetery, Sam shot once, twice, the Oldsmobile swerving in front of them. No hits.
“I’m out!” he shouted with frustration. His Smith & Wesson revolver was a five-shooter, and there wasn’t time to reload now, even if he had the bullets. He held up his gun helplessly next to her.
“Take mine,” Billie said and pushed her left thigh toward him, flipping back her hem with one hand. “It’s in my garter.”
Sam hesitated. Her gun garter was a few inches wide and she had fashioned it to sit over the top of her stocking, and the effect, with the strip of lace and the delicate ribbon ties like the back of a corset, was pleasing as well as practical, she thought. But the sight of it strapped to her thigh evidently gave her assistant some pause, which was, at this moment, quite inconvenient.
“Sam, take it now,” Billie urged. The wind rushing through the car pushed up the hem of her dress yet farther and the little mother-of-pearl grip of the gun flashed.
Sam extracted the Colt.
By now the traffic had thinned considerably; for the moment itwas just them and the Oldsmobile, which frustratingly had not slowed. They’d passed the intersection at Mount Victoria with the old hotel and the railway, the last spot Billie knew, and were heading west into unfamiliar territory. Now dense bush and loosely tended agricultural land hugged the road, the odd weatherboard house sagging into its foundations the only sign of human habitation. The barrel of a gun revealed itself, gleaming and deadly, from the back window of the motorcar ahead. “Look out!” she called, and a shot was fired, missing them narrowly. Billie steered in deliberate arcs along the road, making them a tougher target, her dark roadster holding the road expertly. And then the road opened up dramatically to reveal a precipitous descent into a valley awash with afternoon sunlight. The road turned left, winding downward in wide curves through a cutting, a convict-built rock wall on one side, the valley beyond. Having seen the descent, Billie braked gently, feeling the roadster pull forward to the right. In seconds it came back under her control. The pair ahead had stopped shooting, and now that Sam had Billie’s gun, he seemed ready to use it. But not here. Not now. It was too steep. Too much curve.
The Oldsmobile wobbled and veered left, a rear tire moving unsteadily, and the old motorcar swung dangerously, inexorably, past the edge of the lane, then onward, bursting through the timber guardrails.
In a plume of dust and shattered timber, the thugs were careering over the cliff, plummeting some three hundred feet to the valley below.
Twenty-four
“Tell me again what happened,”the fresh-faced officer said, watching Billie carefully and with a somewhat puzzled expression, brows knitted together and head cocked. “Youwere driving the automobile, you say?”
Billie and Sam sat in Katoomba Police Station, a combination sandstone lockup, police station, and sergeant’s residence at the rear of the Katoomba courthouse. Her black roadster, now a dusty gray from the chase, was parked outside the back entrance. The sun had set on both the day and Billie’s patience. The adrenaline of the pursuit had subsided, leaving little energy for strained diplomacy.
“Yes,Iwas drivingmymotorcar,” she answered with emphasis. She had endured a far too tedious interrogation already, and her professional smile—usually so handy—did not quite work, and settled into a scowl. She pushed back a wavy lock of dark hair that insisted on falling into her eyes, tried to tuck it under her hair wrap, but, not finding a hairpin where she thought she might, let the curl fall again, all the better to obscure her interrogator. She crossed herarms. “I went to the hospital to see my clients—” she began again but was interrupted.
“Your clients?” the officer echoed, as if she hadn’t painstakingly explained the situation already.
Billie watched the uniformed constable from beneath her uncooperative locks. Sandy-haired and fit, he had the glowing but prematurely weathered skin and bright eyes of an outdoorsman. She imagined him scaling the local cliffs in his time off. He might have seen many things in his work with the Katoomba police, but it seemed that gunfights and women PIs driving fast automobiles did not fit into his framework of understanding about the world.
“Yes, my clients,” Billie enunciated clearly, with deliberate slowness. “I am a private inquiry agent, as I mentioned, and this gentleman is my assistant.” She gestured toward Sam as a schoolteacher might indicate a blackboard with a simple math equation written on it, then cleared her throat and paused, trying to maintain whatever scant composure she still possessed. “My clients had almost arrived at the hospital when two men attacked their son in his hospital bed, then fled on being interrupted. It was at that time we made chase, as I mentioned,” she said, stretching out her thinning patience as one would stretch a stick of chewing gum to the moon.
There was a knock on the door and another officer entered, not quite as young, but with the same weathered, glowing skin as his colleague. “Mate, the crocodile...” He paused. “Pardon me,” he said, looking at the elegantly windswept woman and her partner, who looked somewhat like Alan Ladd, clearly believing the pair had already departed. “Um, Constable, there’s been another spotting of the crocodile.”
Billie’s eyebrows shot up. “A crocodile? Out here?”
“Escaped from the traveling circus, it did. Been eluding us for weeks,” the second officer said. He removed himself from the room, and Billie sincerely hoped that the sighting of the crocodile would precipitate the end of the interrogation.
“And the shooting?” the constable continued, evidently not finished yet, despite the bizarre news of a crocodile stalking the streets of his jurisdiction. “Why did you chase these armed men?” he asked, for what might have been the fourth time. “That was dangerous, wasn’t it?”
Billie willed herself to stay calm.Becausethey were armed men,shooting at people,she wanted to say, but refrained. “We felt it was our civic duty to alert the police, protect the vulnerable citizens at the hospital, and hold the men until you arrived. Sadly, we could not reach them in time and they drove off the pass.”
“Right,” the constable said. “I’ll get my superior.”
Billie felt like slapping him.
It was dark before Sam and Billie were released and found themselves back at Katoomba’s ANZAC Memorial Hospital, finally alone with Nettie and Mikhall Brown, and provided with tea and Anzac biscuits. It was a blessing, to Billie’s mind, that the Browns had missed the struggle and the shooting, and had not seen their son pinned to the ground with a pillow forced over his face.
“Do you recognize this photograph?” Billie asked, putting down her tea and extending the small portrait first to Nettie Brown, then to Mikhall.
“Well, yes,” Nettie responded, surprised. “That is my aunt, Margarethe, and her family. Where did you find this?”
Adin’s great-aunt. The one who stayed in Berlin.It was as Billie had suspected.
