by Garry Disher
‘He’s thinking of selling,’ said Leah wildly. She didn’t want to be caught up in any paedophile investigation.
‘Leah,’ said Batten with a little head shake, ‘I have to inform you that we arrested your boyfriend a little while ago, and he’s made some very interesting admissions and accusations.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ Leah said. Grabbing at what she could, she said, ‘He works security, he provides protection, he—’
‘Works for your uncle,’ Batten said, sounding less like a church warden than a hanging judge.
Leah snatched a glance at her watch. ‘Look, I have a showing in—’
‘Is it love? I suppose it must be. Difficult with such a heavy steroid user, I imagine. Balls the size of peanuts. Erectile dysfunction…’
Yes on both counts, thought Leah. She drew herself up and said, ‘Leave now, please. I don’t have to listen to this.’
Batten gave her a lawman’s smile. Lips only, no other muscles involved. ‘We arrested Trask at his gym. Apparently he wasn’t supposed to be there.’
Leah felt a trickle of hope. She hadn’t been followed. That meant they didn’t know about Rafi’s apartment. And they only had Trask’s word for it that she’d ever been at Ormerod’s house. She couldn’t work out why Trask was at the gym, though.
And why had the police been there? ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. If I’ve committed a crime, charge me. If Alan Trask says I’ve committed a crime, he’s lying.’
‘Outrage. Very good. Keep it up,’ Batten said.
His phone rang. He hunched himself as the caller spoke, and darted his eyes at Leah. Then he stiffened, got to his feet, a flicker of anger on his weasel face. ‘How badly wounded?’ he shouted. He listened to the reply, then barked orders: ‘Saturate the area. Look closely at the tourists, look at single men who don’t look right. Wrong footwear, clothing. No towel or sun hat or bathers. Torn or dirty, hot, flustered, dishevelled, evidence of blood. You know the drill.’ Listened again. ‘I’ll be right there.’
He stepped out from behind the desk, nodded the dyke into his vacated chair and opened the door. Said, as he went out, ‘Does your uncle know what’s going on up here, Leah?’
26
Wyatt crept to the bottom of the stairs. It was aftershave he could smell. And something else: a sports liniment.
Left by Ormerod? No. The odours were fresh.
Along the hallway to the sitting room. He entered at a crouch, his gun searching the room, a broad, dimly lit space, blinds almost fully drawn, an expanse of deceptive shapes and shadows. Enough light to see that the wall was bare above the fireplace and a uniformed policeman stood poised on the carpet between armchairs. He had his feet planted, his service pistol beside his thigh, his head cocked at the ceiling, as if he’d heard sounds up there and was waiting to hear them again.
Then, sensing Wyatt, he swung around and brought up his gun arm. Wyatt shot him in the leg, turned, headed towards the stairs as a second uniform appeared, stepping out of a front room. Their idea of a pincer action, Wyatt thought. Well, it hadn’t worked. He fired, missed, fired again, driving the man back into the front room.
Wyatt ran lightly up the stairs.
Fishing the bottle of water from the external pocket of the backpack, he took one swig for hydration, then sloshed the rest over Ormerod’s stairway carpet. Tossed the cap away, screwed the empty bottle over the barrel of his pistol, stepped onto the landing and into one of the front rooms of the house.
It was Ormerod’s bedroom. A vast bed, cabinets, reading lights, walk-in robe and no personality at all. Wyatt barely noticed. He went straight to the window, drew back the curtains and scouted the view.
He was looking over the narrow street that ran around the tiny island, separating the inner clump of dwellings from the outer ring of water-view mansions. A handful of parked cars. There’d be a police car nearby, but Wyatt didn’t bother trying to spot it. Instead, he slid open the window, took a two-handed stance and fired the pistol at an Audi, punching a hole through the windscreen, the makeshift silencer containing the report to a dull clap. The base of the water bottle shredded; smoke curled out, but Wyatt was more interested in the Audi. It seemed to crouch in shock for a moment, before the alarm shrieked.
Wyatt fired at a Range Rover, a longer shot, another alarm, discordant with the first. A third shot, a fourth, at house windows this time. Nothing from the third shot. The fourth set off a burglar alarm.
By now the shredded bottle was barely suppressing the shots. Wyatt fired once more as people emerged from their houses, seeing them scatter as it ricocheted, before he returned to the corridor. He heard screaming downstairs, the wounded officer asking for an ambulance. Another voice, young, nerve-racked, cried up the staircase, ‘Armed police, come down with your hands up.’ Two cops, thought Wyatt. More watching somewhere on the street?
He returned to Thomas Ormerod’s junk room and stripped off his workman’s gear, then slipped through the window again. An escape by water was out: he could see a third uniform, standing guard over his hired boat. He’d have to try the street.
Running at a crouch along the veranda roof, Wyatt crossed to the scaffolding on the house adjacent to Ormerod’s, then across to the next house along, where a large jacaranda tree stood in the gap between them. A couple of the branches dipped into the neighbour’s side yard. Choosing the sturdiest-looking, Wyatt stepped along it like a tightrope walker, beginning to fall at the end as the branch bowed and creaked. He turned it into a graceless tumble over the fence into a bed of ground creepers.
A woman in a sundress at a side window of the house looked on, wineglass in hand. She seemed no more than mildly astonished to see him there. Wyatt rolled to his feet, nodded hello, saw her give him a distracted wave.
He strolled to the corner of the house, paused to gaze at the street. Half-a-dozen men and women had emerged to gawk, complain and swig alcohol. He brushed himself down, stepped onto the road, joined them.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Dunno.’
One of the drinkers handed him a beer. ‘Cheers,’ he said, lifting the can to his mouth. He began to edge away. He looked no more crumpled than some of them, but they didn’t have chlorophyll stains on their pants or an air of urgency. And the woman with the wineglass might start thinking about what she’d just seen.
A little Mazda shot into view, ‘Papa’s Pizza’ bannered along the side and across the bonnet. The driver got out, leaving the engine running. A kid in a hurry. He forearmed sweat from his face, stripped off his Papa’s Pizza jacket and tossed it onto the passenger seat, then retrieved a couple of pizza boxes from the rear of the car. He seemed unaware of the burglar alarms and the gathering crowd, interested only in finding the correct delivery address, aware that he was on the clock.
Wyatt slipped into the driver’s seat of the Mazda and messed with the kid’s schedule.
He shot out of Iluka Islet, over the tiny bridge to the intersection with Noosa Parade. His best hope was to lose the car and mingle with the crowd of bathers and sunbathers on Noosa’s main beach, but the traffic was dense on the Parade with no chance of turning right any time soon. He headed left, hoping to make a U-turn when the traffic cleared.
Moments later, a siren whooped, a pursuit car looming in his rear-view mirror. It would outclass the Mazda if Wyatt had a clear run, but traffic still snarled Noosa Parade. Wyatt accelerated, braked, accelerated, braked, crossing the Munna Point bridge in spurts, hemmed in by the traffic, mocked by a pelican squatting on the light bracket above him.
The traffic cleared after that. He hurtled along the Parade to the Weyba Road roundabout. The hinterland or the river? He turned right, towards the water, where he might find a boat or lose himself among tourists.
But the road was wider here. The police car, riding his rear bumper, swung out to overtake. It drew alongside, the officer in the passenger seat gesturing furiously, mouthing at him to pull over. Wyatt, returning his gaze t
o the road ahead, reached out his left hand for the backpack on the seat beside him, the pistol just under the flap.
Did he want the police returning fire? Wyatt decided against the gun. He patted around for the pizza kid’s jacket. He bundled it in his fist and accelerated until the Mazda was half a length ahead of the pursuit car, then lowered his window. He waited, judging the moment. Flung the jacket from the car where it caught the slipstream, spread its wings, plastered itself across the pursuing windscreen.
Tyres screamed. There was a percussive whump, metal tearing, glass breaking. Wyatt didn’t look. He shot onto Gympie Terrace, along the river a short distance, out along Howard Street to the Parade again.
Police cars blocked the road just beyond the entrance to Munna Crescent. More police cars were coming in from the opposite direction, so Wyatt tore into Munna Crescent with a siren a few bare metres from his rear bumper. The street was empty and quiet, no way of telling what lay beyond the curve.
Braking hard in a straight line, Wyatt threw the stick into neutral and cut the wheel right, simultaneously yanking hard on the handbrake, his thumb on the button. The Mazda’s rear end spun around one-eighty degrees and slid backwards. He straightened the wheel again, pumped the foot brake, and, for a half second, was stationary. The whole manoeuvre took no more than a couple of seconds.
He released the handbrake, planted his foot on the accelerator and steered straight at the police car. He could feel the torque in the little car, wheels spinning until it was wreathed in the fumes of superheated rubber. The police car braked, panic in the eyes of the driver and passenger. They hadn’t signed on for this. The driver flicked the wheel towards the kerb, giving Wyatt the gap he needed. He howled past.
Nearly clear, he clipped the cop car’s rear bumper and the Mazda spun around and slammed into a parked station wagon, the front end crumpling. Wyatt grabbed the backpack, kicked his door open, and cut across a playground to the caravan park beyond it.
It was like stepping from one world to another, slower, one. The sun was lazy overhead, kids threw Frisbees, dogs twitched in their sleep. A woman hosed sand from her legs, another towelled a child’s hair. Radios played, rock music here, frantic football commentary there. An elderly man and woman were parking a van in a series of short, aggravated shunts; teenagers returned from the riverbank wrapped in towels.
Wyatt ran into a shower block, stuffed the backpack under a wad of sodden paper, and ran out with the gun in his hand. People would see him and wonder, but seconds would pass between wondering and acting. Anyway, Wyatt was betting they’d do nothing. He was betting they’d think it was a toy gun. He was betting most of them wouldn’t see the gun to begin with.
He ran along the sand, looking for a way up onto the Noosa Parade footpath. As he ran, he switched hands, the gun in his left for fifteen seconds, the right for fifteen seconds. He was right-handed and needed to rest it regularly. The strain, the gun weight, could spoil his aim.
He saw one policeman. Cleverer than the others, he’d ventured down onto the river and was eyeing the sunbathing teenage boys, the men with their wives and lovers and kids, one hand on the butt of his handgun.
He saw Wyatt and went very still. He fumbled at the holster clip and then had the gun out and his voice was shaky but resolute: ‘Stop right there. Put down the gun.’
Wyatt didn’t alter pace or direction. Just loped along easily, a lanky man who could run like this for hours, it seemed. He didn’t eye the policeman’s gun but his face. He saw bewilderment. Surely if you see an armed policeman you stop? Or run? Or veer off to one side? Open up a gap, not close it? But Wyatt kept coming, and it unnerved the policeman. He fired, finally, spotting the gun in Wyatt’s hand. Fired high because he was rattled and there were kids around and then Wyatt was on him, driving a fist into his stomach. He went down, gasping, halfway relieved, and all around him the kids and their parents were open-mouthed.
Now Wyatt was beneath the bridge. He clambered up the slope, feet slipping in the droughty dirt and dying grass, tucked the gun into his waistband and stepped onto the footpath that arced across the river. Cars streamed by a couple of metres from his elbow. Kids slopped along, a mother pushed a pram, a man strolled with a child on his shoulders.
Then Wyatt was on the other side, entering the Quamby Place shops. He bought a tourist T-shirt and changed into it behind a rack of postcards. He ditched the hat, the sunglasses. He strolled back onto Noosa Parade. He was alighting at Hastings Street before anyone thought to check bus passengers.
27
The Pacific Grand was his safest bet. Finding a different hotel, motel or holiday apartment would mean showing his face again, to the kinds of people who tend to remember a new face if there’s been a shootout on the news, a car chase, an armed man at large. The police would chew up time checking taxi companies, bus drivers, complaining motorists and airports before getting around to hotels, let alone high-end hotels. And the kind of man who thieves and shoots and tackles policemen does not stay at a hotel like the Pacific Grand. Theoretically.
Wyatt slipped into his penthouse room and listened to the news. A description had gone out but it was of a big man, swarthy, scruffy, tattooed. He relaxed: clearly he’d left a trail of heightened emotions along the riverfront. Shocked, frightened people who couldn’t connect their experience to a man of ordinary appearance. A man who robs, shoots and brawls is not like them but foreign, alien, other.
The hysterical descriptions were accurate enough in the broad details, however. Wyatt was tall. Lithe, but large-framed. Olive toned, with hawkish features. His face, rarely animated, was unlikely to seem friendly or approachable.
He set out to soften his contours.
At four o’clock, the town still caught up in the drama on its streets and the theatre on a football field in another state, he slipped with wet, spiky hair into the bowels of the hotel, looking for the laundry room. Finding a pair of pressed grey trousers and an ironed business shirt, he changed clothes. Made his way out onto Hastings Street and stuffed the clothes he’d worn for the robbery into a rubbish bin.
His first stop was a pharmacy, where he bought reading glasses with chunky black frames. Then a bookshop: a paperback and a large book bag. Now he was a scholarly-looking ex-soldier or cop. In a men’s outfitter he bought two linen jackets, one cream, one navy blue, two pairs of chinos, tan and charcoal, and two polo shirts, one yellow, one blue.
Then back across the street to a flight of steps leading to a door marked, ‘Medical and Hospital Supplies Hire or Buy’. Wyatt limped in and bought a pair of lightweight crutches, gauze pads and bandaging.
‘Hurt my leg surfing,’ he said.
The girl at the register chewed her gum and nodded. She didn’t care. Saturday afternoon, bored shitless and counting the minutes until she knocked off. Dickhead tourists who came to Noosa and talked down to you because you worked in a shop, did something active for the first time all year and hurt themselves. She saw it all the time. Chewed her gum and slid the guy’s change over the counter, $5.60.
She looked up at Wyatt then, and something flickered inside her, as her gaze went beyond the neat shirt, the ugly glasses. It was covert, instinctive and contradictory, desire and fear in one hit. She swallowed.
Wyatt saw it and read it. The pharmacy glasses hadn’t worked with this young woman. He mustered a disarming smile onto his granite features, hoping she’d remember the desire, not the fear, and returned to the hotel. Down to the laundry room, to replace the shirt and trousers, into a new shirt and trousers, then up to his room.
Taking the stairs to seven, he eased open the door, checked the corridor. It was a dim, faintly humming tunnel, with a durable carpet and a dozen clever little alcoves and mirrors along its length—but no cops or hotel guests or staff. He’d rarely seen or encountered anyone, anywhere, in this hotel. Where they all were, where they went, he had no idea.
He entered his room at a crouch. It was empty.
He sat on the bed and tugged
upwards on the right trouser leg. His calf was slender, knotted with tendons and muscle, healthy-looking. He needed to fix that. He wrapped it in the gauze thickly, then cut the trouser leg along the seam from ankle to mid-calf, enabling it to fall over the padding. He stood experimentally, the crutches under his arms. He walked around the room, taking the weight on the crutches and his left leg. He hoped to Christ he wouldn’t have far to go or for long over the next couple of days, and hoped no one would look at his size, the hint of power in his frame and the forbidding face, but at his injured leg.
After that he hobbled down to the surf club, where he knew there was still a public phone bolted to the wall. Standing with his back to the building, watching for anyone who didn’t look right—too intent, moving too quickly, eyes sliding away from his—he called David Minto.
‘Yes?’
The voice was guarded, Minto waiting for news—good or bad. But news from whom? Wyatt said, ‘It seems I was too late, the property has already gone and I found the Constable family in residence.’
A pause while Minto read between the lines. He sounded strained: ‘I’m not in the office at present. Call me there in thirty minutes.’
This was the fallback routine: Minto would drive to the shopping centre over the rise from his house and take Wyatt’s call on a payphone. Meanwhile, reluctant to use the surf club phone again, Wyatt limped to the bus interchange. Police were eyeing passengers so he hailed a cab. Getting out at Noosa Junction, he found a 7-Eleven with a public phone and at the thirty-minute mark called Minto.
‘Yes?’
Wyatt could hear muzak and kids’ voices in the background. ‘Police were waiting for me,’ he said, ‘and there was no painting on the wall.’
A long silence. ‘I didn’t cross you.’
‘Have you talked to your niece?’
‘She’s not answering.’
‘Her boyfriend?’
‘What boyfriend?’
‘Big, steroid freak, rides a Kawasaki,’ said Wyatt.
