Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

pieces: brawls, convenience-store hold-ups, cars wrapped around trees resulting in injury and death.
    The parents never knew. Most were shocked to find out what their kids had been doing. Some didn't give a damn.
    Stewing, Ellen went inside, looked up the number for Carl Lister in Upper Penzance and dialled. It was one-thirty in the morning but the phone was snatched up at the first ring. 'Yo.'
    Yo yourself, Ellen thought. 'Mr Lister?'
    The tone changed, as though this wasn't the call that Carl Lister had been expecting. 'Yep.'
    'Ellen Destry speaking.'
    Silence, then, 'Sorry, do I know you?'
    A hint of an accent in Lister's voice. South African, that was it. 'Your son attended my daughter's birthday party tonight.'
    'Uh-huh.'
    'Well, he's lying in our back yard in a pool of vomit.'
    A suggestion of matey laughter. 'Little bugger.'
    Ellen clenched her jaw. 'Mr Lister? I said, your son's lying here—'
    'Look, give him a coffee, put him in his car, send him home. I'll sort him out when he gets here.'
    'I can't do that. He's been drinking.'
    'Well, obviously, it was a party, wasn't it?'
    'Mr Lister, he could crash his car and kill himself. Worse, he could kill or injure someone else.'
    Irritation showed in Carl Lister's voice. 'I don't know what
I'm
supposed to do about it.'
    'You're his father, aren't you?'
    'He's old enough to look after himself. Old enough to clean up after himself.'
    'He's barely nineteen.'
    'So? When I was eighteen I—'
    'Mr Lister, please come and collect your son.'
    'Can't he sleep it off there? Drive himself home in the morning?'
    'I don't run a hotel.'
    'Christ, look, it's not convenient right now.'
    Ellen went icy. She disliked playing the cop card, but sometimes it was necessary and it usually got results.
    'I know what we can do,' she said. 'I'll ring the Waterloo police station and say to the duty officer, "It's Detective Sergeant Destry speaking. Send a van to my house, I've got a prisoner for the station lockup".'
    In the silence that followed, she said, 'How would that do, Mr Lister? You can drive to the station in the morning and fetch your son. That way only a couple of constables—who would be on patrol duty anyway—will be inconvenienced.'
    Carl Lister snarled, 'Give us your address. I'll leave right away.'
    Ellen smiled and there was no warmth in it.

CHAPTER SIX

    Mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday. Mostyn Pearce fed Blur, his ferret, then went for a walk. He walked for an hour a day obsessively, counting cars, counting gates and potholes, and his walk always took in Five Furlong Road. You had Ian Munro's paddocks on the left, sloping down to Penzance Beach, and higher up on the right, along a ridge that commanded million-dollar views of the sea, you had Upper Penzance, an enclave of twenty or thirty houses on two- and three-acre blocks, ranging in price from $400 000 to $750 000. Trucked-in palm trees and other exotics, dirt roads, a general sense of shutting out the rat race.
    Shutting out Mostyn Pearce in his dingy new housing-estate bungalow at the bottom of the hill, in other words.
    What irritated Pearce—and he'd written to the editor of the
Progress
about it—was the air of privilege, like there were rules for the residents of Upper Penzance and different rules for people like him. It was stupid. They resisted mains water, insisting that every householder use tank water. They didn't want made roads, only leafy dirt lanes. They even kept taking down the roadsign to discourage daytrippers.
    As Pearce had pointed out in one of his letters to the
Progress
: 'What if there's a house or bushfire in Upper Penzance? The access roads are choked with trees, the tracks are potholed, there's very little available water, let alone water pressure'.
    The editor had printed that one. She didn't take everything he sent her, like his defence of the detention centre and the need to isolate the queue jumpers, but given that he sent her several letters a week and the newspaper came out only once a