by Garry Disher
Phoebe twinkled at him. ‘You know us—we hired someone to hit the giftshop.’
Muecke laughed, twisting to get comfortable. Got right to the point. ‘You spirited him away in the hearse, right?’
‘I see that being shot up hasn’t tipped you out of cop mode, DS Muecke,’ Phoebe said.
‘Call me Greg. Did he make it?’
‘Make what?’
‘Are we going to do this? Your friend, the one you ran to when he was shot—is he okay?’
She looked baffled. ‘I know that you were shot, and you shot someone else, but I’m not sure who else was shot.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Muecke muttered. ‘How was the funeral?’
‘Fine.’ Phoebe seemed to draw a sombre veil down over her face for a moment. ‘Mum, we should go, Sergeant Muecke needs his rest.’
‘No, wait. Let’s just not play the game for a little while,’ Muecke said. ‘Stay. You do me good.’
The three stared at each other, tourists in a border country of mutual regard between criminal and cop. It was tricky, but not dangerous. Muecke knew he’d sleep soundly tonight, pain notwithstanding. The Kramer women would sleep, grief notwithstanding. But Muecke wouldn’t rest in his daylight hours and the women would know that. He’d come at them and they’d block him, and one day there’d be a breakthrough. Or not.
36
IT WAS PAIN THAT brought Wyatt back from the dead. His spine was bouncing on an unforgiving surface.
Realising he was in the bed of a moving vehicle, little curtained windows all around, he lifted himself onto his elbows, the pain shooting through him as his torso flexed, and looked towards the front. He was in the hearse.
‘You’re awake.’
Wyatt turned his head. The driver’s offsider was perched in there with him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re taking me to the crematorium.’
‘Humour. A good sign,’ the hearse guy said.
He introduced himself as Steve Britt. A squat, broad man with a square, overheated face, yellowing teeth and white hair springing from his skull and face. Wyatt flopped back again, exhausted.
Then he moved his hand to his hip, explored with his fingers, and raised himself to look. A cotton towel had been taped over the wound. Bulky; already full of blood. ‘I’m making a mess of your lovely hearse.’
‘We’ve never carried a live one before,’ acknowledged Britt cheerfully. ‘But we have had the odd fluid leak over the years.’
‘Probably need to work on your embalming skills,’ Wyatt said. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To see a guy who’ll patch you up.’
Wyatt closed his eyes, trying to anticipate the pitching of the hearse as it rolled along bumpy streets and swept around corners. It was impossible. Everything hurt. He thought about the hearse, about the man who’d patch him up. Some struck-off doctor? It all spoke to Sam Kramer’s network, he thought. An expert for every emergency.
THE NEXT TIME HE WOKE he was in a bed in the back room of a suburban house. A flame of autumn orange on the other side of the window—a pair of liquidambars losing their leaves. Otherwise, skeletal fruit trees and a wooden fence. No tennis court, swimming pool, dog kennel, clothesline, discarded toys or wheelbarrow. Nothing to reveal anything about his location or his hosts.
But the room itself had plenty to tell him. A hospital-grade bed, a white gown on a hook on the back of the closed door, a blinking monitor, an IV stand, boxes of compression stockings, syringes and surgical gloves on the shelves of a wall cabinet. The beige and white colours of a hospital ward. The odours of treatment and sterilisation.
He checked himself: he’d been freshly bandaged. Meaning the wound had probably been cleaned, sterilised, stitched up. And they’d have pumped him full of antibiotics.
There was a TV set on the wall, some breakfast show—what day was it?—the sound muted. He hunted around for the remote and switched it off. Keep things simple. He needed continued concealment, restored health and some understanding of the recent past. Forget Tremayne: no mystery there, just a man operating according to some monstrous logic of his own. Forget Phoebe Kramer: he needed to excise her. Focus on who had shot him and why.
He thought about the role of random factors. This job had been riddled with them. No plan, however well conceived and executed, will survive intersection with someone else’s compulsions.
The door opened. A man entered the room, unhooked the gown and worked his way into it, regarding Wyatt without curiosity. About sixty, tall, clean and ascetic looking. He didn’t speak; just took Wyatt’s temperature and blood pressure, shone a light in each eye, checked his tongue, his pulse. Wyatt sensed a mind registering and analysing. The eyes were alert and bright, holding neither sympathy nor judgment.
He feels nothing about me, Wyatt thought. He’s a man who notes, understands and accepts with no need to empathise. Wyatt appreciated it. If he was a doctor treating a gunshot patient with a question mark hanging over him, he’d take the same approach.
‘You’ll live,’ the doctor said eventually. ‘The bullet went straight through. No organ damage. Shouldn’t get infected. You’ll have massive bruising and feel tender for a while. You’ll have two small scars when it heals.’ Pause. ‘Two more. You’ve been in the wars before.’
The voice was low and even with no wasted words. Again, Wyatt approved. ‘How long?’ he croaked.
‘Until you can leave? Three, four days.’
‘Do you have a name?’
The doctor, about to leave the room, stopped; almost curious. ‘Do you?’
Then he smiled thinly, settled the gown on the hook and left the room. He didn’t strike Wyatt as a man deregistered for some shameful puerility, like drugs or touching up women. It would have involved money, he thought. Medicare fraud.
WHEN HE OPENED HIS eyes again, Phoebe Kramer was there, intensely attractive, and he hadn’t excised her after all. And he was vulnerable and self-conscious.
She saw all of this. ‘It’s only temporary,’ she said. Smiling a little; but her face was clouded too.
‘You got me here,’ Wyatt said. ‘Thank you.’
A think-nothing-of-it wave of the hand, then she began a systematic examination of him. His eyes and face, his shape under the bedding. ‘Let me see.’
She lifted up the sheet and eyed the dressing over the wound. ‘Much pain?’
‘Some.’
Her eyes strayed to his bare hipbone and stomach, then to his arms and hands, the veins and corded muscles. Her interest was exquisite and finely honed.
‘I’m at a disadvantage.’
‘Hah.’ She f lashed him her crooked smile, showing her chipped tooth. ‘If you think I’m getting my gear off too, you’re mistaken.’ She took in the bed. ‘Besides, no room. You’ll have to wait.’
So, that was an unspoken matter out of the way.
She pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. ‘We’re in Pymble, in case you were wondering.’
‘And the doctor?’
‘One of Dad’s…associates.’
She began to probe then, a subtle, observant interrogator. That last job, the events in Newcastle, the dead men in her street. Wyatt told her everything and speculated wherever there were holes in the narrative.
‘Tremayne’s gone to some tropical island, you think?’
He nodded. ‘Or somewhere without an extradition treaty.’
‘You’ll just blithely follow the GPS signal.’
‘Unless the police have my phone.’
‘I have it,’ she said.
WYATT DRIFTED INTO SLEEP and when he woke she was there with the watchful eyes and sustaining silence of a parent at bedtime. Except she was no parent, he told himself. And he was no child.
‘Sorry I drifted off. I guess the doctor’s pumped me full of sedatives.’
‘Lucky you,’ she said, then was silent, as if taking refuge in some private reserve where she couldn’t be reached.
She roused herself. ‘I have to be getting back.’
‘You weren’t followed?’
‘That is a very real risk, Wyatt, but I’ve been here for a few hours and no one has come knocking. I’m not sure what our status is, now Dad’s dead. Greg Muecke was sniffing around—the cop who arrested him. But he’s out of action for a while.’
Suddenly it occurred to Wyatt: ‘What day is it?’
‘Monday.’
‘You had the funeral?’
‘Saturday.’
He said urgently, ‘I left a rented SUV in the street.’
‘All taken care of. I drove it away in all the confusion and returned it, wiped clean.’
‘My clothes…’
‘Burnt.’
He flopped back. ‘I’ll need my phone.’
‘I’ll bring it next time.’
HE DIDN’T SEE HER for two days. Barely saw the doctor, but a woman he guessed was the man’s wife brought him his meals and fussed a little and changed his dressing.
‘Margot Perkovic,’ she said, when he asked her name.
‘The doctor’s your husband?’
She smiled, neither confirming nor denying, which pretty much summed up the way people operated if they belonged to Sam Kramer’s tribe.
She brought him a radio and an iPad, and he followed the news trails. The hunt for Tremayne was intense; he was wanted for three murders, now that Mark Impey’s body had been found. He was believed to be sailing towards the Marshall Islands in Impey’s boat, but had also been sighted in New Zealand, Port Lincoln and Singapore. The men killed in Mosman had served together in Afghanistan and were understood to have suffered some kind of PTSD breakdown.
Then Phoebe returned, and he heard about her mother and her brother.
‘I’ll be her carer for as long as it takes. I’ll care for Josh, too, within limits. Silly prick.’
‘Don’t let him bring you all down.’
She flared up: ‘It’s family, okay?’
Wyatt sank back. Her hand snaked into his in apology, a cool presence. He said, ‘I’m getting out in a day or two. I’ll work out a way to get you your father’s money.’
She said, ‘That would be handy.’
She added, ‘But keep enough for your trip.’
And she said: ‘See you when you get back.’
37
NAVIGATING WITH THE AID of a laptop, Tremayne steered a course up the New South Wales and Queensland coasts, through the Whitsunday Islands and up into the Timor Sea. Snap squalls, wind bullets hurtling out to sea, fast tidal currents and numerous coral reefs, all tackled alone. He sailed nervily through two storms, masses of dark energy roiling towards him. He thought about seeking anchorage in the worst of it, but knew it was safer to stay at sea, exhausted as he was. In those early days he was tempted to sail at night to put himself far ahead of search parties, far ahead of his crimes. He couldn’t do that while the coastal waters concealed coral formations.
Then he was through Torres Strait and heading west in the Arafura Sea. Up into the islands of Indonesia, into calmer, safer conditions. He saw an assortment of sea craft as he sailed along, from canoes to massive oil tankers—but no patrol boats. He had long-range fuel tanks and all the supplies he’d need for an extended voyage, which was just as well. By now an Interpol alert would have been f lashed to all the island nations of the Pacific, South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean. Instead of putting into port he’d drop anchor in shallow waters, leave the navigation lights burning, and motor on again the next day.
THE PIRATES BOARDED the Joi de Vivre near the Horsburgh Lighthouse in the Strait of Malacca. He didn’t know he was not alone until a hand smelling of raw fish clapped over his face in the dead of night and he reared up in his bed in the main cabin. Four men—Malay, Indonesian, Singaporean; he couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter. They carried long knives and said nothing.
They were fast: one man stayed with the tip of his blade pressed against Tremayne’s stomach while the other three stripped the boat: laptop, phones, radios; fishing, GPS and navigation gear. They found the safe, forced him to open it. Took the thousand dollars he’d stored there. And his Ben Meyn passport.
They also took the rifle, stowing it in a sack along with everything else, but didn’t pay any attention to the panel over the false drainage pipe, even though it was cracked from his tantrum.
Then they were gone, up onto the deck and slipping over the side. Hearing a snarling motor, he ran to the rail. A speedboat streaking away into the darkness. Not a thing he could do about it.
Badly rattled, he just wanted to get going. But there were hours yet until dawn. What did he have left to his name? The boat, at least; the dinghy in davits on the stern, emergency life rings, lifejackets, hull protectors. His fuel, food and water. His almost-million in cash and bonds. The pistol.
And his life. Tremayne was a man who rallied, and he tried to rally now.
But he was reluctant to continue sailing west and north-west. The waters here felt unfriendly to him now. He knew there’d been Chinese investors who lost money in his schemes and as the hours passed, he imagined them putting the word out to their friends and family in all of the Chinese communities between Australia and Europe. A stupid notion, he knew that, but he couldn’t shake it off. His sense of luck running out grew stronger.
At dawn, Tremayne turned around. He steered north-east into the South China Sea, then through the Sulu and Celebes seas and east into the Pacific.
SOME DISTANCE NORTH-WEST of Kiribati, nothing around, dead calm, the boat uttered a sharp, brain-scraping, almost human wail that tossed him off his feet. When it stopped, everything was shaking unnervingly. He looked back at his wake: he’d just sailed over a shipping container. He didn’t know if he’d been holed. He did know that the blades on both propellers were fucked—either bent or sheared off.
He checked his nautical charts. Kiribati was close, but there’d be officials, tourists. East of his position was a chain of islands marked uninhabited. One, Pentecost Atoll, twelve square kilometres in size, boasted an airstrip built during the Second World War. Also two shallow lagoons, coconut palms and plentiful fish and birdlife. Drop anchor there, lick his wounds, think—maybe even find a way to mend the propellers.
Tremayne limped along for two days, seas a moderate swell, winds twenty knots, the Joi de Vivre setting up a mad shudder if he tried for speed until, in drenching rain late on a Friday in June, he sailed through a gap in a ring of coral and dropped anchor in a sheltered lagoon. He was 350 nautical miles north of the equator. Thin, bearded, all of the recent past scorched out of him. Looking, he thought, as he caught a glimpse of himself in a wheelhouse gauge, like a lightly salted corpse.
WHEN THE RAIN CLEARED, he was astonished to find he had company—a tattered yacht moored at the other end of the lagoon. A two-master named the Santa Ana. Torn rigging and a patched hull, showing the wear of sun, wind, rain, coral and either carelessness or bad luck. Maybe both.
Then movement. Two men emerged from below and climbed down into a dinghy roped to the stern. Young, nimble; both bearded, blond, grimy and shirtless. One carried a rifle. Tremayne hurried below, pocketed his pistol and returned to the wheelhouse. The men must have seen him, but they didn’t come for him. They rowed out to the mid-point of the lagoon and, to his bewilderment, started firing the rifle calmly into the water.
SHAUN MAXSTEAD AND DUSTIN SNELL were shooting fish for dinner. You had to be selective because most of the seafood in this godforsaken place was poisonous. The newcomer had aroused their curiosity, but only in an academic way. They’d been given no assistance to get off the atoll by any of the other visitors in all the time they’d been stranded here. They didn’t expect it this time around.
The first boat to call in had been a big catamaran owned by a holidaying Asia Bank executive. She spent a day photographing the red-footed boobies, the unbelievably stupid swarming birds that overran the atoll, then sailed on again. She’d had two sons and three crew members with her—hard, suspicious, competent types—so
Maxstead and Snell didn’t dare try anything. Then a geomorphologist from Perth dropped anchor outside the lagoon, sailing a huge yacht full of grad students studying coral features of the earth’s surface. Too many to tackle, and they kept to themselves. The third boat to visit was a powerful cabin cruiser with US Pacific Remote Island Area marine biologists on board. Some of the crew members wore handguns. Maxstead and Snell were advised to sail on, they were polluting the lagoon.
‘Yep, no problem,’ said Maxstead. Paused. ‘Can’t lend us some fuel, by any chance? We can swap you some fresh fish.’
A curt shake of the head, and no curiosity. ‘Against regulations.’
‘Some tinned food? We’re sick of fish and stuff.’
‘Regulations. Hang tight, someone’ll be along sooner or later.’
Maxstead almost came clean then: we’re out of fuel, out of food, our pump’s broken, our sails are ripped to shit, and we’re scared this fucking endless rain is going to reveal where we buried the van Horens.
He didn’t say it. But for a brief crazy moment he thought he had. He and Dusty didn’t speak much anymore, just grunted and had pretty much the same impulses, so he was dying to have a proper conversation with someone sane. Thoughts, fears. Maybe even a few hopes, if he could think of any. The isolation, the sun and the rain, the blood on the deck of the Santa Ana—he thought it probable he was living a bad dream.
So here was another visiting boat, and what were the chances anything useful would come of it? A nice enough looking cabin cruiser, but something was wrong with it. A bit of noise and vibration as it came through the inlet. One guy on deck at the moment. For all Maxstead knew, ten guys below, armed to the teeth.
He stood, aimed the .22 down into the water, his slim, hard body accommodating the motions of the dinghy. Dusty, helping him spot, pointed suddenly. ‘There.’
‘Got it.’
A perfect shot. Dusty scooped out the dead fish. You had to be quick or the sharks swarmed.
Fish tonight. Fish every fucking night. And they were down to their last couple of cartridges. Otherwise it was seabird eggs or coconut. Maxstead dreamed of a Big Mac or a meat-lovers almost every day.
