Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Wyatt put his mouth to Victor’s ear. ‘Show yourself in the doorway, but don’t go in. Tell him you need a hand with your car.’

The next step was Jardine’s. Jardine flattened his back to the wall next to the door, his gun arm extended, as Victor Mesic said, ‘Leo, can you come here a sec? I stalled the car and can’t start it again.’

The doorway darkened. ‘Maybe you flooded-’

Leo felt the gun under his jaw and he stopped in his tracks. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Shut up and on the floor,’ Wyatt said.

There was a long, slim-line European radiator bolted to the hallway wall. It ticked and complained softly. Wyatt motioned with his.38: ‘On the floor, backs to the heater.’ He covered the Mesics while Jardine cuffed them to the support clamps.

Very little was said after that. This was the stage Wyatt preferred, professionals doing what they did best. The heart of the Mesic operation was a large office across the hall from the sitting room. Wyatt wasn’t interested in the massive dimpled leather sofa or the glossy desk and bookshelves. He led Jardine to the safe. It was thick, solid, painted grey. Jardine squatted in front of it. His strong fingers reached out and touched the door. ‘No problem.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘You see it all the time. They throw a few thousand bucks into a security fence and alarms, and hang onto crappy safes.’

‘How will you do it?’

Jardine brushed his fingertips around the circumference of the door. ‘Drill a hole in each corner, load with nitro, blast her open.’

Wyatt nodded. ‘If you need me I’ll be scouting around.’

Jardine took a heavy drill from his bag and started drilling. Wyatt left him there and turned off the alarm system and power to the gate. Then he prowled through the house looking for pickings. He knew the real reward would be in the safe, but he was moving instinctively toward darkness, concealed opportunities, closed in spaces.

He also wanted to remove himself from the Mesics. They were so full of loathing for each other that an unease was settling in him. Something about the whole operation bothered him. They’d done their homework, everything was going smoothly, but it was all too smooth and he was waiting for a cross.

He started with the main bedroom. On a dresser next to the bed he found a thin Louis Philippe watch and a wallet stuffed with fifties and hundreds. He counted it quickly-about a thousand dollars. He pocketed the watch and the cash and ranged quickly through the other rooms, finding nothing else. There were plenty of pictures, vases and ornate clocks, but they were all so much junk to him.

Then he went downstairs and into the office, ignoring the Mesics cuffed to the radiator. Jardine had turned the desk on its side to shield the room from the blast. He had finished drilling and was packing the holes. He didn’t acknowledge Wyatt.

Wyatt opened the front door and stepped outside. Silence was his element so he kept to the lawn, skirting the gravel drive. The house that was now Victor’s and had been the old man’s was cluttered, every flat surface crowded with vases and figurines, the pictures on the walls mostly Sunday market bush-hut scenes. The sofas and chairs were made of pinewood and red- and green-stained leather. Clunky, box-like pine dressers jutted into most of the free space. Every other surface was dazzling white enamel.

He didn’t spend more than ten minutes going through the rooms. He discovered a second watch, a gold lighter, three hundred dollars in cash, things he could carry in his pockets.

Outside again, Wyatt watched and waited in the darkness. He heard traffic in the distance, a car accelerating along a nearby street, random noises in the houses opposite the compound. There was no wind. He seemed to hear his blood flowing. He began to feel better. He liked risk, liked being alone, found the tension addictive.

Back at the first house, Jardine said, ‘Ready to blow.’ They waited in the hall with the Mesics. The nitro blast created noise and smoke but Jardine had contained the effects to the door of the safe. When the smoke cleared Wyatt could see it hanging open on one hinge. There was money stacked inside, untouched by the explosion.

‘All yours,’ Jardine said.

Wyatt made an approximate count of the money. There was over two hundred thousand there, that’s all he was interested in knowing. He began to stack it into a nylon bag, wanting to feel secure but knowing he wouldn’t be until he was well clear of this place. Two hundred thousand dollars was peanuts compared to the millions the Mesic operation would earn for the Outfit, but that didn’t mean the Outfit intended to part with it. He zippered the bag closed and joined Jardine in the hall. ‘We’ll find you,’ one or other of the Mesics began, but Wyatt closed the door on their voices.

Leo had recognised the drunk from the Volvo, only this time it was no act the man was putting on. He didn’t recognise the second man, only his style-economical, a flat expression on the runnelled river-stone face. The men weren’t gentle but they weren’t rough either. They didn’t apologise, raise their voices, speak unnecessarily, say who they were or what they were doing. They were entirely mechanical and disinterested and Leo went along with it. What Bax had said made sense. Tackling them would have been a mistake.

Then the men split up. Leo heard a drill bite into metal and he knew it was the safe. He didn’t say anything, got comfortable on the floor, turned his wrists so that the handcuff bracelets didn’t cut off his circulation. Victor and Stella were doing it too.

Then Victor said, turning his head to look at Stella, ‘See? We’re wide open. They just walked in. No security at all.’

‘Get lost, Victor.’

‘The Mesics are a pushover, that’s what this will look like.’

‘Just shut up.’

Victor’s voice was low and insistent. ‘Think about it. It’s time to get out of this Mickey Mouse business, into something where the people you meet don’t have records, don’t wear greasy overalls, where your money’s secure in some Cayman Islands bank, not sitting around in a safe waiting to be picked up by a couple of hoods, where you’re paying off the bloody police commissioner, not some sleazy plainclothes cop like Bax.’

Leo heard his wife say venemously, ‘You’ll be paid off, Victor. Just shut up.’

‘I don’t want to be paid off. I want to put my money where it’s going to quadruple itself every few months.’

Leo listened. Victor had been saying things like this to him all week when Stella wasn’t around, drawing flow charts, jabbing his finger at columns of figures. Toward the end, it seemed to make sense. Victor had also said, ‘See if you can convince the bitch-no offence, old son.’ Leo had tried. He wasn’t sure that she’d listened, though. Now, chained up while their house was being robbed, Leo tried again. ‘He’s got a point, Stel.’

But then the man with the flat look of a killer came back from his search of the property, and shortly after that Leo heard the safe blow open. He was silent, and it was a strain on him. He watched the men leave. When they were gone he jerked the handcuffs, but it was useless and suddenly every clock in the place chose that moment to chime eight o’clock.

They worked the signal using cellular phones provided by Rossiter. While Jardine opened the gate, Wyatt called Towns. The ringing tone sounded once and when Towns answered he said, ‘All clear.’ He listened for Towns’s ‘okay’, broke the connection, climbed behind the wheel of Victor Mesic’s Saab and followed Jardine’s Telecom van through the gate and onto the street.