by JD Nixon
“Nothing, honey-boy. See you later.” I hung up, turning angrily to the Sarge, my stomach a knot of tension. “God damn it! He’s done it again.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Jakey in the car – it was Red!” Furious, I turned on the hapless constables. They didn’t know what they’d done wrong, but they knew their nuts were in the fire. “You’ve let Red Bycraft back into my town! God damn it!”
Uncontrollable anger welled up inside me. I flung the clipboard that held their vehicle log into the surrounding bushes like a Frisbee. Then I directed my rage on the roadblock, kicking over two of the bollards set across the bitumen. The constables watched in alarm as I lost it in public.
“Sorry, Tess. How were we supposed to know? That family all looked the same to us,” Jarod said unwisely.
“They don’t look the bloody same!” I shouted, making him flinch backwards and not endearing myself to anybody. “I told you that Red Bycraft has a long scar on his neck.”
The Sarge placed a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Calm down, Tess. There’s no need to take it out on these two. They did the best they could.” I tried to shake him off, but he tightened his grip, preventing me from kicking anything else. “And the Bycrafts do all look the same to an outsider. It’s only because you know them so well that they don’t to you.”
I gradually managed to compose myself, but he kept his iron grip on me. “They should have checked more carefully, Sarge. They should have checked his ID.”
“We did!” protested Ellie. “I remember him clearly. He had a driver’s licence with a photo of him on it. It said his name was Jacob Bycraft. He sat in the front seat, relaxed and friendly when he handed it over. He didn’t act like a fugitive. He even joked with us as we checked it, reminding us to search the boot.”
“Oh, I bet he did,” I said bitterly. “That would have given him a huge belly laugh. He’s probably still laughing about it now. But why didn’t you notice his neck scar?”
“He had the collar on his shirt turned up as some men like to wear it,” explained Jarod. “And as he had photo ID, we didn’t think twice about it.”
“He must still be using that fake licence of Jake’s,” said the Sarge, taking a risk by releasing me.
“Didn’t you notice that he wasn’t in any of the cars that left town, which could have only meant that the family picked him up outside of town? Didn’t that make you suspicious?”
“We weren’t checking the occupants of cars leaving town – just making a note of their registration number. We only did ID checks on people coming into town as we were told to do by the Sarge. And who would expect a freshly escaped prisoner to have fake ID?”
The Sarge helped stow the bollards in the boot of their patrol car. “Someone in his family must have kept it for him and handed it over just now. They probably handed over that gun he had before as well.”
I stood staring into the bushland for a long moment trying to damp down my last remnants of temper. I knew I wasn’t being fair on the two young cops. They’d followed their orders and it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t know Red Bycraft by sight.
“Do you think there’s any point in conducting a search for him?” I asked the Sarge.
“Where were you thinking of searching?”
“Lola’s house. Sharnee’s house.”
“You don’t think they’re too obvious? Surely he wouldn’t be that bold, staying at his mother’s or his girlfriend’s place?”
I shot him a look. “Sarge, he just danced back into town right under our noses. There’s nothing he loves more than bold gestures, especially if he thinks he’s getting the better of us. And besides, out of everyone in town, they’re the two most guaranteed to shelter him.”
He eyed the two constables. “You two might as well make yourselves useful while you’re here. You can come with us. I’ll just clear it with the Super first. The last thing we need is more trouble from her.”
A few minutes later after a scorching blast of the Super’s tongue, he managed to also obtain her permission to conduct searches of the two properties. We tossed a coin and decided to comb Lola’s house first. Unsurprisingly, she protested our entry to her house with a vehemence that raised my hopes she was hiding something.
“You don’t have no warrant, so you can all just go fuck yourselves,” she spat out through her cigarette, blocking the doorway to her house with her scrawny body. Various Bycrafts ranged behind her, each as surly and immovable as the last.
“Don’t need one,” I said with a sweet smile.
“We have the right to search a property if we have reasonable suspicion of a crime taking place,” the Sarge told her in his bland cop voice. “Namely, assisting a fugitive.”
“There’s no fugitive here, so fuck off.” She tried to slam the front door in our faces, but we both instinctively wedged our boots in the gap.
“Be a good girl, Lola,” I smiled, my mood suddenly swinging upwards. “And I promise we won’t make too much of a mess. Not that you’d notice.”
The Sarge forced the door open and stepped into the hallway, his nose crinkling at the sour smell of unwashed dishes and clothes pervading the house.
“I don’t want my house stinking of bacon,” Lola sneered.
“It would be an improvement, trust me,” muttered the Sarge, shouldering his way through the Bycrafts. They didn’t try to stop him and I knew then that our search was futile. Red wasn’t here. The Sarge knew it too, and we silently confirmed our thoughts with each other via eye contact. But as I lived to inconvenience the Bycraft family whenever possible, I happily spent the next thirty minutes crawling over every centimetre of each room.
We were thorough in our search, hoping at least to rake up some evidence that Red had recently been present in the house. Technically, we had no authority to do anything except search the premises for the man, but the Bycrafts knew it was pointless to remind us of that. They stood around watching us with a confident smugness that had my temper rising again, cracking jokes about dim-witted cops, a few even popping some beers. I was surprised nobody made any popcorn.
Lola, wearing a dung-coloured tracksuit frayed and stained with a hundred meals, laughed the loudest. She watched as we trawled through drawers and cupboards, her sun-spotted wrinkled hands on her bony hips, dry straw-like faded golden hair frizzing around her head. I had no doubt she knew exactly where Red was at this moment. Out of her ten children, he was her favourite, a fact that spoke volumes about the kind of woman she was.
I badly wanted to jam my gun down her throat to coerce her into telling me where Red was hiding, but I didn’t think the Sarge would approve of such an unorthodox method of obtaining information. So I consoled myself instead by ‘accidently’ treading heavily on her thong-clad foot with my runner as we searched her lounge room. That shut her up for a while, but did little to enhance our rapport.
During our search we found a couple of baggies of cannabis, five pirated movies, a stash of stolen goods, magazines containing violent non-consensual porn, and various illegal weapons, all of which we placed in the boot of the patrol car, accompanied by a chorus of foul language. What we didn’t find though was Red – there wasn’t a trace of him anywhere in the house.
Of course in an ideal world, we would have charged people with offences relating to our discoveries, but none of the Bycrafts would ever rat out each other, and they all denied the contraband items belonged to them. In practical terms, confiscation was our only option, though a new supply of everything would probably soon be slipping through the front door to replace the items we’d taken.
The two constables followed us around the corner to Sharnee’s house, where we performed a similar thorough search. Sharnee’s mother, Cheryl, and her two sisters, Dorrie and Kym, lived across the road from her, and when they spotted two patrol cars parked in front of her house, they trooped over to lend Sharnee their support.
“Have you had any contact with Red today, Sharnee?” I asked, examin
ing the contents of her bedroom cupboard.
Her denial was quick and quiet, but she kept her eyes lowered, not meeting mine.
“Leave her alone. She told you she hasn’t heard from him. You’ve got no right to be harassing her like this,” said a heavily pregnant Dorrie, her mean brown eyes hard with hate.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Well, I was talking to you, bitchface.”
“Watch your mouth,” warned the Sarge, rifling through the drawers of Sharnee’s bedside cabinet. “You’re still on a good behaviour bond. And I will have no hesitation in dragging your sorry arse before the court for breaching it if you say something like that to Senior Constable Fuller again.”
“You can’t do that. I’m pregnant,” she retorted, protectively rubbing her swollen belly.
“I couldn’t care less. So shut up and keep out of our way. Or better still, piss off. None of this concerns you.”
“I’m not leaving my sister here alone with a couple of pigs.”
He looked up from his search and pinned her with his eyes, his face flinty. “What did I just say to you about watching your mouth?”
She tried to stare him down, but couldn’t last the distance, sullenly lowering her eyes, her lips pressed tightly together.
We conducted the rest of our search in blissful silence. And though we went through Sharnee’s house as methodically as we had Lola’s, we found no trace that Red had visited there either.
Ten minutes later, temporarily defeated, we were back in the patrol car on our return to the station, the two dispirited young cops making their way back to Big Town.
“Maybe they’re bluffing,” suggested the Sarge, pulling into the carpark of the station. “Maybe it wasn’t Bycraft who was pretending to be Jake. It might have been one of the other Bycrafts pretending to be Red pretending to be Jake.”
“That’s far too Machiavellian for that bunch of village idiots to come up with,” I said, helping to remove the confiscated items from the boot. “What are we going to do with all this stuff?”
“We’ll put what we can in the safe until we have a chance to take it to Big Town.”
“We should have given it all to those other two to take back with them.”
“We have to catalogue it first. And frankly, they couldn’t get away from us fast enough.”
“That happens a lot around here. It’s enough to make a person feel unpopular sometimes.”
“Never mind, you’ll always be popular with me.”
I laughed. “You have a real smooth mouth on you, Maguire.”
“That’s what makes me so successful with the ladies.”
I laughed again. “Had any encounters with Foxy lately?”
He gave a dramatic shudder. “No, thank God. I’ve become quite accomplished at hiding behind things to escape notice.”
“Sounds like you’re almost ready to be a detective,” I teased.
“No need to be a smartarse, Fuller.”
“But I enjoy it.”
We trooped up the stairs of the station, arms full of contraband goods.
As I catalogued each item, he managed to fit the pot, the weapons and the smaller stolen items, mostly phones and jewellery, into our small floor safe. The pirated movies and porn he placed in the bottom drawer of his desk which was fitted with a flimsy lock, first taking a moment to flick through one of the magazines.
His face crumpled in distaste. “This stuff is so depraved,” he commented.
I leaned on the back of his chair and peered over his shoulder at the disturbingly graphic pictures of restrained crying women being sexually abused by masked men. “Oh, that’s nasty. Do you think those bruises and cuts are real?”
“I hope not. I hope it’s all fake.”
I tapped one particularly unpleasant picture with my index finger with morbid curiosity. “Look at that. What in heaven’s name are they doing to her? It’s horrible. That would really hurt. Nobody could possibly enjoy being treated like that. Especially hanging upside down like she is.”
He snapped the magazine shut and pushed it into his drawer. “Someone in the Bycraft family obviously enjoys looking at them, but you don’t need to see things like that.”
I was momentarily taken aback. “Sarge! Don’t treat me like I’m a child. I’m an adult and a police officer. I can see unsavoury material without becoming hysterical.”
“I never said anything about being hysterical. I just don’t want you looking at pictures like that.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “It’s not up to you to decide what I can and can’t view.”
He stood up and looked down at me. “As your senior officer, I believe it is up to me.”
“You might be my senior officer, but you’re not my father. Or my boyfriend.”
He rested his butt on his desk and folded his arms. “Look, Tess, after what we had to witness in dealing with those bikies, I thought you’d be thanking me for –”
“For being a patronising arse?”
“No,” he said patiently, only making my temper climb faster. “For protecting you from this sort of depravity.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I know. No need to thank me.”
“God! I’m not thanking you. And I don’t need any ‘protection’.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Not even from Red Bycraft?”
“Well . . .” I relented. He did have a point – I’d never turn down a helping hand to stay out of his clutches. I suppose I should be more appreciative of having a partner who cared about my safety and well-being, no matter how over-protective he might be on occasion.
He pulled all the magazines out of his drawer. “I’m going to burn these in my barbecue right now.” He arched the same brow again. “After all, we wouldn’t want Romi looking at something – or someone – beyond her age group when she visits next, would we?”
And winking at me, he sauntered out the back door leaving me staring after him, my cheeks pinkening, and my mouth hanging open with surprise.
Chapter 13
I stood watching silently as he burned the magazines. After he’d finished his barbecuing, the Sarge and I called it a day. It was nudging dinnertime by then and the sun had started to set. My stomach rumbled noisily as we walked up the connecting path to his place, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
The Sarge cast me a sideways glance. “Sounds like someone’s ready for food, as per usual.”
“I’m so hungry I could even eat something you cooked,” I smiled, elbowing him in the side.
He elbowed me back, but a bit more gently than I’d been with him. “If you’re lucky, Fuller. I’ll think about it, but that’s all I’m going to promise.”
“And I promise I’ll try to muster up enough courage to eat whatever slop you deliver and the willpower to keep it down.”
He smiled. “Do you want to drop back to your place first to pick up some clothes and things?”
“I can do that while you cook,” I offered with feigned innocence. “I could drive your car.”
“Not a chance.”
“Aw, why won’t you ever let me drive it?”
“Because I’ve seen you drive.”
“Now that’s just plain rude.”
“And I don’t want my precious car involved in a high speed chase.”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a chauvinist?”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a reckless driver?”
“Yes, you. Frequently.”
“I only speak the truth.”
“Well, that’s a lie right there.”
He laughed and tugged on my ponytail. So I thumped him on his hard upper arm.
“Ow! You really should stop doing that. You’re a very aggressive woman.”
“That’s not what Jakey says.”
“I shudder to think how you abuse him in the bedroom. He must be a masochist to keep going back for more.”
I thumped him again. “I’ll h
ave you know that I’m very sweet in the bedroom. Not that it’s any of your business, so you can just stop thinking about my sex life right now.”
He popped the locks on his car with his automatic key. “I can’t think about mine – I don’t have one.”
“Diddums.” We climbed into the car and he switched on the ignition.
“Thanks for the sympathy,” he said dryly, backing down the drive. “It’s greatly appreciated.”
“You’re welcome. And weren’t you the man just boasting to me about how successful you are with women?”
“Less like boasting and more like wishful thinking,” he sighed.
“Cheer up,” I said, snuggling happily down into the leather seat, revelling in the car’s luxurious interior and the soft soul music floating from his stereo. “You do have quite the following here in town, if that makes you feel better.”
“See, other women are smart enough to recognise how lucky you are to be working with a man like me.”
I rolled my eyes and blew a raspberry. “That’s all I have to say in reply to that ridiculously egotistical comment.”
“Hey, who’s the one with the fan club and who’s the one with the bitter family feud?”
“True. I don’t think there would be many people in my fan club in this town.”
My house was quiet and closed, with a depressing air of emptiness. When I pushed open the front door, a note lying on the hall floor immediately caught my attention. I unwillingly stooped to pick it up, the blood freezing in my veins when I recognised the familiar handwriting. I ripped open the envelope.
Tessie lovely
I’m home and I’m ready to play! See you soon!
love Red xx
“It’s true then. He’s back in town,” I said dully, showing the Sarge the note. “He gave us the slip.”
“Positive that’s his writing?” I shot him a look instead of answering. “I know, stupid question. You’ve seen it enough times before.”
A sudden scuffling noise from the kitchen had us both sprinting down the hallway, bottlenecking in the doorway. The Sarge pushed me back into the hall in that irritating way he had of trying to protect me all the time.
