Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(40)

A short, involuntary laugh from the men around him, a sudden betrayal. Jace’s fury was rising quickly. Big mistake, fighting angry. I was enjoying this. I wanted them all to jump in at once. This was my therapy. I sidestepped Jace as he came for me again but he saw the move, swung and glanced his knuckles off my ear. I took the pain. Lapped it up gratefully. I stepped forwards and faked a left jab, punched him square in the nose with my right.

Blood on the dirt. Exhilaration zapped through me at the sight of it.

‘Steady on!’ One of the farmers stepped towards us, having had quite enough of my show. He grabbed me from behind and I kicked Jace in the chest, used the backward momentum to shove me into the second attacker, the two of us barrelling into the ground. I rolled, righted, stepped on his hand and heard a crunch. The man screamed.

‘Grab her,’ one of them said. ‘Fucking grab her, John!’

‘Yeah, John,’ – I beckoned the man with a wave – ‘come grab me.’

The two of them lunged at me at once. Hardly fair, but not unexpected. They thought I’d back up, so I dove instead for John’s legs and felt him tumble over me, his own momentum working against him. John’s friend came for me and I kicked up at him from the ground, catching him in the chin.

Jace’s nose was pouring blood down his face as his friends dragged him to his feet. The men gathered together to reassess the situation. Mentions of a ‘psycho bitch’.

I wasn’t done yet. But when I beckoned the men forwards again, none of them moved. They just stood there, panting, bewildered by the first devastating round.

‘Come on,’ I urged. My own fury was starting to rise. No one moved. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! You pussies!’

I watched the men drive off past Dez’s house, standing in the dark beside Kash. My partner had surprisingly little to say at first. We walked back down the dusty road together under the stars. I hadn’t even exerted myself enough to break a sweat. The punch in the ear had caused a warm, throbbing pain that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I reached up and held it, relished in the hurt. It would bruise. It’d be hard to sleep on it. That was something, at least. Kash laughed after a while and I looked up at him.

‘I thought you said we didn’t want to present a hostile front,’ he said.

‘That wasn’t hostile,’ I said. ‘Hostile would have been arresting them on sight. They wanted us to speak their language. I spoke it. I just wish they’d held out longer.’

He didn’t reply. I knew how it sounded. My brother was accused of being one of the most vicious, violent people in the nation’s history, and here I was, upset that I hadn’t been able to beat a bunch of men into unconsciousness. But the words just came out of me before I could stop them. Kash glanced sideways at me and I caught it – the wary look of someone assessing a threat.

The truth was, Kash was right to be wary of me. Most of my life I’d wavered over a very thin line between light and dark sides of my being. There were things in me that were frightening. How quick I was to anger. How much I liked hurting people sometimes. My mind was full of shadowy places where violent fantasies lived, sickening things that sometimes came out in my dreams. Vengeance I played out mentally against bad people from my past. Most of the time, my light half won out, and the shadows and smoke were sent recoiling to where they belonged, not completely driven out, but controlled.

But sometimes, the halves collided. The score came down fifty fifty, and everyone was left guessing what I might do.

Even me.





Chapter 53


WHITT HAD DECIDED he wasn’t comfortable with Tox Barnes at all. A Sydney colleague had warned him that he’d suffer consequences from associating himself with the shaggy, despondent detective. That a deep, hidden sin in Tox’s past, a double murder, some said, meant that he was an enemy within the ranks of the police, and that he was to be avoided at all costs.

It wasn’t just that, though. To be in the man’s presence felt hazardous, like a journey along a frozen road at night with rain battering the windscreen. The man spoke little, laughed almost never, and caused people who didn’t even know him to shift out of his path. He was stale-smelling and dusty all the time, as though when he went home at night to wherever in the world that might be, he simply tucked himself into an old cupboard and closed the door. Whitt’s own terrible history had caused him to become almost obsessed with freshness and newness, the cleanliness and orderliness of packaged things. He changed his toothbrush on the first of every month. He littered his sock drawer with moisture absorbers. If things weren’t exactly right, they were deeply, inexcusably wrong.

Whitt was having those familiar nervous palpitations as he approached Tox on the third floor of the University of Sydney west car park.

‘I got the CCTV,’ Whitt said, drawing a sheet of paper from the folder tucked under his arm. He handed Tox a grainy photograph printed from the security system of a hock shop in Bondi Junction. Whitt had managed to track down footage of the purchase of the video camera found in Sam Blue’s apartment, originally stolen from an apartment in Elizabeth Bay. The still showed a man in a cap exiting the front doors of the store.

‘It’s not a great picture,’ Whitt said.

‘No. It’s not,’ Tox sighed. ‘Could be Sam Blue. Could be his grandmother.’

‘I’m going to get it analysed,’ Whitt said. ‘See if we can measure the man’s dimensions against the angle of the camera and the doorway. He seems taller than Blue to me.’