Dark City Blue: A Tom Bishop Rampage Read Online Free

headed to the rear of the store and found the toiletry section next to the car care products and picked up a box of tissues, face wipes and some make-up. He struggled with them on his way back to the counter and dumped them on the bench.
    Bishop poured a couple of coffees, but when he reached for his wallet, the man glimpsed his badge. ‘No, no, no. No charge,’ he said with a wave of his hand.
    ‘No, mate, I can’t do that.’ Bishop sifted through the notes in his hands.
    ‘Next time I get robbed, you come, you come.’
    ‘When was the last time you got robbed?’
    ‘Last week.’
    Bishop pointed to the floor. ‘You got robbed here?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You’re only a few blocks from Brunswick Station.’
    ‘Next time you come, free coffee.’
    Most of the coppers Bishop knew had used their truth suits or badges to get discounts or free lunches at some stage in their lives. A couple of bucks here, a free beer there; it was part of the job, a perk the bosses didn’t endorse but couldn’t stop. The perk wasn’t for Bishop. He always felt like he was stealing and the guilt was never worth the discount.
    The old man wouldn’t let the issue drop, so Bishop left some cash on the counter and walked out. He climbed into the car, cranked up the engine and put the bag of cosmetics on Alice’s lap.
    ‘What’s this?’
    ‘You can’t go back to your mother looking like you’ve spent half the night in jail.’
    ‘I have spent half the night in jail.’
    ‘Doesn’t mean you have to look like it.’
    A smile came to her face. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
    Yesterday’s make-up came off easily and with it she lost the anger and attitude. She saw the scars on his knuckles. The badge chained around his neck. The bulge of the gun under his leather jacket.
    ‘Why a cop?’ she asked.
    Bishop leant back in his seat and thought about it, and it wasn’t something he thought about often. ‘It was a way out?’
    ‘From what?’
    ‘A bad future?’
    ‘How’s that working out for you?’
    Bishop smiled; she was growing on him. ‘My old man, your grandfather, we used to live on the road. He was a trucker; we bounced around from place to place. Drive a load across the country, drop it off, pick up another and drive it someplace else. Lived out of the cab, ate in roadhouses, that sort of thing. But the old man liked the drink, and when he drank he liked to mouth off. One night he mouthed off and got his throat cut.’
    Alice frowned. Bishop wasn’t sure if it was out of disgust or horror. He figured it didn’t matter; they were both bad enough and he wondered why he actually told her that. ‘I wasn’t there,’ he said.
    But that was a lie. The thirteen-year-old Tom Bishop was copping size ten steel-capped boots while trying to shield his bleeding father.
    His old man wasn’t easy.
    His old man was a drunk.
    Bishop wasn’t even their real name.
    His mother, Billie, was a philanthropist and being poor meant she had little to give. She volunteered at the Salvation Army, at local charities and when somebody passed away she was always the first to bake a casserole for the family. His father Roy was a petty criminal at best. Everything in their house had fallen off the back of a truck and holding a steady job was difficult for a man who slept until three in the afternoon and was drunk by seven.
    When Tom was five years old, he watched his father cave in his mother’s face with the butt of a longneck. The day before he had had a win at Flemington on a sixty-to-one horse and come home with $9000. That was more money Billie had seen in her life and she came to the conclusion that they couldn’t possibly spend it all themselves so she donated $4500 of it to the local church and for the rest of the afternoon felt good about being able to help. She baked a cake, cooked a roast and when Roy woke up to find half his money in the hip pocket of a church he didn’t believe in, his fist wrapped around the first thing in reach. He swung