Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down Read Free Page B

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