Wyatt - 06 - The Fallout

by Garry Disher

  They anchored late in the day in a sheltered cove on the eastern side of the main island in the Cornwall Group. Steer stared at the little land mass and thought it a fitting place for a wreck, for tragedy, for the end of the line. He saw eroded red stone peaks, ferns, a tidal river between prongs of granite, wind-stunted sheoaks, Cape Barren geese, a few muttonbirds, oystercatchers and sandpipers, bare shoreline rocks, even a fur seal. There was a chill in the air.

  Raymond had hauled himself to his feet as Quincy manoeuvred the boat through the reef. He clasped the rail, pale and blurry. This it?

  This is it.

  Quincy had taken another Stuyvesant from Steer. He ground it into the deck and winked. Over the yard arm, boys.

  Raymond stared at him suspiciously.

  Time for a drink, son, Quincy said.

  Raymond groaned. Not for me.

  Quincy turned to Steer. How about you? Game for a swig of something?

  Steer shook his head. Ill pass. You go on and have one.

  Dont mind if I do, said Quincy delicately, and he waited, and he waited.

  Steer understood. Sorry, didnt bring anything with me.

  Oh, mate, Quincy said. First rule, a bottle for the captain.

  Didnt know Id be sailing with you, Steer said. He moved off. He was tired of this joker. I need the bathroom.

  He went below. When he appeared on deck again he was carrying canvas carryalls from the house in Warrandyte. Raymond was leaning tiredly on the rail. Quincy was waving his arms about, giving Raymond a history lesson.

  Steer unzipped one of the canvas cases and pulled out the stun gun. As described in the mail order catalogue, it fired a disabling jolt of electricity, useful for crowd control and subduing violent men and animals. Steer walked up to Quincy, fired it at his head and saw him drop, stunned, into the icy sea.

  Raymonds jaw sagged. Jesus. Mate. Steady on.

  Shes been found, Ray. You think I dont listen to the news?

  Whos been found?

  You thought you could knock Denise and get away with it? I mean, what do you take me for?

  Denise? I put her on a bus

  What happened, you try to race her off and she turned you down?

  Raymond backed away, eyes wide in pure fright. I didnt kill her. She was, you know, suicidal. I came back one day and found her. Or maybe she was cleaning her gun and it went off. Anyway, I panicked and dug

  Or how about this, Steer said. You and Chaffey cooked the whole thing up. Get rid of me, get rid of Denise, pocket my dough. Only it went wrong, I didnt come back to the house with you.

  I swear. Ask Chaffey. He

  Chaffeys dead in his basement. Steer grinned then, a glittering cold grin of arrogance and vigour. Raymond looked away.

  Hey, Raymond, why so long in the face? Forget Denise. You tell me where Wyatt is and were quits.

  Raymond turned, relieved. He started to blabber out an address in northern Tasmania, then said, Mate, if you want to waste him, be my guest. Whatd he do?

  Steer stroked his chin, let the stun gun hang loose at his side. You wouldve been a gleam in your old mans eye at the time. Wyatt set up this job, an American base payroll near Saigon. Wed done it before. Spent weeks putting this one together, a real perfectionist. I couldnt see any holes in the job, but at the last minute he pulled out, said it felt wrong. So me and a couple of others done it. The MPs were waiting for us. A set-up, clear as the nose on your face. He wanted me out of the way. I think he struck a deal with the MPs, something like that.

  Bastard.

  Steer saw the heat of strong emotions rise in Raymond, as though the little shit shared his sense of betrayal. Raymond shook his head in disgust and said, You reckon thats how come hes stayed out of gaol so long? He makes deals with cops?

  Bank on it.

  Anyway he

  Anyway, this is for Denise, Steer said, and he zapped Raymond three or four times, backing him up to the rail, propelling him over the side. Steer watched for a while. Like Quincy, Raymond drowned quietly, his limbs feeble in the darkening water, as though stirring molasses.

  There was some daylight left. Steer stripped, climbed into a wet suit, and contemplated the bottom of the sea. He didnt find anything on the seabed, but among Raymonds things on board the boat he did find a red vinyl Thomas Cook bag and a PVC cylinder with a couple of paintings in it. He spent the night anchored in the calm waters inside the reef. At dawn the next morning he sailed through the gap and headed south-west, across Bass Strait to the northern coast of Tasmania.

  * * * *

  Thirty-eight

  Wyatt fired again, snapping off a shot through the open door as he rolled toward it. For some reason, Steer was firing high, spraying the room, and there was something unprofessional about that.

  And then he realised why. As ejected casings from the automatic rifle spun to the floor, Steer stumbled on them, his feet threatening to slide away beneath him. Wyatt kept firing, more wildly now to take advantage of Steers carelessness.

  But he was also counting. With one cartridge left in the cylinder, he stopped firing. He was listening now, and through all of his faulty senses he heard a door bang shut, heard footsteps boom on the verandah, then silence.

  He lay there for a short time, trying to blink away the muzzle flash on his retina, swallowing to clear the ringing in his ears. Steers presence here told him that Raymond was dead. He also knew that Steer would want to finish what hed started. He had run, but probably to a safe place so that he could work out how to try again. The house was isolated, the target a man wanted by the law, so he had no reason to fear neighbours or that Wyatt would call the police.

  But it didnt seem likely that Steer would try again before daybreak, not when hed lost the advantage. Daylight was a different matter. Steer could move more freely then, shoot with greater certainty, place the house under siege.

  Wyatt had no intention of allowing that to happen. He would let Steer know that he was the hunter now, even though he had only the patchy moonlight to work with.

  He fumbled in the darkness for a box of cartridges, whispered Stay there, at the wardrobe door, then hurried to the window, pushed open the insect screen and dropped to the verandah. For a moment he clutched the railing, waited for a wave of dizziness to pass, then ran at a crouch to the corner of the verandah. He saw from the dewy grass that Steer had returned to the clump of blackwoods, peppermint gums and manferns below the house.

  Wyatt guessed that he was about a minute behind Steer. Yet he also had all the time in the world. It was 4.30, and in the two hours before daylight broke over northern Tasmania, Wyatt went on the offensive.

  He began by letting Steer know that he was in pursuit. His boots thudded on the open ground; once among the trees, he tore through the undergrowth, his sleeves and trousers snagging on blackberry bushes. He drew ragged breaths. He shouted a couple of times.

  And then he would freeze for ten minutes, letting the silence build, letting it work on Steers nerves. Panic levels rise at night in the bush. You lose track of your quarry, lose track of your own position, yetabsurdly, given the darknessyou feel that you are under a spotlight, that all guns are trained on you. Thats how Wyatt read the psychology of the man he was up against and he hoped for a careless rush through the trees, or wild shots, but Steer refused to be drawn. He didnt even slap himself against the swarming mosquitoes.

  Wyatt sniffed the air, trying to pinpoint Steer by smell, but got nothing. Steer knew all that Wyatt knew about tracking and hunting. They had trained together as snipers, after all, and no sniper will let himself be betrayed by insect repellant, dry-cleaning fluid, tobacco, shampoo, soap, deodorant, aftershave or any other chemical.

  Wyatt tried to recreate his own odours. Sweat and tangled sheets and Liz Redding.

  And in the act of recreating his past few hours he saw the bedroom again, saw the spray of automatic fire crisscrossing the bed and stitching the walls.

  Stitching across the wardrobe door, across Liz Reddin
gs lovely torso? He wished that he could remember. He started to reload the .38but something was wrong. The spare cartridges: they wouldnt fit. In his haste hed grabbed 9mm ammunition for his Browning. A chill crept over his skin.

  He shook it off. He waited in perfect stillness, like a fox, thinking about his next move. His mind flicked down the years to his youth, the army, Steer, trying to focus on Steers weak points. Reluctantly he admitted that Steer matched him. Steers only weakness was that he was fixed on getting even with Wyatt, and that wasnt a weakness unless he let his feelings get in the way of his intellect. Wyatts flickering thoughts brought him to the present again, to the shot-up bedroom, and it occurred to him that Steer had outfitted himself with the wrong weapon for a cat-and-mouse game.

  Wyatt hated automatic weapons. They jammed, they were sensitive to dirt and knocks, they required no skill other than to pull the trigger. Steer had simply stood back from the door, extended the barrel into the room and fired. The natural kick of the weapon had done the rest. The bullets, spraying at the rate of thirty per second, had striped the room. It was an inefficient, noisy, careless way to kill someone, and it was the wrong weapon for a stalking game. Wyatt would have fired only once and it would have been a kill shot. He wondered if his .38, with one shot left in the chamber, was the right weapon. But it wasnt his only weapon. He had his hands and his head, after all.

  His hands and his head. They were not as efficient as they could be. His hands were no good if his head gave way to blackouts.

  He moved. Hed been still for long enough. The daylight was coming and he needed to blend with the trees and the grass and a variety of earthen colours. He drew closer toward the creek, startling a bandicoot. Once or twice he mistakenly snapped a twig or brushed against bark, but waited for several minutes before moving on again, hoping that Steer would dismiss the noise as a random one.

  At the creeks edge he found wallaby and potoroo tracks in mud that was the consistency of axle grease. He scooped palmfuls of the mud over his jeans and sweater, daubed it onto his face, scalp and the backs of his hands. The clay seemed to bind itself to him like an outer skin. It would be slow to dry, slow to flake away. He finished with leaves and stalks of grass, distributing them over his body until he wore mud and flora like a kind of gillie suit, as if he were a Scottish poacher or gamekeeper, not a manhunter.

  In full daylight, Wyatt began to hunt Steer. The creek wandered through a gully several kilometres long, here and there concealed by thickets of dense trees, bracken and manfern fronds but mostly running through a trench across open ground with sloping grassland for dairy cattle on either side. Starting at one end of the trees at the bottom of the slope below his house, Wyatt passed silently and swiftly to the other. Steer was no longer there. At the western edge he stopped and peered through a fine, stubborn mist at the open ground, scanning quickly, not letting his eyes rest for long, for fear that he might miss spotting a movement or a shape that didnt belong there. The creek tumbled over stones; birds greeted the morning: a grey thrush, crescent honeyeaters, satin flycatchers.

  As Wyatt saw it. Steer had three choices: to follow the creek across open ground to the next belt of trees; to head left or right up a grassy slope to either rim of the little gully, where hed be among trees again and have a clear shot downhill; or somehow conceal himself and let Wyatt get ahead of him, so that he could become the hunter and Wyatt the quarry.

  Wyatt investigated this last option first. The only shelter outside of the trees was a clump of bulrushes. Breaking cover at a run, he weaved until he reached it. He saw at a glance that Steer hadnt stopped here. The bulrushes sat undisturbed and there were no tracks in the mud.

  He crouched and stared out across the grassland on either side of the creek. There were plenty of ways of playing this. He could wait, letting Steer make the moves, the mistakes. If he kept moving, on the other hand, hed maintain the advantage and maybe rattle Steer. Hed broken cover to get to the bulrushes, something hed rather not have done. But Steer hadnt fired. Did that mean Steer hadnt seen him? It could be that he was on high ground, keeping watch on several locations at once, meaning that his concentration was split. Wyatt would make Steer break cover if he could, but why should Steer want to do that? Much better to stage an ambush.

  Wyatt guessed that Steer was either on the run now or intending to set a trap away from the creek. He peered at the ridge on either side. Steer was up there somewhere.

  He returned to the shelter of a peppermint gum and began to think his way into the soil. He crouched and looked along the grass, letting the slanting light of early morning tell him where Steer had been. After a while, he found the signs: a bruised grass stem; disturbed pebbles, their moisture-darkened undersides revealed to the light; a patch of bruised lichen on a rock.

  Wyatt began to track Steer, out of the trees and parallel to the creek. He found more signs: an indentation where Steer had knelt briefly; tiny grains of soil pressed to the bottom of a dead leaf; the crust broken on a cow pat; finally a footprint, the heel deeper than the sole, indicating haste.

  Wyatt tracked more surely and swiftly now. He began to listen and watch for larger signs such as quail disturbed from the grass, black cockatooos screeching from the tree-tops. It was clear that Steer had not climbed to the rim of the gully but was heading parallel to the creek, making for the next thicket of stringybark and blackwood. Wyatt noticed dark, kicked-up soil; the lighter underside of grass revealed among the darker surface that faces the sun. He encountered obstaclesa quartz reef, fallen logs and a tributary of the creekwhere he lost the trail and had to gauge how Steer would reason his way past. Hed find the trail again, press on, knowing that he couldnt afford to take short cuts or try outguessing Steer, for backtracking would waste precious time.

  Fifty metres short of the next thicket, he came to a depression in the ground and saw that Steer had rested there. Something gleamed wetly. He bent to look. Blood spots. Was Steer wounded? Had he cut himself? Wyatt climbed out, preparing to follow Steers tracks into the trees, and noticed that Steer had changed direction. He was heading up and out of the gully after all.

  Wyatt thought it through. He was wasting time following Steer like this. Steer might keep running, he might stop and set a trap because he was wounded, but either way hed be expecting Wyatt to come in behind him. As Wyatt saw it, he had to get ahead of Steer and ambush him.

  He broke cover and weaved along the creek toward the trees. He ran through them, dodging branches and leaping rotten logs, and found himself at a culvert on a muddy backroad. The road told him where he was. If he went right hed eventually reach the coast highway. If he went left, hed climb out of the gully to the top of the ridge somewhere behind his house. He knew hed find Steer there. If Steer had come by vehicle, that would be there too.

  Still running, Wyatt scrabbled through a fence and up the embankment to the road itself and followed it uphill. It was a road subject to poor water drainage and he stumbled often on the deep red ruts and washaways. At the top the going was easier, and he came upon an old F100 ambulance parked under a screen of trees, low branches touching the roof. Wyatt watched, and when he was satisfied that the van was unoccupied, he ran to the glass in the rear doors and peered in. Empty but for a red vinyl bag and a PVC cylinder. That has come a long way, he thought. When he peered through the drivers window he saw torn wires around the ignition.

  He straightened from the window, formulating an ambush. Steer would be hyper-cautious as he approached the van. Hed search the trees, then the interior of the van itself.

  Suddenly Wyatt heard a footscrape, heard Steer slide free of the tangling branches down onto the van roof, swinging the assault rifle at him like a club. That explained Steers failure to shoot. His clip was empty or the firing mechanism had jammed. Wyatt fired his last bullet uselessly at the sky as he thought these things and then Steers rifle smashed against his temple and compounded all the hurt and damage of the years.

  Later, when he stirred again, blinking at the
light and daring to move, he saw that the sun was high in the sky. He turned onto his side. After a while, he levered himself to a sitting position, letting the front wheel of the van hold him upright.

  Bang, bang, Steer said. Youre dead.

  Wyatt waited for the tilting world to right itself. He felt too weak to stand. It occurred to him that this was how he might die one day, his backside in the dirt, at the hands of a man like Steer.

  What was Steer waiting for? Did he want to spell out his grievances first? Unprofessional, Wyatt thought.

  He blinked and focused. Steer was opposite him, almost his mirror image, seated on the ground, his back to a tree. He had Wyatts empty .38 in his lap, and when he saw sharpening intelligence in Wyatts eyes, he raised the .38 and pulled the trigger, once, twice, a third time, a series of dry clicks. Bang, bang, he said, as if hed been playing this game all through Wyatts blackness, wanting him to wake up. Bang, bang, he said. Youre dead, and he coughed blood and began to fall.