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“Can you hit him with your knife?”
Jack freezes. He’s caught mid-crawl, the plank he’s balanced on digging into his knee in a way that’s going to get very painful, very quickly. But not nearly as painful as the knife he realises must be aimed at him - or at least somewhere near him - at this exact moment.
The voice wasn’t close, but presumably whoever is holding the knife is.
Although Jack is fairly certain they aren’t able to see him from beneath the carelessly sewn together sheets of canvas draped over the wooden beams he has been crawling across, clearly they’ve realised he’s there. If he has been less careful than he thought he was being, he might even have disturbed the canvas enough that they’ve managed to work out more or less where he is.
Which means that right now, all that stands between him and a stab wound is about two feet of air and a bit of decades old fabric.
He shifts carefully, trying to reach the pistol in his belt, but he’d lose his balance before he managed to get a grip on it. And even if the canvas was strong enough to take his weight, which he’s convinced it isn’t, it would give away his position pretty precisely.
He takes a deep, steadying breath, trying to calculate how many seconds he has before the man below will start simply moving the knife above him at random, and how long it will then take for him to hit his mark.
Not long enough, is the conclusion Jack reaches, since that amount of time is how long he has left of being uninjured and alive.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he hears Phryne Fisher scoffing, brushing away his objections to her coming with him to investigate this possible hide-out. Telling him he’s a fool for going here alone, with no backup at all, although that’s what she usually does. That even if he won’t bring her, he should bring the next best thing, a constable.
None of that has happened, of course. Phryne has not objected, because he hasn’t given her the chance to, and he hasn’t brought along a constable because he knew Collins would be only too likely to accidentally-on-purpose let slip to Miss Williams where they were going and why, because that is exactly the sort of thing Phryne would orchestrate.
And now his damned pride is going to get him killed.
By the time Collins realises Jack has been gone for too long and goes to look for clues to his whereabouts in his office (the map sitting right there on his desk, Prentice’s warehouse neatly circled on it as if some part of Jack’s brain wants someone to come chasing after him), Jack’s body will be floating down the Yarra, never to be found.
Jack came to terms with his own mortality a long time ago, but that was in a different world, in a place where he was fighting for something, for his fellow soldiers, for an ideal. Coming to terms with living afterwards had taken much longer but he had done it.
What is he dying for now?
For trying and failing to catch a murderer, for drawing a line in the sand, for stubbornly refusing to admit - to himself or anyone else - that he likes having her around and it terrifies him.
None of those seem like very good reasons, and he knows she’d agree if he gave her the chance.
He supposes in a way he will give her the chance, since he won’t be around to object.
She can sit there, in the armchair where he left her, legs crossed, one foot dangling carelessly off the ground, sipping her whiskey and telling herself that if only he hadn’t been such a fool he’d be there sipping whiskey with her.
It’s what he’s telling himself right now, at least, as he hears more movement below, a scraping sound getting closer.
Instead of lying here, the last precious few seconds of life stretching themselves around him, he could be sitting in a matching armchair, discussing the case and the relative merit of evidence and police procedure over hunches and strong-willedness.
He could be frustrated, he could be angry, he could be terrified, but he could be alive, and he could be those things with her there instead of being none of them without her here.
As pointless as regrets are, he finds himself regretting this. That fear got in the way, of both his life and of living, by trapping him here alone, quietly hiding, when he could have rushed in head-first and brazen alongside Phryne instead.
It has always seemed like a dangerous, foolish approach, one that would eventually lead to her downfall, and his along with her, but on the whole he probably would have enjoyed it more. Both the living and the ending.
Jack sees the tip of the knife cut through the canvas before he hears the sound of threads being torn, and then he is hidden from sight no more. The fabric falls aside as the blade cuts through it roughly, revealing a man standing on a small stool beneath the gap he is creating.
Even in the dim light Jack recognises the man, the prime suspect in the double murder case he is investigating. His hand reaches for his pistol, the falling or not falling, giving away his location, is no longer an issue. All that matters is the incredibly slim chance that he might manage to get his hands on a weapon of his own before the knife moving ever closer hits its mark.
Suddenly, a switch is flicked and the warehouse is bathed in electric lights.
Jack squints, not sure if what he’s seeing is real or not, because how could it possibly be? Across the room Phryne is silhouetted in the doorway, her gun aimed carefully at the man whose knife is just inches from Jack’s abdomen, her steely gaze focused as she opens her mouth to speak. “I believe the technical term is stab.”