by Garry Disher
Finally he went into the kitchen to get something to eat. He didn’t want to heat anything and release cooking smells, so he opened a tin of goulash and ate it cold from the tin. It had the consistency of glue. He washed and dried the spoon and put the empty tin in the plastic bag with the toilet paper.
Then he slept. He didn’t need an alarm. His instincts would tell him when to wake.
He woke at dawn. He washed and shaved again, then combed gel through his hair and parted it in the middle. He dressed in a white shirt, plain tie and a dark grey suit. The trousers were short in the leg, but he reflected that that wasn’t unusual in country towns. There were four pairs of shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. All were too big for him. He put on two more pairs of socks and tried the grey suede shoes; they were soft and had a rubber sole and he figured that made more sense than stiff leather shoes. With the extra socks they fitted well.
He listened to the six o’clock news. The murders and the robbery were still the main items, but the situation was unchanged. Then he wiped the flat for prints, cleared any mess he’d made, and bundled his dirty clothes into the shopping bag. The occupants of the flat would be puzzled by the missing clothes, but if nothing else was missing and the place untouched, they probably wouldn’t report it. It wouldn’t matter if they did; the trail would be cold by then.
Wyatt opened the door to the corridor and listened. No-one else seemed to be up. He let himself out quietly and walked down the street. The station was ten minutes walk away. He dumped the shopping bag in a rubbish bin along the way.
The air was cool. Not many cars were about. He got to the station a few minutes before seven o’clock. There were four cars in the car park. The platform was deserted and there were no cops in the waiting room or the ticket office. The only people he saw were the station master making coffee in a room next to the ticket office and a bleary-eyed man in the waiting room.
Wyatt looked at the timetable. There was an Adelaide train at 7.35 am. The return train got in at 6.30 that evening.
Twenty minutes later, there were eight more people waiting for the train. Most were women who appeared to be going to Adelaide for a day’s shopping, but there were also two men in suits. All were yawning. One of the men coughed repeatedly. Another smoked, ignoring the sign.
When the train came in they all stood up and walked onto the platform. Wyatt went into the men’s. When the train was gone, he went out to the car park. There were now twelve cars parked along the fence. He chose a white Kingswood, knowing it was the easiest to break into and start. It wouldn’t be missed until 6.30. By then he’d be holding a gun to Leah’s head, asking what her story was.
****
THIRTY-THREE
He’d been in the implement shed. She had just shut the bike away, and was turning to cross the yard, when he’d pressed the gun into the base of her spine and said, ‘Turn around slowly.’
She smelt cop. He wasn’t dressed like one, and he wasn’t acting like one, but she smelt cop all the same. It was the suspicion, worn like a layer of skin, the contempt, the swagger of the heavy limbs. He had clever eyes in the whitest skin she’d ever seen on anyone and the sort of cop expression she knew well-permanent bleakness and cynicism. The eyes seemed to sum her up and toss her out.
When he’d spoken again it was to ask where Wyatt was.
‘Who?’
Dumb. He’d flashed the gun across her cheek, cutting the skin open. He didn’t ask it again, just looked at her. ‘You’re expecting him,’ he said flatly. ‘We’ll wait in the house. Move.’
She turned and they walked across the yard. She felt the gun brush her spine.
When they reached the house he prodded her. ‘In the kitchen.’
So he knew the layout. She heard his footsteps on the verandah behind her and then he was crowding her as they went through the door.
At the centre of the room she turned to face him. ‘Do you work for Jorge? Steelgard? Did you warn the van?’
His expression changed for the first time, showing puzzlement. ‘What are you talking about?’
She stared at him. ‘You hijacked our job, right?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is Wyatt coming or not?’
They had stared at each other then. She remembered noticing odd details, things that had nothing to do with who he was or what he was doing there. The shoes, first. They were brand new desert boots, looking soft and brushed, with pale crepe rubber soles. Then the clothes. He was wearing the sort of things a farmer would wear, except they lacked the patina of age and use. They looked creased and new. In fact, there was still a pin in the shirt collar.
He spoke again. ‘Something went wrong?’
There didn’t seem to be any harm in answering. ‘The van didn’t show.’
‘Snyder, Wyatt, the other man-where are they?’
She stiffened at that. How did he know so much? She felt the bad feelings swamping her again: the job going wrong, Wyatt shooting Snyder, the sense that this was real and nothing else in her life, no matter how rotten, had been real.
‘Tobin went home,’ she said. ‘Snyder’s dead.’
He looked disgusted. ‘How did that happen?’
‘Wyatt shot him.’
The man nodded gloomily. Keeping the gun trained on her, he backed up to the window and looked out.
‘I’ll ask again-you’re waiting for Wyatt?’
She risked a lie. ‘No. The job went wrong and we split up and got out of there. Wyatt’s gone.’
‘Bullshit,’ the man said flatly. He knocked her head back with the butt of his gun. Her jaws closed with a click, her front teeth nipping her tongue. She tasted blood. The pain made her head swim.
Then he pushed her to the floor and she sat with her back to the wall. She didn’t look up at the man after that. There was a cruel irony in all this. The badness she’d felt washing around her after Wyatt shot Snyder had evaporated a minute after she’d ridden off on the bike. It didn’t make the shooting any better but she’d begun to feel guilty about abandoning Wyatt. She’d turned the bike around and ridden to the farm to help him. She should have kept running.
At that moment the man said viciously, ‘Jesus Christ. A helicopter.’
He was standing at the window. Leah stood up and joined him. At first she couldn’t see anything, but then the helicopter changed direction and she recognised the familiar shape. It was a small helicopter, still some distance away. It changed direction again. She was puzzled about that until she realised it was sweeping the valley in a grid pattern.
‘We’re getting out,’ the man said.
‘How?’
He jerked his head toward the back of the house. ‘I’ve got a car.’
‘You don’t need me.’
The man looked her full in the face and grinned. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘you’re taking me home to wait for Wyatt.’
****
THIRTY-FOUR
Letterman directed her into arid country north-east of Burra. The map was spread over his lap, concealing the pistol trained at her thigh. Now and then he moved, dial-hunting on the car radio. He spoke only once in the first hour, asking her where she lived. She told him. There was no point in trying to deceive him. With all the police activity around, they both needed a bolthole.
A regional station picked up the hijack and killings story first. By four o’clock the ABC and all the Adelaide commercial stations had it. Police were sealing the area. They expected an early arrest. But Leah knew it was a big area to seal and Letterman-he’d finally told her his name-was steering them through a land of sand-drifts and mirages. It was clear to her that they were outside the search area. Here and there she saw roadside gates and a distant tin roof on a saltbush plain. When finally they came to a junction of dusty baked roads in a clearing in the mallee scrub, she knew what he had in mind. Morgan, the sign said. The River Murray. Letterman was intending to follow the river to Murray Bridge, then branch off for the Adelaide Hills.
Four o’clock. Five. Six. More information kept filtering through about the dead men and the missing van, but no names had been released and no arrests reported.
Letterman spoke. He looked up at her and said, ‘What do you think?’
She knew what he meant. ‘He got away.’
Letterman nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘What makes you think he’ll come to my place?’
‘Nothing makes me think it. It’s the only option I’ve got.’
She waited. When he didn’t follow this up she asked, ‘And if the cops gaol him first?’
The reply was flat and certain. ‘I can still get him there.’
‘What do you want with him? We didn’t get any money. Is it personal?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
Letterman shrugged. ‘It’s a job. He trod on some toes.’
They lapsed into silence again. Eventually they reached the river and turned south. The sun was low in the sky. Leah turned on the headlights.
‘What are they paying you?’
‘Fifty thousand.’
‘I can pay you that. I’ll pay you more if you like. Just drop the matter and leave us alone.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Letterman said.
She glanced at him. Letterman was staring ahead. The pistol hadn’t moved. She couldn’t see it under the map but she sensed its probing snout. She looked at the road again.
‘Watch your driving,’ Letterman said.
She wanted him to say what he intended to do if Wyatt didn’t show up. She knew the answer-he’d kill her whether Wyatt showed up or not-but she wanted to hear him say it.
‘What if he slips interstate? What if he’s injured somewhere? What if the cops have him but they’re not saying?’
‘You talk too much.’
He was curiously asexual. It was more than the white skin-he lacked any sort of sensual dimension. Trying to distract him in that way would be a waste of time.
It was late when they reached her house. Most of the neighbouring houses were in darkness. Leah felt a surge of hope. Wyatt could be in there, waiting for them. She surreptitiously slid her hand to the horn button.
Letterman hit her, slamming the pistol barrel across her wrist. The pain made her stomach churn. Her fingers seemed to clench lifelessly as if she didn’t own them.
Letterman opened his door and stepped out, pulling her across the seat towards him. When they were outside the car he pushed her onto the ground next to the front bumper and cuffed her wrist to it. ‘Not a sound,’ he said.
She watched him enter her yard and walk around the side of the house. She shivered, fear and the chilly night air clamping themselves to her skin and bones. Far away on the freeway, a truck snarled through the gears. A garden tap dripped nearby.
When Letterman came back it was through the front door. He hadn’t asked her for her keys, so he must have got in by forcing a window or the back door lock. She hadn’t heard anything. If Wyatt had been inside he wouldn’t have heard anything either. She asked, her voice low: ‘Was he in there?’
Letterman knelt to uncuff her. ‘No.’
He took her into the house and cuffed her wrist to her ankle while he built a large fire in the grate and lit it. Then he took her into the kitchen and cuffed her to the refrigerator door. He didn’t speak, didn’t explain himself. He found the frozen fish fillets in the freezer and the vegetables in the bottom compartment and cooked them separately in the microwave. He sneered at her rack of Queen Adelaide riesling but opened one and poured two glasses. Then he took her into the lounge again and they ate in front of the fire, the plates balanced on their knees. At eleven o’clock he took her upstairs, cuffed her to her bed, unplugged her bedside telephone and turned out her light.
She didn’t see him again until the next morning. He uncuffed her and waited while she showered and changed her clothes. He looked fresh and rested. He’d slept behind the couch in the corner of the ground floor lounge room. She saw blankets and a pillow there when they went through to the kitchen.
‘He’s not coming,’ she said.
‘Shut up.’
Letterman didn’t speak to her all day, just listened to the hourly news broadcasts on the radio and cleaned his gun. At midday he went out and came back with copies of the Advertiser and the News. Both carried front page stories of the killings and the van that had vanished. He passed her the Advertiser when he’d finished with it. There were photographs of the farm and the Holden utility with its doors open. A detailed map showed the area of the police net. But according to the radio a stolen school bus had been found abandoned in Aberfeldie, and police were now concentrating their attention further afield.
‘He’s coming,’ Letterman said.
‘He won’t come here.’
‘He’s coming.’
The air was cold in the house. After lunch Letterman lit another fire and they sat in front of it through the afternoon and into the evening. If it hadn’t been for the handcuffs and Letterman getting up to peer out of the window every fifteen minutes, they might have been waiting in a counterfeit of married-couple ease or indifference. Leah almost forgot who Letterman was and why he was there. The plantation trees set up a moaning as the wind rose. Smoke from the chimney blew back into the room. They both coughed occasionally and around them the old house seemed to stretch and creak as if it were breathing.
They went to the kitchen, cooked dinner, took it back to the lounge room again. A storm seemed to be blowing up outside. Smoke made their eyes water. Racking coughs shook Letterman every few minutes. It was the only indication of vulnerability that Leah had seen him display. Yet she wasn’t fooled by it. She felt a heightened sense of the coldness and patience inside him. She saw his face form and re-form in the firelight.
But something was wrong with the fire. Letterman rubbed his eyes. He coughed. Her own eyes were streaming. The air was heavy with smoke. Letterman looked past her at the fire, frowned, coughed again. He got up and prodded the logs with a poker. Smoke was rolling out now, choking coils of it, dimming the light and starving them of oxygen. Letterman got up and uncuffed her. ‘He’s here.’ Then the lights went out.
****
THIRTY-FIVE
There were lights on inside but the curtains were closed and the windows and doors were locked so Wyatt had no clear sense of what he might find until he heard the cough. It was a man’s cough.
He’d already examined the car. He couldn’t judge colours properly under the streetlight but the dust coating the Valiant seemed familiar enough. He’d been sneezing it for the past month. He knelt, keeping the car between himself and the house. There were clumps of grass caught in the dust flaps and bumper bars.
He wondered who the man was. He didn’t think it would be Tobin. Leah had better taste than that. He guessed it would be somebody from the other team. Not that he cared either way now. He’d found them. He’d kill them, get his money, start somewhere new. It wasn’t something Wyatt intended to waste time thinking about. He’d been crossed, that was all he needed to know.
He was pleased about the stormy wind. It masked the creak of the gate, his footsteps, his examination of the doors and windows.
He was at the side of the house when a downdraft of wind caught him. It was laden with smoke, burning the back of his throat. He looked up at the chimney. He thought about the cough.
The roofline was flat and low above the porch at the rear of the house. By climbing the paling fence at the side he was able to leap onto it. He landed lightly but the old struts underneath the roofing iron moaned under his weight. He made for the upper roof area, into which the upstairs rooms had been built, climbed onto it, crawled to the peak and clutched the chimney.
Wyatt hadn’t been sure how he would block the chimney-throw his suit coat over it perhaps-but when he stood up next to it he discovered a lightweight metal plate hanging from a short chain. It was a cap to keep the birds out in the summer months. He placed it over the hole and dropp
ed it into place. Someone in the next house opened a back door, called ‘Puss, puss, puss,’ and went inside again.
Wyatt climbed down the way he’d come. The fuse box was on the front verandah. He opened it, switched off the power and tossed the fuses away.
Inside the house they were coughing. Someone bumped into a piece of furniture and he heard glass shatter. The reading light, he thought.
Tying a handkerchief about his nose and mouth, he opened the front door with his key and slipped into the house. He could smell the smoke, although little had leaked into the rest of the house as yet. He paused at the lounge room doorway, his back to the wall, his.38 extended ready to fire.
He guessed they’d be too smart to pose themselves in front of the fire. He also knew he’d be illuminated by firelight if he tried to come through the door in the ordinary manner. The moment he appeared he’d be shot. His only chance was to come in fast and throw himself down to one side. If someone fired a shot the muzzle flash would give away their position. He could wait them out but one of them might escape through a window and come in behind him.
Wyatt tensed himself and charged through the door. He dived to his right, rolled, and stood half-crouching.
He heard a snuffle as someone fired at him. The slug smacked into the wall above his head.
Found you, he thought, focusing on the muzzle flash. Two shapes, Leah and a bulkier figure with a gun. Wyatt swung his.38 around, aimed, tightened his finger on the trigger.
And stepped on something and lost his footing. He landed on his back, knocking the breath from his body. His.38 skidded under a chair. The fireplace poker grumbled away from him across the wooden floor. The two figures disappeared through the open door.
