The Heat

by Garry Disher

  Wyatt thought it already had gone pear-shaped. He didn’t say so. His eyes were on the headlights in the mirrors. Beside him Vidovic glanced alertly at the buildings on either side of the Nepean Highway, and Wyatt wondered if he was looking for the armoured-car pickups. Did he need to explain? Surely Vidovic knew why he’d pulled the pin?

  Still, he said, ‘Armoured car gets hit, what’s the first thing the cops are going to do?’

  ‘I know, I know. Check accommodation records in the area,’ Vidovic said bitterly. ‘CCTV, car hire records, taxis…’

  There was nothing more to say, so Wyatt said nothing. For all he knew, the Pepper brothers’ plan was foolproof: the junkie wouldn’t let them down, the heist would run smoothly. He wasn’t about to take that risk. A regrettable mark of desperation, agreeing to the meeting. Certainly Vidovic had been desperate.

  Still was.

  Wyatt threaded some steel into his voice. ‘Hope you’re not thinking of going back there, Stefan.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t.’

  The tone was too light. Wyatt shrugged. It was Stefan’s funeral.

  The car was stolen. Plates too, from a different car. Wyatt drove around until he was sure there was no tail then headed for the centre of the city. Dropped the car in Queen Street. No need to wipe it: he hadn’t removed his gloves.

  They nodded goodbye. Vidovic crossed Flinders Street and disappeared into the station. Wyatt walked to his room in the kind of Spencer Street boarding house where questions were rarely asked and never answered.

  Stretched out on his back, looking up at the fly-spotted ceiling, Wyatt thought over the risks involved when you worked with others.

  Youth. Young men took risks, even if they were clean. They were impatient; they thought they were invincible. Thought they knew how to run a heist better than some old dude like Wyatt. They were always starring in some movie, it seemed to him—or a music clip. Guns, fast cars, cocaine and half-naked women. They’d turn up in their Armani knock-offs as if there were paparazzi waiting. Sad, silly, under-educated boys with long youth records. Considered themselves too smart for research or detailed planning. Send them to rob a place and they’d grab everything: couldn’t tell the difference between a Rolex and a thirty-dollar Swatch. Use them in a bank hold-up and they’d go postal—scream, punch, kick, fire off their shotguns—so the tellers would freeze, the customers would panic and the guards would take stupid risks. And if the job did come off they’d brag in public or give stolen valuables to their junkie girlfriends, who’d head straight for a pawnshop and smile for the CCTV mounted on the wall.

  So: steer clear of young men.

  Steer clear of addicts, too. If that native confidence or high energy was chemically induced your driver, lookout or safecracker was nothing but a liability. Usually incapable of weighing consequences or keeping his head. Wyatt thought he’d become skilled at identifying users, but some addicts knew how to hide it.

  Of course drugs were not the only addiction; with Vidovic it was gambling.

  What Wyatt needed was a solo job.

  He wandered across to the station on Spencer Street and eventually found a payphone. When David Minto answered, Wyatt said his name was Warner and he was after a property.

  Minto didn’t hesitate. ‘A big property, Mr Warner?’

  Meaning a big score. Bank, payroll van…Involving a crew and start-up costs. Careful planning over days or even weeks.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Wyatt said.

  ‘All right. But big enough for you and the family?’

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Not too hefty a deposit,’ Wyatt said.

  Meaning an easy job and a modest take; minimal expenses. Minto might think he was desperate but that was irrelevant. Wyatt was never desperate.

  He was broke, though.

  ‘I quite understand,’ said the smooth voice. It sounded like it was coming from a big house in a gated community on the Gold Coast. As indeed it was. Minto said, ‘I do have some auction opportunities that might interest you.’

  Meaning homes or businesses he thought would be worth robbing but, until he had better intel, he couldn’t say what the take would be.

  ‘Perhaps I could fly up and have a look?’ said Wyatt.

  The broker wasn’t finished. ‘I was hoping you’d call, in fact. A property just came in,’ he said. ‘Buy-it-now price of a hundred thousand would put your name on the dotted line.’

  Minto was offering him a fee? To do what?

  ‘I could be interested.’

  ‘This one’s pretty as a picture,’ Minto said.

  A hundred grand to steal a painting. Okay. Wyatt had stolen paintings before.

  ‘The property will be available for inspection three weeks from now,’ Minto said.

  Wyatt had worked the Gold Coast in recent years. Cairns and Brisbane too. There was a chance his face was recorded on a tape or a hard drive somewhere. Or had been remembered by someone. Or would be recalled if seen again. So going in with a new face made sense. What made even more sense was giving himself a new face now, while he was still in Melbourne. He hadn’t felt eyes on his back since leaving the Highett motel, but there was a chance the Pepper brothers were under surveillance. If so there’d be a note of the meeting, his and Vidovic’s photographs circulated. In which case you wouldn’t bet the house on a turned-up collar.

  So—broad gestures first. In the morning he ran the number three clippers over his head. He looked gaunt now, like a monk. Then he made for a department-store bargain basement. Bought two baseball caps and two jackets, changed into one set and took a lift to the top floor, where he walked around. Then he took the corner stairs to each of the lower levels, having a wander for the cameras. Went to the men’s room, changed into the second cap and the bulkier jacket. Walked out of the store a different and slightly bigger man. He altered his gait a little, too, channelling a construction worker with an old injury. He didn’t return to the boarding house. He rode trams, trains and taxis for a couple of hours until he felt safe, then checked into a Sydney Road motel.

  Next he set about acquiring a new identity. In the old days he’d scoured graveyards for the names of boys who’d be about his age if they’d lived. The authorities had acquired decent systems since then and were now able to check birth and death dates against applications for passports and other ID. These days Wyatt used a Flinders Lane jeweller who sold cheap rings from the front of her shop and names from out the back. Wyatt bought the name John Sandford and set about applying for a birth certificate, Medicare card, drivers licence, bank account and credit cards. The real Sandford was incarcerated in a long-term residential-care institution. Unlikely to die any time soon but equally unlikely to apply for the kinds of plastic that proved he existed.

  Meanwhile, a different face. The haircut and the puffed-up jacket had been temporary measures while he found his new bolthole. He needed a more subtle new face for his passport and drivers licence, and for that you needed a pro kit: mixing dish, hand mirror, scissors, cotton swabs, tweezers, spirit gum. Makeup and brushes.

  Freshly showered and shaved, he went to work. Using a six-millimetre sable brush, he applied foundation that suggested gauntness of the cheeks while emphasising the underlying bones. A dark brown pencil intensified the shadow beneath his lower lip; a fine brush, applying a light colour to his eyebrow and temples, suggested grey streaks and a hint of middle-aged tiredness and experience. An educated man, perhaps. Faintly startled, essentially harmless.

  Armed with ID photos, he started on the paperwork. Each document made the next easier to obtain; none would be approved if he couldn’t supply a bona fide street address. A post office box was no good. Wyatt gave the motel’s street address. The manager didn’t mind his premises being a mail drop; minded even less when Wyatt slipped him $100. The bureaucrats didn’t insist on a landline number, fortunately. They’d be happy with the number of the prepaid mobile Wyatt had purchased from an arcade kiosk.

/>   By the end of two weeks he was complete in his new identity. He had no history—only a certificate that said a man with his new name had been born in Ararat forty years ago. But history didn’t matter to anyone anymore. People would want to know who he was and what he did, not what he’d done. Assuming they were interested in the first place.

  3

  Stefan Vidovic had spent two weeks nursing resentment, fear, desperation and a broken finger.

  The little finger on his left hand, snapped like a twig by one of Arlo Waterfield’s blokes, a pyramid-shaped giant who smelled of caramel milkshake and whose eyes only dully comprehended that the finger he’d broken was causing Vidovic pain. The finger was stage two, a reminder that Vidovic had failed stage one, which was to pay Waterfield Turf Enterprises eighteen thousand dollars within a week.

  Stage three was maybe death, the goon had said without apparent interest. ‘But just to show you how fair Mr Waterfield can be, you’ve got another week, by which time you’ll owe twenty-five grand. Is there a lesson to be learnt here, Stefan?’

  The lesson was to go into hiding. Vidovic couldn’t see any way of raising twenty-five grand in seven days.

  He thought about what Wyatt would do, and went to ground in a Rosebud caravan park. There he nursed his splinted finger and considered disappearing. It was possible; it wasn’t like he’d be abandoning family and friends to Arlo Waterfield’s mercy. Vidovic was more or less alone in the world. He knew men like Wyatt, that’s all, and Wyatt wasn’t a mate. You didn’t, for example, call on Wyatt for a loan.

  Vidovic walked south along the sand, with the jetty and the distant, misty towers of the city behind him. If he walked far enough he’d reach Portsea, playground of the rich and not-necessarily-famous.

  Money. Vidovic’s thoughts veered back to the Pepper brothers’ armoured-car job. Wyatt was right, the brothers were amateurs—but the idea was good. Vidovic had met with them twice before bringing Wyatt in, and he’d seen their lists of dates, times and routes, their maps and charts. They even knew radio frequencies.

  It boiled down to this: they knew exactly which banks, building societies, credit unions, cheque-cashing joints and supermarkets were serviced by the SecureCor vans on any given day. And they knew how the van personnel worked the pickup. Three men: driver and two guards. One guard in the passenger seat, one locked in with the money bags. The driver never left the cab. His passenger would get out, secure the okay from the pickup point, then signal to the guard inside the rear of the van. Then that guard would shadow the first guard during the pickup or the delivery. The van would remain locked: driver’s door, passenger door, rear doors. Only the driver could let the guards back into the van.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ according to Jack Pepper, who’d declined to elaborate prior to meeting Wyatt. And look how that turned out.

  Seated on the steps of his caravan, Stefan Vidovic tried to see how overcoming armed guards and locked doors might be a piece of cake.

  There was always pyrotechnics. Take five men in hard hats and overalls, four to stand around a hole in the ground, a fifth to direct the van into a side street. Then block both ends with traffic barriers, jam the radio signals, blow the doors, grab the cash, hop onto a helicopter piloted by a sixth man. Or stash motorbikes nearby.

  Too many men, too much equipment, start-up costs too high.

  Or place explosives in the road, hope the detonation would flip the van. Hope the impact would jar the doors open.

  You’d need an explosives guy. And a lot of hope.

  Or dress as a security guard at the target location, get the drop on the SecureCor crew. But meanwhile where would you stash the real guard?

  Okay: passer-by dressed as a woman pulls a shotgun on the bank or store employee whose job it is to coordinate the handover with the armoured-car guards. Second gang member driving a stolen car blocks the front of the van; a third, ditto, blocks the rear of the van. A fourth gets the drop on the guard exiting the passenger seat, a fifth gets the drop on the guard in the rear before he can close the doors.

  Always five guys, and split-second timing, and a heap of preparation. Guns, disguises, reliable stolen car, somewhere to stash everything.

  So what did the Pepper brothers know that Vidovic didn’t?

  Shireen Ijaz was pretty certain her son was using ice again. The fidgety behaviour, rubbing and scratching at the crawling under his skin. Teeth a mess. Stealing from her purse: not handfuls, just the odd ten or twenty and, once, the hundred-dollar note she’d folded into a tiny liner flap for emergencies. She’d almost forgotten it was there until an emergency did arrive, a few days ago—an unexpected taxi trip to see her brother in hospital. Never pay by credit card when you take a taxi, they could clone it or something, so she’d reached for the concealed hundred and it was gone.

  She’d paid by credit card after all, watching the driver like a hawk.

  Syed. What was she going to do with him? Filching money, staying out all night, making secretive phone calls. He was up to something.

  He was her youngest, born in Australia. Shireen and her husband already had two boys when they emigrated from Pakistan in 1990. They’d struggled for many years. Their community was small, and Anglo-Australians were guarded, often racist. But adversity makes you strong. You face the challenges. Shireen and her husband ran three Mobil stations now, two motels; the older boys had university degrees.

  But Syed…

  He had less to prove, less to strive for. Didn’t sound Pakistani when he spoke. Was spoilt, being the baby.

  Was he a homosexual? Shireen believed so. But mainly he was a drug user. He needed money to pay for his habit. It started with eBay fraud, selling non-existent iPhones, but soon graduated to armed theft. Menacing women at ATMs with a blood-filled syringe. He was arrested for that. No jail time but a conviction recorded, and an order to pay compensation. Ten thousand dollars. Shireen might have paid that; her husband said no. A hard man, Ali. Unforgiving. Pray to Allah that he didn’t learn of Syed’s boyfriends.

  And now Syed was giving off the troubling signals again. Shireen had seen it before, in the weeks leading up to the cash machine hold-ups.

  Four days later, one thing was explained to Stefan Vidovic’s satisfaction: Jack Pepper knew a SecureCor guard.

  Vidovic tailed Pepper for four days. Early on the Wednesday evening he entered a gym near Alma Road. Smoked glass all around and, in daylight, a forbidding blank face. But when darkness settled, light blazed inside and Vidovic watched Pepper climb onto a treadmill. After fifteen minutes a man wearing a SecureCor uniform and carrying a gym bag entered the building, pausing to greet Pepper before moving out of sight. Then he was back, wearing an Everlast singlet and spotting Pepper on the bench press.

  Vidovic already knew where Pepper lived, so it was the guard he followed. The man made no stops after leaving the gym but drove a nondescript family car to a nondescript house in Bentleigh. Vidovic waited. Lights went on and off, a teenage girl came home in netball gear, her hair escaping an elastic tie, and at ten o’clock a middle-aged woman emerged with an empty wine bottle, which she shoved into the recycle bin on the path outside. By midnight only one light burned in the home. The daughter?

  Vidovic went away, grabbed some sleep and returned at six in the morning. He watched the garbage and recycle trucks grumble through and at seven-thirty the daughter came out. School uniform, backpack, tight ponytail, blinking as if stunned by fresh air and daylight. She walked to a bus stop on North Road and thirty minutes later her father appeared. Cheeks shining, hair shower-wet, wearing his uniform. Carrying a spare uniform on a wire hanger.

  Spare uniform?

  The question was soon answered. The guard made one stop on his way to work: EzyPress Dry Cleaning, on Warragul Road.

  That same evening, with both Syed and her husband absent from the house, Shireen searched her son’s room.

  It was months since she’d set foot in it. She’d glimpsed the interior now and then if she happened to be
passing when Syed was stepping in or out, or if he was in the bathroom and had forgotten to shut his door. It had always looked neat enough. No clothes or dust balls on the floor, no funky towels on the bed, no apple cores or overflowing ashtrays. But was that the whole idea? Keep the place neat so she wouldn’t need to go in?

  Eight p.m. and she went straight for Syed’s window. Blind down, curtains drawn, only the light from the hallway for illumination. She stood for a moment, took her bearings. The air was stuffy, a strange odour. Something to do with the drugs? Some chemical leaching from Syed’s pores? But the bed was made, a pair of jeans was folded neatly over the back of his chair, the papers beside his computer were precisely ordered. Posters on the wall: a Maserati, Shoaib Malik playing Twenty20 for the Hobart Hurricanes, some sultry pop singer or dancer or Bollywood actress.

  Shireen checked under the bed first. One sock, one tissue. The wardrobe was tidy, ordered, with boxes piled at the bottom. Nike, Adidas, Asics. Stolen? Syed did love his shoes.

  It was a wardrobe of the old kind, free-standing with a pelmet across the top high enough to conceal any kind of flat item you might want to put there. Shireen looked up at that pelmet. She dragged her son’s chair over and stood on it and reached over the pelmet and found a sawn-off shotgun. Also a balaclava, a hard hat and overalls.

  Jack Pepper had said the job was set for Monday 21 September, so on Monday 14, Vidovic followed the SecureCor van, picking up the tail at its first stop, a supermarket in Sandringham. He kept well back, at the wheel of a mate’s LandCruiser, ladders strapped to the roof. The van made further stops: building societies, a bank, other supermarkets—the smaller independents, no Coles or Woolworths. That was okay. Those places still took a shitload of money, and twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, they handed it over to SecureCor.

  From Tuesday to Thursday he shadowed the Pepper brothers and their tame SecureCor guy. More gym visits, more dry-cleaning stops. Must be a dirty job, hauling money bags around all day. The bags sat on dusty floors, Vidovic guessed. Rubbed against ink and paint and oily substances.