Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down Read Online Free PDF

daughter. 'What's wrong?'
    A dirty look from Alan said she'd been out having fun while he'd been stuck at home trying to maintain order with thirty teenagers. She ignored him, placed her hands on Larrayne's face. 'Sweetie?'
    Larrayne had lost weight in the past year. She'd been plump and awkwardly shaped before, as though her torso and arms had lengthened but not her legs or neck. Now she was perfectly proportioned: tall, willowy and, when the puffiness and skin blemishes faded from her cheeks in the next year or so, likely to be a stunner. Larrayne raised her damp, blotchy face. 'Someone brought vodka and ecstasy, Mum,' she said, baffled and offended.
    Ellen folded her daughter close against her and glanced inquiringly at her husband.
    He took offence. 'Lay off. Don't blame me. What was I supposed to do? I'm just one person, not a squad of security guards.'
    A straggle of teenagers edged past them in the hallway, eyeing them apprehensively, all of the cheer gone out of their goodbyes. Then the Destrys were alone in the house, the front door sealing them from the night, the last car accelerating through the slumbering streets.
    'I'm really sorry,' Ellen said. 'I tried to get home early but we were on a stakeout and made an arrest and it all took a while.'
    She lifted a hand from her daughter's shoulderblades and reached for her husband's arm. 'Alan, sweetheart…'
    Some of the tension left him. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and looked deeply fatigued, rubbing both hands along his bulky jaw. 'One of the kids must have chucked booze and pills over the back fence. It took me a while to realise that half of the kids were stoned and others were coming and going from the back yard all night.' He laughed bitterly. 'I thought they were after fresh air.'
    'Do we know who it was?'
    Larrayne disengaged herself from Ellen and shook her head miserably. 'I
told
everyone no alcohol or drugs. Everyone
knows
you're both in the police. How could they do this to me?'
    'We'd better search the yard,' Ellen said.
    If she could find the remains of the stash, maybe she could get some useful prints and track them back to the supplier. It was the supplier she wanted, not the kid. If she arrested the kid, then her daughter's name would be mud. Fetching a torch from the wall hook beside the back door, she stepped out onto the deck that overlooked the yard, and began to poke the torchlight into the shadows beneath her.
    Plenty of bottles and cans. Someone's windcheater. Crumpled cigarette packets.
    And, half concealed by shrubbery, a pair of slender legs in jeans and trainers.
    Beside her Alan said, 'God almighty,' and clattered down the steps then across the blighted lawn.
    Ellen followed. Behind her Larrayne wailed, 'That's Skip.'
    Skip Lister. Larrayne had brought him home for a meal a couple of times. A slender, edgy but pleasant kid, anxious to please without being fawning, a student at the Frankston campus of Monash University, drove an old Holden fitted with surfboard racks. He lived in an exclusive part of the Peninsula, just off Five Furlong Road in Upper Penzance. Ellen glanced up into the night, past the dark mass that was sloping farmland on the outskirts of Penzance Beach, to Upper Penzance, as if she might see the lights of the Lister house.
    Too late, too dark, too far away.
    Larrayne pushed past her, knelt beside Alan and reached her hand to Skip's face, then recoiled as vomit spurted over her hand.
    'Yuck,' she said. 'Gross.'
    'Roll him onto his side,' Ellen said calmly.
    Her husband snapped, 'I know, I know, I work Traffic, remember? I know what to do.'
    He rolled the boy over, cleared the vomit from the slack mouth, and checked for breathing.
    Skip would have choked to death on his own vomit if we hadn't found him, Ellen thought.
    Suddenly she was furious. She wouldn't mind betting that Skip Lister's parents had no idea where their son was or what he was up to. The police saw it all the time and were usually the ones to pick up the