Kill Shot

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Kill Shot Page 15

by Garry Disher


  Down into the murky darkness, where he swam for as long as his breath lasted, then to the surface to take another breath, and down again, and he thought he heard shouts from the patrol boat, answering shouts on the shoreline.

  The marina, thought Wyatt. Lose myself among the hulls.

  He came to the far western end. Hauled himself out of the water, paused and collapsed briefly, wanting to give in to the deep drowsiness of physical exhaustion. But people were looking twice at this drenched and squelching figure. He summoned up a flicker of energy and crossed Hannell Street to lose himself in the side streets. A few pedestrians eyed him, but he didn’t seem to need their help—he looked off-putting if anything—so they left him alone. One dared to film him on his phone.

  He reached his car eventually, sodden and chafed. He was surprised to see DeLacey’s Lexus parked next to Tremayne’s BMW. He didn’t know what it meant and didn’t have time to work it out. He opened the boot of his Toyota and tossed his damp, stinking clothes in before pulling on lightweight hiking pants, a heavy shirt, a windproof khaki jacket and a pair of black Dunlop Volleys. Finally, he shrugged himself into the straps of a small daypack containing his wallet, phones, and fake ID. Heard a voice around the driveway corner, closing in.

  ‘We might get lucky and find a white Corolla here, too.’

  Wyatt made a neat running leap onto the lid of the dumpster and rolled over the fence into the alley.

  AFTER A FISHERMAN HAD towed the crippled patrol boat back to the marina, Muecke, seeing the water police officers settle in for an interminable recap for the shore police, had slipped away with Agostino. It would take the local plods ages to organise a sea-air search.

  ‘I believe you now, mate, Agostino said.’

  The younger man looked shaken. He looked angry, too. Good: Muecke could use that. He hurried across the road to William DeLacey’s law office.

  ‘You think the guy headed here?’

  ‘Have to start somewhere,’ Muecke said. ‘Tremayne parked here, right? Maybe his wife’s here, or his lawyer. Let’s check the carpark first.’

  ‘I don’t know what that’ll tell us.’

  ‘I don’t either. But let’s see if Tremayne left anything in his car. Never know, we might get lucky and find a white Corolla here, too.’

  Muecke heard it then, a thump and clatter, and ran to the corner of the building trailed by Agostino.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Agostino said. ‘There is a Corolla.’

  Muecke approached the little car feeling jittery. The boot was open, damp stains on the concrete around it, wet footwear and a wad of wet clothing inside it. He peered through the windows, then walked around the BMW, peering in. Pointed at the Lexus: ‘Do you know this car?’

  ‘Belongs to DeLacey, Tremayne’s lawyer.’

  Nothing in the Lexus, either. Muecke glanced around the space at the rear of the building. That thump he’d heard: the guy jumping up on the dumpster and over the fence.

  He told Agostino exactly what he thought had happened and what he wanted Agostino to do. ‘Saturate the area. Get his picture out. Keep an eye on stolen vehicle reports.’

  ‘What are you going to be doing?’

  ‘Hunting,’ Muecke said.

  In another man, it might have sounded self-important.

  TOO SANE TO TRY a running leap, Muecke laboured onto the dumpster and landed with a thump in the alley behind the fence. Which way? He tried to read the man’s impulses. He’ll need cover: a crowd would be good, Muecke thought. But not the fun run. People ambling. Window shopping. People on a Sunday afternoon.

  He buttonholed a couple as he trotted out onto the streets: where was the best shopping around here? The woman thought about it. Around here? Try King Street, the Marketown Shopping Centre.

  Muecke was looking for a man above average height with dark hair—but he could be wearing a cap by now—and a sense of loose, coiled energy. He found one; but he wasn’t certain. The man ahead of him was hatless, dark-haired; with a water-darkened collar, looked like. Muecke held back, watched, and understood: his quarry was using reflective surfaces to check for a tail. Shop windows, parked cars, probably even the sunglasses of oncoming pedestrians. Looking for anyone who lingered too long; someone not moving to the rhythm of the shopping throng.

  And he knows my face.

  Muecke ducked into a chemist shop and bought a towelling hat and sunglasses. He folded his tie into his trouser pocket and draped his suit coat over one arm, slipped back out onto the footpath.

  The man had vanished. Muecke half-expected it. His little shopping diversion had been quick, but he was following a man who was super-aware and had probably seen him. A man who’d double back towards the confusion he’d recently caused rather than keep going as most people would do instinctively. Or maybe, having flushed me out, he’ll wait to see if I’m alone.

  Muecke patted the inside pocket of his coat. His phone was missing. Fell out on the boat or in the alley, he thought. The guy’s gone, or he’s too far ahead, using the shops: in one door and out another. And I can’t call for backup.

  Meanwhile, though: how did the guy think he was going to get to Jack Tremayne?

  CONFIDENT THAT HE’D SHAKEN off his tail, Wyatt caught a bus, hanging back until the doors were about to close before stepping aboard. He sat in the rear corner and looked out, concealed by the broad panel between the rear window and the first of the side windows. His gaze scanned restlessly, passed over suit pants and a white shirt, roamed on—and shot back to suit pants and white shirt. The plainclothes man had gone the hat and sunglasses route. Close but no cigar, Wyatt thought.

  He got out three stops later near Railway Street, the last to alight from the bus, and caught a taxi to Westfield shopping centre in Kotara, then a train back the way he’d come, a taxi ride to Mater Hospital and an Uber out to the airport. It took most of the afternoon. He knew there’d be an alert out for him, but they’d be looking for a man taking a flight out of the city, not one who’d just arrived and needed a rental car.

  Not the Budget booth twice in one week; Hertz this time. He offered a Visa pay card in the name of Sven Van der Horst. There was a thousand dollars in the account. He didn’t want to do anything that would strike people as odd this time. Certainly no paying by cash. It had probably been a mistake, paying cash at the Budget counter earlier in the week, but some of the cards had been unused for a while: he didn’t know if they’d been compromised. The Van der Horst ID was new, purchased last month.

  This time he rented a white Subaru XV. Fast and tough, but still a common enough vehicle on the roads of the country. And as he was walking to the Hertz parking bays, he felt a tingle in his spine. He turned his head, a casual movement, and registered a panicked flutter at the Budget counter. Two women, their faces studiously busy with paperwork. He’d been remembered. He wouldn’t be holding on to the Subaru for long.

  Wyatt set out on an indirect route to Anna Bay, where he intended to check in on Tremayne’s movements using the GPS tracker and think through his next moves. He drove across to the town of Raymond Terrace, then east on Richardson Road. The adrenaline was in him, and that was useful but also dangerous. He switched to cruise control and set his speed to five below the limit.

  Around past the airport again. Then to Williamtown where he headed east, and they found him, two patrol cars coming up fast in his rear-view mirror.

  Wyatt accelerated until he was in a region of small shops and rear delivery lanes, the pursuit cars hard on his tail. He braked, shot into an alleyway and slowed halfway down it. He waited. The leading police car overshot the entrance, braked heavily, backed up, and came creeping up on Wyatt. He already had the Subaru in reverse. He took his foot off the brake and slammed down the accelerator. The Subaru shot back into the police car, crumpling the bonnet and with any luck crushing the radiator against the engine. Then into drive, and he planted his foot again. Made a hard right at the end, out onto a main road.

  An evil scraping sound travelled
with him. Some distortion of the rear panels, he thought. Tyre on wheel arch or alignment out of whack.

  He swung around a bend and a divisional van was slantwise across the road, the young constables sensible enough to abandon it there and take refuge on the verge. Wyatt didn’t ease off the throttle. He aimed at the rear of the van where it was structurally weaker and there was a good chance of driving it forward. He rammed it at fifty k’s, punched a gap and drove through.

  But the Subaru was a mess, protesting from all of its organs. He was slowing and couldn’t hold the car steady. He didn’t have much time.

  Doubling back along a parallel street, he found a plant nursery. Almost closing time, but several cars lingered and the carpark itself was a small garden, with red-gum sleepers stacked to make big planters for date palms and bamboo. Perfect screening for a few minutes. He steered off the road and into a shaded rear corner.

  For a moment he was alone. Shoppers would be appearing soon, laden with plants and mulch. He could hear sirens in the distance. But he had a margin of safety.

  Wyatt trotted across the road and into a side street. Modest country-town houses built for families. Footballs and cricket bats on front lawns, bins out for collection, a house that hadn’t taken down its Christmas decorations. A dog sniffed incuriously at his ankles. Wyatt kept walking. He found a small brick house with a Holden Calais wagon in the driveway, gunmetal grey and tricked out with antennae and mag wheels. Not a family car. No kids’ clutter about.

  Wyatt darted back to a previous house, grabbed a pink tricycle left abandoned in a driveway and wheeled it to the brick house. He dumped it where the porch steps met the path that bisected the front lawn. It would be the first thing you saw when you opened the front door.

  He gave a soft knuckle rap to the door, the knock of a shy child, and stepped to one side. The door opened. A man stepped out. ‘Hello?’

  Wyatt swarmed him, got him inside and explained what he needed.

  30

  TWENTY-FIVE GRAND to kill Sam Kramer.

  In the pit of the night, Salter tried to put that into perspective. He’d be richer by twenty-five thousand dollars, of course. He’d have some kind of job with NightWatch Security when he got out, and Nick Lazar’s eternal gratitude. And Kramer off his back. Not to mention revenge for being beaten up and pissed on.

  Could he do it without being caught, was the question. He found himself checking blind corridors and empty rooms.

  Another factor: yeah, he might enjoy killing Kramer, but who would get the most benefit—himself or Nick Lazar? Lazar’s argument was if someone close to Wyatt was killed, it would affect him emotionally and lure him into the open. Salter thought this was horseshit, and meanwhile it was him, Salter, taking all the risks. If anything fucked up, he’d have another ten years added to his sentence.

  AS HE WAITED, HE worked on his weapon of choice. Or rather, necessity—you wouldn’t attack someone with a toothbrush if you had a choice. After lights out he’d scrape the tip of the toothbrush back and forth on the coarse brick wall surface behind his sink. Spit on the tiny plastic shavings, rub his finger around until he got a gritty paste; mop it up with toilet paper and flush it away.

  He thought about the survival techniques he’d learnt for himself the first time he went to jail (assault) five years ago. Unravel the mechanisms of power and respect, for a start. Someone holds a door open for you—why? It doesn’t mean they’re being a good citizen. Never hold the door open yourself. If you reach it first, you go through it first. If someone offers you a cigarette, you don’t accept it: you ask yourself what they want in return.

  Demand respect even in small ways. Never accept second best—patched-up prison clothing, for example, or half serves of grub. Acceptance means weakness. If someone blocks your path in the yard, you don’t walk around him. If you do that he’s got you: you’re his. Take him on. Sure, you might get the shit kicked out of you, but you’ll have earnt respect.

  What it all boiled down to, the only sure survival technique: arm yourself. And so he worked on the toothbrush. Until finally he had a sharp, strong, stabbing instrument. Lethal, so long as it was inserted properly: straight in, not hitting bone. Otherwise it was just a length of easily snapped plastic.

  He spent some research time in the library. Anatomy books.

  KRAMER CAME FOR HIM late Sunday afternoon when most of the inmates were in the rec room watching the football. Kramer and two of his offsiders, interchangeable muscle with stubbled skulls and singlets. Salter got to his feet, hands loose at his sides. The toothbrush was in his sock, behind his right ankle. Couldn’t bend to retrieve it: too obvious.

  ‘Giving you another chance to come clean, Bradley,’ Kramer said.

  A psycho, but a cautious one, Salter thought. Mild-looking. But Salter recognised the gleam behind the glasses. A man who’d got few breaks in life and given none back.

  Salter said nothing.

  ‘Who’s interested in me?’ said Kramer. ‘Who’re you working for?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Salter said, knowing in advance that he’d say it, just as Kramer had known he’d say it. Kramer gave a nod and his offsiders surged around him, filling the cell.

  The instinctive part of Salter was all visceral fear but another side of him fully recognised that fear and told him to dump it: shake it off as if it would burn his skin. His body was a system of weapons, after all: windmilling arms, punching fists, legs snapping out. And voice box screaming, shrieks to curdle the blood, eyes white and spit flying as he launched himself at the closest Kramer goon.

  But the space was small, he had to look in two directions at once—three; who knew what Kramer might do?—and now one of them was behind him, clamping his arms. He still had his legs and feet, and as the other man closed in, winding up to drive a fist into his guts, Salter kicked wildly, fury building with the memories of thirty years of slights and slurs, of all the people who’d held him back, held him down: his father, teachers, cops, officer-class arseholes like Nick Lazar. He didn’t stop kicking. Shins, thighs, balls, stomping on toes.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ one guy said, retreating.

  Salter felt himself go down, his spine smacking hard against the floor, and they were piling on him, one pinning his legs, the other sitting on his chest. Don’t give up, never give up, Salter said to himself, thrashing about.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ the same guy said again, as if he’d never struck anything like it before.

  Salter bucked them off and curled himself into a foetal position while they booted his kidneys and tried for his balls. And now he had the toothbrush.

  He bucked and screamed as the two goons looked at each other and laughed, and looked at Kramer, who wasn’t laughing but standing there in the cell doorway, unprotected.

  Kramer saw something in Salter then, absolute focus under the apparent derailment, and began to turn. That suited Salter: Kramer’s back was toward him when he got there and jabbed the sharpened plastic into Kramer’s neck. The vulnerable area where the last vertebra meets the base of the skull. After that first quick thrust, he hammered it in with the flat of his palm, and Christ did it hurt. Then he jiggled the blade for good measure. Sever the spinal cord with any luck. With any luck, very little bleeding and instant death.

  31

  AS SOON AS HE’D cleared the harbour, Tremayne replied to the abduction text—fuck you—and powered north, hugging the coast. Past Anna Bay, past the Tomaree National Park, before turning into the Karuah River between Nelson Bay and Hawkes Nest. He felt himself begin to relax. He was getting away, the boat was as familiar under his fingers as his wife’s body, and he liked the sensation of the wind, the rolling deck and the slap of the water under him. Here, semi-sheltered at the wheel, he was emerging from the domestic into the elemental. Transposed into a cleaner, edgier existence from the messy entanglements of the past months. His money troubles, Lynx, the government’s nagging—for too long now he’d seen everything through the distorting lenses of those three t
hings.

  Five p.m. on a chilly Sunday in May. Less than an hour of useful daylight left. Not many tourists in the shoreline accommodation and not many other watercraft about. He glided further up the river until he found a suitable place to drop anchor, unseen from nearby houses and jetties. All the while the radio had crackled at low volume. Now he turned it up, listening intently, switching between the frequencies. His name was out, the name and description of his boat, and some confused chatter about an incident on Newcastle Harbour.

  But he hadn’t been sighted since, or not that the radio talk revealed.

  He dropped into the storage compartment and hauled out a huge blue tarp, some plywood sheets, stencils and spraycans of paint, and worked feverishly in the dwindling light, renaming, renumbering, altering contours. She was called Joi de Vivre now, the decking was black, the superstructure reshaped and painted pale blue. It would merge with the sea and the sky if seen from a distance.

  But they could still come for him; he needed the Sig Sauer. As he descended the stairs again, he found the fingers of his right hand curling in anticipation around a ghost pistol grip.

  The gun was a micro-compact model: small, flat, comfortable and comforting to hold. Ready for use: he’d cleaned it a few weeks ago. Washed the cartridges and the emptied clip in dishwashing detergent, dried them, washed them again in bleach to finally rid them of prints and DNA, then applied a thin protective layer of gun oil before stowing the reassembled pistol in a freezer bag.

  Working by torchlight, he removed the panel concealing the drainage pipes, put it to one side, reached in and turned the familiar third pipe. It came away too easily. It was too light.

 

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