by Rhyll Biest
‘Hmm.’ Evert looked down at the crate. ‘Let’s take him out back and get him settled and then grab a coffee.’
She followed him past Sharon and Beth, who had returned to their reception duties as if nothing had happened.
They passed through the tea room, still empty and bare.
‘Anyone shown you around?’ Evert shifted the crate to a more comfortable grip.
Showing herself around didn’t count. ‘Not yet.’
He nodded. ‘Okay. Grab that door for me, please.’
She entered the code again and they passed into a long hallway.
‘This is the surgical and x-ray area.’ He nodded at each room off the hallway as they passed by. ‘And behind this door …’ She hurried ahead to unlock it. ‘… Are the kennels, cattery, stables and yards. Of the vets, only Stacey is on clinic duty today. I’ll introduce you.’
Hooray, another new face.
Once they reached a demountable building, Evert paused to lean a hip against the railing and knock on the door. ‘Yo, Stace, incoming,’ he hollered.
A head leaned out the window, streaks of grey amid the dishwater blonde bob. ‘Whatchya got for me?’
‘Surrendered cat.’
‘Bring ‘er up.’
Evert waited as Kat punched in the code for the door of the demountable. Already she could tell she would be entering that code in her sleep.
As she held the door open for Evert to pass through, his head almost brushing the doorframe, he gave her a ghost of a smile. ‘I feel like some celebrity douche, you holding the doors for me.’
‘I draw the line at powdering your nose.’ Evert was alright.
Inside the compact demountable, a woman sat at a bench, hunched over her stool as she prepared an injection. ‘One second.’
Kat scanned the room, utilitarian and boxy, a bit like a human pet crate. Cheap lino floor, steel walls lined with lockable steel cabinets stocked with veterinary products. An ancient-looking air-conditioning unit was set in the small, single window. The glass rattled and the unit hummed, drowning out any sound the largish dog, some kind of crossbreed, in the cage beneath it might have made.
Finished prepping the injection, the vet stood, revealing a body as straight up and down as the syringe she wielded. Needle stick and sharps injuries were one of the most common hazards for many healthcare workers and Kat had always dreaded needle sticks when searching baggage.
The vet disposed of the needle and gave Kat a nod. Kat awarded Stacey a mental gold star for her direct gaze, the kind that wouldn’t waver even if one of Kat’s former colleagues held her vibrator aloft in a crowded airport terminal during a luggage inspection, a joke they never tired of. This woman would simply shrug.
As Stacey eyed the cat in the carry crate, Kat picked her for the type to forget to declare plant-based handicrafts.
‘Hello there, aren’t you a pretty boy?’ the vet crooned.
Evert slid Kat a deadpan look. ‘Don’t worry, she talks to me like that all the time.’
The vet rolled her eyes hard enough to see brain. ‘Like I’d call you pretty, there’s nothing cute about a face full of birdshot.’
Kat’s smile froze. He was the one.
Stacey opened the crate to examine the cat. ‘Anyone tell you that story yet, Kat? About how Nick got a face full of birdshot when he approached some ultra-aggro type about neglecting his horses. But he still loves to ignore people who point rifles at him. Talk about a slow learner.’
‘Stace, you’re makin’ me blush.’
The vet snorted. ‘Nice to meet you, Kat. This your first time working for RSPCA?’
After Kat’s run-in with the deadbeat dad and Officer Unsettling, the woman’s welcoming smile delivered a much-needed shot of reassurance.
‘Yep, looking forward to it.’
Over the tom, Stacey gave her a contemplative look, one that pierced right through her bravado. ‘You’ll be fine, just stick with this one the first few days, he won’t let anything happen to you.’
Kat eyed the man who would hopefully teach her how to avoid a face full of birdshot better than he had.
The vet extracted the cat from his crate with practised skill. ‘Luka here too? I thought I saw a giant Serb roaming the grounds. Though it could have been a yeti, I guess. Looked like he’d been mud wrestling.’ She glanced at the mud spatter on Evert’s jeans and smirked. ‘If you boys are mud wrestling together in your spare time the least you could do is send me an invitation. Middle-aged women have needs too, you know.’
Kat almost sucked a breath in at the vet’s teasing but was distracted by the description of Belovuk as a ‘giant Serb’. So, he did belong to the Slavic family. Hopefully his was a happier one than hers had been.
A gleam lit Evert’s hazel eyes as he locked gazes with Stacey. ‘You know there’s a men’s correctional facility nearby, right?’
Kat waited for the vet’s reaction to Evert’s jab. Those two sparred like they needed to jump one another’s bones.
‘Ouch.’ The vet winced good-naturedly as her hands moved over the cat, squeezing and feeling. ‘He’s pretty quiet, well-behaved. Good weight. No abscesses. He’s been de-sexed.’
Evert glanced at Kat. ‘All the animals that come to us have to be assessed for their suitability for rehoming.’
‘Physical and behavioural,’ Stacey added, opening the cat’s jaw. She peered inside the cat’s mouth. ‘And his teeth look okay, so somebody cared about him once. I’ll wave my magic wand over him in a second and find out whether he’s micro-chipped.’
Kat recalled the Weimaraner puppy. ‘Do you know the story about the puppy missing hind feet?’ She groped for his name. ‘Stumpy.’
Stacey grimaced. ‘Stumpy? Oh, yeah, that was a shitty thing.’
Kat raised her brows.
‘Young kids put rubber bands around his feet and no one noticed until two of them went gangrenous. By the time they brought him in the feet had to be amputated to save him.’
Kat’s hand flew to her mouth. The pain would have been horrific.
Evert nodded at her expression. ‘The parents were quite upset and I had to explain to them the age at which kids understand suffering and how to treat animals gently is about nine years.’
Kat was pretty sure she’d understood suffering long before she was nine. ‘Will he go back home to that family?’
Stacey frowned. ‘Nah, we haven’t heard from them since we sent them the vet bill. And he’ll always need special care. I think he’ll pass the behavioural assessment for rehoming with flying colours but probably not the physical. There’s too big a likelihood he’ll develop arthritis and other problems due to how he has to get around.’
Some animal shelters had a no-kill policy but this was not one of them. Kat heard herself blurt words she shouldn’t. ‘Don’t put him down. I’ll take him, sign a waiver saying I understand the potential future costs involved.’
Evert gave her a sideways look. ‘You’ve fallen for Stumpy?’
She hesitated, nodded.
‘What will you do with him while you’re at work?’
‘While he’s really small, I’ll find a puppy-sitter. Would make nice pocket money for someone.’ Hello, financial destitution.
‘That could work. Don’t become a hoarder, though, will you?’ Evert grimaced.
‘I won’t.’ God, how ironic would that be?
Evert quizzed Stacey about the status of various animals and Kat took mental notes of the questions he asked until he turned to her. ‘Okay, let’s grab a coffee in the kitchen so you can spill all your deep, dark secrets to me.’
Kat smiled. She wasn’t spilling her secrets to anyone. Not to Evert, though he seemed very nice, and certainly not to Officer Pushy-pants.
‘I’ll also fill you in on what we’ll be doing tomorrow. The first thing will be a visit to the cop shop so I can introduce you to folk. It’s a good idea to make their acquaintance before you have to call on them to accompany you to a residence in the d
odgier parts of town, or you find yourself in trouble.’
And it would be a cold day in hell before she agreed to weekly training sessions that would involve touching and conversation and things that could lead to trust.
Chapter 5
Still rubbing her eyes from the early morning start, Kat eyed the waiting room of the Walgarra Police Station. It wasn’t anything like the police stations on American cop shows. For starters, it was no bustling hive of activity—more of an empty hive.
The yellowing phone on the counter sneered at her while the walls—a deadly beige scrubbed clean of who knew what—gave her attitude, implied they’d seen a thing or two. But so what? So had she. She’d once stopped a man from smuggling bee semen in his belt buckle into the country. Oh, yes, the bee semen tales she could tell.
Other than the printed notices tacked to a cork board—crookedly, which bothered her no end—she could have been waiting at the dentist’s, an activity which also filled her with unease. At least there was no dental smell, just a whiff of too much testosterone.
She’d left Stumpy with Beth, who felt as passionately about him as Kat, before driving to Evert’s so he could drive them to the station. He’d then ditched her at the station to grab himself a coffee—what he referred to as ‘the good stuff’—from a place nearby, which left her with Officer Over-keen—tall, slightly pimply and determined to impress her with his crime-fighting knowledge.
She tuned Rod, Rob, or whatever his name was out as he launched into a tale about the local ice problem, and the bikers who’d moved into town to take over dealing the stuff.
He used the ‘f’ word a lot but unfortunately for him she’d heard it before. Besides being the type to try to smuggle throwing stars in his luggage, he played a little too rough when it came to conversation, not so subtly negging her whenever she ventured a comment.
All in the harmless name of flirtation.
Her mother had always compared flirtation to bare-knuckle boxing. If a bare-knuckle fighter simply swings at their opponent’s head without any skill or strategy, they risk damaging their fragile hand bones more than their opponent.
Rod-Rob was flailing away at her, not realising that he could break every bone in his flirtation fists without her ever giving him the time of day. Plus, his tough-guy act was that of a whelp trying to convince her he was one of the big dogs.
She called bullshit.
No doubt some women’s magazine would tell her to feel flattered but, nah, really she just wanted to smack his butt with a rolled up newspaper to let him know he’d pissed in the wrong place.
The atmosphere changed as an entirely different type of animal entered the room.
Belovuk.
Brick.
He came to a halt, his size twelve polished boots planted on the floor like he owned it, including the bit of shitty, scuffed lino she was occupying. A rude habit that, and one her old man had mastered, filling a room with his being and reducing everyone else to a squatter.
Command fucking presence, she believed the term was. It rolled across the linoleum floor, unstoppable as Black Death, and tugged at her, felt her up for former crimes and patted her down for weaknesses while Belovuk gave her an equally curt and thrilling visual frisk.
Galenka, though unsettled by the location, purred at the sight of him.
Hussy.
The impact on the officer on desk duty was equally instantaneous. Gone was his hipster slouch, his spine injected with enough starch it almost snapped when he stood to attention. Belovuk’s presence blew the pup’s former smarmy smile right off his lips.
Instead of fleeing, Kat gave Belovuk a super-casual nod. ‘Hi. Evert’s grabbing some coffee.’
Officer Over-controlling nodded and used the shovel he called a hand to open the door leading deeper into the police den.
Usually she didn’t accept invitations from strange men, or allow a predator to take her to a secondary location, but the fact that Evert would soon join them lulled her into doing both.
As she passed, Belovuk’s gaze followed her, the shade of his eyes prison cell grey. No wonder she always felt he was going to arrest her any second.
Belovuk’s warning from the day before taunted her, and not just the words themselves but the way he’d delivered them in that gravel tone while—and maybe she’d just imagined that part—he assessed her, his inspection a cold river that had flowed from her perspiring brow down to her sweaty socks. Small, grubby and inadequate. That’s how he’d made her feel, just like her old man. Maybe it was a cop thing.
She winced as her back twinged, a sign she was too old to be sleeping on a floor covered by just an old sleeping bag. Still, she figured it was her own fault for not noticing that someone—raise your hand former detector dog and all-round badass beagle Bill—had chewed a hole in her inflatable mattress. And her fault for not hiring a removalist competent enough to actually deliver her furniture on the date requested.
Hopefully the twinge was the kind that resolved itself. She doubted a town the size of Walgarra had even heard of physiotherapy.
As she followed Belovuk she was struck by several things. One, the way he walked with the loose ease of an athlete. She’d bet he could run down a felon like nobody’s business.
Two, he walked past a soft drink dispensing machine and dwarfed it by a full head, so he had to be well over six feet. Big bastard.
Three, the way his belt rode his hips was obscene. She’d seen the older, heavy utility belts that made cops look downright chunky around the middle, and her father had always complained about the aching back it gave him. In contrast, Belovuk wore a load-bearing vest that carried Taser, flashlight, body cam handcuffs, baton, radio, and OC spray all above the waist, which left only a set of keys on his leather belt. A nice thick leather belt that emphasised his lean, lean hips, the kind she associated with Olympic swimmers.
And fucking, murmured Galenka.
Hush.
And last, but not least, there was the thigh holster he wore like some lethal garter belt, twice as obscene as the hips begging to have legs wrapped around them. She’d heard thigh holsters were more comfortable and more accessible—particularly when wearing a load-bearing vest—but really they were just about driving innocent women like herself out of their minds, exposing them to an amount of manliness that was the equivalent of tasering them right in the ovaries.
He ushered her into a Spartan tea room but she waved away his offer of a drink. She didn’t trust communal mugs. What guarantee was there that the last person had washed it thoroughly?
As if to confirm her low opinion of communal tea rooms, a dark, palm-sized puddle of coffee lurked on one Formica table.
Belovuk froze at the sight of it.
She stilled. She hated a mess as much as the next person but he looked shattered by it. Weird. ‘Something wrong?’
‘No.’ With that terse answer he grabbed a handful of paper towel from the kitchen bench to mop the spill up, his motions jerky and his jaw taut.
Okay, he was making her inner neat freak look slack.
He shot her a glance, still on edge. ‘I’m making myself a coffee, you want one while you wait for Evert?’
‘No, thanks.’ He obviously needed the caffeine fix, fatigue having bitten deep into his cheeks. Working too many night shifts? Too much overtime? He should watch that. Fatigue could result in all kinds of accidents.
She waited, and when he joined her at the table she wished she had asked for a coffee. Without something to occupy her hands she suffered an attack of the fidgets while staring at Belovuk’s mug which, oddly, had a picture of a unicorn pooping coloured sprinkles onto a cupcake.
If forced at gunpoint to guess, she’d say a lady friend had bought it for him. Not so surprising, he was attractive, though she’d only admit that at gunpoint too. But attractive was nothing. Sexy didn’t protect in the trenches of life. Pressure bloomed in her ears, an old tell of discomfort. She rubbed the side of her head and caught Belovuk watching her.
‘Do I make you uneasy?’
She blinked. Wow, that was direct. ‘No.’ She would sooner wave a bird smuggler through quarantine than admit such a thing. ‘Why?’
‘You avoid looking directly at me.’
‘I wasn’t aware of it.’ She met his too-intent gaze. ‘How’s that?’
A smile almost surfaced. ‘Better.’
She could have told him her avoidance of eye contact was about a woman with a cop husband, a woman with nowhere to turn because her husband knew all the domestic violence shelters along with their staff, a woman who was too afraid to leave because her husband could access vehicle registration and social security information with just a few keystrokes. But since that woman was Kat’s mother and ‘victim’ wasn’t the first impression Kat was looking to make, she kept her mouth shut.
***
She was wary as a fox. Fox-wary of him, and two seconds of direct eye contact couldn’t conceal that. But people were often uncomfortable around him, whether due to his size or job or both, so it was possible it didn’t mean too much.
Possible.
‘So, what are the areas or people I need to avoid?’ She pulled her ponytail tighter.
A nervous habit? Hard to believe that this cool, self-patrolling creature had such a thing.
Her gaze rested on his knuckles and, judging by the look on her face, she was counting the number of visible scars there.
‘You should always try to bring someone with you to the government housing estate. And some of the farms are a bit iffy. Walgarra isn’t a bad town, but it’s hit hard times’ (if you could call bikers and ice ‘hard times’) ‘and the population is changing, so you’d be better off just backing away immediately if something doesn’t feel right. Or call for help.’
She nodded. ‘Okay, how do I do that?’
‘You call one of these numbers.’ He handed her a card.
‘What if you’re busy?’
‘Mostly I’m just a glorified paper pusher so I shouldn’t be too hard to get a hold of.’
She paused in the middle of reading his card to give him a sharp glance, one that told him she saw right through him.