The Roo Wrangler

"In a city, you get to choose who knows your name. In the outback, that decision was made for you about three hours before you walked through the door."

I was coming out of the change room — sidearm locked away, duty belt hung in the locker, the weight of the uniform swapped for jeans and a jumper that still smelled like the washing powder from my flat — when Brock appeared in the corridor. Already changed, jacket on, keys in hand. He looked like a different person out of uniform, or maybe the same person with the volume turned down — broader in civilian clothes, more relaxed through the shoulders, the kind of bloke you'd see at a barbecue and not immediately think cop.

"Pub?"

One word. No inflection. It wasn't really a question — it was an announcement that the day was over and the next part of the evening had a shape, and I was being offered a place inside it.

"God, yes," I said.

We left through the front. The station behind us was still running — Haynes on the desk, the phones ringing, Mitchell somewhere in the building doing whatever Mitchell did when the visible work was finished and the invisible work began — but the day shift's energy had drained out and been replaced by the thinner, quieter hum of a Friday evening skeleton crew. Harding had left twenty minutes ago.

The walk to the Silver Crown took less than five minutes. Everything in Broken Hill took less than five minutes — I was beginning to understand that distance here wasn't measured in blocks but in who you'd run into on the way. The air had cooled, finally, the winter sun sitting fat and orange on the horizon, throwing long shadows down the side streets and turning the corrugated iron rooftops into sheets of copper. My boots scuffed the pavement. Brock walked beside me with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, the silence between us easy in a way it hadn't been at the start of the week. Five days. I'd been in Broken Hill five days. It felt like a geological era.

"You alright?" Brock asked. Not looking at me. Looking straight ahead, the way men ask things when they want the answer but don't want you to feel the weight of the question.

"Yeah." I thought about it. "I don't know. Yeah."

"Eloquent."

"Piss off."

He almost smiled. Almost.

The Silver Crown sat on the corner of Blende and Crystal, a low-slung pub with a wide verandah and a paint job that had been white sometime during the Hawke government and had since settled into a colour best described as historical. The sign — a silver crown on a navy background, slightly crooked — glowed above the entrance, and beneath it, the double doors were propped open to let the evening air circulate through the front bar. The noise hit us before we reached the steps: voices, laughter, the clink of glasses, a jukebox playing something by Cold Chisel that nobody was listening to but everybody knew. Friday night. The whole town exhaling.

Brock went first. I followed him up the steps, through the open doors, and into the front bar of the Silver Crown.

It was a pub. A proper pub — not a wine bar, not a gastropub, not a renovated heritage space with craft beer taps and a sharing menu. A pub with carpet that had seen better decades, a long timber bar stained dark by a century of spilled beer, stools occupied by blokes whose body shapes had moulded to them over years of dedicated use. The walls were covered in the usual outback inventory: a signed football jersey in a frame, a photograph of the 1978 mine rescue crew, a taxidermied barramundi that was either a record catch or a convincing lie, and a hand-painted sign behind the bar that read IF YOU'RE DRINKING TO FORGET, PLEASE PAY IN ADVANCE. The lighting was low and warm and forgiving, which was appropriate because the carpet needed all the forgiveness it could get.

The bar was full. Not packed — not shoulder-to-shoulder city full — but full in the way a country pub fills on a Friday, every table occupied, the bar three deep in places, clusters of people standing in the gaps between furniture with their drinks held at chest height. The demographic was broad: tradies still in hi-vis, their workboots leaving dust prints on the carpet; council workers in business casual, ties loosened or removed entirely; a table of women my mother's age in nice tops and earrings, clearly making an evening of it; a group of younger blokes around the pool table in the back room, their laughter carrying above the general noise. The air smelled like beer and chips and the particular human warmth of a room where fifty people had been drinking since four o'clock.

We made it three steps inside before it started.

A bloke at the bar — big, red-faced, hi-vis vest unzipped over a sweat-stained singlet — spotted me. Or spotted the face he'd seen on his phone an hour ago, or recognised me from the walk with Keith, or all three at once. He nudged the man beside him. That man turned. The woman beyond him turned. And then it rippled outward the way things do in a room where everyone knows everyone and news travels through eye contact — a wave of recognition, heads turning, conversations pausing mid-sentence, the particular electric attention of a crowd that has been waiting for someone to walk through a door.

"Oi!" The big bloke lifted his schooner. "There she is! The roo wrangler!"

The bar erupted.

Not the whole bar — not everyone — but enough. A cheer went up from the group around the big bloke, genuine and full-throated, the kind of sound that's half celebration and half piss-take and entirely, unmistakably Australian. Glasses were raised. Someone whistled — two fingers in the mouth, a proper ear-splitting shriek that cut through the noise like a siren. A woman at the table of ladies started clapping, and the women around her joined in, their applause rhythmic and deliberate, the slow handclap of people making a point. One of the young blokes from the pool table appeared in the doorway to the back room, cue still in hand, and shouted something I didn't catch but which made his mates howl with laughter.

"Fuckin' legend!" someone called from the far end of the bar. More laughter. More glasses raised.

My face was hot. I could feel it — the blood rushing up my neck and into my cheeks, the particular scalding embarrassment of being the centre of attention in a room full of strangers who all knew something about me that I hadn't chosen to share. I wanted to shrink. I wanted to disappear into the carpet — which, given its condition, might actually have been possible. Instead I stood there, three steps inside the door, with Brock's hand on my back — not guiding, just present, a steady pressure between my shoulder blades that said you're fine, keep moving — and tried to arrange my face into something that wasn't a deer in headlights.

"Smile," Brock murmured, close to my ear. "They're on your side."

I smiled. It felt like a grimace. The cheering intensified briefly — someone apparently took the smile as encouragement — and then began to settle, the way applause does, people turning back to their conversations, the moment passing from event into anecdote, something to retell over the next round.

But not everyone had cheered.

I noticed it as Brock steered me towards the bar. A table near the wall — three men, older, work-hardened faces, stubbies and flannelette, the uniform of blokes who'd spent their lives doing something physical and weren't about to change now. They hadn't joined the applause. They hadn't raised their glasses. One of them was watching me with an expression I couldn't read — not hostile, not friendly, just flat, the careful neutrality of a man who was reserving judgement. The second had his back to the room, deliberately, his shoulders a wall. The third caught my eye for a fraction of a second and looked away — not quickly, not guiltily, but with the unhurried disengagement of someone who'd decided I wasn't worth the attention.

Keith's mates. Or men like Keith's mates. Men who saw what I'd done on Argent Street and saw something different from what the cheering bloke at the bar had seen. Not a legend. A city cop who'd put a good man face-down on the road for doing what needed doing.

I filed it. Kept walking.

The bar was sticky under my forearms when I leaned against it. Brock had positioned us at the far end, away from the main crowd, near where the timber curved around towards the back room. It was a good spot — visible enough to be part of the room, tucked enough to have a conversation without shouting. Brock had clearly been here before. Brock had clearly been here a thousand times before.

"What are you drinking?" he asked.

"Whatever you're having."

"Dangerous answer in this town." He caught the bartender's eye — a woman, forties, dark hair pulled back, a sleeve tattoo of roses and thorns running from her wrist to her elbow. She moved towards us with the unhurried competence of someone who'd been pulling pints since before I was born.

"Brock." She reached for a glass without waiting for the order. "Usual?"

"Two, thanks, Marg."

"Who's your friend?"

"Felicity. She's new at the station."

Marg looked at me. Her eyes did a quick, thorough scan — face, posture, the way I was standing next to Brock like someone who'd been brought along rather than someone who belonged — and her mouth twitched.

"You're the one who flattened Keith Barlow."

It wasn't a question. Of course it wasn't. Nothing in this town was a question.

"That would be me," I said.

Marg pulled the first schooner — Tooheys New, I watched the tap — and set it on a cardboard coaster. She pulled the second. She placed both glasses in front of us, and then she leaned forward on the bar, close enough that I could smell her perfume — something floral, unexpected, layered under the pub's ambient musk of beer and deep fryer.

"Keith's been coming in here every Friday for thirty years," she said. Her voice was low, matter-of-fact, neither warm nor cold. "Good bloke. Pays his tab. Doesn't cause trouble."

I waited. There was more.

"He also once shot a brown snake in my car park from thirty metres while I was standing next to the bloody thing, so I'm not going to pretend I don't understand why he did what he did today." She straightened up. "But I will say this — that footage of you putting him down is the best thing I've seen all year, and I've been sharing it with everyone I know."

She walked away to serve someone else. Brock picked up his beer.

"Welcome to Broken Hill," he said. "Again."

I picked up mine. The glass was cold and wet in my hand, the beer sharp and bitter and exactly right. I took a long drink — longer than was polite, longer than was ladylike, long enough to feel the cold spread through my chest and settle somewhere behind my sternum where the adrenaline had been living all afternoon. When I put the glass down, a quarter of it was gone.

Brock glanced at the glass. Glanced at me.

"So," he said. "Five days."

I laughed. It came out louder than I intended, raw and unguarded, and a few heads turned. I didn't care. For the first time in hours, the knot between my shoulder blades loosened, and the pub's noise — the laughter, the jukebox, the clink of glasses, the steady murmur of fifty conversations happening at once — settled around me like something warm.

"Grab us a table," Brock said. "Drew's coming. I'll order some chips."

He turned back to the bar. I picked up both beers and scanned the room.

The table near the window was free — small, round, three chairs, a view of the street through glass that hadn't been cleaned recently enough to be transparent but was clean enough to let the last of the evening light through in soft, amber stripes. I set the glasses down and sat with my back to the wall, facing the room, the way they'd taught us at the academy — always see the door — and felt immediately stupid for applying tactical positioning to a Friday night beer.

But I kept the seat anyway.