Dead Heat Read Free Page A

happened?”
    “Nope.”
    “But you can’t just leave it there.”
    He turned his head to give her a direct stare. He had eyes the color of fresh tar, glistening black, devoid of expression.
    Georgia fired up the engine. Just my luck, she thought, to rescue the least friendly man on the planet. Looking in her rearview
     mirror, she saw Suzie was going through the contents of her damp leather fanny pack.
    “Everything okay?” she asked her.
    “Yes,” Suzie said breathlessly, “you’ve been great and I—”
    She broke off when Lee snapped at her in what sounded like Chinese. Georgia saw Suzie blink rapidly as though she might cry.
    So much for a lighthearted journey filled with jokes about submersible cars, Georgia thought, and pulled out. Driving a little
     way with her left foot on the brakes to dry them out, she set a brisk pace for the aerodrome. With only two miles to go it
     shouldn’t take long, she thought, unless there were any trees across the road.
    “You came from Nulgarra?” she asked.
    Lee shrugged.
    “Suzie? Do you live up here, or were you just visiting?”
    In her rearview mirror she saw Suzie glance at Lee before fixing her gaze outside.
    “I was here for a funeral,” Georgia offered. If that didn’t elicit a response she might as well give up. “My grandfather died
     last week.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Lee.
    She might as well have told him she’d put a blue sock in her white wash and everything had come out gray for all the sympathy
     in his voice. Next time, she thought mutinously, I won’t stop to help you. I’ll leave you to bloody walk.

THREE
    T he one thing about having lived in a small town, where everybody knows everybody, is that no matter how long you’ve been away,
     nobody forgets you. Change is slow, and chances are the boy you had a crush on at school is still around, maybe taking tourists
     big-game fishing or reef-diving, and your best girlfriend is now his wife with three kids and a pool out the back with two
     utes in the driveway.
    So Georgia wasn’t surprised that Bri Hutchison was still piloting the SunAir planes, or that his wife, Becky, continued to
     handle the bookings and office administration and, when the sky got busy during the tourists season, the radio. Seven hundred
     feet from the airstrip, the SunAir office was surrounded by ginkgos, ferns, and club mosses. Built of unpainted timber, it
     had a tin-roofed veranda, a dirt parking lot, a single open hangar, and a patch of lawn with a brick barbecue by the edge
     of the forest.
    After giving her a hug, Becky said, “Sorry about Tom, love. We’ll miss the old bugger.”
    “Me too.”
    “Anyhow, looks like we’ll get you out. Some bloke ain’t turned up, so you can have his seat. Go for it, love.”
    Lugging her backpack to the Piper plane, which was parked well back from the rain-puddled runway, she stowed it inside before
     taking the seat behind the pilot’s. Bri greeted her briefly with a smacking kiss on the cheek, then turned back to study the
     map spread on his lap.
    Like Mrs. Scutchings, Bri hadn’t changed much in the ten years she’d been away. A few more wrinkles maybe, but he was just
     as short and square and solid as brick, and still missing his left upper incisor, where the boom of his yacht had hit him
     all those years ago, when he’d been teaching her and Dawn to sail. Georgia had been eleven and unself-conscious enough to
     ask why he didn’t get a false tooth, to which he’d replied, “You think I ought?”
    She’d put her head on one side. “Not unless you mind looking like a pirate.”
    “Nope.”
    She had always had a soft spot for Bri. They’d first met in her second term at school, when he’d been dropping off his nephew.
     She and Dawn had arrived at the school gates, miserably soaked through after a rainstorm. They had forgotten to bring an umbrella,
     and their satchels and schoolbooks were sodden.
    “You walk to school every day?” Bri had