by Garry Disher
Christ Almighty, thought Tank. ‘No, Aloysius Cree. Yes, Andy Cree. Have you seen him? Did he leave the station? If so, did he say where he was going?’
‘Where he was going?’
Tank closed and opened his eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘He didn’t say.’
With barely controlled fury, Tank turned to go.
‘But he reckoned he was on to a good thing,’ the probationer said.
Tank turned back. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Said he was going to dip his wick.’
‘But he’s on duty,’ said Tank foolishly.
‘You know Andy,’ laughed the probationer.
‘Yeah, I know him,’ said Tank. Then he had a thought: ‘That DVD you were watching the other day.’
The guy blushed. ‘What about it?’
‘Cree set that up?’
The probationer looked hunted. Finally he nodded.
Tank pointed at the driver’s door. ‘Missed a spot.’
His own car was baking in the sun. He cranked up the air-con and drove out of the carpark, flipping open his mobile phone. ‘Murph?’
‘What?’
‘Look, I need to talk to you. It’s a bit delicate.’
‘If it’s Cree’s Internet bullshit, I already know about it.’
‘Oh.’
‘Anything else?’
Tank shook himself into good order. ‘Let me deal with it. I’ll get the bastard to take the site down.’
She said in a hands-off voice, ‘Butt out, Tank.’
Tank couldn’t believe it. ‘A bit of gratitude wouldn’t go astray.’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said and hung up.
****
55
At the close of that long day, Challis said, ‘Uh oh, a flaw.’
‘Not funny.’
‘I don’t mean the kleptomania, I mean I’ve found another split end.’
Too late, he saw that Ellen didn’t appreciate the joke. She punched him, hard, saying ‘Not funny,’ and sat upright, everything about her fierce and clenched, the post-coital flush across her breasts now signifying fury, not release or languor.
He pulled her down. ‘Sorry. I’m truly sorry.’
‘Not funny,’ she mumbled.
Evening light was closing in around the house, the air from the open window carrying dwindling hints of the day’s heat, roadside dust and freshly mown hay. Adrian Wishart was in the lockup and all was right in the world.
Or not. Ellen propped herself on one elbow and said, ‘We have to talk.’
‘Uh oh.’
Her voice low and dangerous, she said, ‘I want you to be serious.’
In fact, he was deadly serious, but he was also afraid. Suddenly big, hot tears started in Ellen’s eyes. They splashed down her cheeks and neck to spot her breasts and the sheet. She made a fist, bumped it against his upper arm and said, ‘It’s not working.’
He waited. At one level, her words failed to land and register. He was also thinking that this had been the shortest relationship in his patchy history.
‘I don’t mean the sex-’ she ran her hand over his chest ‘-the lovemaking. I don’t mean that.’
He found his voice. ‘What, then?’
She swung upright again and sat with her legs crossed, looking down at him. ‘Living together.’
He didn’t trust himself to speak. She tilted back her head and gazed seriously into the distance in a mannerism he knew well. She was looking for the key, and it needed to be concise and accurate. He’d seen her do it in briefings and interrogations.
‘The thing is, I didn’t choose to live with you. I was looking after your house while you were away, you came back, we fell into bed together immediately. Fell in love, too, I guess. Finally, after years of unresolved whatever.’
She glanced at him to see that she was on track. Reassured, she went on: ‘It seemed like an easy solution for me to go on living here. But this isn’t my house. I didn’t create it with you. Even with some of my things here, it’s not my place. It’s a storage unit. I feel that I’m storing myself here as much as my fridge. Which is a better fridge than that piece of crap you have, incidentally.’
She grinned, if a little sadly. He returned it. ‘Little things bother both of us,’ she continued. ‘Like my rearranging the pantry. My way makes more sense, but I know it annoyed you. And it still isn’t my pantry, despite the makeover. Do you know what I’m saying?’
‘Yes.’
She glanced at him swiftly, sharply. ‘Yes,’ he repeated.
‘These may seem like small matters, but in some ways they’re huge.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I need to find my own place. I’m not ready to live with you and I don’t need to live with you. Everything’s been too soon after my divorce. I need to spend time…running my life without struggling with anyone. Or having to take them into account.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t say “oh”. Haven’t you been listening? What I’m saying is, I love you but I don’t need to live with you to prove it.’
Challis was very still. There seemed to be a roaring in his ears. He adored watching her breasts in their various configurations. Right now, with Ellen cross-legged, shoulders bowed, hands clasped in her lap, they were tucked pertly between her upper arms.
‘So a makeover on two levels: I find somewhere else to live, and I set up a new unit based in Mornington. The only thing that doesn’t change is that I keep on loving you. And quit staring at my boobs.’
‘Gorgeous nipples,’ he said.
He stroked her thigh absently, the skin tight over the long bone, dimpled with tiny fair hairs, a couple of moles, a faint crease from the sheets. He heard a duck call softly outside. There were up to twenty of them sometimes, the young ones fully grown now, and as the light failed each day they would forage quickly, almost desperately, over a wide area of the surrounding grass.
Ellen arrested his hand with hers fiercely and said, ‘Talk to me. What do you want? What do you think about what I’ve been saying?’
He said carefully, ‘I don’t want us to stop seeing each other.’
‘I don’t either!’ she said exasperatedly. ‘Haven’t you been listening?’
‘We have a modern arrangement, separate houses, and see what happens?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at him and the tears threatened to spill again. ‘It could be good, Hal.’
‘You’d make a terrific head of any new unit,’ he said.
‘Tell McQuarrie I want sex crimes.’
‘Okay.’
They stared at each other and he reached up and pulled her down to him. She struggled away and said, ‘I’m not finished.’
He knew she wasn’t. He searched for the words: ‘Your…problem.’
She flushed. Outside the ducks and the lone ibis honked a warning and flapped crazily into the air. This was the time when the foxes began to prowl.
‘I promise I’ll get help.’
‘Ells, it’s no big deal. It’s not the end of the world. I’m not judging you. It’s just a darkish little current running through you. It doesn’t stop you being a good cop.’
‘Yeah? How can you understand about living together and everything else and not understand how affected I am about this? I’m going to get counselling’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Until I do,’ Ellen said, ‘I won’t feel right about anything, about having my own place and heading a new unit.’
Challis saw her inward look, her fierce concentration, as she seemed to run through her mental checklist. Then, apparently satisfied, she slid down. Slithered beside him, long, warm, elastic, everything humming with potential.
Then she propped herself on one elbow and reached across to the bedside radio, accidentally biffing him on the jaw. ‘Sorry.’
They both wanted to hear the 7 p.m. news. According to an earlier bulletin, a Waterloo police constable had been found passed out at the base of a flagpole in the grounds of a prim
ary school, naked. Ellen had called the duty sergeant, who gave her the name of the constable and a couple of details that hadn’t made it over the airwaves. Apparently Andy Cree’s dick had been glued to the mouth of a blow-up doll. The doll was faintly suggestive of a schoolgirl; put that together with the location, and you had a whiff of paedophilia.
Now the 7 p.m. bulletin was saying that certain items had been removed from Cree’s flat.
‘Porn?’ guessed Challis.
‘Probably.’
‘Was he set up?’
‘Probably.’
‘But deserved?’
‘Probably,’ Ellen said.
She switched the radio off and nuzzled him. He responded. His on-switch was faster than any radio’s.
Afterwards, they lay there. Suddenly Challis said, ‘I’m starving,’ and swung off the bed. And there was enough illumination left in the sky, and he passed close enough to the window on his way out of the room, for the rifleman on the slope outside to take a pretty accurate shot at him.
****
56
Dirk Roe, with a nice amphetamine and vodka buzz on, fired another shot. That Challis cunt had vanished but his woman was right there, also fucking naked. Dirk felt an old, desperate yearning to see her like that: dirty thoughts, you naughty, naughty boy, his mother slapping him for peeping on her in the bath, his father thrashing him later with a broom handle. So many thrashings: broom handle, belt, whatever came to hand. He sobbed and swallowed and fired off a couple of wild shots to make himself feel better, the rifle recoiling hard, comforting smacks against his shoulder.
Dirk was pretty sure he’d been born out of time and place. He belonged to an earlier era, would have been a bushranger maybe. Protecting his family’s honour, avenging dishonour. Crouching in the tricky shadows, he levered another cartridge into the chamber, sighted on the shattered window and realised, shit, he’d been shooting not at the people who’d fucked him over but their reflections in a mirror.
But did he panic? Did he, fuck. Dirk slithered from shadow to shadow to get a better slant on the room, to where a mirror couldn’t fool him.
Nothing. They’d hit the floor, the cunts. Dirk giggled. See how you like it, scared, knowing that bad things were coming, no one to help you. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child, whispered Dirk, biting the inside of his mouth. His mother and his father, looking down from heaven and finding fault. Dirk snivelled a little bit.
‘A society gets the police force it deserves,’ he muttered-then yelled it for good measure, so those cunts in there, pissing themselves under the bed, could hear him. You had Drug Squad detectives dealing drugs, assistant commissioners interfering in corruption investigations to protect their mates, whole stations moving stolen goods, sacked officers corrupting serving officers, women motorists forced to give blowjobs so they wouldn’t lose their licence…
So you’d expect cops like that to leak to the media. Now his name was blackened, his brother’s name was blackened. Dirk thought of Lachlan in the hospital, his bloodless skin, the bandages…
‘Someone has to pay!’ shrieked Dirk and he fired another shot.
Then the bedroom door moved and he sensed one shadow, and another, slip through the gap. He grinned. He felt very alive. It wasn’t such a big house, and the garden wasn’t so full of obstacles, that he couldn’t cover all of the exits.
He ran in a half crouch to the other side of the house, holding the rifle across his chest. In an earlier era a wronged man made his own justice. People respected that. No red tape, no tangling web of bureaucratic crap.
Hindmarsh calling him a moron. Dirk had run the Roe Report in his own time, right? Plus, the Report had actively promoted the guy, so a bit of gratitude, please. Racist? Sexist? Realistic. Telling it like it is.
‘I’m not a moron!’ shrieked Dirk. His mother’s frown, just like his father’s sneer.
‘I’m not stupid! I’m not!’ Dirk said, tears mingling with the snot on his face.
He made another circuit of the house. He fired the last round, replaced the clip with a fresh one. Good old Dad-’No government’s going to interfere with my right to defend myself’-the rifle never registered, never declared, never relinquished during the amnesty. His father had been born out of time, too. Fire and brimstone. Purity of thought and action. Thou shalt not release thy seed unless for procreation, the words measured out with his belt.
‘You bastard!’ he yelled at the house. ‘You ruined me!’
Then, carrying through the still night air, one of those nights when the whole world is breathless, expectant and sweet smelling, Dirk heard a distant siren. Otherwise everything was reduced to this little patch of fear and retribution under the moonlight. Dirk, tall and true, ready to die-but not before he’d avenged Lachlan, and not before he’d avenged himself.
Another part of him was asking: if I get out of this, what the fuck am I going to do for a job? Who’d hire me?
Change his name? Move interstate, maybe overseas? That would work. Go somewhere he wouldn’t be hampered by rules and regulations. But where? Nowhere left on the planet for a man of his outlook, talent and inclinations.
A mercenary.
French foreign legion.
Born out of time, Dirk was. He ran around the house again, doubled over, rifle at the ready…
And jumped in fright: the sliding glass door to the deck at the rear of the house was open.
The gap dark and gaping like a cruel mouth.
Dirk trembled. ‘Cry baby,’ his father would shout. ‘Bloody great calf of a boy. Snivelling little wretch.’ The belt buckle biting. Blelt bluckle bliting…bellbluttle…
Something narrow, hard and coldly metallic pressed against the hinge of his jaw, and the cop behind him murmured, ‘Put it down or I’ll blow your head off
Dirk’s insides curled up. He badly wanted to piss. A mosquito whined around his ear, and he realised his bare forearms were itchy from brushing against some bush, and there was a spider web in his hair. He hated spiders and insects. He dropped the rifle and windmilled his arms around his head, convinced that creepy-crawlies were marching up his body, stirring the fine hairs on his arms and legs. ‘You great sook,’ his mother said.
‘Dirk!’ shouted the cop. ‘Pay attention!
And the guy actually slapped him. ‘Pay. Attention.’
Shocked, astonished, Dirk said, ‘You hit me.’
‘Dirk, look at me. Look at me.’
Dirk looked. The inspector had the rifle now, a fireplace poker in his other hand. Dirk looked around wildly. ‘Where’s your gun?’
‘What gun?’
‘The gun you stuck in my jaw.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Dirk,’ the cop said wearily, ‘this isn’t television. I don’t own a gun.’
The woman was in the shadows, wearing a T-shirt now, tousled, beautiful. Calmly watching.
‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,’ cried Dirk, over and over again.
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