by JD Nixon
He sighed heavily, rubbed the back of his neck, and glanced over at the Trogs standing outside Industrie.
“Could be a long night of waiting.” He took in Kieran. “You better head off home, kid.”
“Nah, I’m good. This is better than home,” Kieran said, and promptly planted his butt on the narrow brick windowsill of a milk bar shop front. I did the same and settled myself next to him on the sill. The Sarge frowned at him, but short of manhandling him off the scene, it was hard to know how to manage the stubborn teen.
After a while of standing, the Sarge caved in and the three of us sat there waiting until our butts grew numb. Kieran queried why we weren’t being more covert by hiding, helpfully pointing out for cover a smelly skip jammed in a dark, narrow alleyway between two buildings, overflowing with the detritus of the Indian restaurant next to it. The Sarge and I wrinkled our noses, uninterested in that prospect, especially when the rustling of small scavenging rodents was clearly audible. I explained to Kieran that I wanted Red Bycraft to see us as soon as he stepped outside the door. There was nothing more dampening when you’re planning some trouble than a couple of cops on your tail.
The minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness. We discovered that Kieran liked to talk. A lot. Especially about himself.
We learned more than we ever wanted to know about the minutiae of his school life (an above-average but bored student), social life (lonely), love life (non-existent), family life (supportive and loving), life as a Goth (reliant on the internet for all his Goth needs), and the life he hoped to lead in the future (vague plans for some career that earned billions of dollars and worldwide adulation, but still retained his privacy and street cred).
The Sarge rang the Big Town police station for regular updates on the party riot, but by the sounds of things it was only getting worse and consuming even more of the already stretched police resources. The Super had apparently called in every available cop not currently rostered, and was even considering requesting some backup from the police force in the nearest large town, Melcombe Bay, even though it was a three hour drive away. There was no hope of the Sarge and me receiving any backup to deal with Red Bycraft. In fact, we were lucky the Super didn’t order us to abandon what we were doing and drive over to help with the riot.
I stood up, stretched and paced up and down the footpath, trying to coax the blood to flow in my legs again. We’d been waiting about ninety minutes for Red to show, and Kieran had nattered away for at least eighty-eight of those long, long minutes. Judging by the set of his jaw, the Sarge was ready to strangle the boy with his own silver skull-buckled, studded belt, just to shut him up for a few blessed minutes of peace.
“I’m bored,” Kieran complained, staring at his reflection in the shop window, rearranging his hair. “I thought being a cop would be more exciting than this. You two aren’t very interesting. You’re nothing like the cool cops on TV.”
“Might be a good time for you to go home,” hinted the Sarge sourly. “Must be past your bedtime by now. And don’t you have school tomorrow?”
He received a withering glance and a tone dripping with disdain in return from the Goth boy. “I’m allowed to stay up past eight o’clock, grandpa.” And he rolled his eyes with all the scorching contempt a teenager was capable of producing.
“Remind me never to have kids,” the Sarge muttered, pulling out his phone and calling for another update on the riot.
I yawned and jogged on the spot for a minute to wake up. Where the hell was Red? I’d felt sure that when he couldn’t find me in the nightclub, he’d come looking for me. He’d want to make sure that I saw him with that young woman. It wouldn’t be half as fun for him otherwise. My mind whirled with theories. Maybe he’d decided to do whatever he was planning to do inside the nightclub? Maybe in the bathroom? Maybe in the hallway leading out to the . . . A lightning bolt of understanding hit me with a shock.
“Keiran?” I asked urgently, grabbing his arm and startling him. “Is there a back door to Industrie?”
He stopped fiddling with his hair and turned. “Yeah, but it’s a fire escape. Nobody’s supposed to go out that way.”
Without a word of explanation, I tore off across the road, narrowly avoiding being hit by a speeding taxi, the driver blaring his horn and screaming out the window at me what I presumed were obscenities in his mother tongue. The Sarge jogged over to the Trogs while I sprinted down the narrow, unlit passageway between the nightclub and the strip of shops to its right.
I tripped over a garbage bag spilling from an industrial bin and nearly fell face first to the ground. I managed to regain my balance somehow by stumbling around, bouncing off the brick wall, before righting myself and tearing off again. I skidded around the corner to the back of the nightclub.
It was a poorly lit space. A luminescent exit sign and one dim yellow-tinged security spotlight provided the only illumination over what was an unsightly and tiny rear area containing the nightclub’s bins, a stack of empty beer kegs, and a graveyard of broken furniture and fittings. It wasn’t somewhere you’d take a person you’d just met inside the club hoping for some romance or even a quick poke. It was dark, bleak, and stinky, not at all conducive to passion.
Having given that lofty judgement, I could make out two couples going for it in the badly lit wasteland. A police officer can’t afford to be shy, so I jogged up to the first couple and thrust my badge between them.
“Hey, you two. Police.”
They sprang apart as if I’d jabbed them with a cattle prod. The girl was young, the boy even younger. They should have been at home eating popcorn and watching Harry Potter DVDs, not standing at the back of a nightclub amongst the garbage, their tongues tasting each other’s dinners, the girl’s dress down to her waist, the boy’s jeans unzipped. I gave them a moment to hastily fasten their clothes and assume some semblance of dignity.
“We’re both eighteen,” squeaked the boy in a voice that barely sounded as if he’d hit puberty yet. The girl blushed furiously, on the verge of frightened tears, her braces glinting in the dull light.
“Sure you are,” I said sceptically. “And you’re both lucky I don’t care about that tonight. I want to know did you see a good-looking, tall man with wavy golden hair wearing a green shirt come through that door?”
They hadn’t seen anything except the pressing animal excitement in each other’s eyes. I took their names and addresses and told them to go home right now, threatening to call their parents if I found out that they hadn’t obeyed me. They scurried away, casting resentfully frustrated glances over their shoulders at me.
“They go to my school,” said a voice from the darkness behind me and I spun around, almost shrieking in fright, my hand on my knife. Kieran had shadowed me here from across the road, and I hadn’t even heard him.
“Shit. Don’t do that,” I scolded quietly.
“They’re both in grade ten,” he sniffed. “Not old enough to go clubbing.” As if he was.
“Why can’t you kids just let yourself be kids anymore?” I demanded, stalking over to the other pair. Where the bloody hell was the Sarge?
“It’s boring being a kid,” explained Kieran, following me. He paused, considering, then said dismissively, “But it’s boring doing adult stuff too.”
“Be grateful if your life isn’t too exciting.”
The other couple was much older and should have known better. They didn’t appreciate being interrupted during a delicate stage of their lovemaking by my hand shoving my badge between their squirming bodies.
“Police. I need to speak to you urgently.”
“What the hell?” challenged the man angrily, spinning around. “I was just about to . . .”
I looked down, eyes widening. He wasn’t lying. He was just about to . . .
“You stupid cow!” the woman screeched at me and whacked me twice on the arm. “Do you know how long it takes him to get it up these days? I’ll never get a root tonight now. Thanks for nothing.”
The man shook his wanger a few times in despair, but it was no good – it was shrinking before our eyes.
“How about you put that away?” I suggested.
“Sorry, darl,” he apologised to his companion as he tucked it back in his pants. “I was that close, I swear to God.”
“So was I,” she moaned and whacked me again.
“Do that one more time and I’m going to bust your arse,” I promised nastily. “Have either of you seen a tall, good-looking man in a green shirt with golden wavy hair and a scarred neck come through that door?”
“No,” sulked the man, zipping up his trousers.
“Yes,” said the woman simultaneously, awkwardly reaching under her top to do up her bra.
Her partner glared at her. “What the hell, Barb? I thought you and I were hot and heavy out here? That’s what you were telling me the whole time. And now I find out you were looking at other men?”
She shrugged, embarrassed, and twisted her skirt back into place, avoiding eye contact with him. “You were taking a while, and I just looked around for a moment. That’s all, Bruce. Don’t get your nuts in a knot.”
“Where? When? Who was he with? Where was he going?” I asked, my words tumbling over each other in excitement.
“Calm down, love, and let me think for a moment.” She sat on a chair with a broken arm, crossed her legs, and fished around in her handbag for a cigarette.
I waited for an agonising minute for her to light up and take a deep drag, lifting her chin and blowing the smoke up into the air with a groan of satisfied happiness. Her partner crouched down on his haunches up against the hot water system and lit his own cigarette, scowling at all of us.
The Sarge jogged up at that point. Barb’s eyes lingered on him as she took another drag on her cigarette, watched with impotent jealousy by Bruce. I quickly brought him up to speed, and he told me he’d given the Trogs his phone number so they could let him know if Red exited from the front door while we weren’t watching it.
Kieran wisely lurked in the dark background, managing to keep quiet, well aware that if either of us remembered him or heard him, we’d send him packing in no time.
Barb was ready to speak, but she’d transferred all her attention to the Sarge and I was left directing questions to the side of her head. What she’d seen boiled down to Red Bycraft exiting the nightclub holding the hand of a young woman with long dark hair and dubious taste for cheap shoes, she scorned, peering down at her own leather designer ones with a smile. Further questioned by me, Barb was confident the man had a long scar on the left side of his neck because she found it very sexy she confessed with a tight smile and a quick glance at the simmering Bruce. There would be trouble at their place tonight, but her self-assured evidence convinced me that it hadn’t been Rick, Denny, or Mark acting as a decoy.
Barb insisted the woman seemed willing to be with Red and wasn’t being coerced in any way. He’d stopped for a second when he left the club to look around, as if he was searching for something. Barb had particularly noticed that because to her it was odd behaviour from a man obviously out for a good time with a pretty young woman.
He was looking for me, I thought unhappily.
According to Barb, the man had seemed a little angry when he didn’t find what he was searching for, and pulled the girl after him rather more roughly than he had before. They’d headed down the alleyway at the back of the yard, and that was the last she’d seen of either of them, Bruce claiming all of her attention at that point.
I jogged over to the unattractive high fibro fence surrounding the backyard of the club. It led into a long, narrow alleyway flanked by fences and completely unlit. I didn’t hesitate, but with my knife in my hand, I headed into the darkness. After taking their details, the Sarge thanked the couple for their information and hurriedly joined me.
It was disorientingly dark in the alleyway and I had to run my hand along the fence so as to not stumble. The Sarge bumped up against me. The alleyway was so narrow, there was barely enough space for the Sarge’s broad shoulders.
“Let me go first,” he directed, manoeuvring me behind him. It was an awkward movement, at one point both of us squished between the fences in the narrow space, jammed intimately up against each other before I managed to squeeze past him. I wasn’t going to argue about him being in front.
“God, it’s dark in here,” he complained. “Hold on to me so we stay together.”
I resheathed my knife and looped my fingers under his belt. With my other hand on his waist, I tripped after him.
After a few minutes, we burst out of the alleyway on to the street bordering the park fronting the bay, blinking in the bright streetlight. The Sarge and I had eaten our fish and salad not far from here the other day.
A lot of people milled around the park – some having late BBQs, others romancing each other, families eating double ice-creams and letting the kids run wild before a very late bedtime. There were far too many people for this to be a place where Red Bycraft would dare to do anything awful.
The Sarge scanned the environment. “He’s not going to be here where it’s well lit and populated. We need to search the isolated places. Where, Tessie? Think.”
I thought for a moment, trying to put myself in Red’s position. He would want to find somewhere remote and dark, but somewhere I would find him. So a location that was both public, but away from any crowds.
“South Bay Park?” suggested a voice from behind us, making us both jump. It was Kieran, still following after us. I sincerely hoped he didn’t decide to take up a career in crime, because he was showing some excellent stealth skills already.
“Good thinking,” I told him and explained to a confused Sarge. “There’s a park to the south of here. It’s separated from this main part of the Wattling Bay parklands by that rocky outcrop.”
I pointed to the south where the ironically named ‘Rocky Mountain’ was located. In fact it was an ancient lava spill that hadn’t eroded over time and stood like a sentinel between the main bay, Wattling Bay, and the smaller South Bay. Most people preferred the bay parklands because they were larger, with better facilities and closer to the main stretch of town, whereas South Bay Park was wilder, offering far fewer amenities. South Bay itself was separated from Wattling Bay by a rock groyne. The water there was rougher and more exposed to the weather. Most water sport enthusiasts preferred the calmer, deeper Wattling Bay.
At night in particular, South Bay Park became a place to be avoided by families and lone women – a place where drug deals and solicitation flourished under the cover of darkness. It was, therefore, an excellent choice for a violent rapist who needed some privacy.
“This is hopeless, Tessie,” said the Sarge. “We have absolutely no idea where Bycraft is. He could have gone to his car, her car, her house. He could be somewhere in these parklands, or he could be down a side street. He could have returned to the nightclub for all we know. It’s a classic needle in a haystack situation.”
“Sarge, we can’t just give up.”
“There’s a huge difference between giving up and abandoning a futile pursuit.”
We traded glances heavy with increasing frustration.
“The Super should have given us –” My phone beeping an incoming text message distracted me from my incipient rant. I read it, gasped, and thrust it in the Sarge’s face. “Read this!”
The message read: red went 2 old boatsheds hurry.
“Old boatsheds? What are they?” asked a puzzled Sarge.
“It’s the old boatsheds,” Kieran unhelpfully tried to clarify, after snatching my phone from the Sarge to read the message. I snatched it back off him with a frown.
“They’re a set of dilapidated adjoining old boat repair sheds from the early days of Big Town,” I explained hurriedly, feet itching to start moving. “They were abandoned when South Bay bega
n to silt up as they expanded the main bay and built new wharves and sheds on the other side. Because they’re heritage-listed, they can’t be pulled down, but nobody wants to spend any money on restoring them either, so they’re slowly falling apart.”
“How do we know this text is real?”
“How do we know it’s not?”
“Who would have sent it? Bycraft might have sent it himself. It could be a trap.”
“We’ll turn the trap around on him.”
“Tessie . . .”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“No,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Let’s go then,” I said and started walking southwards. “We’re wasting time.”
The old boatsheds were situated at the very far end of South Bay Park, the most poorly lit, least populated, and most dangerous part of the park. You could guarantee that anyone loitering around the old boatsheds was up to something nefarious. I couldn’t possibly imagine how Red had managed to convince a young woman to accompany him there. Which meant only one thing – she hadn’t gone willingly.
Trying not to attract unnecessary attention, we walked as fast as possible down the shared bike and pedestrian concrete path running the length of the two bays. Kieran hurried after us, the need to quickstep to keep up ruining his carefully cultivated languid Goth attitude.
“Go home,” the Sarge instructed him at one point.
“No,” he refused, trotting after us.
“Make him go home, Tess.”
“Go home, Kieran. This isn’t a game. It’s police business.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The Sarge and I looked at each other.
“I tried,” I said, shrugging.
“He better not get in our way.”
“I won’t,” Kieran said, puffing a little.
We passed the crowds to the darker, less populated part of the parklands and it had only taken five minutes of walking. How long had it taken Red to cajole the young woman to continue with him past the safety of all those mothers and fathers to this area? How long had it taken her to realise, too late, that she no longer had a choice about it? Had he produced his little gun, or did he now have a different weapon?