[Challis #5] Blood Moon

by Garry Disher

  Now the 7 p.m. bulletin was saying that certain items had been removed from Cree’s flat.

  ‘Porn?’ guessed Challis.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Was he set up?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘But deserved?’

  ‘Probably,’ Ellen said.

  She switched the radio off and nuzzled him. He responded. His on-switch was faster than any radio’s.

  Afterwards, they lay there. Suddenly Challis said, ‘I’m starving,’ and swung off the bed. And there was enough illumination left in the sky, and he passed close enough to the window on his way out of the room, for the rifleman on the slope outside to take a pretty accurate shot at him.

  * * * *

  56

  Dirk Roe, with a nice amphetamine and vodka buzz on, fired another shot. That Challis cunt had vanished but his woman was right there, also fucking naked. Dirk felt an old, desperate yearning to see her like that: dirty thoughts, you naughty, naughty boy, his mother slapping him for peeping on her in the bath, his father thrashing him later with a broom handle. So many thrashings: broom handle, belt, whatever came to hand. He sobbed and swallowed and fired off a couple of wild shots to make himself feel better, the rifle recoiling hard, comforting smacks against his shoulder.

  Dirk was pretty sure he’d been born out of time and place. He belonged to an earlier era, would have been a bushranger maybe. Protecting his family’s honour, avenging dishonour. Crouching in the tricky shadows, he levered another cartridge into the chamber, sighted on the shattered window and realised, shit, he’d been shooting not at the people who’d fucked him over but their reflections in a mirror.

  But did he panic? Did he, fuck. Dirk slithered from shadow to shadow to get a better slant on the room, to where a mirror couldn’t fool him.

  Nothing. They’d hit the floor, the cunts. Dirk giggled. See how you like it, scared, knowing that bad things were coming, no one to help you. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child, whispered Dirk, biting the inside of his mouth. His mother and his father, looking down from heaven and finding fault. Dirk snivelled a little bit.

  ‘A society gets the police force it deserves,’ he muttered—then yelled it for good measure, so those cunts in there, pissing themselves under the bed, could hear him. You had Drug Squad detectives dealing drugs, assistant commissioners interfering in corruption investigations to protect their mates, whole stations moving stolen goods, sacked officers corrupting serving officers, women motorists forced to give blowjobs so they wouldn’t lose their licence...

  So you’d expect cops like that to leak to the media. Now his name was blackened, his brother’s name was blackened. Dirk thought of Lachlan in the hospital, his bloodless skin, the bandages...

  ‘Someone has to pay!’ shrieked Dirk and he fired another shot.

  Then the bedroom door moved and he sensed one shadow, and another, slip through the gap. He grinned. He felt very alive. It wasn’t such a big house, and the garden wasn’t so full of obstacles, that he couldn’t cover all of the exits.

  He ran in a half crouch to the other side of the house, holding the rifle across his chest. In an earlier era a wronged man made his own justice. People respected that. No red tape, no tangling web of bureaucratic crap.

  Hindmarsh calling him a moron. Dirk had run the Roe Report in his own time, right? Plus, the Report had actively promoted the guy, so a bit of gratitude, please. Racist? Sexist? Realistic. Telling it like it is.

  ‘I’m not a moron!’ shrieked Dirk. His mother’s frown, just like his father’s sneer.

  ‘I’m not stupid! I’m not!’ Dirk said, tears mingling with the snot on his face.

  He made another circuit of the house. He fired the last round, replaced the clip with a fresh one. Good old Dad—’No government’s going to interfere with my right to defend myself’—the rifle never registered, never declared, never relinquished during the amnesty. His father had been born out of time, too. Fire and brimstone. Purity of thought and action. Thou shalt not release thy seed unless for procreation, the words measured out with his belt.

  ‘You bastard!’ he yelled at the house. ‘You ruined me!’

  Then, carrying through the still night air, one of those nights when the whole world is breathless, expectant and sweet smelling, Dirk heard a distant siren. Otherwise everything was reduced to this little patch of fear and retribution under the moonlight. Dirk, tall and true, ready to die—but not before he’d avenged Lachlan, and not before he’d avenged himself.

  Another part of him was asking: if I get out of this, what the fuck am I going to do for a job? Who’d hire me?

  Change his name? Move interstate, maybe overseas? That would work. Go somewhere he wouldn’t be hampered by rules and regulations. But where? Nowhere left on the planet for a man of his outlook, talent and inclinations.

  A mercenary.

  French foreign legion.

  Born out of time, Dirk was. He ran around the house again, doubled over, rifle at the ready...

  And jumped in fright: the sliding glass door to the deck at the rear of the house was open.

  The gap dark and gaping like a cruel mouth.

  Dirk trembled. ‘Cry baby,’ his father would shout. ‘Bloody great calf of a boy. Snivelling little wretch.’ The belt buckle biting. Blelt bluckle bliting...bellbluttle...

  Something narrow, hard and coldly metallic pressed against the hinge of his jaw, and the cop behind him murmured, ‘Put it down or I’ll blow your head off

  Dirk’s insides curled up. He badly wanted to piss. A mosquito whined around his ear, and he realised his bare forearms were itchy from brushing against some bush, and there was a spider web in his hair. He hated spiders and insects. He dropped the rifle and windmilled his arms around his head, convinced that creepy-crawlies were marching up his body, stirring the fine hairs on his arms and legs. ‘You great sook,’ his mother said.

  ‘Dirk!’ shouted the cop. ‘Pay attention!

  And the guy actually slapped him. ‘Pay. Attention.’

  Shocked, astonished, Dirk said, ‘You hit me.’

  ‘Dirk, look at me. Look at me.’

  Dirk looked. The inspector had the rifle now, a fireplace poker in his other hand. Dirk looked around wildly. ‘Where’s your gun?’

  ‘What gun?’

  ‘The gun you stuck in my jaw.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Dirk,’ the cop said wearily, ‘this isn’t television. I don’t own a gun.’

  The woman was in the shadows, wearing a T-shirt now, tousled, beautiful. Calmly watching.

  ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,’ cried Dirk, over and over again.