Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(23)

‘No way.’ He put his arms behind his head. ‘Around here you take over your family farms or you go work for the mines and send your money back here. That’s the only reason people have kids in this town – because if they don’t, their farms will close down. If everybody leaves, the whole town closes down, so anyone who makes plans to go hasta keep it secret or people will start calling you a traitor, talking about how you’re abandoning the place. It’s supposed to be one for all, all for one. So people keep having kids, and their kids take over the farms, and then they have kids. It’s an endless, meaningless cycle of bullshit.’

‘So what happens if you’re a kid around here and you don’t want to be a farmer?’

He made a gun with his fingers, put it to his head. ‘Bang!’ ‘Don’t they try going into the cities?’

‘How are you gonna leave and start again in the big city when you grew up your whole life in a hole in the Earth? You got no money. No friends. No family backing you. No work experience. You don’t know the city ways. You try to climb out, it just sucks you back in.’

‘But you’re not going to get sucked back in.’

‘No way.’ He stretched, reached for the ceiling. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’

‘None of your business.’

He settled back in his chair and knitted his fingers over his skinny chest like he was planning on going to sleep. I knew that kind of calm. The emotionless resolve that comes with knowing you’ve reached rock bottom, that there’s no more trouble that you can get into. No expectations. Maximum ostracism. I’d been that kind of teenager. Wandering around the city at night on my own, spray-painting trains, breaking windows, lighting rubbish bins on fire.

It was actually while I was sitting in a holding cell at Maroubra Police Station, listening to the goings-on in the office, that I’d found my calling. An old lady had wandered in bleeding after being knocked down only a couple of blocks away, her handbag stolen. I’d watched through the bars as two female officers brought her to a chair by one of the desks, tended to her, soothed her, made her a cup of tea. They were like two daughters caring for their frightened, befuddled mother. And the old lady’s eyes wandered over their immaculate blue uniforms, their faces, with awe and joy. I’d imagined someone looking at me like that one day. Like I was their hero.

Zac Taby needed to decide how he wanted to be looked at. Right now it was only me looking at him, seeing myself. But I knew what he was in the eyes of the people here. Their runt. The enemy in their midst.

‘You’re going to go home and stay there,’ I said. I shoved the kid’s phone back towards him. ‘Play Xbox or something until this whole thing blows over. If I hear or see you around town before I leave, I’ll kick your arse.’

The kid took his phone and gave a dismissive laugh. He didn’t know how serious I was.





Chapter 33


THERE WAS A slender, beautiful Pakistani woman standing in the police station’s main room with Snale and Kash when I emerged, shutting Zac in the interview room to cool his heels. Zac’s mother. Kash still had his interrogation stance on, arms folded and head bowed, eyes narrowed as he took in her face, her figure, as though he could see cruel intentions written on her very countenance. I didn’t see anything but a worried, tired woman fed up with her son’s antics.

‘Is he in there?’ She pointed towards the door as I closed it. ‘I am going to absolutely nail that kid.’

I laughed. Her words were much feistier than her appearance.

‘Your son hasn’t done anything wrong, Mrs Taby,’ I said. ‘Not lately, anyway. Not that we can see.’

‘Yeah, not that anyone can see,’ she scoffed. ‘Half the trouble he gets into, I only hear about it three weeks later when someone makes some snide remark to me about their dead cat or their burned-out shed. He didn’t kill Mr Campbell, Officer, but I can tell you he hasn’t been out there collecting funds for charity. I haven’t seen him in three days. He needs a smack on the behind.’

‘Well, after you’ve smacked his behind, we’d appreciate it if you locked him up for a couple of days,’ I said. ‘Just until everything settles down.’

‘Where is Mr Taby?’ Kash said.

‘Mr Taby doesn’t have time to be running around after our little monster.’ Zac’s mother rolled her eyes. ‘He works remotely for Ektor Corp. His hours are strange. He has to be up all night sometimes talking to his divisional partners. He’s locked to that computer sixteen hours a day.’

‘Ektor Corp.’ Kash nodded. ‘Huh.’

‘Your son’s in a lot of trouble, Mrs Taby,’ I said. ‘We’re going to need you to keep an eye on him. There are people in this town who would just love to get their hands on him.’

‘They’ll have to wait till I’m done with him first,’ she said, marching towards the interview room.





Chapter 34


‘I REALLY THINK I ought to seek medical attention.’ Whitt touched the back of his skull tenderly as he sat at the bar Tox had taken him to, looking at the blood on his fingertips. Tox put two shots of Scotch on the counter before them.

‘I hate working with people,’ Tox said. ‘Don’t make me work with a pussy.’