Garry Disher - Port Vila Blues

The job was done. Mansell and Riggs were ready to leave but still Niekirk was wary. If Mansell and Riggs had the opportunity to drive away with half a million, why should they be satisfied with the twenty-five thousand dollar fee that De Lisle had paid into their accounts?

The silence stretched between them, Niekirk at ease with it, Mansell beginning to show signs of strain. It was always like that. There didn’t seem to be an end point to Niekirk’s eyes, only darkness, and no one ever endured his stare for long. Mansell turned and got into the driver’s seat of the car.

But Riggs seemed to think that he had something to prove. He winked at Niekirk, an expression edged with contempt. ‘See you on the next job,’ he said, climbing into the passenger seat.

Mansell fired up the engine. The Range Rover began to creep across the car yard. Niekirk watched it burble away, on to the road and into the darkness.

Springett and Lillecrapp worked the surveillance using a pair of Honda 750s, not cars, wanting speed, ease and concealment on the tight mountain roads. They maintained contact on a little-used emergency band, restricting themselves to clipped commands that might almost have been static, and kept well back, lights off, when they tailed the Telecom van from the bank to the car yard.

Lillecrapp went on ahead to an unlit service station with instructions to tail the Range Rover. Springett watched Niekirk, Riggs and Mansell make the transfer with night binoculars, stationing himself on rising ground behind the car yard.

So far, he’d seen nothing iffy-but that didn’t mean anything. Niekirk and his men could easily have been skimming off some of the money while they were in the bank itself, let alone in the van. Surely the temptation was there. No one had known to the last dollar how big the take would be, after all. As soon as Springett had got word that the money would be in the bank he’d briefed De Lisle in Sydney, and De Lisle had arranged the hit. Niekirk, Riggs and Mansell were De Lisle’s men, not his.

If they were crooked-and someone had to be, given that the Tiffany brooch had suddenly shown up again- then Springett wanted to be sure of his facts.

He took the glasses away from his face, blinked and rubbed his eyes, focused on the yard again. The Range Rover was leaving. Lillecrapp would pick it up farther along the road and tail it. Springett’s instructions had been clear: ‘Stay with the vehicle until you get an idea of where it’s headed. There’s no need to follow it all the way to Sydney. What I’m interested in is if they stash something somewhere along the way, meet with someone, unaccountably double back, that kind of thing.’

Lillecrapp had blinked uncertainly, brushing his ill-cut fringe away from his forehead. ‘You don’t want me to stop them? Heavy them?’

‘Christ, no. Just do what you’re told.’

Niekirk stayed behind after the Range Rover left. Springett watched him. The man was thorough, giving the van a final check. Springett knew there’d be no joy there for forensic technicians. The three men had worn gloves, so there’d be no prints to give them away. They hadn’t smoked; they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. They might have left clothing fibres or shoe grit behind at the bank, but soon there wouldn’t be any clothing or shoes available for a match, only ash somewhere. These guys were pros.

Finally Niekirk wheeled out a big motorcycle that had been stashed behind a rubbish skip and packed the gym bags into the panniers. It was one-thirty in the morning when he left the yard. Springett stayed well behind him. The roads out of the hills and down onto the coastal plain were fast and quiet, yet Niekirk kept to the speed limit all the way.

There was probably half a million dollars strapped to the bike. As Springett had informed De Lisle, it would be in new bills, consecutive serial numbers, therefore easy to trace. But that was De Lisle’s problem. Springett had no intention of ripping off the money himself. There were fences around who would give him twenty cents in the dollar, but that would take time and effort and leave him exposed. It was better to take the one-third cut De Lisle was offering him to identify the hits. Only De Lisle was in a position to get the full return on half a million, a haul that would be like hot potatoes to anyone else.

Springett tailed Niekirk down to the Doncaster freeway and along it to the Burke Road exit. The traffic was sparse, the lights in their favour. A sweet setup, he thought. De Lisle sends in a contract team from across the border, men who aren’t known to the local boys in blue and who can fade back to Sydney after every hit. The foot soldiers like Riggs and Mansell get paid a decent flat rate. I get a retainer plus the promise of a one-third share of the take once the heat has died down and De Lisle has laundered everything. Ditto Niekirk. And if Niekirk and his men get arrested, there’s a number they can call, a green light to get them out of that kind of trouble.

Sweet, Springett thought, except De Lisle has some serious dirt on us, we have to wait for our money, and already someone has fucked up with that Tiffany.

Springett followed Niekirk onto the south-eastern freeway and toward Carlton, keeping below the speed limit, the heavy bike burbling under him. At Faraday Street he stopped and got off the bike, watching Niekirk make two sweeps of the street and finally make for a taxi parked halfway along. There were a dozen taxis just like it nearby, all operated by Red Stripe, a small suburban outfit housed in a narrow tyre-change and service depot on the next corner. Taxis moved in and out of Faraday Street twenty-four hours a day, shift drivers clocking on and off at irregular intervals.

Springett nodded to himself. No one was going to look twice at a man wheeling up on a bike and transferring his gear to a taxi. He guessed that the taxi light, meter, radio and Red Stripe decals were authentic but that the car itself, a Falcon, was simply Niekirk’s transport when he was in Melbourne to pull a job or do the groundwork for one. He could go anywhere in it and no one would question his right to be there.

Springett watched from the shadows. The boot lid up, his body screening the bootwell, Niekirk transferred the money from the bike’s panniers to the car. Two-thirty. He got in and started the taxi. Springett kicked the Honda into life and tailed him again, out of the parking space and across Carlton toward the southern edge of the city, eventually rolling down La Trobe Street and turning left into Spencer Street.

As far as he knew, this was the final stage for Niekirk. A courier would be coming to collect the money and take it to De Lisle. The operation was protected in part by safeguards and circuit breakers. De Lisle remained as far as possible in the background, activating the members of his team separately and by message drop. In turn, Niekirk and his men met only when they were planning and pulling a hit. Springett and De Lisle stayed in touch via a couple of post office boxes.

It worked, but still, De Lisle had a hold over each of them and Springett hated it. He liked to stay on top of things when he could. So far he trusted De Lisle. He had to. But he had no reason to trust Niekirk, Riggs, Mansell or the courier, who’d all been hired by De Lisle.

He braked the Honda. Niekirk parked the taxi and fetched a tartan suitcase from the boot. He was outside a place called U-Store, a self-storage warehouse a few hundred metres west of the big rail terminal on Spencer Street. It was a long, single-storey building with a roof and a verandah of red corrugated iron like a colonial style farmhouse. It looked no more or less out of place than anything else in that part of the city.