Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Somehow she didn’t have the energy for this. There was silence and she let it lengthen, waiting for him to find the answer in it.

‘I’d better go,’ he said at last.

She nodded.

He got up, seemed to wrestle with the idea of kissing her, and said, ‘I could call in tomorrow afternoon.’

‘I might not be here.’

‘I’ll give you a ring,’ he said.

She nodded.

At the door he said, ‘I’ll let myself out.’

When he was gone she realised that she should have asked him to return her key. She unplugged the telephone, got ready for bed. She didn’t want hassles with him, she didn’t want to see his pained face or see him maudlin or violent or however it would affect him, so when she heard his key in the lock a short time later, real anger flared in her. She marched out to confront him.

But the man standing in the main room was one of the men who’d robbed her, and the look he directed at her was full of hard and unnerving intelligence. Bax and two strangers were with him. He pushed them toward her. ‘Your new partners, Stella,’ he said. ‘Meet Mr Towns and Mr Drew.’

After he left them, Wyatt drove back across the river. Everything led to the house in Abbotsford. Rossiter knew about the Mesic job, there was that unexplained release of Niall from prison, and only the Rossiters knew he’d be at Ounsted’s surgery.

He left the Peugeot under a plane tree on Gipps Street and entered the alley on foot. There was no easy way about the next step other than to storm the place. He stopped when he reached the granny flat. Its rear wall was incorporated into the alley fence. There was one dusty curtained window, a light on and a radio playing inside. Wyatt went in noiselessly over the fence.

He was ready for the killer dog. It came at him across the yard, thick and low-slung, as meaty and hairless as a pig. Wyatt wrapped his belt around his left forearm, feinted with it, flicked open the switchblade in his other hand, sliced open the straining throat. The heart and lungs worked briefly, inhaling blood, discharging a scarlet-flecked froth, then life went out of the dog and it dropped like a stone, the canines tearing the skin of Wyatt’s wrist.

He stepped back from the animal, his heart hammering. This death only a metre from Niall’s window was harsh and liquid, and Wyatt instinctively backed into darkness as Niall appeared in the doorway, backlit by a bare light bulb in the room behind him.

Wyatt stepped out again. He let Niall see the.38 in his hand. ‘I’ve come for my money.’

Niall had been smoking and drinking. His eyes were slitted against the smoke drifting from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and he held a beer can near his thigh. He recognised Wyatt and dropped the cigarette. Then, when the dying dog made a last tremor, shooting out its legs, expiring on its side, Niall dropped the beer can.

Wyatt expected Niall to go to the dog. He was prepared to let that happen. Instead, Niall jerked back into the flat and slammed the door.

Wyatt knocked, tried the handle, slammed his shoulder against it a couple of times. ‘Niall,’ he said, ‘just give me the money.’

The crossbow bolt came through the window at him. Weakened and deflected by the glass, it plucked at his thigh and fell uselessly to the ground. He dropped into a crouch and edged away from the light.

Then he heard glass again, only it wasn’t the window facing him but the one on the alley. There was a sound of cotton tearing and then footsteps stumbled away from the house.

Wyatt stepped onto the kennel roof and vaulted over the fence into the alley. He crouched for a moment until he saw Rossiter’s son show clearly in silhouette in the streetlights at the end of the alley. He set out after him, loping easily, the.38 where it couldn’t be seen.

Niall turned toward the river. At one point he passed between a streetlight and the flank of the brewery, his headlong shadow soaring then shrinking across the blank brick wall. He had a day-pack strapped to his back. Wyatt stayed two hundred metres behind him, keeping pace, waiting for the kid to weaken or break stride.

But Niall was twenty years younger than Wyatt and driven by panic. In a series of left and right turns Niall closed in on the river, the old convent on the western bank, and Wyatt lost him in the Children’s Farm behind it.

It was a good place and it was bad. Niall belonged on the street; that’s where he should have run to, hailed a taxi perhaps, shoved the crossbow under someone’s nose at a traffic light. The bushes, pens and grassy paddocks on the river bank would be incomprehensible to someone like Niall. Then again, so long as he had nerve and patience, he could hide all night there and not be found. The traffic noise on Studley Park Bridge, the darkness and the unfamiliar terrain, would provide all the cover he’d need. They’d cover Wyatt, too, but otherwise they were a liability.

Wyatt could flush Niall out in the morning light, but he wasn’t prepared to wait. Starting at a point near the entrance to the Children’s Farm, he began to quarter the area, sweeping left and right across each segment. He concentrated on the centre, knowing that if he spent too long on the margins he might lose Niall. Now and then he stopped to listen. Cars accelerated over the bridge and up into Kew. He heard wind in the trees, and something else, low but constant in the background, that he supposed was the river between its many bends. There was a cough, almost human, as he passed among some sheep in the grass.

Then a squeal of terror. This also was not human but it was terror. By the time Wyatt reached the pig pen the cry had been taken up by other piglets and the heavy old sow, a crossbow bolt in her flank, was ranging back and forth, simultaneously protecting them and menacing Niall Rossiter, who was on his backside in the mire, struggling to rearm the crossbow. Wyatt saw all this in the moonlight and said, ‘It’s over, Niall. Just drop the weapon and climb the fence.’

Niall swung around, loosed a bolt at him. Wyatt heard the phutt of it close to his head. He fired the.38, three well-placed shots that straddled the rail behind Niall’s back and slapped into the mud near his crotch. ‘You get the next one in the stomach. Drop the crossbow, climb out of the pen.’

Niall disintegrated then, letting out a peevish sob and throwing the crossbow at the sow. When he lifted free of the sucking mud he looked helplessly at the filth that clung to his hands and pasted his jeans to his legs. He turned, climbed over the rail. His feet slipped, he fell, and Wyatt was there on the other side.

‘Give me the bag.’

Niall shrugged free of the day-pack, moving exhaustedly, rocking on his feet. ‘There’s nothing in it, only my stuff.’

Wyatt took the bag, stepped back, and opened it, keeping the.38 trained. The things that tumbled onto the grass did not add up to his two hundred thousand dollars. It was an escape kit: a change of underclothes, a wallet, a sheathknife, spare bolts for the crossbow. In the wallet there were sixty-five dollars and four stolen credit cards.

Wyatt threw the pack away. ‘Let’s see what your old man has to say.’

Niall spat. ‘He don’t know nothing.’

‘Your mother then.’

‘She’s gone. Shot through a couple of hours ago.’

That’s all Wyatt could get out of Rossiter’s son. They went back the way they’d come, Niall walking slump-shouldered before him. When they got to the house there was a light on above the front door. The Valiant was in the carport but the VW was missing. ‘Around the side,’ Wyatt said, prodding Niall with the gun.

The back door was ajar, the screen door unlatched. Wyatt pushed Niall inside. ‘No warnings,’ he said softly, guiding Niall’s spine with the barrel of his gun. They went that way past the laundry, the leaking lavatory, through the empty kitchen, to the sitting room, where Rossiter was sitting in darkness, punishing a bottle of supermarket Scotch. He heard them, reached for a switch, and lamplight threw the shapes from bad dreams over the walls and ceiling. His eyes were red-rimmed and cigarette ash dusted the Collingwood football jersey he was wearing in place of a pyjama top. He nodded morosely. ‘Thought you’d show up.’