Dark City Blue: A Tom Bishop Rampage by Luke Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t listening. He slumped to the floor and stayed there as the crime scene came alive around him.
    He waited until after the Homicide detectives arrived, until after the photographs were taken and until Chloe Richards’ body was laid in a government-issued body bag and taken away.
    What was left of the shooters was still in the lobby. Their blood was sprayed on the walls like a bad Jackson Pollock painting. His steps slowed when he saw what he had done to the hitter with the cricket bat. What was left of his face was a mash of bone and pink and it was hard to make out where he ended and the carpet began.
    Bishop used the wall to hold himself up. He wanted to vomit but swallowed hard, pushing everything back down. He made it out of the lobby, onto the front steps of the building. He tried to get air into his lungs with gasping, deep breaths. Tears streamed down his face and he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.
    He felt a calming hand on the back of his neck and his breaths drew longer, his hand stopped shaking and his mind slowed.
    Patrick Wilson looked over his shoulder at the corpse in the lobby and sat down. ‘You’re alright, mate, come on,’ he said with a hand rubbing Bishop’s back.
    ‘Did you see what I did in there?’
    ‘You did what needed to be done,’ Wilson said.
    Bishop wiped the cold sweat from his brow. ‘There’s something inside me I don’t understand.’
    Blue light from an unmarked crossed Wilson’s face as it arrived on the scene. He put a hand on Bishop’s shoulder. ‘Sometimes a little violence is not a bad thing.’
    He told Bishop he was a hero. That he took down five traffickers, sex offenders. Scum. He told him that he saved the lives of sixteen under-aged girls. That he would get a commendation, a medal even. But when Tom Bishop thought of Chloe Richards or the five men he had just killed, he didn’t feel like a hero.
    *
    It was near dawn by the time Bishop arrived home. His feet moved slow, his body was heavy; pushing through the front door felt as if he were trying to move a wall. He closed it gently so as not to wake Alice and moved through the room collecting the clothes she had left strewn over the floor and on the backs of chairs. He folded them into a neat pile on the edge of the kitchen table. His shoulder was sore, his back ached and he wanted to wash the smell of ugliness off his skin.
    He had stepped through the hall and wrapped his fist around the bathroom doorknob before the sound of vomiting on the other side stopped him.
    Bishop rubbed his tired face and sighed.
    When the toilet flushed, he knocked. ‘Is everything okay in there?’
    ‘… Everything’s okay.’
    Bishop took a half step toward the kitchen before slowing to a stop. He looked back at the door. ‘Do you want to talk? Is that how your mother does it?’
    The door unlocked with a click. Alice sat on the floor with her back to the bath and her head in her hands. She had been crying but was now all cried out and there were no tears left.
    He sat next to her. His big knees up near his chin and his arm around her shoulders. He pulled her close. ‘Everything will be okay,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
    She let out a long howl that muffled into his leather jacket.
    ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s okay.’
    When she calmed down she told him the father was some piece of shit that gave her three hundred dollars for an abortion and told her to lose his number.
    He told her everything would be okay.
    He thought of Chloe Richards and the next time he said those words they sounded hollow.

Chapter Nine
    Flashing lights ripped through the morning sky. The block was cordoned off, yellow tape and rookie uniforms pushed the spectators away but didn’t stop them from eyeballing the scene and recording what they saw on their mobile phones. The flow of traffic from the eastern suburbs into the CBD crawled to a stop turning the far end of St Kilda Road into a car park.
    The scene ran from