Chapter 26
ZAC TABY WASN’T hard to find. Snale picked us up in her four-wheel drive and drove us, not to the school but away from the town. Along a dirt track that rattled the car windows almost out of their frames, we came to a shaded gully at the foot of a tall cliff face covered in spray-painted tags. I got out of the truck and stared at the peppering of cigarette butts at my feet. Somewhere in the shady brush someone was playing music, a whiny peal from phone speakers.
A large black-and-grey dog rushed to the car to intercept us, barking in a decidedly unfriendly manner. Its stride jangled with the string of Coke cans tied to its tail. Snale sighed, exasperated.
‘Digger,’ she snapped. ‘Come here. Come here, girl.’
The dog gave up its vicious charade and allowed itself to be freed.
‘Whose dog is that?’
‘It’s the town dog.’ Snale ushered the dog up onto the back seat of the four-wheel drive. ‘No one really owns her. Everybody feeds her. Which is probably why she’s so fat.’
A stringy, dark-skinned teenager emerged from the brush. I noticed others scuttling off through the trees, a couple of girls and a tall, lanky young man in a huge black trench coat that was ridiculous in the heat. Zac must have known we’d come looking for him after hearing about Theo Campbell’s death. There was laughter on the wind as the teens took the back route into the bush, a couple of defiant cries of ‘Fuck the Po-lice!’
Zac had a practised surliness well beyond his fifteen years. I might have wondered what it took to become this angry at life so young, but I had been exactly the same kind of kid. I never slept. I smoked like a chimney. I swore at strangers and hung out in the wrong places. One of my foster dads had nicknamed me ‘Bitch face’ because he said I always looked like I wanted to scream at someone. This kid thought nobody cared about him, and he was probably right.
‘You got some friends, Vicky?’ the teen asked, eyeing Kash and me. ‘That’s a first.’
‘We need you to come with us, Zac,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get your parents so we can chat about an incident yesterday morning.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Oh yes you are.’
‘Suck my dick, bitch,’ he snapped at me. ‘I don’t know anything about what happened yesterday. So you can go and annoy someone else, because I ain’t no terrorist, and I don’t keep a diary. Diaries are for little girls.’
‘We just want to talk,’ Snale said. ‘Maybe you can tell us something that will help. You and Soupy were … well acquainted. You might know someone else who had a major grudge against him.’
‘Whoever it was deserves a fucking medal.’ Zac drew a cigarette packet out of his jeans. ‘Dude was an A-grade fucktard. I heard the bomb blew his head right off. Is that true?’
‘We don’t have time for the tough-guy games.’ I strode forwards. ‘Get in the car.’
‘Should I resist?’ He jutted his chin at me, grabbed a handful of his junk. ‘Would that be exciting for you?’
‘That’s it,’ I heard Kash mutter as he came up behind me. He pushed me aside and grabbed Zac, slamming the kid into the dirt.
‘Stop! Stop!’
Zac was squealing with terror, all his bravado gone. Kash had a knee in the kid’s back and both hands in his pockets, scooping and dumping detritus on the ground around us: cigarettes, joints, condoms, a pocketknife, scraps of paper. Kash got the boy’s phone and let Snale and I drag him off the wailing teen.
Zac rolled in the dirt. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you, po-lice piece of shit!’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Kash was saying, swiping through Zac’s phone. ‘Recent photos.’
‘Stop, Kash.’ I grabbed at him, just missed the phone. ‘This is an illegal search. Anything you find on there is going to be tainted.’
‘Says who?’ He held me back with a massive arm, worked the screen with the thumb of his other hand. ‘I see … naked teen girls. I see kids sucking on bongs. What’s this?’ Kash showed me the phone screen. I glimpsed a mess of wires and tools and glass jars on a sprawling, cluttered table. ‘Bomb-making in progress?’
‘Give me the phone,’ I told Kash. ‘Or I’ll take it from you.’ He was trying to zoom in on the photographs, backing away from me. I gave Kash a few seconds to comply, then strode forward, lunged and grabbed the hand that held the phone. He was fast, catching my other wrist as I went for an open-handed slap to the side of his head. I dropped and hooked a leg around his, pulling him off balance. He let go of my wrist to save himself from hitting the dirt and I got my slap in, wrenching the phone from his fingers as he was distracted by the blow.
‘Oh shit!’ Zac was laughing, pointing at me. ‘Bitch has got some moves!’
I threw the phone at the boy, who only barely caught it against his chest. ‘Call me bitch one more time,’ I seethed, ‘I’ll shove that phone so far up your arse you’ll be able to Skype your spleen.’
Kash watched the teen run off into the bush. His face was slowly flushing with colour, one hand steadying himself against the ground.
‘That was a big mistake,’ he told me. ‘Assaulting a federal agent is a minimum two years’ prison.’
‘Conducting a search without a warrant is a serious service violation,’ I said. I was rolling up the sleeves of my shirt. ‘But neither of us is going to make a report.’
‘We’re not?’
‘No.’ I set my feet apart, cracked my knuckles. ‘We’re going to sort this out right here, right now.’