Then, his voice quiet, near her ear: ‘You want me to beat on you a bit? Make it look good?’

She struggled to shake her head.

‘There’s two ways this can go. We can beat you and drag you outta here or you can walk out. Up to you. Not sure how much you’ve put over these people.’

There was a sound of more retching nearby.

Then the man said loudly, ‘What’re you all looking at? Never seen a bloke beat up a girl before?’

And then she was moving, the carpet beneath her eyes swimming. She heard people moving about, muttering. No telling if they’d bought it. She felt sick with herself. It wasn’t just the headlock.

They were driving in an old ute, a dual cab. Sharon in the back. The moustached one—Judah, she heard the younger man call him––was smoking with the window down. It made Sharon gag but she didn’t cough. She provided them with directions when necessary but otherwise remained silent.

She felt powerless again. No weapon to defend herself. Stupid, leaving it at home. These two men could do anything they wanted to her.

‘Sorry about all that back there,’ Martin, the younger one said, turning his head slightly to afford her a glance. She would have preferred him to focus on the road. ‘So you’re Sharon? Sharon Wornkin?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re the one Cahill’s paying off?’

The words were like bitter lemon.

Martin repeated, ‘Sorry about your bloke back there.’

Judah snorted. ‘I barely touched him. He was drunk.’

‘We just thought, in front of all those people, you might like to keep up the appearance of being a good cop,’ Martin said. ‘Good for the town, you know. They don’t all know you and Ernie have ties, do they?’

‘Never mind me looking piss-weak, hey,’ she said. ‘You planned that?’

‘Well,’ Martin said. ‘Not exactly that.’

‘You shouldn’t have hurt him.’

‘He’s fine,’ Judah said. ‘He is piss-weak, if that roughed him up.’

Sharon sat silently for a moment before saying, ‘Doesn’t make me look good though, does it? I didn’t say anything while you were hurting him. And then me leaving with you. Makes me look like a coward, like I can’t control things.’

Martin said, ‘Guess we didn’t think of that.’

Judah laughed. ‘He’s still piss-weak.’

‘Well,’ Martin said, ‘how about we head around to Jack’s in the morning with our hats in our hands and apologise or something. Make out that it was a misunderstanding. That you’d arrested us, took us in. We could do that.’

‘Just leave it,’ Sharon said. ‘He already thought I was weak. It’ll blow over.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Besides, I’m not telling you where he lives.’

Sharon watched as the houses flicking by her window decreased in number and were replaced with fields. They drove over a drain, a large pipe making a small mound in the bitumen. The ute’s suspension handled it well.

‘Let me show you something,’ Martin said suddenly and turned right, onto a gravel road canopied by the paperbarks lining either side. In the dark Sharon saw kangaroos tipping their ears at the sound of the ute.