Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Bax turned her chin toward him. He didn’t blink, didn’t give anything away, just stared at one cat’s eye and then the other. ‘How do you feel about that?’

The slightest flinch, the slightest hesitation, and he would have jacked the whole thing in. But her hand clasped his wrist, then slipped around his neck. ‘It’s all hot air.’ She kissed him. ‘If it isn’t, then he’s subjecting our assets to an unacceptable degree of risk.’ She kissed him again and pushed his head down. He found the hollow inside her thigh joint, the area he’d told her he liked most. It was fairly stubbly today. He burrowed, lapping at her.

Later, when they were rocking together, she stopped him sharply, clamping the hair above his ears in her fists. ‘Think, Nick. Think.’

On Thursday morning Lloyd Phelps flew into Sydney with a pocketful of the diamonds that netted the Outfit a hundred thousand dollars four times a year. The diamonds were rough-cut pink Argyle diamonds from a mine in the Kimberley area of Western Australia. The mine’s owners paid Phelps good money to secure customers in Sydney four times a year. They didn’t know that the Outfit paid Phelps good money to steal a pocketful of pink diamonds from them four times a year.

The Outfit required Phelps to leave the stolen diamonds in an airport locker, complete his legitimate company business in the city and fly back to the Kimberley. Phelps didn’t know what happened to the diamonds after he’d left them at the airport but he guessed that a buyer flew in from Hong Kong or Amsterdam, collected them and flew out again, leaving payment behind. Phelps often thought about that payment-cash, maybe? US dollars? Yen? Bearer bonds? Phelps himself collected a cash payment left for him at the airport-ten thousand smackers, four times a year. By the time he’d sweetened a security officer and a computer records clerk at the mine, however, only six of the ten thousand was left. He sometimes thought about hanging on to the diamonds, intercepting the buyer, then disappearing with diamonds and payment. He didn’t think about it for long, though. He didn’t have that kind of nerve. The Outfit would find him. Somewhere, some day, they’d find him, and the result would be painful and permanent.

In the three years that he’d been making the diamond run, Phelps had evolved a body language to suit the role. He wore dark glasses. He looked somehow unapproachable. In the Kimberley, where grown men wore shorts and long socks to the office, Phelps wore long trousers and a tie. On the flight to Darwin and then on to Sydney, people would glance at the unsmiling man with the briefcase manacled to his wrist and wonder about him. He never acknowledged them. In public places he tended to hang back, checking faces, watching for danger without appearing to do so. He held himself like a spring ready to uncoil, a man fine-tuned to danger. He imagined movie cameras tracking his movements, isolating him, cinema audiences grabbing at their armrests.

‘That’s him,’ Jardine said.

Wyatt saw a short, edgy, self-conscious individual, dressed in trousers and a shirt ten years out of date, collect a suitcase from the Ansett carousel. ‘Bundle of nerves,’ he said.

Jardine nodded. ‘If he had to go through customs they’d be onto him like a shot.’

Jardine and Wyatt were waiting with an empty trolley at the next carousel. They waited while Phelps crossed to the exit doors, then abandoned the trolley and followed fifty metres behind him. Outside the building, the air smelt of aviation fuel and idling taxis. Someone yelled, ‘Share a cab to the city?’ Air erupted from the brakes of a waiting bus, stale and metallic.

Phelps turned around and went back into the terminal. The two men followed. Phelps looked about nervously, sometimes stopping dead, turning around accusingly, going on again. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Wyatt said.

Phelps finally stopped at a bank of lockers. They saw him take a small parcel from the briefcase, place it in one of the lockers, and lock the door. Then he walked away in great agitation.

His next stop was a men’s on the first floor. A short time later, Wyatt went in, just as Phelps was coming out of a cubicle. Wyatt stood at the urinal. He waited until Phelps had gone out again then went into the cubicle Phelps had used. The air was foul with Phelps’s fear. Wyatt found the locker key taped under the cistern lid. He pocketed it and went out. Phelps was going through the exit door at the far end of the terminal, Jardine a few metres behind him.

Wyatt had about thirty minutes for the next stage. He hurried back to the lockers. He didn’t open Phelps’s locker immediately but watched it for five minutes. Satisfied that no one was around who shouldn’t be, he put the key in the lock, took out the packet and taped a page torn from a notebook to the back wall of the locker. On the note were the words ‘Have a nice day’ and a grinning face.

Wyatt shut the locker again, inserted money, turned the key and returned to the men’s. He went into the same cubicle again, lifted the cistern lid and taped the key to it. His part of the job was running smoothly. Jardine meanwhile was watching Phelps. Phelps was expecting to collect the fee left for him by the Outfit in a locker at the other end of the terminal building. They had followed an Outfit courier to the airport a couple of hours earlier, had seen him deposit Phelps’s fee and leave the key in a slot under a gold phone outside a pharmacy, and had helped themselves to it. Phelps’s ten thousand dollars was now in Jardine’s pocket. The grinning face in the first locker was Wyatt’s idea. He thought it might make the bad news harder to swallow.

He found Jardine leaning on a column outside. The big man looked as though he owned the place. There was a trace of amusement on his face. Wyatt didn’t say anything until they were in the car park, crawling in Jardine’s car toward the pay booths.

‘How did he react?’

‘A caricature of disbelief and outrage,’ Jardine said. ‘He went white, bolted outside and jumped in the first cab.’

‘What will he do?’

‘He’ll shit himself for a while. He can’t go back to check on the diamonds in case it’s an outside job and he finds an angry foreigner there. He’ll want his money from the Outfit but he doesn’t know if it’s a cruel joke on their part or it really is an outside job, in which case he’ll be scared they’ll think he did it.’

Jardine had nothing else to say and that suited Wyatt. Jardine had no use for small talk either. They rode in silence back to the Dorset Hotel. Wyatt thought about the kind of phone call the Outfit was getting from its diamond buyer about now. He imagined the soured relations and the Outfit’s hundred thousand dollar loss. He imagined the other damage he had lined up for them.

Max Heneker’s wife was oddly proud of her husband’s unusual job. He spent weekdays at home with her in their place at Palm Beach, playing the stock market, gardening, walking with her along the beach. Quality time, she called it, and that was why she didn’t mind his flying interstate every weekend. ‘He’s a troubleshooter,’ she explained to her friends. ‘Company computers are always tied up Mondays to Fridays so he goes in at weekends to check for viruses, hackers, unauthorised use, etcetera, etcetera.’ Her friends seemed envious. They had husbands who got in the way on weekends and were distant and cranky with them the rest of the time.

Max’s story to his wife was an approximation of the truth. Yes, he worked every weekend but he didn’t go interstate and his knowledge of computers was limited to doing simple accounting on his Toshiba laptop. In fact, Max went no further than a first floor hotel suite in Kings Cross and he was what the police would call a distributor.