Garry Disher - Cross Kill

There might have been a grin on Jardine’s face. ‘Uh huh.’

It was Sunday morning. They were in Jardine’s rooms at the Dorset and the balcony window was open, letting in a morning breeze. Wyatt had slept on the couch. He felt stiff and cranky, impatient to start work.

Just then a trick of the atmosphere brought a voice clearly into the room from the street below: ‘Oppose the third runway. Sign this petition now.’

Jardine jerked his head at the window and this time he did smile. ‘I donated twenty bucks to the cause yesterday.’

Wyatt suddenly felt an unease close to melancholy. Now and then he glimpsed inside a normal life, a normal person’s engagement with the wider world. Certainly there were things in the world that he hated-stupidity, viciousness, ostentation-but he’d never voted, joined a cause, had a pub debate with anyone about anything. If forced to think about it he might argue that life muddled along only because people compromised, but he rarely gave a thought to what made the world tick. It was as though the things other people did had nothing to do with him. And while he was perceptive enough to understand what some people in some situations were thinking- other crims, for example, or hostages and holdup victims-he realised he knew very little about the inner lives of ordinary people. He said helplessly, ‘What third runway?’

Jardine laughed. ‘Next time you read the paper, check out the news for a change.’ He knew Wyatt. He knew that Wyatt read newspapers solely for the purpose of the tingle in his nerve endings that told him here was a sweet job: a payroll, a bank, a ticket office.

Wyatt hadn’t sat around like this with a friend for a long time. He hadn’t felt embarrassed for a long time. But this was small talk and he wasn’t comfortable with it. ‘I can offer you a fee, or a percentage.’

Jardine was drinking coffee. He’d gone down for croissants earlier and he dabbed at the pastry flakes on his chest with a wet forefinger. ‘Are you trusting your instincts, or do the facts fit?’

‘Both. The place feels right, there’s no security to speak of, and internally the Mesics are in a mess. I need to hit them this coming Thursday, when the money’s there, before someone else moves in on them.’

‘And Kepler’s agreed to bankroll you?’

Wyatt nodded. ‘We meet his people in Melbourne tomorrow morning to work out the details.’

‘We do the hit, they come in after us and mop up?’

Wyatt nodded again.

‘Are you sure the Mesics will be at home when we hit the place?’

‘They feel vulnerable at present. Some cowboys have hit a couple of their operations. Also, they’re not likely to go out and leave the money unattended.’

‘Will two of us be enough? Can’t Kepler send in his hard boys as well?’

‘Kepler’s people are there for backup before the job. I don’t like the idea of too many guns on the ground, especially Outfit guns. Also, Kepler’s not keen on his people getting hurt, or being there if the cops come in. If there is any flack, we cop it. I can live with that.’

Jardine looked across the room at his computer. The face of the monitor was milky grey under the dust sheet. ‘Of course, it would help if the bloke you took with you on this job had worked with you before.’

Wyatt said, ‘Yes.’

‘And he knew Melbourne.’

‘That too.’

‘Plus he hadn’t forgotten his old skills and wouldn’t rob you.’

Wyatt stood up. ‘Come on, Jardine. Yes or no?’

‘I want a flat fee.’

‘I’ll pay you fifty thousand. If there’s nothing in the house, if it all goes wrong, I’ll have to owe you.’

‘Coming from anyone else,’ Jardine said, ‘that wouldn’t bring me any comfort.’

Wyatt put ticket wallets on the coffee table. ‘Ansett at four o’clock.’

The phone rang just as Bax was knocking off for the day. He picked it up and heard Stella Mesic say, ‘Is Mack there?’

This was a signal and Bax felt himself go tight inside. ‘There’s no Mack here, sorry. You must have the wrong number.’

‘Sorry about that,’ Stella said. The line went dead and after a few minutes of paper shuffling, Bax rang through to reserve an unmarked Falcon from the motor pool. It was waiting for him in the garage and Bax cringed as he strapped on the seatbelt: the interior smelt of men who lived on cigarettes and nerves and doner kebabs. Bax had also read somewhere about the vinyl in modern cars, how it secreted toxins into the air you breathed.

He cranked down the window a little and headed across to the Doncaster Freeway, where he took the Bulleen Road exit. Stella Mesic’s blue XJ6 was waiting in the Heidi Gallery car park. Bax skirted the stained grey flank of the gallery, dodged sculptures and trees, and found Stella at the river’s edge.

She didn’t smile, didn’t touch him, just stood there clasping her upper arms, and that was hard for Bax. She’d snatched some time with him on the weekend, and Bax was playing it through his head like a film: her legs, her flat brown stomach, the smattering of fine hairs around her navel.

Now it was as if none of that had ever happened when she said flatly, ‘We’ve got a problem.’

He swallowed. ‘A problem?’

‘A cop came by the house last night.’

In a rush, Bax said, ‘Internal affairs? Asking about me?’

A grimace showed on her face. ‘Calm down, nothing to do with you. This was an overweight individual called Napper, cunning but not very sharp. An ordinary station cop, a sergeant, only he wasn’t wearing his uniform.’

‘Local?’

‘No. Some inner suburban nick.’

Bax couldn’t work it out. ‘What did he want?’

‘He said he had reliable information. He said the family was going to be hit soon. He said they’d be pros, and they’d be armed. He said he thought we’d like to know.’

Bax ran his mind through the names of men he’d put away over the years and men who’d ever worked with or for the Mesics or set up in opposition to them. He said, thinking aloud, ‘The guy in the Volvo last week.’

‘Therefore we have to treat what this cop says seriously; it supports what we already know.’

‘Did this Napper character say where he got his information from? I mean, how come he approached you first and not the local boys or D24? Did he name names?’

Bax was losing control a little. He knew it from the way Stella was watching him, head cocked at an angle, waiting for the bluster to pass.

‘Well, we come to the crux of the matter, don’t we?’ she said. ‘One, our Mr Napper thought we might prefer to deal with the problem ourselves, avoid having cops hiding in the shrubbery. Two, he said he knew who and when and how, but at this stage he wasn’t at liberty to divulge that sort of information.’

Bax nodded. ‘He thought you might like to think it over, come to some sort of arrangement with him.’

‘Exactly. A ten thousand dollar arrangement.’

‘And once this crisis is over,’ Bax said, ‘he’ll be on the doorstep again, wondering if some more permanent sort of arrangement mightn’t be possible.’

‘Yeah, well, you’d know all about that,’ Stella said, and the way she said it was like a knife slicing through Bax’s heart.

He coughed. ‘Who did he speak to? All three of you?’

‘Good, your mind’s working. He spoke to Leo and me. Victor was at the gym and we haven’t told him yet. I thought we might leave him out of things at this stage.’

‘How did Leo take it?’

‘How do you expect? He’s in a stew, now he’s had time to think about it. He wants to bring in some of his hood friends to guard the place.’