by Garry Disher
‘A certain zeal has entered the investigation,’ Erakor continued. ‘The police have asked for warrants to search your bank records and other business dealings.’
De Lisle leaned forward, hissing. ‘You bastard. Grace isn’t the issue, you’re just using her as an excuse. You want my money. You bastard.’
Erakor shrugged. ‘I’m not in charge of the investigation.’
‘But you told them about my bank holdings, right? You and your crooked cronies want to rip me off, seize my deposits, under-declare what was there and keep the rest for yourselves. I know how it works.’
Erakor gazed at him levelly. ‘I’m giving you a chance to escape.’
De Lisle changed tack. ‘Have you issued the warrants yet? Can’t you do something to rescind them? Walter, old friend-’
Walter Erakor was flat and hard and there was no friendship in him. ‘We issue them tomorrow, maybe the next day.’
Relief flooded De Lisle. ‘I need twenty-four hours, maybe less. I need to be here when the banks open in the morning.’
Walter Erakor began to smile. It was a beam that said he could delay the warrants in return for a cash consideration. De Lisle groaned. He looked at his watch. Just as well the yacht was ready to put to sea. God, why hadn’t he given the Tiffany to Grace instead of that Wintergreen slag? None of this would have happened.
He groaned again. Who was he kidding? Keeping Grace sweet wouldn’t have stopped Erakor and his mates getting greedy. They must have loved it when Grace showed up with her nose out of joint, giving them the excuse they needed.
He looked at Erakor. ‘How much?’
****
Thirty-seven
It had to do with context. If you see a workman among a slouch of workmen, that’s all he is. Similarly, you don’t look twice at an airline passenger aboard a plane-load of passengers, not when you’ve got your mind on more pressing matters. But when one of those passengers, standing alone in the Port Vila terminal building, held his head tilted at a certain angle, Niekirk knew that he’d seen him before. A minute later the answer came to him: Wyatt, meeting the fence on a park bench in Melbourne.
Where was Springett? On the island? Coming by a later flight, a different airline?
Niekirk, keeping well back in another taxi, tailed Wyatt to a cliff-top mansion on the other side of the harbour. He saw Wyatt get out and check casually for outside cameras and sensor alarms. Later he tailed Wyatt to the ferry stop for the island resort across the harbour.
He recalled that there had been a few passengers in first class when he boarded in Sydney, and the man had been among them. The surveillance photograph had shown only the man’s inclined head, animated by the woman’s company, and his shoulders. Now Niekirk had a clearer image of him: hooked, pitiless kind of face, black hair pushed indifferently off his forehead, tall and loose in the frame, a habit of touching his jaw every few minutes. The guy had a poor dress sense for the tropics: trousers, shoes, long-sleeved shirt rolled back at the wrists. Niekirk was wearing yellow shorts, sandals and a ‘Life’s a bitch, then you die’ T-shirt so that he’d melt in with the Australian yobbos who populated Asia and the Pacific.
Niekirk couldn’t watch two places at once. He’d come here for De Lisle, so he went back to the house on the cliff top and slept fitfully through the night in the passenger seat of a rental car. He had a story ready, but no one came near him.
The first rattling diesel motors of the day woke him at five-thirty. He crossed the road. The house still had its shuttered look; the yacht still hadn’t docked.
Niekirk drove down to the wharf, bought coffee and sandwiches, and returned to his watch over De Lisle’s house. He wondered what Riggs and Mansell were doing. Maybe they’d shot each other by now. When told what De Lisle was up to and that there’d be no more jobs, Riggs had gone very still, dangerously quiet, and Mansell had blustered. Neither man felt ready to quit: ‘Not when we’re onto something good,’ Mansell said. The only analogy Niekirk could think of was grief: it was as though a loved one had been snatched away and they wanted a sense of closure before they could put the grief to rest. He’d given them the address of De Lisle’s house in the hills behind Coffs, told them they might pick up some goodies for themselves there, told them to keep De Lisle on ice if he happened to show up.
Niekirk saw the shutters open at three o’clock in the afternoon. He crossed the road and stood where he could see down between the houses to the water. The yacht had come in. As he watched, a water taxi called in at the dock and De Lisle stepped aboard. He saw it sweep among the moored yachts and tie up at Reriki Island. Certainty began to settle in Niekirk. Wyatt was here to meet De Lisle. Wyatt and Jardine had been fencing stuff on behalf of De Lisle all along.
He sweated it out, only relaxing when he saw the water taxi skimming back across the water, De Lisle upright in the back. When De Lisle got out, he had the tartan suitcase with him. So, the island was the drop-off point.
Niekirk went back to his car. But maybe Wyatt had been ripped off, too, and was here to even the score. Niekirk sat there for an hour, sticking to the vinyl seat, baking in his glass and metal cocoon. He was still there late in the afternoon when De Lisle appeared again, walking this time.
Niekirk began to hate it all. If he shadowed De Lisle on foot, he risked losing him if the little shit got picked up by a vehicle later on. If he took the car, there was the hassle of traffic and parking in the narrow streets. In the end he got out and tailed De Lisle on foot. De Lisle wasn’t carrying anything, so at least he wasn’t on the run with their stuff.
De Lisle made for a cafй called Ma Kincaid’s. Niekirk was watching it from under a Cinzano umbrella across the road, face disguised by a straw stuck in a frosty glass of iced coffee, when Wyatt appeared from an alley behind Ma Kincaid’s. He had his mouth open, his tongue apparently exploring the back of his mouth, and he was carrying a parcel and seemed pleased about something. Niekirk liked none of it.
****
Thirty-eight
Wyatt didn’t hear anything until it was too late. He was on the narrow balcony, watching the cliff-top house across the water as the sun weakened behind the mountains, waiting for full dark so that he could cross to the mainland and tackle De Lisle, and heard nothing above the chopping blades of the ceiling fan in the room behind him, the mutter of the island’s generator, the scrape and rattle of wind in the palm tree fronds, the band thumping in the dining room a short distance away, the men and women toiling up the path from the ferry, spectres with white teeth, shirts and dresses, drenched in duty-free lotions. And now and then his tongue flickered over the hole torn inside his upper jaw. Deep, raw, salty; a dull, receding ache; a huge relief. So all of Wyatt’s senses were distracted and he was unprepared for an attack from behind.
Until he heard a slick, oiled, double click, the slide of an automatic pistol jacking a round into the firing chamber. The voice came from inside the room; just inside the open sliding door, was Wyatt’s estimation. He stiffened his arms on the chair.
‘Uh uh. Wrap your arms around yourself as if you were cold. That’s it. Now stand, turn, come back here into the room, nice and easy, all the time in the world.’
Wyatt tracked the voice. The man was retreating farther into the room. He read the voice: arrogance, certainty, experience, wasting nothing.
Wyatt hadn’t wanted a light behind him as he waited on the balcony and so the room was dark, illuminated only by the green LED time display of the bedside clock. It was reading 20:05 and picked out the man’s face in a play of pallid cheeks and eye sockets and solid bones. The dark pistol gestured: ‘On the bed. Now, place both pillows on the floor-I said place, not throw.’
There was a pause, the man satisfying himself that Wyatt hadn’t secreted a weapon under the pillows. ‘Now I want you flat on your back, head touching the bedhead, hands clasped under your head.’
Wyatt complied. It was not a position he’d want to maintain for long. He knew his arms would begin to ache. He wa
s too rigid, too awkward, placed so that he’d signal any intention to go on the offensive long before it could do him any good, and the gunman was counting on that.
‘What’s your connection to De Lisle?’
‘Nothing. Never met him.’
‘You’ve been selling stuff for him.’
‘No.’
‘You were photographed with Frank Jardine and a fence back in Melbourne. You were trying to offload a Tiffany brooch for De Lisle.’
‘Not for De Lisle. For myself.’
As Wyatt’s eyes adjusted further to the dark, he saw a sinewy frame, a thick tangle of nondescript hair, and dispassionate eyes set in a cold face, facial lines like cracks in cement. Was this the man who’d frightened Jardine to death? He imagined the man playing with Jardine, resting on his friend a set of dark eyes that would have seemed bottomless and unendurable.
‘I stole the Tiffany,’ Wyatt said. ‘I found out later I’d stolen it from someone De Lisle was shagging.’
It was language he hoped the man would appreciate. The planes of the man’s face shifted, became less controlled, and the voice lost its metallic edge as emotion moved it: ‘He gave it to some sheila? Jesus Christ.’
As if he were talking to himself. Wyatt shifted a little, crossing his feet at the ankle, moving his hands until they clasped the back of his neck, not his head.
The man stiffened automatically, his gun arm tensed, but Wyatt could see that his attention was mostly inwards, on De Lisle.
‘Now he’s getting ready to run,’ Wyatt said, keeping the focus away from himself. ‘You do all the dirty work, he fucks up and still reaps all of the profit.’
The man laughed. ‘Keep guessing, pal. You’re history anyway. Reach one hand over and turn on the bedside light.’
Wyatt saw the man step back into the corner as the light came on, then pull on the drawstring that closed the curtains over the sliding insect-screen door leading to the balcony. Finally the man reached down dreamily, picked up a cushion, and advanced on the bed. There was no suppressor on the pistol, so a cushion, interspersed at point-blank range, was the next best thing. Wyatt said, to distract the man again:
‘How did you get a gun into the country?’
‘Had a permit, didn’t I.’
A cop? The Niekirk character Mansell had told him about? Wyatt said, ‘I can help you get De Lisle.’
‘Forget it,’ Niekirk said, stepping forward.
Wyatt sidearmed his water glass across the space between them. Niekirk lifted the tip of his gun, let the glass sail by. That was his mistake; it granted Wyatt one more second of life. He used it to yank on the electric flex of the bedside lamp and in the sudden darkness he rolled away from the snapping pistol, over the side and onto the floor.
He scrabbled along the carpet to the end of the bed and waited a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness again. Niekirk fired twice, placing his shots, keeping them low, but he didn’t have a target, only intuition and hope.
Wyatt tensed. He had marked a passage between the cane armchairs to the balcony, where the glass door was open and only a curtain separated him from the night. He sprang from the gap between the bed and the wall, streaked low across the room.
Niekirk had him now. He snapped off three more shots. Too quick, too careless. Glass broke in the side window of the balcony. He paused, waiting for Wyatt to fumble at the curtains, to silhouette himself and present a solid target into which he could empty his clip.
Wyatt read his intentions. Staying low, he picked up the glass-topped coffee table and threw it, aiming at Niekirk’s knees. Niekirk went down; there was another shot.
Lights and voices started in the darkness. ‘I heard a gun.’
‘Come away, dear.’
‘I tell you, someone shot a hole through our window.’
Then there were other voices, other lights.
‘Call security.’
‘What number?’
‘I don’t know, do I? Use your brains, woman. Call reception.’
‘There’s no need to take that tone.’
Behind Wyatt, Niekirk was rolling onto one hip, patting the carpet for the gun. Wyatt reached one hand over his shoulder to the space beneath his collar, between his shoulderblades, and drew and threw the fishing knife. He wanted the throat and got it, the blade spearing Niekirk’s windpipe, taking away his voice, leaving him with only the froth and rattle of his useless breathing to keep him company as he died.
Wyatt left through the balcony door and slipped over the side, a shadow among the shadows.
****
Thirty-nine
He edged down the terraced garden slope, dodging fleshy spurs, exposed root cages and stiff vine tendrils. The island’s generator continued to throb through the night, the only calm point in a place of alarmed cries and running feet and jerking torch beams. Once or twice he froze; but there were security guards and paths and lighted areas to get around, so he moved again, showing himself this time.
Shouting, running, waving his arms to confound the searchers and witnesses: ‘The shots came from that room… I saw someone over here… Careful, he’s armed… He ran up the hill…’
The row of cabins at the water’s edge sat on stilts. When he was clear of the confusion above him, Wyatt took shelter under the cabin closest to the ferry mooring, his feet ankle deep in seawater. The ferry wasn’t there. He could see it across the harbour, waiting at the little wharf on the mainland. It wouldn’t be in a hurry to return to the island. The traffic this late at night was all oneway, guests returning from the mainland casinos.
Wyatt considered his options. He didn’t want to swim. His shoes would protect him from the spines of stonefish as he waded into the water but the island was ringed with coral and the guidebooks warned against sea snakes, cone shells and sea urchins. He imagined the coral tearing open his skin, his blood attracting sharks; he imagined the numbing pain as venom shut down his nervous system. These were fears he could only live with in the daylight, when he could see what was coming.
There were plenty of small boats on the island. Half a dozen aluminium dinghies powered by outboard motors were moored to the jetty. A paddleboat and snorkel hire concession operated from a shack at the edge of the only stretch of sand on the island, just beyond the jetty.
Wyatt slipped out of the sheltering cabin and ran half-crouched toward the jetty. Then he stopped, flattening himself on the mossy wetness of the stone shelf that led into the water. Figures were loping along the jetty. Wyatt watched as they peered into each dinghy. A moment later they were gone, leaving two men to continue the search of the hire boats. Finally a security guard growled a few orders, climbed into one of the dinghies and sped away across the black harbour, trailing phosphorescence and a high, small-motor whine.
Wyatt crouched ready to run again but was warned off a second time. Somebody had called the police. Three launches were approaching the island from the mainland, going fast, searchlights poking at the dead water.
Wyatt allowed himself half a minute’s grace, mentally mapping the harbour and the high ground opposite, where the costly white houses sat on green lawns that stretched to private moorings on the water. There was a light burning above De Lisle’s mooring.
Just then a searchlight swept erratically along the shoreline, highlighting cabins and mangroves. Wyatt ducked. People were gathering on the jetty, shouting, encouraging the police launches.
Wyatt’s options were shrinking. The ferry was out of the question; so were the bulbous orange paddleboats the tourists played about in. He couldn’t head inland, into finger-pointing chaos. That left only the rocky shoreline at the uninhabited corner of the island. He slipped under the first cabin again, then down the row away from the jetty. The world beyond the final cabin was dark, treacherous, and that’s where he let himself be swallowed up by the night.
Away from the jetty and garden lights his eyes began to adjust to the gloom. He came upon cliffs first, limestone scored and fissured and s
harp enough to tear open his hands and shoes. Then the cliffs dropped away and he was wading knee-deep in water and finally picking a path along a metre-wide band of coarse, corally sand. Mosquitoes swarmed around his head, and in the darkness and the urgency of his slapping hands he didn’t see the object that spilled him onto his face.
He was out for a few seconds, all the breath driven from his body. When he could move again he climbed free of the trap and explored his ribs, hoping he hadn’t cracked them. It hurt to breathe and his head swam dizzily.
He sat on the sand for a while, breathing shallowly, concentrating, reducing the pain to a size he could shape and channel. It wasn’t a mangrove root that had caught his shins, and he hadn’t pitched onto a sharp-edged log-it was something unchanged in centuries that had trapped him and it was also his salvation.
Wyatt got to his feet. The outrigger section had been fashioned from a sturdy branch about two metres long, pointed at both ends and shaped to slice through the water. It was separated from the body of the canoe itself by two bamboo poles about three metres long. The canoeist sat in a hacked-out tree trunk. Even in the darkness Wyatt could see that both the outrigged float and the main body had been daubed in bright paint. The only concession to the twentieth century was the binding: nylon rope instead of vines or raffia fibre.
Wyatt turned the canoe over. The paddle was underneath, fashioned from a machined board that had probably washed up after a storm. He tried to imagine the man or woman who owned the canoe: someone who had nowhere else to store it, someone who fished the dark side of the island, away from the eyes of the Europeans who still ran the little republic.
He hauled the canoe over the sand to the sea’s edge, tugging it by the axe-fashioned bow. It was heavy, and sat low in the water. He waded out until he was waist deep, the water cold and sobering, erasing the clutter from his mind. For the next couple of minutes he eyed the narrow stretch of water between the island and the mainland. The police launches were concentrating their search around the international yachts and the two ferry stops. Wyatt had no need or intention of straying there. Where he wanted to cross, the harbour was black, impenetrable. If he set out now, he wouldn’t be spotted.