by Garry Disher
‘Been a long day,’ Tobin said, closing his eyes and stretching. ‘Reckon I’ll sleep like a baby tonight. Give us a call when tea’s ready.’
A small table topped with green linoleum had been left behind at the house. Wyatt dragged it to the centre of the room, set it with the disposable plates and cutlery, and unfolded four canvas and wood director’s chairs. Like everything else, the chairs were chosen for easy disposability.
He thought about Snyder. Wyatt never judged whether or not he liked the people he teamed up with. He was interested only in their skills and where the cracks were. Snyder hadn’t made a good first impression but once he’d known what the job entailed he’d put his mind to it. Snyder was helping with the domestic work too. That mattered. It meant he knew about teamwork. Somehow Wyatt didn’t think they could expect that sort of support from Tobin.
They ate at seven o’clock. No one felt inclined to do anything after that. They sensed the huge darkness and silence outside, while here in the house the lamplight was too meagre to encourage reading, card-playing or talk. They were all asleep by nine o’clock and no one moved until dawn on Tuesday.
They worked hard that day. While Tobin made expert-looking road-closed signs from planks, beaten roofing iron and tins of black and yellow paint, Wyatt helped Snyder paint the breakdown-recovery truck pale blue, Brava’s colours. The next day Tobin would paint the black bull logo and the words Brava Construction on both doors. It was clear that he had a good eye and a steady hand. The truck itself was well-chosen. The tray was long and sturdy. The tailgate was easy to operate, sloping nicely to the ground, and there was a powerful winch system.
At ten o’clock Leah drove down the track in the dusty utility. She wore jeans, shirt and scarf, and was carrying a basket.
‘Where’s she off to?’ Tobin asked.
‘Every couple of days she’s been going to the short cut to pick wildflowers.’
Tobin stared at Wyatt stolidly, looking for the trick.
‘She’s checking if the local law ever go down it,’ Wyatt explained. ‘So far she hasn’t seen anyone use it, not even a local farmer, but we have to be sure.’
He watched Tobin to see that he got it. He knew it was important to take pains with Tobin. Tobin had a quick, graceful body, as if he took pleasure in using it, but his mind was plodding. What was worse, he seemed to know it.
‘Got you now,’ Tobin said.
He went back to slapping paint around. After a while he said, ‘She your bird?’
Snyder heard him. He straightened up next to the wheel hubs he was painting and said, ‘Leave it, mate.’
‘I was only asking.’ Tobin went back to his painting. Soon he was whistling a Seekers tune badly.
Wyatt got their minds off it. ‘The tarp,’ he said. ‘I misjudged the size.’
Mustering lost credit, Tobin said, ‘Looks like the boss fucked up.’
Wyatt frowned at Snyder, warning him to stay out of it, then turned back to Tobin. ‘One of us will have to go and buy another one.’
‘There’s a hardware in Vimy Ridge,’ Tobin said. ‘Plus I need toothpaste.’
They watched each other guardedly. Wyatt recognised the signs. Tobin was testing him, asking: do you trust me? If Wyatt said that he couldn’t go, the result could be resentment and trouble down the track. Wyatt also knew that he shouldn’t go in with Tobin. Tobin would think he was being chaperoned.
They continued to watch each other. Eventually Wyatt nodded. ‘Okay. Go in after lunch. Leah will be back by then. I’ll give you some money.’
They returned to their painting. Leah reappeared at twelve-thirty and they stopped work to eat sandwiches and drink cups of tea. At one o’clock Tobin changed out of his paint-splashed clothes and drove to Vimy Ridge, $500 of Wyatt’s money in his pocket. While Wyatt finished painting the truck, Leah spread maps on the table to familiarise herself with the local roads and Snyder took his big radio to the top of a hill to do a band search.
Tobin returned at four o’clock. He gazed levelly at Wyatt as he got out of the utility, then reached into the back of it and hauled out a tarpaulin. He laid it out on the grass. It was large and new. ‘All right?’ he said, looking at Wyatt again.
‘Perfect.’
They worked until five-thirty. Tobin finished the road-closed signs, then painted a couple of large Brava Construction logos on the tarpaulin. While he did that, the others washed the dirt off the Holden utility and painted it. At five-thirty, when Wyatt announced a halt, Tobin produced his football. He kicked it around with Snyder and Leah until darkness fell. Wyatt appeared to be watching from his chair on the farmhouse verandah, but in fact he was watching only the images in his head, looking at the Steelgard hit from all the angles. Dinner that night was minestrone soup and spaghetti bolognese. Dessert was a question and answer session to iron out wrinkles in the job.
****
TWENTY-TWO
Letterman hated the country. His suit was wrong, so were his shoes, and he’d had to park several kilometres short of the farm and go the rest of the way on foot. He’d bought the car that morning, soon after Snyder had called him on the radio. It was a clapped-out Valiant that had set him back $1900. He should have spent another hundred and bought some suitable bush gear as well.
But he’d found Wyatt. He climbed through a wire fence and cut back across a paddock to the Valiant. A mistake, he soon realised. The ground was full of traps for the kind of shoes he was wearing. They slipped off the grass tussocks and twisted on concealed stones and rabbit holes. Grass seeds hooked themselves to his socks and trousers. Now that he’d found Wyatt all he wanted to do was go back and wash the dirt off. He badly needed a Quick-eze.
The only accommodation available in Vimy Ridge had been an on-site caravan in the tourist park. Snyder had called him there at one-thirty saying he only had a moment, he was supposed to be doing a band search on his radio.
‘Where are you?’ Letterman had wanted to know.
‘We’re camped in this empty farmhouse.’
‘How the fuck am I supposed to find you? I told you to come in and get me. I didn’t give you that two thousand for nothing.’
‘Settle down. One of the others is going in. You can follow him out here.’
‘Wyatt?’
‘Not Wyatt, a guy called Tobin.’ Snyder described Tobin. ‘He’s picking something up at the hardware. The same ute that picked me up yesterday.’
‘I’ll find him.’
‘I tell you what,’ Snyder said, ‘it’s a sweet job.’
Letterman didn’t care about the job. As a concession to Snyder he’d agreed to hit Wyatt when the job was over; what he cared about was how easy Wyatt would be.
‘Tell me about Wyatt.’
‘He’s hard to read. He’s all brain and nerve reflexes. On Thursday I wouldn’t try announcing myself if I were you. I’d just go in and pop him.’
‘What about this Tobin bloke?’
‘He’s a moron. Wyatt’s the only one with a gun. Apart from me.’
There had been a pause. Letterman said, ‘Apart from you. How did you get a gun?’
Snyder had been cocky about it. ‘Brought it with me. What I do is I strip it and hide the parts with the radio gear so no one knows what it is, then reassemble it later.’
‘Very clever. I hope you’re not thinking of popping Wyatt. He’s strictly mine.’
‘It’s sort of insurance,’ Snyder said. ‘You know, in case a certain person decides he might try and get out of paying me what he owes me, kind of thing.’
Letterman had gestured irritably at the wall of his caravan. ‘Tell me about the farmhouse. I can’t get too close behind this Tobin character.’
‘Stop when you come to a tin hut in the corner of a paddock. The farm’s off to the right about three or four k’s. But we got a deal, you know. You don’t pop Wyatt till after the job.’
‘Shut up. All I’ll be doing is checking out the place. I have to know where to go on Thursday while you�
��re out doing the job.’
‘You better time it right Thursday. If Wyatt sees you he’ll kill you, no question. If he sees a car shouldn’t be there, he could jack it in.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Letterman said. ‘Listen, what about the locals?’
‘You’ll be right,’ Snyder said. ‘It’s the only farmhouse along there.’ He’d sniggered a little. ‘Tell you what, you could wear one of your suits. If you meet anyone on the road you could tell them you’re from the bank. They’ll think you’ve come to repossess and they’ll piss off and leave you alone. I like the grey one myself.’
Letterman thought about Snyder’s crack now as he stumbled across the paddock. Snyder would be the first to go, no question.
After breaking radio transmission Letterman had left the caravan and gone to look for Tobin. He’d picked up the big hoon at the hardware place, waited while he made a phone call at the post office and shopped at the Four Square supermarket, then settled in a kilometre behind him on the road north from Vimy Ridge. They travelled on the bitumen for several kilometres then turned onto a dirt road. Letterman had hated it. Tobin’s utility stirred up thick dust so it was like driving through brown smoke and clouds of it had poured in around the Valiant’s pissy door seals. He’d sneezed and cursed and hoped to Christ he didn’t have a head-on smash with someone coming from the opposite direction.
Thirty minutes later he’d thought he’d lost Tobin, but then he saw the tin-hut corner. A narrow, pitted track ran off to the right of it. He had parked there and crossed the paddocks in his unsuitable shoes and seen the farmhouse in the distance.
And now he was back at the Valiant, his discomfort forgotten. By Thursday afternoon all this would be over.
****
TWENTY-THREE
Wyatt normally did nothing on the day before his big heists, but this one was different. He’d never worked with this team before and, knowing what a killer boredom could be, he’d deliberately made the lead-up time short. When Wednesday morning came, he still had plenty of things for them to do.
The most pressing was another question and answer session. He wanted them fresh and rested for that. After breakfast he gathered them at the table with maps, notebooks and cups of tea. Leah, he noticed, looked calm. Snyder’s puffy face was creased with recent sleep, but he sounded alert. Tobin had been difficult to wake. He’d held them up for fifteen minutes while he got up and ate a bowl of breakfast cereal, and now he was yawning repeatedly and asking, ‘Could you run that past us again?’
Wyatt took them step by step through the job. ‘When we leave here tomorrow morning I want the place to look unused in case something goes wrong and we can’t come back. I want everything to be buried, prints wiped off every surface, dust spread around. It won’t stop a thorough search but there shouldn’t be a thorough search if the place looks unused. Even so, I don’t want them uncovering the little thing that leads back to one of us. I don’t want them realising the scale behind this. If all goes well we come back here again for a few days and clean up again when we finally leave.’
Tobin yawned. ‘Just a hassle if you ask me.’
Wyatt ignored him. ‘At about ten-forty-five we drive the ute and the truck across to the short cut and put up a road-closed sign behind us.’
Snyder’s eyes seemed to sink deeper into his fleshy face and frown lines appeared above them. ‘Let’s hope no one reports it to the local council.’
‘It’s temporary. We don’t want anyone using the short cut while we’re getting set up. Leah will be tailing the van on the bike. When she calls to let us know the van’s a few minutes away from the turn-off, I’ll go back and take the sign down.’
Snyder nodded. ‘Meanwhile I monitor the radio in the van?’
‘Correct’
‘What about the Belcowie end of the short cut?’
‘You and I’ll drive along it to check there’s no one around. If it’s clear, we place the second sign there at the Belcowie end. If someone is on the road, we wait. If they look like being a problem, I either call the whole thing off or remove the problem.’
Tobin shot the air with his finger. ‘Pow, then chuck them in a ditch.’
Wyatt said nothing. He looked bleakly at Tobin until Tobin started to mutter and shift in his chair. ‘Nothing like that,’ Wyatt said. ‘If some old geezer’s feeding his sheep on the road, we tie him up till it’s over, nothing else.’
It wasn’t scruples or sentiment behind his thinking. There would always be innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time. What Wyatt cared about was the hue and cry that followed a shooting. The cops were always more energetic when guns were involved.
‘So we’ve cut off the road at both ends,’ Snyder said. ‘What then?’
‘Tobin here parks the truck where the road dips down into the creek and we hide the ute ready to box in the van.’
‘You want me to help load?’
‘When the time comes. Meanwhile you’ll be monitoring the Steelgard frequency ready to jam it.’
‘Tricky timing.’
‘Leah won’t be far behind the van. She warns us in time to take the sign down, and as soon as the van’s on the short cut she puts the sign up again.’
‘Then I keep watch from that hill opposite,’ Leah said.
Snyder nodded that he understood. He glanced once at Tobin, twisted his mouth in contempt, looked away again. ‘Sounds good.’
‘Okay,’ Wyatt said. ‘Let’s run through it again.’
Tobin hadn’t kept still all this time. He continued to yawn at intervals and twist restlessly in his chair. He wore brief shorts and a singlet, so he seemed to be a mass of flesh, all of it bored. ‘Ah, pack it in. We’ll be right.’
Wyatt leaned forward. He kept his voice low. ‘If you fuck up tomorrow, I’ll kill you.’
Tobin threw up his arms and rolled his eyes. ‘Fucking charming. You others hear that?’
‘Can it, Tobin,’ Snyder said.
Tobin turned to Leah. He leaned an elbow on the table and rested his head on his hand. ‘What about you? Want to come outside, leave the boys to do the thinking?’
Leah smiled coldly at him. ‘Want to stay here like a good boy and listen to the men? You might learn something.’
Tobin flushed and jerked back. ‘Yeah, well I know all about you, you moll.’
No one moved, waiting to see what else Tobin would do. Leah stared at him neutrally. Snyder tipped back in his chair, watching like someone interested but not involved. Wyatt held himself ready to smack Tobin down if it came to that.
When nothing happened, he said patiently, ‘Let’s run through it again. This time you each tell me.’
One by one they described their part in the heist. Tobin surprised them by summarising his role exactly and leaving nothing out. But he didn’t look at anyone, and his tone was choppy and contemptuous.
When they were all finished Wyatt said, ‘Now the period after the job.’
He was looking at Tobin. He expected trouble from him. He didn’t think Tobin would have the patience to wait around after the job. But Tobin was unusually compliant, swirling his cup, looking at the tea-leaves.
Wyatt explained it anyway. ‘Time and distance are against us. When the van goes off the air, and it doesn’t show in Belcowie, the whole of the mid-north will go on alert. Patrols, roadblocks, you name it. We’d never make it.’
He paused, watching Tobin. Tobin’s face was changing expression rapidly, as though he were having a conversation with himself. Wyatt went on. ‘We stay here until it’s safe to leave. I don’t want anything to show from the air, and we don’t go outside unless it’s safe to do so. We post a lookout, four-hour shifts around the clock. I doubt if there’ll be a ground search here-it’s off the beaten track and with any luck they’ll think the van’s been driven interstate or something-but if there is, we’ll see them coming in time to get out the back way.’
He stopped, looking at Snyder. Snyder had been listening, but it had been polite, as
if he were going through the motions. Now he seemed to sharpen. ‘Plan B?’ he said.
Wyatt knew what he meant. ‘If something goes wrong, if I’m recognised or Leah spots cops in the area, we abandon. We don’t come back here at all.’
Snyder gave him a complicated look. ‘That would be a pisser. What about the van? What if it changes route?’
‘We’ll soon know if it does.’
‘And?’
‘We abandon.’
Snyder shrugged fatalistically. Wyatt looked at Tobin. Tobin had his hands behind his head. He continued to look bored, as if none of this had anything to do with him.
‘You taking this in?’
‘Fuckin’ A,’ Tobin said. ‘If I fuck up, you’ll waste me.’
He looked at the ceiling and began to whistle silently.
The danger signals were clear. But Wyatt had covered everything, so he closed the meeting. It was almost midday. They had lunch, then spent the afternoon taking care of the finishing touches. While Tobin painted the Brava logo on both vehicles, Wyatt and Snyder fitted and tested the radios and the radio jammer, and Leah collected and buried rubbish and cleaned the brushes. Tobin was silent and aggrieved for most of the afternoon but at five-thirty he got out his football again. This time they all kicked it around.
****
TWENTY-FOUR
‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,’ Leah said.
Wyatt felt her kick him under the table. He looked up. She was watching Tobin eat. So was Snyder. Like Wyatt, they had eaten small bowls of porridge and were sipping strong coffee, not having the stomach for anything else, but Tobin had eaten two bowls of porridge and was now attacking a mound of scrambled eggs and bacon. They heard the slush of the food in his mouth and gullet. They heard him swallow. And he was eating rapidly, as if this were his last meal.