Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (3 page)

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.

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.

'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.