Wyatt [Wyatt 07]

by Garry Disher

  He was several minutes behind the bikes by then, the traffic too concentrated for sustained bursts of speed. He jerked along from intersection to intersection, checking the GPS signal, and that’s when he noticed the cursor had almost stopped moving. He pulled into the slow lane, eventually spotting the unmarked police car and the bike. And the arrest. Two more police cars arrived and soon left again, one with the prisoner. By now Le Page had recognised the detective who’d been so interested in his cousins. Rigby disappeared behind a fast-food barn, then reappeared with a gym bag, got into her car and drove away. The GPS signal moved with her.

  She pulled into a side street a short distance away. Before Le Page could work out how to approach her unseen, she moved off again.

  He tailed her to a nearby police station, Outer Eastern, according to a blue and white sign. She parked outside the front door, and when she carried the gym bag into the building, he almost gave up. Instead, he waited, planning how he might break in overnight, when the station was undermanned.

  Rigby emerged at 11 p.m., empty handed. She was dowdy and aroused a sour taste in Le Page’s mouth. She drove away.

  And the GPS signal travelled with her. Le Page wanted to sing. He followed her to a police station near Armadale, where she parked inside a cyclone and razor wire security fence. She got out, hovered by the unmarked car for a while, nodding hello as a handful of uniformed constables and plainclothed officers came and went. When there was a lull, she reached into the car. Le Page saw her remove both document wallets and transfer them to a silver Golf that gleamed under a security light. She entered the station.

  Le Page waited, out of CCTV range, and watched the Golf. He thought about the woman. Was she chronically dishonest? Opportunistic? It didn’t matter. What mattered was what she would do with the bonds now, and how quickly. Sell them, enter them into evidence, even destroy them? He couldn’t risk breaking into her car. If she drove home with the bonds, he’d take her there. If she attempted to hide them en route, he’d interrupt. If her conscience got the better of her he’d take a chance and ambush her, right there at the side door of the police station.

  She left at midnight. The GPS receiver led him to a house in an endless suburb in this endless city. The freeway was nearby. Parking on Burke Road, he ran to a little side street in time to see the Golf slip into a short driveway beside a nondescript house about halfway along. After fifteen minutes he entered the alley that ran behind the houses. Risking a peek through a crack in the fence he saw a patio with sliding doors and a faint spill of light on the floor within, indicating that the woman was nearby, maybe in the kitchen. He made one pass and when he came back the light was off. A new light showed, small, high on the wall. Bathroom. That light went off and he heard water in the pipes.

  Soon there were no lights. After another thirty minutes he climbed over the back fence and circled the house. The woman’s bedroom was at the front and through a gap in the curtains he saw her in her bed, illuminated by the kind of muted light that leaks into the corners of the night. The covers were half on the floor and she slept naked, in an attitude of turmoil and surrender, spreadeagled on her back amid tangled sheets.

  Le Page crept around to the silver Golf and heaved up and down on it and she was out in a flash to cancel the alarm, one arm struggling with the sleeve of a dressing gown, her thin body turned whitish grey by the sodium lamps. House lights went on up and down the street. ‘Sorry,’ she said hoarsely, waving to her neighbours, ‘sorry.’ Silence restored, she returned shivering to her front door, where Le Page showed her his pistol and clamped a gloved hand over her mouth.

  She bucked violently but he prodded her ahead of him into the house and kicked the door closed and turned off the hall light. ‘To the bedroom,’ he murmured in her ear.

  There in her musty cave he said, ‘I will now remove my hand. You will not cry out but get into bed. Do you understand?’

  She nodded and did as he asked, recovering with gasps and whimpers, wiping her mouth and chin. She wanted to burrow beneath the covers so that he could not see her body through the gaps in the robe and she wanted to be upright so that she could fight. He solved it for her by stepping away from the bed and saying, ‘Cover yourself.’

  She pulled the sheet to her chin, her back against the wall. Courage returned to her eyes.

  ‘The bonds,’ Le Page said.

  She didn’t try to bluster or deny it. He saw her calculate the various odds. ‘You followed me?’

  ‘The bonds,’ he said again, patiently.

  She pointed. She’d thrown the day’s clothes over a chair and partly over her briefcase. He edged towards it, keeping the gun on her, finally crouching and snapping open the lid. He found the document wallets and that day’s newspaper and other scraps from her life. He thought of her miserable existence and expectations and debated the merits of shooting her. She had seen his face, but to shoot a police officer would bring extraordinary strife down upon his head.

  Then she said, ‘You’re the French courier.’

  Le Page gave her an amused look. ‘You have been following Henri and Joseph?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Both are dead. Your case is closed.’

  They stared at each other. She began to tremble. ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He jerked his jaw toward her bedside table, indicating a little Nikon digital camera sitting there with a glass of water, tissues and a fat paperback. ‘The camera, if you please.’

  She passed it to him with a twist of shame and outrage.

  ‘It is not what you think,’ Le Page said. He handed her a Bank of England treasury note redeemable for £100,000 sterling, together with the newspaper unfolded to reveal the front page. ‘You will hold these beneath your chin,’ he said.

  Her mind was racing. She gave him a sour twist of the mouth. ‘Arsehole.’

  ‘You are alive, be thankful,’ he said.

  He took several photographs. ‘You will close the file on me and the Furneaux brothers now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you do not, if I receive unwelcome attention here or in Europe, then I shall inform your superiors.’

  ‘I get it,’ she said.

  ‘I am finished here, but if I one day return and find myself in difficulties...’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘The man you arrested.’

  ‘Oberin,’ the detective said.

  ‘Did he give up any names?’

  ‘One. Wyatt.’

  ‘Good.’

  Le Page gave Rigby his smile and leafed through one of the document wallets. ‘Ah. Perfect.’

  He handed her a bearer bond worth £25,000. She accepted it tensely, expecting a trap. There wasn’t one. Le Page said, ‘Spend it wisely,’ and left her sitting there, eyes darting around the kitchen in search of somewhere to hide her windfall.

  * * * *

  Le Page returned to the Sofitel. He was finished in this damn place; making contact with Henri’s clients was risky now; time to go home.

  His flight was not until 10 a.m. Saturday, Paris via Hong Kong and Frankfurt, but he used the hotel’s lobby phone to reserve a next-day flight out of South Australia, the noon service to Auckland. After that he’d play it by ear, maybe a package tour to Fiji, but not leave Suva airport, take the next flight to Singapore instead, and from there fly to London, and finally Toulouse, using different identities for each stage.

  He went upstairs, packed his bag and cleaned the room. No scraps of paper, no hairs in the basin or bathtub, no prints. The cleaners would come in and complete the task by scrubbing anything he’d missed and leaving behind an overlay of new traces. He never used hotel phones. His credit card and passport, while valid, were in a false name, another blind alley for the police.

  Finally Le Page went downstairs, paid, and retrieved his car. He drove all night, his radio tuned to a news station. Police had released Oberin’s name, but that’s all they had to say. Reaching Adelaide at
8.30 a.m., Le Page took a room at the Hilton, where he napped, showered and ate breakfast. He was at the airport by eleven.

  * * * *

  34

  Friday morning, 8.55, and Wyatt was outside the Outer Eastern courthouse, carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit, a white shirt and a sombre tie. In the belief that a woman, a nun or a child was as capable of killing him as a man, he assessed everyone. There were some women around the building—lawyers, victims, mothers and wives of prisoners and victims—but no nuns or children. He didn’t bother with the uniformed police, for they were clearly armed. He concentrated on anyone not in uniform—a woman wearing a jacket over slacks and two men in loose fitting suits. They were detectives armed with .38 revolvers and he’d have known they were detectives even if this wasn’t a courthouse next to a police station. Perhaps they were waiting to appear in court, or guard a witness. They weren’t expecting trouble, simply standing around yarning and smoking.

  Finally Wyatt entered the courthouse. The building was cavernous, an echoing bluestone structure that dated from the 1920s and was the opposite of the dull new police station nextdoor. Faced by a warren of corridors, staircases, shadowy corners and gloomy courtrooms, he stopped to get his bearings. The place thronged with magistrates, defence barristers, prosecution witnesses, jurors, clerks and the friends and family of victims and those on trial. Plenty of police coming and going, with prisoners or files and documents, but they looked busy and distracted.

  He checked the security. A metal detector and a couple of armed attendants. This was a suburban courthouse, dealing mainly with bail hearings, intervention orders and minor crimes. No one had ever escaped from its custody, pulled a gun on a judge or done anything more violent than shout abuse at a witness. But security was ramping up everywhere, a factor Wyatt was forced to accommodate more often these days.

  He thought about the metal detector as he checked a noticeboard in the foyer. Eddie Oberin was to face the magistrate in No. 3 court at 9.30 a.m.

  Wyatt left the building and walked down a path between dying shrubs to the rear. He found a handful of furtive smokers standing around a sand tray, sliding doors, prison transport vans, expensive cars jostling for parking space and taxis pulling in and out of a drive-through, delivering magistrates and lawyers. Young law clerks hurried behind them, wheeling boxed files on small trolleys into a glass-walled foyer, the lino floor streaked black by tyres and shoes. Wyatt contrived to collide with a young woman as she approached one of the entrances, and his briefcase and papers went everywhere. She stopped, face flushed, teetering on high heels and inexperience, to help him gather the spill. When they entered the foyer, composed again, almost friends, no one pointed a quivering finger at him.

  Wyatt found No. 3 court along an empty corridor on the first floor, accessed by a broad marble staircase, the steps worn and grimy, the light poor, the air full of tricky echoes. There was a bench against the wall outside the entrance to the courtroom. Wyatt sat there, a lawyer maybe, an expert witness. A mild guy waiting patiently with his briefcase in his lap and his shiny black shoes placed neatly together on the cold floor.

  He heard footsteps and there was Eddie, in cuffs, struggling up the stairs flanked by a couple of uniformed constables. ‘I’m telling you, she’s crooked,’ he shouted.

  ‘Shut up, will ya?’ said one guard in a weary cop’s voice.

  ‘My lawyer showed me the evidence list. It’s bullshit. Two million? I was carrying bonds worth twenty-five million when that ugly bitch arrested me.’

  Wyatt stood, the briefcase concealing the Steyr pistol, as Eddie went on, ‘She pocketed twenty-three million quid and you bozos are going to let her get away with it.’

  ‘Look, will you just shut your gob?’ the other cop said.

  Wyatt noted the words ‘bonds’ and ‘evidence list’ and filed them away for later. Right now, Eddie and his escort were nearing the top of the stairs.

  ‘Rigby’s the one should be facing a magistrate, not me.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, shut your cakehole.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Their heads were level with the top step. Wyatt screwed plugs into his ears, stepped away from the bench and shot Eddie twice in the chest. The force threw Eddie back, but the reaction of the first constable was to protect him, grab his upper arms and manoeuvre Eddie out of the line of fire. The other did the opposite, trying to insert Eddie between himself and danger. With all of that pushing and shoving, Eddie’s chin jerked back, then slumped forward, giving Wyatt a perfect kill shot to the top of the skull.

  It was quick. Too quick for the guards, who floundered, unable to take it in. They were splattered in blood and deafened, too stunned to draw their weapons.

  It was later reported that Wyatt had said, ‘Cop that, you bastard,’ as he shot Oberin. In fact, he didn’t say a word. Why waste words? This was revenge, but there was nothing heated about it. When he was working, his instructions to bank tellers, security guards, witnesses or the people working alongside him were calm and efficient. The words had a job to do and were not to be squandered.

  He slipped into the courtroom itself, empty apart from the court reporter setting up her machine. Wearing earphones, and humming along to an MP3 player hooked to her belt, she seemed unaware of the drama in the corridor. She glanced once, saw a man dressed in a suit, and forgot about him.

  Wyatt exited through a door behind the bench where the magistrates sat. He passed through rooms and along corridors, encountering no one who was a threat or looked at him twice, and strolled out of the building and across the street, dodging cars and a tram. He entered an alley between a lingerie shop and the branch of a community bank.

  The alley hooked to the left, and when he was out of sight he stripped off his gloves, suit coat and shirt, knowing they would be engrained with gunshot residue. After stowing them in the pannier of a bicycle chained to a parking sign, he dismantled the pistol and concealed the barrel under a wooden pallet on the back of a delivery truck, the frame in a dump bin, the bullets amongst vegetable peelings behind a restaurant and the clip under a loose cobblestone.

  Dressed now in a plain white T-shirt and trousers, he intended to leave the system of alleyways and take a cab to the main airport, where he could join newly arrived passengers who were queuing to take a cab back to the city. Too quickly, though, the air filled with the sounds of sirens and whistles. Then there were running footsteps and yelling. His options had shrunk. The police would be stopping buses and taxis and mounting a watch on bus stops and the local train station.

  Coming to the intersection of two alleys, Wyatt risked a glance each way. Apart from a car parked hard against the wall and one or two garbage bins, the left-hand branch was empty. In the right were a couple of hard-core drinkers, a man and a woman. Wyatt took off the white T-shirt, rubbed it against the grimy walls and pulled it on again. He dirtied his hands in the mucky drain and rubbed them over his trousers, face and forearms. Now he looked dirty, lost and broken. Cities are full of men like him. But one thing was missing. He approached the drunks, who were squabbling piteously over the remaining few centimetres of sherry in their bottle, and said, ‘Give you five bucks for it.’

  They stopped bickering, the man with a days-old beard and scummy mouth, the woman with bloodshot eyes and wonky lipstick. They looked neat enough, but grubby and toxic. In comparison, Wyatt felt clean and wholesome and he needed to match them. ‘Five bucks,’ he said, showing them the money.

  The woman narrowed her eyes. ‘Ten.’

  Wyatt could hear closer shouts and sirens. The police would be doing a sweep of the side streets and alleys soon. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, paying her.

  He took the bottle and drained it, swallowing some but letting plenty of the sticky fluid dribble down his jaw and neck and into his T-shirt, too. He wanted the stink of the hardened boozer on his skin and clothing. The others were appalled at the waste and possibly because they’d expected him to share.

  ‘Bastard,’ said the m
an.

  The woman reached for the bottle and tried to wrest it from Wyatt, who welcomed the tussle, for he could hear footsteps behind him.

  ‘Fucking jacks,’ the man said suddenly.

  The woman released Wyatt. He knuckled his eyes to induce redness, scratched at his scalp with torn nails and, when the other two slid to the ground, muttering, he joined them.

  ‘Piss off,’ the woman hissed. ‘This is our spot.’

  Wyatt tilted the bottle again.

  The police were young uniformed constables. ‘Did any of you see a guy in a suit run past here?’

  Wyatt tried to get them into focus. ‘What?’

  ‘Bloody deros,’ muttered one of the cops. ‘Come on, Marty, we’re wasting our time.’