Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal (12 page)

There were two plush club chairs
against one wall, a large TV and VCR unit on a bench, and a small table with
Dannys crocodile-skin suitcase open on it. Hed left a light on in the
bathroom and there was a damp towel on the floor. A bar fridge hummed in one
corner. What would you like? he said.

He had loosened his collar and was
mopping his brow with a handkerchief. He laughed suddenly and tucked the
handkerchief away in embarrassment. Winnings taken it out of me.

Carol stepped close to him and
rested her palms on his chest. Why dont you get comfortable first? She
fingered his lapels. Why dont you take a shower and let me make the drinks. Ill
make us something long and cool and very alcoholic

What she did with her hand then was
unambiguous and the mark gleamed like a schoolboy. She stepped back, evading
him, nodded at the bathroom. But dont be long.

Im long now.

Now, now, none of that.

Theres this spot, Danny said,
contorting absurdly, in the middle of my back. I can never reach it.

Well youll just have to wait, wont
you?

She turned to the bar. It was well
stocked. She would be able to make martinis. Behind her, Danny was whistling in
the bathroom. He had left the door open. Did he seriously imagine that she
wanted to watch him?

She took two glasses and tumbled ice
cubes into them. She broke the seal on the gin bottle.

What are you making?

She judged that he was standing at
the bathroom door. She would not turn around. A surprise.

There was the sound of Dannys hands
slapping himself. The shower door rolled on its coasters. She heard the water
gush.

After thirty seconds she peeked. The
glass shower enclosure was steamed up and Danny was soaping his groin and
singing.

Swiftly she poured measures of gin
and dry vermouth into each glass, then took a tiny glass bottle from her bag.
The label read eye drops. She removed the top and filled the dropper with
fluid. Danny turned off the water. She had about a minute. She squirted the
fluid into one of the glasses, stirred the drink by poking the floating ice
cube, replaced the eye dropper, and tucked the little bottle away. Da dum,
she said triumphantly, turning to him, holding the glasses aloft.

Danny had succumbed to modesty. He
stood by the bed, pink with emotion and steam and too many carbohydrates, a
voluminous towel around his waist. Great, he said lamely.

He didnt know what was expected of
him. Come, sit here with me, Carol said. She patted the edge of the bed.

I feel at a disadvantage, said
Danny, taking the glass she offered him and sitting down.

Carol dipped a finger in her drink
and touched it to his lips. She brushed his hot cheek with the cool edge of her
glass, then slipped the base under the towel and let it rest on his thigh.
Danny sighed. He raised his own glass and drank deeply.

Youre tense, Carol said. Her
voice was soft. Her fingernails scratched gently in the hairs on his leg. Ill
give you a back rub. Would you like that?

Danny laughed abruptly and turned
onto his stomach. Youre amazing.

Carol began working her hands along
his spine toward his shoulders. There was a great deal of him, and none of it
firm. He sighed again, and once or twice rolled onto one hip to sip from his
glass. When she thought he might he losing interest she let him hear her peel
off her stockings. He gave a little groan, drank deeply, and stretched.

In ten minutes he was drowsy. In
twenty, asleep. He had been administered several millilitres of scopolamine
hydrobromide, a chemical found in motion sickness pills, and would be
unconscious for up to twenty hours. He would wake up feeling dopey and useless.

Carol went to work. She washed both
glasses and let water run in the sink while she cleaned her fingerprints off
all the surfaces shed touched. She stripped Danny of his ring and watch, and
scooped up the cufflinks, lighter and gold chains hed left on the bedside
table. She emptied his wallet. He had almost three thousand dollars in it. Not
bad, but not great.

There was nothing of value in his
suitcase. His toiletries bag was crammed with soap and shampoo sachets hed
stolen from the Tradewinds. But in the wardrobe, next to a pair of carpet
slippers, was a small briefcase. With a handkerchief wrapped around her fingers
she pulled it out and upended it on the bed.

And found her ticket out of this
dump.

* * * *

Nineteen

Anna
Reid had reserved a room for Wyatt in a hotel in Logan City, and the first
thing he did after she dropped him off by car was check out of there and take a
bus back into central Brisbane. He paid in advance for two nights at the YMCA,
two nights at the Victoria Hotel on Astor Terrace, and by wire for two nights
at a chain motel in Surfers Paradise. Wyatt made it standard practice to arrange
more than one bolthole in any place he found himself, and he never made base
close to where he intended to pull a job.

A standard precautionbut there was
a concrete reason for it, this time. Until he knew for sure that Anna Reid was
not working for someone or did not mean him harm, any contact with her had to
be strictly on his terms.

For two days he did nothing. Then on
Saturday he began to fix the geography of the place in his mind. He spent the
day in a tourist coach: twenty Japanese, a handful of Swedish backpackers, a
retired couple from Perth and himself. Pick-up was at 9 am and they spent the
morning touring the city and nearby suburbs with stops at the Gabba cricket
ground, the Fourex brewery, coffee on Mt Coottha, lunch on the South Bank. The retired
couple from Perth seemed to adopt him for the day. They were fearful of
foreigners. The man referred to the Nips in the party and Wyatt guessed hed
been a serviceman during the war. The woman muttered under her breath about the
accents, singlet tops and horny, dirty feet and white teeth of the Swedish
girls. Wyatt let their words wash over him. He stared out of the window or sat
at kiosk tables and let the sun warm his bones as he thought about Anna Reid
and a bank vault that for one weekend only would have close to two million
dollars in it.

The city itself was difficult to pin
down. There was no fixed quality to it. If there were any buildings left
standing from the colonial era, Wyatt didnt see them. The coach would hurtle
down the snarling ribbons of freeway suspended above the rivers edge, crossing
one bridge after another, giving him a clear view of rakish buildings bared
like teeth, and he could feel flourishing energy in the place. Then they would
be prowling the slopes and valleys of the suburbs and he would see
colour-supplement mansions sharing a postcode with triple-fronted brick veneers
and sun-blighted wooden hovels on stilts. The camphor laurels and jacaranda had
finished flowering several weeks earlier, but there were plenty of fleshy,
tropical, over-scented plants to make up for them. The light was drenching,
draining all colour from the sky. They passed near Boggo Road prison more than
once. It dominated one of the citys hills, colder, longer, harder and more
miserable than any building Wyatt had yet seen there.

After lunch the coach ran them
south-east to the casinos and boutiques of the Gold Coast. Wyatt used the drive
to position Logan City in his mind. As they passed through the raw new suburbs
that made up the satellite city, he took in the freeway exits, the strips of
trashy, low-cost glass and concrete shops on either side, the patterns of
first-home-buyers houses behind them. One thing was clearif he pulled this
job he would stay well clear of these streets: they looped and curved like the edges
of jigsaw pieces, not a right angle among them, a living nightmare to a driver
who didnt know them well and had the law on his tail.

Wyatt slipped away from the others
when they reached Broadbeach. He had a pocketful of vouchers entitling him to
floor shows and chips at the Monte Carlo, but he tossed them into a bin and set
out to explore on foot. If he hit the Logan City bank and got away with the
money, he would hide out rather than run for it, leaving the state days, weeks
later. He wanted to know if the Gold Coast would conceal him, if there might be
an identity he could adopt, one that would slip easily over his existing skin
and make him one of thousands and therefore invisible.

He saw enough in thirty minutes to
know that it was possible. He could be a tourist, junkie, gigolo, gambler,
boulevardier.

The coach drew into Brisbane again
at six-forty-five. The city had undergone a change: the peak hour was over, the
buildings empty, the long streets windswept and bare. Wyatt shook hands with
the man and woman from Perth. Suddenly they were all friends. The Japanese
beamed at him. Then, just as he was turning to leave, one of the backpackers
planted a kiss on his mouth. She tasted of salt; he smelt her perspiration
faintly, clean and disturbing. She laughed and he laughed with her and when the
group left him he felt hungry and restless for contact.

Anna Reid answered on the first
ring. Ive been trying to get hold of you. They said youd checked out.

Im still around, he said.

She was aggrieved and needed to
unload some of it. I thought Id kissed goodbye to my five thousand.

Nope.

Youre supposed to keep in touch.

Here I am, checking in, Wyatt
said.

Yeah, two days later. What exactly
is going on?

Wyatt tired of it suddenly. Are you
in this evening?

A pause. Yes.

Expect me.

He broke the connection. In Roma
Street he found a cab rank, twenty cabs lined along the kerb. His driver tossed
away a cigarette, fitted his right shoulder against the door, and drove
one-handed through the city and onto Coronation Drive. He didnt speak.
Riverside lights were reflected in the black water below. A dredge, squat and
box-like, lay idle in the centre of the river. Wyatt told the driver to pull
into a drive-in bottle shop. He bought a bottle of imported claret and realised
that it had been a long time since hed last done this.

Anna Reids house backed into a
hill. Wooden slats painted white concealed a large space under the house. Wyatt
climbed the steps to a broad verandah. A couple of deckchairs sat outside the
floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the front door. Soft blue and yellow
light spilled through the coloured glass surrounds and he saw it darken as he
knocked and a shape moved on the other side of the door.

She stepped back to let him in. He
glanced around curiously. It was a common Queensland house but hed never been
in one like it before. A very short hallway opened onto a large room that took
up most of the central part of the house. Doors to bedrooms and the kitchen
opened off it. It was a high-ceilinged room, trimmed with wooden panels and
arches. An armchair in front of each window, a dining table and chairs at the
far end of the room.

She stared at him and he moved
first, putting the bottle down and lifting her skirt, rucking it about her
waist. Everything after that broke the strain they were feeling. It was
necessary, like a cure. But even as he stripped Anna Reid, and bent to touch
and taste her, a part of Wyatt was removed and working. Three months ago, when
he almost but didnt kill her, shed been trying to steal a dealers cache of
heroin and cocaine. He couldnt see track marks in her groin, between her toes,
in the crook of her arms, and he supposed that that was a good thing.

* * * *

Twenty

Nurse
blinked awake by degrees. He badly needed to urinate. Hed heard knocking
sounds but they had gone away after a while. Now strong sunlight was heating
his face, penetrating his eyeballs. He turned his head away; it was like
rolling a heavy iron ball on wet beach sand and still the sun bore down on his
fleshy cheeks and neck. Lifting both hands to his face was no help; they were
too heavy, too slack.

So he lay there. Then he thought
about the unfamiliar bed, the room, the towel tangled around his legs, the sun
at a high angle outside the window. These facts were the configuration of a
messy life and he jerked upright. His watch was gone but the bedside clock
winked 14:30 in red numerals and at once he knew that hed lost seventeen hours
out of his life. Other realisations chased it. He staggered to the wardrobe.
The briefcase was there but not precisely angled as hed left it and the top
was open. He knew by its weight that the bag was empty but still he shook it
and stuck his hand inside it.

And his wallet was missing.

And his cufflinks and chain.

That girl last night, Sonia,
whatever her name was. It took Nurse some time to move beyond the notion that
hed drunk and screwed himself into a seventeen-hour unconsciousness. Sure, hed
had a couple of scotches, a drink at the bar when hed met this Sonia, then the
martini shed made for him at nine oclock, but thats all. And he didnt
remember screwing her, though theyd been working up to it. The more he thought
about it the more convinced he became that the only action his cock had seen in
the last seventeen hours was just now when it reminded him his bladder was
full. So that meant the bitch had slipped something into his drink while hed
been taking a shower.