Garry Disher - Cross Kill

‘Pervert,’ the women said.

The ring-leader was his ex-wife and she had got the other mothers worked up. They said, ‘Pervert, pervert,’ and snapped their towels. Napper put up a meaty hand. ‘Back off, or I’ll have you in the lockup so fast your heads’ll spin.’

‘Oh, big man,’ the women said, dropping into hoarse baritones.

‘Come on, Josie,’ Napper said. ‘Give me a break.’

‘Give me maintenance and I’ll give you a break,’ his ex-wife said.

‘Give him hell,’ the women said, but they were stepping back, watching to see what he’d do. What he did was not risk embarrassment with the battery. He walked to the Caltex service station on the corner.

Wyatt watched the London Hotel for three hours that afternoon, standing patiently at the first-floor window of a second-hand bookshop on the opposite corner. At four o’clock he slipped across the street. Ornamental trees in terracotta pots stood on either side of the sliding glass doors of the hotel. Using one of them as cover, Wyatt surveyed the reception desk and the lobby. The clerk was talking on the telephone. The man’s clothes flapped and sagged on his body and his face was rubbery with anxiety, his left hand worrying the manufactured knot in his bow tie. The lobby itself was empty. Wyatt wondered how best to work this. If he went in now, the clerk would spot him and run. There were probably side and back entrances but they would take time to find.

At that moment two taxis drew into the kerb behind him. Several young women got out. They wore suits with shoulderpads and carried white vinyl conference wallets. He stood back and watched them enter the lobby. A couple of the women glanced at him. It was covetous, as though they were intoxicated by the day and wanted to admit an element of risk into it.

Wyatt waited. He watched the women walk across the lobby to claim their room keys. He went in then, using them as cover. While they conversed noisily at the reception desk, Wyatt buried his nose in a revolving display of brochures of Melbourne’s beauty spots. When the women were gone he stepped up to the desk and opened his windbreaker.

The clerk saw the.38, closed his eyes and tried to make the best of it. ‘Is sir enjoying his stay?’

Wyatt didn’t say anything. He watched the scared, eyes, waiting for the man to break.

It didn’t take long. ‘I was just doing my job,’ the clerk muttered.

Wyatt ignored that. ‘You were on the phone just now. You looked worried.’

The clerk swallowed. ‘Yes.’

‘What about?’

The clerk said, ‘Look, it’s nothing personal. I had orders to watch your movements, that’s all.’

Wyatt tried again. ‘I know that. I want to know what the phone call you had just now was about.’

‘They’ve been calling every fifteen minutes in case you came back here.’

‘And here I am,’ Wyatt said. He looked at his watch. ‘It’s four. What time do you knock off work?’

‘Any minute. I’m on eight till four.’

‘You were also on duty when I got in last night.’

‘They asked me to do extra shifts.’

‘So you could keep an eye on me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is anyone else here on the payroll? Anyone else told to keep an eye out for me?’

The clerk shook his head. ‘Just me,’ he said miserably.

‘I’ll need to collect my things.’

The clerk began to look panicky. ‘I was told to pack up everything in your room after you left this morning.’

‘Have you done it?’

The clerk nodded. ‘It’s all out the back.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ve got a room here.’

‘We’re going to chat a while, until your replacement comes on duty.’

The clerk swallowed. ‘Then what?’

‘That’s up to you. For the moment all you have to do is act like I’m a mate who’s dropped by for a drink.’

The evening-shift clerk arrived soon after that. Wyatt’s man took off his bow tie, shrugged himself into a zippered nylon jacket and led Wyatt through dark corridors to a poky courtyard room next to the motel kitchen. The air smelt of rotting food. There was a rattly airconditioning unit nearby. The clerk hesitated at his door. Wyatt nudged him with the.38. ‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t intend to kill you,’ he said, ‘although that’s open to change.’ The clerk’s shoulders slumped. He opened his door.

The room smelt of poverty. There was a dull, oily sheen to the walls, from cheap paint badly mixed and meanly applied, revealing green paint underneath. Against one wall was a plywood wardrobe with a spotty mirror, next to a varnished desk with a world map on it. A frayed armchair was in one corner, a cheap stereo in another. At some stage in the past, cigarettes had been stubbed out on the smoky plastic turntable lid. The tits-and-bums calendar on the wall was two months out of date. The feature for July was a tanned backside awkwardly cocked with grains of yellow sand clinging to the flesh.

Wyatt pushed the clerk down into the armchair and sat on the bed opposite him, the.38 dangling loosely between his knees. ‘What’s your name?’

The clerk opened and closed his mouth. Finally he said, ‘Philip.’

‘Phil, or Philip?’

‘Whatever. Doesn’t matter.’

It mattered to Wyatt. This was all part of relaxing the man, letting him feel he had some identity, some importance, despite the circumstances. ‘Which do you prefer?’

‘Philip.’

‘Okay, Philip, all I want from you is some information.’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘Why should they do that? Why should they even know you’ve been talking to me?’

Philip was silent, thinking about it. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘You fingered me, correct?’

Philip said yes. He was looking at the floor.

‘How did you know it was me? Who told you to look out for me?’

‘You were seen arriving in Melbourne a few days ago. They tailed you. They knew where you’d checked in.’

‘They. Who do you mean by they?’

Philip looked up. ‘They’re from Sydney.’

‘The Outfit?’

Philip nodded.

‘Do you work for them?’

‘Not me. I was given five hundred bucks to keep my eyes open, pass on messages, that kind of thing.’

Wyatt smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Five hundred bucks. You’re beginning to feel that’s a bit on the low side, eh, Philip? You thought your life was worth more than that.’

‘Give us a break,’ the man said, and he began to list his fears, creating a picture of meanness and badness in the Outfit. When Philip had talked himself out, Wyatt said, ‘Did you know there’s a contract out on me?’

‘Forty thousand bucks.’

The clerk smirked a little. To kill that, Wyatt raised his.38, cocked it, released the hammer, cocked it, released the hammer, until the smart look left Philip’s face. He lowered the gun again. ‘Who do you take your orders from? Kepler in Sydney?’

‘I don’t know. All I do is ring this number they gave me.’

‘Have you got a Melbourne address for them?’

Philip looked up at Wyatt. ‘I don’t know where they’re based down here. Look, forget it, stay clear, you’re just buying yourself a lot of strife.’

But Wyatt had no intention of staying clear. He couldn’t work while there was still a price on his head. He couldn’t put a team together against the Mesics while forty thousand dollars was distracting every punk on the street.

He stood up to go. There was a safe-at-last look on Philip’s face. Wyatt removed it. He said flatly, ‘I know where to find you, Philip.’

Wyatt needed a bed for the night and he needed a safe passage to Sydney, but the Outfit was a threat on both counts. He didn’t think they’d have the clout to cover every hotel, every booking office, but he didn’t want to test it. He killed time in a cinema then found a bar in a side street and nursed a Scotch, thinking it through, Renting a car was out, sitting behind a wheel for ten hours on a highway where the fuel tankers jackknifed and jobless rural kids tried to end it all by steering into the oncoming traffic. That’s also why he wouldn’t hitchhike-that and the fact that he liked to have more control when he was on the move. He could change his face, but that required time and a bolthole, and he was running out of both. He couldn’t fly-the Outfit would concentrate its energies on the check-in counters. If he wasn’t so broke, he’d charter a plane and avoid the normal passenger formalities, but his funds were low and he’d need all of it to bankroll his hit on the Mesics. That left a bus or a train-assuming the Outfit didn’t have city terminal staff on its payroll or hadn’t brought extra people down from Sydney to find him now that he’d been spotted.