by Garry Disher
Raymond said nothing, just watched coldly as Steer climbed into the Range Rover, but Denise disintegrated. She cried out, even clawed at Steers door as he drove away. When he was gone, she fell to her knees, shoulders heaving. Wheres he going? Whys he doing this to me?
Raymond walked across to her and helped her to stand. Come on, we have to get out of here.
What will I do? What if he never comes back? I cant go back to work. I cant go home. Theyll arrest me. What will I do?
Drive me fucking nuts for a start, Raymond thought.
* * * *
Twenty
Information was everything. Whenever Steer found himself in new environments or unknown company he put out feelers, made bargains, traded and exerted influence and pressure. Within hours of being arrested, hed known who had sold him to the jacks. It was an outfitter called Phil Gent. You needed guns, explosives and detonators, a car, mobile phone, walkie talkies? Speak to Gent. Well, Gent had outfitted Steers latest job, a warehouse load of Scotch, only one nightwatchman to deal with, then gone and spilled it to the jacks, whod been waiting when Steer came out.
Steer had never met Gent at home. It was always on neutral ground such as a pub, a motel room or the docks. Within a couple of hours of his admission to Pentridge, hed learnt where Gent lived: in a farmhouse near Colac in the Western District.
Steer headed there after leaving Raymond and Denise. Wyatts nephew had looked pissed off, Denise heartbroken. It wasnt a betrayal, Steer intended to come back again, but it must have looked odd.
He thought about betrayal as he drove through the night. Hed been stiffed by Wyatt once, but right now he was more interested in Gent. What was it that made Gent sell him to the cops? For that matter, why had blokes in prison sold Gent to him?
To dog, to grass, to inform, to dob in. Steer tried to analyse it as the white line unfolded ahead of his headlights and darkness held him alone in the night. Youd do it for gain, like money, influence, power, advantage. Youd do it for revenge. Youd do it to get someone off your back. Youd do it to stop something happening.
Steer wondered about the other side of the equation. Take the cop who gave his ear to Gent: hed have to reward Gent in some way, like give him money or turn a blind eye. There was dependency in that kind of relationship. Did the cop hate it? Not that he could afford to pin all his hopes on one informant. Someone like Gent might get cold feet or want more out of the deal or stop hearing good information if whispers about his reliability got about.
Or, Steer thought, smirking, someone like Gent might simply stop breathing.
It was a puzzle to Steer how Gent was able to live with himself. Money and favours would help, but hed still have to come to terms with the fact that he was a dog. Did the shame and guilt get to him, or did he make the treachery acceptable to himself with a bit of fancy rationalising? like: Im doing this to those who deserve it. Im not hurting those who havent hurt me.
On and on, the black road renewed itself in the light of the moon and the headlights. There was another form of treachery that could not be rationalised. It boiled down to abandoning your partners on a job, letting them take the risks and get caught by the law. Mostly it could be explained by greed, impulse or cowardice, but when a man like Wyatt does it to you its cold and hard and calculated and unforgivable.
On the approach road to Gents farmhouse, Steer turned off his headlights and kept the engine revs down. Gent might be naturally jumpy, or he might have heard about the prison break on the evening news. Either way, Steer didnt want Gent to know he was there until it was too late. The house came into view, an old weatherboard set well back from the road, looking grey and unlovely in the poor light of the moon. Steer pulled to the grass verge, switched off, and got out.
There was a kelpie on a mat outside the back door. It bared its teeth, it might even have attacked, but it didnt bark. Steer shot it through the head.
A light came on inside the house. Then a shape appeared at the window, Gent leaning to peer into the darkness. Steer shot him through the glass.
Steer stood where he was for a while, blinking, trying to encourage vision back into his eyes. Shows what a man can forget. His old trainingunless you want to blind yourself for a couple of minutes, never look at the muzzle flash of a gun at night.
The darkness around him remained still and silent. When he could see again, Steer walked to the broken window and looked in.
Gent lay dying on his back. Typical gut-shot symptoms grey face, glassy eyes, laboured breathing, a pleading grimace that heralded death. Then Gent retched violently, a froth of dark blood spilling from his mouth. His eyes widened. His tongue protruded. Steer turned away. He knew the final stage well enough. Gent would turn blue-grey, the cast of death.
Steer considered hiding the body. Kick in the teeth first, burn the hands, dump the body in a gorge somewhere. Unidentifiable remains, the papers would say. But the time, the trouble, the cleaning up the house first, the removal of the kelpiestuff that for a joke.
Instead, Steer went into the house and ransacked it, making it look like an aggravated burglary. And he found five hundred bucks in an envelope taped to the bottom of a drawer, so that was all right, plus four grand and a passport in a cavity behind a false power point in a skirting board in the bedroom. The passport was no good to him, for Gent had the squashed features and jowls of a bulldog, and Chaffey had supplied him with a new ID, but the cash would come in handy.
Finally Steer concealed the Range Rover in a barn at the rear of the house. Gent owned a Kombi, parked under a tree in the yard. It needed plenty of choke and was low on fuel. Steer thought about that.
What stopped him thinking was the torch, a finger of light coming slowly across the flat ground behind the house, and an elderly womans voice quavering, Mr Gent? Are you all right?
Steer started the Kombi and drove slowly out of the yard. He hadnt seen another house nearby, but clearly there was one. Maybe the old dear would turn around and go home again, thinking shed heard a backfire, but he couldnt take that chance. Hed have to find another car, and hed have to take a different route out, a longer one, deep into the Western District then maybe north to the goldfield country. Hed allow himself two days, otherwise hed be too late to meet the freighter off Lakes Entrance.
As he weaved through the Western District he thought about Denise. She loved him. It was gratifying. There hadnt been much love in his life. Denise wasnt exactly an oil painting, a bit pink and dampish and sour at the world, but she had a good brain. In fact, she made him feel obscurely inadequate. He wanted her to admire him; otherwise there would be that niggling doubtwas she just another female getting her kicks from screwing a hard man?
And Steer thought about Raymond Wyatt, a bit of luck that had just fallen into his lap.
At dawn the next morning he watched a farmer wave goodbye to his wife outside a log-cabin kit house and drive off in a dual-cab ute. There was a barrelly Falcon in the carport attached to the house, and no kids clothing on the Hills Hoist in the backyard. Steer gave the woman a concussive blow to the temple, concealed the Kombi and drove off in the Falcon ute. At lunchtime he stole a Holden, that evening another Falcon. All the time he was heading west, toward South Australia. At Dimboola he stole a Mazda, fitted it with plates from a scrapyard, and doubled back, driving through the night in heavy rain until he was in the Western District again, closing in on Geelong.
He wasnt expecting the roadblock. He was on a rain-lashed plain and saw brake lights ahead of him through the wash of the wiper blades. Pulling in behind a line of cars and farm vehicles, he thought roadworks, but when a muddy ute ahead of him U-turned out of the line and two motorcycle cops flashed past to intercept, he knew that this was no roadworks. He ran a mental eye over himself, over the car. The pistol was in the glove box, in a small tool kit.
He watched his wing mirror. The cops had stopped the ute. The driver, an elderly woman in overalls and rubber boots, climbed out, a kelpie butting through to the ground ahead of her.
The woman began to berate the cops. One of them laughed. The other walked to the rear of her ute and searched under the tonneau cover. He apparently found nothing, but noted her plate number and a moment later waved her off.
Why here? Steer thought. Are they looking for me all over the state? The van ahead of him moved forward a car length, then stopped. Steer moved with it. The car behind him moved.
He looked at his watch. 9.20. Hed missed the nine oclock news and would have to wait until ten.
Five minutes later he reached the roadblock, which consisted of three pursuit cars angled so that quick acceleration forward was impossible. Half a dozen cops. Two further motorcycles.
A face filled his window; eyes the colour of slate gazed hard at him. Steer tensed, but there was no change in the mans expression, nothing to betray recognition or action. Your licence and registration, please, sir.
Whats going on? Steer asked, knowing that everyone would ask it.
Your papers, sir, if you please.
Steer fished the papers Chaffey had given him out of the glove box. He itched to bring out the pistol.
The cop passed the false papers back to him. Would you open the boot, please, sir?
Steer leaned down and operated the boot release. There was a faint clunk as the lock disengaged. He turned to watch the cop, who stood to one side and gingerly, with his forefinger, raised the lid. An overnight bag of nondescript clothing, thats all.
The cop shut the boot and returned to the drivers window. On holiday, are we, sir? From New Zealand?
Lousy weather, Steer said. Might as well be back home.
The cop stood back from the window. I wonder if you would mind pulling off the road, sir, over there where those other drivers have parked.
What for?
Just routine, sir, if you dont mind.
Steer saw two cars in the mud behind the pursuit cars. He guessed that he shared physical characteristics with both drivers. He started the car, moved forward off the road, switched off. The rain bucketed down. It was miserable, drenching rain, that seemed to reduce the world to the dimensions of a phone box. Figures blurred in the drifting curtain of water, and Steer removed the interior light bulb, pocketed the pistol, opened the passenger door and walked into the rain and out of the police net.
* * * *
Twenty-one
His overnight bag lay packed ready to go on the bed. Wyatt stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom. He prepared the way by hacking the hair from the crown of his head with a pair of scissors. When the bulk was gone he took up the razor, a cheap gadget with a high whine that seemed to cut at the nerves behind his eyeballs. Facing the mirror with a hand mirror angled behind him, Wyatt made long careful swipes until he was left with a bald dome and tightly trimmed hair above his ears and at the back of his head. He looked thinner, sharper, like a man who lived a life of the mind. Finally he put on a pair of prescription glasses. He hadnt needed glasses, according to the one-hour dispensing optician, and so the lens adjustment was mild, but what the optician hadnt known was that Wyatt didnt want anyone to wonder why he had plain glass in his lenses and that Wyatts real purpose in getting glasses was the heavy black frame. It altered his face completely.
It was a one-hour drive to Devonport. The ferrys departure time was 6 p.m., but the company asked passengers to be on board well before that, and the hire car had to be returned, so Wyatt left Flowerdale at 3 oclock in the afternoon. He wore light cotton trousers, a polo shirt and a lined woollen windproof jacket. He looked like a teacher or a priest in civvies. The heavy glasses transformed the cast of his face, from prohibition and wariness to internal musing and melancholy.
At 5 oclock Wyatt found himself being swept by a crowd of people past drink machines, video games, slot machines and knots of smokers around barrelly chrome ashtrays, into corridors that led to the staircase at the midpoint of the ship. It linked all of the floors, and he plunged down to D deck. Here the air rushed in the vents and he bumped shoulders with passengers who had nowhere better to go. His cabin when he got to it was like a tomb, pinkish grey, as disagreeable as the holiday flat in Devonport. He went in carefully, checking corners, checking the shadows. Wyatt lived in corners and shadows and thats where the end would come for him.
He ate upstairs, at a table next to a window, only the black night and the waves outside the salt-scummed glass. Inside the glass it was a world of scratchy muzak, kids erupting through doors, overweight men and women, smoke, and the mulish, quickly combustible emotions of the herd.
He slept badly. The ferry shuddered through the night. The next morning he made his way to the dining room but, realising that he was to be penned like a sheep again and expected to eat like a pig at a trough, he grabbed an apple and a banana and made his way out onto the upper deck, where the wind was cold and clean and empty.
When the public-address system crackled into life, asking drivers to go to their cars, Wyatt went below, retrieved his overnight bag, and waited at the lifts. He chose an elderly couple. They were tottering toward the lifts, fighting a clutter of string bags and cases and each other.
May I help you?
Help the wife throw some of this junk overboard, the man said.
Charlie, shut up, the woman said. She smiled at Wyatt. That would be most kind.
The man looked Wyatt up and down. You going to your car?
Wyatt laughed. I dont drive. Im on foot. I just thought you might need a hand. He reached for a case. These look heavy.
He saw that hed disarmed them. The woman gave up a case and a shoulder bag to him, the man a second shoulder bag.
Most kind of you.
They stepped out of the lift into a claustrophobic iron shelf, the air full of fumes and echoes, the cars lined up like capsules in a pillbox. The elderly couples car was a small blue Golf.
If youd care to squeeze in with a couple of doddery old fools, the woman said, wed be pleased to drop you somewhere, wouldnt we, Charlie?
Of course.
Wyatt rubbed his bald patch, feigning embarrassment. Oh, Im sure you dont want to
Dont be silly, the old woman said. We live in Hawthorn. We could drop you right in the centre of the city.
In that case, Wyatt said, Id be glad to take you up on your kind offer.
By 8.30 they were leaving the dockland. Wyatt felt safe. He wouldnt have felt so safe on foot, eyes watching him file off the ferry.
Wyatt didnt know what sort of hours his nephew kept. Besides, he wanted to approach Raymond with better information than the boy had provided at Hastings a week ago. Wyatt waved goodbye to the elderly couple on Bourke Street and caught a taxi to the University of Technology in West Heidelberg.
Twenty minutes later he was walking through to a broad lawn at the centre of the campus. According to the map displayed at the main gate, the R.J.L. Hawke School of Burmese Studies was the building facing the lawn from the west. He found a bench near a pond and stretched in the sun. There were few students about, fewer staff. The university had once merely called itself an institute of technology, and it appeared that the word technology had determined the creative hand of the architects, for the place was universally ugly and pragmatic. No imaginative spark could ever be nourished in its stolid buildings. They dated from the 1960s and squatted among untidy eucalypts like grey bunkers. Here and there an external wall was pebble-dashed or set with glazed pink and grey tiles in outdated attempts at a stylistic flourish, but the general effect was depressing. No-one ran or whistled or walked with a bounce or conferred earnestly with a friend. Wyatt imagined the humourless lectures and tutorials, the staff down at the mouth because of budget cuts and job uncertainty and the ever-present jibe: Its not a real university. Its just a tech.
He eyed the School of Burmese Studies. It had a look of temporary flashness, an effect encouraged by a new roof and plenty of smoky glass. Workmen were still renovating the interior; Wyatt could see them coming and going with electrical flex, plasterboard, tins of paint and ladders f
rom a makeshift depot behind a cyclone security fence adjacent to the side entrance. Power to the building itself had been turned off. The workmen were relying on an external cable from the mains, looped like a thick black snake to a wooden pole staked temporarily in the lawn outside the security fence.
Chaos and clutter. He liked that. He looked more closely at the building. There were half a dozen trades represented by the workmen. Along with everyday tools they surrounded themselves with specialist equipment, supplies and vehicles. In one corner of the makeshift depot was a stack of plasterboard under a tarpaulin. In another was a portable tin shed. Through the open door Wyatt could see buckets of paint. The air-conditioning subcontractor had claimed a third corner, his lengths of galvanised conduits, angle bends, grilles and ducts scattered as though to help the earth exhale. There were ladders, copper and PVC tubing, reels of flex. In the fourth corner was a rubbish skip, overflowing with broken plasterboard, strips of wood, glass, aluminium window frames, tubes and hosing and empty paint tins. Vans and small trucks and utilities came and went through the morning. They bore stains and rust and crumpled panels, and they leaked unburnt exhaust gases into the atmosphere. Some of these vehicles would be locked in overnight, Wyatt guessed.
