Cash

In movies, action follows declarations. Violence, sex, whatever—shit happens. But real life wasn’t like that. Rae kissed me, and disappeared to make his phone call. Ten minutes later he came back, fully dressed, boots on. He knocked my shoulder like we were dude bros, and then slipped out, leaving me to make sense of something I’d been a fool to misunderstand in the first place.

The silence hit me as soon as the front door shut behind him, but I welcomed it, absorbed it, and used it to blanket my thoughts. Rae was an addiction, but that didn’t change who I was. Sab life was my life. No fucker got to take that away from me.

Didn’t make it hurt any less, though. The prospect of committing to Rae’s gang brought a sense of rightness, a strange peace I couldn’t describe, but it was marred by sadness. Rae made my blood sing, my heart race, and my head implode with a single dark glance. No one had ever made me feel so…consumed. Not even Zander. Giving it up felt so wrong I could hardly think straight.

Dom came downstairs as I was looking for answers in the kitchen sink.

“I thought you’d gone,” I said tiredly.

He reached around me for a bottle of the weird vitamin water he drank every morning. “Not yet. Just didn’t want to intrude.”

I was glad of that, but I didn’t want to be the kind of prick who held his housemates hostage because I had a fella in the house. “You wouldn’t have, but don’t worry about it in any case. It won’t happen again.”

“Why’s that?”

“Rae’s not coming over anymore.”

Impossibly, my cheek felt like it was still shaped like his lap. I turned the hot water tap on, treating myself to a cloud of steam I hoped would irritate Dom enough to get rid of him.

His hand on my shoulder surprised me, but he said nothing, and his silence got under my skin. I turned the tap off. “I want to talk to you about that land.”

“Okay.” Dom twisted the cap back on his bottle and set it on the side. “If you want to talk figures, you’ll have to speak to Fletch. It’s not my information to give out.”

“I don’t want specifics,” I said. “I just need to know what you’re offering is enough for them to start somewhere new. They won’t give up the life, and I can’t be the one who fucked them over.”

“Are you asking me if I’ve offered them a fair price?”

“Have you?”

For a brief moment, Dom seemed offended. Then his expression cleared. “Yes, I have. More than fair. I would never undervalue someone’s land, no matter who I was buying it from. And I’m aware that if this deal goes through, I’m the one with the power—the money to pay lawyers and brokers, etcetera, but I’m not a wanker, Cash. My business would mean nothing if I built it on the back of screwing people over.”

“I know that.”

“So what exactly are you asking me?”

“I’m asking if Fletch’s crew have a realistic future if they sell this land.”

Dom shrugged. “I don’t know jack about being a hunt saboteur, but I know enough about vindictive town councils to know their days on that land are numbered, regardless. If I can buy it, and give them a decent price, there’s every chance they can set up elsewhere.”

“Won’t stop the council coming after them, though, wherever they go in the area.”

“Maybe not,” Dom said. “But they’ll be in a better position if they’re not living illegally in tents and dodgy Transit vans.”

“And you won’t let the hunt ride through the land?”

“Of course not. I’ll build a damn wall to keep them out.”

I’d known this already—had heard him tell Fletch, and then reiterate it to me in the car all the way home, but it felt good to hear it again. Another jolt of determination hit me. I punched Dom’s arm. “You’re a fucking hero, but don’t diss my van.”

Dom laughed. “Whatever. Besides, I thought it was Rae’s van right now?”

Bastard. He left me to my washing up, and I went back to pushing suds around the sink while trying to figure out what recommitting to sabbing actually meant. In a short half hour, I’d put a lid on my feelings for Rae, locked them up in a box, but how tight was the seal? And what about the practicalities? Sabbing was Rae’s whole world, like it used to be mine, but I had a job now, a mortgage. I couldn’t spend every day crawling through fields and vandalising trucks.

There had to be another way, or I’d broken my fucked-up heart for nothing.

***

I dropped my Saturday shift at the garage on Lucky, and I got the feeling Dom was relieved, even though it had ruined his weekend.

“He’s itching to come with you,” Dom said when we met in the kitchen at arse o’clock on Saturday morning. “He hasn’t mentioned it, but I can tell.”

I pictured Lucky on a sab op, then immediately wished I hadn’t. The little shit was an agile fucker, sneaky and fast. We could’ve used him. But I never would. “No chance.”

Dom grunted, glaring at me over a protein smoothie that looked like hell.

I punched his arm, accepted the Instagram-worthy breakfast he’d packed me—dude was someone’s mother, I swear—and hit the road. The predawn darkness was my friend. I stuck my Oasis playlist on, cut through the light traffic, and burned into Bedfordshire in a tidy hour. Over the last few days, I’d toyed with the idea of spraying my bright blue car a more countryside colour, but had ultimately decided a camouflaged car on the village roads would draw more attention to the sabs than some twat in a mark two Golf.

At seven a.m., I parked at the supermarket in the nearest town and set off for Rae’s place on foot, detouring through the woods to get a jump on spraying citronella along the likely trails the hunt would take.

My route took me past the house where the chief huntsman, Goon, lived. I gave the front a wide berth, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to scout the kennel block to see if the hound trucks were parked up and waiting.

I skinned up the wall and stuck my head briefly over the parapet, half expecting, given everything Rae had told me about Goon, to get a crossbow bolt between the eyes, but all seemed quiet—too quiet, for a kennel block that housed over thirty hounds. Even this early, a couple should’ve been up, whining for a breakfast they likely wouldn’t get on hunt day.

Shoulders straining, I gripped the poles that supported the newly reinforced decorative spikes and heaved myself a little higher. I couldn’t see the whole block, but the first few kennels were open, and the scent of disinfectant reached me, signalling that they’d been recently cleaned. Last I’d heard Goon’s place had been stuffed to the gills with hounds, two a kennel, sometimes three. Unless he’d lost some along the way, and the ones I couldn’t see were sleeping too soundly to hear me scrabbling on the wall, the hounds weren’t there.

Alarm bells sounded in my already racing mind. I dropped to the ground, crept away from the house, and set off at a run towards Rae’s camp, chasing the rising sun.

At the camp, I found Fletch up and boiling a pot on a campfire. I called a greeting to let him know I wasn’t an interloper, but instinct took me straight to Rae’s van.

I ripped open the side door.

Rae glanced up from his pot of instant porridge, eyes hooded, hair inexplicable. I wanted to push his hair out of his face and kiss him, but we weren’t doing that shit anymore. “Goon’s moved the hounds. They aren’t at his place.”

He gave me a flat stare. “How do you know that?”

“Passed it on my way in.” I jerked my head back the way I’d come. “Kennels are empty.”

“Fuck.” Breakfast forgotten, Rae scrambled out of his sleeping bag and reached for the combat trousers he wore on hunt days. His long legs were beguiling, and I forced myself to look away while he covered them up. Hid my flushed cheeks under the guise of retrieving his boots from the floor.

He took them from me and crouched at the end of his bed. “Thanks. Right, we need to find Sprig and get him to make some calls. He knows people at every local boarding kennels. If the hounds have been moved there, he can find out.”

“Boarding kennels?” I raised a sceptical eyebrow. “What kind of kennels would have room for thirty extra dogs at short notice?”

“The kind that pay their rent to Goon. Don’t underestimate the thrall he has on this fucking county.”

Rae stamped into his boots and tied them. He took my offered hand and jumped out of the van, pointing across the camp. “I’m gonna find Sprig. Can you tell Fletch?”

“Of course.”

We separated less than a minute after laying eyes on each other again. It felt wrong, but I pushed the feeling away. It was hunt day, and the pain lancing my chest was the reason we couldn’t be anything more than comrades. There was no time.

Fletch was still by the fire. He frowned as I filled him in.

“Boarding kennels are a long shot,” he said. “Kind of brute Goon is, I wouldn’t put it past him to have them dogs crammed into those trucks overnight. Have ‘em parked up somewhere, frantic and hungry.”

I pictured it and shuddered. Hungry hounds meant wild hounds that even the huntsmen couldn’t control. It didn’t bode well for the rest of the day. “Do you know anywhere they could park those trucks unnoticed?”

“Nowhere public,” Fletch said. “But there’ll be plenty of big houses round these parts willing to lend a driveway. It might be that we won’t know where they’ll come from today. We just have to be ready.”

Sprig and Rae agreed when they returned from a fruitless check of the local kennels. The fox hound pack was nowhere in plain sight, so we’d be heading out blind.

Rae’s camp mobilised. Saturday sabs joined the ranks, backed up by neutral observers with Go-Pros and high-vis jackets. The numbers were higher than I’d expected, even accounting for the Buckinghamshire gang who had time on their hands due to their own hunt never running the last week in November.

“I did a sneaky Facebook campaign,” Rae explained as he tied his bandana around his neck. “Anonymous profile in the local arts college groups, and Mumsnet pages. I wrote a couple of diary entries from a vixen’s point of view, stayed away from the gruesome photos, and stuck to some low-key emotional impact. It seemed to work better than upsetting people so much they don’t stick around to absorb what we’re saying.”

Some days I forgot that Rae was a man with stories to tell, a painter with a thousand words as his brush. “I want to read what you wrote.”

Rae gave me another dead stare. “No, you don’t.”

“Rae—”

Meg stepped between us, an open box in her arms. She handed us a radio each, brand new and sleek. “Saves worrying about losing phone signal.”

Clearly surprised, Rae turned his over in his hand. “Where the fuck did these come from?”

“We got another big donation.” Meg inclined her head at me. “And Cash said we needed them, so Drey went out and got them from Costco last night. You were asleep by six, Rae. I didn’t want to wake you.”

She moved on.

Rae raised an eyebrow at me. “Was the big donation from you?”

“Fuck no.” I shook my head. “I cleaned myself out last time. You must have someone else rooting for you.”

Rae didn’t seem convinced, but short of showing him my empty savings account, there wasn’t much I could do about that.

The gang assembled by the gate for a last minute briefing from Fletch. He split us up, a prospect that relieved and terrified me in equal measure. I didn’t know the ground, so I’d slow Rae down if things got lary, but on separate teams, chances were I’d lose track of him. That he’d be facing heavies with quad bikes and crow bars without me at his back.

I swallowed thickly and joined Meg. I’d been tasked with driving her to the most likely area the hunt would start, in Rae’s van, and keeping her safe as she filmed and monitored as much as she could.

“Take it seriously,” Fletch growled when he caught me staring at the side of Rae’s head. “Anyone touches my missus, he’s a dead man.”

I believed him.

Rae was partnered with Sprig to run interference, both active and reactive. They’d worked together a long time, and the deployments made sense, but seeing them depart for the woodland without me left me feeling slightly sick. I wasn’t used to playing possum.

The rest of the group disbanded. Meg took my arm and gave me the kind of smile that made it seem as though we’d known each other years instead of barely a month.

“Hard not to worry, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t sleep the night before a hunt, especially one like this.”

I tracked her gaze as it darted around us. “What’s so hot about this hunt?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but there’s something in the air, don’t you think?”

Her non-answers got on my nerves, but a moment later, something in the air turned out to be the squadron of police cars that appeared on our tail as soon as we emerged from the lane that led to Fletch’s land. Three in total, including a souped-up Audi that was better suited to chasing down drug dealers.

Unease crept over me, as potent as desire, but far less fun. I rubbed the back of my neck. I wasn’t imaginative enough to associate every copper I ever saw with my fucked-up love life, but seeing them mob-handed on hunt day nudged old ghosts to life. Logic told me they’d used their common sense to appear close to the camp, but why so many? And why was Rae’s gang on their radar so much they had the time to lie in wait for us?

Our florescent escort boxed me in, as though they knew exactly where I was going, and sure enough, the car up front led me to the spot Fletch had advised me to park the van.

We got out. Meg smiled amiably at the coppers, but I didn’t have it in me. Suspicion burned my veins and it was all I could do to keep my head down and trail Meg to the gate where the woods met open fields.

The police followed, and even when the monitors and Bucks sabs joined our ranks, they outnumbered us.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. “It’s like they’re herding us.”

Meg fiddled with her Go-Pro. “They do that. It’s to keep us as separate from the hunt as possible so they have nothing to do.”

“They don’t do anything anyway, though,” a Bucks sab protested. “Our car was rolled into a ditch last week and they just watched.”

Stories like that had been told a thousand times over. I tuned everyone out as they swapped gossip, and scanned the horizon. Goon’s house was in the distance, but I couldn’t see the driveway, and the fields were quiet—too quiet, for this time on hunt day. Even if they were rolling the hounds out from a hidden location, something somewhere should’ve been moving by now.

I unclipped my radio from my belt. “Do these fuckers even work?”