by Garry Disher
At 6.30 p.m. a big Kawasaki burbled along the street and bounced through the gate and onto the lawn. The man who climbed off it and propped it on the kick stand was broad shouldered, solid, his hair pale and cropped. He was in love with his bike and his toughness, and Wyatt saw him climb the rotting steps to the front door, holding a gym bag and slapping his leather gauntlet against his thigh. He walked in. She’d left the door unlocked for him.
Boyfriend?
10
Trask strode into Leah’s house, found her in the kitchen, dressed in an apron over a T-shirt, slim bare legs gleaming below the hem. She didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t turn from the stove. Par for the course. And when he planted his lips on her long, damp neck, she wriggled her slim shoulders. It meant either Knock it off or Maybe later. It didn’t mean Do it again.
‘Ya hear? The Lions are in the grand final.’
Leah ignored him. She was cooking, something she rarely did, and badly. Bolognese sauce by the look of it. Minced steak, onions, garlic, tinned tomatoes and tomato paste. No herbs, no dash of red wine, no salt or pepper or stock cube or pinch of sugar to take the edge off all that tomato. But she’d said they had to talk where there were no ears to listen, so they’d be eating in.
Trask bent his large frame into the fridge, peered around without hope, but there was one beer can, Cascade Light. Letting go of the door, watching it swing closed, the magnetised seals kissing quietly, he pulled the ring on the can. Leah was drinking gin and tonic, her glass on the window ledge above the sink. That one glass would last her the whole evening. She said nothing when he touched his bottle to the glass and said, ‘Cheers,’ simply shrugged her tiny upper torso again. What a pair, he thought: the butterfly and the brick shithouse.
Nothing happened for a while. Trask sank his beer, Leah cooked. She didn’t ask him how it had gone with Wurlitzer.
Bored, he used the bathroom. Bathrooms soothed him. He would sit and dream and gaze and read the labels on the tubes and bottles. Leah’s bathroom was full of expensive shampoos and lotions with obscure names written in scripts overloaded with umlauts and circumflexes. Designed to suggest exotic ingredients, rare, costly and forged by the wisdom of the ages. It was all a con, of course. According to the label, Leah’s shampoo came from Factory 4, Technology Road, Newcastle North Industrial Estate.
He returned to the kitchen. Apparently finished with her pot-stirring, Leah seemed ready to grant him a moment of her valuable time. At the end of a long work day she showed not a trace of weariness. Death-dealing and guile kept her in sparkling condition. He leaned in to kiss her, but she placed the flat of her hand on his chest. ‘No you don’t. Let’s go somewhere more comfortable.’
Bed? Fat chance. Trask followed her to the sitting room sofa, watching the sway of her hips. She flipped herself neatly down, patted the space beside her thigh and swung her legs across his lap as soon as he was seated. Her skin gleamed, smooth, taut, tanned. A hint of black knickers showed under the hem of the T-shirt.
He stroked one fine leg, from ankle to knee and some distance above. ‘Wurlitzer went well, by the way.’
‘Of course. I had every confidence,’ she said.
He continued to stroke. Wanting to wrest some proper praise from her, unable to frame the right words.
She grabbed his hand. ‘Concentrate.’
‘Oh, I’m concentrating.’
‘I said concentrate.’
If you ever crossed her, her face tightened, a killer’s look in the eyes.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered.
She tried a smile. It was slit-like, her lips disappearing. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said.
‘That’s what you’re good at.’
‘Do you ever get the feeling we’re taken for granted?’
All the time, thought Trask. He said, ‘By your uncle?’
She nodded. ‘I mean, in effect you brought us the client. If not for you, there would be no Ormerod job.’
‘True.’
‘And what thanks do you get?’
‘Fuck all,’ said Trask, feeling sour.
‘And me?’ demanded Leah. ‘It’s “Do this, Leah, do that, Leah.” No thanks.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Uncle David living there in his big house, pots of money.’
‘Yep.’
‘I was only six when Mum and Dad were killed.’
As Trask understood it, they’d been high on speed and smashed head-on into an oncoming cement mixer. ‘That must’ve been hard,’ he said.
‘Hard? I would’ve been better off in foster care. I mean, I always knew he was bent. When he started pimping me out I was thirteen. Not often, mainly for blackmail photos. But still.’
‘Did he…’
She shook her head. ‘Nup. Never laid a finger.’
‘And your aunt?’
‘Went gaga. She’s in a psych ward.’
Trask wondered where all this was going.
‘The thing is, Uncle David always said what’s his would be mine one day. He’d teach me the ropes and when he retired I’d take over.’
‘He doesn’t give any indication of retiring,’ Trask pointed out.
Leah stopped being acquiescent under Trask’s hand and tightened like a spring. ‘Exactly. I’ll have grey hair by the time I get any responsibility. And what if his little empire falls in around him in the meantime? Where does that leave me?’
Trask wiped a fleck of Leah’s spit from his cheek and stroked her knee. ‘Worst-case scenario, we all go down.’
‘He doesn’t confide in me, he doesn’t run things by me,’ Leah said, vibrating beside him. ‘Like this painting: no consultation, he just brings in some stranger.’
Trask eyed the V of her knickers under the hem of the T-shirt. ‘What’s he paying the guy?’
Leah swung her lithe brown legs to the floor and the black V disappeared. ‘It won’t be peanuts.’
Trask glanced around the room. The exterior of the house was rotting away, but the sitting room was out of a lifestyle magazine: minimalist, with gleaming wooden floors, a jade green rug, leather armchairs and stark white walls and shelving. Daubs of red, yellow and blue here and there to break up the arctic light: vases, book spines, cushions. Small, hectic prints on the walls.
He wondered if he’d be seeing the bedroom tonight, the way Leah was sitting there, stiff and cranky. Maybe an ego massage…
Trask put an arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Leah, you could bring this job off if Minto gave you a chance.’
It was as if she’d been waiting to hear those exact words. Back came her legs, her calves across his lap, her arse a little closer.
‘Funny you should say that, because I’ve been thinking.’
Trask’s heat-seeking hand circled her knee, roaming higher. ‘That’s what you’re good at.’
‘We do pull the job ourselves.’
Trask halted his hand. ‘Tell Wyatt he’s not wanted, you mean?’
‘No, Alan, I do not mean that,’ she said, in her schoolteacher voice.
‘What, then?’
‘We steal the painting, sell it, pocket the money.’
‘I’m guessing we don’t tell your uncle.’
‘That’s for sure.’ She wriggled closer. Trask knew he was being played, but put it out of his mind. He thought of tanned skin, hot and pliant.
‘So, how?’
‘We let Wyatt do all the hard work, and then we jump him.’
Trask stroked his chin. ‘Possible. Not easy. And…do you really want him coming after you?’
Leah’s hand was hot on his forearm. ‘When I say jump Wyatt, I mean permanently. You’ve shown me you can do it.’
That puffed up Trask’s chest a bit, but he said, ‘Okay, but then we have Minto after us.’
‘Not if we hide Wyatt’s body so it’s never found. Uncle David will think he ran off with the painting for himself. I mean, the guy’s a crook. Meanwhile you and I act surprised and outraged.’
‘So…w
hat? Jump him as he’s leaving the house? In his car? We don’t even know when he’s doing it.’
‘Leave it to me. I’ll pin him down to a time.’
Trask, picturing Leah with the hotshot, cleared his throat. He said hoarsely, ‘What’s he like?’
She twitched as if recalling an unpleasant memory. ‘Let’s just say he’s got busy hands.’
Trask felt his fists tighten. Suddenly the prospect of whacking Wyatt had a satisfactory dimension.
She allowed his hand to slide under the hem of her T-shirt, find the heat of her. ‘We’ll use your Jeep to shift the body.’
‘What? No. I don’t want any traces in it.’
‘We’ll need something. Not my VW.’
‘We don’t want your car anywhere near the area. I’ll get a van,’ Trask said, thinking of Cherub. Cherub could get anything. For a price. ‘Leah, I’ll need some money for expenses.’
Leah scowled, her default position for most day-to-day matters, especially handing over money. ‘I’m not an ATM.’
Trask deflected that. ‘We’ll have to hide the painting somewhere.’
‘Storage lock-up out near the airport.’
‘Your uncle won’t just swallow it,’ Trask said. ‘He’ll look very hard at you, and me.’
‘Let him.’
‘What if the client comes after us?’
‘No reason why she’d look at us ahead of Wyatt or my uncle. She’ll want a refund; might spread the word that Uncle David’s unreliable.’
Creating an opening for you, thought Trask. ‘Lot to do, Leah. And what do we know about the art market? Having some old painting’s not the same as cash in the hand. You know anyone able or willing to fence it?’
All Trask knew about art was the Lions team poster on his kitchen wall.
‘Well, we can’t use Wurlitzer.’ Leah smirked.
Trask laughed, stroked her through the cotton. Excited by robbery and murder, she purred, grew languid, eyes sleepy, rolling her pelvis against his thumb. The play of her bones and tendons. Every centimetre of her was lush and perfect.
Then she shifted his hand away and said huskily, ‘I need to warn you: Wyatt could be armed.’
‘So I’ll shoot first,’ Trask said.
‘Not the gun you used on Wurlitzer, I hope.’
‘Course not,’ he lied.
‘Okay then.’
‘This painting had better be worth it.’
‘It could fetch up to a million dollars.’
‘We go halves?’
‘Halves,’ Leah agreed, wriggling her little butt against him.
Trask thought he’d get something out of the deal, but not half. Leah didn’t go halves on anything.
11
Leah Quarrell’s visitor emerged at 11 p.m. Wyatt tracked him to a shabby two-storey apartment building near Noosa Junction and the Kawasaki burbled around to the residents’ car parking at the rear. After that, silence. Wyatt stayed a while, watching, and saw lights go on in an upstairs flat, off again shortly afterwards. He drove back to his holiday apartment and went to bed.
On Sunday morning he explored. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he walked out of the crescent and on to Noosa Parade, turning right towards Noosaville. The sky was clear of clouds but the clarity wasn’t absolute. A haze in the west. Smoke? He headed downriver, towards Tewantin, along the river’s foot- and bicycle paths, which were shaded by paperbarks, mangroves, palm trees and Moreton Bay figs.
The water in its stillness was a gleaming broad stripe on his right. The sounds of the morning were animal and human: birds quarrelling, dogs panting, a radio in a kitchen window, an outboard puttering along the river, running shoes pounding, the occasional car squeaking over the speed bumps.
Plenty of people about. Pretty soon Wyatt thought he could distinguish between the old-timers and the holidaymakers and retirees. Grizzled, slow, contained, faintly glum in manner and face, the old-timers sat on their porches, walked their dogs, watered their patches of couch grass. Cast fishhooks into the water without much hope or expectation. The holidaymakers on the other hand were young, gorgeously kitted out in the uniforms of the jogger, the cyclist, the vigorous young parent. Prams and bicycles scattered mere pedestrians. Male retirees heaved past Wyatt in shorts, singlets and running shoes, red, veiny men with wattled cheeks. Gasping desperately, wheezing desperately, their eyes desperate, accompanied by wives who would outlast them by twenty years.
He looked right, at the river where a kid was hosing the dock of a boat-hire shack. Left, at the Gympie Terrace shops, cafes and holiday apartments. He remembered the location of alleys and side streets, the unattended cars, the scalable fences, the bus stops and taxi stands, noting ways out, hiding places and dead ends. The river offered moored boats away from the shore, hire boats against the shore.
Then he headed inland a few blocks to Mary Street. Supermarket, liquor store, bakery and chemist nestled strangely amid pampering clinics for the wealthy.
He saw no police. His internal warning system registered nothing. The sun climbed in the sky and he knew from the news that today the temperature would reach twenty-seven degrees. Mostly things were right with the world: he remained prepared for everything to turn wrong.
Wyatt returned to the flat with a salad roll and a bottle of water and examined the photographs of Thomas Ormerod’s house, trying to imagine his way in.
After lunch he walked again, making his way along Noosa Parade towards Hastings Street. The Parade was a strip of riverfront houses and holiday apartments, hemming in a road that was never empty. He did encounter other pedestrians but mostly people got around in cars, bikes or the little buses. The toxins hung thickly in the still September afternoon. He coughed.
As he walked, he automatically eyed the houses for vulnerabilities. Big houses, fortresses of concrete and glass, with here and there a vaguely Tuscan or Spanish mission structure, earthen-toned where the others were white, and scarcely any of them designed for the harsh summer months in this corner of the world. No shutters, battens, eaves or verandas. No solar panels. Air conditioners hummed, as they must: there was no other way to fight the heat.
Wyatt reached Hastings Street and roamed, a man dressed as a tourist but thinking like a thief. He looked for ways in and out, not for things to buy. But soon the beachwear outlets, boutiques, cafes, real estate offices and shuffling-along holidaymakers became claustrophobic. He ducked through to the main beach, a long display of baking flesh, none of it interesting to him. And so many kids. School holidays, he realised.
Twenty minutes later he was climbing a walking track through the national park. The sea winked like shards of glass away from the shore, but closer to it crept into a series of little bays where people lay on towels, stunned by the sun. The trees were silent above, but around him the sounds of the park were the slap of running shoes, the ugly moist wheeze of joggers. Wyatt turned around and retraced his steps. Two joggers jostled him, seeming affronted that he was on the walking track.
12
At 10 a.m. on Monday, Wyatt walked with Leah Quarrell to a little dock a hundred metres downriver from her office. ‘Is that smoke?’
A smudge in the sky above the opposite bank. Quarrell glanced. ‘They’re burning sugarcane.’ She sounded put out, as if neither squiring him around nor answering dumb questions was part of her job description. She wore a sleeveless top, a close-fitting skirt and open-toed shoes, and scowled as she fitted a key to a lock halfway along the dock.
Wyatt followed her through the gate to where four small boats were moored. He wore his lightweight suit again. There was barely a man along the entire sun-loving coast wearing a suit that day: people would notice the suit, not his face, and it would spell job tedium to most of them. Here was a man who shuffled and signed paperwork. An accountant; perhaps a lawyer. A man from the city acting for another, wealthier man. No need to give him a second thought.
Quarrell stopped at a small aluminium runabout with a white canvas hood and four red vinyl seat
s. RiverRun Realty was spelled out in huge italics along both flanks and on the canvas. The same words were embossed on the small blue slipcase under Quarrell’s arm.
They stepped in, the little craft rocking. ‘Don’t get seasick, do you?’ Quarrell said, sharkish humour in her voice.
Wyatt ignored her. A different man might trade wisecracks or good-natured insults with her, but he didn’t know how. Besides, it counted as small talk, and he was sensing pettiness in her, as if she wanted to see him discomposed. He sat in one of the vinyl seats and spread his arms out, playing the client. ‘Let’s go.’
Quarrell narrowed her eyes, but started the engine.
Wyatt looked out at the river. They had a job to do. They were not friends or lovers; they would not see each other again after this job. They didn’t need to engage in other than professional ways.
The boat pulled away from the dock and headed out onto the river, keeping between the markers as they headed upstream, towards Noosa Sound. After a while, Quarrell’s tiny frame relaxed, as though the air and the water and the daylight were doing her good. She opened her slipcase, pulled out a small chart, beckoned to Wyatt.
He joined her at the wheel, examined the chart, one hand to keep it flat against the breeze. A clear delineation of the river and its sandbar shadows, bridges and streets. Meanwhile Quarrell steered with one hand, her gaze flicking from the chart to the river markers and the heedless proximity of nearby hire boats and kayaks. Heading into less cluttered water, she jabbed a finger at the chart. ‘We’ll enter here, take a run up and down here, and out through here.’
In at Munna Point—a coastguard station, Wyatt noticed—then past Iluka Islet and down into the network of coves and finally north again, to emerge past Witta Circle and the Lions Park bridge.
