Blood Sport (Little Town) Read online

  Blood Sport

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Blood Sport

  by JD Nixon

  Copyright JD Nixon 2011

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or real locations, is purely coincidental. The police force and justice system and their operations and procedures depicted in this book are purely the product of the author’s imagination and are not based on any real jurisdiction.

  JD Nixon is an Australian author. Australian English and spelling have been used in this book.

  Discover other titles by JD Nixon available at many ebook:

  Heller series

  Book 1: Heller (free ebook!)

  Book 2: Heller’s Revenge

  Book 3: Heller’s Girlfriend

  Book 4: Heller’s Punishment

  Book 5: Heller’s Decision

  Book 6: Heller’s Regret

  Book 7: Heller’s Family (to be published)

  Little Town series

  Book 1: Blood Ties (free ebook!)

  Book 2: Blood Sport

  Book 3: Blood Feud

  Book 4: Blood Tears (to be published)

  Book 5: as yet unnamed (to be published)

  Cover design by Infinity Rain

  ~~~~~~ ###### ~~~~~~

  Cuttings from my scrapbook . . .

  Wattling Bay Messenger, Tuesday, 16 December 1919

  Local man to hang for ‘animalistic’ murder; family members arrested for assaulting police

  An unemployed man, Joseph James Bycraft, aged eighteen years, was yesterday sentenced to death for the murder of Ruth Anne Fuller, aged fifteen years, in Mount Big Town in May of this year. The presiding judge, Justice Henries, condemned Bycraft for the brutality of the murder and his complete lack of remorse, stating that his animalistic urges had robbed the Fuller family of a daughter, sister and niece.

  Miss Fuller was knocked from her bicycle by Bycraft as she cycled to meet a friend at the beach. Bycraft then dragged her to a nearby field where she was indecently treated before being strangled to death. The court heard during the trial that Bycraft was strongly infatuated with Miss Fuller and had pestered her for many years, ignoring repeated warnings from her father and brothers to stay away from her. Mr Fuller had been forced to report him to the local constable on four separate occasions in the last year in response to Bycraft’s increasingly threatening behaviour towards his daughter. It is not known what precipitated the vicious murder, but witnesses stated that Miss Fuller had scorned Bycraft in front of her friends the previous day, at which time he was heard to yell loudly at her, “You’ll be sorry soon enough for your sharp tongue”.

  Miss Fuller’s parents, grandparents, and three brothers were in court to hear the death sentence being handed down, and took the news with quiet dignity, despite their obvious distress. However, members of the Bycraft family created a shameful uproar by yelling obscenities at Justice Henries and the Fuller family, before rightfully being ejected from the courtroom by court officials.

  Three members of the Bycraft family were consequently arrested for assault, after spitting on and kicking police officers outside the courthouse. They will appear in the Wattling Bay Magistrates Court next week.

  Wattling Bay Messenger, Tuesday, 18 November 2008

  Bycraft sentenced to life for motiveless murder

  In the Wattling Bay Supreme Court today, Justice Maria Givenchy handed down a life sentence to Craig Richard Bycraft, 30, unemployed of Mount Big Town. Bycraft was found guilty of the sickening and seemingly motiveless murder of young mother, Marcelle Antoinette Stormley, 25, also of Mount Big Town, in July this year.

  During the trial the court heard that Bycraft waylaid Mrs Stormley as she waited for her friend to go for an evening jog in preparation for a charity fun run in the city. Mrs Stormley was taken by surprise by Bycraft and had no opportunity to defend herself against the attack. She was sexually assaulted before being bludgeoned to death with an iron bar.

  No motive for the attack was established, but police believe that it was a case of mistaken identity. Bycraft admitted during police interviews that he had intended to target Mrs Stormley’s jogging partner instead. The court heard that Mrs Stormley had been well rugged up against the cold air with her features obscured on the night of her murder, and had been wearing a distinctive jacket that she had borrowed from her friend that afternoon. Bycraft later retracted his admission, insisting that it had been made under duress and denied that the attack was premeditated.

  Family and friends of Mrs Stormley, who leaves behind a husband and young daughter, wept in court as the sentence was handed down. Members of Bycraft’s family shouted abuse at Justice Givenchy. Four of them were later arrested, three for assaulting court security officers, and one for serious assault against the detective in charge of the case, Detective Inspector Fiona Midden.

  Bycraft’s father, Robert (known as Bobby) Bycraft, was brutally killed himself in the city jail almost seven years ago while also serving a life sentence for rape and murder.

  Bycraft is expected to appeal his conviction.

  Wattling Bay Messenger, Sunday, 22 May 2011

  Fugitive fires shots at cops

  Two police officers were shot at in Mount Big Town last night, both sustaining shrapnel wounds in the face and neck. At the time of the attack, the officers were attending a residence in Jarrah Street after receiving an anonymous tip-off that fugitive Redmond Christopher Bycraft, 35, was present at the house. Bycraft escaped from custody four months ago.

  Investigations are continuing into the shooting.

  Prologue

  As I sleep, my mind forces me to relive that terrible evening three years ago. During the day I ruthlessly quash any thought of it, but at night every detail returns with awful clarity.

  In my dream, I’m as flustered again as I was on that fateful evening. Snatching the keys to my little silver hatchback from the hall table, I yell out goodbye to Dad over my shoulder. I carelessly fling open the front door and hurtle through the doorway. I jump down the five steps leading from the front verandah, landing on our patchy lawn with a slight jarring of my left ankle.

  “Slow down, love, or you’ll do yourself an injury,” scolds Dad fondly, walking to the stairs to wave me off. I’m running
late, held up by a phone call from my best friend, Marianne. She called me from the city to tell me that she’s pregnant again, after a recent miscarriage. Overjoyed for her, I chatted for far too long, losing track of the time.

  I throw myself into the driver’s seat and switch on the ignition, jamming the car into reverse, a horrible crunch of gears my reward for my haste. I hope that Dad hasn’t heard, but the grimace on his face and slow shake of his head as I speed down the driveway suggest otherwise.

  I screech left at my gate without braking and with only a cursory check for oncoming traffic, even though I’m pulling out on to the Coastal Range Highway. I plant my foot on the accelerator and push my little car as fast as it will go, disregarding the sixty kilometre speed limit. Doesn’t matter, I decide, because I know the town’s two cops very well. And Ryan, the young constable, is notoriously easy to sway with a pretty smile. Being a cop as well doesn’t hurt either, I remind myself wryly.

  It’s almost fifteen minutes past the time that Marcelle and I agreed to meet for our evening jog and I hate being late. Especially as it was my idea to postpone our jog until tonight, using the day to catch up with old friends. I’m on one of my irregular weekend returns from the city to visit Dad in the small town in which I’d been born and raised.

  It’s the middle of winter and the night air is particularly freezing – something about a cold front sweeping in from Antarctica, I’d heard on the TV weather forecast. I’d lent Marcelle my new sheepskin jacket earlier in the day after she complained that her young sister-in-law, Romi, had borrowed her warmest jacket and taken it to a friend’s place for a sleepover. I have a spare, but it’s not as cute as the deep purple jacket I’d recently bought in the city and proudly worn as I flitted here and there in town today.

  I turn off the highway into the side street that bounds the small corner park we’ve agreed to meet in. The park has an unbreakable security light over the entrance to its public facilities, making it one of the safest places to meet in town at night. I step out of my car, careful to lock it behind me.

  There’s no sign of Marcelle. That’s strange, I think. She’s usually as careful about timekeeping as I am. I settle myself on the low log fence that surrounds the park and pull my jacket around me more tightly. But it’s so cold that after a few minutes I’m forced to stand up and jog on the spot to keep myself warm. Where is she?

  Reluctantly, I yank my phone from my pocket and ring the town’s only pub, which Marcelle and her husband, Abe, own. When Abe answers, I enquire after Marcelle, wondering if she’s been held up, keeping my voice deliberately casual. But he’s anxious straight away, telling me that he dropped her off at the park twenty minutes ago. He’d wanted to wait with her until I turned up, but she’d waved him away, laughing in her delightfully throaty way that I’d be there in a second because I was never late. I hang up on him without another word and cram my phone back into my pocket.

  Stomach tense with fear, I start looking for Marcelle, wishing I had a torch on me. I unsheathe the cruelly sharp hunting knife I always have strapped to my thigh and grip it tightly in my right hand. I search quickly behind the toilet block, nervous in its dark shadows. There’s nothing there. Frantic, I run wildly around the rest of the small park, searching everywhere, calling her name.

  Nothing.

  Frustrated, I move over to the beautiful fig tree that is the centrepiece of the park. It was planted back in the early 1920s to commemorate a brave local boy who died a hero at Pozieres during World War I. I walk cautiously around its huge girth, the breath forced from my lungs when I spot one of Marcelle’s running shoes carelessly lying on the ground. I can’t breathe for a minute. Creeping around the tree, I see her other shoe and her legs bare in the freezing weather, her tracksuit pants bunched down around her ankles.

  That’s not sensible, I think to myself in shock. What is she doing lying on the chilly dewed grass like that? She’ll catch a cold.

  Moving further around the trunk, I find the rest of her. She is sprawled indecently, exposed for everyone to see, my sheepskin jacket torn open, the zip ripped apart. Her running top is pulled up high, her sports bra in two pieces, breasts uncovered. Her arms are flung wide apart, as if she was preparing to embrace her awful fate.

  Her face is still, her large brown eyes staring up to the heavens sightlessly, frozen open with fear. Her long, black hair is a mess, sticky and matted, pulled from its ponytail. Something white and bony protrudes through her hair. I know what it is, but my brain won’t process the information. She is like a sister to me. She is married to one of my oldest friends. She is mother to a darling little girl.

  This is not happening, I tell myself, eyes clamped shut in horror. My stomach rolls with nausea and I’m afraid I’m going to throw up everywhere.

  I open my eyes to look down at her violated body again. Suddenly, her beautiful eyes blink and she turns her shattered head to look up at me, staring at me accusingly. Slowly and awkwardly, as if she’s lost her muscular coordination, she pushes herself up to a sitting position. Her bared breasts undulate as she moves, full and round and stark white, riddled with vicious bite marks. Her head is a strange shape, and I realise with a jolt that the left side is caved in. Coagulating blood oozes down her neck to her chest and breasts.

  Involuntarily, I step backwards, breathing rapidly in ragged gasps, cloudy mists of air vapour escaping from my mouth.

  Her lips snarl back, revealing bloodied smashed teeth. Her voice is thick as if there is something clogging her throat.

  “It should have been you, Tessie. Not me,” she spits out bitterly in her accented English, her bloodstained hand rising so she can point a finger at me. I notice that her nail has been torn off.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I whisper to her, over and over, until my throat closes up and all I can manage is an inarticulate gurgle. Bile fills my mouth and I fight the strong urge to vomit.

  She jabs her finger in my direction angrily. “It should have been you!”

  I stumble backwards, shaking hands up in front of me and trip over her discarded shoe, falling heavily on my butt.

  She moves clumsily on to her hands and knees and crawls towards me, her eyes fixed on mine. “It should have been you!”

  I scrabble backwards on my butt, propelling myself with my hands and feet, crying and terrified.

  Her hand reaches out and grasps my ankle.

  And I wake up, screaming and screaming.

  Chapter 1

  The note had been pushed under my front door sometime during the night while I slept, dreaming of Marcelle. I knew who it was from and what it would say even before I opened it, because it wasn’t the first one I’d received. He was taunting me, letting me know he was in town, moving about freely, creeping around my house at night, unafraid of being caught.

  I picked up the note and unfolded it. His handwriting was scrawled – he’d written it in a hurry this time. He always left me the same message, which only emphasised its simple threat.

  Lovely Tessie

  I’m coming for you.

  Red

  Impassively, I read the familiar words and added the note to the other five I’d stored in an envelope that I kept in my underwear drawer. I’d tell the Sarge about it when I saw him later, even though there was nothing he could do.

  Red Bycraft was coming for me. I only hoped that I’d be ready for him when it happened. I only hoped that I found him first.

  *****

  Unsettled and tired from my awful nightmare, I moved on autopilot. Half-asleep still, I drowsily dressed in my running gear and strapped my hunting knife around my thigh as I always did. I made my way down the stairs to the front gate, surprised to find it was raining lightly. I hadn’t heard it from inside, although normally the tin roof on my old timber house amplified the sound of rain. Yawning hugely and stretching my sleep-cramped muscles, I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head and waited patiently for my usual running companions, jogging on the spot and rubbing my arms to k
eep warm in the cold air. I wished I’d added an extra layer of warmth, even though I knew I’d regret it about fifteen minutes into my run.

  Nobody turned up.

  I checked my watch, flicking on its light. It was bang on six o’clock, but still totally dark in the early winter morning. I tutted self-righteously to myself, thinking about Romi and the Sarge tucked up cosily in their beds, giving our regular early morning exercise a miss.

  Pikers, I thought derisively as I headed off slowly through the light rain down the Coastal Range Highway, which led past my house into Little Town. I’d give the Sarge a right serve for being so damn lazy when he turned up at the station later this morning.

  Beach or mountain? I argued to myself, trying to decide between Beach Road and Mountain Road for my jog. Beach Road led east from town in a gentle decline past the secret bikie retreat and the nudist community. It terminated with a carpark and a set of stone steps leading down to the town’s beautiful cove beach with its small expanse of cruel calf-killing soft sand. Mountain Road, on the other hand, led west up to Lake Big and Mount Big and had a cruelly steep calf-killing incline. Decisions, decisions. In the end I took the easier option and turned into Beach Road, much preferring the pain of the soft sand to that of the seemingly unending mountain trek. Mount Big wasn’t called that for nothing.

  It was very dark. There were no street lights on Beach Road and I was totally dependent on my headlight torch to stop me running off the road into the surrounding coastal scrubland. The one advantage of the darkness was that I could see vehicles coming from miles away by their headlights. The disadvantage was that I could easily be ambushed by someone waiting patiently in the dark for me.