by Lisa Henry
“The generals crew are getting smashed,” he said when they met him there. “You and Sean are theirs for the rest of the shift.”
He looked pissed off, but the decision would have been made far above him, Matt knew.
Matt tossed the keys to Sean, tugged his earpiece out, and reached for the car radio. “Eight-oh-three, VKR.”
“Eight-oh-three, go.” The radio operator sounded stressed as hell.
“Eight-oh-three and eight-oh-four going mobile. Have you got a job for us?”
“You guys are three-one-two now, if you can start proceeding Code Two to Bushland Beach. I’ll go with details when you’re ready.”
Bushland Beach? Shit, that was two divisions away. There really must be nobody else available. Matt wrote his new call sign on his hand so he didn’t forget it. “Show us proceeding Code Two, and go with details.”
They peeled out of the car park, and Matt hit the lights and sirens.
The incident location in Bushland Beach was a house in a quiet residential street in a new subdivision. The houses had all been built from the same four or five cookie cutter templates. Except Matt knew this address. He’d never been, but the Deeragun crews were regularly dispatched here. The house was rented by a charity that had a contract with the state government to provide care for kids who were under the care of the Department of Child Safety. The ones who had burned all their bridges with foster families. The violent ones, or the ones with behavioural issues that regular foster carers couldn’t deal with. Except half the time the professional carers couldn’t deal with them either. Share houses like this were usually staffed by a single youth worker at a time who couldn’t do a damn thing when the kids decided to abscond or, like tonight, grab a knife and start cutting.
The ambulance was parked at the front of the house when they arrived. The youth worker on duty—flanked by a couple of annoyed, sleep-deprived residents—met them in the front yard.
“The ambos went in without us?” Sean asked. “And the kid’s armed?”
The flustered youth worker nodded. “They’re talking with him in the bathroom.”
“And you’ve seen the knife?” Matt clarified.
“Yeah. It’s a steak knife.”
Matt and Sean entered the house. The lights were all on. The living room was a mess, but it wasn’t clear if that had been the result of tonight’s disturbance, or just the result of this many teenagers living in the same house. He and Sean made their way deeper into the house, heading down the hallway—there were a couple of fist-sized holes in the wall here and there—toward the bathroom. There was an ambo standing outside, his kit on the floor beside him.
He turned when he heard them. “About fucking time.”
Arsehole.
“Got here as quick as we could,” Matt said blandly. “What’s the sitrep?”
“My partner’s in there talking to him,” the ambo said. “The kid won’t let anyone else in.”
“Okay.” Matt really, really didn’t want this to turn into more of a situation than it was. He already didn’t like it enough as it was. A paramedic stuck in there with an armed kid? That could go sideways quickly.
He approached the door carefully. It was shut. Matt knocked on it gently, and winced at the sudden burst of shouting that elicited. And then, underneath the pitch of the teenage boy’s rage, he heard another voice, this one calm and steady. A familiar voice.
Hayden.
Matt turned the doorknob. Locked.
Shit.
“It’s Hayden,” he mouthed at Sean, and Sean widened his eyes. Matt dug his phone out of his pocket, and brought up Hayden’s name in his contacts. He called. Then, when he thought there would be no answer, Hayden picked up.
“Hey, Matt. Is that you on the other side of the door?”
“Yep. What’s going on?”
Hayden’s voice was calm. “Me and Isaiah are talking.”
“Does he still have the knife?” Matt asked.
There was a pause before Hayden answered. “Yes.”
“Get out of there, Hayden.”
“We’re just talking.”
“Open the door.”
“If I open the door, you need to promise you’re going to stay outside.”
“You’re not a fucking negotiator!” Matt hissed.
Hayden ignored that. “If I open the door, you’re staying outside.”
“Fine! Just open the door!”
It might have only been seconds before the door swung open, but it felt like a lot longer. Matt peered around the edge of the doorjamb and into the bathroom. There was a kid sitting on the edge of the bath, a knife held in his hand: Isaiah. There was blood splattered on the tiles underneath his bare feet, streaked and smudged where he’d dragged his toes through it, agitated. Isaiah was an Islander kid, skinny and half-grown, and wearing baggy basketball shorts and nothing else. A ladder of cuts climbed up the inside of his left forearm, dripping blood onto the floor.
Hayden was crouched a little way away from him—but not far enough away. One easy lunge and Isaiah could be on him. Hayden had his back to Matt. Good. At least he was keeping his eye on the kid, and the knife. But, if anything happened, Hayden was also blocking Matt’s path to Isaiah.
“The guy in the doorway is Constable Matt Deakin,” Hayden said, still without turning away from the kid. “He’s not going to hurt you. He wants you to put the knife down too.”
Isaiah lifted his gaze and stared at Matt, and then looked down at the knife in his hand. He tightened his grip on the handle.
“So I think that it’s a good idea to put the knife down, Isaiah.” Hayden’s voice was so calm, as though he knew exactly what he was doing, and it had never even occurred to him that it could go catastrophically wrong in the space of a single heartbeat. “Can you do that for me, mate?”
Matt’s gut clenched as Isaiah stared up at him.
The kid’s expression was blank. Matt couldn’t read it at all.
“Can you put the knife down, Isaiah?” Hayden asked.
Isaiah continued to stare at Matt.
For a moment Matt was sure everything was going to go to hell, and then Isaiah uncurled his bloody fingers from the grip of the knife and let it clatter to the floor.
Matt was still feeling the low burn of anger when he arrived at the hospital. Friday night at A&E was hectic too. Matt saw the drink-spiked girl from Flinders Street East lying in a bed. He nodded at a uniformed copper he recognised from Kirwan who was lingering by a bed as a doctor inspected a patient’s wounds. Matt wondered if the patient was the victim or the offender in whatever incident the police had been called to. It was sometimes hard to tell. He continued through to where Sean, who’d travelled here in the back of the ambulance in case Isaiah had gotten violent, was watching Hayden hand Isaiah off to a waiting nurse. Isaiah would need to get the lacerations on his wrists dealt with before being sent over to Mental Health.
“Hayden,” Matt said as soon as Hayden was done. “I need a minute.”
Hayden’s look was unreadable, but he nodded and followed Matt outside to the ambulance bay and the humid night. Clouds of insects hummed around the lights. A few cigarette butts littered the cracked concrete.
Matt’s chest was still tight, and his anger was still bubbling away inside as he turned on Hayden. “Why the hell would you do something as bloody stupid as locking yourself in a bathroom with someone armed with a knife?”
Hayden narrowed his eyes. “I know Isaiah. He wasn’t going to hurt me.”
“I don’t care if you know him!” Matt exclaimed, stepping into Hayden’s space. “You couldn’t know what state of mind he was in!”
“I made a call,” Hayden said, lifting his chin. “And it was the right call. What was I gonna do? Sit outside while he kept self-harming? While you lot took over twenty minutes to get there? He could have killed himself by the time you showed up!”
“Don’t even bring response times into this.” Matt shook his head. “We got pulled off
Flinders Street because our crews are getting absolutely fucking caned tonight.”
Hayden snorted. “And ours aren’t?”
“He could have killed you.” Matt drew a breath and forced his anger down. “So yeah, you should have sat outside and let him keep cutting himself instead of putting yourself into danger like that.”
“He wasn’t going to hurt me.” Hayden exhaled heavily. “I know Isaiah. Hardly a fortnight goes by that we’re not sent out there to deal with him. He might hate coppers, but he likes us.”
“He had a knife!”
“He’s a kid!” Hayden’s eyes blazed, and his voice grew louder as he spoke. “Jesus, you’re all like that, aren’t you? You coppers? He’s a kid with a mental illness who’s been dealt a shitty hand in life, and you just write him off, don’t you? What is he? Fourteen? Fifteen? And you’re treating him like that’s it. He’s fucking done. Case closed. He’s never going to be any different!”
“What?” Matt shook his head as his confusion battled with his anger and swamped it. He’d never seen Hayden furious like this. “Did we miss a step? How the hell did we get here from you locking yourself in a bathroom with an armed person?”
Hayden put his hands on Matt’s chest and pushed him back. “Fuck off.”
“No.” Matt caught his wrists. “Hold on a second.”
“Let go of me.”
Matt suddenly remembered the CCTV cameras in the ambulance bay, and wondered if anyone was watching them right now. Wondered what the fuck this looked like. How bad it looked. He released his wrists, and Hayden took two steps back. Matt’s heart pounded, and there was a bitter taste at the back of his throat. “Hayden.”
Hayden breathed heavily.
“I don’t understand why you’re angry,” Matt said, keeping his voice low. “Can you explain it to me?”
“Just—” Hayden pressed his mouth into a thin line for a moment, tension radiating from him. “Just don’t tell me how to do my job, okay?”
No fucking way was it Hayden’s job to put his own safety at risk for a patient. And while Hayden knew Isaiah and had previous dealings with him, no fucking way had locking himself in the bathroom been the right decision. A part of Hayden must have known that, but Matt knew he couldn’t push that point at the moment. Not while Hayden was still angry.
If Hayden had been working with Kate, Matt might have approached her for a quiet word to find out if this recklessness was out of character, or if it was part of a pattern of behaviour. He would also be well within his rights to have Gordy or someone take it up with Hayden’s supervisor, but he couldn’t imagine that would end well between him and Hayden, to say nothing of the tensions it would cause between their respective services. That could be a rocky enough relationship at times. Matt didn’t want to escalate whatever the hell this was, but he didn’t want to ignore it either.
“Okay,” Matt said, and the word tasted sour. He fought to keep his tone reasonable, non-confrontational. “But what happened back at the house, that scared me. It could have gone really wrong, and I need you to know that’s why I reacted the way I did.”
Hayden eyed him steadily for a moment. “Take your negotiator hat off and don’t fucking patronise me. I made a call, and nothing went wrong, and that kid is now getting stitched up instead of bleeding out on the bathroom floor because everyone was too scared to get close to him.”
“It could have gone really wrong, Hayden.”
“But it didn’t.”
Matt held his gaze, and wondered if there was anything he could say that would even get through to Hayden. He wasn’t sure if it was just the wall of Hayden’s ego he was hitting, or if there was something else at play here.
The back doors rolled open. “Matt?”
Matt turned to see Sean heading toward them, looking apologetic. “Yeah?”
“I’ve handed Isaiah over to security,” Sean said. “We’ve got a disturbance in Mundingburra now. It’s another Code Two.”
“Yep.” Matt rubbed his forehead, trying to ease away the tension headache building there. “Hayden, will I see you later?”
Hayden was stony-faced. “Sure.”
And Matt wanted to think he had a lot of things to say to him, but did he? Maybe, if he didn’t have another job to get to, he and Hayden would have stood here for long minutes with absolutely nothing between them except the heavy weight of silence.
Matt turned on his heel and walked away.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
On Saturday afternoon Hayden was hanging around the apartment eating cereal in his pyjama pants. Monique was at a study session at the university, so the place was his. He watched a movie, ate his cereal, and thought seriously about phoning in sick to work tonight. The thought of another twelve hours stuck in an ambulance with Greg? Hayden would rather beat himself repeatedly over the head with a blunt object. He didn’t phone in though. Instead he climbed back into bed for another few precious hours of sleep, and told himself he’d feel better when he woke up.
A lie.
He didn’t even sleep. Instead, he tossed and turned, replaying last night’s confrontation with Matt over and over in his head.
It was too late for a jog by the time he crawled out of bed again.
“Hey,” he mumbled, dragging himself toward the bathroom to shower.
“Hey.” Monique looked up from the couch. “I’m having friends over tomorrow to study.”
“Yup.” Hayden zombie-shuffled past her.
The hot shower revived him somewhat. He changed into his uniform, ate a hastily-made sandwich and called that breakfast, and then headed into work. On his way he swung by McDonald’s to grab a coffee, and wondered if he’d even have time to finish it before he and Greg got their first call.
On nights like this, when he was tired like this, Hayden thought about throwing it all in and going somewhere else. Finding something else to do. It was the fatigue talking—Hayden loved his job usually. But shit, the fatigue had a way of dragging more than his body down. It became like a fog, almost, thick and heavy, and every shift became an exercise in endurance. Working alongside Greg didn’t exactly make things easier.
Hayden checked his phone when he got to work: still nothing from Matt. Annoyance flared in his gut, before it occurred to him that maybe Matt was waiting for him to text. And despite last night, maybe Hayden liked him enough to at least try to meet him halfway.
Working tonight? he sent, even though he knew Matt was.
It was only a few minutes until he got a reply: Flinders Street again. Breakfast on the Strand?
Hayden closed his eyes briefly. So it seemed like Matt was meeting him halfway as well. Ok, he sent back. Coffee club, around 7?
See you then.
So, maybe an awkward conversation to be had but, on the plus side, a hot breakfast. The promise of a hot breakfast was enough to sustain Hayden through twelve hours of the usual Saturday night shit: assaults, drunken tumbles, and a traffic accident where a P-Plater wrapped his shitty hotted-up Toyota around a light pole and was lucky to escape with the minor injuries he did.
The night went quickly, but by the time dawn broke and the pace slowed at last, Hayden was tired and aching. He and Greg finally got a break just before their shift ended, and Hayden dozed on the couch in the break room back at the station. He was jolted awake only a few minutes later by his radio, and they went out for one last job: a local itinerant who was too drunk for the police watchhouse. Greg and Hayden transported him up to hospital; Hayden holding his breath in the back the whole way, since the old guy stank.
It was a little past seven when Hayden got off work. He showered at the station, changed, and joined the morning traffic heading into the city. By the time he made it to The Strand it was closer to half past, but Matt was there, sitting at one of the outside tables, a coffee in front of him. The shadows under his eyes were as dark as bruises.
“Hey.” Hayden slid into the seat across from him. “Sorry I’m late. Have you ordered?
”
“Not yet.”
Hayden grabbed a menu and gave it a cursory scan as the waitress approached. “Eggs Benedict and an orange juice, thanks.”
“I’ll have the same,” Matt said. He waited until the waitress had gone before he leaned forward in his seat. “Are you okay?
Hayden dragged his fingers through his hair. “Uh…yeah.”
Matt’s gaze was confronting. “Are we okay?”
Hayden fiddled with the tiny packets of sugar in the caddy in the middle of the table to distract himself while he figured out how the hell to answer a question like that. A sudden burst of cyclists zipped down The Strand past the outdoor seating area of the cafe, all whirring noises and flashes of neon lycra. Sunlight glittered on the ocean in scattered shards, and palm leaves rustled in the brisk breeze. The morning smelled of salt and coffee.
“I’ve never done the boyfriend thing,” Hayden said at last, and wondered if it was his tiredness that caused the words to tumble out. “Not until you. I’m probably doing it wrong.”
“Same.” Matt’s mouth twitched at the corner.
“But the other night…” Now the incident was behind him a little way, Hayden could see Matt’s point. He’d seen it back on Friday night too, but Hayden knew Isaiah. He hadn’t been in any danger from him, despite what it looked like. “I know how to do my job.”
Matt’s expression tightened.
“I’m going to ask you to let it go,” he said. “I don’t want this to get in the way of what we have here. I’m not going to change my mind, and I’m pretty sure you’re not going to change yours. So do you think you can let it go?”
Matt held his gaze for a long moment, and then sighed slowly. “I don’t know. Can you tell me you won’t put yourself in that position again?”
“I can try.”
Matt nodded. “Then I can let it go.”
Hayden hadn’t realised how much tension he’d been holding in his muscles until he released it. He turned a sugar packet over and over in his palm, so he didn’t need to look Matt in the eye. Maybe he owed Matt an explanation as to why the situation with Isaiah hadn’t just come out of nowhere. Maybe, if he wanted to keep his relationship with Matt, he needed to tell him why it mattered to him. “I grew up in places like that. Down in Melbourne. Just so you know.”
