Wyatt - 06 - The Fallout

by Garry Disher

  * * * *

  The Fallout

  [Wyatt 06]

  By Garry Disher

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  Prologue

  By the fifth hold-up the papers are calling him the bush bandit. An inspector of police, flat, inexpressive, resistant to the pull of the cameras, is less colourful: We are looking for a male person who is armed and should be considered dangerous. His method of operation is essentially the same in every case. He targets a bank in a country town within an area covering west and south-western Victoria and east and south-eastern South Australia. He selects a quiet period when there are few if any customers, then menaces bank staff with a sawn-off shotgun, demanding cash from the tills. To date, we have no reports of an accomplice. I repeat, this person is armed. On no account should he be approached.

  There are things that the inspector doesnt say. He doesnt say that the police are at a loss to pinpoint an operating base for the man. Given the area he moves in, the bush bandit might be holed up in Mount Gambier, Bordertown, Horsham, even somewhere up on the River Murray. Or he might be operating from Adelaide, even Melbourne.

  The inspector doesnt say how effective the bandit is. First, the shotgun, its blunt snout, those twin black staring mouths. Everyone knows about shotguns, knows the massive damage they inflict at close range, the spread of the pellets, scattering and cutting like hornets. The dull gleam of the metal, the worn stock, the smell of gun oil. A shotgun spells gaping death, and so you are quiescent before it. You spread yourself out on the floor, you empty the till, you forget about being a hero.

  Then there is the bandit himself. Witness descriptions tally for each of the five hold-ups. The man is tall and slender and he moves well. Athletic, one bank teller said. No wasted motions, said another. Other than that there is no clear description of the bush bandit. He varies his dress from job to joba suit, jeans and a check shirt, zip-up windproof jacket and trousers, overalls, tracksuit. And something always to divert attention away from his face glasses, sunglasses, cap, wide-brimmed Akubra, a bandaid strip.

  He also speaks in fragments, so that bank staff are never able to get a clear fix on his voice: Face down . . . fill the bag, please, no coins . . . foot off the alarm . . . dont move . . . dont follow. Its a quiet voice, thats all they can say. Calm, patient, understandingthese are some of the words the witnesses use. And young. They agree that he cant be more than about twenty-five.

  Although they dont say it, the police believe that hes probably not a junkie. First-timers and junkies, they barge in screaming, pistol-whipping staff and customers, generally encouraging a condition of panic and instability that can tip over into hostages and spilt blood.

  Its agreed that the man rides a big Ducati. No, a Kawasaki. Maybe a Honda. Big, anyway. Plenty of guts and very fast. Hard to track. On a bike like that he can be miles away before the alarm is raised. You can put up a chopper, send out a pursuit car, but all the bush bandit has to do is simply wheel off the road and under a gum tree or behind a windmill until the danger blows over.

  Where does he store the bike? The police have no answer. Could be anywhere. Maybe their man has a dozen bikes stashed away, all around the country.

  One thing we do know, the inspector says, one day hell slip up. And well be there when it happens.

  * * * *

  It was a wheat and wool town on a dusty plain. According to the local paper, the parade would pass down the main street between midday and half past twelve, turn left at the tractor dealership and wind its way on to the showgrounds next to the Elders-GM stockyards. This was the first anniversary of the Australia Day fire that had burnt out an area the size of Luxemburg and almost destroyed the town. In fact, the front actually licked at the edges of the high school, destroying a portable classsroom. Later the wind had changed, sweeping unseasonal rains in from the west, but not before Emergency Services personnel had lost one unit and two volunteer firemen. The shire president had wanted to run the parade on a Saturday, but feelings were still raw in the town and councillors voted for Australia Day itself, which this year fell on a Friday.

  The man known as the bush bandit had never felt welling pride or sentiment for anything, but he knew how to read emotions. He walked down the main street, stopping to buy a newspaper, a half litre of milk, a packet of cigarettes that he would never smoke. A banner swayed in the wind, thanking the volunteer firemen. People were lining the footpaths, yarning and joking, cameras ready. Half of them were farmers and their families, and thats who the bush bandit was today, a pleasantly smiling farmer dressed in elastic-sided boots and clean pressed work shirt and trousers. He wore a stained felt hat pushed back on his head. He looked work-worn and weary. He wasnt alone in wearing sunglasses. Its just that his were anachronistic, a flash narrow strip of mirrored glass across his eyes. They belonged on a roller-blading kid at St Kilda or Bondi or Glenelg. If anyone thought about it, they thought the man had eccentric taste. Certainly it was the only thing memorable about his face.

  He watched the parade trumpet past: police, firemen, ambulance crews, the two widows in the back seat of a squatters black Mercedes. It was over in ten minutes. In ten minutes the main street was deserted, the tail end of the spectators disappearing around the corner and away from the centre of the town. There was only one bank, and the bandit walked into it at 12.25, removed his sawn-off shotgun from his bag of shopping, and announced that he was robbing the place.

  There were no customers, only two tellers. One said, Oh, no. The other froze. The bush bandit trained the twin bores of the shotgun on the one whod spoken. Hed picked her as the likely source of trouble, so he said, Face down. Not a sound.

  He watched her sink to the floor. She stretched out awkwardly, one hand holding her skirt from riding up.

  The other teller watched the gun swing around until it was fixed on her stomach. The bandit placed a chaff bag on the counter. Fill it.

  Friday. There would be more cash than usual, though not enough to make him rich. But that was a thought for the edge of his mind, a why-am-I-doing-these-pissy-jobs? thought for the dark hours.

  He watched the teller, the shotgun now back on the woman on the floor. The meaning was clear: She gets it if you stuff me around.

  At one point, the teller hesitated.

  Move it, the bandit said.

  Travellers cheques, she burst out. You want them?

  Hundreds of cheques, crisp, unsigned. The bush bandit could almost conjure up their new-paper-and-ink smell. Hed take them to Chaffey. Chaffey handled wills, property conveyancing and sentence appeals in his front office; in his rear office hed pay twenty cents in the dollar for anything the bush bandit turned up that wasnt cash or easily negotiable.

  Yes, the bush bandit told the teller.

  When it was done, and both women were on the floor, he said, Remain there, please. Five minutes.

  One woman nodded. The talkative one said Yes, but the man was already gone.

  The motorbike was on the tray of a farm ute. Hed turned it into a farm bike with mud, dust, dents, a cracked headlamp. He drove the ute slowly away from the town, his elbow out the window, an irritating figure familiar to interstate coach drivers, truckies and travelling salesmen, and soon had faded into the landscape, faded from memory.

  He ditched the ute on a dirt track and switched to the bike. This time it was a Honda and hed stolen it in Preston. He ran into a storm, strong winds and driving rain, on the way back to the city, but by evening was in his balcony apartment, looking out over Southgate and the stretch of the Yarra River between the casino and Princes Bridge.

  At 8 oclock he went out into the storm again and made his way to the casino, to see if he could improve on t
he 12,000 bucks hed taken today. By morning hed have the early edition of the Herald Sun, another bush bandit story for his scrapbook.

  The bush bandit, that was his public name. Ray, or Raymond, those were the names his mother and father both now deadhad called him. What Raymond wanted was simply to be called Wyatt. He liked the whiplash quality of the word.

  But his uncle was called Wyatt.

  * * * *

  One

  One hundred kilometres south-east of the city, the hold-up man called Wyatt brought a crippled yacht in from the storm-tossed seas of Bass Strait to the calmer waters of Westernport Bay, bringing to an end a seven-day voyage from Port Vila. It was 4.15, almost dawn. Just five hours earlier, the bent police inspector called Springett had been washed overboard. Wyatts only other passenger, the woman who had arrested Springett in Port Vila, was asleep on her bunk. Wyatt furled the torn sails and switched to the auxiliary diesel. The yacht burbled quietly between the red and green markers, following the channel to the little jetty on the Hastings foreshore. Liz Redding didnt stir, not even when Wyatt dropped anchor, bundled his clothing inside a waterproof jacket and slipped over the side and away. She was too tired, too warm, too lost to the grains of Mogadon hed fed her for that.

  Wyatt dragged himself shivering from the water and wiped himself down with a handtowel from the yacht. He dressed rapidly in the shelter of a concrete retaining wall, occasionally poking his head above it, looking for fishermen, patrol cars, insomniacs. There were street lights behind a screen of foreshore trees; shire offices ghastly white in the sodium lamps; rows of slumbering small houses; a swimming pool and kiosk; a hut on the jetty that sold fish; and, to his left, a stiff forest of drydocked yacht masts behind a cyclone security fence.

  What he wanted was a car.

  If he left now, he would be in Melbourne by the time most peoples alarm clocks were rattling them awake. If he were not so conspicuousa stranger with wet hair appearing from the direction of the marina at the break of day hed take one of the towns taxis. Otherwise, there was the train, the local from Stony Point, connecting with the Melbourne express in Frankston, but that meant too many factors that he could not control, and which threatened to bring him unstuckaltered timetables, nosy ticket inspectors, faulty boom gates. Or he could hitchhike. But who would pick him up? Wyatt knew that the dark cast of his face and his fluid height and shape and his materialisation at the side of the road would spell prohibition and risk to any motorist.

  And so his only option was to steal a car, one that would not be missed for the next couple of hours.

  He ventured a short distance away from the little dock, into a region of humble side streets where the houses huddled together and the family car sat in the driveway or in the street outside it, straddling nature strip and gutter. But a dog barked. Wyatt backed out of there.

  He couldnt see any service stations nearby. As he recalled it, they were mostly on the outskirts of Hastings. There are often cars parked outside service stations, keys on a hook somewhere inside.

  He returned to the jetty. Wyatt had at first rejected the motley station wagons and utes parked there, fishermens cars, rustbuckets all of them, with mismatched panels and doors and half a dozen registration stickers up and down the windscreens. He imagined their interiors, their snagging springs and crammed ashtrays and rolling UDL cans and faulty electrics. The Hastings police might turn a blind eye, allowing a local fisherman to drive between home and jetty and nowhere else, but Wyatt doubted that bald tyres, rust and cracked windscreens would pass in Melbourne.

  But what choice did he have?

  He could cut down on the risk, though, by driving to a place like Springvale, still well short of the city but a place where he wouldnt be looked at twice. Take a taxi from there.

  Maybe three or four taxi journeysangling north and south as he closed in on the city, so that anyone mapping his route would make little sense of itand board a city tram at some big interchange like Kew Junction.

  Wyatt checked his watch. 4.35. He hoped it was still too early for the first of the fishing boats to come in. He hoped its crew would have plenty to do when it did dock, leaving more time before one of them realised that his bomb was missing from the car park.

  Wyatt went along the row of vehicles, testing drivers doors and checking for keys left in the ignition. Most were unlockedthere was nothing worth stealing, after allbut no keys.

  Then he checked behind bumper bars and inside wheel arches. He found plenty of rust, plenty of gritty mud. He also found a small metal container the size of a matchbox, held inside the wheel arch of a Valiant utility by a magnet.

  There was nothing tight about the motor. It whirred freely and when it finally fired, Wyatt could hear piston slap and rattling tappets and smell the oily exhaust of poor combustion. The seat sagged, threatening backache and stiff neck and shoulders. Wyatt kept himself fit but he was in his forties now and on the lookout for things like the size and shape of the seats he sat in and the beds he lay in.

  But the headlights worked, the left angled higher than the right, and he found reverse without tearing a cog in the gearbox. The fuel gauge showed empty. Either that or its stuffed, he thought. He couldnt risk filling it locally. Hed put some distance behind him first.

  Wyatt cut across country toward Frankston. In the cool dawn light, fog appeared, hanging in the roadside depressions and above the creeks and dams, and hovering in thin streaks across the road, making him blink, as though to clear a film over his eyes. He remembered the fogs of the Peninsula from his recent past. There was a time when hed strike fog on his way back from some smoking bank or payroll van. That was before hed been forced to go on the run. That was a long time ago.

  The engine coughed, surged, coughed again. The fuel gauge was working after all. Wyatt limped through the confusing roundabout in Somerville and into the Shell station on the Frankston road. The fisherman deserved a good turn: Wyatt filled the tank and poured a litre of oil down the throat of the clapped-out motor.

  He abandoned the ute in a side street next to the level crossing in Springvale. He took a taxi to Westfield shopping centre, a second to the taxi rank outside Myer in Chadstone, a third up to Northlands in Doncaster. He felt safer with each journey, as though he were shaking off the dogs and trackers of the past. The tram from Doncaster to the city was warm and quiet and full of early workers. If anyone looked at him it was incuriously.

  There was a 24-hour cafe in Swanston Walk. Wyatt was bone-tired and hungry. They offered bottomless coffee and he downed three cups of it. He wanted something solid in his stomach and ordered muesli, scrambled eggs and wholemeal toast. He looked at his watch. Liz Redding should still be deeply asleep on her bunk aboard the yacht.

  Revived, bouncy on his feet, he headed on foot along Little Lonsdale Street. At 8.30 he stepped into a call box at the Elizabeth Street corner and rang Heneker at Pacific Mutual Insurance.

  In Wyatts experience, all switchboard operators spoke with an upward inflection, as if framing every statement as a question, Im sorry? Mr Heneker wont be in until nine?

  Wyatt hung up. He felt knots in his torso from his cooped-up days at sea. Thirty minutes to kill. He decided to walk, and as he stalked through the streets without seeing the shops, the cars, his fellow humans, he replayed his voyage across the Pacific with Liz Redding. But it all came down to one thing: hed drugged her coffee and slipped away. Hed betrayed trust and desire. The fallout from something like that is often very simple: all bets are off.

  At 9.05 he returned to the phone box and called the insurance company again. Heneker had the surging enthusiasm of his trade. Heneker here, Mr

  He waited for a name. Wyatt didnt give him one. Instead, he said, Ive got the Asahi jewels.

  He pictured the man, the white shirt and sombre suit and darting calculations. Heneker recovered quickly. Shall we discuss where and when and how?

  And how much, Wyatt said.

  How could I forget, Heneker said.

  * * * *<
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  Two

  It wasnt strictly true that Wyatt had the Asahi jewels. He had one piece with him, a white gold necklace set with a dozen chunky emeralds, but the remaining piecesrings, necklaces, brooches, pendants, tiaraswere still locked away in a concealed safe on board the yacht. Taken together, they were too bulky to cart around and too valuable to dump if he found himself in trouble. At the same time, he was not interested in fencing the jewels piecemeal or removing the stones and melting down the settings. To do that involved time and too many middlemen. Wyatt wanted to offload the Asahi Collection quickly, for a lump sum, the reward offered by the insurance company. The emerald necklace was simply his hook. It was the most eye-catching piece, promising more, yet also an easy thing to dump if the deal went sour.

  Wyatt headed down Elizabeth Street, musing upon the twists and turns of his life. The Asahi Collection, touring Australia and New Zealand, had been stolen from a Japanese superstore in Melbourne. Wyatt wasnt the culpritthe actual raiders were policemen using security information supplied by Springettbut Liz Redding had suspected Wyatt. Theyd both wound up in Port Vila, where Wyatt had discovered the hiding place of the Collection. Hed not revealed its location, not even when, on the voyage back, he and Liz had moved from being thief and thief-taker to being lovers.