Take Out by Felicity Young

their bed rang. Monty swore. Stevie groped for the light and leaned over him to answer it.
    With no preamble, Skye gave her a rundown on baby Pavel’s condition. She said he was improving and the doctors were cautiously optimistic he’d get through the physical ordeal with no lingering ill effects. ‘But what about his mental condition?’ Skye said with a hitch in her voice. ‘That’s what I want to know. Can you imagine the psychological effect this will have on him? I mean, the poor kid was obviously adopted in the first place, so who knows what hell he’s already been through?’
    Stevie sat up in bed. ‘Adopted? Who told you that?’
    ‘I don’t need to be told, it’s obvious. I noticed it straight off, didn’t you? The kid’s Asian.’
    Stevie paused and thought back to their discovery. Yes, come to think of it, she had noticed Asian features under the dirt and grime. But as she hadn’t known anything about the child’s parents at the time, she hadn’t given the matter much thought. The penny should have dropped when the deli woman mentioned that the parents were eastern European. She chided herself—she was usually more on the ball than this. Just as well this wasn’t her case, that her leave was almost due. Monty, the cyber-predator case, the house; the stressors were adding up. She was more tired than she’d thought.
    With her hand over the receiver, she told Monty Skye’s news. He lay on his back with his hands under his head and stared at the ceiling, his face mirroring her own perplexed look.
    Stevie listened to Skye a while longer and tried to reassure her that everything was being done to locate the baby’s parents. ‘She’s not handling this very well,’ she said to Monty when she finally extracted herself from the phone. ‘This baby business has really upset her, she’s a sensitive soul.’
    Monty turned and raised an eyebrow as if to say: and you’re not?
    ‘At least I can detach,’ she said, flipping the light off again. Despite almost half an hour under the hot shower, she could still detect the sour odour of the baby on her skin. In some ways, she reflected, its associations made it worse than the scent of decay.
    Monty said, ‘You’ve always said Skye was a bit, what was it, unbalanced?’
    ‘No, not unbalanced, just highly strung and with a keen sense of moral justice.’
    ‘Sounds like someone else I know.’
    She didn’t rise to the bait. ‘I get the feeling Luke Fowler and Skye know each other. She certainly doesn’t seem to have much faith in his abilities. There’s some history there, I’m sure of it. He strikes me as a bully—he’d better not be giving her a hard time over this.’
    ‘I’ve come across him once or twice; did a course with him in Adelaide. He seemed okay to me.’
    ‘He might be okay to prop up a bar with after a day of lectures, but you’ve never had to actually work with him.’
    ‘True. He must have seriously pissed off someone to land Peppy Grove. Never mind, if it does turn out there’s a homicide behind this case, it might end up on my desk at SCS, which means Peppy Grove can be ousted.’
    ‘You’re not on active duty,’ she reminded him.
    ‘But at least I’ll be able to find out what’s going on and you won’t have to rely on gathering information by devious means.’
    The conversation faded; they lay in silence. He rolled over and she spooned into his solid back once more. His pragmatism, though sometimes an irritant, was a comfort tonight. She wondered again why it had taken her so long to agree to set up house with him, wondered how she’d ever thought she could do without him.
    But then her thoughts drifted to the negative, the dialogue in her mind of ‘what ifs’ that refused to shut down. Monty’s upcoming heart procedure was a dangerous operation. The blockage was in the left anterior descending artery, the one the doctors called ‘the widow maker’. What if the operation was a failure? He could become an