Kill Shot

by Garry Disher

  Lynx Tremayne was in a sitting-room armchair. She’d been shot in both eyes. The lawyer was on the floor near the back door. Tried to run, thought Wyatt. Turned at the last moment and was gut shot. Not dead, struggling for a lifeline when he heard and saw Wyatt.

  ‘Help me.’

  There is no help. You’re gone, thought Wyatt. ‘Tremayne did this?’

  DeLacey grimaced in pain. ‘He wouldn’t pay!’ he said, astounded, outraged. He gagged and coughed up a mouthful of blood.

  ‘Wouldn’t pay what?’

  ‘Ransom,’ said DeLacey weakly.

  These are some pretty awful people, Wyatt thought. He took the Lexus.

  ACCORDING TO THE TRACKING app the Range Rover had returned to Merewether Beach. It was still there when Wyatt arrived, parked in the driveway, so he checked the house. Still empty, the kitchen light on, the back door unlocked.

  On his way out, Wyatt took the side street where he’d seen the F100. It was gone, leaving only a spoor of leaked oil.

  He headed across to the foreshore and left the city, taking Nelson Bay Road east, and back up to the river where Tremayne had stashed the boat. Everything was outstripping him. He rode in the darkness with a still face, expressionless: a man alone with his thoughts. But events had got away from him.

  He monitored his phone as he drove. As expected, the boat began to move eventually, out into ocean waters. Then north. Wyatt drove on.

  But what was the point of that?

  He braked. Pulled over onto the verge of a desolate stretch of the road and thought for a while. Start again? Keep tracking Tremayne’s boat? He could do that, but not by car. Wait for the man to stop somewhere on the other side of the world? Time, thought Wyatt. Time and money. Maybe pull another job, if Sam Kramer could find a way to pass some intel to his daughter.

  Wyatt checked his email drafts.

  A message from Phoebe Kramer. Her father had been shanked in prison. No date set for the funeral. Josh erratic and secretive.

  33

  WYATT EMAILED A REPLY: On way.

  He U-turned and began the drive south to Sydney, a steady advance down a slow inland route to avoid the police. This hinterland was edgily desolate at night: small towns, farmhouses and emptiness. His headlights shaped the unwinding bitumen, nocturnal contours he couldn’t make sense of. The eyes of occasional creatures glinting as they assessed him.

  Too warm in the car. He cracked open his side window for a flow of night-chilled air to keep him awake and the rush of sounds that would prove he was moving. He was unsettled. His operating assumption, always, was that his plans were the best he could formulate, likely to lead to the best outcomes; but at the same time he was prepared for the worst to happen, so that he’d never be caught off guard. This time around he’d planned on finding Tremayne’s running-away stash, the caveat being that it might not exist, or he might be too late.

  So the fact that he hadn’t been quick enough was not a surprise. But he hadn’t anticipated this feeling of letdown. Wyatt was not given to self-analysis; had never needed to be. But now he tried to measure what Sam Kramer’s death meant to him. Clearly, he’d lost a source of reliable intelligence; putting a job together would be that much harder now. That was significant to Wyatt.

  In addition, he’d made promises to Sam, and to Sam’s family, to safeguard Kramer’s twenty per cent. He’d honour these promises—not out of sentiment but because he’d promised. And if possible he’d find and kill the killer. Fix the imbalance caused by the killing.

  Finally, he tried to reconfigure the recent and more distant past and work out what Sam Kramer the person meant to him. He’d used the word ‘friend’ in his thoughts, but only because no other label suggested itself. Sam had always done the right thing by Wyatt, so Wyatt had always done the right thing by him. Sam had never cheated on the thieves, hold-up men, safecrackers and drivers he worked with. He’d been a careful planner, a wise head, a logical thinker. He had contacts at all levels of Sydney society and knew both how to use them and how to look after them.

  He’d given Wyatt a grounding long ago, starting with banks and payroll vans, and had been a reliable associate ever since. If he had human failings, Wyatt was interested only to the extent that they affected his ability to get the job done.

  Associate…Friend…Suddenly Phoebe Kramer was in Wyatt’s head. He’d made it a rule never to think ‘if only’; never to dwell anywhere but the present. But now he found himself making an empathetic leap: Phoebe Kramer bereft. Grieving.

  He didn’t think she needed him. Wanting was a different matter. But he’d barely allowed himself to think about her as other than Sam’s daughter until now.

  And the family would need Sam’s money. All of it—for the funeral if nothing else. A murder in prison meant an investigation, forensics, autopsy…The funeral wouldn’t be any time soon. He wondered if he should have stuck with Tremayne. Dismissed the thought.

  Wyatt considered all these things as he drove through the night, sifting through the array of facts, memories and suppositions. He valued his clear, sceptical mind, his sense of precision. But the sheer weight of events—Tremayne, the Newcastle murders, the death of Sam Kramer—was threatening to disrupt all that. He needed symmetry. He could not be a man at the mercy of doubts, scruples and uncertainty; a man who hesitated or fudged and got nowhere.

  That would be fatal.

  Meanwhile people he couldn’t identify were after him. They could, he thought, be waiting for him.

  HE DECIDED TO MAKE contact with the family first, unobserved, then find somewhere to stay. By first light Monday he was watching their house, an untended Californian bungalow on a quiet broad street in Mosman.

  The aspect bothered him. Too many trees beside and behind him, in the foreground of the house, on an uphill slope beyond the backyard. Even more in the surrounding yards. He stood fused with a shadow bank that was losing out against the dawning sun. He watched with eyes wide and unfocused to gain a general impression, then homed in on the specifics. One tree or car or neighbouring house at a time.

  There was plenty of movement in the suburb, as it happened, all of it benign. A woman setting out on her morning run, meeting and running with another woman half a block down. A man in a dressing gown fetching the morning newspaper. A taxi collecting a man in a suit. A woman piling two tracksuited schoolboys and their gym bags into an SUV.

  Soon Wyatt would be spotted: an oddity on that street.

  He stepped deeper into the shadows, intending to wait until there was movement at the bungalow and a chance to communicate with one of Sam Kramer’s loved ones.

  Before long, though, the street was too busy for him to risk it. He found a café and over breakfast made another Airbnb booking—a granny flat behind a house in nearby Middle Head—and arranged to rent a mountain bike.

  As the day progressed, he made two passes through Mosman on the bike, three hours apart, and three passes by taxi and Uber. By mid-afternoon the street was streaming with a different kind of traffic: friends and family visiting the Kramers’ house to pay their respects. At one point Josh Kramer drove away in his little red Mazda MX5. Then, late afternoon, the cop from Newcastle was there.

  34

  MUECKE HAD FLOWN BACK to Sydney at first light on Monday. Sunday afternoon and evening had proved frustrating, full of dead ends and his own sense of being an unwanted irritant in Newcastle. Again he’d been reminded that police work was never systematic: it was messy, subject to lucky breaks, deals and Chinese whispers, with missed opportunities, cock-ups, tainted evidence and loss of heart thrown into the mix. And waiting. Endless waiting.

  Feeling haggard, the Property Crimes sergeant drove his venerable Commodore home from the airport. He was due at work by 8 a.m. but didn’t feel the need to rush. Another shower, a fresh suit, a few minutes of Meg’s company; the way she made coffee how he liked it.

  He parked outside his Newtown house, a rundown terrace. The first students of the day—diligent Chinese and
Indian kids—were heading off to early lectures. He locked the car and let himself in the front door. Home had always exerted a certain dark gravity on him, and he knew at once that he was alone. The mental image of Meg and her bustling and coffee-making was from his early married life. He could tell she hadn’t been gone long, but these days she always had things to do away from the house. Her new life, the kids too old to live at home anymore, Muecke morose and preoccupied. Her breakfast dishes were draining on the sink and she’d left a note on the table: Excursion, back tonight xxx and a smiley face.

  He remembered: a field excursion to convict ruins for her Australian history special subject. The kisses were automatic, of course; historical themselves, in a way. Still, they were kisses.

  Muecke put the coffee on, thinking of the debacle in Newcastle yesterday. Tremayne’s ruse and escape; the interference of the man Muecke thought of as Sam Kramer’s associate; the murders. And Kramer shanked in prison, down here in western Sydney. Muecke had gone back to his hotel last night with a sense of the local CIB, the Fraud Squad and the Probity Commission scuffling about in the dirt, their investigations slightly clownish. If they couldn’t grasp the contours of the case, what chance did he have?

  He shrugged his weary shoulders into a fresh shirt and pulled on the grey suit, dry-cleaned last week. His place was here in Sydney. His case was here in Sydney. Kramer was deceased. That might have nothing or everything to do with the events in Newcastle, but it was all dead ends up there now. Any kind of forward movement would be down here. The man he was tracking would show here eventually, maybe glimpsed among the gravestones when Kramer was planted in the ground.

  But would a man like that show himself? Muecke thought of other wanted men he’d known over the years, their propensity for bad thinking. Twice in his long career he’d served a summons on some break-and-enter hero living in an expensive harbour-view unit, only to recognise, and arrest, a friend of the guy—sitting right there on the couch with his belongings in the spare bedroom. Crooks graduate to other crooks, especially if they live in fancy places, Muecke thought. They aren’t smart enough to lie low. Muecke was hoping for some bad thinking in this case. Not really expecting it, though.

  HE MADE A NUMBER of phone calls and by 11 a.m. was in the Watervale Prison infirmary, interviewing Brad Salter, who was not alone.

  ‘Thought I should have my lawyer present this time,’ he smirked.

  The lawyer shot out her hand; young, sharply dressed and with the attack eyes of a pit bull. ‘Sarah Ogilvy.’

  ‘Quick off the mark,’ Muecke observed.

  They both smiled.

  Muecke said, ‘It’s my intention to interview Bradley in relation to the death of Samuel Kramer.’

  Ogilvy said, ‘My client, Mr Salter, has already answered questions in relation to this matter. He was attacked by three men. He defended himself. If not for the subsequent actions of corrections officers, he might have died.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Salter said. Ogilvy touched his forearm.

  Muecke gazed at Salter. Broken nose, one eye blackened, old cuts reopened. ‘Can you provide me with any further information in regard to the death of Mr Kramer?’

  ‘My client has said all that he intends to say regarding this matter.’

  ‘I put it to Mr Salter that the death of Mr Kramer was planned and orchestrated. Do you have anything to say in regard to that, Mr Salter?’

  Police work was all about fishing and watching. Muecke, his eyes probing Salter’s face, spotted a brief flare of guilt.

  ‘I don’t doubt that you were attacked,’ Muecke went on.

  ‘Nice to be believed,’ Salter said, lifting a hand to his face.

  ‘And were obliged to defend yourself.’

  Ogilvy interjected. ‘So how, DS Muecke, could the whole mess be construed as planned and orchestrated? And correct me if I’m wrong, you’re Property Crimes, not Homicide.’

  Muecke ignored her. ‘I put it to you, Mr Salter, that the attack was a stroke of luck in that you already had a weapon at your disposal and had fully intended to use it on Mr Kramer at some future date, perhaps not in so public or risky a manner.’

  ‘You are referring to the shank?’ said Ogilvy, as if the word tasted bad. ‘It is my client’s assertion that the shank was never in his possession, except in the final moments of the attack, but was brought to the scene by one of his assailants, who intended to kill him with it. Fortunately, my client wrested it away from him in the struggle and, in a moment of life and death, Mr Kramer sadly lost his life. It could easily have been my client, or one of the others.’

  As if pitching to a judge and jury. Muecke wondered what her pillow talk was like. He cocked his head curiously at Salter. ‘I expect you’re watching your back more than usual now?’

  Salter’s eyes flickered: he knows he’s a target, thought Muecke. He continued to probe but Ogilvy continued to intervene, and Salter’s face went dead above the resolute line of his lips.

  Muecke tried another tack. ‘I was interested to see who’s visited you since your incarceration—and who hasn’t. Mainly hasn’t. You’re not on many people’s Christmas card list.’

  ‘I fail to see…’ said Ogilvy.

  ‘One visitor, in fact: fellow name of Nicholas Lazar,’ Muecke said. ‘I did some digging. Served in Afghanistan with you.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Sniper. You were also a sniper, isn’t that right?’

  ‘I don’t know the relevance,’ Ogilvy said, ‘and I don’t know how you unearthed that kind of information.’

  ‘Lazar’s business is failing,’ Muecke said. ‘NightWatch Security. A nice ring to it, but it isn’t bringing in the bacon.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, he’s forced to hustle for work. Bouncer at the odd pub gig, for example.’

  ‘So?’ said Salter again.

  Ogilvy was silent, interested now to see where Muecke was going.

  ‘So, one of the bands he provides security for is fronted by a guy called Joshua Kramer, who by a curious coincidence is the late Sam Kramer’s son.’

  ‘This interview is over. I am advising my client not to answer any more of your questions.’

  ‘Who knows what kind of subterranean forces are at work, Brad. Better keep your mouth shut and your head down.’

  A PUB LUNCH IN PARRAMATTA—the comfort of a plain old mixed grill in a plain old corner pub—then to the police station, where he wrote up his notes on the weekend in Newcastle and the interview with Salter.

  Mid-afternoon, Kitty Brenner called him to her office. The door was ajar. Sam Henderson sat in one of her two stiff-backed visitor’s chairs.

  ‘You called?’

  She indicated the second chair with the chewed end of a Bic pen. ‘Sit.’

  Muecke sat. He didn’t know what to expect, but the senior sergeant’s face radiated anger and Henderson was smirking. Muecke glanced about the office but found no clues. Just a potted plant and the usual office paraphernalia. Otherwise it was a spacious room filled with a wintry light—literally and figuratively.

  ‘Greg, did you precipitate events in Newcastle?’

  Muecke reminded himself that Brenner was superior to him in rank—but not that superior. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Word has filtered through.’

  That’s all she was giving him? And word from who? Agostino, probably. ‘Filtered.’

  ‘The investigation was under control, ticking over nicely, and then you arrived.’

  Why wasn’t the inspector making these charges? Or professional standards command? ‘I had information germane to a number of parallel investigations up there. I passed on my information. That’s all.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Henderson said. ‘You went around asking questions and poking your nose in. You asked to see CCTV footage, photos, surveillance reports. You interviewed witnesses. You ran around giving advice and orders…’

  Henderson was a sneak and not very good at hiding it. Brenner, on the other hand, was show
ing Muecke a compact, unyielding face, with barely a glint of animation.

  ‘You saw Bradley Salter this morning,’ she said.

  For a dinosaur cop like Muecke, modern policing was murky and paralysing. The mix of new-broom hotshots and old, lingering collusions meant that nothing got done, or certainly didn’t get done well, or quickly. Ambitions were soured, energy lost, the will to arrest the bad guys sapped.

  ‘All part of my investigation into Sam Kramer. Salter killed Kramer. Given his, shall we say, animus against Kramer, it was worth talking to him. Just because Kramer’s dead, we don’t have to close the books on some pretty big Property Crimes cases. Or is that your style, washing your hands of further investigation whenever you hit a snag?’

  ‘You take that back.’

  Muecke shook his head and stood. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Really?’ Henderson said, as Muecke left. ‘Would that be through proper channels?’

  LATE MONDAY AFTERNOON, Muecke drove to Mosman and knocked on Cindy Kramer’s door. Turned to view the cars crowding both sides of the street while he waited.

  Turned again when the door opened. ‘Hello, Phoebe.’

  ‘Mr Muecke,’ said Sam Kramer’s daughter, a pretty woman, her face tight with grief.

  ‘Just came to pay my respects and offer my condolences.’

  She thought about that; decided she believed him and stood aside for him to enter the house. Small, crammed rooms; a life that had been put on hold with the imprisonment of the main breadwinner. Put on hold forever now.

  ‘I warn you, we have guests. Not all of them are going to appreciate your being here.’

  She led him into a large, open-plan living area at the rear of the house—the only sign that money had been spent on the place since it was first built. A broad glass wall overlooked decking, mouldy canvas chairs, a stretch of overgrown garden and a back fence with a treed slope beyond it. In the room itself, a huddle of men, women and children, awkward in their best clothes.

  Muecke recognised some of Kramer’s associates from investigations over the years. One or two he’d arrested. There was no overt hostility; he’d been fair with them. But still, he was a cop.