by Garry Disher
Pay Dirt
( Wyatt - 2 )
Garry Disher
Garry Disher
Pay Dirt
ONE
The work was dirty, the little town a joke, but Wyatt was interested only in the advantages-they didn’t know who he was, there were no cops, and no one was expecting a payroll snatch.
He was up to his elbows in grease when the money arrived. The Steelgard security van appeared at the cemetery corner in a cloud of dust, crept past the bowling green clubhouse, and slowed for the gate in the temporary fence that separated the construction camp from the town. He watched the van lurch through the gate into the camp and stop outside Brava Construction’s site office, fifty metres from where he was getting his hands dirty. He checked the time: midday. He saw two men get out. They began to haul cash-boxes into the site office. When one of them glanced in his direction, Wyatt bent over his work again and got some more dirt on himself.
He was in the Brava Construction repair shop, servicing gearboxes. On previous Thursdays he’d been with the crews laying pipes across the wheat flats north of the town, but this time he’d paid one of the Chileans fifty bucks to swap with him and now he was up to his elbows in grease, watching the money arrive.
Normally Wyatt never pulled a job from the inside. If he was in a city he’d base himself in some distant suburb and strike out of nowhere. But this wasn’t a city, this was Belcowie, population two hundred, a dusty farming town three hours’ drive north of Adelaide. It had a Four Square store, a post office, four massive grain silos, a garage with a solitary petrol pump, a bank open two afternoons a week, fifty houses, no police station, and a long, low pub that had never had it so good.
Brava Construction had hired one hundred and fifty men when it got the contract to lay the gas pipeline. All of them had a big thirst. Oddly, a third of them came from South and Central America. The boss was an Argentinian called Jorge Figueras, and he’d tell anyone who listened that it was his duty to help others who’d fled from poverty, death squads, generals and communists. It was a ten-month contract so the wages were high. One hundred and fifty men at $1500 a week, a further $50 000 in managers’ wages and expenses-$275 000. But the Steelgard van also did a bank run, servicing ten banks in a hundred-kilometre radius. Given that the run finished in Belcowie, Wyatt figured the total snatch could be worth as much as $400 000.
It had to be worked from the inside. He needed to plan and watch, and that took time, so posing as a tourist or salesman was out-no tourist or salesman ever stayed in Belcowie for long. This way, as one of the grimy hundred and fifty, Wyatt wouldn’t be noticed. And by the time the cops had got through interviewing a few hundred residents and construction workers next payday, he’d be long gone.
The siren sounded for lunch. Wyatt straightened the kinks in his back. He was tall and fluid-looking, with a hard edge that kept him out of trouble when the South Americans got rowdy. They were friendly, quick and sentimental, and he liked them, but some thought they had something to prove, and he could sense them watching him sometimes, looking side-on at his narrow, hooked face and loose, strong arms.
He crossed the shed and joined the Chilean mechanics at the stainless steel sinks. He measured hand cleanser into his palms from the dispenser and slapped it up and down his forearms and over his hands. Just then one of Leah’s girls walked past the shed on her way to her caravan. The Chileans began to whoop and whistle, and one of them nudged Wyatt, but the woman didn’t interest Wyatt. He was watching the Steelgard van, memorising all he could. When he hit next Thursday he wanted it to go like clockwork.
Steelgard had got slack, that was clear. They were based in Goyder, a rural city seventy kilometres away, and in all the years they’d been servicing the banks there had never been an incident to sharpen them. The van was a small, short wheelbase Isuzu with external rear-door hinges and ordinary locks. But the van wasn’t important. Wyatt wasn’t interested in the van, only in the slack security.
First, there were no cops keeping an eye on things. Sometimes a patrol car from Goyder showed at pub-closing time, but only for thirty minutes and usually on the weekend. There was no guarantee that cops wouldn’t show next Thursday, but they hadn’t come for today’s delivery, and Leah had never seen them come, so Wyatt was betting they wouldn’t show.
Second, the camp was almost deserted. The only people populating the wasteland of concrete pipes, fuel drums, earthmoving equipment and temporary buildings were Leah’s girls and a handful of clerks and mechanics. Everything would change at two-thirty, when the crews came in to clean up and collect their pay packets, but Wyatt intended to be a hundred kilometres away by that time next Thursday.
Third, the guards looked easy. Only two men, and they lacked that edge Wyatt had seen on his other hits. He noticed other lapses. Instead of one man unloading while the other stood guard, both unloaded. And Brava hadn’t assigned anyone to help them.
Then, as Wyatt watched, the guards shut the van, lit cigarettes and strolled across to the canteen. They’d have lunch and come back to supervise while the pay packets were made up, but right now the money was in the care of just one man, the pay clerk.
Wyatt would have hit then and there if he’d had a gun, a partner and a fast car.
****
TWO
The set-up was exactly as Leah had described it.
Wyatt had turned up on her doorstep six weeks earlier, on the run from a Melbourne job that had gone sour. His cover had been blown, he was wanted for murder, he’d had to leave the state. A few addresses and a wad of cash were all he had in the world.
Her home in the Adelaide Hills had been in darkness the night he arrived. He prowled around it warily, looking at the doors and windows. The ground-floor curtains were drawn, but there was a window open in one of the two upper-level rooms that had been built into the steeply pitched roof. He knocked and waited. No lights came on but after a while he’d sensed that she was behind the door. ‘Leah,’ he said softly.
Her voice came low and hard. ‘Yeah?’
‘Wyatt.’
She had opened the door, noted his hunted look and his paleness, and stood aside to let him in. She didn’t say anything, not even as he took out his.38 and prowled with it through her house. It was something he had to do, an instinctive thing, so she waited until he was finished.
‘How long this time?’ she said.
‘Not long. A week, two weeks.’
‘It’s been five years, Wyatt.’
He nodded. He had no use for this, then realised a beat too late that it was mostly a joke. He smiled at her briefly, a sharkish twist of the mouth.
‘Are you broke?’ she said.
‘Not entirely.’
She nodded. ‘You’re on the run,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a job.’
Wyatt watched her for a moment. She’d been sleeping and was wearing a thigh-length black T-shirt. She had black hair, cropped short so that it spiked. She was small and compact-looking, and he remembered her round brown belly and how quick and elastic she could be. He felt calm and safe now. He put the gun away and placed his hands on her upper arms. Instantly her ironical expression disappeared. She closed her eyes and breathed out. She opened them again. ‘Well, come on,’ she said, almost irritably.
It was the next morning when they were in bed, which was a mess, that she’d told him about the Belcowie payroll.
‘Godforsaken little place,’ she said, ‘in the middle of nowhere. Nothing ever happens there, except one day the government decides to put a gas pipeline through and the locals wake up to find a hundred and fifty randy construction workers living on their doorstep.’
‘That’s where you come in,’ Wyatt said.
‘Exactly. Fifteen hundred bucks a week and nothing to
spend it on except beer and poker. I made Jorge an offer-I put a few girls in, you get ten per cent and a contented workforce.’
Wyatt leaned on his elbow and touched her. It was absent-minded, but she looked down her body, watching his hand. ‘The money,’ he said.
She flopped back. ‘I stayed on for a couple of weeks, helping the girls get settled, laying the ground rules, kind of thing, so I was there twice when the payroll came in.’
‘Details,’ Wyatt said.
‘Payday is each Thursday. The van arrives just before lunch. The security’s not very good.’
Wyatt nodded, beginning to shape the job in his mind. ‘Cops?’
‘The nearest cop shop is an hour away. I never saw a single jack the time I was there.’
‘What about the camp? Who’s around when the money arrives?’
‘Hardly anyone. The crews knock off about two-thirty on Thursdays to come in and pick up their pay, but the place is quiet until then.’
‘How many guards?’
‘I only saw two, same ones each time. They stay until the pay packets are made up, and leave about three o’clock.’
‘The town?’ Wyatt said. ‘Witnesses?’
‘The camp’s along one edge of the town, in an empty paddock. From memory there’s a bowling club and a few backyards opposite, that’s all. It’s a pretty dead place.’
Wyatt began to pay attention to her again. She laughed and wriggled. ‘You like it, huh?’
‘I’ll check it out.’
‘I can ask Jorge to give you a job there.’
His face had been tired-looking and distant, but now she saw it sharpen. ‘No! No links.’
‘Suit yourself,’ she said, stretching, closing her eyes.
A few days later she drove him down from the hills to the bus station in the centre of Adelaide. Buses going through to Broken Hill passed within twenty kilometres of Belcowie, so he caught one of those. He got off at a crossroads on a mallee scrub plain and started walking. A mail driver picked him up after an hour and dropped him on the outskirts of Belcowie. It was early afternoon. Wyatt knew motors and he looked strong and he could drive a truck. By four o’clock Jorge Figueras had given him a job laying pipes for $1500 a week.
****
THREE
Now, drying his hands and watching the camp dog cock its leg on the Steelgard van, Wyatt knew how the snatch would go. He would hit as soon as the money was unloaded and the pay office more or less unattended. Any later and he’d be dealing with armed men and a hundred and fifty pay packets. He had seven days to put a good team together and stash some cars between Belcowie and Adelaide.
‘Hey, gringo, lunch.’
It was the repair shop foreman. His name was Carlos and he was standing with the other Chileans, waiting for Wyatt.
But Wyatt was concentrating. He stared at the Chileans as if they weren’t there. The Chileans shrugged and turned away and set out across the dusty yard to the canteen.
Wyatt looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes later he left the shed and took a roundabout route past the site office and the front gate. He was still concentrating, fixing in his mind the timing and the geography of the town and the camp. Leah’s girls worked from caravans a few hundred metres from the men’s dormitories, in a corner of the camp screened from the town by peeling gum trees. The boundary fence went along the eastern edge of the town and the town itself straggled north and south for three kilometres. After that it was nothing but dry farmland and distant hills.
His attention was caught by a movement in a dusty lot opposite the camp. A month ago the lot had been vacant, and it would be vacant again when the camp moved on, but now it was a branch of Trigg Motors, a struggling car dealership based in Goyder. Half a dozen used Holdens were gathering dust under a string of sun-faded plastic flags, and a caravan annexe bellied in the wind. Trigg himself was there today, a short, ferrety man dressed like a grazier, pasting a sale sticker to the windscreen of a 1973 Kingswood. Trigg was always there on payday, when the South Americans had money in their pockets. Apparently he enjoyed haggling with them. Wyatt turned away. Trigg would see the snatch next week but he was no hassle.
Wyatt’s next step was to get a fix on the driver and the guard. Just as he was approaching the canteen the driver emerged. Wyatt saw a big, soft, fleshy man, with large worried features crammed together on a small head. The name tag on the uniform said ‘Venables’. Wyatt turned, watching him go. Venables grunted as he walked. He looked tight and knock-kneed, his vast behind stretching his trousers.
Wyatt had no interest in Venables, beyond the man’s potential to foil a holdup, but then Venables did a curious thing: he didn’t go to the pay office but out the front gate, across the gravel road and into Trigg’s yard. He conferred with Trigg for a few seconds, then both men left the lot and walked along the road to the pub on the corner.
Wyatt heard a clatter behind him. Carlos emerged from the canteen. He tapped his watch and grinned when he saw Wyatt. ‘Fifteen minutes, okay, gringo?’
Wyatt grinned back at him. ‘Si seсor,’ he said, and he went into the canteen to get a look at the guard.
****
At three o’clock it all came apart.
Although the pipe-laying and trench-digging crews were back in camp and the showers were running hot and men were lining up outside the pay office, Wyatt was still in the repair shop, stripping a gearbox. Permanently suspicious and wary, he was the first to notice the upset. It started with the unmarked cars and vans. There were ten of them, all white. Half entered the camp, the other half took up positions around the perimeter fence.
Wyatt didn’t know what they wanted but he did know his prints and description were now on file somewhere, so he wasn’t going to stick around to find out. His gun and most of his cash were at Leah’s so he wasn’t bothered about the few things in the locker next to his bunk. He stepped back to where he couldn’t be seen and watched as thirty men got out of the cars and vans. There were plainclothes among the uniforms, but what interested him most were the insignias on the uniforms. These cops were federal, not state.
Then a group of Chileans outside the pay office made a useless run for the gate. A scuffle broke out. Soon all the cops were involved.
Illegals, Wyatt thought. Fucking Jorge has been employing guys who’ve overstayed their visas.
He crouched in the shadows. There were a couple of Kings woods across the road in Trigg’s yard. Wyatt could hot wire Kingswoods with his eyes closed.
****
FOUR
‘I’m good for it, Ray, you know that,’ Tub Venables said.
Raymond Trigg screwed up his eyes. He was lighting a cigarette and the smoke got him, every time. ‘I know you are, Tub. The question is, when?’
The car dealer and the security van driver were in the front bar of the Belcowie Hotel, a dim, beery room with laminex surfaces and cracked brown linoleum on the buckled floor. It was two-thirty and they’d been there since one o’clock, Trigg nursing small glasses of Southwark Light while Venables soaked up pints of draught. The Chileans would be crossing the road with their pay packets soon, but meanwhile Trigg had to keep Tub Venables from falling apart. ‘You got to be more responsible, my son,’ he said. ‘Five thousand bucks-it’s a lot of money.’
‘Interest,’ Venables said mournfully. He sweated when he was scared. He was also leaning on the bar cloth, getting his elbows wet. ‘I’ve paid back the principal, but you keep charging me interest on the interest. I’ll never catch up.’
‘That’s how it works, Tub. Five thousand bucks principal costs you five hundred a week interest. The five thousand has to be paid back in a lump sum-like you can’t pay five hundred interest and a hundred off the principal or something. I told you that at the beginning. You shouldn’t have borrowed so much.’
Venables’s face creased fatly in cunning. ‘I could just stop paying.’
‘Ah, come on, Tub. You know what happens if you do that.’
Venables looked
gloomily back into his beer glass. He didn’t like Trigg. Trigg was a short, scrawny bloke who tried to compensate for it with his moleskins, Akubra hat and elastic-sided boots, as if he owned a sheep station instead of a car yard. But he knew it wouldn’t do to underrate the man, for Trigg also ran the local SP, loan-sharking and distribution rackets, and with the downturn in the economy he’d become mean and touchy. Hold out on him and he’d send in Happy Whelan, his mechanic, a mindless big thug who’d break your neck as soon as look at you.
‘You drink too much,’ Trigg said. ‘You want to watch it. That and the horses and fast women, Tub, you’ll keel over before you’re fifty. I’ll never get my dough then.’ He poked the fat man. ‘Joke, Tub, for Christ’s sake.’
Venables looked up. ‘All I want is a bit more time. I don’t want fucking Happy knocking on my door.’
Ray Trigg’s bloodless lips stretched in a smile. ‘You’re sounding like a cracked record, old son.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t you get back to work? Your mate’s going to be pissed off. I mean, someone could snatch the payroll.’
‘Never happen,’ Venables said, easing his buttocks off the bar stool.
He stood there, watching Trigg climb down. He felt a dangerous desire to lift the little man under the arms and deposit him on the floor. He hated Trigg’s staved-in face, the neat little rabbit teeth on his lower lip, the elevator heels.
Trigg seemed to catch his thoughts. He looked vicious suddenly. ‘The vans are booked in two weeks from yesterday, am I right?’
Venables nodded. Trigg’s garage in Goyder had the servicing contract for the Steelgard vans.
‘Pay me a thousand then, no less,’ Trigg said.
He turned and crossed the room, nodding at the licensee and the only other customer, a farmer sneaking a quick beer.
