Port Vila Blues

by Garry Disher

  She shot the junkie twice, one a doubling-over punch to the stomach, the other straight into the crown of his head. This second shot blew the man back against a table. He rolled off, tangled with a chair, and fell, leaving a red smear on the tabletop. Wyatt saw that he was dead. The interesting fact about the dead man was his crooked wig.

  23

  ‘Oh no, oh no.’

  It was Liz Redding and her face was white, dismayed.

  Wyatt reached over, took her gun, turned her to face him, her chin clamped in his hand. ‘Liz, snap out of it.’

  ‘I’ve killed him.’

  ‘It was a setup. We can’t stay here,’ he said.

  He had the voice of a convincer, flat, exact, experienced. Liz came with him into the sunlight and let him drive her out of there in her car.

  He barrelled down the first side road, a winding channel between overhanging trees. Three hundred metres down he spotted a narrow parking bay and a pipe-and-glass bus shelter. He pulled in. ‘Take off your T-shirt.’

  She looked at him numbly then nodded. She was mute, everything closed down now, but he was banking that elation and relief would flood in soon—and anger, and questions.

  He was already taking off his jacket and reversing it, tan corduroy outermost, the plain weatherproof cotton now the lining. He stripped off his buttoned black shirt, pulling it over his head to save time.

  Beside him, Liz Redding’s head and arms were briefly lost to view as she bent forward and removed the big T-shirt. He saw her flexing stomach, her breasts beneath her raised arms, squeezing together briefly, the brownness very brown against an unfussy white cotton bra. Wyatt felt a powerful urge to pull her against his chest. It was as much a symptom of his lonely state, a memory trace of friendly, uncomplicated intimacy with a woman again, as a need to feel her bare skin against his. Then she was shaking hair out of her eyes and swapping shirts with him. He also gave her the jacket and the sunglasses and seconds later was peeling the little rental car away from the parking bay, snaking down the road as he accelerated.

  A short time later, he began to double back, turning right at each intersection until they were on an approach road to Emerald again. He slowed as they entered the town, looking left and right as he cruised past the side streets. Liz Redding was looking with him. ‘There,’ she said.

  It was a small, high-steepled church with room for parking under a box hedge at the rear. No one would spot the car there for a few hours, maybe even for a couple of days. They got out, walked unhurriedly back into the town. Wyatt sensed the change in Liz Redding, an electric charge in her step. She was waking out of her shock and misery, engaging with the world and him again. Her arm went around him and he felt a ripple of energy in her flank.

  They ambled to his chunky rental Commodore, got in. By now there were sirens in the distance, an awareness of high drama telegraphing itself from person to person along the street. Wyatt started the car, signalled, U-turned slowly and took them out of there.

  He was looking for somewhere to hole up overnight. Motels and hotels were out. So too—to a lesser extent—were guesthouses and places offering bed and breakfast. Wyatt and Liz Redding no longer resembled the couple who’d fled from the cafe, and their car was different, but the police would eventually begin a check of all accommodation addresses in the area and want to talk to all couples.

  He found it outside the next town. The sign read ‘Expressions of interest invited for this outstanding commercial opportunity’, the hype referring to a half-built holiday lodge consisting of a mud-brick reception area and half a dozen mud-brick cabins. Weeds grew hard against the walls and plywood had been tacked over most of the windows. Here and there tin flapped in the wind. There was a lock-up garage at the rear of the property. The lock was flimsy. Wyatt forced it and drove in. Nothing inside but dusty drums and a stack of floorboards. They closed the door again, hurried across to the lodge, and began to check each of the buildings, keeping to the back walls. The cabins were empty but two rooms behind the main office had been set up as accommodation for a caretaker or nightwatchman in the days when the developer still had hopes for the place. They found a tiny kitchen with tins of Irish stew and peaches on a shelf, a gas burner, a kettle, three enamel mugs and half a packet of stale tea. In the other room there was a foam mattress on a lightweight tubular metal camping cot, two thin khaki blankets folded at the foot of the bed.

  They stood there, turned, and contemplated one another gravely. Since fleeing the cafe, Wyatt and Liz Redding had scarcely spoken, communicating in snatched murmurs, a kind of shorthand that worked because they each wanted the same thing, each faced the same odds. Now they didn’t need to talk at all. Wyatt eased the reversible jacket away from her shoulders. He unbuttoned the black shirt. Liz Redding fixed her gaze on him, eyes dark in her strong, dark face. When the shirt was on the floor, Wyatt leaned his bony nose to the dark cleft between her breasts, kissed each upper slope, reached around to unfasten the strap. He was clumsy and she laughed once, quietly, not minding.

  Then Wyatt was unbuckling the belt at her waist but he felt her hands on his, pushing him away with a queer, embarrassed kind of modesty. She finished the act for him, watching his face as she let the pants fall to the floor, weighted heavily by something, the belt, then slid her briefs to her ankles and stepped out of them.

  When it was her turn to strip him she started slowly but grew impatient, all the constraint gone as if it were pointless. She was full of charging energy, and Wyatt was infected by it. He fell back with her onto the bed and let her straddle him.

  She began. He saw her close her eyes tight in concentration, head tilted to one side as if she were listening for a voice. Then a little later she’d remember him, and grin and buck and lean down to bite his lip.

  At the end of it, she dozed. Wyatt waited. Finally her eyes snapped open. ‘You were right, it was a setup.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was acting the junkie. Someone hired him to kill us.’

  ‘Or only one of us. Me,’ Wyatt said.

  She stiffened in his arms. ‘Or me. I didn’t set you up.’

  They fell silent, playing out the possibilities.

  ‘You’re good with a gun.’

  He felt her shrug against him. ‘It pays to be. In this game you’ve got to be prepared for any contingency.’

  Queer, formal wording. Wyatt rolled away from her.

  She was alarmed, a little hurt. ‘Where are you going?’

  He leaned back to kiss her. She smelt and tasted humid and salty from their lovemaking. He heard her murmur, the words unintelligible but affection and desire clearly there in them. He disengaged. ‘Handkerchief,’ he said.

  She watched him, lazy-looking and tousled, propped up on one arm. That changed to alarm when she saw him reach for her trousers. ‘I haven’t got—’ she said, stopping when he uncovered the little revolver concealed there.

  She seemed to slump, then rallied. ‘So? So what if I carry two guns?’

  All the tenderness was gone from Wyatt. He fixed on her like a pin through a butterfly. ‘A crotch holster? Come on.’ He gestured with the little gun. ‘This is your backup piece. If you were wearing boots I’d also expect to find a gun there. But it was the way you handled yourself in the cafe. You’ve had training. And look at this, no front sight, thumb-bar filed off the hammer so it won’t catch on anything.’

  ‘Mack Delaney trained me,’ she muttered, mouth sulky.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Wyatt snarled, a slow, hard rage building in him, narrowing his face and filling it with colour. ‘Delaney’s dead. You knew I couldn’t check on you.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Get up.’

  When she was standing before him, tall and bare and defiant, he said, ‘Pick up your shoes.’

  He saw it in her face at last, confirmation, a sense that she knew he had her. ‘Let’s talk about this.’

  ‘The shoes.’

  He watched her pick them up. She half drew back one arm sullenly, as if she migh
t smack him down with a shoe, but stopped when he ground the tip of the gun against her throat. ‘Let’s see it.’

  She removed it from beneath the lining of her left shoe. She held it out, propped between thumb and middle finger so that he could read it. He read ‘Victoria Police’ and ‘Senior Constable’ and that was enough.

  ‘How long have you been working undercover?’

  She shrugged. She wasn’t going to say, but then seemed to think that it wouldn’t matter what she said now. ‘A few months.’

  ‘If you knew the Tiffany was stolen, why didn’t you have me arrested at Southbank that day?’

  ‘Too soon.’

  Wyatt stared at her fathomlessly until she said, ‘I thought you were part of the magnetic drill gang. I wanted the whole gang.’

  ‘Who knew you were meeting me today?’

  ‘That’s my problem.’

  ‘I’d say it was a problem for both of us.’

  ‘Let me handle my side of it. The cash is there in the bag. That part’s real enough. The insurance company wants the Tiffany and was prepared to pay to get it back. Take the fucking Tiffany too, for all I care.’

  ‘A deal’s a deal,’ Wyatt said. ‘You figured I belonged to this gang?’

  ‘I did. I don’t now.’ She paused. ‘At least tell me where you got the Tiffany.’

  He smiled his brief vivid smile. ‘No. This way we find out who tried to kill us from separate ends.’

  ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ she said, then seemed to wonder why she’d said it.

  There were nylon restraining links in her bag. He let her get dressed then cuffed her to a corner of the iron cot. ‘I suppose you could always drag it down the road with you.’

  She bit her bottom lip. ‘So you knew I was a cop before you had sex with me. That was pretty calculated of you.’

  He touched her cheek with the flat of his hand, a tender gesture for Wyatt. ‘Calculation had nothing to do with it.’

  She stared at him carefully for a few seconds. ‘I guess I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t. How did you know about the ID card in my shoe?’

  ‘I thought my way into your skin,’ Wyatt said, as fanciful as he’d ever got with his language. ‘I’d carry ID if I were working undercover. I’d want it for a situation like this. I’d want it if I had to bargain for my life.’

  He saw the alarm in her face. ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ he said, moving to the door. ‘You helped Frank Jardine.’

  ‘You’re sparing me because I helped your friend? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Wyatt couldn’t answer that.

  24

  Springett checked his watch. Unless there’d been a balls-up, Lillecrapp should be on his way back from making the hit about now. He pictured it, Lillecrapp’s wet teeth bared, a mad light in his eyes, that falsetto giggle he was always coming out with, roaring down out of the hills, two more bodies to his credit. As the saying goes, a natural-born killer. Springett pondered upon that as the traffic ahead of him shunted forward two car lengths and stopped again, trapped by a Sydney Road tram. Lillecrapp had been useful; now he was a liability. Springett wondered if paying him off would work. Unlikely. Lillecrapp would want more, or he’d brag to someone when he was in the sack, or grievances would begin to eat away at him. Maybe Niekirk’s boys could arrange an accident for him?

  The conductor appeared in the open door of the tram, jerking his thumb at the line of cars, signalling them to pass. Greasy hair, in need of a shave, runners on his feet: How did someone like that keep his job? Springett accelerated, sticking his middle finger at the man as he passed the tram.

  He was in a big Falcon from the divisional motor pool. He liked to drive with both feet, one riding the accelerator, the other the brake, a kind of edgy dance that made his blood race. That was the beauty of your automatic transmission.

  He found his landmarks, a furniture barn opposite a mosque, and turned off Sydney Road, into a system of narrow streets. The red light in the Falcon’s rear window winked as he surged, braked, surged, braked, steering a course between beefy cars parked outside the tiny houses neat as pins, new cladding on the walls, wet cement gardens, Middle Eastern smells and music hanging in the air.

  Springett felt hungry. He would eat soon, but not before he was finished with Jardine. He needed that margin of irritation you got when hunger creeps in.

  According to Liz Redding’s notes, Jardine lived in a rented house with an unmarried sister. He rarely went out. He was ill; the sister looked after him. Springett gnawed at his bottom lip. A shame about the sister. She wasn’t involved. Jardine himself had said so—it was in Liz Redding’s notes. A shame to have to knock her as well as her brother.

  Springett slowed for Jardine’s street, prowled along the row of houses in the car. No numbers on the front doors or gates, of course, so he was relying on Redding’s surveillance photographs. There: the white weatherboard, a sorry-looking ruin sitting in a patch of onion weed. He drove past, turned around, drove out of the street, looking for the laneway that ran behind the houses. Redding’s photos showed a back gate fashioned from a sheet of iron, held shut with a twist of wire. Every house had a high laneway fence and there were no flats overlooking the lane. He could go in that way unobserved, catch Jardine and the sister with their pants down, maybe literally.

  Redding was thorough, at least Springett could say that about her. Pity she had tunnel vision. Pity it had to be her that Wyatt and Jardine contacted, instead of a real fence, for the Tiffany would have disappeared again by now. But it was her, and it got her thinking that she was onto the famous magnetic drill gang. Tunnel vision. ‘No worries, boss,’ she’d said, ‘I’m going to follow this through to the bitter end.’

  Bitter was right. A bullet between the eyes from Lillecrapp. And an end that was sooner than she’d expected.

  Springett got out, locked the car, crossed the street into the lane. If Liz Redding had been allowed to arrest Wyatt and Jardine, been allowed to process them and stick them into interview rooms, then there wouldn’t have been a lot that Springett could have done about it. One of them would have talked, seeking a deal, and sooner or later De Lisle’s name would have come up as the main man in the chain of people who’d handled the proceeds of the Brighton bank job.

  Springett had said it himself to Niekirk: De Lisle will talk to save his neck, count on it.

  Springett had a break-and-enter-gone-wrong in mind for Jardine and the sister. He wanted it to look like one of those random, messy, everyday tragedies that you find in the poorer areas of the cities of the world. He didn’t want the homicide boys scratching their heads over an atypical shooting; he didn’t want neighbours reporting gunshots; he didn’t want to have to get rid of a gun afterwards. He didn’t want to get rid of a knife, either, or risk blood fountaining over his clothing.

  So he was carrying a baseball bat.

  Springett came to Jardine’s skewiff laneway gate. He unfastened the wire, edged into the back yard. No dog—Redding’s notes would have said if there was a dog.

  Not much cover, either, apart from a fig tree, a clothesline and a couple of dead tomato plants in plastic pots. And according to Redding, Jardine liked to sit at the back of the house, where the sun penetrated, and watch his hopeless hours pass by. No time to waste. Springett charged across the yard, jerked open the screen door, shouldered through the inner door, and found himself two metres away from Jardine on a daybed.

  There was a tartan rug over Jardine’s legs, a form guide on his chest. Jardine opened his mouth and Springett saw fear crawl in him, literally claw its way through his body. Jardine jerked, tried to speak, rolled back his eyes, tugged at his collar, and died.

  For a long moment, Springett gaped at the body. He closed his mouth, swallowed, looked nervously over his shoulder, then back at Jardine again.

  Jesus Christ, a stroke, he thought. But where was the sister? He jerked into action, running into each of the other rooms, swinging the bat. Nothing. The sister
was out.

  He went back to Jardine and felt for a pulse. The guy had definitely carked it. What a fucking piece of luck. No investigation.

  Springett tucked the baseball bat under his jacket and left through the front door, onto an ordinary street of the struggling class, everyone indoors in front of the TV or hanging out down the DSS.

  Springett whistled, bounced on his toes a little. Almost time to go to the public phone near the high school in Princes Hill, wait for Lillecrapp to call in that he’d plugged another two holes in this operation.

  Leaving just one big hole.

  25

  Would he call someone to say where she could be found? Would he come back for her? Liz Redding had wanted to be able to answer yes to either question, but she had seen the transformation in Wyatt, and told herself no. Life for Wyatt was not a matter of expansive gestures, throwing care to the winds for the sake of desire, but of tactics.

  She had rotated her bound wrists uselessly after he’d disappeared through the door. Nylon restraining cuffs, lightweight, a little flexible, but nevertheless tough and effective. She’d have to cut them somehow. If a caretaker had lived here, maybe he’d left tools behind when he’d moved out?

  She glanced at the mattress, now sad and dusty-looking. What would it be like to sleep regularly with a man who was mostly silent, who lived in some private reserve of the mind where you could never reach him? Whose face—as soon as the striking smile faded—was cruel rather than appealing, the contrast swift and unsettling?

  She got to her knees, lifted the little cot onto its side, and tumbled the mattress into the corner. The tubular frame sat on U-shaped, fold-down legs, one at each end. By hooking with her feet she was able to close the legs flush with the frame. The cot was more manoeuvrable now; Liz lifted it off the floor and waddled with it into the depressing kitchen.