Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal (5 page)

At ten oclock he walked through the
cobbled lanes to a Turkish restaurant on Brunswick Street. He bought a doner
kebab and ate it on the move. Something about the excursion unnerved him. It
had been a principle of his life that he operated in and cherished his dark
solitude at the edge of clamorous cities and people, but now he felt exposed.
He didnt dare eat at a restaurant table. That would be inviting
troublearrest, a blade in his neck, a bullet at the hairline.

Back at The Abbey he leafed through
a telephone directory in the foyer. Mesic. In Melbourne it was a name that
meant small-scale racketeering and a vicious brand of muscle. Hed heard that
the Mesics lived in a compound in Templestowe, and there it was, Mesic K. and
L., on Telegraph Road. Wyatt was obsessed with them. He wanted to hit them hard
and get his money back. Tomorrow hed look at the place. That meant another
car. He was running close to the edge, stealing a set of wheels every day or so
like this. But there was no-one he could go to for help any more.

He tried to sleep, his reflexes dull
and velvety, but he could not escape the trams and the mean, barren laughter of
young backpackers returning, shouts as people left the nearby pubs and looked
for their cars. Whenever he did wake, he supposed that some noise had caused
it, but an old heartache seemed to slink away at the edge of his consciousness
each time, like a trace of a badly remembered and comfortless dream. It left
him tense and sleepless for long stretches of time. He slept through the early
trams but at eight oclock there were trams every few minutes and he woke for
the day, haunted and distracted.

He needed a car that would not be
missed for a while. There was a Mobil service station across the road from The
Abbey. He watched it through the morning. It was a busy place with a high and
rapid turnover of customers for petrol and simple service and tune-up jobs.
What interested Wyatt was that after the mechanics had finished working on each
car, they parked it in an adjacent yard and tossed the keys on the floor under
the drivers seat. At eleven oclock a Mobil tanker pulled into the forecourt
and filled the underground reservoirs. The obscuring bulk of the truck, the
distraction, gave Wyatt his chance. He loped across the road, slipped into a
nondescript Datsun, and drove quietly away.

This was better. Planning an act,
carrying it off successfully, was work, the sorts of things he was good at. Yet
the sensation didnt last. He found himself driving the little car with his
head down, his shoulders hunched, as though every driver and passenger in the
city was primed to spot him and raise the alarm or crack open their windows
enough to train a gunsight on him.

Thirty minutes later he stopped at a
milk bar on Williamsons Road and ordered takeaway coffee and a cheese sandwich.
Four dollars. He asked for directions to Telegraph Road and got back into the
Datsun.

Telegraph Road was a broad,
self-satisfied ribbon of clean black bitumen and white-grey kerbing. It curved
around a gentle slope in the land and the houses were set far back behind thick
hedges and red brick walls. The houses were ugly, the bad-taste homes of people
whod acquired sudden wealth and nothing else.

He found number eleven. Everything
about it suggested that the Mesics hadnt lived in the area for long. Theyd
taken a hectare of dirt and turned it into a family compound: raw landscaped
terraces, young trees, shiny lockup garage and a couple of blockish cream brick
houses with colonnades grinning across the faces of them like stumpy teeth. The
grounds were surrounded by a wire and girder perimeter fence three metres high.

The place looked deserted. It looked
vulnerable to a hit: the neighbouring houses were concealed by trees, there
were plenty of exits, he couldnt see dogs or guards. They had his money in
there. The payroll heist in South Australia had gone wrong because someone who
owed money to the Mesics had got to it first. Three hundred thousand. That
would set him up again, enable him to buy a place, live in comfort while he
concentrated on the big jobs again, the way it had been for him before it all
went sour.

But it was pointless. He couldnt
hit the Mesics alone, even if he did have the time and the funds to bankroll
it. He couldnt put a gang together because he didnt know who he could trust.
Everyone wanted a slice of him: he could feel the heat of it. Melbourne was
unsafe. Victoria was unsafe. Maybe in six months, a year, he could come back.

Wyatt turned the car around and
headed back into the city. He was on the freeway when an idea edged into his
mind. It was foolish, born of desperation, which is why hed been suppressing
it. But now he admitted the idea and let it grow, and it took on the
configuration of possibility.

There was money hidden at his old
place on the Mornington Peninsula and there was a pistol. Three months ago hed
been forced to run, to abandon the farm and that part of his life. Hed thought
it was permanent. It
was
permanent, he could never go back, but there
was money there, and a gun. They were well hidden. Police and reporters would
have climbed all over the house, the sheds, the little block of land with its
view over the water to Phillip Island, but there was a chance they hadnt found
anything. At this point that was the only chance he had in life.

* * * *

Seven

Six
weeks back, Stolle had started with what the client had given him: that bare
name, Wyatt, and Lake, a name he went by sometimes; an old address; a
description; and the names of two men hed worked with recently. Both men
proved to be dead. No photograph.

But the description shed given him
the day she came into his office was clearer, more impressionistic than he
normally got from a client.

Wyatts tall, shed begun, with
dark hair and eyes and a kind of dark cast to his face, making him look
watchful and sometimes almost lonely. Does that help?

Youre doing fine, Stolle had
assured her. Go on.

Slender build, but strong. He moves
easily, a sort of fluid grace. She didnt even blush. Like Robert Mitchum,
the actor, except not so pleased with himself. The thing is, he adapts to
places and people. In a room of lawyers hed be a lawyer. In a room of wharfies
hed be a wharfie. A pair of glasses, a change of clothes, hair parted a
different way, youd have to look twice to realise you knew him.

Jesus Christ, Stolle thought. Why
do you want him?

The woman had looked away, a sure
sign that she was about to be careless with the truth. Hell learn something to
his advantage, she said. The thing is, its urgent. He has to be in Brisbane
by mid-November at the latest.

Lawyer? Stolle wondered. He had
waited a couple of beats, then said carefully, Is he a con man, a pro? Do the
cops want him?

Shed looked at him sharply then.
Stolles preference was for cheerful, leggy blondes, not brunettes. Your blonde
is basically generous and uncomplicated. Still, hed had to admit that the
woman from Brisbane had plenty going for her, from the shape of her ankles to
her fine tilted head, framed with dead straight black hair. She knows and likes
herself and gets what she wants, hed thought, and the only chink in her armour
is this Wyatt character.

Im relying on your discretion,
she said.

Which is?

Find him for me and not say
anything to anyone and get a ten thousand dollar bonus. Cash.

Ten?

On delivery to me in Brisbane. I
might also point out that hes hard and hes dangerous. If you snitch, hell
get even somehow, even from prison.

Stolle flared suddenly. I dont
like being threatened.

Its not a threat. Im just saying
I know what hes capable of. All I want from you is for you to do your job.

Stolle had shrugged, said sure,
pocketed the five thousand dollar retainer she handed him. Thats yours
whether or not you find him, shed said.

Very generous of you.

Shed scowled, sensing sarcasm. And
heres a further five. Tell him its his if and when he accompanies you to
Brisbane, and tell him theres more where it came from. Do we have a deal?

We have a deal.

She had watched him for a while
then, assessing him. Stolle stared back at her. He wondered if there was an inheritance
behind all this. If Wyatt
was
wanted by the law, he could use that as a
lever to get a percentage. Meanwhile, the woman was here on her own. If youre
staying a few days, why not enjoy yourself?

She laughed. Mr Stolle, she said.

Encouraged, he kept pushing. It
earned him forty minutes in an expensive cocktail lounge and that was as far as
he got. Hed gone home feeling obscurely dissatisfied, and the next day she
flew back to Brisbane and he had put Mostyn and Whitney on the Wyatt case.

Wyatt had been busy, very busy,
leaving dead men and an agitated underworld in his wake. People were prepared
to talk to Stolle, but they didnt know anything. The police now had prints
that they supposed were Wyatts, but Wyatt had never been arrested and so they
had nothing else on record. The man seemed to have no friends or family. It was
rumoured that hed started his career in the armed forces in Vietnam, stealing
a payroll from an American base, raiding high-stakes poker games, selling
jeeps, radios and weapons on the black market, but when Stolle checked with
Canberra, he found no Wyatt matching the man he wanted in army, navy or
airforce records. Police in four states had him down for a string of hold-ups
and killings but, as Wyatt operated largely outside the system of loose
criminal groups and coteries, their investigations had taken them nowhere.

Wyatt didnt even have interests to
speak of. Anyone looking for
me,
Stolle thought, would know to check out
the casinos and sooner or later theyd find me.

But Mostyn and Whitney had got
lucky. They knew the man had fled interstate, leaving behind a house on the
coast and an identity for which thered been no paper record. The trail had
gone cold for a while thenuntil the payroll heist north of Adelaide had hit
the headlines. They were smart enough to trace him to the border near Mt
Gambier. They werent smart enough not to get greedy.

Now Wyatt had disappeared again and
hed be twice as wary and twice as hard to find.

Either Ill stumble on him by
accident, Stolle thought, or someone will sell him to the cops.

Or hell make a basic mistake.

Stolle took down a Victorian
accommodation guide from the shelf. He also got out a book of maps. Then he
started dialling.

* * * *

Eight

Wyatts
private name for his old place was the farm, but real estate wankers must
have dusted off the dented brass nameplate that had been tacked to the wall
next to the front door and were calling it Blackberry Hill Farm. He slowed the
Datsun, letting the little car roll to a halt opposite the shiny auction
notice. This was Monday. The auction was midweek, Wednesday, 1 pm. The hype
went on to spell out everything hed lost and had to run from: original
weatherboard farmhouse; fifty hectares of pasture and bushland; running creek;
original sheds; views to Phillip Island; seven minutes to Shoreham township.

A separate notice announced a
clearing sale, 12 noon on the same day. It listed furniture, house fittings,
wine collection, original paintings, tools, Massey Ferguson tractor, Rover
ride-on mower.

It didnt list the Colt .45
automatic or the two thousand dollars hed stashed away. Nor did it mention whod
owned the place and why the real estate firm, acting under instructions from
the Attorney Generals Department, was selling it.

Wyatt put the Datsun in gear and
drove along the sunken road for a further fifty metres. He came to the
driveway. It was lined with golden cypresses and made a lazy curve to the front
door of the house. Wyatt didnt go in. They had bolted a new cyclone gate
across the driveway and wrapped a chain and padlock around it. Nor did he climb
the gate and go in that way. He didnt think the police would be watching the
place any longer but the neighbours would still be jumpy.

Wyatt was wearing sunglasses and a
decent enough op-shop suit, and hed scraped his hair back over his scalp. But
it would not be so easy to shake off his loping walk, the articulation of trunk
and limbs that would be like a signature to the people who once had accepted
his right to be here, in the days before he had a running gun battle in the
pine plantation behind his house and shot a Melbourne punk in the back of the
head.

He followed the fenceline, driving
slowly, looking the place over. There were twenty or thirty sacred ibis picking
their way through the marshy ground at the base of his hill. Someone had put a
slasher through the long grass and cleared the blackberry thickets. There was
fresh paint on the house trim and the barn door was bright red. Wyatt had kept
a car in the barn, facing the doorway, a spare ignition key under the dash,
permanently ready for a fast escape. Thats how it had been, three months ago.
Now some barrister would buy the place, park his air-conditioned 4WD there, use
it as a tax write-off.

Wyatt drove back the way hed come.
The farms and orchards rolled away on small humped hills toward the sea, and
the land was divided by hedges, lanes and avenues of pines. It was a place
where you could hide and learn to match a bird to its cry and be left alone by
your neighbours apart from a finger raised from an oncoming steering wheel on
the narrow roads. It had been a part of Wyatt and hed lost it. Bought from the
proceeds of just one job, a gold bullion heist at Melbourne Airport five years
before. He needed something like that again. He needed a new base, somewhere he
could emerge from once or twice a year, pull a job that had plenty of money
attached to it, disappear again.