Blood on the Sand

(Regional prize in the Newcastle Short Story Award 2025)

Labradors, terriers, and kelpies are the household pets and working dogs held in mesh cages along the length of the low aluminium shed. I can’t hear beyond the barking and can’t smell past the dog crap. A long pink tongue licks Charli’s glove like it’s starving, while our fellow inspectors wrestle overwhelmed dogs into slip-leads. The space vibrates with joy, and a primal tension triggered by the presence of men. Every available male inspector attends a dawn raid in case the owner picks violence over cooperation. However, today there’s no one to argue back.

I leave Charli and Amy to their bodycam recording and head back to my truck.

As I age, my pulse is absorbing peripheral sounds. Today it’s chosen burping frogs in this swamp out the back of Salisbury, where our animal cruelty taskforce is collecting bait dogs: some as small as five kilos, a few as big as thirty. From the owner’s place in town, last weekend we seized the pit-bulls and mastiffs honed to rip these poor souls apart. Whoever created catch poles was a genius. I wish we’d been allowed to use them in the police force during demonstrations.

Our thirty-two new dogs, as they’re ours for now, will get impounded until the case floats to the top of our namby-pamby judicial system. The rules don’t allow reuniting them to their owners until there’s a prosecution. Somewhere there’s a kid asking mum where her best friend is. Or a farmer struggling to muster without his mate sweeping the paddocks.

Every killer we seized on the first raid was euthanised.

It’s tough to keep vets at the inspectorate, they arrive having only seen loved animals, then learn the imaginative cruelty of people. Some never give up trying to make our world a better place. Across the state last year, two found suicide easier, and according to the chatter amongst the troops, neither had enough heart left to leave a note.

I slip behind the wheel of my truck and close the door. The engine’s running with the air-con on even though I haven’t any animals onboard. It’s 6:37am.

From the rear seat I retrieve my backpack holding its illegal baton and doubly illegal Taser gun, together with a mess of cables and Raspberry Pi microcomputer from Jaycar loaded to the brim with hacker tools. In my shirt pocket there’s also a fast entry USB. You don’t need to know programming anymore, common websites selling cheap malware and exploits are everywhere. It’s the law enforcement materiel that’s tougher to find.

DefWâre is my guy, or girl, for tactical gear in the on-line world. It could be a mum in an Amalfi apartment flogging weapons on the side, although more likely it’s a Miami teen reselling whatever he picked up at Walmart. Either way DefWâre wraps things nicely, so Customs don’t spook, and he leaves the courier guy thinking I collect second-hand books. My last baton from DefWâre was too short for the rotting meth-head who enjoyed de-earing cats with crimping shears. She dodged my swing and hit my stab vest with an 8-inch kitchen knife, so this time I ordered the 21-inch hardened telescopic baton with the nickel-zinc surface.

Explaining why the druggy’s kneecaps were shattered was a hard conversation with the Chief Inspector. What’s worse is I’m running out of favours with the local cops. They’re mates of mates, and I’ve never worked with any of them, so why should they help me out.

Charli thumps my tinted window, leaving a smear in my blind spot to drive me insane later.

I close the bag and crack the door, replacing the smell of dead cigarettes with warm grass. Her armpits have grown dark and there’s fresh blood on her gloves. She says the guys are loading the last dogs, and I tell her I’m going to hang around a bit. Being ex-Public Order and Riot Squad, the team don’t mind me snooping around, regardless of the rules, just in case I find something extra we can feed the police.

Charli’s strides are short, so I move aside to not walk into her back. The first to arrive, hardest to work, she takes any overtime offered plus her fifty-hour week. She and Amy are saving for a place in Tenambit, yet whenever they get close to the deposit, the banks lift their interest rates. Dog now masks her usual scent of coconut soap and Winfield Blue’s.

In another shed, past a stretch of spongy grass that’s never been mowed, we spot a mum being separated from her pups. Her heavy teats nearly touch the ground. She’s pressing her nose against the calico bag as Adam fills it with her dead babies. For a second, I want to scoop her up and take her home to live with the broken horde I call my old friends, but I don’t because a sixth dog will really piss off the neighbours.

Besides, Adam’s looking at her funnily and I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow, she doesn’t make it onto the register.

We stop beside a large pen holding a labrador. Unlike the others, this enclosure has a concrete floor, and the dog’s pads have worn off from constant pacing. With head bowed he’s oblivious to the brown circuit of smeared shit and blood. He’s as good as dead if the behavioural team can’t draw his mind back from the abyss.

I squeeze Charli’s shoulder for longer than I would any other workmate, then head to the door at the end of the shed which looks like it was assembled in a hurricane. Charli with her no real curves is stronger than she looks. A thick galvanized chain, cut and abandoned on the ground, was her handiwork. From over my shoulder, I ask the obvious question whether anyone’s heard where the owner is.

She hopes he’s lying in a ditch somewhere with his legs broken.

As the first trucks roll out with their saved cargo, I shove aside the aluminium door and reflexively touch my hip. Before me there’s a weedy yard, an EH Holden missing a bonnet and engine, then twenty yards on a weatherboard bungalow. Behind this gingerbread house there’s a pen designed for dog fighting. The guys can keep thinking I’ve a sixth sense to find these hell holes, they don’t need to know I use the Darknet. As I approach the flyscreen, from my thigh pocket I swap out the leather work gloves for black nitriles.

The door is unlocked; not that a lock was ever going to be a problem. From the left I sweep each room until I’ve circled back to the entrance. Aside from a locked gun safe, nothing stands out. My first port of call will be that early 2000s HP desktop in a room off the kitchen, then it will be the pizza oven across the yard that looks more like an industrial incinerator. Normal people don’t keep wheelbarrows beside food ovens.

Today is day four hundred and ninety since my maiden raid in Howes Valley. Ruby was my first recovery as an animal cruelty inspector. After ten years as a cop, I thought I’d seen everything, yet I wasn’t ready for Ruby who’d been a puppy factory. Only three years old, she was arthritic, wormy, and covered in weeping sores. Our vets poured every medication they could into her and even fudged the books, so management didn’t see the full cost. Eventually even the most determined of us gave up. As she lay on my lap to take her Lethabarb injection, the vet nurses seethed while I broke down for the first time since accidentally killing a kid in Melbourne. Ruby hated no one, not even those who were cruel to her. That day I vowed that someone should be savage for the creatures who can’t be.

Soon after starting the computer my John the Ripper password cracker on the USB lets me through. I don’t get a chance to view much before Charli comes in. The screen goes off and I’m pushing papers around the desk when she finds me.

She calls me an idiot for leaving the magnetic logos on my vehicle, then lectures me like I’m a rookie about deidentify during raids to reduce the chance of being assaulted. Once that’s off her chest, she squints with her wood-coloured eyes and tells me not to be stupid.

When she’s gone, I pour a glass of water from the kitchen tap and notice in the distance the last of our trucks disappear down a gully that winds back to the main road about two clicks away. There’s a hint of rust in the glass by the time I put it down.

At a count of fifty I backtrack for my bag, kill the ignition, and pocket the keys.

Now I’m alone I carefully sift through the guy’s computer. Folders containing photos of men and mauling dogs are unencrypted and emailed to public websites using the guy’s own email address. After the dust settles in a months’ time let’s see what’s in his bank accounts: surely there’s a hidden Bitcoin wallet with a key somewhere. If I find enough cash for Charli’s place, I’ll say my Lotto numbers came through. Ahead of killing the power, I load a keystroke logger with a remote access tool so the rest can be done from the comfort of my home.

When the tech work’s done, I start on the bedroom cupboards but don’t get far before there’s a vehicle tone deeper than ours approaching.

This is not meant to happen in my uniform. Not now in broad daylight.

Before the truck appears I’m back at my pack and the baton’s clipped to my belt. The Taser’s grip is cool and fat in my right hand. From a gap in the blinds, I watch a top of the range Dodge Ram pull up near my car and a heavy-jawed guy exit.

The inspectorate logo grabs his attention. He retrieves what looks like an axe handle from the back tray, then stares straight at the door beside me. Without realising, he’s made everything simple.

It’s only a t-shirt which means the darts won’t fail to penetrate his chest.

Now I realise how weak I’ve become. My left hand unclips the baton and with a sharp flick the hardened pole snaps to its full length. I bend at the knees and blink freely as my pulse slows to the creak of footsteps on the timber porch. It’s better when they’re big, they stay conscious for longer.

Unlike that cat mutilator, no amount of surgical pins will repair this one.