by Garry Disher
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. They 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 corrugated 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.
Footsteps and someone whistling. Wyatt swung around and crossed to the opening. A shape blocked the sunlight. Wyatt nodded pleasantly, Good day for it, and limped past the man in the doorway. Youngish, about twenty-five, jeans, baseball cap, black Nike runners with a yellow stripe, an expression on his face of boredom and restlessness out here away from the city streets. He could be anyone, Wyatt thought, and made his way along the path to the pump shed. Behind him the man was idly stamping around inside the dairy.
The incident confirmed one thing: Wyatt would have to come back for his stuff when all this was over.
There was no-one in the pump shed. It was a small building, fibro, with a tin roof, cement floor, shelves and an electric water pump connected to an underground rainwater tank. When water pressure dropped in the house, the pump would cut in automatically. Wyatt leaned on his stick, regarding the pump carefully. It was bolted to an alloy support that was in turn bolted to the cement floor. His pistol was under the support itself, a gap five centimetres high sealed with a flap at each end. The area looked just as dusty and untouched as it always had.
Then the pump motor whirred, building quickly to its rattly full speed. It didnt die away, so Wyatt guessed someone somewhere had turned a tap on. Maybe the auctioneer was making himself a cup of tea, maybe a child was fiddling in the laundry. The noise seemed to fill the little shed, and Wyatts first indication that he wasnt alone was a sharp pain in the flesh high under his right arm. He stiffened. The pain increased a little, the cotton parted before the blade, and Wyatt looked down and around at the Nike running shoes.
Saves me the trouble of tearing the place apart, eh, Wyatt?
Ten
If it had been a gun, Wyatt might have moved against it. No-one would risk a gunshot with eighty witnesses around. But it was a blade and a kind of fear paralysed him. Hed been cut when he was barely a teenager, trapped by the Comets, neighbourhood kids in a gang driven to rage and hate by his lone-wolf air. He had weaved too late and a knife blade had scored his stomachshallow, barely raising a blood ribbon, but the pain had been like a hot wire and his mind had done the rest, spilling his guts into his hands. In Vietnam it was bamboo, one misstep on patrol and a panjee stake had punctured his calf. So Wyatt stood stock-still in the pump house and thought about the razor edge slicing through his chest if he moved against it, slipping between the bones of his ribcage.
Cat got your tongue?
What do you want?
What do I want? What do you think I want? Same thing you came back for.
Wyatt said nothing. It had happened before, some punk convinced that he had a fortune stashed away somewhere.
Youre wasting your time. Theres nothing here.
Yeah, right, you just came back out of sentiment.
I mean, Wyatt said, theres hardly any money, not worth your while.
Dont hand me that caper. Every bastards after you. You wouldnt chance it if it wasnt worth it. Turn around.
Wyatt turned cautiously, thinking the man wanted him face to face, but the black runners edged around with him, the knife tip maintaining its pressure.
Where are we going?
To hide till everyones gone home. Then you can show me where the stuff is.
The clearing sale was over. The main auction had started and there were eighty backs turned to them as Wyatt and the man with the knife stepped out of the pump house. Wyatt didnt try to run. He knew that before hed taken a step his body would betra
y him and hed feel the knife. He didnt want to call attention to himself. He didnt try to swing round with the walking stick. He did as he was told, walking ahead of the man with the knife, down the hill and into the pine plantation at the bottom.
At the edge of the trees he stopped. The knife nicked him again. Further in.
Wyatt walked on. His skin felt damp: blood was gathering at his waist. It wasnt a deep cut, barely painful, but the intention was there, and memories.
Thisll do. Chuck the stick away.
The cane flew end over end toward some saplings. They were in a small clearing. The air was resinous, blanketed and still, but snatches of the auctioneers shouts reached them. The pine trees were old and densely packed. The earth between them was bare, all nourishment given up to the trees. The pine needles were springy under Wyatts op-shop shoes. On your stomach, the man said, and Wyatt stretched out on the ground. A beetle skittered over the ground, paused at Wyatts thumb. Above him a Nike running shoe pressed against the base of his spine.
Three months earlier, Wyatt had shot a man dead among these trees, in a clearing like this one. He said, Whats your name?
He got a harsh laugh. How does Finn grab you?
Three months earlier Wyatt had also robbed a lawyer named David Finn, the job set up by Anna Reid, the job that had precipitated all the trouble he found himself in now. I know the name.
David Finn was my brother, so you might say theres also a personal element in all this, its not just the money.
They were silent. The auctioneers shouts ceased. Later they heard cars start up in the yard above them and on the road at the front of the farm. Still Wyatt and Finn stayed there. Theyll be signing the papers now, Finn said. Well wait.
Thirty minutes later he kicked Wyatt. Lets go.
They climbed the hill again, skirting the boundary unseen. The grounds around the house and sheds revealed the recent presence of eighty peoplepaper scraps, scuffed dirt, torn plantsbut all the cars were gone and they were alone. Satisfied, Finn prodded Wyatt into the dairy.
