Click.
'Never point a gun at someone in fun, you know that.'
Click.
'Stop it,' she said.
Click.
Badly rattled now, she leapt from the bench and shouted, 'Loser!'
He seemed to wake from whatever possessed him-sexual arousal? Power? The gun itself? Or a combination. Whatever it was, he snapped out of it and said irritably, 'Settle down, it's not even loaded.'
'One day it will be,' she said and couldn't keep the shakes out of her voice.
John Tankard lived in a rear unit of a block of four similar units on Salmon Street. He overlooked someone's back yard, a dull reddish Nubrik wall and mouldy PVC downpipes. The front units overlooked weedy grass, a bicycle path and drydocked yachts behind a steelmesh lockup yard, but the rent was higher. Besides, his rear unit was a blind corner in the world, like a burrow away from all of the shit.
He flicked on the TV and sank into the sofa, his usual spot, against the right arm, next to a little op-shop cupboard on which his phone sat in a scattering of beer-can rings. The sofa was op-shop too, a job lot he bought when he first moved into the flat. He'd repaired the vinyl with duct tape that more or less matched, but the tape was lifting here and there, showing the cracks.
Cracks are a metaphor of my life.
Now where the fuck had that come from? He wasn't even drunk yet, hadn't had a beer since lunchtime.
But a crack had shown back there in the locker room, right? When he'd aimed and dry-fired his gun at Pam Murphy.
Wished he'd seen her other crack, nudge nudge, wink wink. He'd stopped thinking she was a lesbian some time ago. Stuck in the divisional van with her day after day, he'd begun to appreciate her close proximity. When she wasn't looking, he'd take in her shape under the shapeless uniform. Her bare arms through the summer and into early autumn. Once or twice out of the corner of his eye he'd seen her wet her lips. Now that was either unconscious and unrelated to him or unconscious but stimulated by his proximity to her, their thighs less than a metre apart there in the divvie van. Or a deliberate turn-on.
Tankard flicked through a week's unopened mail. A couple of bills and credit card statements and the latest Sidearm News from the States. He'd found it advertised on-line when surfing the Web for information about the Glock 17 pistol, subscribed to it, half wondering if it was a rip-off and he'd find his card account stripped bare, but it was legit and now the magazine came regularly and was an antidote to the shit he had to face in his job.
Through its pages he'd bought stuff by mail-order. Deerhide holster. Night-vision goggles. Ankle-strap scabbard. Tins of mace. Pistol replicas: a Uzi, a Sig Sauer, a Heckler and Koch.
Plus a Confederate flag-and fuck me if he hadn't seen six Confederate flags in the past six months, usually in some dopehead's scungy flat. Tonight, in fact, he'd gone with Pam to the rundown weatherboard house that Dwayne Venn shared with the Tully sisters and there, in the sitting room, was a Confederate flag on one wall, photos of Sitting Bull and Cochise on the other walls, and sundry Native American beads and blankets and other crap scattered around the place.
The world was full of fuckups whose lives were so shithouse they escaped into dreams of a time and a life where you'd find courage and absolutes and something clean and noble.
Me? I get that from a gun in the hand, Tankard thought. Like earlier tonight.
There was a hot dark corner of his mind-and it made his groin tremble-where he imagined shooting Pam Murphy. Imagined the spurt of it, like an ejaculation. Not destructive, necessarily-though that was part of it. Sort of a pumped-up feeling. Tankard was no longer a porcine, sweaty, unappetising tired copper with a crook back, but as tall and hard and sinewy and unreadable as the Indian chief who wiped out General Custer at Little Bighorn.
But I've never fired a shot on active duty, he thought, and most cops haven't and most cops never do.
God, his back hurt. He stretched out on the floor and visualised his spine as a sequence of knots along a rope and tried to unpick them one by one.
He fell asleep and woke up cold at three o'clock in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was eleven pm and Challis was slumped in front of the television set, thinking about bed, when Tessa Kane knocked on his door, still dressed in her outdoor gear: hiking boots, jeans, padded jacket. She didn't look angry, exactly, but didn't smile either, her face a little sad under the vivid intelligence that was always there, as if the disappointments she'd been bottling up since yesterday morning had worked their way to the surface.
He fetched her a scotch, walking on eggshells, trying to read her. But she said nothing about his letting her down, running to his mad wife instead of taking a camping walk with her.
He'd lit the fire, for the wind had turned sleety by the time he'd returned from Bushranger Bay, and now the house was warm and safe against the squally night. He didn't know what to say to her. Now and then she sipped at her scotch, very still and silent, but finally a grin chased away the blues and she fished around in her daypack. 'I called in at work on the way here,' she said. 'Lots of letters and messages to catch up on.'
This was better. This was something she did from time to time when she visited him. She liked to read stuff to him.
Soon her lap was full of envelopes, e-mail printouts and slips of paper. She flipped through them abstractedly as he watched.
He said lightly, 'Any mail from the Meddler?'
She'd often told him about the man who bombarded her with anonymous letters and phone calls. The Meddler was an appropriate name: he had an obsessive and insane regard for good manners, law and order, and commonsense. He liked to report bad drivers, rubbish dumpers, lazy shire workers, mulish bureaucrats, vandals, property owners who failed to slash their grass in late spring. Unfortunately, you had to agree with him most of the time. Last summer, for example, he wanted to know what bright spark-'pun intended'-had ordered a controlled burn of the nature reserve on Penzance Beach Road when hot northerlies had been forecast for the next day. The resulting bushfire had burnt out half of the reserve, grassland and fences, and come within a few hundred metres of a weatherboard house.
'Roadside rubbish this time,' Tessa said, not glancing at Challis.
'Uh-huh,' he said.
She waved a letter in her fist. 'Garbage bags dumped on Five Furlong Road, to be precise. He actually hunted around in the garbage bags and found a letter, which he's kindly enclosed.' She wrinkled her nose. 'Smells of rotting fish. It's from the Department of Social Security and addressed to a Donna Tully, inquiring as to the status of her cohabitation with one Dwayne Andrew Venn. The Meddler wants me to denounce Venn and Ms Tully in the pages of the Progress as dumpers of rubbish. Says he's also sent a copy to the shire, hoping they'll prosecute.'
Challis nodded. At least she was talking to him now. He wondered if she'd noticed the significance of the Tully name. Surely she had. She'd reported extensively on the disappearance of Lisa Tully's child, and left no doubt in her readers' minds that she thought Bradley Pike was behind it.
As for Dwayne Venn, he wondered if he should tell her about Ellen Destry's stakeout.
No.
'The Meddler's offended by everything,' Tessa said. 'The genius who approved give-way rather than stop signs at the corner of Coolart and Myers roads. The woman at Peninsula FM who says "yee-uh" instead of "year", "haitch" instead of "aitch". The residents of Upper Penzance for not wanting paved roads or mains water and thinking themselves better than anyone else. He seems to live in a state of permanent apoplexy.'
Not that she minded. The Meddler's weekly letter had become an institution in the Progress, attracting other letters. Tessa's view was, if you're on a good thing, stick to it.
He watched as she continued to sort through the papers in her lap, and as he watched from the other side of the fire, her dark, clever, mobile face relaxed into a shy, pleased smile. 'What?' he demanded.