I don't know how long I was out, but when I came to it was still dark. My head was throbbing with a burning pulse. And my car had vanished.

I pulled myself out of the ditch and back onto the road—after a half hour or so of wandering, my woozy balance seemed to float back to equilibrium and my eyes stopped seeing red. Then I wandered for a half hour more. There were no cars and nothing but the swell of dry dust and chilled night along the road. I could still see the mountain range ahead, dark and heavy and impassive, and wondered if Elizabeth Shaw was somewhere up there looking down with glee at the idiot left all the way back on Earth.

After enough wandering, my prayers seemed to be answered with the miracle light of a roadside pub close to the foot of the Carmody mountain range; my feet were burning and my new work boots were nearly worn through by then. It was by luck I didn't deserve that the pub was an all-night establishment.

I closed myself into a Telstra booth outside the front door and dropped in enough coins to make a call to the number I had for my employer.

A tired grunt answered after a few minutes.

'Mr Shaw?'

'Fuck all of a time to be calling, son. You closing my case, are you? Found my wife?'

I told him what happened, as I thought he wanted to hear it: I traced his wife's credit card, closed in on her at a motel where she was using the name Jean Angstrom and readying to slip out of town, she got the drop on me, made me a prisoner at gunpoint, forced me to drive out west, and stole my car after giving me a kiss with the blunt end of a handgun.

Shaw was silent, before giving nothing but a gruff exhale in response.

'She had some money, Mr Shaw,' I said. 'A lot of money. Money that she was deadly about.'

'You're not an idiot, Burke,' he said. 'She stole from me—sixty thousand dollars of my own money.'

'I think I would've liked to have been told that at the start,' I said. 'I think that would've made all the difference in my handling of this case.'

'Don't get smart with me. I know how people are. I didn't want any idiot questions, and I still don't. This is private matter between my wife and me. Now hurry up and tell me where you've gotten yourself lost.'

'As far as I can tell, I'm at a pub close to the Carmody Mountains.'

Shaw made a sound; a quick ambiguous sound that was midway between a grunt and smirk. 'I know where she's heading,' he said. There was a grim smile in his voice.

'Listen, Mr Shaw...'

'Just sit tight and wait a while, I'll be heading out there as soon as I can. Thanks for all you've done, Holden. It's nearly over.'

The line clicked dead before I could say anything else and I was back standing in the face of black-moonlit nowhere with no more coins to make another call. There was a lonely howl running over the brim of the plain. I blew out my frustration and tried to rub the growing exhaustion out of my aching eyes. I went inside the pub.

'Shit, fella, you look like you've walked a long'n hard road tonight.' 

The bartender leant his reedy arms atop the wooden counter as I sat down and sized the damage to my face. The few midnight denizens, sweaty and gap-toothed and with faces like war trenches, were staring across the stuffy air of the barroom at me. I must've had a mighty blue bruise by then, and they must've been impressed.

The bartender stood straight again. 'You need the RACQ or something? We don't got one out here, but Roy could hitch you in his Ute someplace.'

I smiled as best I could, with as much blood in my pallid face as I was sure I still had. The eye closest to my pained temple was still a little foggy, but had cleared up some. 'What would help the most is if a woman driving a silver Mazda might've been through here in the last hour or so,' I said.

'Mazda, huh?'

'A shitty little one, two doors, about ten years old. And probably pretty dusty by now.'

The bartender laughed and poured a courtesy glass of warm Four-X. 'Right, we saw her. Couldn't fuckin' miss, huh? Just popped in real quick, asked if she was headed the right way to the Carmodys, if someone could tell her if the Shaw Road is up. Real weird, then she left, just gone.'

'Shaw Road?'

'Up the mountain a piece, this little road with this holiday place for some rich city bugger. Tiny little road, you know, keeps flooding in rainy season.'

'Someone wouldn't be driving out that way about now, would they? I'd sure love a ride to catch up with her.'

'Done you wrong, huh, bud? Yeah, I'll bet.' The bartender raised his head across the room and shouted, 'Oi, Roy!—How fuckin' blitzed're ya already?'

The one called Roy kindly finished his beer and had me in his truck within the next five minutes, heading away from the halo of light surrounding the pub and up the looming bloat of the mountains. The suspension of his ancient Ute had turned to rust long ago, and was rattling the pain inside my head harder than I would have preferred. But we were making our way swiftly up the rising mountain roads, criss-crossing the crumbling strips of hard clay that had been painted across the face of the ridge.

We found my Mazda at the bend of a small road, its driver door left open and its front wheels lodged in a swelling of mud.

'House is up there,' Roy said, shifting his truck to stop and nodding up the path. 'Looks like she got all caught up. Probably can't wade through from here on four wheels, not in that mud.'

I told Roy not to worry about it and left myself on the side of the road. He turned around and back down the mountain after I assured him that I'd find a way back on my own four wheels.

I found small footprints pressed in the grass incline alongside the muddy road and followed them. Another ten minutes down the path, and I found myself approaching the house at the end: a large and comfortable lodge-style retreat that was burrowed privately under the tree-lined bluff of the peak. In the dim glassy hours of the dawn, I could see a light on through the tall windows of the house's east wing. The front doors were ajar. I crept inside.

I could hear the muttering of her voice around the corner of the hallway, leading into the parlour room—silent, careful, angry. There was a clambering of sounds along with it that I stuck to the side of the wall to lend my ear towards.

I heard her sigh. Then I heard her walk. Her shadow came to the edge of the doorway.

I spun around the corner and hoisted her by the waist. She struggled, but didn't make a dent against my grip; I released her onto the couch, at the same time that I found the gun on one of the end tables.

'Remember me?' I said.

I unloaded the magazine and dropped it in the waste bin. Courteously, I threw the empty gun back to her.

She didn't acknowledge it. Her eyes were stone fierce up at me. 'You idiot—Goddamn idiot. He's going to kill you too.'

I took a look around the room and found what Elizabeth Shaw had been working towards: a safe dug into the wall on the far side. It was still locked, but an upended lamp directed at its flat steel face told me that she'd been working at it for some time.

I looked back at her. 'You're stealing even more from him?' I said.

She shook her head. She'd settled herself on the couch. 'Do you know how much is in there? Everything. All of his dirty money.'

'You're not getting it.'

'Look, I'll split it with you, okay? I get into the safe, we go for half, I get out of here. We never see each other again. You know how many millions that is?'

'Sixty thousand wasn't enough?'

She scoffed. She had a sharp and crisp scoff, ferocious. 'For him? Not even close, that fucking pig.'

'Come on, Elizabeth. This is useless.'

In a long and strange moment, her look of anger softened into a one of hard curiosity. 'You don't know?' Then her face relaxed completely. 'Of course you don't,' she said with a sigh. 'You really must be a hired sap. I thought you were just one of his cronies, his brainless soldiers...He probably didn't want any of them making a run at the money themselves.'

She took a moment and laughed a little without humour. 'I should've known everything he told you was a lie,' she said.

'So you didn't steal sixty thousand of his money?'

'I did, but don't you see? He's a goddamn crook. He's not in construction—that's all on the surface. He's connected to some bad people, the worst of the underbelly. I met them, I was around him the whole time. I was his goddamn arm piece.'

'The mob?'

She stood. 'Don't you judge me for anything. You would've gotten out, to; the things I've seen, the things he did to me...I had to take the money. I had to get out.'

'But why the sixty thousand? Why are you here trying to crack at his safe?'

'The sixty was a bunch of noise, something to get everyone busy back in town to buy some time so I could get over here and make off with the big score. He doesn't have people here, not at this time of the year. If I get that safe open now, I'm home free. I'll have everything of his and I can get across the country, get him off my trail, get across the ocean, make it so he can never follow me.'

'No, Elizabeth. It won't work. He knows where you are.'

Her face hardened into stone. 'He what?'

'He knows you were heading toward the Carmody Mountains, so I'm guessing he knows you're at his lodge. He's on his way here right now—you don't have any time for that safe.'

She threaded her fingers into her hair and bit at her faded lipstick. 'Oh, God. Oh, Jesus Christ...'

I stepped in front of her and hardened my voice. 'Listen to me,' I said, 'you can get out of here now. You leave the safe, and you leave the sixty thousand. If he thinks I caught up with you, he can think you slipped away from me. He won't think you can survive without his money, but you can if you have time. This is all the time you have, Elizabeth. Now.'

Her eyes had vanished, looking cold and ghostly somewhere into mine. She brought in as much air as she could find, and tightened herself back into a resolve of strength.

'I can go down the mountain...' she said to herself, '...I can make it to Birdsville before dawn, get a ride out of state...' She looked at me again. 'I don't know if I should thank you.'

'Don't,' I said. 'Especially if I don't know you're lying.'

'I'm not lying. I promise.'

She didn't thank me. All Elizabeth Shaw did was go out of the room and vanish. I don't know where she went after that; my car was still at the head of the road when I wandered back and sat inside it to collect myself. Perhaps she had found a way back down the mountain and away from it, away from everything, just as she said. I even believed that she could have, if she'd gotten this far.

There was a grim sliver of dawnlight that was breaking up the mountain by the time Del Shaw arrived. His long and charcoal-black SUV parked at the other side of the muddy road, and he heaved his squat and sturdy frame out of the back seat as if he was the King of the Mountain himself. For all I knew, he could've been.

'Holden,' he greeted. I must've looked well and ragged by then, but he made no reaction.

'I don't know what to tell you, Mr Shaw,' I said without energy. 'I had her. Then she was gone.'

He nodded slowly. I peered behind him and could see the shrouded figures of back-up men sitting behind the black tint of his SUV, at least three of them.

'A bloody shame,' he said.

'But your money is safe.' I handed him the sixty-thousand, still bound in its tight seal. 'You can take it back home to your kids. But I think you should forget about your wife—she could be out of state by now, for all we know.'

'I guess you've done all you can, Mr Burke. We can only do so much when a woman's involved, can't we?

I nodded for him.

Shaw took a step closer to me. His heavy feet squelched in the mud. 'And I think it should go without saying that whatever you might've found out about this whole shit show, any other information that you might've uncovered about me or anyone else—You'd know that it'd all be a bunch of lies, right? Nothing you'd go believing, or talking about to anyone?'

I nodded again. There was a whole world waiting behind his words, just to see if I would dare do anything but nod.

He smiled at me when I did. I wished to God I'd never have to see him smile again.

As tense as I found myself become at times, I never did hear from Del Shaw again. I guessed that he'd found no reason to pay me a visit for knowing of his extracurricular professions—or that he'd forgotten. God, how I hoped that he'd forgotten. But I went on with my life, with my work and with my cases, wondering only sometimes if Del Shaw had ever caught up with Elizabeth.

Except one morning, months later, maybe a year, when I received a postcard in the mail. There was no return address, and no indication at all of a location except for the modest image of a painted beach scene on the front.

Written on the back was:

Holden Burke Investigations

Thank you for the humanity.

I promise I'm still not lying.

Jean Angstrom

Jake asked me what I was smiling at, but I demurred him away, glad I didn't have to tell him about the time I came across the fairest maid of the Mountain King.

***