by JD Nixon
A frisson of fear tickled my spine at that thought, and I wondered if I was too predictable. I ran at the same time every morning, always on one of two routes, and I’d become accustomed to the safety of companions when I ran. It had been ages since I’d had to run on my own. I fleetingly worried that I’d forgotten how to look after myself, relying too much on the Sarge’s constant supportive presence.
A loud slithering noise in the grassland nearby made me yelp in fear. I suddenly realised how tense I was, verging on the edge of an uncharacteristic panic spin. I shook my head sharply and took a deep breath, relaxing my tight muscles. Calm, Tess Fuller, calm. Those golden words repeated in a mantra seeped into my nervous system and soothed my jangling nerves. I guess those regular notes from Red Bycraft were beginning to psych me out, just as he’d planned.
Why on earth would something happen to me this morning, out of all the mornings that I’d been running since he’d escaped from custody? It was laughable. I even made myself laugh out loud to prove the point. But my forced jollity jarred in the silence and only made me more uneasy.
I had spent the last four months looking over my shoulder for Red. I knew only too well that he would kill me the first opportunity he had. It was barely two months since he’d shot at the Sarge and me that night we’d cautiously approached his mother’s house.
We’d been tipped-off that he was the guest of honour at his sister Larissa’s eighteenth birthday party. Their mother, Lola Bycraft, hosted the rowdy party at the Bycraft family lair in Jarrah Street, located in the rough side of town. Despite her pathetic attempts to disguise it, I’d immediately recognised the shaking, terrified voice of our ‘anonymous’ tipster as Red’s downtrodden and much beaten girlfriend, Sharnee Lebutt. She’d finally found some spine to dish it back up to Red, desperately wanting him recaptured and returned to jail. It was only then that he wouldn’t be in her life, smashing his fist into her face on a regular basis, and spending all her welfare money on booze, cigarettes, and other women.
Unfortunately for the Sarge and me though, we’d been noticed as we crept towards the house, guns out, wrongly assuming that the loud music would cover our approach. Before we even reached the door, we’d been fired at from inside the house, the bullets smashing against the screened security door and showering us in shrapnel. We’d looked as though we’d been wrestling echidnas afterwards, we were so full of holes. It was only through sheer luck that we hadn’t been more seriously injured. Neither of us had been wearing any bulletproof gear, for the simple reason that we didn’t have any.
The police station at Mount Big Town (or Little Town as we locals all called it) was probably the most neglected and worst-resourced in the entire state. But three days after that incident, two complete sets of brand new riot gear, including bulletproof vests and helmets, were delivered to the station. And the Sarge’s enigmatic smile when I questioned the sudden appearance of the much-needed equipment only confirmed that he was responsible. I didn’t know how he did it, but I was determined to find out. It was driving me crazy. It was almost as if he had a direct line to the Police Commissioner himself.
“Your fiancee is the Commissioner’s daughter, isn’t she?” I’d accused him. He’d merely continued to smile silently at me. “You’re his nephew? His love child? You have footage of him snorting coke off an underage rent boy’s naked butt?” He had laughed then but hadn’t told me anything. He was an inscrutable clam.
Poor Sharnee had paid for her courage in tipping us off about Red though. A few days after our ill-fated raid, she walked past me in the dairy aisle of the exorbitant local supermarket where I’d ducked in to grab some milk (and Tim Tams). She kept her head down, sunglasses on inside the shop, fresh ugly bruising visible on her cheeks and neck, colouring up like a rainbow. I’d touched her gently on the arm to get her attention, but she’d reared back in terror as if I was a deadly brown snake. She span around and fled, almost running away from me, abandoning her groceries in the middle of the aisle. Sadly, I realised that it would be the last time she would ever try to help us.
Although Red Bycraft on the loose was a current threat for me, I’d been a target for the Bycraft family my entire life. Bycraft men were obsessive by nature and for some unknown reason, they were murderously obsessive about Fuller women and had been since the first Bycraft man killed the first Fuller woman way back in 1888. I’d escaped from Little Town and the ever-present danger to my life when I’d moved to the city to go to university, followed by the police academy and three years duty in the city’s toughest suburb. But my father’s life-threatening cancer had prompted the return back to my home town a couple of years ago and once again, I was living back in my old family house, sleeping in my childhood bedroom. I looked after Dad, who was now wheelchair-bound, as much as he would let me. They say that absence makes the heart grows fonder, but the Bycraft family certainly hadn’t grown fonder of me in my absence. I’d been the subject of constant abuse, threats and various attempts on my life since I’d returned. That had all eased somewhat since the Sarge had arrived four months ago, the same week that Red Bycraft turned fugitive, but hadn’t completely ceased.
So I was right to be wary as I ran and I patted my knife handle reassuringly. A set of headlights in the distance also provided a sense of not being totally alone in the darkness. I jogged towards them as a goal, thinking they’d grow bigger as we approached each other, confident it would be someone I knew, because I knew everyone who lived in Little Town. But the lights didn’t appear to move and as I jogged closer and closer, I realised they belonged to a car that was parked by the side of the road. I assured myself that there was nothing to worry about. There were a few residences on Beach Road, squeezed between the nudist community and the bikie retreat, and obviously someone was waiting outside a house to give a friend a lift to work that morning, or something like that. There was nothing sinister going on – it was all perfectly normal.
I kept jogging, but my heart pounded harder than it should have been at my easy pace. A cold sweat broke out down my spine, making me shiver even as I was heating up from the exercise. Compulsively, I patted my knife again, regretting that it had been a few months since I’d done any solid self-defence training. I’d taken up the Sarge’s invitation to use his expensive home gym equipment, and had spent a lot of time honing my muscles instead of practising my moves. I sure hoped I wasn’t going to die this morning because my butt was tight but I couldn’t manage a flying kick any more.
I kept jogging. I wanted to turn off my headlight because it made me a huge target in the darkness, but I might break an ankle if I did, it was that dark. Besides, I could see the very faint signs of dawn breaking over the horizon of the ocean in the far distance. Soon it would be daytime and all the scary things would run away, I thought with sheepish amusement as my feet continued to pound the road.
Or maybe they wouldn’t, because sometimes the scary things lived amongst us, with human faces and black hearts.
The car with the lights started up and glided slowly towards me. I hadn’t heard a door slam as someone entered the car, but I’d drifted off into my own thoughts for a while, so perhaps I’d missed it?
I kept jogging and soon the car neared me, its lights on high beam, blinding me as it grew closer, illuminating the gentle rainfall. I couldn’t see who was inside the car or what make it was, but it didn’t swerve towards me or try to run me off the road. We passed each other peacefully and I patted my knife once more. I took my hunting knife with me everywhere when I wasn’t in uniform with access to my gun – even to bed. It had saved my life on more than one occasion.
The car drove away from me, the engine noise receding and I relaxed again, laughing at myself for my irrational fear. I was like a kid around a camp fire, telling creepy stories to frighten my friends, but scaring myself more than anybody. I breathed out and thought about something much more pleasant – my upcoming weekend with my boyfriend, Jake. It was his birthday next Saturday and as a surprise, I had boo
ked a room for us at one of Big Town’s flashest hotels, as well as a table at one of its leading restaurants. We were going to celebrate him turning twenty-nine in style. I couldn’t wait.
But even with that happy thought in my mind, I couldn’t shake the quiver of uneasiness that snaked down my spine. I berated myself. What the hell was the matter with me this morning? I was jumpier than a bigamist at a family gathering.
A stunning moment of clarity swept over me. I was ignoring my instincts. Something was hinky, but I wasn’t listening to myself. That’s how people got themselves killed. I stopped running immediately and turned around. I was going home.
As I did, I noticed a glint from something ahead of me in the darkness. I realised that it was a car with its lights off at exactly the same moment that its high beams flicked on. Its engine gunned and it drove straight at me.
I froze. It was my worst nightmare, but my brain simply would not communicate with my legs. No doubt about it, I’d grown soft since my over-protective sergeant had come to Little Town. I screamed to myself to move and finally neurons connected with neurons again and I began to run. Not away from the car, but towards it, reaching up to turn off my headlight.
The car drove towards me and I ran towards its harsh light. I was quite good at judging distances, being a reasonable shot. When I thought it was the best time, at the last second I veered to the right into the darkness of the wild scrubby coastal vegetation that flanked the road. I kept running. The car tried to swerve after me, but its momentum carried it one hundred metres further down the road before it shuddered to a screeching halt, reversing with squealing tyres and recklessly ploughing into the vegetation after me.
I was a sitting duck in that high beam, the gentle rain misting in the dazzling light surrounding me. On the positive side though, it did provide me with much needed illumination as I stumbled over the prickly, low-lying, salt-tolerant plants that grew profusely in the sandy soil. The plants scratched my legs through my tracksuit pants as I thrashed through the vegetation, my breathing stertorous, my heart hammering. Without any warning, I made a ninety-degree turn right, away from the lights, running sideways for ten metres before turning again and doubling back towards the road, hoping the driver hadn’t noticed my u-turn.
He had. The car also spun in a u-turn, chasing after me relentlessly, high beam pinning me in its glare again. I sped up, self-preservation lending wings to my feet. I desperately ran as fast as I could, arms and legs pumping, tripping over plants, lungs bursting, until I hit the road. I threw my head left and then right, trying to decide which direction to head. In the end I went where a car couldn’t travel and that was straight ahead. I sprinted towards the giant old mango tree on the other side of the road that grew next to the high fence surrounding the nudist community. Local boys had been climbing up its branches for decades, peeping over the fence, and learning a lot about female anatomy in the process.
The car sped straight ahead, following me, wildly flying across the road and screeching to a stop, mere centimetres from the trunk of the mango tree. The driver’s door flung open and a tall, well-built man stepped out into the rain.
“Tessie Fuller!” he shouted loudly in the silence. “Come and play with me, lovely.”
It was Red Bycraft.
My heart doubled up on its already thumping beat. I struggled to calm down and control my emotions, needing to think and plan clearly. I was standing a bare two metres away from him on the other side of the huge trunk, pressed up against its reassuring girth, holding my breath. I thought my lungs would explode.
“Tessie!” he shouted out again. “I’m waiting for you.”
As quietly as possibly, I climbed the tree, grabbing low lying branches and using the knobbly trunk for footholds, memories flooding back as I did. I was very familiar with this tree myself, and I’m embarrassed to admit that my girlfriends and I had climbed it a number of times as teenagers, despite our condescending comments to the boys in town for doing the same. We’d been just as curious about men’s bodies as they were about women’s, although the middle-aged paunches and wrinkly appendages we’d spied in the nudist community had almost turned us all into committed lifelong virgins.
Climbing with cautious silence, I made only slow progress up the trunk, catching glimpses of Red through the branches. I was thankful that his continued taunting helped cover any noise I made as I moved.
He grew angry, cursed with an impatient nature and a short fuse. “Where the fuck are you? I know you’re close by and I want to play. You’re making me wait. When I find you, I am going to make you pay for that,” he threatened, waving his arm in the air, grasping something in his hand. “And guess what, Tessie? I have a gun of my own now.”
That wasn’t welcome news and although I strained my eyes in the gloom, I couldn’t see what type it was or even if it really was a handgun he was brandishing so dangerously. But I sure wasn’t waiting around to find out either.
Still climbing, I reached a branch that dangled over the fence to the nudist community. I slid myself along it slowly trying to be quiet, getting soaked in the process. I neared the fence, intending on dropping down into the grounds of the community and escaping from him that way. He noticed the movement of me scraping along the branch though, and turned his head up towards me. I peered down at his face with its mane of wavy golden hair, now longer than the last time I’d seen him and glistening with rain. He grinned in delight when he spotted me, his white teeth bright in the gloom of the rainy dawn.
“Hello, Tessie lovely,” he laughed, pointing his gun in my direction. “Long time, no see. Have you missed me? Come on down, now. I want to play with you.”
“Go to hell,” I replied instead. I swung myself over the fence into the nudist community, landing hard and slipping on the wet paving bricks that surrounded its ‘Come Together’ pool and spa, situated at the back of the complex. Everything in the community was named after a Beatles’ song. Its founder, ironically named George Harrison himself, was a huge fan who boasted that he’d gone to primary school with John Lennon back in Liverpool in the late forties. Or so he claimed.
George Harrison’s manhood had been severed in an horrific hedge-trimming accident early last year, which only goes to show how inadvisable it is to garden in the nude. With the nearest hospital a ninety minute drive away, it had fallen to me to calm down the hysterical pack of nudists, provide him with first aid to stem the blood flow, locate the lopped tip, pack it in ice, and speed him to meet the ambulance racing towards us from Big Town. After a delicate and lengthy operation at the hospital, it was successfully reattached. I’d given my hands a good wash after that incident, but I couldn’t scrub the memory from my brain.
Mr Harrison had been understandably grateful to me for ensuring that he hadn’t suffered a permanent penectomy and gifted me a lifetime membership of the nudist community. I was yet to take up the offer, being rather fussy about exactly who I allowed to see me naked. Currently, Jake was the only one on the list.
I lay on my back, stunned for a moment from my hard landing, gazing up at the heavens as the rain fell on my face. An angel appeared in my vision and I smiled up at it because it was watching over me. It smiled back. Suddenly coming to my senses, I realised with a horrified start that it was in fact Red, his beautiful face surrounded by his golden hair, leaning over the fence looking down at me, grinning. I scrambled hurriedly to my feet, flinging myself behind the pool filter shed, narrowly avoiding a bullet that thudded into the thatched straw. He wouldn’t shoot to kill, but he would shoot to disable so he could take his time with me afterwards. I wasn’t going to let that happen because he was a bloody terrible shot and he’d probably kill me. I took refuge behind the shed, hunched over, my breathing ragged. Water dripped off me everywhere.
With shaking hands, I pulled out my phone and pressed speed dial for the police house.
The Sarge took a while to answer, groaning sleepily when he realised it was me. “I didn’t feel like running this mornin
g, Tessie,” he grumbled straight away, not bothering to greet me. “It’s raining in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Red Bycraft’s after me,” I said, speaking quickly and keeping my voice low, my eyes constantly on Red. “I’m in the pool area at the nudist community on Beach Road, but I’m going to have to move on to somewhere else. I’m not safe here. He’s about to climb the fence. He’s armed with some kind of handgun and I only have my knife. Hurry!”
He hung up and I knew he was mobilising, stopping only long enough to gather his gear. But even though we lived in a small town, it would still be ten minutes at least before he turned up. I could count on him to take me seriously any time I rang him for help, night or day. When he’d first arrived in town, he’d thought I was crazy for carrying a knife with me everywhere, but it hadn’t taken him too long to realise that I wasn’t hysterical or paranoid – the Bycrafts really were out to get me.
Red had shoved his gun into the waistband of his jeans to free up both hands as he climbed over the fence. I watched him carefully, thinking that I should take the opportunity to flee. But I badly wanted to see him banged up again and not roaming around free, mocking me. So instead, I made a snap decision and rushed out to ram him at the very moment he landed with a thump, unsteady on his feet on the wet pavers. The force of my impact made him slip to the ground heavily. As he fell, he grabbed out at me, clutching my arms and pulling me down on top of him.
I immediately reached towards his jeans to secure his gun, but he moved swiftly, capturing me by the wrists, clasping me cruelly.
“No, you don’t, lovely,” he warned. “You don’t want me telling Jakey that you were trying to get your hands down my pants, do you?”
He shouldn’t have mentioned Jake, because I didn’t need reminding at that moment that the despicable Red was my much-loved boyfriend’s older brother. How such a horrible family of demons as the Bycrafts had brought forth a gem of a man like my Jake was one of the world’s enduring mysteries.