Garry Disher - Port Vila Blues

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.

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 was 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.