by Garry Disher
Then he did something he’d seen a farmer do a few weeks earlier, when he was pipe-laying north of Belcowie. Standing the bike on its stand, he charged into the mob, wrestled a sheep to the ground, and leaned down to examine its hindquarters.
When the Brava helicopter stopped circling, dropping to just above the ground fifty metres away, the pilot and passengers saw a farmer start in surprise, a sheep propped butt down against his knees. The surprise changed to anger. He shook his fist at them. Bugger off, he seemed to be saying. You’re spooking the sheep.
Wyatt saw faces grin at him. Then the rotor tilted, the tail lifted, and the chopper left him in peace.
****
THIRTY-ONE
It was the longest afternoon of Raymond Trigg’s life. Four hundred thousand bucks sitting there in the repair shop and it couldn’t be touched until knock-off time.
He spent the hours until then answering his phone, paying bills and biting his nails. He thought the girls in reception looked at him oddly but he couldn’t be sure. Happy was okay, Happy had valves to grind and punctures to mend. The problem-apart from the waiting-was Tobin. Tobin stuck out like a sore thumb in his shorts and singlet and orange shades. The girls knew who he was-the man who delivered or picked up parcels from time to time-but Trigg didn’t want them asking why he was hanging around.
‘I don’t know why we don’t just take the lot and disappear,’ Tobin said. He’d been saying this since they got back. ‘That’s why I told you about the job in the first place.’
‘You don’t know the Mesics, my son. They’d track us down and we’d be found in little pieces. I’m not going to debate about it. Three hundred thousand will get the Mesics off our backs, and we split the rest. Except you still owe me twenty grand for the last few consignments.’
‘Yeah, well, that pisses me off. It should be sale or return. I’m expected to fork out twenty thousand bucks for pills and videos, but no one’s buying, the economy’s too fucked.’
‘Look, I’m busy, okay? Why don’t you take in a movie?’
It took Tobin a moment to absorb this. ‘A movie?’
‘We got a twin cinema,’ Trigg said. He was leafing through the Mid-North Gazette. ‘Cinema One-”Three Men and a Baby”.’
‘Seen it. Heap of shit.’
‘Cinema Two-”Twins”.’
‘Never heard of it.’
Trigg peered at the advertisement. ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in it.’
Tobin scratched his jaw and screwed up his face. ‘Might be all right.’
‘Gets out at five,’ Trigg said. ‘Maybe if you had a beer or two after, by the time you get back here the girls would’ve gone home and we can start cracking the van.’
Tobin’s face narrowed in suspicion. ‘You wouldn’t be pulling a swifty?’
‘Don’t be a moron. We can’t do anything till knock off time.’
Tobin flushed. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, and he headed off down the street to the mall.
When he was gone, Trigg thought about the Steelgard van and the money. The doors wouldn’t be a problem. The thermal lance and jaws-of-life gear would take care of the doors. After the money was removed, Happy would dismantle the CO cylinder, hose and tap he’d put in place when the van was last serviced.
Venables had been anxious about the gas. He’d wanted to know what sort it was. Trigg told him sleeping gas. Then he’d wanted to know how come it was necessary. We don’t want the guard seeing any faces, hearing any voices, Trigg said. Venables frowned, hunting for holes in the story. When should I turn on the tap? he asked. As soon as you’ve left Vimy Ridge, Trigg told him.
Still Venables hadn’t liked it. Was Trigg sure it would work? Was he sure the cops wouldn’t think it was an inside job?
You trying to chicken out? Trigg had demanded. You want to go on paying me interest for the rest of your life? Do this little thing for me, old son, and all your debts are cancelled.
Stupid prick.
All that remained now was to clear up a few loose ends, get rid of the evidence, deliver the money to Melbourne.
Trigg was looking forward to that part of it. He’d rung to say he was coming over. He had a plane ordered for seven that evening. Goyder Air Service didn’t run to Lear Jets but they’d assured him they had a turbo-prop Beechcraft that was fast and comfortable. Get him to Melbourne before ten o’clock, they said. Well, the local graziers did this sort of thing all the time, flew interstate to the ram sales wearing their moleskins, Akubras and R. M. Williams elastic-sided boots, and Trigg didn’t see why he shouldn’t pose a bit too.
Except your average grazier these days doesn’t carry three hundred grand around with him.
Trigg thought about how it would go at the other end. He could take a taxi to the Mesic compound, but something about that seemed low-class. He reached for the intercom.
‘Liz?’
‘Yes, Mr Trigg.’
‘I want you to get on the blower and see if you can arrange a limo for me.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Doesn’t have to be a stretch limo. An ordinary one will do, like a Jag. So long as it’s black and there’s a chauffeur and he’s waiting when I touch down in Melbourne tonight.’
There was a long pause. Trigg waited. He knew the locals were a bit slow. It took them a while to take on board new notions like stretch limos, even though they saw them on TV all the time. ‘Got that?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Mr Trigg.’
‘Good girl.’
Drive up to the compound gates in the limo, wait while the guy at the gate calls ahead for permission to let him in, then creep slowly through the compound to the main house.
The compound. Trigg had never seen anything like it before. The Mesics had bought up an entire suburban block in Melbourne, knocked down most of the houses except one for the servants, erected two mansions-one for the old man, the other for Leo Mesic and his wife-planted a few trees, built a high fence around it, put in the latest alarm system and a few armed guards, and no one could touch them.
That was the way your top boys did it these days.
This time tomorrow, Trigg thought, the Mesics will be three hundred grand richer. They’ll also be off my frigging back.
At five-thirty he left the office and went through to reception. Marg, as usual, had slipped away early. Liz was staring into space. ‘How did you go?’ he asked her.
‘Sorry?’
It was always the same. He said it again, slowly, carefully. ‘The limo. Were you able to line up a limo for me in Melbourne?’
Liz beamed. ‘Sorry, yes, something called an SEL.’
Mercedes, Trigg thought. Nice.
‘But I couldn’t arrange one this end.’
Now it was Trigg’s turn to look perplexed. ‘Sorry?’
‘I asked around. No one does chauffeur cars in Goyder.’
Trigg counted to ten. ‘That’s okay. I’ll drive myself. You’ve done a good job.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, if you’ve finished for the day you might as well toddle off home.’
Liz got into a muddle over that but by five-forty he was alone. He went across to the service bay where Happy was greasing a Volvo. ‘All set?’
Happy didn’t reply. He usually didn’t. He put down the wrench he was using, wiped his hands and together they crossed the lot to the panel-beating shed.
It was crowded in there. When the good folk of Goyder were asleep in their beds on Sunday evening, they intended to dump the truck with the van still aboard it into Hallam Gorge, but until then they had to edge around each other, avoiding the old-fashioned mechanics’ pit in the floor. Next to the pit was a new hydraulic hoist, still in its packing case. Bags of cement were stacked against one wall.
Trigg and Happy dragged cutting equipment to the rear doors of the Steelgard van and started work. They had just cut out the lock on the Steelgard van when Tobin found them. He was beery and flatulent, wavering on his feet as he watched Happy prise open the doors. He burped. ‘Wasn’t your usua
l Arnie.’
This was too much for Trigg. He turned and snarled, ‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘The movie. Nothing like your usual Schwarzenegger.’
Trigg turned away from him in time to see the doors spring open. The guard lay sprawled on the floor of the van. There were steel cabinets built into the floor and walls. That’s where the money would be.
Trigg thought he might as well do it now. In a single motion he picked up a steel mallet and swung around with it, adjusting for Tobin’s height. The metal head was swinging upwards when it smacked under Tobin’s jaw. Tobin dropped as if all the elasticity had gone out of him. Trigg hit him again to make sure, then tumbled him into the pit. He let Happy do the guard.
****
THIRTY-TWO
Wyatt spilled off the bike sometime in the middle of the afternoon. It was a bad fall, leaving him bruised and winded. Partly it was the change in the terrain. As he pushed farther south the grazing land gave way to cultivated land-wheat, oats, barley, peas, lucerne, all tightly sown in coarse, ploughed furrows. The Suzuki’s front tyre hit irrigation piping concealed in thick lucerne. The handlebars were wrenched out of his grasp, and he was off. He landed heavily on his side, one leg twisted under the bike frame. He lay there for a minute, thinking how quiet it was without the engine screaming under him. The stubby lucerne, crushed and tangled under his cheek, smelt fresh and clean. He longed to stay there, but the exhaust pipe began to burn through his overalls.
He struggled free and stood up. It was more than the change in terrain, he realised. He’d been rough-riding the Suzuki for almost three hours and he was tired, his body so jarred that he didn’t trust his judgement any more.
The spill helped him decide-he needed to rest, and he needed to find a car. He looked around. The farmland here was more closely settled. There was a town in the distance. A bitumen road went through it. Wyatt counted the traffic. There seemed to be a vehicle every minute or so.
There were other reasons why he should dump the bike. The cops would have found bike tracks at the farm by now. Sooner or later they’d compare notes with the chopper crew and realise that the figure they’d seen looking at his sheep hadn’t been a farmer. They’d also got a good look at his face, so he’d have to do something about that soon as well. And he could smell petrol. Some had spilled onto the ground. He shook the bike: there wasn’t much in the tank. He would rather steal a car than a tankful of petrol for the bike.
He uprooted clumps of lucerne, covered the bike and set off across the paddocks on foot. He felt exposed. The sky above him was open, the flat land benign under the afternoon sun, but he knew it could turn bad quickly. Two men shot to death, signs of occupancy in an abandoned farmhouse nearby; a missing security van with up to half a million on board-it all added up to crusading cops, trigger-happy farmers and nervy civilians all over the state. The search would be big and thorough and there wouldn’t be any second chances once they’d found him.
Wyatt also wanted to get his hands on a radio. The ABC and the commercial stations would be running hot with this story. He might learn things about the police operation that would help him escape the net, and he might hear if there had been any arrests-hear if Leah or Tobin had been nabbed, or anyone else from the other team. Information was like blood to Wyatt.
He was not sure of the next stage. He walked until he came to the town, stopping just short of it and skirting the edge until he came to a quarry carved like an ugly bite in a hill half a kilometre behind the town. From there he had a clear view of the main street and the grid of smaller streets on both sides of it. It looked to be bigger than Belcowie. It had two of everything. He thought if he waited long enough he’d see a lapse in someone’s security.
The answer was a school bus. Soon after he settled down to wait, he heard three blasts of a siren. The sound carried clearly to him and he pinned down the school as the source. A few minutes later kids poured out of all the classrooms. Some boarded the three yellow buses parked with staff cars at the side of the administration block; the others walked or rode bicycles to houses in different parts of the town. As Wyatt watched, three men with briefcases left the administration block, boarded the buses and drove out of the town. Teachers, Wyatt thought, earning extra money driving a school bus.
He guessed that the buses did a run of the outlying farms and towns. Ninety minutes later, the first of the buses came back. This one parked outside the pub and Wyatt saw the driver go into the bar. The second bus parked outside a house on the other side of the town. But the third bus was delivered back to the schoolyard and the teacher driving it walked to his house from there.
Wyatt didn’t wait. Within fifteen minutes he’d hot wired the bus outside the school and was heading away from the town.
There were no roadblocks-he’d come too far south for that-but he was worried about his face. There would be an identikit of him by now. Cops would be at all the main stations, bus terminals and airports. He needed a bolthole, somewhere where he could rest and do something about his face. And get a radio.
But the country towns he was passing through were too small to provide that sort of cover. They’d be jumpy places too, he thought. So would the farms surrounding them. He needed to find a large place.
He entered Aberfeldie just as the street lights were coming on. The first indications were favourable, but he drove through slowly, to make sure. He was reminded of Goyder. Aberfeldie had the same range of motels, small businesses and flashing neon along the main street, the same sprawl of ugly new houses and flats at either end. There was even a mall. The town hall was as big as any he’d seen in Melbourne.
He had to get rid of the bus before he did anything. He didn’t dump it in the street-it would be like a signpost to the police if he did that. He always left stolen vehicles where they couldn’t be found until the trail was cold. Despite its size, the bus was easy to hide. He simply hid it in the open. He drove until he found the high school, then parked the bus outside the workshop of a service station on the other side of the road. The mechanics would scratch their heads over it in the morning, and eventually someone would ring the school and ask what they wanted done with it, but by then he’d be long gone.
It was seven o’clock before Wyatt found somewhere to spend the night. He wasn’t interested in a house-a house has neighbours who want to know what is going on. There are also neighbours in blocks of flats but they tend to come and go and expect others to come and go, so he wasn’t expecting anyone to ask him his business there.
There were six units in the first block he examined. Most had their lights on and all had empty letterboxes. He moved on to the next block. Flats 2 and 6 had not claimed their letters yet. He rejected flat 2 when he heard someone answer the telephone. He climbed to flat 6, listened for half a minute knocked on the door and listened again. Silence. He picked the lock and entered. There was no one home but the place felt lived in. Then he saw a movement in the corner. It was a cat stretching awake in a basket on the floor.
Wyatt let himself out quickly and walked down the stairs and along to a single-storey block in the next street. These he rejected immediately. According to a sign by the driveway entrance, the flats were let to elderly parishioners of the Uniting Church. They would all be at home.
His luck improved at the third block of flats. The letterbox for flat 4 was crammed with junk mail. He climbed up to the second landing and tried the door. When no one answered his knock, he picked the lock and went in. This time there were no pets or signs that people had been there recently. The place felt as if it had been empty for several days. The rooms were tidy. The refrigerator had been switched off and the door left open. The garbage bin was empty and clean. He examined the bedroom and the bathroom. The clothing, jewellery and cosmetics indicated that a youngish man and woman lived there.
But how secure was he? He checked the calendar pinned to a cabinet door above the sink. Notes had been scribbled in the blank spaces under some of the dates. Leave
for Qld had been written under a date at the beginning of the month and a bold blank line cancelled the next two weeks. At the end were the words Arrive home. Wyatt understood that he had the place for a week if he wanted it. He hoped the key hadn’t been given to friends or relatives. He hoped the weather was fine in Queensland.
Before doing anything he turned on the transistor radio next to the toaster on the kitchen bench. According to the news, no arrests had been made yet. The money and the van were still missing. There was, however, evidence that several people had spent several days in an abandoned farmhouse not far from the area where the bodies were found. Police were broadening their search.
Wyatt switched off the radio and went into the bathroom. He stripped and washed at the sink, not in the shower, knowing how thin the walls were in these places, how noisy the plumbing. Then he went to work on his appearance. In the cabinet above the sink he found hair gel, an old razor, scissors, a comb and two boxes containing blonde hair-colouring cream and rubber gloves. He shaved first, removing not only the day’s stubble but also his sideburns. Then he shortened his hair at the top, front and sides. Finally he applied the cream to his hair, leaving it on for almost an hour before rinsing it off. He looked curiously at himself in the mirror. He was fair-haired now, his features thin and drawn. He finished by wiping away water drops and stains with toilet paper and stuffing the paper into a plastic shopping bag.
In a bedroom drawer he found a tracksuit that was short in the leg but otherwise fitted him. Dresses, slacks, blouses and skirts took up most of the wardrobe space, but there were also some trousers and shirts and a couple of suits and sportscoats. The chest and waist sizes looked to be about right; he was too tired to check just now.