Prime Cut Read Free

Greer. Tess added hair dye to her mental shopping list and turned the radio on.
    The interviewer sounded young enough to be her daughter. She’d countried her voice up a bit, talking with an authoritative twang to a primary commodities broker about the grain and wool prices. Apparently one was up and the other was down, in contrast to the stock market in general which was still in freefall. Tess couldn’t get her head around how a handful of venal mortgagebrokers in America could trigger what seemed to be a global financial tsunami and the end of the world as we know it. Never mind, it was unlikely to hit them here in Hopetoun – the end of the world and proud of it. This was Tess’s first posting since she came off sick leave. Nine months. Most of the first month in hospital and outpatients, the next three in physio, the rest in therapy. She wondered how Melissa would go: new to town, year nine in high school, sharing a classroom with a bunch of teenage hard-cases whose dads had come down to work at the new mine. She’d seen themhanging around the park – the kids, not the dads. Testosterone. The pushing and shoving, swearing and shouting: youthful high spirits, some called it. Only these days it sent her into cold sweats and panic attacks, fighting for breath, tears welling up. Even now, just at the thought of them.
    A new life, a new start, new hope in Hopetoun, they’d promised her. The place hadn’t warranted a permanent police post in the past. For decades it had been a laid-back holiday or retirement spot for wheatbelt farmers. There was nothing to police except maybe the occasional drunk driver or domestic. Now, with the nearby nickel mine, the population had steadily grown from a stable four hundred in the old days to a whopping two thousand – and rising. It would still be a while before it was Gotham City but with more houses, plenty of money being tossed around and the pub getting busier it meant more bad behaviour, temptation, vandalism, domestics and drugs. Hopetoun was a good place to put ageing or wounded or useless cops out to pasture. Tess ticked all three boxes. At first she’d turned it down. Senior Sergeant Tess Maguire – the bump up to ‘Senior’ was a reward for getting the shit kicked out of her – wanted to tough it out. But after a few weeks at a desk in Perth HQ with the concerned but embarrassed stares, the traffic, the noise and the crowds, Tess was sold on the sea change. Hopetoun. No crime to speak of, she reasoned, no stress, just sunshine and sea breezes to clear out the cobwebs.
    First she heard him. Then she smelled him. Then she saw him: weaving down the road, screeching and roaring, the acrid stench of burning rubber from the smoking tyres. Tess checked the clock on her dashboard: he was right on time. She had parked the paddy wagon by the turn-off to the mine. The swirling black tyre marks at the junction were a testament to his earlier handiwork. They were the kind of marks you’d see on any road in any Australian suburb these days but the big nobs of the Shire wanted an end to it. It was rampant hoonism, it created a bad impression, it was a bloody disgrace. And it was Tess Maguire’s job to nip it in the bud. Tess started up her motor, switched on the flashing lights and swung across the road blocking his path. He stopped. She tappedon his window until he opened it.
    ‘Having fun, Kane?’
    Kane Stevenson, Doughnut King: a drongo kid from a drongo family. There was a time Tess might have avoided pinning labels on to people. Give them a chance, that kind of thing. Not any more. Drongo is as drongo does. But what the Shire bigwigs might find hard to swallow was the fact that this particular drongo was a local boy, born and bred. They couldn’t blame this on miners, outsiders or incomers; Kane was home-grown trouble. Now that he was working at the mine, he had money to burn along with those tyres.
    He wound down his window, all innocent. ‘Morning Tess, early