Blood Ties (10 page)

“I don’t like your attitude today, Officer Tess. You’re being mean to me.”

Oh brother
, I thought,
here we go
, and looked over at the Sarge, who was standing by the patrol car watching the action keenly. I hoped he was good at reading minds because we hadn’t had a chance to develop any signals for each other and I wanted him over here. Fast.

But before he could move, Martin threw open the front door of the car onto me, catching me by surprise and knocking me flying. He sprinted from the car and headed off down the street like lightning. He was a fast runner and a regular gold medallist for the sprint races at the clinic’s annual athletic games. I was up on my feet and pounding after him before I could even gather my thoughts, ignoring my bruised butt and as angry as hell. I didn’t want my prawns to spoil sitting there in the sun.

He ran to a t-junction, flipped his head left, then right and shot off to the right, running across the road without even checking if it was clear. A battered ute screeched to a halt, narrowly missing him, its horn blaring angrily. I held up my palm to stop the ute taking off and ran across in front of it as well. I was running Martin down, not being too shabby in the sprinting department myself, when I heard the siren sound nearby and turned to see the Sarge in the patrol car. I jumped in the passenger seat and pointed down the street where we could see Martin running for his life.

Although the roads leading into it are reasonably steep and windy, Little Town itself is built on a plateau so is flat with streets made wide to allow bullock trains hauling timber to do a full u-turn. It isn’t full of small alleys, back lanes and traffic like a city, so in terms of tailing someone, it’s a dream come true. We cruised behind Martin, easily following him with the lights flashing, but siren turned off still.

When Martin appeared to flag, the Sarge pulled over and we both jumped out.

“Lock the car!” I yelled over my shoulder. “Otherwise one of those Bycraft bastards will steal it.”

We ran after Martin and soon had him cornered in the town’s only dead end street, imaginatively called Dead End Street. It was the only street in town not named after a tree and it terminated with the old cemetery. I’d often wondered if the town fathers had deliberately planned it that way as a subtle statement on human mortality.

The cemetery was full of ornate and precariously leaning headstones from the town’s earliest settlement days. A lot of my ancestors were buried there; some of them well before their time, including my mother. It was closed now except for family plots. The new lawn cemetery that replaced it was located two kilometres out of town on the corner of the Coastal Range Highway and Mountain Road, the road that led up to Mount Big.

Martin was very superstitious and would never set foot in the cemetery, so for him to run down this street told me a lot about his strong need to be captured and returned to safety. I’d never asked, but I’d always assumed that he had some kind of authority complex, which was probably why he needed his regular encounters with me.

“Take it easy on him,” I said in a low voice as the Sarge efficiently pushed Martin to the ground and snapped the quick restraints around his wrists, hauling him to his feet gently. Martin began to cry and I don’t mean a few token tears trickling out of his eyes to make us feel sorry for him, but huge gut-wrenching sobs that shook his whole body and echoed down the street. His eyes and then eventually his nose streamed with liquid.

“I-I j-j-just w-wanted to g-g-g-go for a dr-dr-drive,” he wailed, hyperventilating, almost incomprehensive with emotion. He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his t-shirt, leaving a disgusting smear behind.

“I know, Martin,” I said kindly, patting him on the shoulder. “But you’re not allowed to drive. You don’t have a licence. It’s not safe for you to drive. Not for you or for other people.”

He gave a watery snort and appeared puzzled when I mentioned other people. I wasn’t a psychiatrist, but even I could tell that Martin had great difficulty in empathising with other folk. His entire world consisted of him and his needs and desires alone. There was probably some fancy term to describe that, but I didn’t know what it was.

We led him to the patrol car and pushed him gently into the back seat. I handed him a bunch of tissues and climbed into the driver’s seat again and the Sarge into the passenger seat.

“We’d better secure the stolen car first,” I said and he nodded agreement.

“Borrowed,” insisted Martin from the back with another watery snort. I ignored him, did a u-turn and drove back to where Martin had abandoned the little green car.

It was gone.

“Bloody Bycrafts,” I muttered to myself and sped off in anger the fifteen kilometres to the south of town where the mental health clinic was situated. I threw the Sarge my mobile and asked him to ring the clinic to let them know we were bringing Martin back, mindful of his ticking off earlier this morning about using the phone while driving. I had the number to the clinic on speed-dial.

He spoke for a few moments and not long afterwards we turned into the tall gates of the clinic and handed over Martin to its relieved and embarrassed director. The Sarge gave him a hard-faced reprimand about allowing a patient to escape so frequently and bluntly suggested that he review the clinic’s security arrangements immediately. The director nodded the entire time, his face a strange mix of fawning discomfit.
He’d never looked like that when I’d given him a serve about Martin
, I thought sourly. In fact, he’d always had a smutty smirk on his face as he listened, his eyes dropping continuously from my face to my boobs, once even wolf-whistling under his breath when I walked to the door. I quietly resented it when people took a male cop more seriously than me.

Martin safely returned, we drove off back towards town again. I sped past my home though, instead taking the turnoff for Mountain Road, the Sarge raising his eyebrows at me in question. We drove up the mountain in silence. As I suspected, sitting forlornly abandoned in the public carpark adjacent to Lake Big was the little green car, doors wide open and keys in the ignition. It was a little scraped on the front bumper and worse for wear inside, but mostly okay.

“How did you know it would be here?” the Sarge asked, looking at me with guarded respect.

“This is where the Bycrafts abandon all their stolen cars,” I told him, instantly dispelling his emerging image of me as a wonder-cop. “They’re creatures of routine. And knowing them, they’ve probably had an orgy in the car as well.” I smiled at him brightly. “So which one do you want to drive back to my place?”

I wasn’t too surprised when he kicked me out of the patrol car and drove off.

There was a revolting stain on the driver’s seat of the little car that I didn’t care to examine too closely. I looked around for something to cover it and found a beautiful and expensive pale lilac cashmere jumper carelessly thrown onto the back seat.
That silly psychiatrist
, I tutted to myself. It looked as though someone had wiped something disgusting on it, maybe even a few times, that I also didn’t care to examine. I draped the jumper carefully over the stain and drove the little car back to my house. The patrol car was already parked when I returned, but I noticed immediately that the Sarge’s Beemer was gone.

I trudged up the stairs wearily as I rang the clinic to let the psychiatrist know she could pick up her car from my house. It had been such a long day. I hadn’t had much sleep the night before and I was fast running out of puff. I hadn’t even had a chance to think about getting my chickens out of the lockup, and wondered if the Sarge would really start eating them if I didn’t move them out fast enough.

In the lounge room, I kissed Dad on the forehead and flopped onto the lounge, closing my eyes. “What a day!”

“Tired, love?”

“Beyond tired, Dad. Beyond exhausted. Getting perilously close to expiration. I swear I will never move from this lounge again.”

“Jakey rang. He’s coming over tonight,” he told me with a sly smile.

I sat up immediately. “Oh goodie! I better go have a shower.” I jumped to my feet and hustled my butt to the bathroom with the sound of Dad’s chuckles ringing in my ears.

Chapter 5

As I stood under the shower, I thought about Jake. There was a reason I called him my honey-boy – he had honey-brown skin, wavy golden hair, incredible amber eyes and was as sweet as honey. Like all the Bycrafts he was very good-looking and kept himself in top shape. He was mostly even-tempered and good-natured and was smart, the only one in his extensive extended family so far to work out that crime doesn’t pay, not that he was an angel by any means.

In my eyes, he was almost perfect and had only one flaw, but it was a biggie – he was a Bycraft. And he was a loyal Bycraft. We’d had a million arguments over his awful family, but he would defend them with his life. Deep in my heart, although I loved him intensely, I acknowledged that we had no long-term future together because of his family.

I loathed the Bycrafts; it was as simple as that. In fact, there hadn’t even been a word coined yet to describe the level of hatred I had for the Bycrafts. I would never marry into his family of demons. I would rather die than become a Bycraft. My father would rather kill me than let me become a Bycraft. If I married a Bycraft he wouldn’t go to my wedding. I suspect that he would never speak to me again. He had been upset and furious when I’d started going out with Jake in the first place.

But all that was something to worry about in the future. I certainly had no thoughts of getting married yet, even though I’d turned twenty-seven on Christmas Eve last year. Jake, a year older than me, wasn’t thinking of getting married either. But that was because he was already married.

He’d married when he was twenty to Chantelle Lebutt (Sharnee and Dorrie’s sister), and permanently separated from her after nearly two years of unstable and hot-blooded wedded ‘bliss’, with a great deal of wild sex, shouting, threatening and cheating on both sides. He’d never got around to divorcing Chantelle and when I asked him about it one day, he muttered some unconvincing answer that left me wondering if he was using his marital status to distance himself from women, including me. Nobody could expect him to get married if he was already married, could they?

I think he also felt some obligation towards Chantelle, a less-than-charming woman who’d boasted about having ‘
Property of Jakey
’ tattooed on her arse during the first flush of married love. I bet she’d regretted that once or twice afterwards. In the six years since they’d separated, she’d had four kids to four different fathers and stacked on fifty kilograms, all of which she blamed on Jake for walking out on her. Her four kids’ fathers were Jake’s older brothers Red, Karl and Rick and his younger brother Denny. Jake didn’t seem to mind though. It was that kind of family. They shared.

He was the only Bycraft who hadn’t impregnated any women growing up. This was due to his fanatical use of birth control from the moment he was first sexually active at school, even during his time with his wife. The rumour was that they’d broken up because he wouldn’t get Chantelle pregnant so she could collect the government’s baby bonus to go on a holiday to the Gold Coast with her sister Dorrie. He really was the smart one in the family.

When she’d tried to blame the first of her kids on him, despite the fact that they’d separated eleven months previously, he’d demanded a DNA test straight away. She had baulked at that and hadn’t tried it on again. Any other women over the years who’d insisted that he was the father of her child received the same treatment. He was almost obsessive about ensuring that he didn’t become a father. It was psychological – probably something to do with the fact that his own father had spent most of Jake’s life in jail and his mother wasn’t exactly the patient, faithful, maternal type. It hadn’t been a great childhood. But all that was okay with me too, because I wasn’t ready to become a mother yet and I would never forgive myself if I was responsible for bringing yet another Bycraft brat into the world. God knows there were enough of the little monsters running around already.

I dried myself off and dressed in a short skirt and body-hugging t-shirt, leaving my hair loose. I sprayed myself sparingly with my favourite perfume, a ruinously pricey delicate floral scent that Jake had bought me for my last birthday and which I was trying to make do for the entire year. I then added that glamorous final touch as I did with all my outfits – my hunting knife. I probably didn’t need too, reasonably sure that I was safe when Jake was near me, but old habits die hard and I’d been wearing it for so long that I virtually felt naked when I was unarmed.

I went to the kitchen and prepared the prawns for dinner, ripping off their heads and shelling them, grateful that the Sarge had remembered to bring them in from the car. The familiar sound of Jake’s pride and joy, his distinctive gold-coloured double-cabined ute driving into the yard drifted up the side of the house through the open kitchen windows. For Christmas last year I’d bought him a personalised number plate for it that read:
JAKEY-B
. He loved it.

Before long I heard him come in the front door to spend a few minutes chatting to Dad. I was engrossed in the recipe, carefully chopping home-grown red chillies, coriander and mint, when strong, brown arms snaked around my waist, hands moving up to caress my breasts and hot lips pressed themselves against my neck. I threw down my knife carelessly and leaned back against my honey-boy, eyes closed in bliss, surrendering myself to his magical wandering hands.