in the corner behind his mother with a box of bullets nearby on the bench. Strange, to see the rifle there instead of in the gun safe. Strange to see it there without his father holding it.
'Mum?'
She jumped, knocked her tea over. Swore, dabbed at the mess, then ignored it to hug him. She smelled of English Breakfast and sweat; she wore sorrow like an overcoat. The lines in her face had never seemed so deep. Fresh tears brimmed and she gestured for him to sit at the table. It was as old as he was, big enough to comfortably seat six though there'd only ever been the three. Knife cuts, coffee stains and teapot burns marred the timber. Looking at it now, running his fingers over that abused surface, it was as if he'd never seen it before.
Meg fetched a cloth and mopped up the spilt tea where it puddled around the little glass vase in the centre of the table; a single rose curling to brown drooped over its lip.
'You should be lying down, Kev,' his mother said. 'How do you feel?'
'Just hungry.'
'That's a good sign. I had snags out for dinner.'
'Don't, Mum, it's okay.'
'Don't be silly. We have to eat.'
She went into the kitchen and dug out utensils.
Meg pulled up a chair next to Kevin and said, voice low and anxious, 'Smithy only let us come back to collect some stuff. We weren't meant to stay.'
God, she was beautiful. That tanned skin, smooth there on her chest and the side of her throat where her pulse bobbed. His throat constricted, his stomach tightened with love or lust or both. He needed her, needed to bury himself in her smell and her heat and -
A sharp clank made him jump. He swallowed, aware of the tension in his muscles, the shame of his distracted daydream; here she was, all care and concern, while he could think only of jumping her bones. And with his mother standing right there, too. With his mother standing right there, and his father not.
Meg lifted her hand to reveal a set of keys. 'Smithy gave us these. Found them out the back of the servo. Yours, see - the key ring I gave you. It's not scratched up too bad.'
He mumbled an embarrassed 'thanks', his fingers lingering on hers as he took the keys, the Holden emblem unmarked. He shoved them in his pocket. Keys to a servo that didn't exist, but he'd take them off the ring another time. When he could do it without crying or smashing something.
'We're going to have your mum stay with us for a few nights, at least until the police are finished down at the servo,' she said. 'You can stay, too. Mum and Dad won't mind.'
A car drove past, slow, its headlights glaring against the front windows.
'Is that the ambulance?' his mother asked as the sausages sizzled in the pan. The room filled with the smell of meat frying. 'Or Smithy?'
'I'll check,' Meg said. 'If it's Smithy, let's hope he's got good news.'
FIVE
Reece, barefoot and shirtless, cradled a stubby of beer and forty years of regret. He took in the massive wall of storm clouds building in the west; the humidity had thickened during the day to be almost choking. His body ached all over, as if he'd been dragged here from the roadhouse behind Smith's Land Cruiser rather than in the passenger seat.
He felt bad for Diana Matheson. She was an impressive woman. If his own mother had been that strong, that stoic, well, maybe he wouldn't have joined the cops. If his mother had stood up to the drunken thug of a husband of hers, maybe Reece would've gone on to a respectable public service job, or even, who knew, if he'd stuck with the schooling, to university. Now that would've been funny. It might've been him brandishing a sign on the street march instead of taking names and busting heads. Maybe he wouldn't have had to drive over to the morgue and ID his sister, just another overdosed prostitute dredged up from a Valley gutter. Or maybe it wouldn't have made any difference at all.
The story about the Night Riders being drug traffickers wasn't a line. Taipan's bunch would sell anything, do anything, if it meant staying a step ahead of the Hunters. Whereas drugs were the one thing that the Von Schiller organisation would not touch. Despite the lure of big turnover, Maximilian would have nothing to do with what he described as pollution in society's bloodstream. His people had carte blanche to deal with drug dealers any way they felt fit, as long as it didn't come back on the firm. Reece had done his share, and it still hadn't made up for the loss of his sister. Hell, he'd never even found out who'd sold her the junk. That'd been the spring of '71 and he'd been on Springbok duty. His path had crossed with Mira's and, well, here he was. Smoking and shooing flies on the back veranda of a decrepit pub in a dying town, waiting for the axe to fall. Him and everyone else here, by the look of the place.
A presence tickled at the edge of his brooding mind. Mira. It was never a good sign that her control had slipped enough to allow that sensation to filter through their bloodlink. Hunger stirred, different to the steak and eggs he'd polished off. Pavlovian, that's what it was. Needing that taste, needing it today more than ever to ease his many pains. How angry was she? He blew his concerns out with a last lungful of cigarette smoke and ground the butt out.
Back in his room, he checked his pistol where it lay on the bedside table, then rinsed his face, pulled on shoes and buttoned up his bloodstained shirt. He'd just double-checked that the internal door into the pub was locked when someone knocked on the verandah door. He didn't need to look through the window to know who it was. He could feel her, a seething thunderhead; could see in his mind's eye that boot tapping impatiently on the floor. He opened the door before Mira could kick it in, then stood back with a bob of the head and a muttered 'Strigoi'.
Mira stood, dark and electric, eyes glinting green from the shade of her hood, her custom Driza-Bone draped about her like bat wings. 'What happened, Reece?'
'We lost him.'
She hovered on the threshold, as though waiting for an invitation, considering her options, perhaps, to bleed him or not to bleed him, and he wondered if he had time to get to the bedside table, if perhaps he shouldn't have had the Glock tucked into his belt. Futile, when she was this close. She entered, her shoulder brushing his chest, and flipped the overcoat across the single chair. The material snapped like a matador's cape. Her driver followed, looking boyish in a pants suit, a black ranger cap pushed down on her tightly pulled-back hair. She cleared a space on the small table for a duffel bag, then removed her mirrored sunglasses and tucked them into a pocket. Ponytail, freckles, wide shoulders. Familiar, but he didn't think they'd worked together. 'Nice place,' she said.
'Penthouse was taken.' He checked who might have seen them arrive - no-one - and locked the door before, as casually as he could, edging closer to his pistol.
'I've just spent an hour convincing the redneck coroner in Charleville that your partner died from a bullet to the brain and that no further inquiry was necessary.' Mira wiped the corners of her mouth with her thumb. 'He reeked of body odour. He ate tomatoes, raw, with salt, like they were apples. It was disgusting.'
The driver stood with her back to the veranda door. Reece caught the flash of a shoulder holster through her open jacket.
'I had to pay through the nose for a charter flight. Drag Felicity here off the GS roster with no notice.'
He re-appraised the driver. A jackal? Yeah, she was Gespenstenstaffel all right - no collar flashes, but she had the economy of movement, the hint of cherry glazing across the eye when the light caught it just right. And
