Blood Sport (2 page)

Her face is still, her large brown eyes staring up to the heavens sightlessly, frozen open with fear. Her long, black hair is a mess, sticky and matted, pulled from its ponytail. Something white and bony protrudes through her hair. I know what it is, but my brain won’t process the information. She is like a sister to me. She is married to one of my oldest friends. She is mother to a darling little girl.

This is not happening, I tell myself, eyes clamped shut in horror. My stomach rolls with nausea and I’m afraid I’m going to throw up everywhere.

I open my eyes to look down at her violated body again. Suddenly, her beautiful eyes blink and she turns her shattered head to look up at me, staring at me accusingly. Slowly and awkwardly, as if she’s lost her muscular coordination, she pushes herself up to a sitting position. Her bared breasts undulate as she moves, full and round and stark white, riddled with vicious bite marks. Her head is a strange shape, and I realise with a jolt that the left side is caved in. Coagulating blood oozes down her neck to her chest and breasts.

Involuntarily, I step backwards, breathing rapidly in ragged gasps, cloudy mists of air vapour escaping from my mouth.

Her lips snarl back, revealing bloodied smashed teeth. Her voice is thick as if there is something clogging her throat.

“
It should have been you, Tessie. Not me,” she spits out bitterly in her accented English, her bloodstained hand rising so she can point a finger at me. I notice that her nail has been torn off.

“
I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I whisper to her, over and over, until my throat closes up and all I can manage is an inarticulate gurgle. Bile fills my mouth and I fight the strong urge to vomit.

She jabs her finger in my direction angrily. “It should have been you!”

I stumble backwards, shaking hands up in front of me and trip over her discarded shoe, falling heavily on my butt.

She moves clumsily onto her hands and knees and crawls towards me, her eyes fixed on mine. “It should have been you!”

I scrabble backwards on my butt, propelling myself with my hands and feet, crying and terrified.

Her hand reaches out and grasps my ankle.

And I wake up, screaming and screaming.

Chapter 1

The note had been pushed under my front door sometime during the night while I slept, dreaming of Marcelle. I knew who it was from and what it would say even before I opened it, because it wasn’t the first one I’d received. He was taunting me, letting me know he was in town, moving about freely, creeping around my house at night, unafraid of being caught.

I picked up the note and unfolded it. His handwriting was scrawled – he’d written it in a hurry this time. He always left me the same message, which only emphasised its simple threat.

Lovely Tessie

I’m coming for you.

Red

Impassively, I read the familiar words and added the note to the other five I’d stored in an envelope that I kept in my underwear drawer. I’d tell the Sarge about it when I saw him later, even though there was nothing he could do.

Red Bycraft was coming for me. I only hoped that I’d be ready for him when it happened. I only hoped that I found him first.

~~~~~~

Unsettled and tired from my awful nightmare, I moved on autopilot. Half-asleep still, I drowsily dressed in my running gear and strapped my hunting knife around my thigh as I always did. I made my way down the stairs to the front gate, surprised to find it was raining lightly. I hadn’t heard it from inside, although normally the tin roof on my old timber house amplified the sound of rain. Yawning hugely and stretching my sleep-cramped muscles, I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head and waited patiently for my usual running companions, jogging on the spot and rubbing my arms to keep warm in the cold air. I wished I’d added an extra layer of warmth, even though I knew I’d regret it about fifteen minutes into my run.

Nobody turned up.

I checked my watch, flicking on its light. It was bang on six o’clock, but still totally dark in the early winter morning. I tutted self-righteously to myself, thinking about Romi and the Sarge tucked up cosily in their beds, giving our regular early morning exercise a miss.

Pikers
, I thought derisively as I headed off slowly through the light rain down the Coastal Range Highway, which led past my house into Little Town. I’d give the Sarge a right serve for being so damn lazy when he turned up at the station later this morning.

Beach or mountain?
I argued to myself, trying to decide between Beach Road and Mountain Road for my jog. Beach Road led east from town in a gentle decline past the secret bikie retreat and the nudist community. It terminated with a carpark and a set of stone steps leading down to the town’s beautiful cove beach with its small expanse of cruel calf-killing soft sand. Mountain Road, on the other hand, led west up to Lake Big and Mount Big and had a cruelly steep calf-killing incline.
Decisions, decisions.
In the end I took the easier option and turned into Beach Road, much preferring the pain of the soft sand to that of the seemingly unending mountain trek. Mount Big wasn’t called that for nothing.

It was very dark. There were no street lights on Beach Road and I was totally dependent on my headlight torch to stop me running off the road into the surrounding coastal scrubland. The one advantage of the darkness was that I could see vehicles coming from miles away by their headlights. The disadvantage was that I could easily be ambushed by someone waiting patiently in the dark for me.

A frisson of fear tickled my spine at that thought, and I wondered if I was too predictable. I ran at the same time every morning, always on one of two routes, and I’d become accustomed to the safety of companions when I ran. It had been ages since I’d had to run on my own. I fleetingly worried that I’d forgotten how to look after myself, relying too much on the Sarge’s constant supportive presence.

A loud slithering noise in the grassland nearby made me yelp in fear. I suddenly realised how tense I was, verging on the edge of an uncharacteristic panic spin. I shook my head sharply and took a deep breath, relaxing my tight muscles.
Calm, Tess Fuller, calm
. Those golden words repeated in a mantra seeped into my nervous system and soothed my jangling nerves. I guess those regular notes from Red Bycraft were beginning to psyche me out, just as he’d planned.

Why on earth would something happen to me
this
morning, out of all the mornings that I’d been running since he’d escaped from custody? It was laughable. I even made myself laugh out loud to prove the point. But my forced jollity jarred in the silence and only made me more uneasy.

I had spent the last four months looking over my shoulder for Red. I knew only too well that he would kill me the first opportunity he had. It was barely two months since he’d shot at the Sarge and me that night we’d cautiously approached his mother’s house.

We’d been tipped-off that he was the guest of honour at his sister Larissa’s eighteenth birthday party. Their mother, Lola Bycraft, hosted the rowdy party at the Bycraft family lair in Jarrah Street, located in the rough side of town. Despite her pathetic attempts to disguise it, I’d immediately recognised the shaking, terrified voice of our ‘anonymous’ tipster as Red’s downtrodden and much beaten girlfriend, Sharnee Lebutt. She’d finally found some spine to dish it back up to Red, desperately wanting him recaptured and returned to jail. It was only then that he wouldn’t be in her life, smashing his fist into her face on a regular basis and spending all her welfare money on booze, cigarettes and other women.

Unfortunately for the Sarge and me though, we’d been noticed as we crept towards the house, guns out, wrongly assuming that the loud music would cover our approach. Before we even reached the door, we’d been fired at from inside the house, the bullets smashing against the screened security door and showering us in shrapnel. We’d looked as though we’d been wrestling echidnas afterwards, we were so full of holes. It was only through sheer luck that we hadn’t been more seriously injured. Neither of us had been wearing any bulletproof gear, for the simple reason that we didn’t have any.

The police station at Mount Big Town (or Little Town as we locals all called it) was probably the most neglected and worst-resourced in the entire state. But three days after that incident, two complete sets of brand new riot gear, including bulletproof vests and helmets, were delivered to the station. And the Sarge’s enigmatic smile when I questioned the sudden appearance of the much-needed equipment only confirmed that he was responsible. I didn’t know how he did it, but I was determined to find out. It was driving me crazy. It was almost as if he had a direct line to the Police Commissioner himself.

“Your fiancee is the Commissioner’s daughter, isn’t she?” I’d accused him. He’d merely continued to smile silently at me. “You’re his nephew? His love child? You have footage of him snorting coke off an underage rent boy’s naked butt?” He had laughed then but hadn’t told me anything. He was an inscrutable clam.

Poor Sharnee had paid for her courage in tipping us off about Red though. A few days after our ill-fated raid, she walked past me in the dairy aisle of the exorbitant local supermarket where I’d ducked in to grab some milk (and Tim Tams). She kept her head down, sunglasses on inside the shop, fresh ugly bruising visible on her cheeks and neck, colouring up like a rainbow. I’d touched her gently on the arm to get her attention, but she’d reared back in terror as if I was a deadly brown snake. She span around and fled, almost running away from me, abandoning her groceries in the middle of the aisle. Sadly, I realised that it would be the last time she would ever try to help us.

Although Red Bycraft on the loose was a current threat for me, I’d been a target for the Bycraft family my entire life. Bycraft men were obsessive by nature and for some unknown reason, they were murderously obsessive about Fuller women and had been since the first Bycraft man killed the first Fuller woman way back in 1888. I’d escaped from Little Town and the ever-present danger to my life when I’d moved to the city to go to university, followed by the police academy and three years duty in the city’s toughest suburb. But my father’s life-threatening cancer had prompted the return back to my home town a couple of years ago and once again, I was living back in my old family house, sleeping in my childhood bedroom. I looked after Dad, who was now wheelchair-bound, as much as he would let me. They say that absence makes the heart grows fonder, but the Bycraft family certainly hadn’t grown fonder of me in my absence. I’d been the subject of constant abuse, threats and various attempts on my life since I’d returned. That had all eased somewhat since the Sarge had arrived four months ago, the same week that Red Bycraft turned fugitive, but hadn’t completely ceased.

So I was right to be wary as I ran and I patted my knife handle reassuringly. A set of headlights in the distance also provided a sense of not being totally alone in the darkness. I jogged towards them as a goal, thinking they’d grow bigger as we approached each other, confident it would be someone I knew, because I knew everyone who lived in Little Town. But the lights didn’t appear to move and as I jogged closer and closer, I realised they belonged to a car that was parked by the side of the road. I assured myself that there was nothing to worry about. There were a few residences on Beach Road, squeezed between the nudist community and the bikie retreat, and obviously someone was waiting outside a house to give a friend a lift to work that morning, or something like that. There was nothing sinister going on – it was all perfectly normal.

I kept jogging, but my heart pounded harder than it should be at my easy pace. A cold sweat broke out down my spine, making me shiver even as I was heating up from the exercise. Compulsively, I patted my knife again, regretting that it had been a few months since I’d done any solid self-defence training. I’d taken up the Sarge’s invitation to use his expensive home gym equipment, and had spent a lot of time honing my muscles instead of practicing my moves. I sure hoped I wasn’t going to die this morning because my butt was tight but I couldn’t manage a flying kick any more.

I kept jogging. I wanted to turn off my headlight because it made me a huge target in the darkness, but I might break an ankle if I did, it was that dark. Besides, I could see the very faint signs of dawn breaking over the horizon of the ocean in the far distance.
Soon it would be daytime and all the scary things would run away
, I thought with sheepish amusement as my feet continued to pound the road.

Or maybe they wouldn’t, because sometimes the scary things lived amongst us, with human faces and black hearts.

The car with the lights started up and glided slowly towards me. I hadn’t heard a door slam as someone entered the car, but I’d drifted off into my own thoughts for a while, so perhaps I’d missed it?