Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Wyatt gestured both men to the couch and handcuffed them together. They were heavy and unresisting, Rossiter saying uselessly, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ Then he changed expression, looking up at Wyatt for understanding. ‘Mate, she let me down, I’m sorry.’

But Wyatt gave him nothing, only a stare that did not shift or stray but stayed locked on him. Rossiter had to turn his head away from the force of it.

‘Did she take the money with her?’

Rossiter laughed. ‘She took the VW and my last fifty bucks.’

The anger building in Wyatt stripped his face of flesh and colour. He slammed the old man’s head with his fist. ‘She traded me for Niall. That’s why he’s out of jail.’

‘Yes.’

‘You spilled the whole job to her, where we were staying, everything.’

Rossiter’s eyes flickered briefly at Wyatt. ‘Mate, she’s the wife.’

‘As if that explains it,’ Wyatt said. ‘Who did she spill to? A lawyer? A magistrate? A cop?’

‘A cop,’ Rossiter muttered.

‘Name?’

‘Napper. From the local nick.’

‘She’s with him now,’ Wyatt said, ‘splitting the money with him.’

Rossiter thought about that. His face said it was a cruel possibility. Then he said, ‘No, doesn’t sound right. She did it for the boy, not the money.’

Wyatt watched him neutrally. After a while he said, ‘The Outfit sent someone to knock me at Ounsted’s tonight.’

Rossiter flushed and looked away. ‘Well, yeah, she did that. She was expecting to hear Napper had arrested or maybe shot you tonight, so when you rang here she panicked, knowing you’d come after her sooner or later.’

‘So she tipped off the Outfit they could find me at Ounsted’s?’

There was no spirit left in Rossiter. He looked down, nodded his head.

‘Have you always been on friendly terms with them?’

‘Mate, that price on your head, forty thousand, everyone knew who to call.’

‘The pair of you should have cleared off with her.’

‘I wanted to put it right with you,’ Rossiter said.

Wyatt stared at him. It might have been true. He gestured at Niall. ‘What about him?’

Rossiter looked at his son and there was no pride in it. ‘Stupid fucker reckoned he’d be able to take you if you came here.’

Niall jerked away from his father, turning his shoulder to shut him out. The movement pulled Rossiter’s arm with it, and Rossiter’s veiny mottled hand flopped onto Niall’s thigh. Niall shrugged it off, swearing bitterly. Wyatt saw what blood ties could do to people and it looked small and vicious to him.

Then both Rossiters stiffened, listening. The front gate creaked open. They seemed to wait for it to close.

Napper had got the idea from a rapist he’d arrested after a stakeout one night several years ago. The rapist would climb onto his victim’s roof, remove a few tiles, crawl into the space above the ceiling, then drop into the house through the manhole. Except the rapist had been a weedy little squirt. Napper’s broad thighs felt scraped and bruised from squeezing through the manhole of the house in Northcote where Wyatt and Jardine were staying and he’d landed hard, hurting his shins.

Added to which he’d panicked when the pistol jammed. Next time he pocketed a drug-raid gun, he’d make sure it was a double-action revolver, not a semiautomatic. If a pistol misfires and jams, you’re stuffed. If a revolver misfires, you don’t have to stop and clear the jam, you just pull the trigger again.

Still, he was home safe and two hundred and nine thousand dollars better off. Napper clapped his arms around himself on the edge of his bed, rocking a little, relieved and exultant. He reached out and touched the twenties, fifties and hundreds. He’d unbundled and scattered the notes to give an impression of bulk. Somehow, bundled together, it hadn’t looked like a lot of money. In fact, he’d been disappointed until he’d actually counted it. And-probably owing to all the vodka he was drinking-the more he looked at the money the less real it looked, like a spill of jam jar labels, rectangles of coloured paper, swimming, swimming.

Napper jerked himself awake, swallowed more vodka. It was past midnight and he’d been sitting here like this for over two hours. He’d rung Tina, but she’d bitten his head off, said she was sleeping, she had to get up at five, as he well knew, so why didn’t he just piss off, and had slammed down the phone.

The more Napper thought about it, did he want her anyway? This was some serious money he had here. With that kind of money you can pick and choose your birds. He gazed at the money again, unfocused, looking inward at the years with Josie. It had seemed like the real thing at first: as a social worker she’d appreciated the problems the cops had, Roxanne had come along, they’d bought a house-then suddenly everything had turned around on him. Josie found feminism-and lesbianism, for all he knew-and a mouthful of slogans she used on him twenty-four hours a day. She’d wanted to return to study. She accused him of being brutalised by the job, said it would taint Roxanne, said he never spent time with Roxanne. Napper stiffened as he remembered it all, the glass of vodka halfway to his mouth. Wasn’t that a contradiction? He was tainting Roxanne yet he never spent time with her? Lousy bitch. He’d have to make sure she never got wind of the money.

By degrees Napper came to see that his two hundred and nine thousand dollars amounted to fuck-all. Lawyers’ fees, maintenance, child support, replace the ute with something that didn’t have a hole in the floor between him and the exhaust pipe, find a better place to live, pay off the few thousand he owed the SP bookies-Jesus, it could all be gone by the end of the year.

He swallowed the vodka, poured himself another glass, reached over and scattered the money some more, making it cover a greater area of the bed. But then he caught himself, and laughed. It was still two hundred and nine thousand bucks; scattering it wasn’t going to make it bigger. Napper put down his vodka, stood up, leaned over and gathered in every twenty, fifty and hundred, and bundled them back into the vinyl bag. He zipped it closed and sat again with the bag in his lap. The bag felt solid and comfortable. Napper had removed his trousers to rub cream into his scraped thighs. He was wearing his towelling bathrobe and liked the feeling of nakedness it gave him, the idea of his cock in striking distance of all that dough.

Napper looked around his bedroom. He couldn’t stash the bag under the bed, under dirty clothes in the bottom of the wardrobe, in his sock drawer. Or in the kitchen or bathroom cupboards, or behind his collection of Willie Nelson LPs. And that was the extent of his miserable flat. If he left the money in the flat, he’d spend all his time thinking of burglars when he wasn’t at home. If he took the money with him, he’d spend all his time looking out for muggers. Well, no one was going to break in tonight, not at this hour, not with him at home. Maybe he’d bank the money tomorrow, twenty accounts of nine thousand nine hundred dollars each to avoid the government legislation that required banks to report all deposits of ten thousand or more. Jesus Christ, were there that many banks and building societies? It would take him days. A creeping kind of dread grew in Napper. He had the money but where was he going to hide it, how was he going to hold onto it?

That fear gave rise to another, and this one gripped him hard. It wasn’t burglars he had to worry about, it wasn’t muggers, it was the business he should have finished tonight but hadn’t. He had failed to kill Wyatt and Jardine. He had shot one, clubbed the other, but it had been panicky and it hadn’t felt final. How would they see it? In Napper’s experience, crims were always ripping each other off. With any luck they’d look in that direction. But they weren’t stupid, they’d start wondering who knew about the job. Eileen wouldn’t stand much pressure, she’d soon shop him.