Blood Ties (25 page)

She was wearing a royal blue linen skirt suit with a pristine white blouse and a twin set of perfect cultured pearls. Her elegant nose wrinkled when she smelt Young Kenny. A quick turn of her head confirmed her worst suspicions.

“Ugh!” she said expressively and stared at me with her protuberant pale blue eyes. “You’re bleeding, Senior Constable.” I peered into the little mirror I kept under the counter and noticed that there was blood trickling from where Stacey had scratched me.

“Had a little altercation this morning,” I explained, taking a tissue from the box on the counter and wiping off the blood.

“I heard that Dorrie Lebutt tried to kill you by hitting you with her car.”

“She did.” I didn’t even wonder that word had spread so quickly. It was that kind of town.

She raked me up and down with her eyes. “You look all right to me.”

“She didn’t succeed, obviously,” I said dryly. “Now how can I help you, Councillor?”

“I wish to report a . . .” she was discomforted, a strange expression for such a confident woman. “I wish to report a peeping tom.”

“Really?” I asked with undiplomatic disbelief.

“Yes, Senior Constable. I don’t dally at the police station for laughs, you know,” she said in a huff.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Villiers. I just meant that yours is not the first complaint we’ve had. I’m surprised we have a peeper in town with the nudist community so close by.”

I really shouldn’t have brought up the nudists because she held very conservative views and I had to listen to a five minute diatribe on the evils of nudity in modern life. While she sermonised, I let my mind wander back to my previous night of immensely satisfying nudity with Jake.

“Senior Constable Fuller, were you listening to me? Because you have a silly smile on your face,” she accused.

I pulled myself back to the here and now. “Of course I was, Councillor.”

“Then why weren’t you taking any notes?”

“Modern policing, ma’am,” I lied. “We’re now encouraged to keep it all in our heads. To save on paper. It’s a new environmental initiative of the Police Commissioner.” She wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not. I continued, “When the new sergeant is free, we’ll come to your place and investigate. Is that satisfactory?”

“Thank you,” she said, mollified by the mention of the Sarge and took herself off with an air of importance about her, casting her eyes disparagingly in Young Kenny’s direction as she did.

I went back to my cup of tea and had it to my mouth about to take my first sip when the phone rang. Sighing, I put the cup down and reached over to the phone.

“Mount Big Town police station.”

“Tessie, what’s this I’m hearing about Dorrie Lebutt trying to kill you with her car and Stacey Felhorn trying to shoot you? What the hell’s been going on over there this morning? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, Jakey. A bit sore, that’s all. The Sarge is going to take me to Dr Fenn later for a check up.” I quickly filled him in on what had happened.

He swore under his breath. “I’m going to kill that woman next time I see her.” He was seething with anger, which wasn’t like him. “And where the hell was Sergeant Serious when all this was going on?”

“He was moving in his furniture.”

“So much for him having your back.”

“That’s unfair, Jake. The second he turned his back, your little brother and cousin were trying to steal his stuff.”

He never liked me pointing out inconvenient truths about his family, so we hung up and I returned to my tea. It was lukewarm by then and I ended up throwing half of it out. When Stacey had finished her tea, stopped crying and was completely calm again, I told her she could go home. To my surprise, she gave me a quick hug and thanked me for pushing her to safety when Dorrie drove at us. And it was amazing how much a rare and simple act of gratitude like that could lift my spirits, especially in this town. But when I went to return the Tim Tams to the fridge, I noticed that she had eaten all of them except one, and it had been a full packet. The greedy bitch!

The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. I rang the two no-show reportees and left messages gently suggesting that they better get their butts down to the station by noon or I’d be recording them as absent. How hard was it for them to take ten minutes from their busy days of drinking, fighting, screwing around and playing computer games to check in with me once a week? It wasn’t as though either of them even had a job.

I pottered around, spent another age waiting for the computer to log in again after it had gone into sleep mode, answered a few wrong numbers for the brothel and tried to ignore the screaming pain from my hip.

The bell rang and I went out to the counter. It was my two reportees, arriving together, as cocky and disrespectful as usual.

“Gentlemen. Good to finally see you,” I lied and pulled out the attendance book. I looked at the first one, Jake’s cousin Garth Bycraft, barely twenty, on parole after eighteen months in jail for break-and-enter and destruction of public property. He’d broken a window at the primary school in a drug-fuelled frenzy, climbed in, spray-painted the walls with obscene graffiti and whizzed over all the library books, before smashing the computers to pieces. I hadn’t heard anything bad about him this week, so gave him a tick for behaviour, collected his signature and then turned my attention to the other man – the loathsome Red, my absolutely least favourite Bycraft.

He leaned on the counter and smiled at me with lazy insolence, his eyes deliberately dropping down to my boobs. His tongue flicked out and slowly licked along his top lip. I resisted the urge to cross my arms.

“Officer Tess,” he drawled, “don’t you look simply edible today?” Those menacing snake eyes on my face again.

I stared at him, face stonier than a gravel path.

He smiled. “You still showing our Jakey a good time?”

“What have you been up to during the week, Red? Apart from roughing up Sharnee?”

“You still sucking our Jakey off hard, Officer Tess? Still fucking him good? He told me you’re the sweetest, tightest little pussy he’s ever had and our Jakey’s tried a lot of pussies.” He was lying – Jake would never discuss our sex life with anyone, especially Red. “I believe him too, because you are one hot little whore. When our Jakey gets bored with you, he’s promised to hand you on to me.” Another lie. “It’s not fair if he’s the only one who gets to play with such choice pussy. And you know better than anyone how much Bycrafts love Fuller pussy more than any other.”

I clenched my teeth together but otherwise remained serene, ignoring his crude and cruel taunting. “I’m recording that you’re using offensive language towards me, Red, just like I write every week. I’m also writing that you were drunk and disorderly on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and had to be forcibly ejected from the pub both times. I’m also writing that you were involved in an altercation with your sister Rosie in public on Friday, where you physically assaulted her and that I was called to your place Saturday morning. Anything else you want to confess?”

“Only my endless longing for you, lovely. I can’t wait for you forever.” He lifted his face and sniffed the air dramatically a couple of times. “I can smell that sweet pussy from here. So tantalising.”

“Sign here,” I insisted coldly. He took the pen from me, making sure to brush my hand as he did. I tried hard not to react, but couldn’t completely repress the shudder of revulsion that swept over me at his touch. He laughed and suddenly grabbed my hand, lifting it to his mouth and running his tongue along the length of the back of my hand, from fingertip to wrist.

“Damn you taste good, Tessie. Just makes me want some more.”

I snatched my hand back in disgust and he laughed again loudly as he sauntered from the station, Garth in tow, sniggering at my discomfort. I put the book away and went straight to the bathroom to scrub my hands three times, wondering yet again how that repulsive family had managed to produce someone as wonderful as Jake.

The rumble of the empty removalist van negotiating down the police house driveway drifted in through an open window and ten minutes later the Sarge turned up at the station in uniform. He stopped in surprise when he saw that Young Kenny was still sitting in the front area, presumably thinking that I was being slack in serving the customers.

“Sarge, this is Young Kenny. He likes to keep me company every Monday morning. Young Kenny, this is Des’ replacement, Sergeant Maguire.” Young Kenny looked up at him, nodded and looked down again.

The Sarge came out the back with me. “What’s the number for the prison? I want to ring them to let them know we’re coming over.” I rattled it off and he dialled the number.

The bell rang and a booming baritone voice announced, “Mail.”

I went out to the counter to take the mail and leaned on it chatting for a while with the town’s mailperson, a friendly woman who always made a point of bringing the station’s mail up to me instead of leaving it in the letterbox. She and her husband ran the town’s small post office/newsagency and had the contract to deliver the town’s mail as well.

“The doctor can fit you in but we have to leave right away and –” said the Sarge, stopping both talking and walking when he got to the counter.

I turned to smile. “Sarge, this is our mail-lady, Joanna. Joanna, this is Des’ replacement, Sergeant Finn Maguire.”

“Nice to meet you, Sergeant. Welcome to Little Town,” Joanna said heartily, holding out her huge beefy hand. The Sarge took it warily, his eyes not leaving Joanna except to cut to me for a startled second. I suppose that I was used to her now, but I guess Joanna would come as a shock if you weren’t expecting to see a six-foot-five, large, unusually hairy woman wearing a pretty yellow summer dress complete with white straw hat and white sandals, in full makeup, delivering your mail. At first glance, she did look awfully like a man in drag.

Joanna had unfortunately been born with the overly-muscular physique and manner of a pro-wrestler, teamed with an ultra-feminine fashion sense. Despite being a big strapping woman, happily married with four big sons of her own, she favoured dainty, lady-like apparel that would have suited a petite Southern belle far better than her own hulking mass. The more unkind people in town hinted that perhaps she hadn’t been born with her two X chromosomes and that she probably even left the toilet seat up. But of course nobody ever said that to her face. You wouldn’t dare.

“We have to go,” the Sarge insisted, quickly recovering from his shock.

“I have to see the doctor,” I explained to Joanna.

“Because Dorrie Lebutt tried to kill you with her car?” she asked sympathetically. I nodded ruefully. “She’s a wild one, that girl. You should arrest her. You just can’t go around running over the police. It’s not right.”

I agreed. “You can say that again.”

“I don’t know who is worse sometimes – those Bycraft bastards or the brainless women who run around with them. They’re all nothing but a pack of stupid and vicious animals.”

I laughed when she said that. She twigged to what she’d actually said and blushed a deep, unbecoming red. “Sorry Tess. I didn’t mean you and Jake, of course.”

“I sure hope nobody’s lumping Dorrie and me together in same category,” I said lightly before chasing both Joanna and Young Kenny from the station and locking up. At the patrol car, I eased my aching body down onto the passenger seat and did up the seatbelt.

I spent the drive to the prison filling the Sarge in on my morning. We puzzled over Mrs Villiers’ peeper, wondering if it was connected to Miss G’s peeper.

We turned into the prison. It was a complex for low-risk prisoners who were nearing the end of their terms and had displayed exemplary behaviour throughout their sentence. Less well known was that it was also the cushy place that politicians, sports starts, TV stars, anyone famous, spent any incarceration time that their expensive lawyers weren’t able to make disappear with their fancy weasel words.

For a prison it was a very agreeable place, with modern buildings, landscaped gardens, a sports complex with a pool and well-equipped gym, spacious, well-appointed cells and decent catering. Jake loved living and working there. It was hard for someone like me not to look at it all without a touch of bitterness, thinking of our small, cramped station and ancient technology.

I was well-known around the place, being Jake’s girlfriend and turning up as often as I could to watch the regular prisoners versus prison officers footy matches, as Jake was captain of the officers’ team. He was a popular colleague, being good-natured and friendly and always willing to assist by taking over a shift or giving a helping hand when somebody moved. My Jake was a great guy like that.

We flipped our IDs at the reception area, the desk staff not even bothering to glance at them. I introduced the Sarge to the staff, stopping for a minute to lean on the counter for a friendly chat. They questioned me about Dorrie’s hit-and-run, and the Sarge marvelled at how quickly news spread in the town.

“We’ve got phones out here, Sergeant,” teased one of the desk staff.

“Really?” he responded, deadpan. “I thought it was all done with morse code and carrier pigeons in these parts.”

Leaving them unsure of whether or not he was joking, I led the two of us down the familiar route to the medical centre. As we waited in the consulting room, a couple of Jake’s workmates popped their heads in to say hello to me. We were chatting when Dr Fenn arrived, an older man with wild steel-gray hair and a contrasting well-groomed gray moustache. He had a gruff manner, probably the result of years of dealing with malingering prisoners. He nodded at me brusquely.