Blood Tears (53 page)

“
Let
me go, piglet whore,” Lola spat through her cigarette. I encouraged
her to remain silent by choking her a bit harder.

“
We
are going to arrest Lola.”

“
What
for, bitch?” demanded Rosie, her arms full of chocolates from the
grocery store.

“
Suspicion of arson. The Sarge and I saw her at the police
station, and I will swear on a Bible that I saw her set it on
fire,” I said.

“
That’s a fucking lie, and you know it,” said Rick, his fists
clenching and unclenching with anger.

“
We’ll set her free if you all go home now. And I mean now.
We’re going to park the patrol car at Lola’s house and we’re going
to check you all off a list. And when you’re all home again, we’ll
let Lola out.”

“
What
a fucking stupid plan,” sneered Rosie, and I had to admit that I
kind of agreed with her. It was a stupid plan, but it was our only
plan.

“
What
if we just fucking refuse?” asked Jade.

“
Then
we’ll drive Lola to Big Town tonight to have her formally
charged.”

I let that sink into
their low-voltage brains for a few minutes. I’ll admit it wasn’t
much of a trump card, but the Bycraft clan were deeply protective
of Lola, who’d taken on the mantle of matriarch since all the older
male Bycrafts were either dead or incarcerated.

“
She’ll probably end up going to jail,” I bluffed, to increase
the menace of my threat.

“
Come
on,” spat Rosie. “That bitch is crazy enough to do this to Mum and
to ruin Denny’s wake.”

“
Make
her pay for this,” croaked out Lola through my
strongarm.

“
Oh,
she’s going to fucking pay for it, don’t you worry about that,
Mum,” said Rick, looking at me with an expression of pure
loathing.

“
Good
boy, Ricky,” Lola croaked before I increased my pressure on her
throat and she was no longer able to say anything.

I shuffled over with
Lola to the patrol car. Not looking too pleased with the situation,
nevertheless the Sarge opened the back door and we shoved Lola
inside.

We drove to Lola’s
place and parked out front, ignoring the constant stream of foul
language and banging on the divider from the back seat. I took out
my notepad and started writing down the names of all the Bycrafts
as they straggled back to her place, each of them giving us the
finger as they approached, and more than a few hurling something at
the patrol car as well.

“
I
don’t like this plan,” the Sarge said bluntly.

“
It’s
working, isn’t it?” I snapped back.

“
For
now, but what’s to stop them rioting again when we let that
harridan in the back out?” queried the Sarge in a terse tone that
let me know he wasn’t in full approval of my unorthodox
approach.

“
We’ll keep hold of her until the backups arrive. Then we’ll
let her go. Or not.”

“
Tess, are you planning on double-crossing them?”

“
Why
the hell not? We can’t trust those bastards, so why should they
expect us to be trustworthy?”

“
You
are setting up a whole world of pain for yourself,” he said,
drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in contained
anger.

“
No,
I’m not. Because after tonight, the Super is going to
have
to do something about the Bycrafts. She can’t ignore them anymore.
Nobody can get away with burning down a police station.
Nobody.”

I ticked off a few more
Bycrafts as they straggled in. From the direction of the shops, a
burst of flame following an explosion startled us.

“
Great. They’re going to burn down all the shops as their
finale.” I got on the phone to Dave, telling him to urgently divert
his resources from the school to the shops. At least he and his
fellow volunteer firies might have a chance of saving some of the
shops. The schoolhouse was probably a lost cause.

After about an hour,
I’d ticked off most of the Bycrafts, the last being Rick, Garth,
and Mark. We received the obligatory finger from them all and one
of them threw a projectile, possibly a brick, at the rear window of
the patrol car, shattering it, making Lola screech in fright.

“
The
rest of them are probably sleeping it off somewhere,” the Sarge
said. He rang the Super to be told the backups were almost with
us.

I looked down at my
list with real sadness. “I haven’t ticked off Jakey yet. Did you
see him anywhere tonight?”

He gave me a long,
evaluative look. “No. But there were so many of them milling
around, it was hard to keep track of anyone. Perhaps he’s with that
woman.”

“
Dorrie? Perhaps.” The bitterness of that particular
humiliation swamped me again.

We waited until we
received notice from the Super that she’d arrived with the backups.
We drove off, angering the Bycrafts who came swarming out of Lola’s
house, hurling things at the patrol car. At the shops, we drove
past Dave and his guys busy battling the fire.

“
How’s it going?” the Sarge yelled out the window.

“
I
think we can save most of them,” he spared a second to shout back,
before returning to work.

Four patrol cars and
the Super’s unmarked were parked around the entrance to the still
burning police station. The acrid smell of scorched timber hung
heavy in the air.

“
Fucking hell,” said the Super when we stepped out, rubbing
her forehead as if she had a massive headache. “Look at you two.
You look as though you’ve been fucking cage fighting with an angry
bear with PMS. Shitfuck, look at your car. It’s a wreck. Fuck.
Those turd-drops in the city aren’t going to like this.”

“
Can
we hand over Lola to someone else, ma’am? She’s kind of our hostage
for keeping the Bycrafts at home,” I asked, suddenly
weary.

“
I
don’t even want to know the details about that batshit crazy plan,
but I just know it was you who came up with it.” She turned to a
male and female uniform. “Hey, you two! Stop picking your arses,
and get this bitch out of the rear. And keep a closer eye on her
than you do on each other’s herpes.”

While those two
unfortunates wrangled a struggling and foul-mouthed Lola from our
car to theirs, the Sarge gave the Super a brief rundown of events.
She listened without comment, her eyes flicking from him to me, and
back.

“
This
is a class A clusterfuck, isn’t it?” she commented when the Sarge
had finished.

“
Yes,
ma’am, isn’t it?” he replied frostily. “If we’d had those extra
uniforms as we’d –”

“
Not
one more fucking word, Maguire,” she warned, one finger up. “We can
autopsy this balls-up later when it’s sorted.”

“
We
did what we could, ma’am,” I said defiantly.

She stopped and her
face softened for such a brief moment that I thought I imagined it.
She cupped her hand against my blood-smeared cheek for a second. “I
know you did.”

Just then, a crowd of
Bycrafts came rolling down the street, clearly furious with the
Sarge and me for not keeping our promise to release Lola. It was
almost comical to see them double-take on noticing the extra patrol
cars, turning tail and fleeing.

“
You
stay here and watch your prisoner,” the Super said to the uniforms
with Lola. “The rest of you follow that crowd and stay outside
their house until I give you other directions. Tessie, give them a
mud map to the old bat’s house.”

That took five seconds.
It was impossible for them to get lost because there weren’t that
many streets in town.

It was then that I
noticed the plume of smoke in the distance, and my heart started
racing double-time.

“
Take
me home,” I said to the Sarge urgently.

Seeing the look on my
face, he wasted no time and we were soon speeding southwards. I sat
upright, so tense that I would have snapped in two if someone had
tried to bend me.

We got closer to my
house and my worst fears were realised.

My house was on
fire.

Chapter
37

“
No!
” I cried out, jumping out of the car before the
Sarge had even stopped, stumbling and rolling when I
did.

The blaze was fierce,
flames licking up half as high as the house itself.

“
Dad!
” I screamed, running towards the burning
building.

“
Tessie, no!” the Sarge shouted, sprinting after
me.

I didn’t hear him, all
my focus on saving Dad and Adele, trapped inside the inferno.

“
Tessie, you can’t go in!” the Sarge shouted, desperately
chasing after me.

He crash tackled me to
the ground, his arms around my calves. I landed hard, arms out,
face smashing into the ground.

“
Let
me go!” I cried, wriggling on the grass using my forearms, trying
to escape his grip. “Let me go!”

“
You
can’t go in, Tessie. It’s too late.”

“
No!”
I insisted, tears pouring down my face. “It’s not too late. Let me
go, you stupid bastard.”

I twisted around, and
punched him in the face, freeing one leg to kick him in the
stomach. He winced but didn’t slacken his grip. He moved up my
body, almost belly flopping on me, forcing all the air out of my
lungs. I struggled fiercely beneath him, trying to push him off,
trying to punch him again, but he grabbed my arms and pinned them
to the ground. I bit his shoulder and tried to head butt him,
wriggling desperately beneath him. But after a few minutes of
unproductive fighting, eventually my strength waned and I lay
beneath him, spent.

“
It’s
too late, Tessie, my girl,” he said in my ear. “It’s too
late.”

I started crying, huge
heaving sobs of tears that I thought were going to rip my body
apart. I knew what he said was true – nobody could have survived in
that inferno, and it must have started burning while we’d been
sitting outside Lola’s place.

At some point, his
restraint turned into an embrace, and I lay on the patchy lawn of
my front yard, engulfed in his arms, crying, while my whole life
burned behind us. And if someone at that minute had offered me a
choice between living and dying, I would have gladly chosen
death.

“
That’s enough, Maguire,” said the Super in an unusually
subdued voice.

He rolled off me and
helped me to my feet. I stared at the burning house, sobbing my
heart out, the sound of the fire engine in the distance. I couldn’t
imagine ever being able to stop crying.

The Sarge hugged me
again, before he stepped away, presumably at some silent order from
Fiona.

“
Tessie, darling,” said the Super and hugged me. I clung to
her, wetting the shoulder of her uniform with my tears.

After five minutes,
when the firies had set up and were battling the fire, the Super
said, “Maguire, take her back to your place.”

The Sarge led me by the
hand to the patrol car and buckled me up. I felt numb and
completely unresponsive to anything he said or did.

At his place, he again
had to lead me into his house and sat me down on the lounge. And I
sat there for the next – hours? minutes? I couldn’t tell. People
came and went and I sat and stared at the wall, unstoppable tears
flowing from my eyes. At one point, the prison doctor came to
examine me, a passive examination in which I didn’t answer any of
his questions.

“
She’s in a severe state of emotional distress,” I heard him
say in a low voice to the Super and the Sarge. But that wasn’t
quite true. I was, instead, building up to a severe state of anger
– white-hot anger; anger like I’d never experienced before in my
life, and I would be the first to admit that I was quite practiced
in anger.

Oblivious to my
emotions, the doctor continued, “She also has a number of injuries,
none of which I’m particularly concerned about, though they’ll be
painful over the next few days. Here are some sleeping tablets for
her. Try to get her to bathe, have something to eat, and go to
sleep. I can’t say for sure she’ll feel any better when she wakes
up, but it will assist her physical recovery in any case.”

The Super murmured
something in response.

“
I
honestly don’t know,” said the doctor. “This place looks like a war
site. It’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like
it.”

The Sarge also murmured
something.

“
Definitely not. Let’s talk about that in a few days. Look, I
have to go, but let me know if you need me. This is a terrible
thing. Terrible.”

The low voices
conferred for a while before the Super kneeled in front of me,
taking my hands. I focused on her.

“
Tessie darling, I have to go now.” She looked away, blinked
rapidly a few times before turning her eyes back to me. “I just
don’t know what to say to you, except that I’m going to bring down
every last one of those fuckers. Okay?”

“
Okay,” I said dully. But what she said only served to
reinforce the immense rage stirring in my mind.

She kissed me on my
dirty, blood-encrusted forehead, and jerked her head to one side to
indicate she wanted to speak to the Sarge in private. I listened
into their conversation.

“
Those fucking maggots in the media are already crawling
everywhere over this place. I don’t want Tessie anywhere near them.
Understand? I don’t want them to see her, to speak to her, or to
even know that she’s here. That is your sole responsibility at the
moment. I’m leaving a force of uniforms around the clock. All the
Bycrafts in town are under house arrest at the moment until I can
send a team of dees to give them the third degree. So for now,
consider them none of your business. Just look after Tessie for
me.”