Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Larrayne was subdued, teary, on Wednesday morning. She didn't want to get up, and for the past two days had taken to wandering around with her mobile phone in her hand.

'Why won't he ring?'

'Perhaps he's away, sweetie. Studying for exams. Staying with friends.'

'Well, why didn't he tell me? I'm sick of leaving messages.'

Larrayne recognised the anguish well enough from her youth. There's nothing worse than waiting for calls that never come, the calls of the beloved.

'I love him, Mum.' Said frankly and devoutly, as though Ellen doubted it or no one before Larrayne had ever loved.

'I know you do. It will sort itself out, you'll see.'

'He's avoiding me, I can feel it.'

In the end, Ellen told Larrayne to get dressed, go to school, take her mind off Skip.

Fat chance, but it was worth a try.

She dropped Larrayne at the school gates and drove to the police station, and Challis nabbed her as soon as she walked in to CIB. 'Carl Lister was seen visiting Aileen Munro.'

And at once Ellen connected the dots: Lister, his son, Munro, marijuana, and saw good reasons why Skip had suddenly stopped seeing Larrayne.

Three-thirty that afternoon, just before the four o'clock shift went on, found Pam sitting with John Tankard and Sergeant van Alphen around a table in the canteen. They were full of coffee and someone's leftover birthday cake and disinclined to start work.

'Get this,' Tank said from behind yesterday's Progress. 'Says here: "With labels like 'illegals' and 'queue jumpers' we demonise the asylum seekers". I'll give her labels.'

He poked his head around to see that Pam was paying attention. 'Challis's girlfriend,' he explained unnecessarily.

Pam said sweetly, 'And what labels would those be, Tank?'

Caught on the back foot, he looked flummoxed, then mustered himself: 'Poser, do-gooder, un-Australian, wanker. That do you? Want me to go on?'

Pam thought that John Tankard would know all about labels, he who'd been called a stormtrooper. 'What do you think, Sarge?'

Van Alphen said, 'So long as it doesn't affect his job.'

She had no idea what he was talking about. Tankard's job? 'Sarge?'

'Challis,' van Alphen said. 'So long as his work isn't compromised by what his girlfriend thinks.'

'Hadn't thought of it that way, Sarge,' Pam said, thinking that Challis's relationship with Tessa Kane wasn't the issue here. The issue was the asylum seekers and their reception and treatment. People were funny. Funny and limited.

As Wednesday evening settled, the sun flattening red over the mangroves and smokestacks of Westernport, Brad Pike's skin crawled with need and loss, and he left his flat beside the strip of used-car yards and drove through the side streets to the cop shop at the roundabout. Plenty of parking outside so he zipped in, braked, turned off the ignition, waited a few seconds while the motor ran on and coughed and died with a rattle, then went in and said that he was being stalked.

The cop on desk duty-looked like a probationer-called Sergeant van Alphen. Shit, shit, shit.

Van Alphen came in, lean, dark, a repressive cast to his face. 'Well, if it isn't young Bradley. How's things, Brad?'

'Not bad. Yourself?' Pike said automatically, then kicked himself for being polite to a cop.

'So, what weird shit have you been up to now, Bradley?'

'No need to be like that.'

'Like what?'

'I come in here on legitimate business,' Pike said, the word 'legitimate' tangling his tongue a little.

'Your only business with us is telling us where you buried Lisa Tully's kid.'

Pike felt his face grow hot. 'The charges were dropped.'

'But that's not the same as being found innocent, though, is it, Brad?'

Twice lately he'd been told that. Van Alphen was a hard nut, dark and hard, like old leather. They reckon he'd gone off the rails a bit last year, but if that was true then he'd long recovered. He'd been on Pike's case from the start. In some ways he was as fucking bad as John Tankard.

'I come in here to make a complaint.'

'Don't tell me, you're being stalked. You said that on Monday, you said it last week…'

'So how come no one's listening?'

'Because you're full of shit. You're a slime bag and don't deserve to live.'

The probationary constable was looking on with his eyes and pimply mouth wide open.

'It's true, someone's following me.'

'Constable Tankard,' laughed van Alphen.

How did van Alphen know that? Had he put Tankard up to it?

'I dunno who it is,' Pike said. 'I get, like, these phone calls in the middle of the night, these letters. I can feel someone's behind me all the time. I think it's Lisa's sister, maybe Dwayne Venn. When I'm out walking and stuff.'

'Out walking? You never walked a millimetre in your worthless life.' Van Alphen leaned forward over the front desk, disturbing a pile of brochures. 'You know what I think? It's in your mind, a delusion. The world hates you for what you did to Lisa Tully's kid-hell, you are probably stalking Lisa- so you're twisting it around, pursuing the joys of victimhood.'

A deep, slow flush spread through Pike. But van Alphen wasn't finished.

'You're a lonely, isolated, pitiful specimen of humanity. You know it, the world knows it, and you're desperate for sympathy. You're intent on blaming others for your own shitty life. You can't accept any responsibility for that shitty life.'

Then van Alphen stood back and folded his arms dismissively. 'So forgive me if I'm sceptical, Brad.'

Pike opened and closed his mouth a few times and turned to leave, just as the station boss, Kellock, burst in, calling, 'We need a couple of cars out at the aerodrome. There's been another shooting.'

'Munro?'

'Don't know. Security guard called it in.'

Then Kellock grew aware of Pike and shut down, growing cold and still, but Pike was thinking, I'm out of here, and he pushed through the glass doors to the footpath outside.

To his car, where Scobie Sutton was standing with his hands in his pockets. 'Brad,' he said mildly, 'perhaps you're not aware of it, but you're in a no-standing zone, police vehicles only. And I see your registration is long overdue.'

'So sue me,' Pike said with a sob, and he got in and turned the motor over for a long few seconds before it fired.