Blood Sport (25 page)

“Yeah, but I have a gun to prove otherwise, haven’t I, sir?”

We stared at each other with open hostility. I was glad the Sarge was there with me because I wasn’t sure how it would have panned out without him. I had a terrible inability to keep my mouth shut sometimes.

“Did you come to visit us about my girlfriend?” he asked finally, tearing his blazing eyes away from me to the Sarge.

“No sir. We had a complaint about an offensive odour coming from this place on Sunday night and this morning.”

He pretended to think for a moment, then smiled at us sheepishly. “I admit it. Guilty as charged. We’ve been burning off some rubbish.” He flashed us his gappy grin yet again and held up his palms in appeasement. “I know, I know! It’s illegal to have backyard bonfires, but everybody does around here in the country. It’s the quickest way to get rid of rubbish. Tell me that you don’t yourselves, Officers.”

He was right. Everybody in Little Town
did
have backyard bonfires from time to time to dispose of burnable rubbish, despite it being illegal because of bushfire concerns. Dad and I ourselves had on occasion. But he’d forgotten one important detail.

“You had a backyard bonfire in the pouring rain?” I queried with scepticism. “You must have used a tanker-load of petrol to ignite it in this downpour. No wonder the neighbours complained.”

“No, Officer,” he explained with insultingly slow patience. “Of course I didn’t have it in the rain. We burnt our material under the shelter of our backyard patio. In an oil drum for extra safety. I have my mates here to think about. I’m not going to put them in any danger and I certainly don’t want to burn down our little house here.”

“What were you burning?” asked the Sarge.

“Old films mostly. They did give off a terrible smell, I’ll admit that and I’ll apologise for that to all the neighbours. In person if you request. It won’t happen again. We managed to dispose of all our films. There won’t be any more fires.”

“Films of what?”

He smiled at the Sarge. “Just normal family films. Holidays, kids’ birthday parties, Christmas. You know the kind of stuff. Everybody has them.” His smile loosened. “Even you two, I’m sure.”

“Why were you burning them?” I asked. “They’re the kind of memories most people want to keep.”

He shot me a pitying look. “We’ve converted it all to digital, haven’t we? It’s all up on the internet now. Who needs film? It degrades too quickly and it’s a fire hazard. We decided to get rid of all our old film and only use new technologies from now on.” He glanced from the Sarge to me. “It was a one-off burning and I promise you won’t hear a peep from us for the rest of our stay. I regret the inconvenience of you having to visit.”

We weren’t ready to let it go yet.

The Sarge commented, “Sounds like you burned a lot of film.”

Rusty smiled depreciatively. “We’re a big family. We have a lot of memories.”

“What are you doing here in town, exactly?” I asked.

“Holidaying, what else? I hate the place personally – give me the city any day. But the kids and the wives seem to like it, so here we are again. It’s just so . . . wholesome.” He flashed the uneven front teeth again.

“So you’ve brought your wives and kids with you?” I asked. I hadn’t seen any women or children when they’d driven past us the other night.

He threw me an angry look, pissed off with my persistence. “No, it’s just us guys here this time. Boys’ holiday. Escape from the old ball and chain. Need a break from the nagging from the better-half now and then.” He winked at the Sarge congenially. “You know how it is, mate.”

“No, I don’t,” he replied coldly. Touchy point for him. His chosen future ball and chain was half a world away, refusing to come home.

“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 veranda. 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 mismatched 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.”