Read Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down for Free Online

week, there was always something for her to use. She'd started calling him the Meddler about six months ago. At first he'd been offended—it sounded derisive—but now he liked it. And after every Meddler column there was always plenty of supportive mail for her letters-to-the-editor column.
    Not a peep from the residents of Upper Penzance after his bushfire letter, but.
    He always had something to write about. Like on Thursday last week he'd been passing one of the houses on Five Furlong Road and seen that they'd fastened an American-style letter box to the front gate, complete with a little red metal flag on the side. He'd been seized with fury. He wanted to sit the guy down and slap him about the face and demand to know
why
, since this
wasn't
America, he'd erected an American letter box? And what, pray tell, is the little red flag supposed to indicate? he wanted to say. Is the postie supposed to put it up whenever he pops mail into your box? If this were America you'd put it up to indicate that you had letters for him to collect—but this
isn't
America, arsehole. Even if the postie could give a shit one way or the other, what makes you think he's got the time or energy or inclination to shift the stupid lever?
    The arm was up again today. Pearce clicked it down.
    He walked on, coming to Ian Munro's fenceline and the metal sign that read 'Any person caught stealing firewood off this property will be prosecuted', the word 'prosecuted' spraypainted out and substituted by the word 'shot'.
    And that's when he saw the sheep. Distressed sheep, a dozen of them, hollow-ribbed, spines bowed in exhaustion, heads drooping. Baked dirt under their feet. No water in the trough, only a greenish sludge at the bottom. A car went by him on the road, a woman driving, and he turned to face her, indicating the sorry spectacle of the sheep with a gesture of his right hand, inviting her to share his outrage.
    But the car headed obliviously on up the road toward Upper Penzance, so Mostyn Pearce went home and fired off an anonymous call to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Then he glanced at his watch. Whoops. Three-thirty in the afternoon, and he started work at four. Time he was gone. He set the VCR to tape tonight's 'International Most Wanted', a true-crime program on one of the pay TV channels, kissed his wife and daughter, and left for work.

    As she passed the oddball looking over a fence at some tired sheep, Ellen Destry slowed the car to scrutinise him more closely. Pinched, unhappy face, dainty Michael Jackson nose, scalp shaved within an inch of its life and full of pale, defenceless ridges. But harmless, and so she continued along Five Furlong Road and into Upper Penzance. She was bone-tired after last night, the business with Skip Lister and his father, the cleaning up this morning. And it wasn't finished. There was a leather jacket on the seat beside her. It belonged to Skip Lister and she'd found it stowed behind a sofa cushion just before lunch. It had taken all morning to make the house presentable again. The odour of cigarette smoke lingered in the curtains and upholstery. Puddles of vomit waited for her in unlikely places. The carpet was sodden with spilt beer and spirits—but not red wine, thank God. Cigarette burns on the mantelpiece. Someone's knickers—none too clean either— under a deckchair on the side verandah. A couple of condoms underneath the ti-trees at the back.
    Alan was working from eight until four today, otherwise she might have done her block and shouted, 'Didn't you keep an eye on them
at all
last night?'
    She glanced at her watch. Four in the afternoon. He'd be driving home about now. She sighed: she simply felt too fatigued and dispirited to contemplate a row with him later. Besides, in a sense he wouldn't be there but shut inside the dining room to study for another shot at the sergeants' exam. Meanwhile sex had become an infrequent and complicated transaction. Their lives