Two Man Station Read online

  Two fucking years.

  He ate his meal, and listened attentively while Sergeant Quinn spoke, and tried to remember why the hell he’d ever thought he was too proud to quit.

  Thump.

  Thump thump thump.

  On Thursday, Gio awoke with aching muscles and a vague sense of unknowing. It took a moment for him to recognise the pattern of sunlight slanting through the blinds onto the wall, and a moment longer to remember what that meant. Richmond. This was his home now.

  He’d spent all of yesterday shifting his furniture around. However he’d arranged it, it was too thinly spread. The third bedroom held nothing but his two bookshelves. Which was the closest Gio would ever get to a dedicated library, he supposed. Might as well enjoy it.

  He had a couple more boxes to unpack today before he started his first shift at the station. He could have unpacked them last night probably, but he’d resisted. Didn’t want to make it seem so real by having everything put neatly away, like he actually lived here now. Stupid, because he did actually live here now, and at some point he was going to need his plates and cutlery unpacked.

  Thump thump thump.

  Gio climbed out of bed, hitching his track pants up. He treaded down the hallway, into the kitchen, and then pushed open the screen door and stared out into the backyard. Taylor was standing there, smacking a cricket bat against one of Gio’s discarded packing boxes. He must’ve dragged it out from under the house.

  Thump thump thump.

  Hell if Gio could figure out what he was doing.

  “Hey,” he called out.

  The kid spun, wide-eyed, mouth open, the picture of guilt.

  “What’re you doing?”

  Taylor shrugged his skinny shoulders.

  “Where’s your dad?

  “Asleep.” Taylor hefted the weight of the cricket bat from hand to hand and squinted worriedly up at Gio.

  “Right.” The sergeant had been working until two, hadn’t he? And it couldn’t be much past six now. “You’re gonna wake him up if you keep bashing that box.”

  The kid’s guilty expression intensified, and Gio wondered if that was what he secretly wanted. He was bored, probably.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?” Gio asked him.

  Taylor looked scandalised. “Not for ages.”

  “If you want something to do,” Gio said, “you can help me finish unpacking.”

  Taylor’s hesitation lasted for about half a second. Then he dumped his cricket bat and walked towards Gio’s house.

  “I am great at unpacking,” he said confidently, climbing the steps.

  After the third broken coffee mug, Gio begged to differ.

  But it was better than silence, right?

  When Jason Quinn woke up, Taylor was gone. There was a half-finished bowl of cereal in the kitchen sink and the milk had been left to slowly curdle on the table. The back door was open.

  Jason was too tired to panic. He was still half sunk in sleep when he was climbing the new guy’s back steps, and by the time he’d pulled himself into a state approaching wakefulness, he could already hear Taylor chattering away inside.

  Boundaries.

  Time to remind Taylor that boundaries were a thing that existed. He’d been the same with Dan and his family. At least Dan and Gabby hadn’t minded having Taylor underfoot all the time. Taylor had liked coming over to visit Gabby and the baby. He’d been inconsolable when Dan had put in for a transfer to Cairns.

  “Who’s coming to live here now, Dad?” he’d asked one night, sniffling into his pillow.

  “I don’t know, mate.”

  Taylor had scrubbed at his eyes. “Will they have kids maybe?”

  “Maybe,” Jason had told him, tousling his hair. He’d hoped whoever got the spot did have kids, for Taylor’s sake. Jason had just wanted someone he could work with as easily as he could with Dan. Someone he could trust to have his back.

  Turned out they’d both been shafted, hadn’t they?

  Jason knocked on the screen door and then opened it. “Taylor? You in here, mate?”

  Taylor poked his head around the kitchen doorway. “Dad! I’m helping Gio unpack!”

  “You’re supposed to be getting ready for school,” Jason reminded him.

  “What time is it?”

  Jason squinted at his watch. “Eight thirty.”

  “Shit!” Taylor’s eyes went owlishly wide.

  And it was probably time for a refresher course on appropriate language while they were going over that boundary thing again.

  “Go and get your bag and your shoes,” Jason said. “And your lunchbox is in the fridge.”

  “Can I get money for tuckshop?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Taylor’s face split with a grin.

  “Bye, Gio!” he yelled, pushing past Jason to get to the stairs. “Bye, Dad!”

  Gio appeared in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the frame. He was wearing track pants and a faded Green Day shirt. “Sarge,” he said, nodding.

  “Morning. Sorry about . . .” Jason made a vague gesture that he hoped encompassed Taylor’s lack of boundaries, Taylor’s lack of polite language, and pretty much Taylor himself.

  “It’s no problem.” Gio’s expression was impossible to read.

  “You settling in okay?”

  “Yeah.” Gio didn’t hold his gaze. “Fine.”

  “Okay,” Jason said. “First shift today, huh?”

  “Yes, Sarge.”

  “I’ll see you at two.”

  Gio lifted his gaze again. “Yes, Sarge.”

  Jesus. The guy was an absolute fucking delight, wasn’t he? No wonder they hadn’t been able to wait to see the back of him down the Gold Coast. Jason was tempted to ask him which telephone box they’d held his farewell party in.

  “Okay,” he said instead. “I’d better get Taylor to school.”

  He was halfway down the stairs again when he heard Gio locking the door behind him.

  When Jason arrived at the station just before two, Gio was already there.

  “How’s it going?” Jason asked, pulling the back door shut behind him. The blast of air-conditioning chilled the sweat on the nape of his neck.

  “He set the alarm off trying to get in,” Sandra said, walking past with a stack of court briefs. “Twice.”

  Jason snorted out a laugh.

  Gio ducked his head, but not before Jason saw his lips quirk in what might have been a tentative smile.

  Jason grabbed the car keys off the board. “Time for a grand tour of town, Gio?”

  “Yes, Sarge,” Gio said, and Jason didn’t think he was imagining the relief in Gio’s voice. Sandra had probably ripped him a new one for setting the alarm off. She was . . . set in her ways. She’d been the AO in Richmond for the past twenty-three years. She ate coppers for breakfast.

  Gio followed Jason outside to the LandCruiser.

  “Don’t drive these on the Coast, do you?” Jason asked.

  “No.” Gio settled himself into the passenger’s seat, and then twisted around to check the gear in the back seat. “This is a lot of stuff.”

  “Wet season’s coming,” Jason said. “Last year I got stuck between two flooded creeks for three days. Fuck if I’m doing that again without camping gear and supplies.”

  “Are you serious?” Gio asked, eyes widening.

  “You’re a long way from Cavill Avenue now.”

  “Yeah.” Gio’s answering smile was a little hollow. “I’m starting to get that, Sarge.”

  Jason turned the key in the ignition, and the engine rumbled to life. He glanced at Gio as he checked for traffic before pulling out onto the road, and wondered exactly how this was supposed to work.

  Giovanni Valeri.

  On balance, Jason would prefer not to know what sort of cloud Gio came to Richmond under. Then again, given that Gio was the sort of arsehole who had Ethical Standards on speed dial, forewarned was forearmed, right? Jason didn’t know the specifics of what
had happened on the Gold Coast, but he knew enough. It could have been managed in-house, without bringing Ethical Standards on board, but Gio had apparently had an axe to grind. Because the guy whose career he’d sunk hadn’t just been a colleague, they’d also been fucking. And the way the entire situation had been handled was bullshit. Jason had heard from at least three different sources that it was all bullshit, but Gio had pulled the discrimination card, and the bosses had been falling over themselves to prove how unprejudiced they were. Too scared they’d be called bigots and sued if they’d told Gio to go fuck himself. So some guy had lost his job and had his entire future ripped away from him, and Gio had got a promotion to senior constable out of the whole deal. Senior constable at twenty-six, and the guy had the audacity to look pissed off about it.

  They drove slowly through town, and Jason pointed out the landmarks. The pubs, the motels, the supermarket, the banks, the post office, the hospital, the school. They went by the servo on the edge of town.

  “The coffee’s terrible,” Jason told Gio. “But it’s the only place open after midnight.”

  He stole glimpses of Gio’s profile as he drove.

  Gio was a good-looking guy. Probably got a lot of action some place like the Gold Coast. Probably wouldn’t in Richmond. The girls would be all over him though, with his olive complexion, his dark eyes, and his generous mouth. There were going to be a lot of disappointed women in town when it turned out the new, hot, single copper was playing for the wrong team. Jason wondered if he was out, or if having fucked that bloke he worked with down on the Coast was supposed to be a secret.

  Jason and Gio toured a few of the shit addresses in town, the ones that Gio would need to know, where there were disturbances and domestic violence incidents as regular as clockwork. They stopped in at the Ferguson house. It was early enough that everyone was still sober. Their welcome was grudging, but at least it wasn’t hostile.

  The house was a mess, which was par for the course with the Fergusons, but it wasn’t the worst Jason had seen it. There were holes punched in the walls, and the broken window from last week still hadn’t been fixed. The place stank of cigarettes.

  “Janey, how come the kids aren’t at school?” Jason asked, looking at the kids sitting in front of the TV.

  Janey Ferguson tugged her threadbare dressing gown around herself, and glared at the kids as though she’d only just noticed them. “Hey! You kids! Go to fucking school!”

  The kids scattered.

  “Is Harvey around?”

  “Not since last week when you locked him up.” She chewed her cracked lower lip.

  “I told you, you can’t invite him around. That’s what the order says. He’s not allowed to come over.” He kept his voice even.

  Janey huffed and rolled her eyes, like Jason was the bad guy here.

  “You know I’m keeping an eye on him,” Jason continued. “If I find out he’s breached the order while he’s on bail, he’ll be going to prison.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Janey lit a cigarette and looked Gio up and down. “This the new guy?”

  “This is Senior Constable Valeri,” Jason told her.

  Gio nodded.

  “Whatever,” Janey mumbled, sniffing.

  Gio was quiet while Jason asked after Janey’s mum down in Gympie and about Janey’s plan, the last time they’d talked, to move there with the kids. Gio’s gaze took in the house: the cigarette burns on the peeling kitchen linoleum, the overflowing nappy bucket in the corner by the fridge, the loaf of bread mouldering beside the sink. Jason wondered what he was thinking, but his expression didn’t give anything away. A professional mask or he just didn’t give a shit?

  Janey unfurled a little as she spoke with Jason, becoming less guarded, more animated. It was like pushing water uphill, but maybe one day he’d actually convince her to go, before she and Harvey killed one another.

  “So,” Jason said, stepping over the busted fence as they left, “that was Janey Ferguson. I’m sure you’ll meet her other half soon enough. She’s the aggrieved in the DV, but when she’s drunk, she’s as bad as Harvey. She’s a biter too.”

  Gio cast a look back at the house.

  “And there’s usually a shitload of Harvey’s family turning up to drink as well,” Jason said. “Any callouts you get for the Fergusons, wake me up too.”

  “Right.” Gio crunched a clump of red dirt under the toe of his boot. “How long ago did the last senior connie leave?”

  “About three weeks.” Jason climbed into the driver’s seat of the LandCruiser and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Gio sat in the passenger’s seat and tugged his seat belt across his chest. “So how have you dealt with the Fergusons in the meantime?”

  Jason hesitated for a moment. “Well, you just have to manage.”

  The largest place Jason had worked was Mount Isa. He’d been a country copper ever since graduating from the academy in Townsville. It was sometimes hard to remember that there were cities that had a constant stream of radio chatter, and their crews went from job to job to job, and had help only minutes away if it all went to shit. The pace was a lot slower out here, but so was the backup.

  “Right,” Gio said, squinting out the windscreen. He worried his lower lip with his teeth. “You manage.”

  Jason pulled the car off the wide dirt shoulder and back onto the road. “Yeah, you manage.”

  And if you don’t, you can fuck off back to the Gold Coast.

  But that was probably better left unsaid.

  Jason left Gio at the station when he went to collect Taylor from after-school care.

  “Can you put the siren on, Dad?” Taylor asked, slinging his school bag into the passenger seat and climbing up after it.

  “Have I ever said yes to that?” Jason asked him.

  “Today might be the day!”

  “It isn’t,” Jason told him, but flicked the radio over to the Mount Isa channel so that Taylor could hear what was going on there. Not too much, as it happened.

  “What’s a three-one-four, Dad?” Taylor asked, listening avidly nonetheless. “A disturbance?”

  “That’s a three-one-three.”

  “Drunk!” Taylor exclaimed. “Is it a drunk?”

  “It’s a drunk,” Jason confirmed.

  Taylor raised his arms and cheered.

  Jesus. The kid spent way too much time at the station, no question. And now with Dan and Gabby gone . . . “You manage,” he’d told Gio. You manage.

  Sandra pursed her lips when Jason dropped Taylor off at her house, but she didn’t say anything. She’d save it for when Taylor couldn’t overhear.

  “See you at ten, mate.” Jason scruffed Taylor’s hair.

  “Okay,” Taylor said, his face falling. “Bye, Dad.”

  Jason was managing. They both were.

  The afternoon passed quickly, burning away into the sunset. The insects came out with the evening, shifting in glittering swarms around the streetlights. Jason did a few patrols through town, just to show the flag, and then returned to the station to take care of some paperwork before heading out again, this time with Gio.

  Thursday night in Richmond. There was a fight at the pub that was the work of minutes to sort out—nobody seemed particularly invested in continuing once the coppers showed up—and someone smashed the front window of the bakery. The Fergusons were suspiciously quiet, but Charlie Grant and his brother George around on Racecourse Road picked up the slack for them by having a screaming match in the street. Jason watched the way Gio approached them. A little more aggressively than Jason would have—this was small-town policing, not riot control—but then Gio looked over at Jason and took his lead from him. Relaxed his posture, held one palm up in a conciliatory manner, took his other hand off his spray. It was easy enough after that to get the pair of them separated. They drove George to another relative’s house in town for the night, and told him to come to the station tomorrow when he was sober if he still wanted to make a complaint against Charlie for
punching him.

  “Any reason we didn’t bin him for drunk, Sarge?” Gio asked as they headed back to the station.

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “There is. It’s almost ten o’clock, and I don’t want to spend half the night watching a drunk snore in the cell. If that’s how you want to spend your time off, feel free to arrest him next time.”

  Gio nodded curtly.

  Fine. The next drunk job they got, Jason would let Gio take the lead. He’d figure out soon enough that the aim of the game out here was to not arrest anyone unless there was no alternative. The first time he had to drive a prisoner all the way to Townsville because Charters Towers was too busy to assist with the transport . . . well, that ten-hour round-trip would cure his enthusiasm for binning people. Gio would quickly learn to appreciate diversions, notices to appear, and arrests by appointment.

  “You went in a little hard tonight,” Jason said as they pulled up behind the station. “With the Grant boys.”

  Gio’s expression shuttered.

  A single spotlight attached to the back of the station illuminated the small car park. The spotlight created a wide column of light that was thick with long-winged flying ants and buzzing, iridescent Christmas beetles. Jason waved a few away from his face as he stepped out of the car.

  “I’m not having a go.” Jason dragged his vest out of the back seat, the plates in it heavy enough to pull his arm down. “But you go in like that, like you want a fight, you might get one. And this isn’t the Coast. You don’t have twenty other coppers right behind you ready to back you up.”