by Garry Disher
Ellen looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. Where was Venn? Assuming their rapist was Venn, he liked to take a knife from his boot and burst in upon a pair of lovers, demanding money. Then he'd threaten to start slicing pieces of flesh from the woman unless she undressed fully and handcuffed her boyfriend's hands behind his back and performed oral sex on him. Finally he'd insert the handle of the knife inside the woman's vagina and leave after cutting clumps of pubic hair from her and pocketing any cash the couple had on them.
Ellen badly wanted to catch him.
Then she saw him. 'He's here,' she murmured.
She had heard the engine and at first thought it was a passing motorist, but then a lowered black Longreach ute with a roll bar appeared in her glasses, slowing for the entrance, then U-turning to make another pass, and giving her a clear view of both its numberplates. She saw the ute enter finally, then coast past the police Falcon and stop some distance away, pointed toward the exit. The Longreach looked fast and hard, like the driver.
They were going to make an arrest no matter what. If Venn simply spied on Sutton and Murphy, then they'd have him on a public nuisance charge and would work on him to confess to the rapes. But what Ellen wanted was to arrest him as far along the stages of assault, unlawful imprisonment and rape as possible, so that she could make a firm arrest yet not imperil her officers.
Venn opened his door. Ellen took the fieldglasses from her eyes and saw nothing: he'd removed the interior light bulb. She put the glasses to her eyes again and saw that he wore darkjeans, a dark T-shirt and lightweight army surplus boots. The balaclava sat like a pelt of short black hair on his scalp. He was big, but light on his feet. The fear he inspired, one person going up against couples, made sense to her finally.
She murmured into her mike, 'Approaching you now, Scobie, coming in on your rear passenger side.'
'Roger.'
The reply was a whisper. She watched Venn reach the Falcon and apparently meld with it as he put his face to the glass and looked in at Sutton and Murphy in their partial nakedness. Then she saw him break away from the car and bend swiftly to his right boot before straightening with a knife and unzipping and tugging out his penis.
'Get ready.'
Venn didn't shout. Witnesses to his previous assaults said he always kept his voice low and even, but crackling with menace. Ellen Destry watched him open Pam Murphy's door and heard him say, 'Surprise! See the blade, lover boy? It slices open your girlfriend's windpipe, you give me any aggro. And feast your eyes on this, sweetheart. I'm gunna slip it up your cunt and your arse and in your mouth and your boyfriend's gunna fucking watch.'
'Don't hurt her,' Sutton said, sounding scared.
Venn's got the knife to Pam's throat, Ellen thought. And he's exhibiting himself to them. She could see the back of him in the open door. Then she saw the hand that must have been holding his penis suddenly slide around to the rear pocket of his jeans.
Handcuffs.
'See these, sweetheart? Cuff lover boy's hands behind his back. Come on! Move it or I'll stick you with this.'
'Don't hurt her.'
'Shut up. Okay, sweetheart, let's see what you got to offer.'
And as he backed away from the door, slicing open Pam Murphy's skirt as he went, Ellen said, 'Go, go, go.’
John Tankard got there first. He slammed his baton on Venn's arm. The knife fell into the dirt. Venn groaned, hugged his arm to his chest and whimpered.
That's when Pam Murphy's foot caught him between the legs.
Not a happy boy.
CHAPTER THREE
After Dwayne Venn had been booked and remanded, Pam Murphy stretched out on the bench inside the locker room, poleaxed with tiredness. She was alone and liked it like that but knew it wouldn't last. There was always someone going on or off a shift or fetching or stowing something. There were separate showers and change rooms but a unisex locker room at Waterloo. It was a meeting ground, a staging ground, a breeding ground for oversexed young men and women and normally she avoided it like the plague, but right now she was too tired to care.
The door hissed on its pneumatic arm and John Tankard came in. His tongue had been hanging out earlier. It was the black bra. Her bareness from the waist up as she'd climbed into the rear of the Falcon to trap Dwayne Venn two hours ago.
'Good result tonight,' he remarked.
She watched him through eyes heavy-lidded with exhaustion. He was unbelting his uniform jacket, releasing the revolver, cuffs and other junk that weighed you down and ruined your lower back.
'Yes,' she muttered.
And it was a good result. No doubt some smart-arse lawyer would get bail for Venn, but Venn would go down for rape, attempted rape, false imprisonment and assault with a deadly weapon and whatever else the DPP could throw at him. Plus he'd go on a sex-offenders' register and earn himself a lifetime of official harassment whenever there was even the hint of a sex crime on the Peninsula.
She took a moment to profile Venn in her mind: twenty-two years old, fit despite a diet of beer, hamburgers and amphetamines, poor, poorly educated, face like a child's drawing. He would die before the median age for men—of alcoholism, bad health, work accident, car smash. There were thousands like him living in shabby estates. His parents hadn't known any better, just as he didn't, his children wouldn't. Young men and women like Dwayne Venn spent their lives in and out of courtrooms, lockups, rental houses, welfare offices. They never moved away from the area. Their friends had been their friends at school—friendships based on proximity, familiarity and disadvantages in common. They became parents at sixteen or seventeen. They were mute and vicious and a police officer's nightmare.
It was the interconnections that had surprised Pam when she first came to the Peninsula. Although Waterloo was the main town for the eastern region of the Peninsula it was like a big village compared to her old stamping grounds, the restless inner suburbs of Melbourne. For example, Venn lived with Donna Tully. Donna was the sister of Lisa Tully. Lisa had lived with Bradley Pike before Pike killed her toddler daughter and hid the body—if that's what had happened, and Brad Pike was the only person in creation saying that he hadn't done it. Now Lisa was living with Donna and Venn. She didn't want to have anything more to do with Brad Pike, she'd said, and had even taken out an intervention order on him, but recently Pam had seen Brad Pike in the company of Venn and the Tully sisters.
At the pub, in fact. Go figure. They'd all gone to school together. Maybe that was enough to bind them. She would never understand it.
Yet it was Pike who'd informed on Venn. He'd stopped her in the street one day with a weird story about being stalked and what was she going to do about it, then suddenly told her that Venn was the lovers' lane rapist. No, he didn't want to go onto the official informants' register. Wanted her to keep his name secret from her bosses too. She'd honoured that, but really, he was weird, they were all weird.
Uh-oh. Now John Tankard was seating himself on the end of the bench beside her stretched-out feet. An unmistakable tremor ran through the wooden legs and padded vinyl seat as the bench surrendered to Tankard's bulk. She'd removed her shoes earlier and now the soles of her feet were touched briefly by his massive thighs, by polyester heated from within by meaty flesh. She drew up her legs hastily.
God. She was too tired for this.
'Want me to massage your feet?'
'No thank you, Tank.'
'Or I could sit on the other end and feed you peeled grapes.'
'What do you want, Tank?'
'Just making conversation.'
'Well don't.'
After a while he said, 'It was good tonight. On any other Saturday night we'd've been cleaning puke out of the divvie van.'
'Yes.'
He fell silent. His body made minute adjustments that were transmitted through the bench to her like shifts deep in the earth. She was almost asleep when she heard an oiled click and a faint, lubricated, whirring sound.
He'd taken out his service revolver.<
br />
'Put it away, Tank,' she said, then regretted it. He was the king of the double entendre, after all.
But he didn't ask what was out that should be put away or where he should put it. Instead, he said, 'Pow, pow,' and the revolver dry clicked on an empty chamber.
Shocked, she sat bolt upright. He was pointing the revolver directly at her midsection with the dazed, swollen look of a man aroused by naked flesh.
'Don't point that thing at me!' she shouted, scrambling away from him.
Click.
'Never point a gun at someone in fun, you know that.'
Click.
'Stop it,' she said.
Click.
Badly rattled now, she leapt from the bench and shouted, 'Loser!'
He seemed to wake from whatever possessed him—sexual arousal? Power? The gun itself? Or a combination. Whatever it was, he snapped out of it and said irritably, 'Settle down, it's not even loaded.'
'One day it will be,' she said and couldn't keep the shakes out of her voice.
John Tankard lived in a rear unit of a block of four similar units on Salmon Street. He overlooked someone's back yard, a dull reddish Nubrik wall and mouldy PVC downpipes. The front units overlooked weedy grass, a bicycle path and drydocked yachts behind a steelmesh lockup yard, but the rent was higher. Besides, his rear unit was a blind corner in the world, like a burrow away from all of the shit.
He flicked on the TV and sank into the sofa, his usual spot, against the right arm, next to a little op-shop cupboard on which his phone sat in a scattering of beer-can rings. The sofa was op-shop too, a job lot he bought when he first moved into the flat. He'd repaired the vinyl with duct tape that more or less matched, but the tape was lifting here and there, showing the cracks.
Cracks are a metaphor of my life.
Now where the fuck had that come from? He wasn't even drunk yet, hadn't had a beer since lunchtime.
But a crack had shown back there in the locker room, right? When he'd aimed and dry-fired his gun at Pam Murphy.
Wished he'd seen her other crack, nudge nudge, wink wink. He'd stopped thinking she was a lesbian some time ago. Stuck in the divisional van with her day after day, he'd begun to appreciate her close proximity. When she wasn't looking, he'd take in her shape under the shapeless uniform. Her bare arms through the summer and into early autumn. Once or twice out of the corner of his eye he'd seen her wet her lips. Now that was either unconscious and unrelated to him or unconscious but stimulated by his proximity to her, their thighs less than a metre apart there in the divvie van. Or a deliberate turn-on.
Tankard flicked through a week's unopened mail. A couple of bills and credit card statements and the latest Sidearm News from the States. He'd found it advertised on-line when surfing the Web for information about the Glock 17 pistol, subscribed to it, half wondering if it was a rip-off and he'd find his card account stripped bare, but it was legit and now the magazine came regularly and was an antidote to the shit he had to face in his job.
Through its pages he'd bought stuff by mail-order. Deerhide holster. Night-vision goggles. Ankle-strap scabbard. Tins of mace. Pistol replicas: a Uzi, a Sig Sauer, a Heckler and Koch.
Plus a Confederate flag—and fuck me if he hadn't seen six Confederate flags in the past six months, usually in some dopehead's scungy flat. Tonight, in fact, he'd gone with Pam to the rundown weatherboard house that Dwayne Venn shared with the Tully sisters and there, in the sitting room, was a Confederate flag on one wall, photos of Sitting Bull and Cochise on the other walls, and sundry Native American beads and blankets and other crap scattered around the place.
The world was full of fuckups whose lives were so shithouse they escaped into dreams of a time and a life where you'd find courage and absolutes and something clean and noble.
Me? I get that from a gun in the hand, Tankard thought. Like earlier tonight.
There was a hot dark corner of his mind—and it made his groin tremble—where he imagined shooting Pam Murphy. Imagined the spurt of it, like an ejaculation. Not destructive, necessarily—though that was part of it. Sort of a pumped-up feeling. Tankard was no longer a porcine, sweaty, unappetising tired copper with a crook back, but as tall and hard and sinewy and unreadable as the Indian chief who wiped out General Custer at Little Bighorn.
But I've never fired a shot on active duty, he thought, and most cops haven't and most cops never do.
God, his back hurt. He stretched out on the floor and visualised his spine as a sequence of knots along a rope and tried to unpick them one by one.
He fell asleep and woke up cold at three o'clock in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was eleven pm and Challis was slumped in front of the television set, thinking about bed, when Tessa Kane knocked on his door, still dressed in her outdoor gear: hiking boots, jeans, padded jacket. She didn't look angry, exactly, but didn't smile either, her face a little sad under the vivid intelligence that was always there, as if the disappointments she'd been bottling up since yesterday morning had worked their way to the surface.
He fetched her a scotch, walking on eggshells, trying to read her. But she said nothing about his letting her down, running to his mad wife instead of taking a camping walk with her.
He'd lit the fire, for the wind had turned sleety by the time he'd returned from Bushranger Bay, and now the house was warm and safe against the squally night. He didn't know what to say to her. Now and then she sipped at her scotch, very still and silent, but finally a grin chased away the blues and she fished around in her daypack. 'I called in at work on the way here,' she said. 'Lots of letters and messages to catch up on.'
This was better. This was something she did from time to time when she visited him. She liked to read stuff to him.
Soon her lap was full of envelopes, e-mail printouts and slips of paper. She flipped through them abstractedly as he watched.
He said lightly, 'Any mail from the Meddler?'
She'd often told him about the man who bombarded her with anonymous letters and phone calls. The Meddler was an appropriate name: he had an obsessive and insane regard for good manners, law and order, and commonsense. He liked to report bad drivers, rubbish dumpers, lazy shire workers, mulish bureaucrats, vandals, property owners who failed to slash their grass in late spring. Unfortunately, you had to agree with him most of the time. Last summer, for example, he wanted to know what bright spark—'pun intended'—had ordered a controlled burn of the nature reserve on Penzance Beach Road when hot northerlies had been forecast for the next day. The resulting bushfire had burnt out half of the reserve, grassland and fences, and come within a few hundred metres of a weatherboard house.
'Roadside rubbish this time,' Tessa said, not glancing at Challis.
'Uh-huh,' he said.
She waved a letter in her fist. 'Garbage bags dumped on Five Furlong Road, to be precise. He actually hunted around in the garbage bags and found a letter, which he's kindly enclosed.' She wrinkled her nose. 'Smells of rotting fish. It's from the Department of Social Security and addressed to a Donna Tully, inquiring as to the status of her cohabitation with one Dwayne Andrew Venn. The Meddler wants me to denounce Venn and Ms Tully in the pages of the Progress as dumpers of rubbish. Says he's also sent a copy to the shire, hoping they'll prosecute.'
Challis nodded. At least she was talking to him now. He wondered if she'd noticed the significance of the Tully name. Surely she had. She'd reported extensively on the disappearance of Lisa Tully's child, and left no doubt in her readers' minds that she thought Bradley Pike was behind it.
As for Dwayne Venn, he wondered if he should tell her about Ellen Destry's stakeout.
No.
'The Meddler's offended by everything,' Tessa said. 'The genius who approved give-way rather than stop signs at the corner of Coolart and Myers roads. The woman at Peninsula FM who says "yee-uh" instead of "year", "haitch" instead of "aitch". The residents of Upper Penzance for not wanting paved roads or mains water and thinking themselves
better than anyone else. He seems to live in a state of permanent apoplexy.'
Not that she minded. The Meddler's weekly letter had become an institution in the Progress, attracting other letters. Tessa's view was, if you're on a good thing, stick to it.
He watched as she continued to sort through the papers in her lap, and as he watched from the other side of the fire, her dark, clever, mobile face relaxed into a shy, pleased smile. 'What?' he demanded.
She might stay the night. She might not.
She waved a flimsy piece of paper at him. 'This is the proof-sheet of next Tuesday's column.'
He crossed in front of the fire, let his fingers brush against hers as he took the proof-sheet, retreated to his armchair again. She wrote a weekly column for the Progress. This time she'd tackled wankers.
Appreciating the wanker and his art, and distinguishing the wanker proper from the wanker accidental, is best undertaken with a close, like-minded friend. Just the other day one such friend and I were shopping in Rosebud and encountered a man walking a ferret on a lead. Our reaction was immediate and simultaneous. We turned to each other and murmured, 'Wanker.'
But wanking is a fluid notion, so to speak. Once upon a time a man with a big bunch of keys hanging from his belt was a wanker. Now only certain tradesmen and misguided old queers clip keys to their belts.
Challis grinned. He'd been the 'like-minded friend' that day. 'Nice one,' he said, attempting to be like-minded again.
Tessa scowled at once, her face sharpening. She straightened her back, folded her arms and looked fully at him. 'How was the little wife?'
'Don't be like that,' Challis said, immediately feeling sulky and small.
'Like what?'
He turned his face to the flames in the grate.
Tessa continued: 'Big emergency, was it? Is she in intensive care by any faint chance?'
Challis flushed angrily. 'If you must know, she had cut herself.'
