Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal

by Garry Disher

  He needed a car that would not be missed for a while. There was a Mobil service station across the road from The Abbey. He watched it through the morning. It was a busy place with a high and rapid turnover of customers for petrol and simple service and tune-up jobs. What interested Wyatt was that after the mechanics had finished working on each car, they parked it in an adjacent yard and tossed the keys on the floor under the drivers seat. At eleven oclock a Mobil tanker pulled into the forecourt and filled the underground reservoirs. The obscuring bulk of the truck, the distraction, gave Wyatt his chance. He loped across the road, slipped into a nondescript Datsun, and drove quietly away.

  This was better. Planning an act, carrying it off successfully, was work, the sorts of things he was good at. Yet the sensation didnt last. He found himself driving the little car with his head down, his shoulders hunched, as though every driver and passenger in the city was primed to spot him and raise the alarm or crack open their windows enough to train a gunsight on him.

  Thirty minutes later he stopped at a milk bar on Williamsons Road and ordered takeaway coffee and a cheese sandwich. Four dollars. He asked for directions to Telegraph Road and got back into the Datsun.

  Telegraph Road was a broad, self-satisfied ribbon of clean black bitumen and white-grey kerbing. It curved around a gentle slope in the land and the houses were set far back behind thick hedges and red brick walls. The houses were ugly, the bad-taste homes of people whod acquired sudden wealth and nothing else.

  He found number eleven. Everything about it suggested that the Mesics hadnt lived in the area for long. Theyd taken a hectare of dirt and turned it into a family compound: raw landscaped terraces, young trees, shiny lockup garage and a couple of blockish cream brick houses with colonnades grinning across the faces of them like stumpy teeth. The grounds were surrounded by a wire and girder perimeter fence three metres high.

  The place looked deserted. It looked vulnerable to a hit: the neighbouring houses were concealed by trees, there were plenty of exits, he couldnt see dogs or guards. They had his money in there. The payroll heist in South Australia had gone wrong because someone who owed money to the Mesics had got to it first. Three hundred thousand. That would set him up again, enable him to buy a place, live in comfort while he concentrated on the big jobs again, the way it had been for him before it all went sour.

  But it was pointless. He couldnt hit the Mesics alone, even if he did have the time and the funds to bankroll it. He couldnt put a gang together because he didnt know who he could trust. Everyone wanted a slice of him: he could feel the heat of it. Melbourne was unsafe. Victoria was unsafe. Maybe in six months, a year, he could come back.

  Wyatt turned the car around and headed back into the city. He was on the freeway when an idea edged into his mind. It was foolish, born of desperation, which is why hed been suppressing it. But now he admitted the idea and let it grow, and it took on the configuration of possibility.

  There was money hidden at his old place on the Mornington Peninsula and there was a pistol. Three months ago hed been forced to run, to abandon the farm and that part of his life. Hed thought it was permanent. It was permanent, he could never go back, but there was money there, and a gun. They were well hidden. Police and reporters would have climbed all over the house, the sheds, the little block of land with its view over the water to Phillip Island, but there was a chance they hadnt found anything. At this point that was the only chance he had in life.

  * * * *

  Seven

  Six weeks back, Stolle had started with what the client had given him: that bare name, Wyatt, and Lake, a name he went by sometimes; an old address; a description; and the names of two men hed worked with recently. Both men proved to be dead. No photograph.

  But the description shed given him the day she came into his office was clearer, more impressionistic than he normally got from a client.

  Wyatts tall, shed begun, with dark hair and eyes and a kind of dark cast to his face, making him look watchful and sometimes almost lonely. Does that help?

  Youre doing fine, Stolle had assured her. Go on.

  Slender build, but strong. He moves easily, a sort of fluid grace. She didnt even blush. Like Robert Mitchum, the actor, except not so pleased with himself. The thing is, he adapts to places and people. In a room of lawyers hed be a lawyer. In a room of wharfies hed be a wharfie. A pair of glasses, a change of clothes, hair parted a different way, youd have to look twice to realise you knew him.

  Jesus Christ, Stolle thought. Why do you want him?

  The woman had looked away, a sure sign that she was about to be careless with the truth. Hell learn something to his advantage, she said. The thing is, its urgent. He has to be in Brisbane by mid-November at the latest.

  Lawyer? Stolle wondered. He had waited a couple of beats, then said carefully, Is he a con man, a pro? Do the cops want him?

  Shed looked at him sharply then. Stolles preference was for cheerful, leggy blondes, not brunettes. Your blonde is basically generous and uncomplicated. Still, hed had to admit that the woman from Brisbane had plenty going for her, from the shape of her ankles to her fine tilted head, framed with dead straight black hair. She knows and likes herself and gets what she wants, hed thought, and the only chink in her armour is this Wyatt character.

  Im relying on your discretion, she said.

  Which is?

  Find him for me and not say anything to anyone and get a ten thousand dollar bonus. Cash.

  Ten?

  On delivery to me in Brisbane. I might also point out that hes hard and hes dangerous. If you snitch, hell get even somehow, even from prison.

  Stolle flared suddenly. I dont like being threatened.

  Its not a threat. Im just saying I know what hes capable of. All I want from you is for you to do your job.

  Stolle had shrugged, said sure, pocketed the five thousand dollar retainer she handed him. Thats yours whether or not you find him, shed said.

  Very generous of you.

  Shed scowled, sensing sarcasm. And heres a further five. Tell him its his if and when he accompanies you to Brisbane, and tell him theres more where it came from. Do we have a deal?

  We have a deal.

  She had watched him for a while then, assessing him. Stolle stared back at her. He wondered if there was an inheritance behind all this. If Wyatt was wanted by the law, he could use that as a lever to get a percentage. Meanwhile, the woman was here on her own. If youre staying a few days, why not enjoy yourself?

  She laughed. Mr Stolle, she said.

  Encouraged, he kept pushing. It earned him forty minutes in an expensive cocktail lounge and that was as far as he got. Hed gone home feeling obscurely dissatisfied, and the next day she flew back to Brisbane and he had put Mostyn and Whitney on the Wyatt case.

  Wyatt had been busy, very busy, leaving dead men and an agitated underworld in his wake. People were prepared to talk to Stolle, but they didnt know anything. The police now had prints that they supposed were Wyatts, but Wyatt had never been arrested and so they had nothing else on record. The man seemed to have no friends or family. It was rumoured that hed started his career in the armed forces in Vietnam, stealing a payroll from an American base, raiding high-stakes poker games, selling jeeps, radios and weapons on the black market, but when Stolle checked with Canberra, he found no Wyatt matching the man he wanted in army, navy or airforce records. Police in four states had him down for a string of hold-ups and killings but, as Wyatt operated largely outside the system of loose criminal groups and coteries, their investigations had taken them nowhere.

  Wyatt didnt even have interests to speak of. Anyone looking for me, Stolle thought, would know to check out the casinos and sooner or later theyd find me.

  But Mostyn and Whitney had got lucky. They knew the man had fled interstate, leaving behind a house on the coast and an identity for which thered been no paper record. The trail had gone cold for a while thenuntil the payroll heist north of Adelaide had hit the headlines. The
y were smart enough to trace him to the border near Mt Gambier. They werent smart enough not to get greedy.

  Now Wyatt had disappeared again and hed be twice as wary and twice as hard to find.

  Either Ill stumble on him by accident, Stolle thought, or someone will sell him to the cops.

  Or hell make a basic mistake.

  Stolle took down a Victorian accommodation guide from the shelf. He also got out a book of maps. Then he started dialling.

  * * * *

  Eight

  Wyatts private name for his old place was the farm, but real estate wankers must have dusted off the dented brass nameplate that had been tacked to the wall next to the front door and were calling it Blackberry Hill Farm. He slowed the Datsun, letting the little car roll to a halt opposite the shiny auction notice. This was Monday. The auction was midweek, Wednesday, 1 pm. The hype went on to spell out everything hed lost and had to run from: original weatherboard farmhouse; fifty hectares of pasture and bushland; running creek; original sheds; views to Phillip Island; seven minutes to Shoreham township.

  A separate notice announced a clearing sale, 12 noon on the same day. It listed furniture, house fittings, wine collection, original paintings, tools, Massey Ferguson tractor, Rover ride-on mower.

  It didnt list the Colt .45 automatic or the two thousand dollars hed stashed away. Nor did it mention whod owned the place and why the real estate firm, acting under instructions from the Attorney Generals Department, was selling it.

  Wyatt put the Datsun in gear and drove along the sunken road for a further fifty metres. He came to the driveway. It was lined with golden cypresses and made a lazy curve to the front door of the house. Wyatt didnt go in. They had bolted a new cyclone gate across the driveway and wrapped a chain and padlock around it. Nor did he climb the gate and go in that way. He didnt think the police would be watching the place any longer but the neighbours would still be jumpy.

  Wyatt was wearing sunglasses and a decent enough op-shop suit, and hed scraped his hair back over his scalp. But it would not be so easy to shake off his loping walk, the articulation of trunk and limbs that would be like a signature to the people who once had accepted his right to be here, in the days before he had a running gun battle in the pine plantation behind his house and shot a Melbourne punk in the back of the head.

  He followed the fenceline, driving slowly, looking the place over. There were twenty or thirty sacred ibis picking their way through the marshy ground at the base of his hill. Someone had put a slasher through the long grass and cleared the blackberry thickets. There was fresh paint on the house trim and the barn door was bright red. Wyatt had kept a car in the barn, facing the doorway, a spare ignition key under the dash, permanently ready for a fast escape. Thats how it had been, three months ago. Now some barrister would buy the place, park his air-conditioned 4WD there, use it as a tax write-off.

  Wyatt drove back the way hed come. The farms and orchards rolled away on small humped hills toward the sea, and the land was divided by hedges, lanes and avenues of pines. It was a place where you could hide and learn to match a bird to its cry and be left alone by your neighbours apart from a finger raised from an oncoming steering wheel on the narrow roads. It had been a part of Wyatt and hed lost it. Bought from the proceeds of just one job, a gold bullion heist at Melbourne Airport five years before. He needed something like that again. He needed a new base, somewhere he could emerge from once or twice a year, pull a job that had plenty of money attached to it, disappear again.

  But he needed that Colt first and he needed that two thousand.

  Thats if they were still there.

  Thats if the cops hadnt stripped the place. He had no reason to suppose they hadnt.

  Wyatt took side roads back to Frankston and checked into an on-site caravan. Twenty-five bucks, grimy toilet and shower block, cars coming and going from the red-light van two doors down. He lay on the bunk, tuned everything out. He guessed thered be a big crowd at the sale and theyd stay on for the auction. It was almost November and thered be buyers there wanting a summer place close to the sea, thered be gawkers attracted to the blood spilt and the mystery, thered be neighbours curious to know how much their own places might fetch.

  There could also be cops, wondering if sentiment would bring him back there.

  The cops didnt really know what he looked like. They shouldnt be a problem.

  It was the neighbours, kids like Craig from the next farm. Wyatt would have to work on his face, work on his body language, move around unnoticed and check both hiding places. Hed know at once if theyd been disturbed. If they had, hed slip away.

  If they hadnt, hed return when the fuss was over and retrieve his gun, and the money that would buy him some time until a big job came along.

  * * * *

  Nine

  Wyatt worked on three thingshe had to look as though he belonged; he had to draw eyes away from his face and body; he had to baffle those eyes that did look twice at him.

  The first was easy enough. He was brown from the sunforearms, hands, face and neckand his hands were worn and roughened from weeks on the run. Added to that were faded khaki trousers, a worn army surplus shirt with a frayed collar, old, sturdy, highly polished brown shoes, a sweat-stained felt hat. Eighteen dollars at a Salvation Army op-shop and Wyatt resembled a smalltime Peninsula farmer, a man who slashed the blackberries and cleaned the horse troughs and weaned the cattle for barristers who spent the week on Queen Street making three hundred thousand a year and drove their teenage daughters to gymkhanas on the weekends.

  The hat concealed his face but his height was a problem, the way he moved when he walked. He added a walking stick, a gammy leg.

  That left his features, the thin, unsmiling, hooked configuration of eyes, nose and mouth, the dark, unimpressed cast of a face that someone there might know and recognise. Wyatt did two things. He shaved badly on the morning of the auction, leaving stubble patches on his neck and high on his cheeks, and he trained himself to mouth-breathe, resting his upper teeth on his lower lip so that he looked mild and slow and faintly stupid.

  He checked out of the caravan park at eleven. Shirt, trousers, hat and walking stick were in the car; hed been wearing jeans and a T-shirt for the past two days and he didnt want to attract attention to himself now. When he was away from Frankston and on a back road, he pulled over and changed.

  At the farm, parked cars, utilities and 4WDs choked the approach roads and were angled among the golden cypresses in the driveway. Wyatt had to drive several hundred metres past the entrance before he could slot the Datsun into a gap at the side of the road. He walked back, leaning on his stick, licking road dust from his upper teeth, and limped up the track to the house that had once been his. Eleven-forty. He had twenty minutes before the knots of people formed themselves into a crowd and followed the auctioneer around from one sale lot to the next.

  He edged past them. No-one looked twice at him. Those who looked once were indifferent, maybe slightly sympathetic. He had some nice stuff, a woman said, resting her hand on a walnut sideboard. She looked puzzled, as though she thought a killer couldnt have a taste for fine things. Wyatt moved on. Hed once known every chip and scratch and loose thread in the furniture around him, but out here on the lawn it all looked dispossessed, running to seed.

  He walked around the side of the house. The people were avid and suddenly he hated them. They were standing where a mystery man had lived and committed murder and something about it seemed to quicken their senses, make their lips wet, their eyes hungry. Wyatt scanned them as he limped past, searching for the face that didnt belong, the face that might blow his cover. But there was no-one.

  Then a hand-held bell clanged and the auctioneer called the crowds attention to lot one, five dozen bottles of fine Mornington Peninsula wine. Wyatt hung back, then slipped away among the outbuildings like a farmer who had his eye on the tools and equipment, not the fancy stuff.

  He stopped at the old dairy, a cobwebby log and corruga
ted iron structure as old as the farmhouse itself. The walls leaned to the left; the roofing iron was fringed with rust. Wyatt stepped inside. He was ready for an amiable, half-embarrassed exchange with any stranger he might encounter, but the dairy was empty. He crossed to the milking stalls against the far wall. It was clear from the floors unevenness that the police had prised up the flagstones. They had even torn parts of the inner walls away, revealing red-back spiders and decades of dirt and insect husks. What they hadnt done was check the upright bail posts. Wyatt reached up, hooked his fingers over the edge, felt the plastic sandwich bag with its wad of banknotes resting in the hollow.