Clementine spread one blanket on the floor in the back of the station wagon. The after-hours vet in Earlville had given her three. She lay down on top, fully clothed, Pocket’s blood smeared down the front of her jumper, and pulled the other two up around her shoulders. The shivering, she realised, was not from the cold. It was residual shock.
The vet had said that Pocket needed a night at the animal hospital on painkillers but, all going well, should be strong enough to go home tomorrow with a round of antibiotics for the gash in his head. She said the leg fracture was blunt-force trauma, and that it could have been a blow with the back of the tomahawk. Clementine had cried, loud exhausted sobs, there in the surgery, the vet’s hand on her shoulder and Pocket asleep on his mat in a cage.
It was after eleven o’clock. She looked out through the rear window. A half-moon emerged from behind a thick cloud, lighting up the gumnuts hanging from a scraggly tree on the nature strip. She was in the northern suburbs of Earlville, parked right across from the vet, on a street lined with old fibro homes. Now, alone in the silence, she felt it would have been better to park in front of the police station.
No, she thought. Whoever it was had achieved their end, scaring her senseless. They would not be pursuing her now.
It was hard to think—there was a throb above her eyes, and her shoulders were already starting to ache from the cold, hard floor beneath her—but the question of who wanted to frighten her badly enough to hurt Pocket and smash up her house would not go away. She thought back to her conversation with Melissa. The Plains community were sure Clancy’s departure from the team had been the result of a threat from the Earlville gang—payback for his testimony in court. Perhaps someone had seen her with Clancy at the post office or with Mel at the pub and it had got back to the thugs at Earlville. They might have been angry that she was befriending the couple in some way, interfering in their grand scheme to make Clancy suffer.
Or what about Gerard? His thugs had burned Clancy—they wouldn’t think twice about hurting a dog. Gerard had agreed only hours before to leave her alone, but what if the break-in had already been planned and he hadn’t had time to call it off? Perhaps they’d gone in immediately after she’d left home, before the deal was done. That might account for Gerard’s overly agreeable response—he knew the deed had already been done, whether he agreed or not. Or maybe Gerard had agreed just to shut her up and had no intention of leaving her in peace.
But surely Gerard wouldn’t hire people so evil as to break a dog’s leg? All this for his wife’s promotion?
She lay on her back, staring up at the sky through the back window of the wagon. The moon had slipped behind a large cloud, thick enough to dim its light to almost nothing. The throbbing above her eyes had become a sharp pain, spreading towards the back of her head.
She thought back to the first of the violent acts. It had been completed by her own hands, the night she’d sprayed those revolting lies on Andrew’s car and slashed his tyres. Maybe this was how he and Rosemary had felt. Maybe it was karma.
It must have been at least an hour later when she woke, as the clouds had cleared completely and the moon was nowhere in sight. There had been a loud noise, and she could hear yelling. There it was again, a rock on a corrugated-iron roof. She sat up in the back of the wagon, looked around. The shouts were coming from the corner, further up the street. Lights came on inside the nearby houses, illuminating a crowd of young men on the street, a few of them with shaven heads. Something cold crept over her skin, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
She threw off the blankets and clambered over the back seat, slid down into the driver’s seat. She was breathing fast, fumbling for her keys. The shouting was getting closer—the crowd had moved onto the street where she was parked.
She turned the key. The starter motor chugged, but nothing fired. She tried again, and it took hold briefly, then stalled. She waited a moment, telling herself the appearance of the angry throng was a coincidence, nothing to do with her.
She turned the key again and checked her side mirror, gasping as she recognised a bald head reflecting the streetlight—Red Flanno. He was screaming abuse at a house on the corner. A projectile flew from somewhere in the crowd—a brick silhouetted in the streetlight, soaring through the air. She heard the crash of shattering glass.
She turned the key again, pumping the accelerator. The engine fired and she planted her foot, her eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror as she pulled away from the curb.
The sound of sirens in the distance, the crowd running, scattering in all directions. Then, from deeper in the pack, a fiery bottle came sailing through the air, trailing two feet of flames behind it, crashing through a window of a tiny, run-down house at the end of the street. She gasped, looked again to the spot where the bottle had come from.
There—towards the back, head shaved, running with the rest of them—was Todd Wakely.