by Garry Disher
He turned to go, but his partner held back. Wyatt didn’t want that. He burped, gave a gassy yawn then scraped at something on his ankle, hoping the cop named Marty would get the message. The drunks were staring mutinously at the empty bottle.
‘Come on, Marty,’ the policeman said again.
Marty ignored him. He stood over Wyatt and the others and said, ‘You can’t stay here. New regulations.’
Wyatt had no interest in the affairs of the city or the nation. He’d never voted and his name did not appear on electoral rolls. But he did know what was going on. He’d put together some of his biggest scores from studying the social and business pages of daily newspapers. Last month, when the Labor Premier ecstatically announced another Major Sporting Event for Melbourne, Wyatt’s first thought was the money that would pour into the city. Now he remembered something else: the Premier had ordered a gradual eradication of street people in the lead-up to the event. So much for championing the downtrodden, he thought, about to see himself come unstuck on one man’s glorious vision.
‘So come on, get up,’ the cop named Marty said, in this foetid alleyway in a well-heeled outer suburb.
‘Jesus, Marty, leave it,’ his partner said.
‘Regulations.’
‘Stuff regulations. They were never intended to—’
‘I want to see them move along,’ Marty said.
‘Fuck you,’ said the woman, still enraged with Wyatt. The bottle was empty and she didn’t remember emptying it, but it was in Wyatt’s hands now. That made her mad.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Fucking leave us alone.’
Please don’t, Wyatt pleaded silently, closing his eyes.
‘Maybe a day in the lockup will teach you some manners,’ Marty told the woman.
‘Marty, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got a job to do.’
Meanwhile the woman had found ten dollars in her hand and wanted to spend it, but vaguely remembered being rolled by a copper once before, losing five bucks to him. ‘Yeah, Marty,’ she sneered, ‘run along now.’
Marty stiffened. Wyatt tensed. This was bad for him. ‘It’s okay,’ he slurred, looking up at Marty. ‘I apologise for my friends. We’ll move along.’
‘The fuck we will,’ the woman said.
‘Yeah, fucking cops, always fucking hassling us,’ her boyfriend said.
For some reason, that cracked them up. They nudged each other and chortled at the cops.
‘I’m calling it in,’ Marty said.
A police van was there in a couple of minutes. Wyatt and the drunks were arrested, thrown into a tight space of reinforced steel mesh, and taken to the lockup.
* * * *
35
Wyatt found himself in a holding cell along with the man from the alleyway and four other drunks. Three were grimy, stinking wrecks. The fourth, asleep with his back to the wall, was about Wyatt’s age, early forties, and about his size, tallish and lean. The same dark hair, but he wore glasses, trousers and a tweed jacket, and his hands were soft. His face told a different story, too. He was an accountant, a salesman or an office manager worn down by his job or home life, and he’d spent the night and early morning drinking and betting on horses that came in last. His story was in his face.
Wyatt watched the out-of-place drunk and let a plan gestate. More men arrived in dribs and drabs: a junkie caught purse snatching, two old vagrants and three TAFE students on a bender. Wyatt guessed that the police were also sweeping up possible shooters, but they’d be placed in another part of the lockup.
The morning wore on. Most of the other men looked harmless, but he was careful not to make eye contact with them. He’d been locked up in an army stockade as a young man, and soon learnt how to handle it. You didn’t smile; you kept your face neutral. You didn’t accept the offer of a cigarette or anything else—it was never free. You never looked down—it indicated weakness. You didn’t look hard or mean, either, for that was like a red rag to men who believed they were hard and mean and needed to prove it every day. And if a man did begin to get in your face, you needed to hit him immediately, put him down before he got very far with it.
And so Wyatt was left alone to doze and watch the tweed jacket, who remained deeply, drunkenly asleep.
At one point he saw furtive movements. Tweed jacket was reaching a hand into one sock, a thin, black businessman’s sock, bunched around a spindly white lower leg and ankle.
Wyatt crossed the cell, dodging a restless schizo kid, who was pacing and muttering, and the vagrants, who were stretched out asleep on the floor. He perched beside the businessman and murmured, ‘Don’t let these guys see that.’
The man blinked behind his glasses. ‘See what?’
Wyatt tapped a bony knuckle. ‘That flask you’ve got hidden there.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘I don’t want your booze,’ Wyatt murmured. He indicated the other men in the cell. ‘But these guys will take it off you in a heartbeat and kick your teeth in for the hell of it.’
The man blinked again. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and between them they worked out a way for him to drain his flask unobserved. It was scotch, he said. Almost full. The cops had got him to empty his pockets but hadn’t thought to search his socks. ‘Want a swig?’
Wyatt shook his head. ‘What are you in for?’
‘I was having a quiet drink in the pub and the landlord called the police, said I was being rowdy, which is total rubbish, I was simply minding my own business.’
Wyatt knew there was probably more to that story, but it didn’t concern him. The jacket did. The glasses. The guy’s name.
‘Parker,’ the guy said, shoving a frail white hand at Wyatt.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Wyatt said.
Time passed and Parker drained his flask of scotch and soon Wyatt was aware that they were being observed from the other side of the cell. The drunk from the alley wandered across, his face elaborately innocent. ‘Hi, guys,’ he said, his gaze flashing up and down Parker’s prone body. He sat close by on the other side of Parker. Wyatt breathed shallowly: their combined odours were of alcohol, cigarette smoke, grime, sweat and stale aftershave.
‘Got a drink?’
Wyatt said levelly, ‘Piss off.’
Ignoring him, the drunk got into a crouch and reached for Parker’s flask. A moment later he was crumpled on the floor, unconscious, and Wyatt was flexing his fingers to ease the temporary numbness.
Parker mumbled and Wyatt said, ‘The bastard was trying to rob you.’
Parker smiled and went to sleep. After a while, Wyatt began to swap clothes with the guy, all of his movements gentle and economical, and he finished by stretching Parker out on his side so that he wouldn’t choke if he vomited. The other men watched. Their instincts told them to leave Wyatt alone. They’d seen the cold purpose. They went back to what they were doing—pacing, sleeping, bickering—and Wyatt washed his hands and face with spit and a handkerchief, finger-combed his hair, thumbed Parker’s glasses onto his nose.
When he felt that no one was watching, Wyatt fished $200 from his shoe and pocketed it. Carrying a concealed wad of cash was instinctive to Wyatt, as familiar as breathing. He waited, intent on his surroundings. Passivity had set in among the other men, and little was happening outside the cell, which was partway down a long corridor. Now and then a constable wandered by, checking that no one had died, choked or attacked another prisoner. A couple more men were delivered to the cell, a sullen teenage dealer and a middle-aged man in tears. Wyatt, standing next to the corridor, heard them being booked. The station was understaffed; arresting and holding a few drunks was an irritation. It wasn’t proper police work, not when a killer was loose. The drunks would be released after four hours, and the small-time dealers and thieves brought before a magistrate, but the whole process would be repeated the next day, and the day after that.
In the early afternoon the custody sergeant came by with a doctor and they took the schizoid kid away. Later still the
students were told their parents were outside. ‘We’re releasing you into their custody,’ the sergeant said.
Twenty minutes after that he came back and called the name that Wyatt had supplied when he was booked.
Wyatt didn’t respond.
‘Warner,’ said the custody sergeant again.
Wyatt uncoiled from the wall and said, ‘I think it’s one of those guys.’ He pointed to Parker and the man from the alley.
The sergeant nudged each man with his boot. ‘Come on, get up.’
They didn’t stir. Cursing, the sergeant called out the next name on his clipboard. ‘Parker.’
‘That’s me,’ Wyatt said.
The sergeant was escorting him up to the front desk when they were forced to give way to a couple of hard men in suits, heading down the corridor towards the cells.
‘What’s up?’ said the sergeant, his hand on Wyatt’s elbow.
‘Don’t know,’ said the file clerk. She looked to the desk constable for an answer.
‘They think one of our drunks might be the shooter from this morning,’ he said.
Wyatt tensed. The arresting officers hadn’t taken his fingerprints before throwing him into the cell. He was only a drunk, after all, obliged to sleep it off for a few hours. But what if the police decided to start printing every man in the drunk tank? Wyatt had never been arrested but didn’t doubt that his prints had been collected and stored in some national database. Now and then over the years he’d been forced to go on the run, obliged to leave behind a bolthole, a bank vault or a body. If the police ran his prints and got a match, they’d arrest him for past armed robbery and murder offences. Not to mention looking at him very closely for the hit on Eddie Oberin.
‘You’re kidding,’ the sergeant was saying.
The constable peered over the desk at Wyatt. ‘So what’s this guy’s story?’
The sergeant laughed. ‘He’s a pisspot. We picked him up before the shooting.’ He leaned over the counter. ‘Check for a Parker.’
The constable ran his finger down a list, said, ‘Got it,’ and handed over a large envelope.
The sergeant nudged Wyatt through glass doors to the footpath. A service road bisected the space between the police station and the courthouse. Parked cars, a few plane trees, police officers running errands between the two buildings.
‘What will happen to me?’ Wyatt said. He guessed he was no more than a couple of minutes ahead of a permanent place in the system.
‘Depends. Plead guilty to being drunk in a public place and we can take care of the paperwork in about, oh, a couple of hours? Plead not guilty and it will be a fucking hassle for you and for me.’
‘Guilty,’ said Wyatt, eyeing escape routes and obstructions. There was tension in him.
The custody sergeant laughed, then nudged him. ‘Nah, just joking. You’re free to go. Just lay off the sauce, okay?’
He handed Wyatt the envelope. Parker’s wristwatch, wallet, keys and handkerchief. ‘Thank you,’ Wyatt said, abject, like a man of good character.
* * * *
36
First he put plenty of distance between himself and the lockup. Using Parker’s money, he bought a train ticket to Box Hill. Parker’s keys told Wyatt he drove a Toyota fitted with remote locking, but there was no way of telling where he’d left the car. The wallet held $160 and plenty of cards: Visa, Medicare, driver’s licence, Blockbuster Video, HBA and the ambulance service. Parker had also listed himself as an organ donor, had a bewildered-looking wife and two toothy blond boys, and had ignored his bank’s warning not to store his PIN with his cards. According to a credit slip with the cash, Parker had withdrawn $500 earlier in the day. With any luck his daily limit was $1000.
At Box Hill Wyatt disappeared into the shopping centre and found a cheap department store where he bought jeans, a white T-shirt, a cotton jacket, a baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses. He changed in a public men’s room and donated Parker’s jacket and trousers to a Red Cross opportunity shop. After that he went looking for an ATM. There were several; he knew he’d be filmed at all of them. Choosing one at a bank near the highway, he pulled the cap down over his face, keyed in Parker’s PIN and withdrew $500.
Then he set out to spend it. First he took a taxi to Melbourne airport, which was hectic, the queues long. He bought a Virgin Blue ticket to Sydney using Parker’s ID, then in the shelter of a men’s cubicle he tore up the ticket and tossed the pieces into a bin. All he wanted was for Parker’s name to show up on a computer. Then he queued with newly arrived passengers at the Skyways bus. By late afternoon he was back in the centre of the city.
Now it was time to alter his face again. It was all about suggestion. This time he suggested the great outdoors, buying sale items in a camping store: walking boots, cargo pants and a jacket overloaded with pockets and patches. To Wyatt, camping and hiking were ludicrous activities, he couldn’t imagine engaging in them unless he was on the run from the law, and amused himself by calculating how he might rob the store.
He finished with a cheap MP3 player and headphones from a discount store. The device was empty and switched off, but that wasn’t the point: he didn’t want anyone to talk to him. He walked across town to the station and boarded a train for Frankston. The carriage filled with office workers and schoolkids, their lives pointless and unimaginable. As always, he watched, gauging who might help or hinder him if things fell apart.
The doors closed, the train pulled out. Wyatt swayed with the motions of the carriage and worked out what would happen next.
First, he needed to know the full story behind Wednesday morning’s hijack. Eddie Oberin had been raving about bonds worth millions of pounds: was that the real target all along? He remembered how light the titanium cases had felt, with no hint of any metal objects shifting around inside them. If Eddie could be believed, the cases held bearer bonds and most were pocketed by the arresting officer, female, name of Rigby. Wyatt needed to learn her story.
Then Lydia Stark. Recuperation in a private clinic under the doctor’s care, after which she’d need to lie low and maybe disappear.
That left Eddie Oberin’s girlfriend, and only old ground to go over. He’d search the North Melbourne house again, question Lydia again, spread money around inside Blue Poles again.
The spring racing carnival was on. At Caulfield station the doors opened and a horde of racegoers stumbled aboard the train. They were young, raucous, the women underdressed and hanging on to mouth-breathing boys unused to wearing suits. They were mindlessly having fun and would mindlessly marry, raise families and vote. It was not contempt that Wyatt felt. He was barely curious about them. Some of them would have money one day, that was all, and he’d take it away from them.
He rode with them all the way to Frankston. A few of the young women glanced sidelong at him, momentarily calmer and less shrill. In the minute flexing of their arms and thighs, the tiny motions of their throats, they betrayed their awareness of him. Their friends and boyfriends retreated from their minds. Wyatt rode in a cocoon of their longing and felt safe.
The spell broke at the end of the line. He saw them blink awake and shriek again and stumble away on their high heels, in their cheap, flimsy, tasteless dresses. He followed them out and then he cut down a side street to the lane where a few days ago he’d made his escape after robbing the harbourmaster. The .32 automatic was still on the roof of the clothing shop. When evening settled he retrieved it and headed back to the Southbank apartment.
* * * *
37
Khandi Cane slept through Friday and found herself waking in a big bed in a little room full of sweetness: scarves draped over photo frames, Body Shop cosmetics, books on massage, aromatherapy oils in dark vials. Repulsed, she turned her head and there was the pub waitress beaming at her from the other pillow.
‘Hi.’
Her voice was loaded with desire. Khandi felt vaguely ill. ‘What’s the time?’ she croaked.
‘After four.’
&nb
sp; Khandi was confused. ‘Morning?’
‘Silly!’ said the girl. ‘Afternoon.’
‘Oh, god.’
‘I’m all sore,’ the girl said, wriggling close.
Khandi remembered a tight, appreciative, squirming little body, wrists manacled to the bedposts with silk scarves. She groaned and reached for her cigarettes. ‘Don’t you have to go to work soon?’
‘An hour.’
What the fuck was her name? Theresa? Tina. Khandi reached for and knocked over the glass of water beside the bed. ‘Shit.’
‘I’ll get it, don’t worry,’ Tina said, springing out and running to the kitchen for a cloth. Desire flickered; Tina was slim and firm and soft and round all at once.