by Garry Disher
One thing: on Thursday afternoon, Pepper visited a used-car yard in Frankston and bought a decommissioned security van. He took it to a backyard operation in Footscray, where it was painted in SecureCor colours. Then it was driven to a shed at the rear of a backstreet factory in Collingwood and locked behind a pair of corrugated iron doors with a piss-poor padlock.
That same evening, Vidovic was unsettled to learn that Arlo Waterfield’s guy was looking for him again. Looking hard. If he was going to pull this off, it had to be tomorrow, not next week.
Shireen started about it the wrong way. It was right not to tell her husband what she was doing, but wrong to tell the policeman at the reception desk of her nearest police station that she feared her son was taking drugs.
He yawned. ‘I’m not sure there’s much we can do, Mrs Eejazz.’ He waved at the wire racks bolted to the walls. ‘We do have some literature on drug counselling and specialist rehab clinics.’
So Shireen edged closer to the topic that worried her. ‘He tried to rob someone last year. What if he does it again?’
‘If we acted on what an individual might do, we’d never act on what others have actually done,’ the desk sergeant said. Overweight and given to smirking, Shireen thought. Given to barely veiled contempt for people with dark skin, too.
That’s when she told him about the shotgun and the disguise. After that things started to happen and she found herself talking to detectives.
On Thursday evening, Vidovic entered the change room of the gym and sat tying and untying his shoelaces until the SecureCor guard appeared. He stood then, contriving a clumsy stumble against the lockers and benches.
‘Phew,’ he said. ‘Must have overdone it on the weights.’
The guard helped him up. ‘You got to work up to it.’
‘Yeah, I think I just found that out,’ Vidovic said. He gathered his gear together, said, ‘Thanks, mate,’ and left with the man’s dry-cleaning ticket.
Next, he used fake ID to obtain a costume-hire pistol and gun belt, then went straight around to the shed in Collingwood and stole the van. It now had the SecureCor name and logo on the panels. Crudely done; okay from a distance.
On Friday morning Vidovic collected and changed into the guard’s dry-cleaned uniform, strapped on the pistol and began to hit the supermarkets. Not the banks: they had security guards stationed front and back. The supermarkets—their rear entrances usually a grimy yard spattered with rotting vegetables—were less security-conscious, and by late morning he had $58,000.
He could feel it burning a hole in his pocket. Then he thought about his toes and fingers and drove to Arlo Waterfield’s place of business. Paid his debt in full, Arlo demanding twenty-eight grand, the prick.
Still, Vidovic had thirty to play with. Place it wisely on sure bets, he could double it. Triple it, probably.
4
Late Friday morning, Wyatt took the shuttle bus to Melbourne Airport. He preferred to fly, if the journey was long. He wasn’t a man given to self-reflection, but he was aware that driving long distances depressed him—mindless, tedious. And he’d been shot, stabbed and beaten at times in the past. His body bore the trauma, on the surface and deeper in his bones. Better two hours on a plane than two days at the wheel of a car.
The drawback was he couldn’t take his pistol on board, and that might prove to be a problem at the other end. It would be impossible for a man like him to buy one legally when he arrived, and too risky to meet a stranger behind a pub. Ambush; undercover cops; getting saddled with a gun that was not only expensive but liable to have a nasty history or mechanical defects. He’d ask Minto to provide one.
Facing a long wait in the gate lounge at Melbourne Airport, Wyatt positioned himself in a chair that allowed a clear view along the branch corridor from the check-in counter. Two federal policemen strolled past at one point, chatting, barely interested in the waiting passengers. Still, he tensed a little, gauging where he’d run if it came to it. His gaze passed over the men and women streaming by, the children, the sports teams. None posed an immediate threat.
If not for his restless interest in his surroundings, masked by a newspaper open at the letters page, he might not have glanced at the TV bolted to the wall. Breaking news: police had swooped on two properties, arresting a man at the first, shooting dead a man at the second. The dead man was named as Leon Pepper, and his brother—Jack Pepper, 27, believed armed and dangerous—was on the run.
Another man was helping police with their inquiries.
Wyatt thought about that. Someone had talked. The junkie, Syed Ijaz? Would he spill names? In particular, Wyatt’s? Unable to hear the newsreader over the clamour of the waiting passengers tending to toddlers, rustling newspapers, poking at mobile devices, Wyatt watched the screen intently. A line of script at the bottom, images of a street, a house, police cars, uniformed and plainclothes police. Then Jack Pepper’s face filled the screen. He looked hunted, half-demented, raising a glass at some social function, his black bow tie askew.
Then another story: a man disguised as a security guard, and driving a security van, had staged a series of robberies in the bay suburbs south-east of the city centre. It was presented as a separate story, but Wyatt knew better.
The common denominator was Stefan Vidovic.
His flight was called and he boarded. A man named John Sandford, not given to frills, a man you wouldn’t look at twice. This was the dangerous time, when police might swarm at the gate or on the plane itself. He found his aisle seat and sat, tense. Business class as always. The seating and the aisle were more open and closer to the main door. Also business class passengers were valued by the airlines and assumed not to be killers and thieves—a psychological advantage that might give him a few seconds of physical advantage if the police came for him. At take-off, Wyatt plugged in a headset to save him from conversation with the man next to him.
Two hours later they were on the ground. The police hadn’t stopped him on take-off; they might on landing. Wyatt was poised for that when he stepped into the close, warm air of the Gold Coast. Following the other passengers into the terminal, barely conscious of the mountains etched along the horizon, he was making snap assessments. The many vehicles parked around the buildings and aircraft bays. The faces in the terminal. Police; there were always police. He passed three of them: they watched him. Nothing kindled in their faces. Then he passed the luggage carousel, another vulnerable place, but only if you were waiting for your bags, boxed in by a hundred other passengers. Wyatt was travelling light, cabin luggage only, a small case with room enough for his razor, toothbrush, makeup items and a couple of changes of clothes. That’s all he needed. That kind of thinking, that habitual alertness, ruled his every waking moment.
David Minto had offered to send a car for him, but Wyatt wanted to eyeball Minto’s house on his own terms. He found a men’s room, changed into shorts, sandals and polo shirt, and caught a bus like any tourist on a budget.
He sat as it swayed and surged away from the airport and along the commercial streets. This was a semi-tropical world and Wyatt hadn’t been here for a while. He was accustomed to Melbourne—the reserve, the greyness, the business suits and well-mannered thievery. The Gold Coast was brash and hungry. People settled here to worship sunshine and quick profits, and desiccated into stringy middle-age or corpulence within a few years. Still wearing shorts and T-shirts, their children growing into lithe, golden-haired gods. There was no need of thought here. No one expected it and the sun burned off any mental process as it lit up the perfect white teeth, the perfect tanned flesh. Politicians called it God’s own country, but Wyatt thought God was pretty much away on business most of the time.
He glanced out at the Gold Coast streets, not registering the sun glint, the glossy palm fronds and the endless sky. Thinking about David Minto, a man he didn’t know well and didn’t want to know but mostly trusted. Minto was a property developer, real estate lawyer and back-room Labor Party hack. Minto said he hadn’t m
et a Labor parliamentarian or local councillor he couldn’t bribe or blackmail. Even so, few people knew who he was. He operated at several removes from the men and women in the public eye.
Behind the respectable face, Minto also brokered high-end robberies and heists to men like Wyatt. He might hear of a closet safe holding $100,000 in Krugerrands, or a racehorse good for a $50,000 ransom, or a $250,000 Ferrari being shipped overseas ahead of a bankruptcy seizure order. He didn’t pull these robberies himself. He proposed them to men like Wyatt. If necessary, he would advance a few thousand dollars for expenses. At the end, he took a percentage. He did not get his hands dirty.
Minto could, and would, buy and sell anything. When Wyatt had returned from France with all that was left of a sheaf of treasury bonds originally stolen from a London courier, Minto converted them into cash for him. Wyatt hadn’t the means to handle large sums of money, complicated transactions and tricky questions, but Minto did. First founding a corporation, Minto obtained a business loan with the stolen bonds as collateral, then let the corporation vanish. He pocketed a few million dollars for himself and gave Wyatt a hundred grand. Now most of that was gone, and Wyatt needed work again. If Minto had a job in mind, Wyatt was listening—just as he shouldn’t have considered listening to Stefan Vidovic and the Pepper brothers.
He alighted outside the Gold Coast Hilton, crossed the road and strolled for a while. Checked reflections in the plate glass. He had no interest in bikinis on display dummies, Pandora bracelets or glossy shots of the Maldives: he needed to know that no one had shadowed him, either on the bus or by car.
Satisfied, he crossed again and entered the Hilton by a side door. In shorts, sandals and sunglasses, he excited no interest and his walk across the lobby to the men’s room was the walk of a guest who could afford to stay there.
He changed into trousers, shirt and shoes and exited by the front door where he let a teenager loaded with gold stitching hail him a taxi. Wyatt gave the kid five dollars, settled into the back seat of the cab and said, ‘Palm Springs Golf Club.’
He didn’t expect the driver to know it. In his experience, taxi drivers knew less about the cities they served than most of the people who lived there, but Wyatt’s driver was a lumpish grey-haired woman of sixty who grunted and planted her foot before he’d fastened his seatbelt. She said nothing. The radio murmured. There were no-smoking signs on the dash, but she was a smoker, her skin seamed by years of sun and nicotine. Wyatt guessed she was a battler. She would assume he was some snotty tourist off to play golf with his rich buddies. There was therefore nothing to say, for either of them.
Presently she grunted again and he saw a set of gates, a driveway, palm trees on either side. She dropped him at the shaded main doors of the clubhouse. Other cars were pulling in, pulling out, taxis and chauffeured BMWs and Jaguars: no one took the slightest interest in Wyatt. He strolled out again, along the driveway to the main gate, where he turned left. Away from the Pacific, a broad ribbon of blue and grey in the distance.
Turning left took him along the main flank of the golf course: a palette of different greens with bright splashes of pink and yellow marking the golfers. Adult men and women who liked to chase little white balls and bounce around in toy cars.
At the far end the road branched. To the left was a nest of roundabouts and watered lawns leading to a formless mass of retail outlets besieged by vast car parks. The sun beat down on the glass; the air swam with oily intensity.
The other fork ran downhill through manicured parkland to a clutch of fifty or sixty houses inside a perimeter wall the colour of sand. Big houses, all striving for an original touch; ultimately all alike. Two storeys, off-white or grey walls, terracotta tiled roofs, swimming pools behind hedges, fronting or backing onto a waterway—depending on your income. And the only way in or out was past a guard at a gate.
Wyatt strolled part-way down the slope until he overlooked Minto’s place at a shallow angle. It was the biggest house, vaguely Dutch, vaguely New England colonial. Parked on the driveway was a black Lexus with a personalised plate, MINTY. Inside the open garage door was a beefy white Range Rover. Wyatt bent to retie one shoelace, and the other, then fussed with his backpack. He couldn’t spot anyone waiting or watching.
Then he was at the bottom of the slope, and now his view of Minto’s gated community was of roofs and treetops above the high yellow wall. Still nothing, apart from the CCTV cameras at the gate.
He’d attract the same kind of attention as a rogue brontosaurus if he arrived on foot. He climbed the slope again and down the other side to the shopping centre, about twenty minutes, then hailed a taxi as it dropped a woman and her children outside a department store. He directed the driver over the hill and down to the gate in Minto’s security wall. A five-dollar ride. The driver shrugged—the next ride might be worth a hundred. Anyway, five bucks was better than nothing. He pulled up at the gate, where Wyatt gave the name Warner. ‘Mr Minto’s expecting me.’
The guard consulted an iPad screen, nodded, pushed a button, and Wyatt paid the driver and walked. There would be a record of the taxi, and his arrival at the gate, but no one knew who he was and he didn’t exist anywhere else. And if he needed to run there were scalable trees hard against the perimeter wall.
5
David Minto waited, watching, as Wyatt paid the driver and stepped out of the taxi. He seemed faintly amused, perhaps by Wyatt’s altered appearance. Wyatt ignored it. The broker had always been well insulated, had never needed a new name or face. Probably thought Wyatt was overreacting.
Minto came down the path from his front door looking well curated in trousers, a collarless white shirt and Italian shoes. A thin gold watch gleamed on his soft white wrist. He was about sixty, prosperous, untroubled. There was an ex-wife and others before her, but Wyatt had never met them. ‘She’s out shopping. I don’t mix business with pleasure,’ Minto had told him once, when he caught Wyatt watching doorways, listening for footfalls in the house. In fact, Wyatt had been satisfying himself that Minto’s armed driver and bodyguard was hovering nearby in case of trouble.
Minto shook Wyatt’s hand. ‘Good to have you on board.’
As though Wyatt were a member of something. Team Minto. Wyatt halted. He looked past Minto to the house, then back at the security gate, wondering who else was involved.
‘Keep your cool, mate,’ Minto said, faintly mocking. ‘Except for the client, we’ll be alone.’
‘Who is it?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘How did he get here?’
‘She, and she’s staying at the resort up the hill. She walked here.’
They stepped out of the steamy air and into an arctic hallway, an echo chamber with a tiled floor, stark walls and a high ceiling. Minto liked to cycle paintings through the space: this time Wyatt spotted an Ian Fairweather, a Weaver Hawkins and a Brack. A scatter of oils and drawings by lesser artists. As he crossed to a doorway at the end, he felt a scraping sensation, grit caught in the tread of his left shoe. He stopped, removed it, pocketed it. He made a mental note not to wear these shoes when he worked: the scraping noise might alert a security guard or a householder. The grit itself could tie him to a location.
Dump the shoes, in fact.
Minto watched all this, still half-amused. He was a man who liked to keep people slightly offside, and possibly imagined that’s where he had Wyatt.
The sitting room was L-shaped. The short arm, at the far end, was an entertainment nook: huge TV, iPod dock, speakers, earphones, shelves of books, DVDs, CDs, a couple of red leather armchairs.
In the long arm of the room were more armchairs, a sofa, vases on pedestals, and a broad maple coffee table on an Afghan rug. More paintings on the main wall—colonial prints and drawings this week—and a broad glass outer wall opposite, faintly tinted to reduce glare. On the other side of the glass, beyond a shaded deck, was a slope of lawn, a canal, other mansions on the far bank. Wyatt took in these details quickly. He was mostly interes
ted in two things: possible lines of escape, and the woman now getting to her feet from one of the armchairs.
She was about forty, watchful, reserved. She made no move to greet Wyatt but waited beside the armchair, a briefcase at her feet. Her knee-length black skirt, long-sleeved top and tights were wrong for the heat. Perhaps she disliked the sun. Her face and hands were very white, the whiteness of cultured, urbane Europe. Two plain gold rings on one finger, a tiny white-gold watch on a slender wrist, fine black hair cropped short around a narrow face. Her eyes were dark, shaded with caution and mistrust. Her thin nose seemed to draw in the scent of him and assess it for danger. She glanced at Minto, back at Wyatt. Not ready to drop her guard any time soon.
Finally, she moved, crossing the room, extending her hand to Wyatt. ‘Hannah Sten, Mr Wyatt.’
Lightly accented English and a cool, dry hand. And now, thought Wyatt, everyone knows my name.
‘Sit, sit,’ Minto said. He seemed flustered. ‘Something to drink?’
‘Water,’ said Hannah Sten.
‘Water,’ Wyatt said.
He watched Sten as Minto stepped away, and she watched him. First reading his face, looking, he supposed, for steadiness and intelligence. Then his body. Seeing a tall man, fit. Slender but with some heft to the frame. His hands bony like hers, but large and blunt and scarred. Not a fighter’s hands, exactly. Not an accountant’s either.
She didn’t care that he knew what she was doing. She took her time and then, finally, gave him the smallest nod.
‘I want you to steal a painting,’ she said, while Minto was still at the other end of the room fetching a tray of crystal tumblers and a jug of water. Minto meant nothing to her now. He’d done his job. All her attention was on Wyatt.
She handed him a photograph. ‘My grandfather,’ she said. ‘With my father.’
