Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal

by Garry Disher

  Better the devil you know, right? Ive got three jobs for you. The main one is the picket line at Plastico. I want you to slip in and stir them up a bit, get the cops called if possible. Take your camera along. If some bastard takes a swing at someone or chucks a rock through a windscreen, the client will pay a bonus.

  Wont I stand out?

  Theres a whole heap of outside stirrers there. You wont be noticed.

  Whos the client?

  Lets just say hes a Minister of our fair state.

  Mostyn knew how it worked. His family companys got shares in Plastico, plus he wants to bash the unions.

  But you and me, we dont know that, all right, Chuckles?

  Sure. What else?

  Stolle grinned. He had a tight-skinned face and the grin seemed to stretch and split it. How does a 3 am wake-up call sound?

  I can handle it.

  Stolle pushed a folder across his desk. Tony Baggio, greengrocer, lives in Cheltenham.

  Fuck no. Let one of the others take it.

  Mostyn, you owe me, okay? Youll pick him up at three-thirty tomorrow morning. Hell have about seven grand on him, so take a gun with you. See that old Tony plus dough get to the market safely.

  Jesus, boss, the Mafias doing these blokes over left, right and centre.

  So shoot first and ask questions after.

  Yeah, yeah. What else?

  Stolle pushed another file across his desk. No hurry with this one. The client is Ameribank. They need information about the names on this list, deep background stuff if possible. Use our regular contacts in Social Security, the Lands Department, Motor Vehicles, Tax Office, Securities Commission. Tell them to fax it to mefrom a newsagent, not the officeand Ill pay cash on delivery.

  Stolle watched Mostyn collect the files and leave the office. Despite his name, despite his failure to bring in Wyatt, Mostyn was good valuequick with his hands, a sure instinct for outguessing people. The failure to bring in Wyatt probably owed more to Wyatts skills than to Mostyns sticky fingers.

  Stolle tolerated a certain level of dishonesty in his people. He could hardly do otherwise. Seven years ago hed gone by the name Securicor. On the surface hed been in the business of installing burglar alarms, video scanners and electric eyes, but mostly what he did was rob small companies. Theyd see Securicor in the yellow pages, call for a quote, and Stolle would wander around with a polaroid camera, a frown and a clipboard, noting doors and windows, distances and angles, making little sketches to show the proprietor, constructing models with the polaroid snaps.

  What he didnt write down, but filed away in his head, were lock size and type, window height, alley layout, traffic direction on the one-way streets, who the neighbours were, whether or not there was space to back in a small truck, how close the nearest cop shop was. Then hed type up a report, quote a figure guaranteed to scare the proprietor off the idea, and wait a few weeks. If another firm had fitted security to the place in the meantime, fine, Stolle simply pulled a long face and carried on, as his mother used to say. But more often than not the proprietor would hold off for a while and Stolle would hit the premises one night and clean it out.

  That came unstuck the night he got clubbed by a nightwatchman. He got away, but the headache lasted six months.

  Then two years ago he was SecureSafe. It was a sweet operation, more or less legitimate. Hed show the customer only top of the line security devices, but install look-alikes made in some Bangkok sweatshop. The cheap gear worked just as well as the expensive stuff.

  More or less.

  Most of the time.

  There was the occasional pissed-off letter, the odd rave on his answering machine, but if he ignored them they went away after a while.

  Until Inquiry File got wind of it and investigative reporters started to poke around with microphones and video cameras, camping on his front lawn, hanging outside his workshop, peering through the glass doors into his office, some bitch screaming questions at him three days in a row. He had rounded on her finally, shoving her to one side, clamping his hand over the lens of the camera. Dont touch the equipment, she squawked. Dont touch me or Ill have you up for assault.

  Stolle had never felt such huge, useless rage. Hed been unable to get his words out. Hed wanted to smash the camera to dust, flatten the fairy cameraman, tear the clothes off the bitch with her questions, questions, questions.

  So now he was Stolle Investigations. He didnt advertise. He ran a discreet business, installing security gear for cocaine kings, tax dodgers, bent union bosses and bikie gangs, finding missing persons, supplying bodyguards, anything for a buck. He even had a TAFE College diploma.

  The main problem was that he ran a large staff of part-timers and a couple of full-timers, and they all cost money. Hed bleed his customers where he could, spin the job out over three days when it could have been done in two, charge for travel and faxes he hadnt made, but what he needed more of were clients like this Brisbane woman. He could smell more work there if he played his cards right. The fee didnt bother her, forty-five bucks an hour plus expenses, plus she was offering ten thousand bucks bonus if he could deliver Wyatt to her before the end of October. He looked at the calendar. He had three weeks.

  The door to the outer office opened and closed. Stolle leaned back and waited. His secretary was out on a job, store detective at a mink show in the city. He heard a knock.

  Its open.

  The man who came in had the appearance and manner of a minor executivedark suit, plain white shirt, silk tie. He was about forty, thin, a hollow look to his face and not an ounce of humour in his bones. He said, Is your name Stolle?

  What can I do for you?

  I said are you Stolle?

  If this was going to go anywhere Stolle had to admit to being Stolle. He nodded, and repeated, What can I do for you?

  The words tumbled out. I heard you were the best person for what Ive got in mind.

  Oh? Whats that?

  The man sat uninvited and folded his arms as though to rein in powerful emotions. Theres this matter, this person, that needs fixing, if you know what I mean.

  Stolle pulled his chair toward his desk, using the movement to press a switch with his knee. The switch was connected to a voice-activated tape recorder in his top drawer. The microphone was the tip of a pen in a jumble of pens and pencils in a jar next to his in-tray.

  Go ahead.

  Ill pay ten thousand.

  To do what?

  The man waited for a while. She has to go. I dont care how long it takes. Five thousand now, five on delivery.

  Youre not making yourself very clear.

  My wife. The property division has all but ruined me.

  I still dont understand.

  You want me to spell it out? Kill the bitch for me, okay? I dont care how long it takes, just do it. I heard you were the one to do it.

  Stolle reached for his pad. Name and address?

  Jesus, youre not keeping a file on this?

  I cant start until I know who and where, now can I?

  Stolle said it sarcastically. The man seemed to shut down in the face of it. Eventually he muttered his name and address and the name and address of his ex-wife. Stolle made a show of writing these on the pad and putting the paper into his pocket.

  Now, he said, I want you to listen to something.

  He opened the drawer, pressed rewind, pressed play, and their voices swelled from concealed speakers, filling the tiny office. The mans face suffused with anger. As he came out of his chair, Stolle waved an automatic pistol at him. To reinforce the point, Stolle drew back the slide, jacking a round into the chamber. It was an oily click, sharp and nasty. Sit down. Youre also on camera.

  You bastard.

  Youre the one who wants to kill his wife, Sunshine. Give us your wallet.

  The man tossed a fraying wallet across the desk. As Stolle guessed, there was big money in it. Not the five thousand upfront fee the man had mentioned, but seven hundred and fifty dollars good-faith money. H
e pocketed it, tossed back the wallet.

  This is as far as it goes, he said. I keep the audio tape, the videotape, insurance in case you do anything stupid. I also know where you live. Take my advice about the wifegrin and bear it. I did.

  You bastard.

  Only the one payment, and youve already made it. Im not greedy.

  The man got up. He looked paler, weaker. Maybe hell get his courage back and try knocking her himself, Stolle thought. He could warn her. Then again, it was nothing to do with him.

  The man stopped in the doorway. He looked compressed and dark again. Was that bullshit, what I heard, that you get rid of people for a fee?

  Stolle rocked back in his chair, grinned, laced his fingers behind his head. Youll never know.

  * * * *

  Five

  In fact, Stolle had carried out four contract killings in the past three years: an errant wife; a junkie whod got a company directors daughter hooked on crack; an investment banker whod developed a conscience during a Royal Commission; an armed hold-up man suspected of killing a cop. Two had looked like accidentsthe banker, the junkie. The wifes murder had been attributed to a burglary gone wrong, the gunmans to an underworld score settling.

  The point was, Stolle did referral killings only. His clients didnt know who had been hired and he never met them face to face. When he was wearing his private investigators hat, he liked to meet his clients. He liked the fact that they needed him, and there was always something more than the cash in it for him. But he wasnt interested in meeting clients when he was wearing his killers hat. He wasnt interested in their fear, greed, anger, their banal motives.

  It was satisfying work, but he wasnt making a career out of it. Four jobs in three years was about right for him. The background research, the wait for the right moment, the swiftness of the hitall those things were satisfying but they were no match for the singular, prickling sensation he felt in his nerve endings when he was doing what he did best: tracking somebody.

  He didnt even have to be in the field to experience it. A lot of the work was spent sitting on his backside, reading faxes, leafing through files, peering at computer or microfiche screens. When rumours first surfaced that things were crook in the National Safety Council, hed been hired by an investment company to do a background check on John Friedrich. He discovered that there was nothing on paper for Friedrich before 1975. He reported back to the client, the client pulled out of a deal with Friedrich, and Stolle earned himself a handsome bonus.

  Most of his work entailed finding a spouse, a lover, a creditor. There was a standard approach and it worked eighty-seven per cent of the time. He started at the end: where was she last seen, and who was with her? He handed out pictures, he talked to family, friends, enemies, hotel and motel staff, taxi drivers, bus drivers, reservation clerks. He looked at passenger lists. If that failed, he followed the paper trail: credit card receipts, parking fines, passport applications, travellers cheques. If people changed their ID, he dug deeper. There was always a bureaucracy somewhere that had what he needed.

  He liked the hunt, but he also liked the hidden benefits. A bit of the old in-out with female clients whod gone over budget; blow-jobs from sixteen-year-olds whod run off with boyfriends; hush money from embezzlers who didnt want to be found.

  Stolle liked to get inside the skin of the people he was hired to find. He knew that a stranger in town didnt attract curiosity anymore, the nation being so mobile, so what Stolle did was not look for someone who was new to a place but look for that same person in a different guise. More often than not the people he was looking for tried to be the exact opposite of their former selves. Take his last case: a solicitor had done a bunk with money from his trust fund. He had exchanged his Porsche for a fishing boat and a Holden ute, his DB suit for jeans and thongs, his South Yarra townhouse for a fibro beach shack, his smooth cheeks for a beard and sunburn. What he hadnt changed were his basic tastes and habits. The man liked to play tennis, bet on the horses, borrow music videos, subscribe to yachting magazines. The stupid prick had even given himself a name similar to his real one: Ross Wilson, Ray Wilkes. Stolle wouldnt have been surprised if Wilson had eventually contacted his family or hung around outside his kids school.

  Missing teenagers, mostly girls. If they hadnt been murdered and their bodies dumped in the bush, they were the easiest to find. More often than not the clients were exclusive boarding schools or wealthy executives who didnt want the police brought in. Stolle started with friends and relatives. If the girl wasnt shacked up with her boyfriend or she hadnt convinced an elderly aunt that she was taking an extended semester break, he checked railway stations, squats, refuges, the morgue. When that failed, he went straight to St Kilda or Kings Cross. Once, accompanied by a father, hed dragged a fifteen-year-old PLC girl from a brothel and been attacked by pimps armed with fireaxes and knives. The girl was doped to the eyeballs and HIV-positive. Stolle and the girls father went back a week later and torched the place to the ground. It was the least Stolle could do for the poor bastard. The girl? Stolle guessed she was dead by now.

  Since the big-paying jobs were scarce, and the money always found its way into the pockets of the bookmakers, Stolles bread-and-butter income came from process serving and debt collection. He worked 12 to 14-hour days sometimes, six or seven days a week. The car became a mobile office and he was on the phone every few minutes, to his snouts, his answering service, his staff. He flashed his ID twenty times a day. He wasnt a cop but often people thought he was. It was in the words he used: Im licensed by the State of Victoria as an investigator

  Sure, it was obsessive, but it made him feel connected to the street, in control of the flow of information, free for a while from that permanent hunger that made him want to chance all he had on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice.

  Stolle had one advantage over his competitors: he drank with a sergeant in the protective security group, the crowd responsible for Victorias witness protection program. They supplied anything from intermittent surveillance, around-the-clock guard and 008 hotline, to relocation under a new identity. Stolle had learned a lot that way; the sergeant enjoyed explaining the job. Apparently the easiest people to hide were the natural mimics. They knew how to fit their appearance, body language, speech and manner to a new place, a new name, a new job, a personal history saturated with solid information: passport, bank account, educational qualifications, birth and marriage certificates, employment record, club membership, Medicare and tax file numbers, drivers licence, photograph album, old letters and Christmas cards. Everything was recorded on computer, every file protected by an inbuilt code to prevent printing or copying. One day the sergeant showed a file to Stolle. Stolle wasnt interested in the file. He was interested in the mechanics of identity creation. Once he understood that he could anticipate, intercept or uncover the moves that people made.

  The hardest people to find were those who shrank away from their pasts and ordinary human contact. It was as though they no longer existed. They had no-one, wanted no-one, had no ego, didnt want to be seen again. People like that left no paper trail, made no new friends, ended up in paupers graves. They were running away from life or some deep hurt. They were the sad ones.

  Then there was Wyatt, in a class of his own.

  * * * *

  Six

  Wyatt reached Melbourne at nine oclock and abandoned his stolen Kingswood in the Spencer Street station car-park. There were advertisements for accommodation on the station concourse. He called a number and at nine-thirty moved into a room at The Abbey, a backpackers hotel near the parklands on Nicholson Street. It was not the best roomonly metres from the tram tracksand now he had little more than eighty dollars to his name.

  At ten oclock he walked through the cobbled lanes to a Turkish restaurant on Brunswick Street. He bought a doner kebab and ate it on the move. Something about the excursion unnerved him. It had been a principle of his life that he operated in and cherished his dark solitude at the edge of cla
morous cities and people, but now he felt exposed. He didnt dare eat at a restaurant table. That would be inviting troublearrest, a blade in his neck, a bullet at the hairline.

  Back at The Abbey he leafed through a telephone directory in the foyer. Mesic. In Melbourne it was a name that meant small-scale racketeering and a vicious brand of muscle. Hed heard that the Mesics lived in a compound in Templestowe, and there it was, Mesic K. and L., on Telegraph Road. Wyatt was obsessed with them. He wanted to hit them hard and get his money back. Tomorrow hed look at the place. That meant another car. He was running close to the edge, stealing a set of wheels every day or so like this. But there was no-one he could go to for help any more.

  He tried to sleep, his reflexes dull and velvety, but he could not escape the trams and the mean, barren laughter of young backpackers returning, shouts as people left the nearby pubs and looked for their cars. Whenever he did wake, he supposed that some noise had caused it, but an old heartache seemed to slink away at the edge of his consciousness each time, like a trace of a badly remembered and comfortless dream. It left him tense and sleepless for long stretches of time. He slept through the early trams but at eight oclock there were trams every few minutes and he woke for the day, haunted and distracted.