Blood Ties (19 page)

We spent the time between ordering and the food arriving re-reading the information we’d printed out, but it wasn’t long before our meals turned up. To my shame, I gobbled mine down like a hyena at a fresh antelope kill. It was delicious but didn’t really fill me up. I’d gone for the cheapest thing on the menu, a bean enchilada with a small side of fresh salad, his contempt for fast food echoing in my ears. He’d gone for a huge platter himself that included a taco, a burrito and rice and salad sides. Then I realised that maybe he’d been as hungry as me. We’d had quite a jog that morning and he wasn’t a small man. Maybe I should be grateful he was looking out for me by keeping me away from junk food? I wished I knew more about him.

When the bill came, he made moves to pay for it when I stopped him vehemently. I insisted that we each pay for our own meals, especially as he had offered to take Dad and me out to dinner that very night. I would have offered to pay for both of us, but I knew that I didn’t have enough on me to cover the entire meal. Unfortunately, I hadn’t expected to eat out today, thinking I’d be lunching at Fiona’s house, and when I’d changed into my uniform at the last second in a rush I’d forgotten my purse. I had to dredge up every dollar coin and every fifty, twenty, ten and five cent piece I had at the bottom of the small moneybag I stashed in the patrol car for emergencies. I was desperately embarrassed, but determined to pay for my own meal. I just managed to scrape enough together. Just. Well, to be honest, he had to throw in a couple of dollars for me in the end.

His eyes were scathing as he scooped up the mountain of loose change I’d placed on the table and headed off to the cashier to pay. I watched as he shoved that coinage into his pockets and paid the bill with his credit card. When he returned to the car, he pulled out all my coins from his pocket and threw them into the holdall between the front seats.

“I’ll pay you properly when we get back home,” I insisted, squirming with discomfort at the clinking of the small change falling into the holdall.

“You’ve paid me, Senior Constable. This is now my money, I believe,” he said dismissively. “I’ll decide what I do with it, thanks.”

Feeling as though I’d been firmly put back in my box after that experience, we headed to Bessie’s daughter’s house to check on Miss G and to drop off the list of properties. They weren’t home, so I scribbled a message on the papers asking her to let us know if she noticed anything out of the ordinary, shoved them under the front door and we buckled up and sped off back to Little Town.

Chapter 9

Back home, we dropped in at the station, making it just in time to watch the removalist van pull out of the driveway of the police house. It was followed by Des and Maureen’s car, the back seat crammed with possessions too precious to trust to the removalists. There were parts of Jesus poking out of every window, which I couldn’t help but feel was a little irreverent. The Sarge parked in the station carpark and we sauntered up to the house, waving goodbye to them as they left. Most of the sightseers were long departed, but there were still a few stragglers left behind, nothing in their dull lives a match for the respectable boredom of Des and Maureen’s departure.

I was surprised to see Rick Bycraft still around, sitting on the ground, leaning up against the fence. He was slugging on a stubby of beer, surrounded by what seemed to be a whole carton of empties, tired and very drunk by the look of him. All the adult Bycrafts had deserted him and there were only a few of the whippersnappers around to keep him company.

I pointed him out to the Sarge.

“He couldn’t have found out already about that woman and his cousin, could he?”

“God only knows. News travels fast around here.”

I detoured over to him. In my eyes he was one of the least objectionable Bycrafts and Jake was very close to him as they were only a year apart in age, so I didn’t loathe him as much as I did some of the others. When I crouched down next to him, I could see that he was even drunker than I suspected and had been crying, his face streaked with tears. There was a faint smell of vomit emanating from him.

“Rick,” I said gently, “how you going?”

He rolled dreary, bloodshot eyes towards me. “Fuck off, piglet.” He didn’t sound too friendly.

“How about Sergeant Maguire and I take you home to your mum?”

“I said to fuck off.”

I exchanged a glance with the Sarge and tried again. “Rick, we’ll take you to Lola’s place and she can look after you tonight, okay?”

“
Fuck off, you nosy bitch!
” he screamed suddenly, lurching up and grabbing me around the neck. He was an angry man, had a vicious grip and he’d taken me by surprise, so I was choking for air straight away. When you’re in that position, you get real proprietal about oxygen, believe me. I lashed out at him in the stomach with my foot in a fierce side kick, throwing him violently backwards. He hit the fence hard and slumped drunkenly, before turning on his side to vomit. The Bycraft minors stood in an interested semi-circle around us, filming Rick’s attack and defeat on their stolen smart phones. None of them offered to help me or him. I wouldn’t have expected it.

The Sarge didn’t waste a moment though. He pushed through the audience to join the fray immediately, but it was all over by the time he got there.

“What are we going to do with him?” the Sarge asked, remembering the chickens in the lockup.

“Take him home. Let his family deal with him,” I recommended, rubbing my poor throat. I hoped it wouldn’t bruise.

Nodding agreement, he manhandled Rick into the back of the patrol car, stopping to let him vomit again, while I followed, shooing away the young ones. The Bycraft minors yelled out insulting comments to us before jumping on their stolen bikes and riding off to warn Rick’s mother about our imminent arrival.

We drove in silence, the only conversation me directing him to Jarrah Street where the Bycraft family lair was situated. When we pulled up outside the unkempt timber house, a coven of Bycraft women, tipped off by the young ones, swarmed outside to the curb, crowding the patrol car, banging on its roof and swearing at us. The Sarge opened the door and told them all to stand back in his loud, authoritative voice. They obeyed, which frankly stunned me. The Bycraft women made it a point to never let men tell them what to do – unless it was to open their legs and then they were all ears, so to speak.

We pulled Rick out of the back of the car, decidedly worse for wear. The women immediately crowded around again and accused us of roughing him up and mistreating him. I wanted to yell back at them that we were trying to
help
him, but it was pointless. They’d never listen to me and I’d only be wasting my breath even trying to explain.

“Back off!” I warned Rosie Bycraft, Rick’s and Jake’s older sister, who was shoving against me and getting in my face.

“Make me, piglet bitch,” she sneered, trying to grab Rick’s arm off me. I pushed her overly-generous chest backwards with my open palm a few times to force her to move away from me and thought longingly of my baton. There would be nothing that would make my day brighter at that moment than cracking a few Bycraft skulls.

Rosie took exception to my gentle pushes though, and without warning rammed into me, knocking me off balance. I fell heavily, bringing down both Rick and the Sarge with me. Rick landed on me and was far too drunk to have speedy reflexes, so he thrashed around on top of me with little effect except grinding me painfully further into the dirt. I gagged at the smell of his vomit breath on my face.

The Sarge struggled to his feet and hauled Rick to his, but wasn’t fast enough to stop the onslaught of Bycraft feet opportunistically making contact with my body as I lay prone on the ground. He battled to hold up Rick, whose bones had seemingly turned to jelly, while the Bycraft women repeatedly kicked at me so viciously that I curled up into as small a mass as possible and desperately reached for my baton. I swung it wildly as I lay on the ground, whacking them hard and indiscriminately on their shins and calves as their feet headed towards me. I was causing them significant pain too, judging by the curses raining down on my head.

The Sarge let Rick fall to the ground in order to get out his baton, wading into the melee and yelling at the Bycraft women to back away. Between the two of us we managed to give me enough breathing space to stagger to my feet. Panting and hurting, I held the baton up, one palm out in warning, ready to smash in someone’s head given the slightest provocation.

The Sarge moved in close, pushing me behind him again with one hand and swapping his baton for his OC spray in the other. Stupid Rosie Bycraft took a step towards me, blinded by her own hatred, wanting to take another swing at me. He warned her to step back. She ignored him and so copped a full blast of the spray in her face, rendering her instantly helpless. She cursed the Sarge with language that would have made me blush if I hadn’t heard it all before out of her own kids’ mouths towards me. She shuffled inside her mother’s house, crying, accompanied by her sister and cousins to wash out her eyes.

“Bring out this man’s mother now!” the Sarge bellowed after them. A minute later, tiny Lola Bycraft, spawner of numerous evil Bycrafts as well as my beautiful Jake, reluctantly came down the stairs. She was moaning about being torn away from
Oprah
repeats, a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. I’d never seen her without one.

“What did you do to my Rosie, pig-bitch?” she demanded abrasively, her cigarette jiggling up and down as she spoke.

“She got what she deserved.”

She shrugged then because, despite having ten kids, she didn’t really care about most of them, only a few. Red was her favourite, being her first born. Jake was another favourite, because everyone in the family adored him. She looked down at one of the unlucky ones, lying on the ground, snivelling in front of us all. “What about my Ricky? What did you do to him?” she asked automatically, without much feeling. But I still saw red at her attitude.

“We’ve brought him home for his own damn safety, you old bat. We found him drunk and crying at the police house. Next time I won’t bother. I’ll just chuck him in the lockup until he sobers up,” I spat out at her.

“He’s not a fucking chicken, piglet,” she scorned, blowing an awful fugue of cigarette smoke over me.

I turned and addressed the Sarge, “Let’s get away from this ungrateful bunch of arseholes. Last time I do any of them a favour.”

“The only favour you could do for me is dying, bitch,” retorted Lola viciously. “And the sooner the better.”

I stalked back to the patrol car in a right temper as the Sarge hauled Rick to his feet again. I was feeling sore from where that pack of witches had attacked me. In a fair world, we would have arrested all of them for assaulting a police officer, but with nowhere to put them and no way of transporting so many of them to Big Town, there wasn’t much we could do except walk away. Again.

“Stacey’s broken up with me, Mum,” Rick cried pitifully, leaning drunkenly on Lola’s shoulders and sobbing. “She found out about me and Dorrie. She’s kicked me out of her house.”

“There, there, poor Ricky,” Lola soothed, patting him absently on the back as she took a long draw on her ciggie, shooting venom at me over his shoulder. “Stacey Felhorn’s an ugly, fat slut anyway. You can do better than her. You stick with that Dorrie. She knows how to look after a man.” She flipped me the finger as we drove away and took out her cigarette to yell out at me, “Stay away from my Jakey, you motherfucking pig-arsed whore!”

Unprofessionally, I flipped the middle fingers of both hands right back at her through the window. Oh yeah, I could totally see her as my mother-in-law.

“That family is nothing but a pack of obscene animals,” said the Sarge in disgust. “I’ve only been here two days and I hate them already.”

I laughed briefly. “Welcome to my world. I grew up with them.”

“I know it’s none of my business, but I just can’t understand why you would go out with one of them. Especially with the way they treat you.”

I replied evenly, “You’re right, it’s none of your business.”

“I understand why they hate the police, but it seems to be almost personal with you,” he persisted.

“I guess it’s just my charming personality,” I said and smiled at him with a fake sincerity usually reserved for campaigning politicians. I’d probably tell him one day about me and the Bycrafts but it was too early in our partnership to do so just yet. That’s assuming he stuck around long enough to remain my partner. After witnessing the Bycrafts at their worst, that scenario probably just became a lot less certain.

“Okay,” he sighed. “I can tell when I’m being fobbed off. I’ll take you home. And my advice? Take a bath. You’re going to bruise up.”

I shrugged nonchalantly, but I was sure he was right. I would be in a whole world of pain tomorrow. I was feeling it already. He drove up my driveway, considerately parking near the stairs so I didn’t have to walk too far. As I was about to step out, he put his hand on my arm to stop me.

“Tess, you need to get those chickens out of the lockup. I want those cells available for holding people. I don’t want those Bycrafts to think that they can get away with treating you like that anymore. We have to bring some order to this town.”

I regarded him gravely and nodded. I was coming around to his point of view that we did need a lockup in town. “As soon as I can. Hey, can you do me a favour and check to see if Des took his old chicken run with him? It was in the backyard. It’s a bit of a ruin, but it would save me buying a new one. I could get Jake to help me fix it up if it’s still there.”