Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal (20 page)

At this time of the morning there
were no students waiting on the university side of the river. The traffic was
all one-way, from Dutton Park to the university. Wyatt waited on the ramp that
extended over the water. On the opposite bank cars were pulling into the
carpark and students were gathering to cross. The ferry was in midstream. It
swung around in a wide arc, drew in, and Wyatt stood back as the passengers
filed off. There were one or two older people among them, academics or campus
workers, but most were students wearing the puffed faces of recent sleep and
anxiety and morning lecture panic. Some wheeled bikes. One or two looked
curiously at Wyatt. You didnt get many suits on this ferry.

Wyatt paid his dollar and sat down.
The ferryman waited a couple of minutes. When no-one else appeared, he cast
off.

Ten-thirty. Wyatt found that he was
trembling. Mostyns blood had streaked his fingers. He stood up, shoving them
into his pockets, and remembered the loose cash from the vault. Standing where
the ferryman couldnt see him, he counted it: fifteen thousand dollars in
fifties and hundreds.

His heart stopped thudding and
slowly the fright ebbed and a cold anger took its place. She had set this up
with Stolle. They had brought him in to do the hard work, the kind of planning
and execution work that he did better than anyone, then Stolle had stepped in
at the point where Wyatt was most vulnerable, the final switch of vehicles. He
thought bitterly about the code he worked by and how this time hed betrayed
it. One: people who cross you once will do it againnever give them a break.
Two: never let feelings affect your judgment. Three: never tell the people you
work for more than they need to know. Hed told Anna Reid exactly how they
would do the job and where the getaway vehicles would be waiting.

He heard the ferryman throw the
motor into reverse. Water churned and the ferry edged with a bump against the
rubber tyres on the Dutton Park landing. Wyatt stepped out, threaded through
the students waiting on the ramp, and climbed the hill behind it.

He walked. He had fifteen thousand
dollars that he could be spending on transport but it was enough that the
ferryman had seen him without taxi or bus drivers pinpointing his movements any
further.

Wyatt walked through Highgate Hill
to South Brisbane and in thirty minutes he was at the rear of the State
Library. He went in, found a mens room outside the Childrens Library, and
cleaned the dirt from his clothes and shoes, the blood from his hands. Then he
worked water into his hair and used his fingers like a comb, creating a new
part and a lock over his forehead. He removed the tie and put the suitcoat over
his arm, the .38 in a pocket where he could reach it quickly. He walked over
the Victoria Bridge into the city like any white collar worker in the sun.

Eleven oclock. Hed told Anna Reid
not to do anything that would draw attention to herself on the day of the
robbery, so shed be at work now. Her firm was in a building on Allenby Street.
It had a flat, innocuous, concrete slab exterior that offered no pleasures for
the eye. Wyatt went in through the main doors and straight to the lifts as
though he had business there.

He waited. A lift arrived and he
stepped in, pushing the button to close the doors, then pushing buttons for the
seventh and ninth floors. He put on his suitcoat and tie again and moved the
.38 from his coat pocket to the waistband at the small of his back.

The lift climbed. In a panel above
the door, green numerals formed and dissolved, formed and dissolved:
4 . . .
5 . . . 6 .. .
Then 7, where Anna Reid worked. Wyatt would not get out at 7
but he needed to know the layout, where the offices were in relation to the
corridor, where the stairwell might be. He lounged at the back of the lift when
it stopped, just a man on his way to an upper level.

The lift gave a shudder, the door
seemed to hesitate, then the three panels slid back into the door recess and
Anna Reid stood staring at him.

The blood drained from her face, as
though she knew hed come to kill her.

Neither moved. Wyatt stared at her
neutrally, then at the men standing with her, one at each elbow. One made to
step into the lift, pulling Anna with him, but the other said, Its going up.

The first man nodded, resumed his
position and his hold on Annas arm.

Not that she was going anywhere,
handcuffed like that.

Wyatts expression was gawking now,
the nine-to-five citizen finding a little vicarious drama in his day. He kept
the look pasted there as the doors closed again, shutting off Anna, the
plainclothes men, the uniformed cops in the corridor behind them.

Wyatt got out on 9, a long corridor
with unmarked doors on either side. Somewhere he heard a racking cough but
otherwise the place was deserted. According to a notice on the wall opposite,
the toilets were to the left. Wyatt followed the arrow and came to the
stairwell door. He opened it and went in. The air was musty. Somewhere far
below him a door banged.

He took a first step down and then
another. He couldnt stay in the building: she might say that shed seen him,
use him to trade her way out of trouble. His head was pounding again. He wanted
to run, but forced himself to go slowly all the way to the bottom. There could
be a cop on the stairs, there could be someone snatching a smoke break. A
running man in a stairwell would not look right.

At the ground floor he eased the
door open. Through the main doors at the end of the foyer he could see the
plainclothes men, an unmarked car, Anna being bundled into it. Thats it for
her, he thought. Theyll give her ten years.

Wyatt closed the door and waited. He
thought about his options. Hed pocketed fifteen thousand dollars of loose cash
from the vault, which was better than nothingenough, anyway, to finance a hit
somewhere that would support him until it was safe to return to Melbourne and
get his money back from the Mesics. Stolle and Mostyn must have been operating
alone, he realised. He began to picture Stolle, the mans place in Melbourne,
the quarter million hidden away somewhere, and left TrustBank behind him
forever.

* * * *

Thirty-seven

Stolle
whooped as he drove away from the city. He couldnt help it. He giggled and
whooped and pounded the flat of his hand on his knee.

He owed it all to a combination of
idle curiosity, hatred and lack of funds. Just over a week ago hed been
blinking in the afternoon light outside Jupiters, wondering whether to run his last
twenty dollars through the poker machines or buy a ham sandwich and take the
first flight home, when hed seen Wyatt step down from a tourist coach.

Hed ducked into a boutique and
watched Wyatt through the racks of string bikinis against the window. He waited
to see if the woman was with him. A bunch of Japanese, a couple of pensioners
and a handful of breezy backpackers but not the woman whod hired him to find
the man.

Help you, sir? Something for the
wife, is it?

Stolle motioned the assistant to
leave him alone. He didnt turn around. Perve, she muttered.

As Stolle watched, a kind of shiver
had crawled across his skin. Something was going on and he owed it to himself
to check it out. If Wyatt had been needed so urgently, why was he down here on
the Coast a couple of days later with a load of tourists? If sex was the reason
the woman in Brisbane wanted Wyattand Stolle had come to accept that that was
the casethen how come shed let him free with a bunch of leggy sheilas half
his age?

He saw them pour into a cafe near
the bus. Wyatt did not go in with them. Wyatt walked off alone. A while later,
Stolle followed. What did the guy want, if not to play at being a tourist?

Hanging well back, hed tailed Wyatt
for thirty minutes. Wyatt walked slowly and he seemed to be acutely aware of
his surroundings, a stranger in a strange land. He looked in clothing shops. He
stood near sidewalk cafes, eyeing the patrons intently. Once or twice he went
right around beachfront motels, checking windows and doors. Was he casing the
place? The man did armed robbery; he wasnt a cat burglar.

There was a risk that Wyatt would
tumble him if he kept this up. Stolle remembered Wyatts treachery in the pump
house at the farm, the way hed treated Mostyn at the motel, the womans
curtness at the bus station, and had allowed a kernel of hate to grow for both
of them.

He dropped away a few minutes later
and rang the coach company. He learnt that they ran a full-day bus tour each
day, taking in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, finishing back in Brisbane just
before 7 pm. Did sir want a ticket? There were spare seats today, pick-up
outside Jupiters at six oclock.

Future reference, Stolle told the
operator, and cut the connection.

Curiosity, hatred and lack of funds.
Stolle looked at his last twenty dollars. Wyatt robbed banks and armoured cars
for a living, so if it wasnt sex the woman wanted him for, maybe she had a job
lined up for him.

Stolle had two options: wait around
and see if he could grab a piece of the action, or fly home to Melbourne. Given
that the tingling in his spine was working overtime, the second option was out.
He trusted that feeling, every time.

So, he stayed in Queensland. He
would follow the woman, follow Wyatt. See where they went, who they saw, what
they were spending their money on.

But hed known he couldnt do it
alone. He fed five of his remaining dollars into an STD phone inside a Burger
King and called his office in Melbourne. How are you doing with those jobs I
gave you?

Had an argument with the grocer,
Mostyn said. Now hes got his nephew riding shotgun, stupid prick. The
Plastico strike was called off. Thought Id start that other job tomorrow.

Leave it. Itll keep. I want you in
Brisbane first thing tomorrow morning. Check a couple of guns and permits
through on the same flight, and scrounge what cash you can. Plus a couple of
infra-red binoculars and the Nikon with a range of lenses. I think Im onto
something here.

Fifteen dollars left. Stolle had
walked into Jupiters then. An hour later he walked out again with five hundred
dollars in his pocket. He went to the Avis office, rented a Falcon and was
waiting in it when the coach pulled up outside Jupiters at five-forty-five. He
didnt know if Wyatt would be among the passengers or not. If the hit was
somewhere on the Gold Coast, Wyatt might not go back to Brisbane. Tailing him
locally would be tricky: the Coast was a small place and Wyatt would spot him
eventually.

But Wyatt did board the coach.
Stolle saw him hang back and let the others on first. The man was a pro, the
way he guarded his back out of habit, even on a bus trip among a bunch of
tourists; the way he stood where he could watch the pedestrian traffic, waiting
until the last moment so he wouldnt be boxed in on the bus itself.

Stolle got to the freeway ahead of
the coach. He let it pass him and draw away. When the city skyline appeared, he
accelerated, catching the coach and passing it. He was waiting half a block
away when it pulled into Adelaide Street to unload.

It was a useful evening for Stolle.
He tailed Wyatt and found where the woman lived. He rooted around in a rubbish
bin under her house and came up with a name: Anna Reid. At three oclock in the
morning he discovered where Wyatt was staying.

The next morning, Sunday, he drove
out to the airport. Mostyn had checked through two .45 automatics and was
carrying three thousand dollars in cash. They claimed the guns and Mostyns
luggage and drove to Wyatts hotel. A little before eleven oclock Wyatt emerged
and caught a bus.

They had tailed him to a new
shopping centre halfway to the Gold Coast. It was puzzling. Was the guy meeting
someone? Stolle went carefully. The streets were deserted and he knew Wyatt had
only to spot the Falcon twice in two separate locations to know he was being
followed. When the bus signalled for the stop, Stolle parked two blocks behind
it, pulling in tight against a small car with a high roof and plenty of glass
on all sides.

Train the camera on him. Telephoto.

While Mostyn fiddled with the Nikon,
Stolle tried to figure what Wyatt was up to. First Wyatt went into a milk bar.
He was in there a while and when he came out he was reading a newspaper as if
he had all the time in the world. He ambled across the street, eyes on the
paper. He went down a side street and they lost sight of him. A couple of
minutes later, he was back again.

Hes scouting, Mostyn said. Has
to be.

The bank, you reckon?

Has to be.

I guess well find out, Stolle
said.

He started the car and they drove
back to Brisbane. Wyatt had still been at the bank but Stolle didnt want to
push his luck by sticking to him any longer. They bought sandwiches in the mall
and staked out Wyatts hotel again. At mid-afternoon, when Wyatt wandered
around South Bank with Anna Reid, Stolle and Mostyn had watched and taken
photographs from a spot on the opposite bank.

What do you think?

Mostyn lowered the Nikon. What do
you mean?

What Ive been teaching you: signs,
body language.