Wyatt [Wyatt 07]

by Garry Disher

  After arranging a tow and going to the hospital for a check-up and giving a statement to the police, she was a mess. ‘I won’t be coming in tomorrow,’ she told her boss tearfully. ‘I ache all over and my nerves are shot.’

  ‘Take a couple of days,’ Henri Furneaux said. ‘Me and Joe will look after the shop.’

  * * * *

  Tuesday morning, Wyatt sent Lydia in to the Armadale store. ‘Browse for a while, maybe buy something cheap. I need to know where the obvious cameras are, the layout of the showroom, anything else you can gather. Maybe fake stomach cramps, your period: ask to use the bathroom. We need to know how many rooms are behind the showroom, doors in and out, security on the back door and windows.’

  They met again that evening. Lydia was wearing a new gold chain that looked garish under the McDonald’s fluorescents. She hooked it with a finger. ‘Can I claim expenses?’

  Wyatt gave her a sharkish smile. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘The only person I saw was the manager, young, blonde, not a twit, name of Danielle.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘Plenty of it, all high-end. Motion detectors, bars and alarms at the rear, newish safe.’

  Wyatt shook his head. ‘Not looking good.’

  Eddie Oberin rubbed dry palms together. ‘So we don’t break in. We steal the Audi when it’s got the gear on board, either from under their noses or hijack it once they’re on the road.’

  Wyatt nodded but didn’t want to be drawn or rushed. To a man like Oberin, Wyatt was patient and plodding beyond all reason. This was a broad-strokes conversation: the detail would come later and not in a diner.

  * * * *

  On Wednesday afternoon Wyatt and Lydia wore shorts, hat, bum bag and hiking shoes to High Street. She carried a Lonely Planet guide, he a digital camera. They looked American or possibly German, and sauntered in the street for a while, licking ice-creams. Once or twice, when Lydia hooked her hand in the crook of his elbow, Wyatt tensed, thinking that he liked the sensation, thinking that he was unused to it, thinking that it was part of their cover, and wondering if that’s why she did it.

  She did it again as they window-shopped outside Furneaux Brothers. Dim inside. Then she gave Wyatt a little push, and he entered, began to browse. ‘Just looking, ma’am,’ he drawled. The woman named Danielle smiled, busied herself. He peered at the estate jewellery. ‘People buy this old stuff?’

  She smiled again, a little tighter, and turned away.

  At once he took several photographs of a man’s watch, Jaeger-Le Coultre, and left the shop.

  That night he found the watch on the Internet. Pink gold, dating from 1996, one of a limited edition of 500. It had been stolen from a Lyon banker.

  * * * *

  On Thursday Wyatt told Oberin, ‘I want to check out the rear of the building and the layout of the nearby streets.’

  ‘Mate, what do you think I’ve been doing over the past few weeks?’

  Wyatt stared at Eddie. ‘New road works,’ he said repressively, ‘one-way systems further out, speed bumps...’

  Eddie shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  They started in a coffee shop diagonally across from the store. Wyatt had green tea, Eddie a long black and a muffin. To avoid being spotted and perhaps remembered by the men they intended to rob, they were not seated by the window, but had an unobstructed view of the jewellery store nevertheless. Eddie talked, Wyatt watched. The eastern half of the greater sprawl of Melbourne was crosshatched with long roads that chopped the suburbs into postcodes. This part of High Street was situated in one of the better postcodes and the shops were full of antiques, dresses, homewares and jewellery. Every third or fourth building was a bistro or a coffee shop and the cars were perky imports: Audis, Minis, Peugeots.

  ‘The main thing I’m noticing is the traffic,’ Wyatt said.

  Eddie nodded. ‘No high-speed getaway.’

  ‘A getaway needn’t be speedy if it’s accurate and efficient,’ Wyatt said. ‘Vanishing, that’s the thing, and that means anticipation.’

  Eddie looked bored.

  Wyatt said, ‘Let’s take a walk.’

  ‘I haven’t finished my muffin,’ Eddie complained.

  He was wearing a leather jacket over a cotton shirt buttoned at the throat. As Wyatt stood then, looking down, he saw, in the narrow gap between Eddie’s neck and shirt collar, a hint of discolouration. The guy had a love bite. No contact, Wyatt had said. ‘You and Lydia are in separate motels, right?’

  Eddie looked confused. ‘Yep, just like you said.’

  Wyatt didn’t pursue it. He stalked out and headed along the street away from the vicinity of the store.

  Eddie caught up. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I want to see what’s parallel to High Street, I want to check the laneways.’

  He walked on, Oberin struggling to keep pace. Eddie was lean and elegant but unfit. He was also the kind of man who needs to add to the general racket of horns, muzak, mobile conversations and engines surging uselessly: he talked. And sneezed from time to time, checking the evidence in his handkerchief. ‘You may not know this,’ he told Wyatt, ‘but Melbourne’s one of the worst cities in the world for air quality.’

  They were parallel to High Street and doubling back. The laneways, Wyatt realised, were narrow, narrower still where dump bins and cars waited.

  ‘You’ve got pollens from all the surrounding grasslands, and no prevailing winds to blow the factory shit away.’

  Wyatt ignored him. ‘Let’s take a drive.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  * * * *

  Wyatt caught his first glimpse of the main players on Friday morning, watching with Lydia Stark as two men emerged from Furneaux Brothers, one plump and soft-looking, the other tall and circumspect. ‘The fat man’s Henri Furneaux, the other is Le Page,’ Lydia said.

  Wyatt discounted Furneaux and measured Le Page, noting the European cut of the suit and shoes, the bony insolence of the face, the unmistakable language of the human form concealing a handgun. But, more than anything, it was the walk Wyatt noticed. All of his senses came on hard and he watched Le Page nod goodbye to the jeweller and stride towards a waiting taxi, unhurried, as though everything in life was settled and nothing would ever stop him. He noted other characteristics, too, probably because he shared them with the man: nerve, economy, containment. The taxi pulled out and crawled away in the direction of the city. Furneaux re-entered the shop.

  ‘Le Page stays at the Sofitel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wyatt grunted. He said, ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A park.’

  ‘You’ve been looking at parks?’

  It didn’t require an answer. In the car, Wyatt asked in a neutral voice what she did in the evenings.

  She was puzzled. ‘Nothing. Why? Low profile, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  * * * *

  The weekend passed. They amassed more information and didn’t spot Tyler Gadd anywhere.

  On Monday morning Wyatt took another pass along the alley behind the store, then spent the last of his money on bullet-proof vests, latex gloves, balaclavas, pre-paid mobile phones and a pistol for Eddie. He’d been away for many years, but some of his old suppliers were still in business.

  Late that afternoon he met the others in Lydia’s motel. It was a struggling, sun-blasted structure on a flat, windy street near Sydney Road, a street of extremes, pretty evident at that time of the day: young Muslim women carrying lecture notes, Turkish widows in black, Goths, business types in suits, labourers returning home from, building sites, a handful of junkies. The other buildings ranged from small factories and rundown terraces of the 1880s through to expensively restored 1920s bungalows, 1970s tan-brick apartment blocks and a handful of immigrant-made-good monstrosities with pointless white columns, backyard pools and plenty of wrought iron around the perimeter. There was nothing remarkable about the motel
, therefore. In that neighbourhood, there was nothing remarkable about Wyatt, Eddie or Lydia, either.

  He told them what happened in the alley behind the jewellery store.

  Lydia snorted. ‘Joe saw you?’

  She lay sprawled on the bed, chin propped on the palms of her hands. A framed poster advertising a Matisse exhibition hung from the wall above her bed. It was a good reproduction, adding colour to the dingy room, but Wyatt couldn’t see the point of buying, framing and hanging a reproduction, let alone a poster with names and dates on it. He smiled at her, his habitual twitch. ‘I pretended to be drunk.’

  When he’d wandered down the Furneauxs’ alley that morning, there was Joseph Furneaux in the little yard, waxing the Audi four-wheel-drive, an ugly vehicle, high and bloated, with a low window line and a lift-up rear door.

  ‘The gate was open,’ Wyatt continued, ‘so I staggered in and asked for a smoke. He told me to fuck off.’

  Lydia laughed, a friendly, uncomplicated laugh, acknowledging ironies. But her air of completion and contentedness bothered Wyatt. He swung his gaze upon Eddie Oberin for a long moment. He failed to pick up anything. Eddie was Eddie, twitchy and impatient in one of the room’s chairs.

  Maybe Lydia felt content because the job was coming together. Wyatt saw her sharp mind working. ‘That back yard is where the Furneauxs feel safest,’ she said, ‘yet it’s where they’re most vulnerable.’

  Wyatt agreed. ‘They expect to be hit on the open road, not at home.’

  ‘Did you get a good look inside the yard?’

  ‘The gate shouldn’t pose a problem. The rear of the shop itself is well secured: bars on the windows, a camera, a steel door with a good lock.’

  ‘So on Wednesday morning we hijack the Audi,’ Lydia said. She turned to Oberin. ‘Eddie?’

  He’d been fiddling with a small, black electronic device. ‘This will override the locks, alarm and ignition.’

  They continued to talk through the plan, their voices backgrounded by traffic noises and the permanent music of water tinkling through a faulty valve in the bathroom. This wasn’t the kind of place where the management would wonder why the water bill was so high.

  Lydia rolled off the bed and pulled on one of the bullet-proof vests. ‘Let’s hope we don’t need these.’

  Wyatt nodded. He passed Eddie the pistol.

  Eddie grimaced. ‘I never used a gun in the old days.’

  Wyatt didn’t bother with a reply. A job was a job and required tools. He distributed the disposable phones, gloves and balaclavas.

  ‘I don’t get a gun?’ Lydia said.

  ‘You’re the driver.’

  Wyatt watched her shrug off the vest and swing neatly to a sitting position on the bed. He’d brought maps to the meeting. She gathered them into her lap. ‘You want me here?’

  Wyatt stood beside the bed. The street he’d taken her to on Friday curved around a patch of green parkland five kilometres from Furneaux Brothers, and she was indicating, with a shapely forefinger, a guardrail above a steep slope that bottomed out in a clearing concealed by trees.

  ‘And you dump and torch the Audihere.’ She tapped the clearing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Eddie.

  They examined the map, the two men and the woman, knowing the job was moving beyond idle speculation.

  ‘I won’t be able to see you until I see you,’ warned Lydia. She’d said it on Friday, too.

  ‘Keep the motor running,’ Wyatt said.

  * * * *

  12

  Ma Gadd was watching Tyler like a hawk these days.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she’d say, whenever he set out in the delivery van. It was clear she didn’t trust him to leave Wyatt alone.

  So he’d tell her the truth, he was delivering flowers, buying plastic buckets from K-Mart, doing the rounds of the sad wankers who owed her money, collecting tulips from the airport, KLM, direct from Amsterdam. Ma would cast him a doubtful look from her pudding face and say, ‘I want you to come straight back, okay?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Every day for a week.

  Tyler got his chance in the second week, Tuesday morning, a delivery of funeral wreaths to the Monash University chapel, all over and done with in record time. He stopped in Armadale on the way back and, seeing no sign of Wyatt, Oberin or the woman, peered through the unsmeared display window of Furneaux Brothers Fine Jewellery. Plenty of glass-topped counters, revolving display cases, velvet drapes and shadows. He went in.

  The chick behind the main counter looked him up and down as if first gauging his dollar value, then sizing up his cock. Nice tits.

  She blinked, stepped behind one of the glass counters. ‘May I help you?’

  Tyler smiled, deciphering the body language. She was using the counter as a barrier. But—big but—it was see-through, meaning she wasn’t blocking him off completely. He ran his tongue around his lips and said, with heat and a hint of a growl, ‘Just looking.’

  Hands behind his back, he idled along the display cabinets, paying attention to the diamonds. Maybe arouse a little stab of jealousy, here’s this cool guy buying not for me. At the same time, he was scoping the place for cameras, alarms, doors, windows.

  ‘See anything you like?’

  He straightened and stared at her name tag and cleavage. ‘Danielle. Cool name.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Could I see that tray of rings, what are they, engagement rings?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  She bent gracefully, more tit, reached in and placed the tray on the glass top. ‘Sir has a good eye.’

  Plastic smile, plastic voice. Tyler felt rage bubbling and leaned forward, pointing past her hip to the floor behind her. ‘What’s that? You drop something?’

  With no change of expression or manner she snarled, ‘What, a snatch and grab? Get lost, loser.’

  And a voice in Tyler’s ear. ‘You heard the young lady.’

  Tyler jumped and spun around. The guy sounded foreign, and that bony European look, a hawkish nose carved from granite, you could feel the menace coiled in him. Must have been in the showroom all along, lurking in the shadows. Tyler swallowed. ‘Just going.’

  He turned for the door and long, dry fingers clamped his neck and the hinge of his jaw and then he simply blacked out, waking on the floor in terrible pain and numbness. Bony had found some kind of pressure point. How long was I out? wondered Tyler.

  The chick smiled.

  * * * *

  13

  Furneaux Brothers Fine Jewellery, Wednesday morning, 8.30. The young store manager contemplated her boss.

  Sly and sleazy were the words that usually came to Danielle’s mind. Henri Furneaux’s face was saturnine, his fleshy jowls dark and closely shaven. Dark eyes and eyebrows, down-turned mouth. Dark forearm and knuckle hairs. Always a black suit and a sombre tie. Manner gravely courteous to the rich, pointless women who bought their jewellery from him. He’d be a convincing undertaker, she often thought.

  But this morning he was fired up. She guessed it was agitation and anticipation, in equal doses. He got that way every time he and Joe made the rounds of the regional buyers. The imagined problems stirred him up, the knowledge that he was going to get richer put a spring in his step, and all that emotion always got him aroused. He’d stand close and she’d feel his shoulder press against her if she were standing too, his meaty thigh if she were sitting. Right now, as she took rings and necklaces from the safe and arranged them in the display cabinets, his groin brushed her hips and behind as he manoeuvred around her in the narrow spaces of the shop. He murmured, ‘Excuse me.’

  As Danielle bent to slide a $4000 diamond ring in under the glass counter top, Furneaux’s partial erection pressed against her hip. Otherwise the day was beautiful, sunny, a lovely spring morning. Sure, there was plenty of bumper-to-bumper traffic, as always at this hour of the day, plus kids in their school uniforms overrunning the footpath and
bus stops, but they’d be gone soon. She avoided Henri’s cock adroitly and stepped through an inner door to the tearoom. The guys would want coffee before they left.

  That creepy French guy was there, draped elegantly in a plastic chair, sitting in utter stillness. Danielle avoided meeting his gaze but could feel it licking at her. Normally he flew in, flew out again. Never stuck around. She finished making the coffee and returned to the showroom, doing her job. The French guy followed her and took up position in a dim corner.