Garry Disher - Cross Kill

‘Fucking slag,’ Napper said.

Stella Mesic turned the ignition key. ‘Well, I won’t keep you. The two and a half thousand is yours, by the way. Fair’s fair.’

Fair’s fair. Napper got out of the Jaguar. He got into his ute and started it. Fair’s fair. He inched into the peak-hour traffic on Heidelberg Road and the words kept repeating themselves. Fair’s fair. He felt dazed. Everything had turned around on him and he hadn’t been ready for it.

The traffic was worse on Hoddle Street, bumper to bumper. Napper rode the clutch. He was low on fuel. Trouble was, the gauge was broken and he was in an inside lane. Heat shimmers disturbed the oily atmosphere outside, and hot air, smoky from the exhaust pipe, reached him from the hole in the floor. The cars in his lane were stalled for some reason. The other lanes moved, but his didn’t. There was a wog car next to him, all thick duco, chrome and full-volume stereo. Napper longed to turn the wheel hard, knock the little shit into a bus.

The thing was, people seemed to be looking at him. The wog car crept past, then a Silver Top cab, a furniture van, two or three of your average family rustbuckets, a couple of flat-faced Asians in a brand-new Volvo, all those faces peering at him in the ute, a suggestion of a snigger on their faces.

He wound down his window, leaned out and waved his fist at an elderly woman in the back seat of a taxi. ‘What are you staring at, you old slag?’

The woman shrank away from her door. She looked straight ahead. Soon the taxi was gone and he had a Renault-load of dykes next to him. Cropped hair. Singlet tops. Underarm hair. This bunch was actually laughing and pointing. Napper waited for the Renault to pass, but it didn’t. He craned his head-an ambulance was backing into the traffic ahead. All lanes were stalled now.

He half-opened his door and leaned out. ‘Help you molls with anything?’

The women in the Renault wound up their windows, locked their doors, but even though they were huddling together, leaning into one another, Napper knew he hadn’t won a victory over them.

So he opened his door and got out. He kicked the side of the Renault and tried to tell the women all the things that were crowding his head. But the words refused to come out clearly. There was only flooding hate and rage. He felt he could tear through the metal and glass. People around him were locking their doors, saying, ‘Don’t look… ignore him,’ to one another.

‘Eh?’ Napper shouted. ‘Help you molls with anything?’

Then the Renault jerked forward half a metre and Napper stepped away from it. The ambulance was gone and the traffic was moving again.

Napper turned to get back into the ute. What was eating these people? The ute looked all right. No flat tyres. Then he went around to the back of it and the rage hit him again.

The poster was the size of an opened-out newspaper and his bitch of an ex-wife had pasted it across the tailgate. You could read it a mile off: ‘WANTED: FOR FAILURE TO PAY CHILD SUPPORT’ screaming above a blowup shot of his head and shoulders. There was a bit more at the bottom, a catalogue of his crimes probably, he didn’t wait to find out. The lousy cow. He tried jerking at a corner of the poster. She’d used a powerful glue. Behind him, drivers were leaning on their horns and some of them were even laughing.

Bax wandered out of the trees, stopped in the middle of the track, cocked the heel of one handmade shoe and then the other, five hundred bucks from Footloose in Chapel Street, and cursed. Dust and mud. And a hint of onionweed odour in the fabric of his suit.

He passed some kids feeding the ducks, lovers necking on the grass, and made his way up the terraced river bank. The Mesics were waiting for him in Stella’s XJ6, Stella in the back, Leo behind the wheel. Bax folded himself into the passenger seat and said, ‘Did you get him?’

‘Listen,’ Stella said, and she thrust a microrecorder between the seats. Bax heard the fat sergeant incriminate himself.

‘Pictures?’

Leo had a video camera in his lap. He gave it to Bax, showed him how to monitor what was on the tape. Bax saw Napper and Stella clearly, both cars, both numberplates. The recording also showed time and date. ‘Nice.’

Leo retrieved the camera from him. ‘Yeah. Terrific. Now all we have to do is sort out a couple of professional gunmen tomorrow night, a piece of cake, something I do all the time.’ Bad teeth showed under his stiff ginger moustache. His face looked pouchy with calories and strain. ‘Right, Bax?’

But Bax raised a hand warningly, shutting him up. He strained to hear the tape. ‘Wyatt,’ he said at last. ‘I know that name.’

‘So?’

‘So he’s bad news, not someone you’d want to tangle with.’

‘Great,’ Leo said. ‘I’d hate to think I was going up against a wimp.’

Stella hitched herself forward on the rear seat until her face appeared in the gap between the seats, close to her husband’s upper arm. She touched him. ‘It’ll be fine, sweetie. Don’t fret.’

Leo looked down at her fingers, covered her hand with his. He said to Bax, ‘I can’t see why you don’t grab them before they break in.’

‘Think about it,’ Bax said. ‘They’ll be at their most jumpy then, most determined. You and Stella could get hurt, not only me. On the way out of the place they’ll be more vulnerable because they’ll have their hands full and will be starting to think they got away with it.’

He looked to Stella for support. She said to her husband, ‘We’ll be tied up, remember, so they’ll feel safe from us, they’ll have their money, and they won’t be expecting the police to show.’

‘You’ll probably be handcuffed,’ Bax said. ‘The pros find that quicker and easier than tying people up.’

‘Whatever,’ Stella said. She shook Leo’s arm. ‘Okay, sweetie? The police will grab them on their way off the property.’

‘Cops doing us a good turn,’ Leo said, shaking his head. ‘Why can’t we sort this pair out ourselves?’

‘One,’ Bax said, ‘you probably couldn’t. These blokes are killers, they’ll shoot their way out if they’re cornered, they’ve got more to lose than you have. Do you want to chance it? If you bring in hired guns you’ll just advertise to the world-and to Victor-how vulnerable you and Stella are.’

Bax waited. Leo looked away. ‘Two,’ Bax said, ‘news of the raid, the arrest, police around the place for the next few days, will scare off the opposition. Three, this will throw a scare into Victor. He’ll learn that his seniority and his contacts are worth fuck-all. When he realises that not only did we know about the raid, we stopped it dead and I was instrumental in protecting the family’s interests, he’ll feel left out, his power base eroded. If you bring in hired guns for protection, he’ll take the advantage, he’ll argue that it’s time to break up the firm.’

‘We can put pressure on him then,’ Stella said, ‘to go back to the States and do what he did before. He’ll continue to get his percentage, same as before.’

They fell silent. Stella hadn’t taken her hand away from Leo’s arm and after a while Bax found himself staring at it. She still had sex with Leo, so she said. She didn’t say whether or not she liked it, and she didn’t say whether or not she liked the guy himself, but she still had sex with him. This was an area in which Bax felt uncomfortable and ignorant. Once, laughing, she’d said she’d gone home still wet from him and there was Leo, wanting a screw. So, they’d screwed, she said, only she wished she’d had time to have a shower first. There was nothing calculated about the words or the way Stella delivered them-it was just the way she was. Bax hadn’t struck that kind of thing before. It did something to him, a kind of unpleasant wrench in his guts.