Anarchy by James Treadwell Page A

show up.”
    â€œWhere, though?”
    â€œKid’s gotta eat.”
    â€œDon’t tell me. You’re going to go sit in Traders and wait for her to show up asking for a sandwich.”
    â€œWhoa, that’s some smart thinking. They should make you an inspector.”
    She’d even thought about locking herself in the cell, to see whether there was some trick about the door that meant you could open it from the inside. It was hard to think straight. A churning in her belly was telling her she’d screwed up. Everyone would know she’d screwed up.
    â€œI’ll tell you something,” Jonas went on. “She’s nowhere in Alice. I guarantee it.”
    She bit back a retort.
    â€œMusta hidden out somewhere in the trees and walked away in the dark. Over toward Hardy, if I had to guess. She’ll be getting hungry. Can’t hide out forever. Someone’s gonna see her on the roads.”
    â€œI’m not too sure about your predictions anymore, Jonas.”
    â€œHey. You know I’m right. Look, Goose, we’ve had kids go running off before. It’s not a big deal. You should get a couple hours’ rest, drive over to Hardy. Someone’s gonna call in saying they picked her up trying to hitch a ride south. That’s how it usually goes.”
    â€œThis kid’s different,” Goose said.
    â€œCan’t argue with that.”
    She saw what he was getting at, though. She thought about it as she drove out of town on 30, turning away from the inlet, up the steep switchbacks where unexpected stands of silver birch broke up the forest’s usual dark wet monotone. The persistent weirdness of the file had distracted her, or maybe her memory of the girl’s uncanny stare when she’d tried talking with her in the cell. She should have ignored all that and concentrated on the simple facts, the way Jonas did. Think of the girl as a runaway seventeen-year-old and it suddenly didn’t seem so hard to guess where they’d eventually find her.
    Of course, when seventeen-year-old girls went missing they fairly often showed up dead. Goose pushed that thought away, ashamed of her first reaction to it: well, that would make things a lot simpler.
    Food. The kid would need to find food. Whether she broke into someone’s house or stole from a store, there were only three places she could get it: Alice, Hardy, Rupert. Beyond them was nothing but trees and water until you got to the next towns down-island, too far for her to reach unless she had a vehicle, and if she’d got a ride somehow then the game was up anyway, there’d be nothing Goose could do. Alice she could rule out already. Jonas was right. It wasn’t the sort of place anyone could go half a day without being noticed. So if the kid hadn’t already been driven south, or if she wasn’t dead in the forest somewhere, most likely she’d walked all night over the pass and would now be tired, cold, hungry, and sneaking around the edge of Hardy looking for a way of getting something to eat.
    And if she managed that, then what? There was still nowhere to go. Hardy was, literally, the end of the road. The asphalt tangle that represented civilization here reached one of its terminal threads. The highway came up all the way from the other end of the huge island, from Victoria, where she’d been living for a year until the Hardy detachment lost a constable to long-term sickness and she was assigned to replace him. She’d driven its whole length. It narrowed and emptied as it went north. About halfway up it started avoiding the port towns on the east coast, swinging inland, forgetting everything but forest and logging roads. A couple of kilometers short of Hardy it reached its only significant destination, the ferry terminus on the south side of Hardy Bay, where most of the summer traffic that traveled it would go aboard for the long passage to the northern mainland. Its work done,