Garry Disher - Cross Kill

The man who answered his knock was slight, undernourished, dressed in a crumpled suit with broad lapels. He smelt of whisky and cigarettes and tried to hide it with fluttering, gingery hands. His face had the chalky shut-away look of a man who shudders at the sun. He looked about sixty, but was probably younger. Ounsted had been struck off the register fifteen years ago and now he treated patients who suffered from the kinds of injuries and ailments they couldn’t let the authorities know about. He supplied morphine, plugged gunshot wounds, sewed up knife cuts.

‘There’s a lane behind the house,’ he told Wyatt. ‘Drive around while I get the surgery ready. We’ll bring your friend in the back way.’

The lane was narrow; the Mazda juddered on the bluestone cobbles. Wyatt stopped halfway along, the engine idling, waiting for Ounsted to open the gate. Every back wall except Ounsted’s had been replaced in the past ten years. Some were topped with jasmine-choked lattice. Ounsted’s rear entrance was a warped, padlocked wooden gate on hinges, four metres high. He’d coiled barbed wire around the upper frame.

Wyatt could smell booze and tobacco inside the house as well, but there was a layer of antiseptic under that and one of the rooms was clean enough: a drugs cabinet, stainless steel trays, lights, an operating table. The rest of the house was like the doctor himself, battling and apologetic.

They put Jardine on the operating table and Ounsted gave him a painkiller and a sedative. ‘He’ll be okay for the moment,’ Ounsted said, a kind of clipped professionalism entering his voice. ‘Now you’d better let me look at you.’

Wyatt sat where Ounsted could examine his head. ‘You’ll live. Bruising, swelling, and a small patch of broken skin. A painkiller and you’ll be okay. Just take it easy for a while. Rest up for a couple of days.’

‘I’ve got things to do.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ Ounsted said. ‘I was just going through the motions, that’s all.’

Then he went to work on Jardine, Wyatt helping him to wash the blood from Jardine’s head and clean and bandage the wound. The bullet had scored a shallow trench above the right ear. Ounsted murmured as he worked: ‘A fraction further to the right and he’d be in worse shape than this. He’ll need to stay here for a few days. He’s a lucky man. But it’s amazing what the body can withstand. I remember…’

The man wanted to talk. Wyatt screened him out. He thought about his options. He’d start with Kepler, but it didn’t have to be immediately-the Outfit would always be there. What he needed most now was rest, a safe house for the night. When Ounsted was finished he said, ‘How much do I owe you?’

Ounsted seemed to take an interest in the carpet. ‘Two fifty should cover it.’

‘I’ll give you three hundred,’ Wyatt said. ‘I need a bed here for the night.’

Ounsted looked at Wyatt professionally. ‘Wise man. You look knackered. I’ll give you something for the pain, it’ll help you sleep.’

‘No drugs.’

‘Suit yourself. The spare room’s through here.’

Ounsted took Wyatt to a small room at the front of the house. There were two narrow beds in it. Wyatt considered them: one was as good as the other. He stood in the centre of the room and stared at Ounsted. The doctor grew uncomfortable and moved toward the door. ‘Bathroom’s down the hall. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Something woke him, some shift in the atmosphere. He lay on his back, feeling his skin creep, his nerve ends coming alive.

He knew where he was, and that he felt rested, the pain in his head less acute. No one was shooting at him, screaming at him to get on the ground, aiming lights in his eyes. In fact, the house was peaceful. But it felt wrong.

He lay still, feeling the blood pulse in him. Maybe he simply was cold. He pulled the bedclothes to his neck. The substance of his half-asleep, half-awake condition clarified with the movement, and he remembered that there had been the sound of a telephone, of a voice in the far reaches of the house.

Wyatt supposed that Ounsted’s nights were like that, sleep punctuated by calls to come save a life or inject a hit. He concentrated, eliminating the expected sounds of Ounsted’s life, his house, this street at night, to see what he was left with.

He heard Ounsted at the front door, then at the gate that opened onto the footpath. There were Venetian blinds in the window. He forced an aperture in the slats and looked out. Ounsted, wearing a coat and a hat, carrying the medical bag. Wyatt watched him get into the Peugeot, crank it into life, turn on the lights. Ounsted turned right at the end of the street and after that it was quiet.

Wyatt dozed. He would kill Kepler and leave it at that. If he went after Rose, after Towns, he would have to go after the whole bunch of them and he didn’t have the time or the energy or the resources to do that. The orders had come from Kepler to begin with. Towns would take over from Kepler. Towns was someone Wyatt could make a deal with that would stick. The money mattered but he’d never get the actual two hundred thousand back. He’d have to screw the money out of the Outfit some other way.

Ounsted was away for almost half an hour. Wyatt recognised the Peugeot’s rattling tappets and complaining differential, and checked the time: 11.02 pm. He clacked a gap in the blind, watched the doctor park the car, come through the gate, shut the door behind him.

There was the problem of getting to Sydney, getting at Kepler. It would take time and it would take money. Wyatt had all the time he needed but his funds were low. He would do what he’d done in the past, hire himself out to a crooked insurance agent or snatch the daily take of a restaurant in a suburb where nothing much ever happened, the kind of small-time hit that would earn him a bankroll but no credit at all.

Wyatt slept then, until Ounsted turned on the bedside light and prodded him awake-only it wasn’t Ounsted, it was Rose, wearing the doctor’s hat and coat and holding her own gun in her hand.

That explained the phone call. They’d called Ounsted out of the house and Rose had switched places with him.

Rose stepped clear of the bed and grinned down at Wyatt. ‘The legend himself. Shame he had to die in bed with his boots off.’ She centred the barrel on Wyatt’s forehead. ‘You can close your eyes if you like.’

She wasn’t good at this after all. She shouldn’t have stopped to speak to him. She was letting emotion and competition get the better of her. She was gloating, letting him know he’d lost, letting him see her, making sure he knew he was going to die and who was pulling the trigger. It was unprofessional and Wyatt shot her through the bedclothes. There was a spurt of blood and tissue and she slammed back against the wardrobe, then forward onto the floor. Her limbs thrashed but, as Wyatt watched, there was a final heave, an involuntary finger spasm and then she was still.

Wyatt found the keys to the Peugeot in her coat pocket. He checked that Jardine was sleeping peacefully in the surgery and a minute later he was in the alley at the rear of Ounsted’s house. He circled the block, saw no one. Rose had come without backup. He was the hunter now.

East Melbourne was leafy, damp and full of shadows, but a hundred metres away some light leaked into the darkness from the Outfit apartment building. Wyatt checked the time-11.30-and settled against the door of Ounsted’s car to wait.

Some time later he straightened. He saw the glass door open and a uniformed doorman touched his cap to a man in a hooded grey tracksuit. Wyatt didn’t know who the jogger was. He only knew that twice since Monday’s meeting he and Jardine had met with Towns late at night after watching the Mesics, and each time he’d seen joggers leave the building. The jogger padded past the Peugeot and out of sight.