Kill Shot

by Garry Disher

  Suddenly the kid was standing, fishing an envelope from his back pocket. ‘Before I forget.’

  Lazar nodded his thanks and counted the money. Counted it again: a hundred dollars short.

  ‘Joshua,’ he said sadly.

  Kramer raised a pacifying hand. ‘I know, I know, but I’m good for it.’

  ‘You were short last time,’ Lazar said, angry with himself for taking tonight’s job. As if he’d had a choice. Between escorting second-tier celebrities to and from opening nights and standing on street corners while some shopkeeper took the day’s takings to a night-deposit slot, running ‘crowd control’ for Josh Kramer was as good as it got.

  He sipped his beer—you wouldn’t want to drink the wine in this wine bar—and kept all inflection out of his voice: ‘Why don’t you get this Wyatt character to shell out some coin.’

  He wanted a repeat of that evening a month earlier when young Joshua had suddenly begun boasting how his father was a mover and shaker in the Sydney underworld. How back in the day he’d put together hold-up crews: banks and payroll vans. How insiders had provided him with police radio frequencies, security-van routes, and locations of roadblocks, major operations and surveillance teams. And how, even now, behind bars, he was still putting jobs together. ‘Twenty per cent finder’s fee. Must add up to a quarter of a million by now.’

  Well, Lazar had taken notice of that. Careful not to let his interest show, he’d shrugged. ‘I guess he doesn’t get to spend it where he is.’

  Whereupon the kid told him that Kramer senior’s quarter million was being held in trust by a hard man name of Wyatt.

  Tonight, Lazar intended to find out more about this Wyatt. ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘it’s no skin off your father’s nose if you get slipped a few hundred now and then.’

  ‘Yeah, well, easier said than done,’ the kid said, staring into his bloody mary.

  Lazar let it pass. There was a woman eyeing him from a stool at the bar. Seeing him return her gaze, she took a slow, red-lipstick sip from something foul-looking in a martini glass.

  Clearly the kid was in a funk. Time to get him talking. Lazar said, ‘You can always ask him. No harm done.’

  Josh Kramer seemed to flinch. ‘Actually, me and Dad don’t get on that well.’

  And here we have the crux of the matter, thought Lazar. ‘Too bad.’

  The kid smiled weakly. ‘Hard to please, my old man.’

  Lazar could see the inner struggle. Kramer wanted to earn his father’s approval in the long term—but in the short term he wanted to get back at him. By stealing his quarter million, for example. Not yet prepared to be upfront with Lazar, put himself in a position he couldn’t retreat from. Happy just to circle the matter, drop the odd hint.

  Meanwhile the woman at the bar was lifting a shoe to the rung of her stool, skirt hem artfully riding her thigh. The stiletto caught, and she lurched, sloshing her drink. She flushed. Turned her back in a lonely hunch over the bar. Lazar shook his head, completely and utterly weary. ‘What about your mother and your sister?’

  Kramer shifted to get comfortable on his squeaky, overinflated leather booth seat and shrugged. ‘They’re not on my back twenty-four seven, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Can they lend you money till you get established?’

  Kramer shot Lazar a look, as if Lazar hadn’t been paying attention this evening. ‘Like I said, we’re broke. Dad doesn’t want the cops sniffing around, which is what they’d do if we suddenly came into a quarter of a mill.’ His manner saying, I told you all this.

  ‘Right, right,’ said Lazar slowly.

  ‘So, we make do with Wyatt doling out a grand here, a grand there.’

  And the kid was bitter about it. Lazar let silence settle around them, wondering if in fact there was a quarter of a million dollars, or considerably less, or none at all. The bar-stool woman was climbing down from her perch, casting him a hurt look, teetering off with her head high. He said casually, ‘Let’s hope your bloke doesn’t get arrested or decide to piss off with the lot.’

  Kramer gave him a look. ‘The thought’s crossed my mind.’

  As if I might offer to do something about it, Lazar thought. Like steal it for him. Lazar had every intention of stealing it, but not in partnership with the little prick. ‘How do you all get in touch?’

  Kramer shrugged, sour again. ‘I’m out of the loop.’

  ‘Joshua,’ Lazar said patiently, ‘this guy pulls robberies put together by your father, right? So how does he get the information required?’

  ‘He’s not stupid enough to visit Dad in jail, if that’s what you mean.’

  Lazar wanted to smack him about the chops. ‘No, I guess that would be asking for trouble. But how do you think they communicate?’

  ‘I know how they communicate,’ Joshua Kramer said. ‘When Dad’s on day release.’

  Lazar tingled. ‘Day release.’

  Kramer said, as if Lazar was slow, ‘He’s low security, not high security. They let him out to pull up weeds, clean graffiti, that kind of thing.’

  Okay. This was hopeful. There would be a problem, though, with finding out how, when and where Sam Kramer was allowed out on day-release work details. It might be easier to locate Wyatt through the women.

  ‘Perhaps get your mother and sister to give you a few hundred bucks next time Wyatt forks out.’

  Kramer snorted. ‘Like I said, I’m out of the loop.’

  This was useless. Lazar waggled his empty glass. ‘Mine’s a Coopers.’

  As Kramer tottered off to the bar, Lazar brooded. The kid knew bugger all. Sounding me out, hoping I’ll take the bait, no actual information about the main players.

  He was aware of a groin at his shoulder: the woman from the bar stool. ‘I noticed you before. Buy a girl a drink?’

  What a fucking cliché, thought Lazar. He stared up at her. Seeing the void, she swallowed, said, ‘Suit yourself,’ and disappeared.

  The waste-of-time Kramer kid was returning from the bar, baby face expectant, drinks riding high in his hands. Lazar would sit and listen and maybe he’d learn some tidbit that would help him find the moneyman. He wouldn’t be holding his breath.

  4

  FIRST THING THE NEXT morning Wyatt logged into a shared email account. Phoebe Kramer was the other user: the conduit between Wyatt and her father, currently residing in Watervale, a medium security facility west of Sydney. She’d contact Wyatt via emails that she would not send but save into the drafts folder of the account. Never the details of the job, only the day and place of her father’s next day-release outing. With a C3 security rating, Sam was allowed out once or twice a fortnight to tend flowerbeds, lawns and parkway shrubbery with other trusted prisoners.

  Wyatt would log on, read, delete. Likewise, his messages to her were always stored in the drafts folder and deleted when read. No one else had access to the account; messages that were never sent or received couldn’t be intercepted.

  Phoebe had lodged a message overnight: $2000.

  It was immaterial to Wyatt why the family needed two thousand dollars. It was Sam’s money. He replied: art gallery at noon.

  He showered, dressed, deposited the forty-five grand from Blackstock in his safe deposit box, then walked along the nearby beach, stopping for a coffee on Arden Street. He liked the rock pools along the Coogee-Bondi coastal walk. He wasn’t interested in swimming; he just liked to look. The tossing seawater was a wild comfort, somehow.

  LATE MORNING NOW. A sky lidded with gunmetal clouds driven by a wind that carried the scent of distant rain. Wyatt walked uphill from the Circular Quay ferry station and across parkland to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He’d spent an hour shaking off a possible tail—doubling back, short taxi and train rides, entering buildings by one door and leaving by another. He was confident he hadn’t been followed. As the ragged cadence of the streets receded, he could hear birdsong in the trees, briefly silenced when thunder rolled across the harbour behind him. He glanced up
wards. No downfall yet, but the air was electric. Rain might absolve this thieving old city.

  He had no umbrella, but he did have a five-dollar canvas backpack containing two grand in cash. He thought of Sam Kramer’s wife in her wheelchair, Phoebe steering it through puddles. He looked about but didn’t see them.

  Joining other gallery patrons at the coat-check, he pocketed the claim token and began to roam. The main exhibit was named Fake or Copy and contained a number of big Sydney Harbour views attributed to Brett Whiteley and subject to court actions regarding provenance, materials and technique. Wyatt got a kick out of that. He’d stolen paintings that proved to be fakes, in his long career, and he’d replaced real ones with fakes.

  But he was also taking in the men and women around him. In particular, recurrent but unfamiliar faces. People catching his gaze and looking away too quickly or casually or at a companion. A flicker of recognition, a hand jerking to a pocket or inside a jacket flap.

  Still no sign of the Kramer women. It had been a year since his last visit to the gallery and he found Tom Roberts’ Coogee painting and tried to match it to the Coogee he knew. Then he paused a while at Elioth Gruner’s Frosty Sunrise and tried to understand where his mind was taking him, as he took in the hillside, the fences, the grass striped by the rising sun shadows of a farmer and his animals. Nothing from his Struggletown childhood, anyway. But back when the jobs were easier and he’d amassed a lot of money, he’d lived in a sometimes-misty landscape south-east of Melbourne. A place of hill folds down to the distant sea, and grasses and fences hung with webs jewelled by the sun as it rose. That old life was gone. He could not match it earning twenty thousand here, fifteen or thirty there, with long, unoccupied periods in between.

  Then Phoebe Kramer was standing at his shoulder, ignoring him and fussing over Cindy in her wheelchair. ‘Comfortable, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, dear.’

  Phoebe was half a head shorter than Wyatt, with dark cropped hair framing a wryly magnetic, faintly off-centre face. The only time Wyatt had been alone in her company she’d bestowed on him an almost-smile full of a certain guarded appeal. She wouldn’t be taken in by the legend any time soon, but she might give the actual man the benefit of the doubt. Now he was aware that the attraction still existed, and he didn’t know what to do about it. She was Sam’s daughter. Cindy’s carer. And it was likely the police had a watching brief on her.

  But his task here was to act as if he didn’t know her, had never met her. He viewed the painting. A metre to his right, Phoebe and Cindy Kramer viewed it. He moved on two metres to the next painting, just as Phoebe bent to her mother to straighten the rug and accidently tipped her open handbag onto the floor.

  Wyatt said, ‘Let me.’

  He squatted, harvested and tumbled everything onto Cindy’s lap, and now they had exchanged bag-claim tokens. Next time it might be a left-luggage locker key inside the spine of a hardcover in the State Library. Some ruse or other to fool a watching gaze.

  Wyatt nodded, smiled, moved on to the next painting. He happened to catch Cindy Kramer’s expression in the corner of his gaze, a look full of humour and appreciation, with a sideways eye flick to her daughter. Almost as if she were gathering him in from the cold.

  5

  WYATT STROLLED ACROSS the park, scanning everyone without appearing to. Japanese tourists, a Chinese wedding party, lovers on the grass, noisy schoolkids, office workers on early lunch. These were his general impressions. He homed in on specifics: a woman wearing an earpiece—she was on her phone. A brawny tattooed guy—but there was a second one just like him, and a third. Two police constables ambling along, but with restless eyes. A man wearing a winter coat in the mild sunshine. If he heard a sound he didn’t like—footsteps, a ticking bicycle—he’d turn his whole body, not just his head, because the half-second delay in turning head, then body, and bringing his fist, foot or gun into play might cost him his life.

  Doing this was as automatic to Wyatt as breathing.

  He did it twice on the way out. A squeaky wheel turned out to be a child’s stroller; running footsteps a jogger. The jogger gasped and veered away when she saw a flicker in Wyatt, a tall, solid man but light and fluid, too. His face as he assessed her would have been frighteningly direct, his hands corded with veins.

  A short ferry ride and then into his car, parked at a supermarket—the edge, not the middle where he could be trapped. There had been street parking, but all they’d need was one vehicle to hem him against the kerb, whoever they were. He always avoided multi-storey carparks with their stairwells, ramps and ambush points.

  He climbed behind the wheel, locked his doors and rolled through the carpark and out onto the street. Heading back to Coogee, he used his mirrors constantly. There was a red Mazda two cars behind him for some time, then a silver Camry three cars behind him. A guy on a scooter, a ponytailed woman in a Suzuki. Bike messengers, van drivers, commuters. They all peeled away eventually, and he arrived at his street unattended.

  He pulled over and watched. No service vans sporting dishes or discs; no crews working on a water main; no gardeners, couples wheeling prams, powerful sedan cars of a uniform type.

  EARLY AFTERNOON NOW.

  Hungry, Wyatt changed his clothes and left the flat. Twenty minutes later he was in the shade of a bistro table umbrella, forking calamari and salad leaves into his mouth. The wind came in cold from the sea. He rolled down his sleeves and shrugged into the jacket he’d hung on the back of his chair.

  He finished eating and looked out over the whitecaps. Now that his body was at rest his mind would not let go of the gallery and Phoebe Kramer. Thoughts he couldn’t name.

  Back before the Kramer family’s realignments and reversals, Phoebe had simply been the daughter, a hard-to-read presence in a corner of the room whenever Wyatt visited to confer with Sam. But eventually it became clear that she was responsible for some of her father’s intel, and one day Wyatt found himself working alongside her, gun for hire on a job that she’d planned and her father had bankrolled.

  An IT specialist at the University of New South Wales, she spent her spare time tweaking software weaknesses in the university’s relationships with donors and business partners to siphon off funds for ‘scholarships’ and ‘goods and services’, and pass on insider corporate information to her father.

  One day she hacked into the Exclusive Assembly Church, which had donated fifty thousand dollars to a right-wing thinktank associated with a professor in the Business School. She hadn’t been able to sideline any of that money but did learn from the church’s email accounts that the Australian offshoot relied on twice-yearly cash infusions from HQ in Alabama. Literal cash: stuffed into envelopes folded into handbags and flown in, eight at a time, by elderly women posing as a tour party of widows. On arrival at Sydney Airport, the women would rent a Hertz minibus and drive to the church’s rural enclave an hour south-east of Sydney.

  As Wyatt eyed the tossing sea, he recalled the hold-up. A Sunday in October, a quiet side road, the sun warming the front seats of the stolen Chrysler 300. Phoebe Kramer calm and focused beside him, a laptop resting on her thighs. A quiet, unscented, barely stirring presence in hiking pants and black running shoes. Strong bare arms, faintly tanned. She was watching the screen, fingers poised over the keyboard. The only things she’d need to hack into the bus’s onboard computer, she’d told Wyatt at the planning session, was a laptop, a mobile phone, the bus’s IP address and software she’d already devised.

  He’d glanced at her once or twice as they waited; she’d glanced back, expressionless but for lazy-lidded eyes and the hint of a smile. He had a job to do, she had a job to do; but there was an undercurrent. Wyatt didn’t know how to read it. He knew how to read the nuances that forewarned him of treachery or attack. He was less certain about desire.

  Nothing was said or done and then Phoebe’s fingers flew over the keys. The bus was behind them, then alongside, already slowing. The horn sounded. The wipers swept the win
dscreen madly, the emergency lights flashed. Wyatt saw the driver lift her hands from the wheel, then clutch it again as the bus ran out of steam, and steer into the kerb a few metres ahead of the Chrysler.

  Wyatt pulled on a ski mask and got out. A lonely back road, spring grass choking the fence wires, a bird like a paper scrap above, the cloudless sun laying a scattered brightness over the dusty vehicles. He stepped onto the bus, stood with a small pistol resting against his breastbone, and said two words: ‘The envelopes.’

  He waited. The women were more indignant than afraid—they’re used to guns, he thought—as they debated the issue. Not worth getting shot over…Different method next time…

  An hour later, he was in a motel room with Phoebe Kramer. She was still sleepy-eyed and withholding, but not in the ways that mattered.

  Only that once. She continued to resurface in his thoughts from time to time.

  Now, as his fingers toyed with a paper napkin, the wind picked up, the chill factor high, and he zipped the jacket to his neck. Little wonder that he registered a man who didn’t seem affected by the conditions. A man who’d evidently strolled onto the sand from the carpark, neat in trousers, a plain shirt, sunglasses. Looking one way along the beach, then the other, all the time in the world, and he’d been at the art gallery.

  This was unfinished business and Wyatt got up to leave, looking to end it. But he’d had to compromise when choosing his table. It had given him a view of the water and any possible tail, but it was far from the entrance and overlooked a steep drop. By the time he’d ducked and weaved his way out onto the side path to the sand, the man was gone.

  Wyatt returned to his flat. The venetians were open, as if someone inside needed advance warning of his return, and the recycle bin he’d left half over the path had been moved aside.