Blood Feud (38 page)

And have the Sarge in his bed, fully aware Jake and I were having sex a few rooms away? Maybe even hearing us? No thanks.

“No Bycraft will come near me when I’m with Jakey. Not even Red,” I insisted.

“You’re not going to your house.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“If you want me to pull rank, I’ll pull rank.”

“Guess what? I’ve clocked off the job for the day and I sure don’t remember signing up for my boss to tell me what I can and can’t do in my private life. And that’s the operative word here – private. So butt out.”

“I’ll butt out when everything you do stops having a direct effect on me.”

“You’re not stopping me from going.”

“Listen to reason, Tess.”

I beseeched him with my eyes. “I need to spend some time with Jakey. Can’t you understand that, Sarge? I
need
to.”

His gaze was searching, but his voice cool. “I’m concerned that his mind will only be on one thing and it’s not going to be your safety.

I smiled. “Isn’t every man’s mind mostly on that one thing?”

He turned and strode to the door. “No.”

I trailed after him up to his house to shower and change, leaving him cooking his solo dinner while I drove to my place. Jake was already waiting for me with a plastic bag full of containers of Chinese takeaway food. After we ate, we sat on the lounge, leaving the kitchen table full of dirty plates and empty containers.

“What do you want to do tonight?” I asked, my eyes captured by his.

“We could practice guitar,” he suggested, his arm creeping around my shoulder, his voice a little husky.

“We could . . .” I sounded a little husky myself as I leaned into him and ran my hand up his thigh, not stopping until I reached the end, feeling him stiffening under my touch.

“Or we could do something else,” he said, slipping his hand under my t-shirt and pushing my bra to one side, caressing my breast.

When our lips met it was as if we hadn’t seen each other for weeks, months, instead of the few days it had been. We ended up leaving a trail of clothes on the floor on our way to the bedroom.

Afterwards, in post-coital bliss, we dozed for a while. When we roused, we lay on our sides and gazed into each other’s eyes.

“Are we okay, Jakey?” I asked hesitantly, leaning over to kiss his lips.

“What do you mean, babe?”

“I dunno. We don’t seem to spend much time together anymore and when we do, all we do is . . . you know, this.”

“What’s wrong with ‘this’?” he asked smiling, tickling my side and kissing my neck. “It’s my favourite thing in the world.”

I wriggled in ticklishness. “Stop it. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’d just like to see you more.”

He threw his arms out, grinning. “Hey, you can see all of me – there’s no more to see.”

I slapped his chest. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. We need to spend more time together.”

He flung himself onto his back. “It seems to me that you spend too much time with Finn. It shits me. Every time I try to see you, he’s there.”

“Fiona insists we stick together at the moment.”

“All I know is if my boss told me I had to spend every single second of the day with one of my colleagues, I’d tell him to go to hell. There’s no call for that kind of thing.”

I sat up, staring down at him, clutching the sheet to my breasts. “There
is
call for it, Jakey. The Sarge is trying to help keep me safe while
your brother
is a fugitive.”

He avoided my comment about Red. “It’s almost as if you want to spend all your time with him.”

“Jake! How can you say that? Of course I don’t want to be exiled from my own house, with Dad forced to stay with Adele. I want to be back here, living my own life, not living with the Sarge. You’re looking at this the wrong way around.”

“
I’m
looking at it the wrong way around? Why is it always my fault? Why am I always the one who’s over-reacting? You could interview any random guy on the street and he’d tell you he wouldn’t be happy about his girlfriend spending all her time with another man. That’s the way I look at it.”

My tone was snarky. “Maybe if we lived together, I wouldn’t have to depend on the Sarge. My own man would have my back.”

He was immediately contrite, knowing this was yet another touchy topic between us. “Tessie, you know it helps me save money to live at the prison.”

“Money for your family to leach from you.”

“Babe, don’t. You know I need the money to pay off my ute.” The ute that received more loving attention than I did in any given week.

The Sarge’s comments about Jake and a divorce sprang into my mind again. “Have you seen Chantelle much lately?”

He virtually squirmed. “Now and then. At family things. Not on her own.”

“You giving her money?”

“On occasion,” he said evasively.

“Why, Jakey?”

I thought he wasn’t going to answer for a while. “I suppose I feel a bit responsible for her. She’s still my wife.”

That was a slap in the face I didn’t need. “You planning on getting back together with her one day?”

He laughed at that, “No! Of course not. That bridge has been crossed and burned down.”

I wanted to test him. “Time for a divorce then, right?”

More squirming. “What difference does it make? We’ve been separated for years.”

That saddened me. “Maybe I’d prefer not to be going out with a married man. Maybe I need to start seriously thinking about our future,” I said quietly.

Sensing I was in a dangerous mood, he flicked a switch to charming mode. “Let’s not fight, babe,” he coaxed. “Not tonight. Not when I can think of better things to do.”

His lips blazed a hot trail up my arm and across my shoulder. He nibbled on my neck.

“Jake . . .” I protested, wanting for once to have a real conversation with him about the important sticking points between us. But it was increasingly hard to concentrate as his hands started caressing my body, his talented tongue finding my pleasure spots. I tried again. “Jakey . . .” my voice weakened and petered out. My body would not be denied its desires, so I surrendered all thoughts and gave in to him.

We could always talk tomorrow
, I told myself. And that was the last coherent thought I had for a while before that final burst of passionate activity sent us both to sleep.
There couldn’t be anything better in life than snuggling into a warm, cosy bed with Jakey
, I thought with happy sleepiness, slipping an arm around his body, every cell in mine relaxed and satisfied. I patted my knife for reassurance and pushed all thoughts of Red Bycraft from my mind. I found myself thinking about the Sarge instead, before pushing all thoughts of him from my mind as well, willingly giving myself up to oblivion for a while.

Something woke me a few hours later. I sat up in bed, hand on my knife, my ears and eyes straining into the silent darkness surrounding me. A long, slow minute ticked by, then another.
False alarm
, I chided myself, preparing to settle back down into bed when I heard a noise. I froze, ears burning with the effort to hear.

A faint scraping sounded from under my bedroom window, followed by the quiet crunching of the gravel I’d deliberately landscaped under every window in the house. Nobody was entering my house without some warning.

It
was probably just Denny Bycraft
, I argued to myself. For some indefinable reason, tonight didn’t have the feel of Denny though. He was usually rather careless, making more noise than my current intruder. So I ruled out Denny. The big question for me then – was it Red?

I crept out of bed without waking a slightly snoring Jake, and rounded up my crumpled clothes I’d discarded earlier. I crawled around on my hands and knees and located my runners. Tugging them on without socks, I took my utility belt, which the Sarge insisted I bring with me, and slung it around my hips. Strapping my knife back on my thigh and with my phone shoved into my front jeans pocket, I headed for the back door, taking a second to tie my hair up into a ponytail.

I knew my house and yard intimately, even in the dark, having lived here most of my life. I quietly slipped through the back door, down the ramp which we’d installed a few years ago for Dad’s chair. The smells from my herb garden were always strong at night and the aromatic and competing smells of basil, rosemary, parsley and thyme assailed my nostrils as I crept to the side of the house, sticking closely to the back wall. My presence passing the coop stirred up my sleepy chickens and there were a few soft complaining clucks and flutterings until they settled themselves back to sleep again.

I stood still at the corner between the back and the side, flattened against the house, holding my breath, gun up and ready. I waited to see if the small fuss the chooks had made drew anyone to the backyard to investigate. Muted footfalls slowly approached from the side. Whoever my mysterious midnight visitor was, they were taking great care not to be heard. I shrunk into the shadows thrown by our big mango tree, my heart thumping. I took a couple of steps backwards towards the ramp.

A dark shape cautiously peered around the corner of the house, scoping the immediate vicinity. I didn’t dare to breathe. It was Red. I could tell by his profile in the moonlight as his eyes roamed over the backyard. His hair had grown longer again since I’d seen him last in court, trying to convince the magistrate with his neat attractive appearance and new suit that he wasn’t a violent recidivistic offender. It hadn’t worked.

He smiled to himself when he noticed my chicken coop and my blood ran cold.
Not my girls
, I thought. Not again.

Time to act.

“Hello, Red,” I said quietly from the shadows, my gun trained on him.

He spun around, his own gun out, waving it in my general direction. He was a lousy shot, but he was a lucky man and had managed to shoot me once before by chance. And although he had nothing but a pissy little pink-handled gun he’d stolen from an elderly lady, I wasn’t keen for a replay. That bullet wound had hurt like crazy.

“Tessie,” he said, delighted, his white teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Wait a minute.” He put his nose to the air and sniffed dramatically. “Yum! I can smell that beautiful sweet pussy of yours from here. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”

“Don’t move. Drop the gun and get on your knees, hands in the air,” I told him coldly.

“Why don’t you step out into the light where I can see your pretty face? It’s been so long.” He crept closer to where I was hidden, guided through the darkness by my voice.

“Redmond Christopher Bycraft, you are under arrest. Don’t move. Drop the gun and get on your knees, hands in the air,” I repeated louder. “That was a lawful direction from a sworn police officer.”

“Fuck off with the pig-speak, Tessie,” he laughed. “You’re dying to kill me, aren’t you? Death by cop is what you’re planning. ‘Accidently’ and fatally shot while resisting arrest is my guess.”

“You better believe it, arsehole.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Come closer,” I tempted.

It would be the perfect excuse to shoot him dead.
Yes, ma’am, he was threatening me and advancing on me with his weapon drawn. I had no choice but to defend myself. I did aim for his shoulder, but he moved and that’s how I accidently shot him in the head. Five times. At close range. Oh yeah, and once in the wanger too.

He stayed where he was and laughed again, waving his gun towards me. “That’s not going to happen either. But top points for trying, Tessie.”

Without any warning, he twirled on his heels and sprinted away from me, down the side of the house from where he’d come.

“Hey!” I shouted and sprinted after him, tripping over my own feet in my haste. “Stop, Red Bycraft! You’re under arrest!”

My girls clucked loudly in alarm, protesting the disturbance. I had to ignore them this time and pounded after Red down the side of the house, trying not to stumble over the pieces of rusting machinery that Dad had stored up against the fence over the years. I could shoot Red and bring him down. I was a crack shot, but it was dark and he was a moving target. Plus, it’s always hard to explain shooting a man in the back.

He turned the corner from the side to the front yard and I lost sight of him. A commotion sounded from the front of the house, an angry, cursing voice and stifled scuffling noises. I sprinted to the front to find Red on the ground having tripped over one of the small timber borders framing the sad remnants of a once-beautiful flower garden that my mother had planted as a newlywed. It was now overgrown and neglected because I never seemed to find any spare time to garden these days. The border was rotting and termite-ridden in parts.

I dived onto him, clasping him around his thrashing calves. There was no way I was going to let him escape me once again. We wrangled and rolled across the garden bed, each trying to get the upper hand.

We flailed wildly together, turning over and over as we struggled against each other, breaking the spongy timber of the garden edge to roll out of the garden onto the lawn.

I managed to stagger to my feet and hauled Red upright by his upper arm. I had my gun trained on him and it seemed as though we were done and dusted and I’d recaptured myself a fugitive. But of course, life is never that simple and Red hooked his foot around the back of mine and rammed into me. I stumbled backwards. Red took advantage of my unsteadiness to fling me aside and make a run for it.