The Heat

by Garry Disher

  He remembered the cat. No infra-red.

  But if Ormerod hadn’t secured his house to the final degree, it was always possible he’d turned the sitting room into a kind of vault. No way to tell from Leah’s photographs if the floor was set with pressure sensors, or the vases and knick-knacks with cameras. He thought of the cat again. A cat can be shut out of most rooms, but the main entrance to the big room was an open archway.

  Wyatt contemplated the locked doors he might find on his way to the sitting room. He was confident he could pick most locks. He’d trained, many years earlier, with an ex-locksmith partner named Jardine. Studied technical blueprints of lock shafts, tumblers, springs and cylinders, followed by practical lessons, Jardine teaching how to use picks and tension wrenches on a variety of locks. By the end he could open locks, dismantle them, read their inner workings, reconstruct them.

  Then Jardine had taken him on a handful of domestic break-ins. ‘Classroom learning is all very well,’ he’d said. ‘Now you need to work under test conditions.’ Time constraints, darkness, nightwatchmen, guard dogs, nosy neighbours and armed householders.

  That hadn’t been the end of it. When Wyatt had mastered the intermediate stages, Jardine pushed him on to more advanced locking systems—car locks, commercial locks, dead bolts, wall and floor safes—and more advanced methods—code readers, electronic picks and magnetic bolt slides.

  Wyatt didn’t think it would come to that at Ormerod’s house. He’d seen Leah’s photographs and eyeballed the exterior. The place consisted of airy rooms with minimal security. He’d try the upstairs window first and if that didn’t work, he’d use tools: lock picks, glass-cutter, suction caps. He wasn’t too fussed about security. Too bad if he set off an alarm. He’d be in and out in a couple of minutes.

  He returned to the boat and puttered back out to the river, thinking of the barriers he hadn’t seen yet.

  Thought about them until nightfall, and on Friday turned in the Hertz Hyundai at the airport and took a taxi to Noosa Junction. Finding a supermarket, he bought superglue to smear over his fingertips the next day, and latex gloves as a back-up. The gloves would raise eyebrows if he was seen wearing them, and would make his hands sweat anyway, but he liked to be prepared. He also bought a beach towel, and bottled water to stick in an outside pocket of the daypack. He might drink the water. But like the beach towel it was a part of his cover story. Hauling bottled water around was something people did, part of his beach outfit. Except you wouldn’t know he had a pistol wrapped in his towel, and a set of break-in tools in the daypack.

  Then the hardware store. He bought rubber suction caps, a glass-cutter, putty, a trailer tarp and two cans of white spray paint. A shop assistant who wondered about the glass-cutter and suction caps would stop wondering when putty became part of the story. Here was a do-it-yourself guy, not a burglar.

  Finally, a huge blue and white Styrofoam cooler. No weight at all. But when he walked across Thomas Ormerod’s lawn tomorrow, cooler in both hands, a bit of a stagger going, he’d be a guy invited to a barbecue, weighed down by beer and steak.

  At 6 p.m., feet up in his hotel suite, he heard his mobile phone ring. Leah Quarrell, tone accusing. ‘Tried the apartment number but you didn’t answer.’

  ‘Out,’ growled Wyatt.

  Quarrell grunted. ‘I’m calling to say we’ve just had word: Ormerod flew into Melbourne this afternoon, took a limo to his hotel, checked in.’

  She waited, as if expecting deep gratitude from Wyatt. ‘Good to know,’ he said at last, knowing nothing he ever said or did would be enough, and heard her break the connection.

  He switched on the news. Half a dozen local stories, then national news and a Melbourne item, a shooting death in Ballarat. Someone had found Stefan Vidovic and put a bullet in the back of his head. Wyatt’s first thought was: why? His second was that now he had one less skilled hand to call on when some future heist came up.

  20

  It hadn’t entered Jack Pepper’s mind that Wyatt and Vidovic would end up crossing him. So when they’d walked out of the Nepean Highway motel room he’d merely shrugged. ‘Fuck it, we don’t need them.’

  Syed, a twitching mess in need of a hit, said, ‘More for us.’

  Leon, stretched out on the bedspread, asked, in his slow-to-comprehend way, ‘You mean just the three of us? Hold up a security van?’

  Pepper counted on his fingers. ‘One to bail up the van, one to intercept the money. One to drive and monitor the police band.’

  Leon bit his lip. ‘You sure?’

  Jack had known bringing his little brother into it was risky, Leon the nervy one of the family. Younger, softer, incapable of independent thought or action. But Leon would do what Jack told him to do. Jack had saved him from their father’s fists and belt, not to mention schoolyard fights and the kinds of women who’d squeeze his last dollar out of him.

  ‘It’s doable,’ Jack said that evening, as the mist rolled in from the bay.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Leon said, and Syed nodded with enthusiasm. Or that might have been the meth needing a top-up.

  So after the aborted planning session with Vidovic and Wyatt, Jack went back to his day job selling slot machines into the clubs and pubs of suburban Melbourne. In between appointments he visited the gym and caught up with his good buddy, a SecureCor driver, to confirm routes, times, dates, procedures. And Jack checked and double-checked, recalling the only good advice his father ever gave him: ‘Look at everything from all angles, look again, expect the unexpected.’

  Stupid old loser. Dead now, cirrhosis of the liver and a long stretch in jail. Still, the advice was sound.

  A few days before the job, Leon drove Jack to a miserable stretch of car yards between Frankston and Seaford. Sun-faded plastic pennants snapped in the breeze as if to fire up any punter desperate or dispirited enough to wander around the hectares of dated body shapes, badly plugged oil leaks, cracked dashboards and star-crazed duco, but Jack didn’t need stimulation. He strode right onto a lot that specialised in commercial vehicles, ignoring utes, delivery vans, light trucks and ambulances, and slapped his hand on the snout of a decommissioned security van. Got it for $7500, knocked down from $9000.

  Then, trailed by Leon, he drove the van to a mate’s panel-beating and spray-painting outfit in Footscray, paying another grand to have it painted in the SecureCor colours. Done and dusted in two days, and on the Thursday he steered to a back lane shed in Collingwood and locked the van away, ready for the Monday.

  At 5 a.m. Friday, King went mental in his kennel beside the garden shed. Jack’s first thought was cops. He grabbed his Browning and thumped on Leon’s door, ‘Get up, dickhead, we’re being raided.’

  He ran to the laundry at the rear of the house, hammered out the glass and fired into the grubby bands of shadow and moonlight that defined the backyard at that hour. Dawn was an hour away but some light was leaking into the sky, tricky light. Jack fired again and the dog shrieked. Fuck. He sobbed. Where were the cops? Was it cops? Had they shouted? Pounded on the door? Jack’s mind was half-cooked on tiredness and ice, so he was only sure of one thing, his blood was up.

  Then good old Leon was firing through the back door and the yard shapes returned fire and after the perfect storm of smoke and noise and muzzle flash, Jack’s little brother gave a whimper and tumbled out onto the concrete steps. Half in, half out of his pyjama bottoms, leaking blood. He twitched once and went still. Half his head was gone.

  Jack ran.

  He spent the first night at an ex-girlfriend’s house, monitoring the news: Leon was dead, Syed Ijaz in jail, and someone had used a fake SecureCor van to stage a series of supermarket robberies along the Nepean Highway.

  Wyatt and Vidovic, who else?

  Jack slipped from house to house across Melbourne, old contacts returning favours or plain scared of his crazed eyes and the Browning. Jack did his best to reassure them, meanwhile putting out the word, adding a bit of persuasion as needed. He soon learned that
Syed had been dobbed in by his mother and no one knew where Vidovic or Wyatt had disappeared to.

  But where Wyatt was a ghost—no imprint anywhere—everyone knew about Vidovic.

  Jack started knocking on doors, and one of Arlo Waterfield’s enforcers opened one of them. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘Fuck off. You’re bad news.’

  ‘I’m also pointing a gun at your balls,’ Jack said.

  The bloke was unimpressed. ‘What is that? A toy? Bottom of your Christmas stocking?’

  Jack figured he had nothing to lose and shot the goon in the foot. Then, with a look of surprise, he sniffed at the barrel. ‘Nup, it’s a real gun.’

  Arlo Waterfield’s minder had gone white. He didn’t hop and groan or faint, but quietly backed against the door jamb and slid down it to the ground, whispering, ‘You’re history.’

  ‘Sadly for you, I’m your present,’ Jack said. ‘I’ll ask again: Where’s Vidovic? Or Wyatt, I’m not fussy.’

  ‘Vidovic came in here last weekend,’ wheezed the minder. ‘Paid off his debts.’

  ‘With my money.’

  ‘Good as anyone’s.’

  ‘Fuck you. Where’d he go?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘How much money we talking about?’

  ‘Had a huge wad of it, mad cunt,’ the minder said, very white now, slipping sideways and into unconsciousness.

  That big wad was probably burning a hole in Vidovic’s pocket. Where a wise man might bank the money or limit himself to a flutter here and there, Vidovic would play the odds until he hadn’t a cent to his name.

  Jack knocked on more doors. None of Waterfield’s bookies or ‘loan officers’ had taken face-to-face or phone bets from Vidovic. None of his rivals had either. So Jack went around the country race meetings. Eventually he found a small turf operation in Ballarat that had taken a few mid-week bets from Stefan Vidovic. The man said Vidovic had lost heavily, too, and Jack tightened his fists involuntarily. Seeing all his money evaporate before his eyes.

  He found Vidovic in a flimsy self-catering caravan in the rat-haunted corner of pissy shadows that was the Golden Mile Caravan and Camping Oasis off the Western Highway. Under the snarling cover of trucks and semi-trailers, he shot Vidovic in the foot. It had worked before.

  Vidovic, who’d been asleep in grimy underwear on top of a tatty blanket, went into shock and fainted. Pepper stuck his head outside the thin aluminium door, glanced up and down the rows of caravans, saw that no one was looking or listening, and went back in and threw a pot of cold coffee over the man who’d stolen his idea and his money.

  Vidovic gasped, tossed his head about, coffee drops flying. ‘You shot me.’

  ‘Where’s my money?’

  ‘Wasn’t your money. My money. I did the work.’

  ‘My van, to the tune of seven-and-a-half grand, plus a grand for redecorating,’ Jack said. ‘My plan, my money.’

  Vidovic scrabbled away from him, rucking the blanket, and propped his fleshless spine against the wall. He levered his foot around to examine it, his dick flopping in the gape of his underpants.

  Jack winced. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘What if I can’t walk again?’ Vidovic whimpered. ‘I need a doctor.’

  Jack glanced at the ruined foot. Plenty of blood, thick and congealing. Pools and streaks of it at the bottom end of the bed. ‘My money.’

  ‘I’m broke, you little shit.’

  ‘So I’ll take Wyatt’s share.’

  Vidovic blinked, his pain forgotten. ‘Wyatt? What’s he got to do with it?’

  ‘What,’ sneered Jack, ‘you’re scared of him?’

  ‘Anyone in their right mind is scared of Wyatt,’ Vidovic said. ‘What I mean is, he wasn’t involved.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Jack. He thumped the wounded foot with the tip of his gun, showed his teeth: ‘Where…is…Wyatt?’

  Vidovic shrieked and whimpered. After a pause he gasped, ‘The moment…you show your face…he’ll whack you.’

  Pepper shot Vidovic’s other foot and he had to go through it all again, the fainting and recovery and general bitching. ‘Wake up. Where the fuck is Wyatt?’

  In the end he got a name and a place, David Minto, up on the Gold Coast.

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ Vidovic whimpered. After that, Jack Pepper made the whimpering stop.

  21

  Saturday, the hour before dawn.

  Alan Trask, in op-shop overalls with a meaningless logo stitched to the top pocket, walked around to the back of his block of flats and unlocked the white van he’d picked up from Cherub the previous afternoon. He ran a tracking device sensor over the vehicle. Nothing. He fired it up, nosed out onto the street, then down the hill and out to Noosaville. Very little traffic about; no one followed him along the Parade, on Gympie Terrace or into the car park at the rear of RiverRun Realty.

  There was Leah’s yellow Beetle. She answered his knock on the back door, her usual bright, chirpy self. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘And a very good morning to you.’

  Also wearing overalls, she stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Did you remember to get an alarm decoder?’

  Trask jerked his thumb at the van. ‘Yep.’

  She pointed at an empty Sony plasma TV carton. ‘Put that in the back.’

  ‘It would be my very great pleasure.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Leah snarled, and a minute later was in the passenger seat while Trask crouched in the back, transferring his Glock pistol, protein bars, police-band radio and infra-red security kit to the empty TV carton.

  Then he clambered into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine. Joined the sparse traffic on Noosa Parade, and finally crossed the little bridge to the circle of houses on Iluka Islet. A silent trip on his part, but Leah didn’t shut up. She was down hundreds of dollars on TV sets and overalls, not to mention the money she’d fronted Trask for the van, guns, code reader, and it was coming out of his cut, and…

  Trask stopped listening.

  Eyes on the van’s mirrors, he pulled into Thomas Ormerod’s driveway and got out. Leah got out. It was like flicking a switch: the scowl vanished and she smiled and sang and whistled as she helped him slide open the side door of the van, remove the Sony carton and heave it towards the front door. Labouring as if it weighed a tonne.

  Probably needn’t have bothered. There was no one walking a dog, collecting the morning paper or spraying the roses. As soon as they were screened from the street by shrubs and a creeper on a trellis, they headed down the side of the house to the kitchen door, where Leah removed her overalls. She wore a Speedo one-piece under it, a sylph in a dark blue second skin, nipples clearly delineated and the hint of texture where her thighs met…

  Leah shot him a look. ‘Focus.’

  ‘Oh, I am.’

  She snorted and reached into the overalls pocket for a bottle of massage oil. Began to lubricate her legs, thighs, arms. Trask could scarcely bear it. He looked away.

  Then heard a rubbery snap: she was pulling on latex gloves. She stared pointedly at his bare hands. He fished in his pocket and gloved up. ‘Satisfied?’

  Leah ignored him. She dropped to her knees and began to slide her way through the pet flap. Trask watched, fascinated. He’d once observed a long, thick-bodied copperhead snake disappear down a narrow hole in a concrete slab. It seemed to flex its body in long, slow pulses, shrinking a section at a time as it slid out of sight.

  Leah did that now, her right arm above her head, the left along her flank, as she eased first the extended arm through the gap, then her shoulder, head, neck, stretching and undulating until most of her trunk was through, then her tiny perfect rear, and finally her gleaming legs and, with a flip, both feet.

  What unnerved Trask was waiting for an alarm to sound. What if Ormerod had installed motion detectors? He waited, barely breathing.

  Still nothing.

  Then her slender arm emerged, fingers snapping. He gave her the security decoder and the arm disappeared.
Two minutes later, Leah opened the side door and let him into the kitchen. No alarm sounded. Trask checked the security box in the hallway: the light was green.

  A sensation at his feet and his heart hammered. Jesus. A fucking cat twining around his ankles. He nudged it away and tipped the contents of the TV carton on the floor.

  Leah pointed at the infra-red security system. ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘Let me know when Wyatt gets close to the house.’

  Leah shrugged, losing interest. She pulled on the overalls again. ‘I’ve got several clients this morning, so I can’t hang around. I need to shower, change and stow the painting.’

  ‘Where?’

  She said distractedly, ‘Where, what?’

  ‘Where are you stowing the painting?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘Tewantin self-storage,’ she said offhandedly.

  He might have questioned her further but Leah, capable of being nice for ten or twenty whole seconds at a stretch, gave him a full-body hug and a face-splitting grin, so that his doubts evaporated. She tugged his hand, leading him to the vast sitting room. Curtains drawn, it was a dim cave. Leah halted before the painting and gave an ironic bow and hand flourish. ‘Kind sir.’

  Trask grinned. He reached up his hands, grabbed each side of the frame, and lifted the painting off the wall, his heart pounding. No alarm. Relieved, he slotted the painting neatly into the Sony carton. ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  Leah was all business again. ‘You wait here and call me when Wyatt makes his entrance. I’ll come back with the van.’

  ‘Got it,’ Trask said.

  ‘You know he’s got a gun.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘When you’ve whacked him, we load him in the van and dump him at sea.’

  That’s what Trask had said he’d do, but he hadn’t thought how or where, exactly. ‘Not a problem.’