Limbo (36 page)

And then he grinned down at her and Joy felt ridiculously like bursting into tears.

Or jumping him
.

They didn’t know a lot of things — the whys and the hows would become clearer, she supposed — but knowing this one thing was enough for now.

She grinned back. ‘
We
did it.’ And they stared at each other for long seconds. For a crazy moment, as his gaze drifted to her mouth, Joy thought he was going to kiss her. Hell, for a crazier moment she thought she was going to let him.

But the feeling passed. Maybe it was the twigs and rocks and bark sticking into her backside, or maybe it was an awareness that a murderer and kidnapper who owned a shotgun was less than fifty metres away, but they both seemed to think better of it and looked away simultaneously.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here while they’re all still inside.’

And they backed out of their position the same way they’d entered, crouching carefully.

***

‘So, what now?’ Joy waited til they were well out of earshot but still kept her voice down. ‘Call the cops?’

He nodded his head. ‘I’m going to download all the shots onto my laptop and send them to Baz along with a report of all our findings, then I’m going to ring him.’

‘Will he believe you?’

‘It’s fairly compelling circumstantial evidence. A helluva lot more than they appear to have on Martin Richardson. Without a DNA test we can’t prove it’s Isabella but I think people can join the dots.’

‘How soon will they get here?’

‘Depends. They’ll want to check it out properly and with Isabella not in any imminent danger…Could take them a bit to get a team together. Also might depend on if anything big is going down elsewhere at the moment.’

Joy slowed as she stepped over a couple of smaller fallen trees and digested his words. ‘So maybe not today?’

He checked his watch. ‘It’s three o’clock. Maybe not. I’ll suss out the lie of the land when I talk to Baz.’

‘I just want it over now.’

‘Yep. I know the feeling. But it will be soon.’

Joy held on hard to that as they picked their way out of the bush. The nervousness that something could still go wrong — that Ronald would suspect and flee with Isabella — lurked amid the euphoria that sizzled at her nerve endings.

Ten minutes later she could see the road and the fallen-down section of fencing where they’d entered the bushland. She’d had an itch up her spine the entire journey back, like Ronald was possibly tracking them with a pair of binoculars, and she wouldn’t feel truly safe until they were in the car and well away from Hutchins Road.

Part of her felt like they should stay in the bush and keep guard until the police came. But to do that they needed to contact the cops and they couldn’t do that from where they’d just spent the last two hours. Dash needed space and time to prepare things and he didn’t need to be whispering it all into a phone.

Joy watched as Dash jumped down the last bit of incline and then turned and held out his hand to assist her. She figured a lot of women might consider that an insult to feminism and ignore it, but while it was only a small jump for him it was a freaking leap for her.

The sudden noise of a vehicle coming from her left startled her as she reached for his hand. It was in their line of sight as their palms slid together and their hands clasped. A couple in the front seats looked at them curiously. How strange must it be to see two people emerging randomly from the middle of freaking nowhere?

‘They’ve seen us,’ she said as Dash yanked on her hand.

‘It’s fine,’ he said as her body landed all smooshed up against his. He plucked something out of her hair. ‘Just play along, okay?’

Joy frowned, more worried about the approaching car then how close they were or what he was saying. Were they friends or neighbours of Ronald’s? Would they knock on his door later and mention this unusual occurrence?

It wasn’t until his mouth landed on hers that she became aware of him at all. But her body got with the program real fast. His mouth was hot on hers and his body was even hotter, a fact she was intimately aware of as he grabbed two handfuls of her ass and pulled her in hard.

The kiss filled her head and Joy temporarily forgot everything. She’d been starving for it since the night he’d sucked her nipples into an absolute frenzy and every cell in her body roared
yessss,
as she lifted on her tippy toes and snaked her arms around his neck.

The camera was huge and hard between them but it seemed to melt away and she was only vaguely aware of the car passing them as he groaned against her mouth, or maybe she groaned against his. She couldn’t be sure.

It was the beep that yanked her out of it. The beep and the wild yahooing out the window. ‘Get a room.’

Joy ripped her mouth away and tried to pull out of his arms but Dash clamped his arms around her body like a vice. ‘Wait for a couple of seconds,’ he murmured as his lips muzzled her ear. ‘Let them think we’ve just had wild monkey bush sex.’

Joy’s pulse danced a wild tango and her eyes practically rolled back in her head as Dash’s mouth nuzzled down her neck. If he kept that up she’d be dragging him into the bush and
demanding
he give her wild monkey sex.

She stretched her neck out a little more as the engine noise slowly faded into the distance and he obliged. But she knew they couldn’t stay like this forever and eventually he eased back a little.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured, looking down at her. ‘It was the quickest thing I could think of to not look suspicious.’

She wasn’t sorry one little bit. ‘What would you have done if I was a guy?’

He grinned. ‘Probably the same thing.’

Joy laughed then.
Now that she’d like to see.
Thankfully his joke had dissipated some of the awareness, the tension that still buzzed between him.

Which was a good thing. They had things to do. Big things. Monumental things. So they needed to get cracking.

He seemed to read her mind as he stepped away from her altogether. Joy wobbled a little at the loss of support. The kiss had left her legs feeling like strands of fairy floss and it’d been good to lean into him while she recovered first from her alarm at the approaching car and then the surge of wanton heat that had flayed her insides.

‘Let’s go get Isabella back,’ he said gently.

Joy cleared her throat and injected some mental spine stiffener. ‘Hell yeah.’

***

Twenty-five minutes later Dash pulled into the reception area of the Gympie Palms hotel. It was the first one they’d come to that displayed a vacancy sign and boasted the high speed internet connection he was going to need in the next couple of hours.

‘This’ll do,’ he said to Joy who looked behind at the standard front reception and then ahead at the block of lowset hotel units spread out in front of them, lining the perimeter of the car park.

She’d been looking at all the pictures on his camera, flicking back and forth between them all and hadn’t said much on the short trip other than to affirm their suspicions or doubt herself. Like him, he guessed she had a lot to think about. Being this close to who he was positive was Isabella Richardson was a big thing and the next couple of hours were critical. They were close, so close after a mad few weeks.

And then there was what had happened on the roadside.

The kiss.

It wasn’t something Dash planned. It had literally been a spur-of-the-moment thing. But it had been more than a kiss required to prevent suspicion and he knew it. It had been a kiss that had picked right up where they’d left off the other night — as if they’d never stopped — and even now it sparked between them like a low-voltage current.

Humming. Buzzing. Purring.

He wanted her bad, damn it, and to hell with all the reasons why he shouldn’t.

She glanced at him then and muscles in his belly tightened. ‘Shall I get one room or two?’

Dash half expected her to drop her gaze. Joy was no shrinking violet. She was tough. She’d been out in the world busking and gigging since she was sixteen. She looked at dead bodies every day, for crying out loud. And she’d clearly been through a recent rough relationship. But she’d been doing her damnedest to fight this thing too. He wouldn’t have put it past her to baulk and he wouldn’t have blamed her for it either.

Hell, part of him wished she would. Somebody had to save him from himself because his self-control was shot to hell.

Her throat bobbed but held his gaze and she said, ‘One.’

Deeper fibres in Dash’s belly squeezed harder. ‘Are you sure? You understand what I’m asking? I’m tired of fighting this, Joy and there could be a lot of hours to fill tonight.’

Another swallow, but she nodded anyway. ‘I understand. As long as you understand that’s it a one-off. We get this…sexy business out of our system tonight. You and I aren’t happily-ever-after material.’

Dash nodded. He knew that. In fact he couldn’t have put it better himself. ‘What happens in Gympie, stays in Gympie?’

‘For good.’

‘Deal.’

If only they didn’t have an entire police force to convince before they could get to the sexy business.

***

Dash barely glanced at the room when they entered. It seemed fairly regular fare for this type of hotel unit. Similar to the one they’d stayed at in Rockhampton except it was more of the self-contained unit variety. Bathroom to the left as they walked through the door. A kitchenette ahead with a bar fridge and small round table with two chairs. A wall-mounted television and a double bed.

He didn’t let himself think about the bed. He couldn’t go there yet. He had to concentrate.

As neither of them had any luggage to worry about he headed straight for the table with his camera and fired up his laptop. ‘I need to do this now,’ he said glancing up from the screen by way of apology considering he’d just gone all hot and heavy on her in the car.

‘I know,’ she nodded, all serious again with that v between her brows working overtime. ‘Coffee?’

‘God, yes,’ he said as he sat.

By the time the laptop had finished booting up, there was a strong black coffee placed in front of him.

‘Thanks,’ he said, looking up and smiling at her.

She gave him one of her solemn little nods. ‘I’ll keep them coming.’

Dash hooked up the cable from his camera to his laptop and started downloading the photos he’d snapped earlier, then opened a Word document and started to write probably the most important report of his life.

Everything
was riding on it because he wasn’t writing it with the full authority of the law backing him anymore. The report wasn’t coming from Detective Sergeant Dash Dent. It was coming from Dash Dent, P.I.

Disgraced cop.

It had to be more concise and thorough than he’d ever been.

Borrowing from years of report writing, he laid everything out methodically. He had all of the documents from the board of death shoved in the laptop case and also saved to a memory stick. Joy was an invaluable help, leafing through the hard copies so he was more quickly able to identify the most relevant ones. She also helped him chose the best five photographs of Keisha/Isabella to send with the report.

Almost two hours and five cups of coffee later he looked up from his laptop, finally satisfied. ‘Finished,’ he said to the serious face sitting opposite him, a bunch of papers, coffee mugs, some market fudge and free hotel biscuit wrappers between them.

She held his gaze. ‘Time to ring Baz?’

Dash nodded and exhaled deeply. ‘Time to ring Baz.’

‘Will he even be working today?’

‘It won’t matter. I have his number and with what I have to tell him…he’ll head in to work regardless.’

‘
If
he believes you.’

Gash grimaced. ‘He will.’ One way or another he was going to force Baz to take action.

Dash stood, swiping his phone off the table. He stretched out his back as he scrolled through his contacts to Baz’s number. Once upon a time he’d rung this number regularly both for work and social purposes.

He pushed the green call button and shot a here-goes look at Joy. She held up two lots of crossed fingers, her eyes glowing with anticipation. He walked away from her a little as the phone rang in his ear, stretching out his legs. The call went to voice mail after ten rings. Dash gritted his teeth. Was Baz busy or just ignoring him?

He’d put money on the latter.

He rang the number again. Again it went to voicemail and Dash muttered an expletive under his breath.

‘Not answering?’

He turned around. ‘Voice mail.’

‘Oh.’

The anticipatory sparkle dulled in her eyes and her shoulders drooped. It wasn’t just Isabella and Martin Richardson and Dash himself who had a lot riding on this. She did too. Bringing a ghost story about a missing woman and child to the authorities had taken a huge leap of faith and being dismissed as a loony because of it must have grated.

Isabella’s safe return and Martin’s release from prison would be vindication for Joy most of all.

‘It’s okay. I’ll text him,’ Dash said. ‘He’ll get back to me.’

Fucking pronto if he knows what’s good for him
.

Dash’s thumb tapped out the message in that slow methodical way people who weren’t raised in an iPhone generation usually did.

I know where Isabella Richardson is
.

‘How can you be so sure?’ she demanded. ‘It’s Saturday. He could be out at a barbecue. He could be on holiday or on the golf course or at the… range shooting his gun. Or whatever it is you cops do for kicks.’

Dash grinned as he pushed the send key. ‘Because I am. Time it,’ he said. ‘I bet he rings back in less than a minute.’

She frowned at him. ‘That’ll be hard if he’s got earphones on and —’

Dash’s ringing phone cut her off. Baz’s name flashed on the screen and he turned it round to show her, smiling.

‘You are far too cocky for your own good,’ she muttered but she was smiling too and the anticipation was back in her eyes.

‘Afternoon, Baz,’ Dash greeted winking at Joy.

‘What the fuck are you up to now?’

Dash wandered into the kitchenette and leaned his butt against the hip-high sink. ‘I’m not
up
to anything, Baz. I know who took Isabella Richardson and I know where she is right now.’