Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Wyatt wasn’t carrying the money. The money was in the Telecom van, giving it a second margin of security. Wyatt was allowing for the bored or nosy patrol cop who might just decide to give a Saab driver a hard time but who wouldn’t look twice at a Telecom van. The first margin was Wyatt himself. He drove several hundred metres behind Jardine and he watched the traffic ahead of the van, behind it, next to it. If the Outfit wanted the two hundred thousand badly enough they might try a snatch in the open. Wyatt knew what to look for: he’d pulled stunts like it himself, running courier vans off the road to snatch bullion, furs, Scotch, oil paintings. ‘When you’re on the freeway,’ he’d told Jardine, ‘don’t let yourself get boxed in by heavy trucks working in pairs; stay in the far lane; don’t let yourself get forced onto an exit ramp or the dividing strip.’

‘And off the freeway?’

‘Off the freeway look out for roadworks, broken-down cars, any sort of emergency where you’re asked to slow down or stop or detour. If they put a car across the road, don’t stop, ram the rear of it at an angle.’

‘And fly through the windscreen.’

‘I doubt it. With most cars there’s no engine and not much structural reinforcement at the back. If you hit it in the right place you’ll shift it sideways and get through.’

Nothing like that happened on the roads out of Templestowe. They joined the freeway at Doncaster Road. There was very little traffic going into the city. The space-age lights floated high above the broad dreaming lanes and Wyatt followed Jardine at a steady 90 kph along a shallow valley that gave no sense of the city’s tiled roofs and street grids and three million people.

They got off the freeway at Hoddle Street, leaving the Saab and the Telecom van in a side street and switching to rented Mazdas left there earlier in the day. Jardine had rented the cars from separate firms using fake ID. Again Wyatt tailed Jardine. They kept to the speed limit, obeyed the traffic laws, still wore the gloves.

They made a final switch in Spring Street, knowing there were always taxis waiting outside the Windsor. Avoiding a bag snatch, Jardine parked opposite, cut across the road on foot, and got into the back seat of the first taxi on the rank. The taxi pulled away and Wyatt stayed with it, three car-lengths behind, through Fitzroy, Carlton and Clifton Hill. The time was 8.30 pm.

By 8.45 they were in Northcote. Wyatt double-parked well back from the taxi, lights out, and watched as Jardine paid off the driver and entered the corner milk bar. The taxi driver was there for a minute or so, writing up his log, answering a radio call. When he was gone, Wyatt drove up to the milk bar, collected Jardine and drove out of the street.

They left the Mazda two blocks away from the Northcote house and walked the rest of the way. Jardine hadn’t understood the need for this. He’d said to Wyatt that afternoon, ‘You can trust me. I won’t run out on you.’ Wyatt told him, ‘I know that. I don’t trust the Outfit. We stick to each other the whole way with this. If you’re in sight and you get attacked, I know what to do about it. If you’re out of sight and they jump you, I won’t know it.’

Jardine had nodded. ‘You cover all the angles-some might say obsessively.’

‘It’s how I stay alive,’ Wyatt had told him.

It was 8.55. The streets were quiet, settling into darkness as front-porch lights went out. Wyatt and Jardine slipped into the grounds of the house and went around it twice. The first time they searched the small yard; the second time they checked the strips of tape Wyatt had pasted to the windows and outside doors. Nothing had disturbed them.

They finished at the front door. Jardine went in first, the money in the bag over his shoulder. ‘Made it,’ he said, half-turned to hold the door for Wyatt.

‘We’ll see,’ Wyatt said.

They were home, they had the money, but still Wyatt didn’t let go of his expectation of trouble. He followed Jardine into the hallway and waited crammed up against him as Jardine put his hand to the light switch. The switch clicked once, then again, but there was no light and Wyatt started to say, wait.

The words froze in his throat. He heard a smooth metallic snap as someone in the shadows jacked a shell into the firing chamber of a semi-automatic pistol, and then he heard the shot.

The pistol had been fitted with a suppressor. The baffles contained the sound as a flat cough, and Wyatt connected it to the sudden jerk of Jardine’s body ahead of him. He tried to avoid the big man, tried to twist away and find his.38, but Jardine slammed backwards into him and they both went down, Wyatt face down on the dusty, fibrous carpet. His back muscles knotted together, expecting a follow-up shot.

It didn’t come. Instead, there were useless tugging sounds and Wyatt could sense panic behind them. The pistol had jammed. Semi-automatics will do that. It was why he rarely used them. He pushed up, snarling, ridding his body of Jardine’s weight.

It did him no good at all. He saw an arm swing at him, the pistol held like a club, and hunched away as if that would make his skull elastic. The rest was all pain.

He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there. He blinked awake and turned his head to check the time. That was a mistake. The pain cut through him and he felt a faint tug on his scalp as the blood crust broke. 9.15 pm. He hadn’t been out for long. He didn’t remember Jardine until he became conscious of distressed, shallow breathing and felt the weight of his friend’s body across his legs.

This time Wyatt was ready for the stabbing in his head. He rolled out from under Jardine and found a light switch in the front room. It leaked enough light into the hall to tell him that Jardine had been hit in the head and that his upper body and the carpet under him were blood soaked. He reached around and explored Jardine’s scalp with his fingers a little at a time. It didn’t tell him anything, only that Jardine’s hair was clogged with blood.

Wyatt leaned against the wall to think about it. The bag with the money was gone. Jardine needed attention. The Outfit gun had jammed, meaning they might come back to finish the job. Rose, he guessed. She’d been his dangerous shadow from the start. A smudge on the wall caught his eye. He looked up to see a series of them, shoe marks reaching up to an open manhole in the ceiling. She’d got in through the roof, and she’d taken out the light bulb.

Wyatt used the telephone in the kitchen. He was expecting Ross or Eileen to answer, not the son. The son was supposed to be in remand. He didn’t give his name. ‘Your dad there?’

‘I’ll just get him,’ Niall Rossiter said.

When Rossiter came on Wyatt said, ‘I need a doctor who won’t ask questions.’

Rossiter took that in. ‘You hurt bad?’

‘Jardine’s been head shot.’

‘Let’s see,’ Rossiter said, and Wyatt listened to him thinking. ‘There’s Ounsted.’

‘I’ve heard the name. How can I get hold of him?’

‘He does a moonlight flit every few months,’ Rossiter said. ‘Hang on a sec,’ and Wyatt heard the receiver clatter onto some hard surface before he could warn Rossiter to keep his trap shut.

Rossiter came back on the line with an address and telephone number in North Carlton. ‘According to the wife it’s still current.’ There was a pause. ‘What went wrong?’

‘I’ve got some sorting out to do,’ Wyatt said, with a chill that seemed to reach Rossiter on the end of the line. Rossiter said, ‘Right,’ hurriedly and rang off.

Wyatt took Jardine to the North Carlton address in the rental car. The doctor lived in a small, flat-faced, cement-rendered place sandwiched between a couple of stately brick terraces on a leafy street. It was a street of academics, TV writers and yoga fanatics who drove Landcruisers and soft-top VWs, but Ounsted’s car matched his house. It was parked outside it, a Peugeot station wagon, ancient, soft-springed, rust in the doors.