by Garry Disher
‘What do I think? I expected a bigger van. This is going to be easy.’
‘You can shift it all right?’
‘No worries.’
‘What if it shuts down-motor, brakes, locks, electrical system?’
‘Cut the brake lines and winch her in,’ Tobin said.
He turned to face Wyatt as he said it. His back was against the door how, and he’d extended his arm along the top of the seat. His fingers were curled close to Leah’s shoulder. Wyatt felt her move away from him.
‘The next problem is,’ Leah said to both of them, ‘will the short cut be too narrow to take a truck?’
Tobin was an uneducated man. Like many men who work at practical jobs, he relied on physical gestures to supplement speech. Wyatt glanced away from the road for a moment, to see how Tobin would answer this question, and saw an elaborate play of shoulders, mouth and hands, Tobin’s way of saying, ‘You got me there.’
Ahead of them the dust cloud swirled and changed direction. Good-the van was using the short cut again. Wyatt waited for ten minutes before he turned in after it. They followed the track to where it met the main road again, four kilometres north of Belcowie. Wyatt stopped. ‘Well?’
‘No worries,’ Tobin said.
He said it again thirty minutes later when they showed him the farm buildings. ‘No worries. You could hide a bloody ship in here.’
He grinned at them. He had the orange shades on. Wyatt knew he was looking at Leah’s breasts. ‘So,’ Tobin said, ‘am I in? Is it a goer?’
‘That depends. We still need a low-loader or a breakdown truck, one that can’t be traced back to us.’
Tobin actually tapped his nose knowingly. ‘Let me take care of that. So, am I in?’
Wyatt nodded.
Tobin stuck out his hand and shook Wyatt’s enthusiastically. Then he put his arm around Leah and squeezed her. It was brief, as if it meant nothing, but he looked at Wyatt while he did it, and Wyatt knew the gesture meant everything.
****
SEVENTEEN
On Friday afternoon Trigg said, ‘What do you mean, too expensive? Don’t you kids get pocket-money any more?’
The kid was about seventeen. He wore a prefect’s uniform. His name was Wayne and he was Trigg’s main supplier at the high school. ‘I’m just telling you what they tell me,’ he said. ‘The speed’s too expensive, so’s the dope.’
‘In my day kids had paper rounds, they mowed lawns, washed cars. Too fucking slack. These days if they’re not hanging around the mall they’re in Mooney’s-’
Trigg broke off. If the kids were in Mooney’s playing the pinball machines, how come Mooney kept holding out on the seven hundred and fifty bucks he still owed? Fucking everyone in Goyder was welshing on their debts.
‘Fucking slack,’ he repeated.
Wayne drank from the Southwark stubbie that Trigg had given him. He let Trigg rave on. The fact that Trigg was bent didn’t mean that he wasn’t like a parent when it came to what kids did these days. Half smiling at Trigg, Wayne said, ‘Some kids are doing all right money-wise. The ones with a few dope plants. They charge less than you do.’
Trigg closed his eyes. It just wasn’t worth the hassle. By the time he’d paid Wayne and the others, and allowed subcontractors like Tobin some leeway on what they owed him, he never had enough to meet the interest payment on his Mesic debt. He would have to start coming down hard on a few people.
‘So if that’s all…’ Wayne said, putting down the stubbie and retrieving his satchel from behind the door.
Trigg attempted a smile. ‘You’re in a big hurry. Why don’t you stay a bit longer?’
Wayne knew what it was about and his face shut down. He swung the satchel at the level of his knees. ‘I have to get home.’
Trigg patted the two-seater couch. ‘Just ten minutes.’
Wayne took charge. He dropped the satchel on the floor again and sat next to Trigg. He trailed his fingers absorbedly over Trigg’s knee.
‘You’ve had a haircut,’ Trigg said.
Wayne shrugged. He kept up the movements of his hand.
‘I suppose your girlfriend likes it?’
‘Now, now, Raymond,’ Wayne said. With the subdued light, the closeness, and the choked breathing, the air in the room was charged and avid. ‘It hurt me last time,’ he said.
‘Oh, babe, you should’ve told me. We’ll do it another way.’
Ten minutes later Wayne said, ‘Ten minutes,’ and he was out of Trigg’s house within sixty seconds.
Trigg made his phone calls then. He felt clammy. He picked at his clothing as he talked.
‘Mooney?’ he said. ‘You’re not getting any younger.’
‘I can give you a couple of hundred,’ Mooney said apologetically.
‘What do you do there, anyhow?’ Trigg demanded. ‘Let the kids play the machines for free?’
He cut the connection and dialled a different number. ‘It’s Trigg. You’re not getting any younger.’
The voice on the other end seemed to come through a mouthful of food. There were chewing noises and then a clearing cough. ‘You’ve got me. You might as well repossess the car.’
Repossess the car? Jesus fucking Christ, Trigg thought, no one’s buying cars to begin with. ‘I’d hate to leave you without wheels,’ he said. ‘What say I come back a bit with the interest? Could you pay me, oh, a thousand by next month?’
‘No good, sorry. The bank’s taken my cheque book away. They’re letting me stay on because they can’t sell the farm. But they’ve seized me new plough, the wife’s microwave-’
Trigg cut the connection. He was about to dial again but he felt fouled underneath and went into the bathroom, stripped off, and had a shower.
It was five o’clock. He changed into clean moleskins, checked shirt, a khaki tie decorated with the wool symbol, and a kid’s sports coat bought in Myer’s, and returned to the Trigg Motors showroom. His day wasn’t made any better by seeing the wrecked LTD on a trailer at the back of the lot. He walked across to the pumps. Sergeant King’s kid was slipping a foil packet to a couple of railways apprentices driving a panel van. He stood back till the transaction was over, then came closer. ‘I’m getting a new shipment in tonight.’
‘I’ve still got half the last one,’ the King kid said.
‘Not you as well?’ said Trigg in exasperation.
Just then a school bus pulled in for diesel on its way back from a run through the surrounding farmland. Trigg turned away in irritation and went into the showroom. Liz was packing up to go home. Trigg checked the time: five-thirty. He sighed and went into his office, wanting badly to crack someone’s skull open.
He picked up the phone, flipped open the rolodex, and dialled. ‘This is Ray Trigg. Is Tub Venables still there?’
‘Just leaving work now.’
‘Ask him to pop in and see me first, will you?’
Trigg hung up and sat down in the chair behind his desk. It was fully ergonomic, with levers for raising, lowering, tilting. Coasters on the bottom. Lower-back support that followed you as you moved. In this chair, Trigg sat high behind his desk. The best six hundred bucks he’d ever spent.
A trick of the light illuminated Tub Venables as he appeared at the Steelgard gate and looked both ways before crossing the road. Trigg watched the fat driver approach, noting the body language. Scared shitless. A useless bit of useless blubber, all piss and wind.
Trigg knocked on the glass. Venables started, looked even more scared, and came around the back way. Trigg waited. A few seconds later, there was a knock on the door.
‘Don’t fucking stand out there,’ Trigg yelled.
Venables came in. He shut the office door behind him and stood as if fearful of the vast stretch of carpet separating him from Trigg’s desk.
‘Come closer, old son.’
Venables advanced across the carpet, taking small steps. He stopped at the desk’s edge. ‘Look, I know-’
‘Do you, now? So why give m
e a hard time? You think I haven’t got better things to do than chase up welshers all the time?’
‘It’s not easy. My daughter’s braces-’
‘Plenty of kids lead fulfilled lives with buck teeth. But go on, let’s hear the rest. I need a good laugh.’
‘The granny flat’s working out more than I thought. At least five thousand more.’
‘Shove the old bitch in a nursing home.’
‘So I haven’t got the thousand I owe you,’ Venables concluded.
‘What I don’t like,’ Trigg said, ‘is fucking cowardice. You’ve been avoiding me. You get your mates to tank up your van, I never see you, you must go in and out of work through the back door, you’re never in the pub.’
‘The wife-’
‘The wife’s broken your balls,’ Trigg said. He stood up. ‘I want you to come with me.’
‘Pardon?’
Trigg rounded his desk and made for the door. ‘Come with me.’
He led the way out of the office and across the used-car lot. He tapped his knuckles on the bonnet of a newish Honda Legend. There was another shipment coming in tonight, one Merc, one Saab. Why the fuck they couldn’t send him Corollas or Commodores, he didn’t know.
‘In here,’ he said.
They entered the service bay, a long, low structure that smelt of transmission fluid, grease and touch-up paint. Happy Whelan was there, and Venables fell apart. ‘Give us a chance,’ he said.
Trigg ignored him. ‘Hap,’ he said.
Happy Whelan had an undertaker’s face on a massive, bandy-legged, topheavy body. His movements were slow, his mind was slow, but he could conceal rust patches and pack noisy differentials like a pro, and once started on something he was hard to stop. ‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘Let’s see if your new mallet’s got any bounce in it.’
‘Say again?’
‘Bring Tub over here,’ Trigg said, ‘and we’ll do some panel beating on him.’
Happy grabbed Venables by the upper arms and pushed him to where Trigg was standing next to the benches and wall-mounted tools at the rear of the shed. ‘Place his thumb down there,’ Trigg said, pointing at the top of the bench.
The front of Venables’s trousers were wet. He didn’t speak, just closed his eyes and swayed a little.
When the blow came he opened them, and groaned and went limp. Happy held him up. ‘Not much of a bounce,’ Trigg said, looking in mock surprise at the head of the mallet. He dropped it on the floor, its steel head striking a gouge in the cement, and reached for Venables’s hand. ‘You’re going to have a nasty black nail there soon, old son.’
Venables was moaning, looking sick. Trigg stroked the back of the injured hand, letting the tips of his fingers brush across the thumb nail. Blood was welling under the nail. ‘The pressure’s building up,’ Trigg said. ‘We should do something about that. Hap, put Mr Venables’s thumb in the vice. Not too tight.’
‘No,’ Venables said. He was helpless and rubbery on his feet.
Trigg waited until the thumb was ready, then took a Stanley knife down from its bracket on the wall of tools. It had a sharp, pointed blade. Happy used it for trimming upholstery.
‘Your poor thumb,’ he said, and he bent over it and began to pick a hole in the centre of the nail. Venables went white but watched, fascinated. In fact, Trigg was doing him a favour, but it all looked like the end to Venables.
Suddenly the blade cut through to the blood. It spurted out, then beaded, and Trigg said, ‘Now, isn’t that better?’
‘You bastard.’
‘One grand, this time tomorrow, when you bring the van in for servicing.’
‘I haven’t got it. I’ll pay you some other way, anything you like, but I haven’t got it in cash.’
Trigg began to push Venables out of the shed in a series of bitter shoves. ‘You might live to regret that offer. Bugger off out of here.’
Then he stopped. A car transporter was outside, jutting half across the street as it backed in, the reversing signal beeping. The sight unhinged him, bringing back the pain. A Saab and a Mercedes, both newish, both black. Not only didn’t the locals buy expensive models any more, they didn’t buy black ones, not where the roads are dusty three-quarters of the year and muddy the rest of the time. And another batch of pills and videos that no one wanted.
****
EIGHTEEN
The more Letterman thought about it the more pissed off he felt about Loman. Loman knew about Wyatt but hadn’t said anything. Loman had made him look foolish.
The feeling grew after his meeting with Snyder. He’d settled in at the motel to wait until the flight left on Monday morning, but he’d made the mistake of reading an 87th Precinct novel and that had been the last straw. He had to do something about Loman.
On Sunday evening he backed the Fairmont out of the motel car park and drove to a service station on Beaconsfield Parade. Here he bought two one-litre containers of engine oil. He drove out of the service station and turned left into a dark, narrow side street. He parked the car, got out, poured the oil into the nearest stormwater drain. He got back into the car and made the long drive to Loman’s hardware business in Preston. Just before he got there he pulled into a Mobil self-serve and filled the tank with unleaded. No one saw him also fill the two empty oil containers with the fuel. He filled them to the top: he didn’t want fumes building up in them.
Loman ran a big place, taking up one-third of a block at the end of a shopping centre. The N in his name on the sign above the entrance was back to front. The main building was a long, low hardware supermarket fronting onto the street. Behind it was a large storage shed next to a paved area cluttered with do-it-yourself garden shed kits, sample brick walls, and piles of soil and gravel in shades ranging from pinkish-grey to black. A high pine-board fence surrounded the whole place.
In the far corner, well back from the street, was Loman’s house, a four-room transportable building resting on wooden blocks. Letterman approached it cautiously, alert for a dog or a nightwatchman, or kids taking short cuts home from the video library. Holding a container of petrol in each hand, he waited for five minutes, watching and listening. He could hear the sound of a television set coming faintly from inside Loman’s house. When he was satisfied, Letterman ran doubled-over to the back door. He didn’t trip-there was nothing to trip on. The yard surrounding the house looked as if it had been swept to within an inch of its dull life.
Letterman never ate or drank before a job. He felt concentrated, full of nerve endings.
This had to look right. He went from window to window of Loman’s house, checking for security alarms. He supposed a man as neat as Loman was, a petty crim like Loman, would have some sort of security fitted, and he found it on every window, a silver strip that would activate an alarm if it were cut.
In other circumstances windows like these were no problem for Letterman. He’d simply pry out the putty surround and-move the whole pane aside. But this had to look innocent all the way.
He went around to the front door. It was in darkness and faced a side wall of the storage shed. Putting the litre containers down, he bent to examine the lock. It looked pretty standard. He took out his folder of lock picks and went to work.
There were twenty picks in his kit. He’d got them-and lessons in how to use them-from a crim he’d put in Long Bay five years ago. They were long, flat gunmetal strips with small indentations at various stages and angles along both edges. The kit also contained key blanks, small pry bars and ratchets, but he wouldn’t be needing them tonight, only the raking bar. He selected a pick, inserted it into the lock and pushed against the first tumbler pin. Then, inserting the raking bar, he raked the tumbler pin open. He repeated this operation several times, pushing the pick deeper and deeper past the opened tumbler pins.
He reached the end, straightened to ease the strain on his back, and opened the door. He didn’t push it fully open but waited and listened. Satisfied that no alarm had gone off, he pushed the doo
r open in stages. Still no alarm sounded. It probably meant that Loman had separate systems for the door and the windows. He’d turn off the door system when he was at home, but generally leave the window system on.
Letterman closed the door. He had stepped straight into a lounge room. The television set wasn’t here, though, it was in one of the other rooms.
The bedroom in fact. Through the partly open door he could see Loman stretched out on a monastic-looking single bed, watching a night football game. He wore short pyjamas and a dressing gown. His ‘good’ leg was horribly scarred. The other was a stump. The plastic leg was on a chair next to the bed. Apparently Loman felt the cold, for a bar heater glowed on a floor rug in the centre of the room.
Letterman didn’t waste time. He didn’t bother with pointing out Loman’s sins to him but ran into the room and stunned him with a heavy blow to the temple. He hit him again.
When he was sure that Loman was fully unconscious he turned off the bar heater. Next he took out his knife and gouged holes in the caps of each petrol container with the sharp, narrow point. He squirted the room with petrol-onto the walls, the wardrobe, the ceiling and the curtains. Apart from the area around the bar heater on the floor, he sprayed high, knowing that the arson squad would be suspicious of intensive burning on the floor or low down on the walls. He made sure the ceiling got plenty. He was relying on it catching early and collapsing on Loman.
Finally he soaked the quilt and dragged a corner of it down to touch the bar heater. Then he turned the heater on and hurriedly stepped back into the doorway. The bed caught at once. When the flames were strong, he tossed the petrol containers onto the bed. They wouldn’t last long.
By nine o’clock Letterman was back at his motel arranging an early wake-up call. He showered, packed his bag, and checked his reserves of cash. Thirty thousand dollars-eighteen for Snyder, twelve for expenses. He thought about informing Sydney where he was going but changed his mind. He was his own boss, after all. He didn’t have to report in every five minutes like one of their goons. They’d get their report, their pictures, when the job was done.