by Garry Disher
Ivan folded his arms across his thick chest, and leaned back against the bench. ‘Is something wrong?’
Wyatt’s narrow face seemed to sharpen. ‘What do you fucking think?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Straightforward job, experienced lookout, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Except there’s this hidden agenda,’ Wyatt said. ‘We have a young punk who wants to learn a few tricks so he’ll be useful to his older brother, and the older brother thinks, why not send him out on a job with a pro?’
Ivan Younger shifted uncomfortably. ‘Thought it would do him good,’ he said, his high voice a register higher. ‘What did he do?’
‘Later,’ Wyatt said. ‘Give me my fee.’
Ivan pointed at a corner safe. ‘It’s in there. I want the stuff first.’
‘Haven’t got it.’
Ivan stared at him. ‘Did you get into the place?’
‘Oh, we got in all right,’ Wyatt said.
‘Don’t fuck around. How come there’s no stuff?’
‘My fee.’
‘No way. You deliver, you get paid, that was the deal. If you’re holding out for more, you can just fuck off.’
Wyatt stood lightly on the balls of his feet, his fists ready. He kept half an eye on the alley door. He said, ‘We left the stuff behind.’
‘What the fuck for? You-’
Sugarfoot Younger stepped in from the alley. He was carrying a painting, another small one, a plain wooden frame this time. ‘Hey, Ive? He tell you what happened? Got cold feet and left the stuff behind. I snuck this out, but.’ He began to cross the storeroom towards them.
‘What do you mean?’ Ivan said. ‘There were no paintings on the-’
He stopped. Wyatt had stepped behind Sugarfoot and was jerking savagely on the ponytail. He had the pistol in his other hand. He motioned at Ivan with it. ‘You move and I’ll blow his brains out’
Sugarfoot struggled. He had the blockish body of a weightlifter but his large limbs lacked flexibility, his arms bowed out at the sides and he was a head shorter than Wyatt. ‘Get him, Ive,’ he said, grunting the words.
Wyatt ground the pistol barrel under Sugarfoot’s jaw, cutting off his voice. The pressure on the ponytail forced Sugarfoot’s head back. The painting clattered onto the floor.
‘You want him to learn things?’ Wyatt said. He tugged hard on the ponytail in punctuation. ‘Here are some basic lessons. One, obey orders. Two, know your part. Three, no guns unless the job demands it. Four-’
He released the ponytail, stepped back, and raked the pistol across Sugarfoot’s face.
‘Stay out of this,’ he said, gesturing at Ivan again. He drove his knee into Sugarfoot’s groin, let him double over, then smacked the butt on the back of his neck. Sugarfoot collapsed, dry-retching.
Wyatt prodded with his foot. ‘Four, know your limitations. You’re a punk.’
He stepped back and pocketed the pistol.
Ivan Younger relaxed. ‘In other words,’ he said, ‘he fucked up.’
It was an attempt at humour, but Wyatt took out the pistol again. ‘My five thousand.’
‘Fuck you.’
They stood and stared at each other. Wyatt thought about it. Stand-offs wasted time. He didn’t want the antagonism, and the longer he hung around here the riskier it would be. Still holding the pistol, he bent down and picked up the little painting and took it across to a deep stainless steel sink.
Ivan said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Wyatt ignored him. He smashed the glass with the pistol butt, snapped the wooden frame and dropped the painting into the sink.
‘Jesus Christ, Wyatt.’
He watched dully as Wyatt doused the painting with methylated spirits and set fire to it. ‘A Whiteley,’ Ivan said. ‘Know what one of them’s worth?’
Wyatt knew Whiteleys. If he wanted, he could steal job-lots of Whiteleys in every house in Toorak. He watched the painting turn to ash, said, ‘Stay away from me,’ and let himself out into the night.
****
Three
Ivan watched Wyatt go, feeling vaguely dissatisfied. He’d backed him down on the five thousand dollars, but it was a hollow victory. Wyatt wasn’t someone you’d normally cross. He told himself he did it because of the guy’s arrogance and the way he’d thumped Sugar.
He leaned down and twisted his brother’s ear. ‘Get up.’
Sugarfoot patted at him feebly.
‘Get up. I want to know what happened tonight.’
Sugarfoot put his weight on his hands, then his knees, and finally stood. He swayed groggily, touched his face and took his hands away. They were sticky with blood. ‘Look what the cunt did to me.’
‘I’ll do worse if you don’t fucking tell me what happened.’
Sugarfoot shrugged, his loose, pouchy face growing sullen. ‘The maid, whatever. One minute she’s all right, the next minute she carks it.’
‘Jesus H. Christ.’
‘Must’ve had a dicky heart.’
Ivan stared at his brother. ‘You didn’t help her along, of course?’
‘No. I swear-’
‘Ah, fuck off, I don’t want to hear about it.’
Ivan leaned against the workbench, concentrating hard. Wyatt wouldn’t talk. But the insurance clerk would have to be sweetened in case he developed a conscience.
Fucking Sugar. A grade-A fuckwit. That Whiteley painting could have put them all in Pentridge.
He stiffened. ‘Listen-you take anything else?’
‘Nothing,’ said Sugarfoot. ‘Look, I’m sorry, right?’
Ivan regarded his brother sourly. Sugarfoot: a joke name, yet he was proud of it, the moron. He’d been charged with his first offence at the age of twelve. That was followed by ten stretches inside for periods ranging from four days to eighteen months: indecent assault, extortion, social security fraud, possession of cannabis resin.
He grabbed Sugarfoot’s face in a pinch grip. The eyes looked okay. Whenever Sugar was on coke or angel dust or whatever, his pupils shrank.
Sugarfoot shook him off. ‘Leave us alone.’
‘Ask you to use your brains,’ Ivan said, ‘and look what happens. I’m putting you back on collecting.’
Sugarfoot dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. He shivered in the chilly air of the storeroom. ‘Yeah, well I want a change. I’m going freelance.’
‘Oh really? Doing what? Mugging old ladies?’
Sugarfoot flushed. ‘Wyatt’s bankrolling something. I’m gonna-’
Ivan jerked him by his shirt front. ‘If he is and he sees you hanging around he’ll wipe you out, no questions asked. Stay away from him.’
Sugarfoot looked down at his brother’s hand. With great dignity he removed it, gratified to see Ivan wince. He said, ‘See my face? I’m supposed to just let him get away with it?’
‘He’s bad news,’ Ivan said. ‘Look, take the weekend off. We’ll see what we can find for you next week.’
Not all that much, he told himself. Their existing set-up ticked over nicely. Sugar did the minding, he did the thinking. He was fucked if he could see Sugar doing business with Bauer and the Sydney outfit, for example.
‘Sugar?’ he said. ‘Think about it, all right? Take a couple of days off. See the girls in Calamity Jane’s, get your end in, and we’ll talk about it on Monday, okay?’
The best solution, he thought, would be to give Sugar the sort of muscle work he’d respect. Maybe Bauer could use him.
He walked Sugarfoot out of the shop to the street. Sugarfoot’s Customline was parked outside the takeaway joint. He clapped his brother on the back, returned to the storeroom, went out the back door and got into the Statesman.
His car phone was top of the range. He tapped out Bauer’s number in St Kilda. Placida or whatever her name was answered in her Manila whorehouse accent: ‘Who is speaking please?’
‘Get me Bauer.’
The handset clattered in his ear. Bauer’s raspy vo
ice came on the line. ‘Ja?’ Amazing the way Bauer still said ‘Ja,’ even though he’d left South Africa fourteen years ago.
‘It’s about Calamity Jane’s,’ Ivan said. ‘Are you delivering the take to Sydney on Monday?’
‘Ja.’
‘Tell them I found out who’s been skimming off the top.’
‘Who?’
‘One of the shift supervisors. Ellie.’
There was a pause. Ivan went on: ‘Want me to handle it?’
‘No. They’ll tell me in Sydney what to do. I’ll deal with it when I get back on Monday.’
‘Whatever it is, take my brother along. I need him to pick up a few clues so we don’t have to keep bothering you.’
‘Your brother,’ said Bauer repressively.
‘Sugarfoot,’ Ivan said. ‘He’s okay. He just needs someone to show him the ropes.’
****
Four
In his big Customline outside the takeaway joint Sugarfoot was resting his head, waiting for his knot of bitterness to ease. Then the pain and the shame and the need for comfort told him he couldn’t stay out here all night. He fired up the big motor and drove away from Bargain City, over the Westgate Bridge again and across to his place in Collingwood. He drove slowly, one hand on the wheel, one shoulder against the door. He believed that if he moved he would fracture.
He reached his shabby terrace house feeling as though he’d been away for a week. The lights were on. The others were home, fuck it.
He went in by the back porch. In the laundry he ran cold water into the sink, leaned over, sluiced out his mouth, and washed the crusted blood from his cheek and forehead.
On the way through to the stairs he paused in the kitchen doorway. The wood stove was alight, softening and warming the room. Tina had her numerology chart open on the table. When she was not reading it or absorbing energy from crystals, she volunteered at Friends of the Earth. Rolfe was tinkering with a bicycle lamp. He wore shorts all winter and the high point of his day was running five times around Victoria Park. As far as Sugarfoot was concerned, they were both off the planet. Luckily the house was big enough for him to avoid them most of the time, and they were too up themselves to be sus about what he did for a crust.
Tina glanced up, her face as tight-arsed as ever, then down again. Usually she wore overalls but tonight she had on what looked like a T-shirt the size of a tent over purple tights and about a dozen other garments, so Sugarfoot still had no idea what sort of body she had. She didn’t notice his cuts and bruises.
He went upstairs to his room and closed the door and drew the curtains. He had all night and he was going to ease his mind.
He got out his trunk and unlocked it. With the.32 now in Wyatt’s hands, all he had left in the way of handguns was a replica, a Colt Python.357 with the six-inch ventilated barrel. But he had a Winchester rifle-a.460 magnum, blued metal, burled walnut stock. The genuine article. The problem was size and noise and getting rounds for it. Sugarfoot dreamed of close work with a sawn-off Remington eleven-hundred shotgun firing pellets the size of.38 slugs.
He had a few grams of Columbian left, hidden in a plastic bag in his shoe cleaning kit. Plastic drinking straw, mirror and razor blade. He chopped and sorted the coke into two lines and bent over them with the straw in his nostril. Two quick, strong snorts, one in each nostril, and wait, not long, for the expansion it always gave him.
Then turn on the VCR, slide in The Long Riders, watch the unfolding story of The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid. He was in the wrong century. He belonged then, not now. Carry a gun, use it, no questions asked. Quick raids on lonely towns, then slip away where they couldn’t track you down.
None of that crappy work Ivan made him do, Ivan calling him the Enforcer like it was supposed to make him feel good. Going around collecting debts, putting the hard word on mugs late with the interest. Using his muscles, never his mind.
A long film. Towards the end, Sugarfoot sat forward in his chair, feeling concentrated and alive. He would never tire of this: minutes of beautiful camera work, the action slowed down, complex angles and sound effects so you were actually in there, hearing every shot fired, hearing that incredible low whirring howl of a flying bullet, hearing it hit, a dull slap, plucking bone chips and blood.
The horses rear. The Younger gang regroups. Sugarfoot Younger saves others even as bullets slam into him. Outside the town he slumps over his saddle and when his men prop him up, concerned, he says, ‘Go, save yourselves, I’m finished.’ They don’t want to leave him but he insists. They lift him from his horse and place him behind a fallen log. ‘Give me my Winchester,’ he says. ‘I’ll hold them off for you.’ Already they can hear the posse. Troubled, close to tears, his men mount up again, wheel round and gallop away. Sugarfoot has held up his thumb to them but they don’t see that, or see him settle his Winchester on the log, firing when the posse appears between the trees.
That night, his men come back. They take his body to a secret burial place. Now, at the same time every year, silent, grim-faced men gather at the log. Every year there is one man less. You don’t survive long in this line of work.
Of all the stories in his head, Sugarfoot far preferred this one. After seeing The Long Riders he liked to go back over the action, fine-tuning it.
In another story he sometimes played with, his end is witnessed by a huge crowd and millions of viewers, television cameramen in risky positions filming him picking off Asians, wogs and poofters with AIDS-pinched faces. The government tries to play down his death and his funeral, but it’s impossible, he’s hit a nerve with the people.
But it was a problem getting all the details right in that one.
So he rewound the video. A new story came to him. In this one he uncovered the job Wyatt was bankrolling and picked him off and ran with the take.
****
Five
Wyatt dumped Sugarfoot Younger’s pistol in the nearest storm drain, then drove away from the city, pushing south through the wintry night, feeling corroded and uneasy.
There had been a time when he pulled just two or three big jobs a year, banks and armoured cars, working for four weeks and living on the proceeds for forty-eight. He’d spend six months somewhere warm-Italy, the Pacific Islands, South America-and when the money ran out he’d go back to work, always choosing a hit that posed interesting problems, always working with pros, never junkies, parolees, cowboys.
He tried to shake off the sour feeling. He switched on the car radio to monitor the ten o’clock news. Nothing about the Frome job.
At Frankston he turned onto a back road and cut across to Shoreham. There’d been a time when he felt free to pick and choose his jobs, not go to sleazebags like Ivan Younger. Work had been a challenge then, it kept him alive. He’d liked the feeling of concentration, ignoring everything that didn’t relate to the job. He knew how to wait, immobile, for long periods. Small talk would bore him. He would be cold and distant, but he men he worked with never minded that: he cut through the fog of detail surrounding any job.
He turned on the windscreen wipers. A misty rain was sweeping across the Mornington Peninsula. At Shoreham he turned north, taking a narrow road into a region of orchards and weekender farms set amongst trees and dams on small, humped hills. Here and there he saw a distant light, but it was almost midnight and most of the locals would be in bed.
Italy, the Pacific-he hadn’t been somewhere like that for a while. Things had started to fall apart about two years ago. Someone shot on a job, big jobs that fell apart even before he’d applied his mind to them, too many small jobs, too many cowboys like Sugarfoot Younger on the scene. Too much high-tech gadgetry around every door, window, safe.
He came to a hairpin bend, slowed the car and steered into his driveway, a narrow track winding through an avenue of golden cypresses. Below him were the lights of Shoreham. Beyond the town was the black mass of the sea. There were no ships’ lights.
Suddenly the rear wheels lost their grip on the mud. He
steered into the slide, and when the car was righting itself he saw a rain-slicked figure glisten once in the headlights and disappear.
He also saw the rifle. He pulled on the handbrake, turned off the engine and headlights, and wound down his window. He listened for a moment, his hand drawing out the flat 9 mm Browning he kept in the car. He’d taken out the bulb of the interior light and had the door open when a voice called, ‘Mr Warner? Sorry, Mr Warner, it’s only me.’
The figure that stepped out of the cypresses and onto the track wore a stockman’s waterproof coat and carried a powerful torch and a hunting rifle. It was the neighbour’s son. Wyatt hid the Browning again. ‘Craig,’ he said.
‘Sorry, Mr Warner. That damn fox again.’
Now Wyatt could see Craig’s pimples and earnest face and the troubling raindrops in his eyelashes. ‘Did you get him?’
‘I tell you what,’ Craig said, shaking his head in wonder, ‘he’s a cunning bugger.’
Wyatt nodded. He started the car again. ‘Well, good luck,’ he said.
‘Night, Mr Warner. Sorry if I startled you.’
Wyatt continued along his driveway and across his yard and into the old shed he used as a garage. He backed in, to give himself that second or two of forward advantage if ever he had to run for it, and tucked the ignition key in a slot under the steering column.
He went to bed then and in his dreams gave way to impulses to hurt and kill. He woke up sweating. He tried to read but he felt dissatisfied, on edge. It was bad enough that he’d spent hours on a minor job with second-raters and come out of it minus the money, but he’d also been too close to losing control back there in Ivan Younger’s storeroom. A job was a job; there was no room for emotions. He had hurt and killed before, but only when necessary. Otherwise it became the solution to everything and that was dangerous.