Irish took another swig of his Jameson, looking most pleased with himself.
“By the living Jesus, there’s a story waiting to be told here, or my name’s not Seamus O’Shannessey.”
“You know, Irish, you’re not such a silly old bugger after all,” joked Kylie, her mind running ahead of her mouth.
“If we can orchestrate getting enough public outrage on this issue, that could just be a tipping point. The cops may have to give in to public pressure and relinquish Rosi’s bail. Or alternatively, they may be forced to speed up their investigations into Cait’s abduction so he could be charged with that as well. Then there’d be enough evidence to warrant holding him in remand until his trial.”
COMMENT
Bringing the Thugs to Justice
Organised, cash-up criminals with the ability to hire top legal counsel are getting away with crimes that should have seen them incarcerated for extended periods of time. Instead, these dangerous lawbreakers are free to walk the streets alongside law-abiding citizens like you and me.
According to Kylie Fitzpatrick, a top Melbourne criminal barrister, in a recent case last week a well-known thug, drug dealer and extortionist, with a long list of prior convictions to his name, was released on bail on a technicality, even though he was found with a trafficable quantity of MDMA and methamphetamine in his possession.
Investigations by this paper has proven that this gangster is the sergeant at arms of a notorious outlaw motorcycle gang that is reputed to be pivotal in the manufacture and distribution of many of the illicit drugs that are killing our children.
Yet this monster has been freed pending trial and is able to continue to ply his illegal activities on the streets of Melbourne, when logic dictates that he should be held in remand.. . .
Robert Macillicuddy
Senior Features Writer
“Dad, Mum, have you seen Macillicuddy’s latest article in the Tribune?” exclaimed Cait as she was browsing through the news on her iPad over breakfast. She was somewhere between her detox green juice that looked like liquid grass and didn’t taste much better, and her coffee, which she knew would be significantly more palatable.
“That’s the article that I told you about the other day. The one Kylie organized, with a bit of help from Irish of course. I haven’t seen it yet. What do you think?” said G.
Jools and G had discussed the best way to approach the issue with Cait of Boss-man’s release from remand, and they decided to be totally up front, but regardless to also play it down until Macillicuddy’s article was published. That way Cait would then be able to get a small positive out of a negative situation.
“The most important consideration here is to keep Cait’s spirits up.” Jools had said to G during their pillow talk a few days back. “Emotionally Cait’s turned the corner and she’s now all the way there and halfway back, but the kidnapping’s still raw for her. The mind map’s still on her wall, with Boss-man’s name taking pride of place in the middle of it all. When she takes that down we’ll know she’s overcome another hurdle in her recovery.”
G and Jools felt that hopefully Cait would feel buoyed by Macillicuddy’s article. Even though Boss-man was now free to walk the streets until his trial, the police were onto him, he was being closely monitored, and with luck the public would get behind Cait and her cause. Well, that was the long-term goal.
G took in his daughter’s pleasant, happy glow as he looked at her across the kitchen bench and warmed inwardly, remembering the lows that she had sunken to just a few short months ago. He noted how she’d changed, yes, and lost the innocence of youth, but in her maturity she had also blossomed. Caitie was a fine-looking woman now who exuded confidence and poise. He was so immensely proud of the person she had grown into.
“The article reads all right. Could definitely help our cause,” replied Cait, almost sagaciously. “I’m uncomfortable that Boss-man’s free to roam again, but the conditions of his bail will limit his movements and the direction of this article might see him back where he belongs behind bars with any luck.”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” replied Jools. “Our sentiments exactly.”
“Hey, what about if Boss-man goes after Kylie again,” quipped Dec. “She had her cat crucified after the last article that Macillicuddy published.” Dec wasn’t known for his subtlety, and although he loved his big sis to bits, he was prone to rapid-firing from his mouth sometimes before engaging his brain.
“Dec, stop that!” said Jools rather sternly.
“Ah yeah, sorry, sis. That just came out.”
“That’s okay, Dec,” said Cait. “Actually, I’m a bit concerned myself about that. Dad, do you think Kylie will be okay? I know she was really upset when her cat was mutilated.”
Cait’s comment brought back a mixture of emotions for G: revulsion at the blood and gore he had to clean up at Kylie’s front door, and a mixture of guilt and stimulation at the thought of their later dalliance.
“She’s a big girl, Caitie, who can well and truly look after herself, but yes, I’ll follow it up to see she’s okay.”
“Thanks Dad, I’d like that. Kylie and I are sort of like blood sisters after her cat thing. Girl power, Dad. We look out for each other.”
Kylie woke to the sound of a series of small snap-crackle-pop explosions and an intense brightness creeping around the edges of her drapes. Still in the slumber zone, she instinctively groped for her phone on the bedside table and checked the time.
What the? It’s 3:32. I’ve got an acquittal hearing first thing tomorrow morning. Kylie was a girl who liked her eight hours of sleep and hated being woken in the middle of the night, especially by some disturbance in the street.
I’ll bet it’s kids playing around with the rubbish bins. Damn them! she thought to herself as she dragged her slightly comatose self out of bed and staggered half asleep over to the window.
Cracking the curtains from the side, Kylie peered outside and immediately woke up, her mind clicking into gear.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, her eyes rapidly coming out of sleep mode and focusing on what was happening down in the street one story below. “It can’t be.”
Grabbing her dressing gown that she had previously tossed over the occasional chair in the corner some four hours ago, Kylie almost jumped into her slippers, urgently wrapping her gown around her as she rushed down the stairs. She snatched up her keys off the hall table and promptly dropped them on the floor.
“Damn!”
She rummaged around in the dark and found the keys hiding at her feet. Fumbling for the right key, she quickly unlocked her front door and rushed outside.
“Oh no, I don’t believe it.”
Shielding her eyes from the intense heat and brightness that was in the street right out front of her house, Kylie stopped and stared, dumbfounded. It was her car. Her Porsche 718 Cayman GTS. Or what remained of it. It was totally on fire. Flames and sparks were spitting into the air, plumes of acrid black smoke rising toward car heaven, burning itself into oblivion. The car she’d worked long and hard for; the one she’d promised herself when the time was right. And the time had been right just recently, as she only took possession of her prized toy five months ago.
Kylie stood in her driveway, transfixed, staring at her car. Her next-door neighbor came up beside her and said, “Kylie, we better move back to safety. The petrol tank could explode. I called triple zero and they’re sending a fire truck and the police.”
“Oh . . . thanks, John, I . . . ah, don’t know what to say.”
John gently took hold of Kylie’s bent elbow and guided her back down her driveway.
“Kylie, this might not be the right moment, but earlier, well, I heard some noise outside and saw your car ignite.” John paused while they both stood and stared at the burning wreck. “But that’s not all.”
“Sorry John, I’m, ah, just not quite with it at the moment.”
“Kylie, I saw someone running away. It was dark and he was
in the shadows, but there was definitely someone there.”
Kylie’s pallor turned gray. With the light of the fire reflecting on her face washing out all other color, John thought that she resembled the living dead.
“Why didn’t I park the car in the garage?” Kylie muttered, more as a rhetorical question to herself than to John. “I always garage my car. Except tonight. Oh God, this is such a shock. I just can’t believe it.”
“Kylie, there’s nothing that can be done until the fire truck and police arrive. Let’s go inside and wait for them there.”
John led Kylie over to her front door. They stopped in the portico and turned to have a final look at the mayhem before moving inside.
“This for you?” John bent down and picked up a folded piece of paper that was lying on her doorstep and gave it to Kylie.
As if on automatic pilot Kylie unfolded the paper and froze, dropping it at her feet.
“Oh shit, not again . . .”
John picked up the note for her and couldn’t help but read the large, careless writing:
FirST yOUr Cat. NoW yOUr Car.
THe hOUse iS neXT.
BaCK Off BiTCH
“Cait, come back to us. You’re slipping down a hole where there’s no bottom, no end to how far you fall,” said Jools in a melodic voice, beginning an incantation, a Gaelic bricht, that would enable Cait to cross from the normal to the paranormal and summon the powers of the Otherworld.
Although Jools hadn’t fully ingratiated herself with the transcendent world as a young girl and acted on all her own mother’s teachings, she still had a latent connection—a power—that was part of her spiritual makeup and her eolas, her magical ability, had never left her. It was part of her DNA, a legacy from a long bloodline of gifted women, and it just needed reawakening.
And Cait’s current regression back to a frightened young girl proved to be the catalyst to stir the simmering embers of her gift of perception into action.
For the past five days G and Jools had been watching Cait slip from her vibrant, totally together, womanly self to a broken girl again. The news of Kylie’s car being torched, and then the threatening note, had reversed months of recovery in a split second.
It broke her.
Since the news, Cait had shut out the world around her and virtually locked herself in the house, rarely venturing out of her room. And they knew they had to do something to snap Cait out of the hole she was digging for herself.
“Cait’s drifting between her two worlds without a rudder at the moment, sinking and slipping away from life as she knew it, from the new world she’d just created for herself.” Jools was in the car last night driving home from the shops, talking to G.
“G, since the burning of Kylie’s car, life for Cait has become a continuum of worry and confusion,” Jools had said intuitively.
“Yeah, seems like she’s just surviving at present, simply going through the motions,” G had replied. He knew his daughter well, and she wasn’t coping: day dragging after day, from light to dark, warm to cold, awake to asleep.
“She tries to get enthused,” G had continued, “but it’s as if she’s got nothing to look forward to anymore, nothing to try and achieve; instead her only constancy’s fear and desperation.”
“Well put, G. And total disillusionment.”
So they decided then and there that Jools would have another “mother and daughter pep talk” with Cait.
“Mum, everything’s going pear-shaped at the moment,” replied Cait with a nervous edge to her words. The burning of Kylie’s car had totally freaked her out. Cait simply didn’t feel safe anymore, and doom and gloom were her constant companions. All she kept recalling, over and over as if it was a recording on a loop, was the cobra—a.k.a. Boss-man—hissing at her threateningly, “I’m coming to get you.”
“One minute Boss-man’s being held in remand, the next he’s out of jail.” Cait paused to calm her worried self, then continued. “And he’s coming to get me, Mum. The snake keeps telling me that in my visions.”
Cait felt powerless to avoid spiraling out of control on an inward journey to nowhere, and her demise was exponentially worsening by the day.
“Mum, I close my eyes and Boss-man’s there, threatening me. I can feel his presence everywhere. I know it sounds really weird, but like, he’s hiding in my wardrobe . . . he’s up a tree when I look outside . . . he’s under a rock in the garden . . . behind a door. I tell you, he’s following me.”
Cait was starting to wonder if she was losing her mind.
Or am I hallucinating? she thought in one of her down moments. This can’t be real.
“Why didn’t I see this in my visions?” The lack of forewarning about Boss-man’s movements had hit Cait like a sucker punch from behind. She was beginning to doubt the validity of her newly acquired powers.
Maybe the whole Otherworld thing was just a figment of my imagination?
Cait found it convenient to use her doubts as a method of rationalizing current events. She was looking for excuses and a place to park the blame.
Jools looked at her daughter’s physical presence and sensed confusion and panic. She was obviously scared out of her wits and winding herself up to the point where she was locking out her Otherworld experiences.
“I’m sure that your visions did point you in the right direction. But you overlooked the warning signs because of the relief of knowing that Boss-man was in jail. You didn’t want to accept what your visions were trying to tell you.”
“Cait, always remember, nothing in the world that we live in is as it seems.”
Jools needed to bring her daughter back to the reality of two side-by-side worlds coexisting. But if she didn’t believe, she’d lock out the Otherworld and be stuck in the single dimension of the world that was around her.
“Our world is a transitory place that’s constantly changing and evolving.” Jools continued with her incantation. “Behind everything that you see in front of you, everything that’s occurring, there’s also a reaction, a rebound, in the Otherworld. To fully understand what’s happening, you need to look at events with an open mind. You need to accept and visit both worlds.”
Jools continued with her invocation, her lilting voice flowing in and around Cait, weaving a protective spiritual web that she hoped would shield her from the evil attacking her until Cait was able to drag herself out of the mire she was wallowing in.
“When you move between the here and now and the spiritual, you’ll realize that there are as many answers to what you’re looking for as you have time to find. Remember, your powers of insight and your eolas will enable you to see the cracks in the veneer of life that other people can’t see.”
“Use your insight, Cait. Look past and through the immediacy of the moment and fight back. You’re stronger than this. You can beat the beast. You’ve done it before, now do it again. Take control.”
Jools stopped her spell-like chant to let Cait absorb what she had just said, then added almost as an afterthought, “But you won’t see any of this unless you open your mind.”
“Cait, you’re stronger than this. Get a grip and get over it.” Kylie had heard from G that Cait was regressing and in a bad place at the moment, so in her usual blunt, albeit caring way, she decided that Cait needed some tough love.
“So Sammy was killed by those thugs and nailed to my front door. I got over it. The car? Yeah, I’m mighty pissed off, but it’s replaceable. The note they left about burning down my house? I’ve hired a security guard.”
Kylie was on a roll and intended to lay it all on the table to Cait. She was used to dealing with problems, issues, and people who were scared out of their wits about a potential negative outcome, and damned if she was going to let Cait end up like them. They had a Girl Power pact between them, and Kylie fully intended to remind Cait of her obligations in this regard.
“Do you see me wallowing in self-pity? Did I ever go off the deep end, saying, ‘woe is me, the world as I know it’s
about to end.’? No. So grow some balls, Cait, and get with the program. We—yes, you and me—we have a fight on our hands, and there’s no way you’re getting out of it now.”
Kylie paused for dramatic effect. It was a courtroom thing.
“I need the old Cait back. Now! No namby-pamby half-arsed excuses, you hear me? I’m in court all this week, but you’re coming into my chambers next week to talk strategy. With Irish. I intend to nail this bastard, see him put away, then the key lost for the rest of his natural days. With luck, some crazy inmate with a grudge will beat the living shit out of him, regularly.”
Cait took the phone off speaker and held it to her ear, not quite believing the tirade she was getting from the other end of the line.
“So, what have you got to say for yourself? Don’t just stand there with your phone stuck to your ear, mouth open, no words coming out.”
Kylie was well versed at playing with people’s emotions, sounding them out to get a rise or forcing them to speak a hidden truth. In the courtroom she was more than tough. She was ruthless, feared, and Cait was currently on the receiving end of Kylie’s best courtroom game plan. In fact, Kylie’s aggressive, almost brutal attack had a purpose. She intended to break Cait, because she knew that behind that currently glum façade was a tiger of a woman who was fearless and would stop at nothing to see a result here. All she had to do was tear down the protective brick wall that Cait had erected around herself.
And fast.
“We talked about it once before,” continued Kylie. “Remember that quote I mentioned to you once: ‘Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.’ Well sister, that’s you and me. We’re a team, we’ve both been crossed by this prick, and we’re going to see him behind bars, okay?”
“Ah yeah, Kylie. Sort of,” replied Cait, still shell-shocked from Kylie’s outpouring.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 48
