Blood Sport (Little Town)

by JD Nixon

  “Except for Kylie,” I reminded Rusty. “She’s here with you. She’s not one of the boys. And she’s not your wife.” That last comment was a guess.

  Another impatient glance at my endless curiosity. “Yes, well, now you’ve put me on the spot. She’s my little bit on the side, isn’t she? And that’s not illegal, as far as I know. I couldn’t pass up the chance to be with her for a few weeks,” he lied, just as his ‘bit’ returned, waving her driver’s licence in the air triumphantly, teetering in her heels. She looked as though she’d never seen it before in her life.

  “It was just where you said it would be, Daddy,” she beamed, leaning against him and holding it out to us.

  “Daddy?” I repeated, a bad taste in my mouth, taking the licence from her.

  He smiled grimly. “It’s just another expression. Don’t judge us. Sure, there’s a difference in our ages, but it doesn’t mean we’re not in love.”

  And then he kissed the young girl in an embarrassingly ardent manner and for an inappropriately long time, his tongue flailing around inside her mouth, mining for tonsils. The Sarge turned his head, sickened by the shameless display. I watched despite my revulsion, noticing her initial recoil from his lips and his bruisingly tight grip on her arms, forcing her to participate in the embrace.

  When they separated, I examined her driver’s licence carefully. It looked right. It felt right. But there was surely something hinky about it that made me uneasy. I handed it to the Sarge. He scrutinised it before handing it back to the young girl.

  We gave Rusty one further rebuke about illegal burning, before leaving him groping his young girlfriend’s butt. Spontaneously, I turned back and pulled out one of the Little Town police business cards from my notepad, writing my mobile number on the back. I pressed it into Kylie’s hand.

  “In case you want to contact me one day, Kylie,” I said, imploring her with my eyes, thinking of that other girl. “For anything. Anything at all. Don’t hesitate. Any time of the day. Whatever your problem is.”

  She gazed after us with big eyes as we returned to the patrol car and drove off.

  “Something stinks to high heaven at that place and it’s not the burning film,” I said when we turned back to the highway.

  “I agree, but that licence seemed genuine to me.”

  “To me, as well. It’s frustrating. It seemed genuine, but something just smells off about the whole thing.”

  We drove in silence for a while. I looked out the window, watching the rain turning paddocks into swimming pools. Idly, I told him about how Kylie had resisted Rusty’s kiss and speculated on their exact relationship.

  “Really? I didn’t even think twice about the fact that she’s his bit on the side, no matter how old she turns out to be.”

  I shook my head slowly, disappointed. “How typical. A man says a woman is his and you believe him, just like that.”

  “Not all the time. Jake keeps telling me that you’re his woman and I refuse to believe him.”

  I shot him a withering look, not sure if he was trying to be funny or not. It was sometimes hard to tell. He didn’t give me any clues, keeping his eyes firmly fixed ahead. “What now?”

  He said, “Back to the station. We’ll run a check on Kylie Francine Petroff.”

  “Of 347 Greenfield Terrace in the picturesque suburb of Benara in the city.”

  “Kylie is 158 centimetres tall and was born on 28 April, exactly eighteen years ago.”

  “With blonde hair and blue eyes.”

  He pulled a sad face. “But she hasn’t agreed to be registered as an organ donor.”

  “Shame. More young people ought to. She’s a P-plater, only licensed to drive automatic cars.”

  “She has a very immature signature as well,” he threw in.

  “I thought so too. Like a young teenager learning to do it for the first time.”

  “Definitely.”

  It was our way of working together. We’d agreed that when we needed to memorise something without appearing too interested in it, we each paid attention to alternate facts and pieced them together afterwards. He always started with the name.

  “Benara, huh?” he pondered. “You’re familiar with that suburb.” I had worked in Benara for three years after graduating from the police academy. “What do you know about Greenfield Terrace?”

  “It’s a misnomer and not as fancy as it sounds. In fact, it’s a total dump. Right next to the train line. Abandoned, derelict houses full of squatters, cheap sex workers, and junkies.”

  “And runaways?”

  “Unfortunately. And most of them fitting into all three categories. Do you think that’s what we have on our hands with Kylie?”

  “Who knows?”

  “One thing I do know though and that’s nobody lives in Greenfield Terrace. Not long enough to claim it as a permanent address, anyway. It has a very transient population.”

  “Fake address?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “How old do you reckon she really is?” he asked.

  “Thirteen or fourteen? No more than fifteen, tops.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”

  He pulled into the police station carpark, the tyres of the patrol car crunching on the wet gravel. I didn’t hear what he said next, my attention centred on Dad’s battered ancient Land Rover, which stood forlornly alone in the rain. I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds.

  Every one of its windows had been smashed to pieces.

  Chapter 15

  I jumped out of the car and ran over to the Land Rover.

  “Shit,” I said softly to myself, walking around it, surveying the damage. A sudden thought flung my head towards the Sarge. “Take me home! Now!”

  We drove at speed to my house and I leapt from the car before he had even stopped, almost slipping in the sludgy mud of the driveway, not caring about the rain.

  “Oh no! God, no!” I groaned as I took in the destruction.

  “Tessie!” came a shout from behind me.

  I didn’t hear anything he said, racing up the stairs to unlock the front door, my boots crunching on broken glass. My visitors had broken the front windows of the house from the inside, the glass scattered all over the verandah. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t fit the key into the lock, dropping it to the timber boards. The Sarge picked up my keys and unlocked the door for me, pushing me behind him as he entered the house first, his gun out.

  “Police!” he yelled in his loud voice. There was no sound.

  A frosty breeze blew down the hallway. I ran frantically from room to room. Every window had been smashed and anything made of glass or of any value inside had also been broken – my dresser mirror, the TV, Dad’s small aquarium, his two much-loved and pampered goldfish lying dead on the floor. When I reached the dining room, I groaned again in despair. Nana Fuller’s best crockery was a mess of shattered plates and cups. I knelt on the floor, holding one of her favourite delicate floral teacups by its broken handle, fighting back tears. The set had belonged to her grandmother and it was her greatest treasure. I sadly remembered the first time she’d let me carry the tea tray when I was nine, watching anxiously over me as I proudly wobbled my way from her kitchen to her lounge room, this very teacup perched precariously on the tray.

  “The kitchen, Tessie,” said the Sarge somberly from the door.

  Sniffing, I followed him there and the first thing I noticed was that I now had a different back door, recalling that Jake had promised to fix up my broken back door for me earlier today. He must have found an old one in the shed and had been and gone before the vandals turned up. It was a dirty old door with peeling green paint and curious striations and stains across it, but at least it locked. Well, it had locked when Jake left, but was now hanging by one hinge, the rest of it splintered into pieces. All of Jake’s hard work had been in vain.

  The next thing I noticed was that someone had tried to start a fire on the floor in the kitchen, using the old mism
atched timber chairs that sat around my kitchen table as kindling. The floorboards were charred and jagged, but the fire had died out, the damage localised to a small patch. I laughed without one shred of humour.

  “The dumbarses! Didn’t they realise it’s too wet to set anything on fire in here? The roof’s leaking!”

  Unaccountably, I laughed at that thought as I stood in my rain-drenched, fire-damaged, leaking kitchen, everything I owned ruined, with no money to replace anything. I clutched my sides, tears falling from my eyes, shoulders heaving with laughter. I would be bunking down with Young Kenny tonight. That thought made me laugh even harder.

  But suddenly I wasn’t laughing at all, but I was crying. The Sarge came over and put his arms around me, pulling me in close. I leaned against his comforting shoulder until my tears were exhausted.

  “I just don’t know what to do anymore,” I admitted in an unsteady voice, sniffing. “I guess I deserve this after what I did to Lola’s house, but I only did that because I was so angry about what Red did to my chickens.”

  The Sarge was grim. “You can’t stay here. Go and pack. You can stay with me for a few days until we can sort this mess out. But what about your father? Is he okay with his girlfriend or should he come and stay at my place too?”

  I gave a huge, unladylike watery snort. “He’s better off where he is. Adele has a ground floor flat and it’s wheelchair friendly. Your place isn’t.” I wiped my eyes with the heel of each palm. He handed me a clean handkerchief. “But I can’t stay with you, Sarge. It’s too much of an imposition.”

  “Nonsense. I’m not arguing about it with you, Tess, so just go pack. I’m going to ring the Super and see if she wants to bother getting forensics involved. Because I’m sure we all know who’s responsible for this.”

  I did what I was told, guiltily glad that someone else besides me was dealing with my problems for once. I could hear him talking the whole time that I threw my things into the tattered old backpack I’d dragged around Europe with me when I was younger and which now constituted my sole piece of luggage. Either he was having a very long conversation with the Super or he was making a number of phone calls. And the Super didn’t do long conversations.

  He was still talking when I came out of my bedroom, so I took the opportunity to ring Dad to let him know what had happened. I’d forgotten to turn my phone back on again after being in court and had a flood of messages waiting for me. I listened to the first few, but they were all telling me the same thing – that someone had gone on a rampage in my house or that the windows of the Land Rover had been broken. As usual, the townsfolk were looking out for me. Jake had left a number of messages as well, each more anxious than the last.

  Dad had already heard about the damage to the windows on the grapevine, but was devastated to find out about his goldfish and Nana Fuller’s treasured crockery. I rang off, him assuring me that he’d be fine at Adele’s place for a while. He wanted to help me sort everything out, but I convinced him that I could manage it by myself, even though I wasn’t nearly as confident about that as I pretended. Adele’s flat wasn’t as comfortable for him as our house was, particularly her bathroom, which was cramped and awkward for him to negotiate in his wheelchair. I was angry that he’d been forced out of his own home by the Bycrafts and that anger pushed away other, sadder, emotions.

  I had my thumb on my phone keypad, about to ring Jake back, when the Sarge finished his own phone calls.

  “I’ve organised for a glazier, a locksmith, and a cleaning crew to come as soon as possible. But they won’t get here until tomorrow at the earliest, so you’ll be spending tonight at my place at least. The glazier promised to send some men here to board up your windows late this afternoon.”

  I stared at him in stunned disbelief. He should have asked me before taking charge like that.

  “I can’t afford to pay any of them,” I mumbled, unbelievably embarrassed. “Ring them back and cancel them all. I’ll have to fix things up myself.”

  “And how the hell do you think you’ll do that with one arm out of action, Tess?” he asked, irritated, his hands on his hips. “You need to get your house secured and fixed so that you and your father can come back home. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it bloody well is!” I said, looking up at him angrily. “But I don’t think you understand – I can’t afford to pay for it! I can’t make money appear out of nowhere.”

  “I know we joked before about your finances, but you must have some rainy day savings at least.”

  “Must I?” He was beginning to get up my nose. “People like you have rainy day savings. People like me don’t, because I spend every cent I earn trying to keep this old house up to scratch and trying to keep Dad out of a nursing home. And none of that is a joke to me!”

  He was silent for a moment, looking down at me, a series of emotions flying across his face. “We’ll sort something out, Tess. You can pay me back later, bit by bit. Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay with me. “I appreciate the offer, Sarge, but I don’t want to be in your debt.”

  His lips compressed. “You wouldn’t think twice about borrowing money off Jake.”

  I shook my head at his thickness. “He’s my boyfriend, you’re my boss. It’s a completely different situation.”

  “Not in my eyes. Anyway, you don’t have a choice. I’ve already organised it and I’m not ringing them back.”

  “Sarge! Cancel the workmen. I can’t pay for them!”

  “I won’t. The workmen are coming and we’ll sort out the cost later. And that’s final. I’m not discussing it any further. You need to have a safe living environment.”

  We confronted each other. “My God, you’re such a –”

  I was rescued from that potentially career destroying comment by my phone ringing. Saved by the bell literally. It was Jake.

  “Jakey,” I answered, incredibly glad to hear his voice. I left the room so I could talk to him in private. I told him everything that had happened, pacing up and down the hallway as I spoke. “I wish you were here.”

  “I know, baby doll. Me too. I’ll round up a few guys and get them to board up your windows this afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The Sarge has already gone ahead and organised everything.” There was nothing but silence on the other end for so long that I thought I’d lost the connection. “Jakey? Jakey? Are you there?”

  His voice was frosty. “What’s he organised?”

  “A glazier, a locksmith, and a cleaning crew.”

  Another long silence. “Who’s paying for all of that?”

  “Me.”

  “How?” My turn to be silent. I had no secrets from Jake – he knew how precarious my financial situation was, just as I knew how precarious his was. He didn’t earn a lot of money, had a huge loan on his ute to pay off, and had a large lazy family that treated him like their personal auto-teller machine. “Tessie? How are you going to pay for all that?” His anger sparked down the line.

  “I don’t know, okay? I just don’t know!”

  “Tell Maguire to cancel everything. He’s not your fucking boyfriend and he shouldn’t be arranging things like that. I’ll get a group of guys together and we’ll help you out.” He paused, marshalling his temper, his voice softer. “Just like we always have.”

  “Thanks, Jakey,” I said, voice catching with emotion.

  “Put Maguire on. I want to talk to him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yeah.” His tone was unmistakably unfriendly.

  Reluctantly, I handed my phone to a surprised Sarge and watched as he spoke to Jake. His expression traversed a range of feelings as he did, hostility to the fore. There were some heated words exchanged that I wished I hadn’t been present to witness, feeling more than uncomfortable. What the hell was the matter with them? Why couldn’t they just get along with each other? It would make my life so much easier.

  Finished, he threw my phone back to me and stalked out of
the room. I could almost see the steam blowing from his ears.

  “What did you say to him, Jakey?” I asked wearily into the phone.

  “I told him that I’ll look after you and that he should keep his fucking nose out of your business.”

  “Jakey! That’s unforgivably rude! He was only trying to help me.”

  “That’s my job, not his. I’m your boyfriend, remember? Not him! No matter what he thinks.”

  I’d had enough of his ego and turned very snappy with him. “For God’s sake, I don’t have so many friends that I’m willing to turn one away. The Sarge is a good man and a good boss, not to mention a great friend. And yeah, he shouldn’t be stepping in like that, but I don’t want you being so rude to him ever again. Do you hear me?”

  “Tessie –”

  “I mean it, Jake! You’re being a complete jerk about him lately.”

  He hung up on me. I threw my phone at the wall in temper. It broke into two pieces.

  “Problem?” asked the Sarge, leaning on the doorway, arms crossed.

  “Everything in my life is a problem at the moment,” I replied coolly, picking up the pieces of my phone and trying to push them back together. I wasn’t sure how much he’d heard of my conversation with Jake.

  He took the pieces from me and attempted to fix them together. They wouldn’t.

  “I think it’s broken,” he said wryly, handing them back.

  I rolled my eyes in resignation. “Of course it is.”

  We looked at each other and laughed. It was a good release from all the tension of the last few days.

  “I feel like Calamity Tess,” I admitted ruefully.

  “I’m afraid to be near you in case something happens to me,” he joked. He glanced upwards. “Maybe a piano from the sky?”

  “Ha ha,” I said sourly, and spent the next few minutes wrestling with my phone while he made some more phone calls. Not having any luck, I gave up for the moment and looked at him. “Sarge?”

  “Hmm?”