by Garry Disher
Venables’s face knitted in worry. ‘He’s on the floor. You sure he’s okay?’
‘He’ll have a headache when he wakes up. Apart from that, he’ll be fine.’
They heard footsteps thudding in the grass at the edge of the track. Happy appeared, his gloomy face showing the strain. ‘Okay?’ Trigg asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Good,’ Trigg said. Then, to Venables: ‘It’s time you called in again.’
Venables’s prominent eyes were watery and troubled. He reached into the cab of the Steelgard van for the radio handset. His voice rasping a little, he reported to the base in Goyder: ‘Steelgard One; nothing to report; ETA Belcowie fifteen minutes.’
‘Good,’ Trigg said again, and he tucked the front sight of the.303 under Tub Venables’s chin and pulled the trigger. There was a spurt of blood and bone chips and Venables seemed to spring up and back and smack to the ground. For several seconds afterwards, tremors passed through his arms and legs.
‘Dump him in the ditch,’ Trigg said. ‘We don’t want him found yet.’
He wasn’t worried about a ballistics test. The slug would have gone right through Venables’s head. He wasn’t particularly worried about the rifle. A drifter had given it to him five years ago in part payment for a clapped out VW. There was no paperwork linking him to it, and he didn’t intend to hang onto it.
He watched Happy haul the body off the road. Then he got into the XJ6 and Happy into the Steelgard van and they drove along the track for three minutes. Tobin was waiting for them next to an earthen bank thick with tall Scotch thistles and reeds that screened them from traffic passing along the Belcowie road a short distance away. Tobin had just arrived. He was dropping the ramp at the back of the breakdown truck. No one spoke until Happy, guided by Tobin’s hand signals, had the van aboard the truck.
‘Where’s the drivers?’ Tobin asked.
Trigg stared moodily into the distance. ‘He couldn’t make it. Help Hap get the tarp over the van.’
While they were doing that, Trigg went back to move the first sign. The signs would attract attention when the panic started, and he didn’t want Venables found just yet. He hid the sign in the grass and drove back to the truck. The van was completely concealed now, the tarpaulin covering it on all sides. The paint job, the logo on the side-Wyatt’s team had done a good job.
They pulled out. Trigg went first, to drag the second sign into the grass, and Tobin and Happy followed in the truck. At the intersection they turned left, away from Belcowie. There was no traffic.
Trigg led all the way, keeping in radio contact with the others. He didn’t think there would be a roadblock this soon, not until the cops had searched and scratched their heads for a while, but he wasn’t taking any chances. If there was a block, he’d have time to warn the others. He imagined the confusion when the police did find something. When they found Tub Venables but no van, they might be inclined to blame the guard. If they found the hideout, found Wyatt and the woman and the other man, they’d think they had it solved.
There were no roadblocks. In fact, the bogus Brava truck and its cargo were locked in the long panel-beating shed at the rear of Trigg Motors in Goyder two minutes before the first Goyder patrol car had even left the city.
****
TWENTY-EIGHT
The blood had begun to coagulate and flies were gathering but the body was still warm. The fat driver looked less fat now that he’d been shot and dumped in a roadside ditch. Wyatt wondered why Venables had taken this route, why he had stopped, why he had left the van.
He examined the tracks. Apart from Venables’s heel scrapes in the powdery dirt, there were two sets of tyre tracks- the Steelgard van and a narrower set belonging to a car. Both had stopped here, something had happened, and both had gone on again.
Maybe they wouldn’t be far ahead. Wyatt started the utility again and put his foot down, the elderly suspension complaining, the sump smacking against the hard-baked ruts in the road.
He got to the end and stopped. The main road to Belcowie was empty. There was only a shot-up road sign warning of the T-intersection and indicating that Belcowie was four kilometres to the north, Goyder seventy to the south. He got out to see if he could read the tracks. There weren’t any. Gravel had been spread around the junction, too coarse to register tyre tracks. But something had been dragged across it recently. Wyatt followed the scrape mark into the thick grass leading to a strainer post in the fence on the left-hand corner paddock. Someone had dumped a road-closed sign there. It was cruder than the ones Leah and Snyder had made.
He returned to the utility. The intersection was on a slight rise. He could see Belcowie clearly, the wheat silos glowing white, sunlight flashing on windscreens and rooftops.
He turned his head the other way. South, he thought. That’s where they’ll be.
He was about to head after them when something about the scope and intensity of the flashing windscreens made him pause and get out the field-glasses. At one point between the intersection and Belcowie the road curved broadly to skirt a large limestone reef. Within a few seconds he saw what the fuss was about. Four of the Brava Landcruisers were pushing fast out of the town. He guessed there would be more like it setting out from the other end of the town. Jorge was sending out search parties. His men were volatile and wanted their wages.
Wyatt spun the utility around, cursing himself. He should have thought of that, should have realised Steelgard wouldn’t be alone in wondering where the money had got to.
He threw the Holden into the bends and over the bone-jarring ruts and holes of the track. He had to get out and onto a main road before they squeezed him from both ends. If they saw him they’d know the utility wasn’t one of theirs. If they found Venables’s body, they’d assume he’d done it. They’d call each other on their CB radios and box him in. They’d call the cops. If they caught him they wouldn’t find any money but they’d find Snyder under the sleeping bags and plenty of evidence of a planned job. They’d find enough to put him away for life.
For a few seconds, when the track was flat and smooth, Wyatt risked giving his attention to Snyder’s fancy radio. It was turned low, still tuned to the monotonous Steelgard dispatcher. He switched to the CB band and tuned it to the channel used by Brava.
Excited voices erupted in Spanish and English. They knew each other, so no one was bothering with formalities.
‘Jorge said no heroics, wait for the police.’
‘Fuck that. By the time the cops get here the bastards’ll be long gone.’
‘Maybe is no been robbed. Maybe is lost, is no more gasoline in the tank. Maybe the radio he is broken.’
‘So how come there’s no sign of the van? How come he changed his route?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
Then a voice said, ‘The chopper will find them.’
Wyatt went cold, remembering the gasfields helicopter. Several times a month it flew geologists and engineers down to confer with Jorge. If this was one of those times, it was probably already in the air, starting a sweep of the area.
‘Plus there’s an air ambulance coming down from Port Augusta,’ the voice continued.
‘No worries, then,’ said another voice. ‘We’ll find the bastards in no time.’
Half a dozen other voices agreed.
Wyatt pushed even harder along the track, feeling the old chassis bottom out on the outcrops of stone. If they spotted him from the air, he was finished. They’d guide the land party in until all his exits were closed. His only chance was to get to the farm, get the Holden into one of the sheds, then escape on foot across country.
Meanwhile Leah deserved a better chance. He called her. There was no answer. Perhaps she couldn’t hear him. She’d be kilometres away by now, probably well out of radio range. He called again, waited, and called a third time.
He didn’t try again. He felt the strain of listening, the strain of driving one-handed along the tortuous track.
&nbs
p; For just a few moments then he had a clear view of the Vimy Ridge road. A lone Brava Landcruiser had braked beyond the turn-off and was backing up to it.
There was only one way out of this. Wyatt pulled up next to Venables’s body and turned off the engine. Ejecting the cartridges from Snyder’s pistol and using the butt as a hammer, he destroyed the big radio. Then he opened both doors wide and shot the front tyres with his own gun. He threw Snyder’s gun into the grass. He was still wearing latex gloves so he wasn’t worried about prints.
Part of the fence line along this section of the track was a stone wall built by shepherds in the nineteenth century. Flat stones the size of frying pans had been stacked chest-high for several hundred metres. Here and there parts of the wall had collapsed. Wyatt vaulted through a gap and got ready to wait, disturbing a tiny brown lizard. The lizard flicked away in the space of an eye blink.
It wasn’t much of a trap but it had the element of confusion-a stationary vehicle, both its doors open; a dead man in the grass; the fake Brava paint job; the empty road under the spooked sky.
They weren’t taking any chances. He watched as the Landcruiser approached slowly and stopped fifty metres short of the Holden utility. There were two men aboard. They didn’t get out but waited there, the engine running. One of them was calling on the CB radio. Wyatt recognised him. It was Carlos.
Half a minute later, Carlos got out and cautiously walked towards the body and the stranded utility. He was. carrying a heavy tyre iron. There were guns in the Brava camp, but they were kept under lock and key in Jorge’s safe.
Wyatt watched Carlos circle the Holden, look around apprehensively, his eyes passing over Wyatt’s hiding place, and crouch next to the dead driver. He seemed to recoil in shock then, stepping back from the body and signalling urgently to the other man.
Wyatt waited until they were both standing there in the road, looking down at the glistening skull, their guard down. He vaulted the wall again and took them at a run. They heard him and turned around. Slowly their hands went up.
Carlos spoke first. ‘They will catch you, my friend.’ He gestured at the sky and spun the tip of his forefinger. ‘The aeroplane, he comes now.’
The other man had red curly hair and a sneering mouth. ‘Mad bastard.’
‘Shut up. The keys,’ Wyatt said.
‘In the ignition.’
Wyatt nodded and began to back away from them.
‘Where’s the fucking money?’
Wyatt ignored them. When he was a few metres away from the Landcruiser he turned and sprinted the rest of the way. A minute later he was on the Vimy Ridge road again, just another mad Latin adding to the confusion on the ground.
****
TWENTY-NINE
They were going crazy in the Brava camp. Eight of the pale blue Landcruisers with the bull logo passed Wyatt in the first five minutes. They were being driven carelessly and fast-but at least they weren’t stopping him to ask who he was. He drove slouched over the wheel, lifting a finger as they passed-a custom which the Brava crews had adopted from the locals. It helped that he was wearing the sunglasses and bright orange baseball cap left by Carlos on the driver’s seat, but what helped most was the high spirits in the Brava camp. Wyatt was driving a Brava vehicle so they assumed he was caught up in it too.
But Wyatt knew that the disguise was only good for another few minutes and wasn’t good enough to get him past a roadblock. He’d have to go to ground at the farm.
He was thinking it through when headlights on an oncoming car flashed at him and a blue light started to pulse on its roof. A policeman stepped into the middle of the road with his hand raised, waving him down. Wyatt got ready. Slowing the Landcruiser, he slipped his.38 out of his belt and onto the seat beside him, covering it with his hand.
He pulled up twenty metres short of the police car and left the engine running. He was about to put his foot down but something told him to think twice about it. The cop’s expression was wrong. He wasn’t wary. He wasn’t expecting trouble. If anything he was angry. Wyatt wound down his window. ‘G’day,’ he said.
‘Don’t g’day me. Do you arseholes know what you’re doing?’
‘Sorry?’
‘One of you blokes has already rolled over. I nearly smashed head-on with another one. You’re buggerising around inside an official crime scene. Piss off before I lock you up.’
‘Sorry, just trying to help.’
‘Go and do it somewhere else. If you see any of your mates, pass it on-anyone found farting around gets the book thrown at him.’
‘Sure, no worries,’ Wyatt said. He lifted his foot off the clutch, nodded at the cop and pulled away.
‘Bloody cowboys,’ he heard the cop say.
Wyatt watched him in the rearview mirror. He saw him shake his head, climb into the patrol car, and pull away fast, spinning tyres in the roadside gravel. The blue light faded in the dust like a special effect.
No one else bothered Wyatt after that. He came to the tin-hut corner a few minutes later, paused for half a minute, and bounced his way towards the farm gate. He saw dust in the distance, from all the excitement, but no vehicles were close enough to spot him. The helicopter was several kilometres away, sweeping back and forth across the valley. Eventually it would pass over the farmhouse, but now it was concentrating the search around the turn-off.
Wyatt first began to doubt Leah when he got to the implement shed and found the Suzuki there. The door was open, the bike on its stand in the corner. The doubts weren’t specific-he just wanted to know what she was doing there.
He drove the Brava Landcruiser into the musty interior, switched off, and got out, holding the.38 loose at his side. He didn’t go into the house immediately. He closed the massive shed door then waited outside it for a few minutes, testing the air, giving Leah a chance to come out of the house. The helicopter was now a few degrees left of where it had been. It was hovering, beginning to settle on the ground. They’d found Venables.
Wyatt turned and crossed the yard. He needed only a minute to see that the house was empty. He searched the sheds. Nothing. He told himself that she’d got spooked by the helicopter and made a run for it.
But it didn’t feel right. And when he found faint tyre marks on the track behind the property, the doubts set in and wouldn’t go away.
He went to the head of the driveway to sweep the valley with his field-glasses. The helicopter had just completed a sweep near the tin-hut corner. Beneath it the roads were dust-clogged.
The ground party was congregating. They’d be at the farmhouse soon, wondering if this was where the murderers had got to.
****
THIRTY
Wyatt wheeled the Suzuki out of the shed. He could hear the flat whump whump of the helicopter now. He shook the bike- fuel sloshed in the tank. He climbed on, pushed hard on the kick-start and accelerated across the yard. A minute later he was on the track leading back into the ranges behind the farmhouse.
He had advantages on a bike. He hoped they’d be enough. It was faster than walking and he could go where a car couldn’t go. The cops would be blocking the roads but they couldn’t throw a cordon over paddocks and creeks. That was what Wyatt was relying on. That and speed.
He looked back over his shoulder briefly, almost losing the bike in an erosion channel. The helicopter was apparently closing in on the farm. Wyatt hoped they’d concentrate on the house and sheds and not the hills behind it just yet. He was a small shape, dressed in dull khaki overalls, but he knew it was movement that attracts attention from the air, not shape, size or colour.
He righted the bike, his eyes darting from the ground surface under his wheels to the shape of the land ahead. He didn’t want to tie himself to the track if he could save time by heading across country. Using his eyes and his mental map, he began to plot his route out of the hills. He knew what to avoid-the dry creekbeds with their treacherous sand; stone reefs like stakes embedded in the wind-blasted hillsides; foxholes and rusty fenci
ng wire in the long grass.
In other circumstances he might have enjoyed his flight across the forgotten back country. They said land like this was bland-blindness, Wyatt thought, taking in the purples and greens, the tortured shapes. The sun was mild on his back. The spring wildflowers were out and the sky was cloudless. He risked another glance over his shoulder. The farmhouse and sheds were out of view. There was no helicopter yet.
But the reversals of the past hour wouldn’t let him alone. He thought about Leah’s STD call to her contact, her trips away from the farm. Snyder puzzled him. Snyder had been too keen to go back to the farmhouse. He felt more certain about Tobin. Given that the other aspects of the plan had been duplicated, it was reasonable to suppose that Tobin had been used to shift the van. And it was Leah who’d brought Tobin into the team. He’d find her. He’d find both of them.
He began to pick a way out of the worst of the stone reefs and hidden gullies. Before him lay undulating farmland. It was fenced, immense paddocks of grassy slopes dotted with ancient gum trees. Sheep had spread across one end of the closest paddock, several hundred of them grazing head down in the long grass. He opened a gate, closed it behind him and set out across the paddock, mindful that snarls of fencing wire might be caught in the grass. There was a gravel road at the far end of the paddock. He intended to travel along it for a few kilometres then cut across country again.
Something passed across the sun behind him. It threw a shadow that was gone as suddenly as it was there. Wyatt didn’t look back or increase speed. He changed direction slightly. A few seconds later he was wobbling in low gear at the leading edge of the sheep.
Wyatt had built his life on blending in so he wouldn’t be noticed. It was automatic. Now he was doing it again. He steered in and around the sheep, stopping occasionally, waving an arm. He’d never done anything like this before. He didn’t know anything about sheep. But they seemed to be doing the right thing. They were fat, their bellies full, and they moved hurriedly a short distance and appeared to forget about him again, yet bit by bit they were bunching up. Now and then some of them streamed away from the mob, wild-eyed and mindless, but he had no trouble heading them off. He hoped it looked right from the air. He lacked one essential prop, a dog, but he hoped he looked as though he belonged here.
