Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Napper looked at his hands and they were shaking- the drink or fear or both.

He tucked them into his armpits and rocked on the edge of the bed, trying to think it through. Should he do something, or try to find out what had happened? He couldn’t go back to the Northcote house. He could try ringing around the hospitals, try the Homicide Squad or the Northcote station boys, but there’d be questions, cops wanting to know who he was and why he was so interested in a man with a gunshot wound.

That left the Rossiters. If he could shut them up, the trail would end right there, and Wyatt and Jardine would never find him. Only the Mesics knew he was involved, and they thought he was out of the picture. Napper sniggered. Thought they could get rid of him. Thought he’d be happy with their measly two and a half grand. Just as well he’d decided to stick around tonight, see what he could salvage. Only the fucking jackpot, that’s what.

His anxieties came back. How do you wipe out three people one after the other without disturbing at least one of them? It happened all the time, crazed fathers walking through the house shotgunning the wife and seven kids in their beds, but Napper didn’t want to risk it. A knife? Napper had never used one, didn’t know if you stabbed the heart or sawed through the neck. All that blood, and the person in the act of dying rearing up in bed at you. Napper couldn’t do it.

It had to be a bomb. Get all three Rossiters at once. Bombs he understood. He’d been to army bomb-disposal lectures, done a short course, and one of his informants, the man who’d given him the mercury switch idea, had been a car bomber in Belfast before he’d got tired of poverty and politics.

Napper put on his pants and went outside. There were lockup garages at the rear of the flats. Napper didn’t use his as a garage. He drove the ute every day and it was a drag unlocking and locking the garage door all the time. He used his to store the gardening gear he’d had from when he’d owned a proper house: lawnmower, fertiliser tins, rakes and shovels. Most of the space was taken up with removalist’s cartons, stuff he should have flattened and recycled, except the word ‘recycled’ made him think of Josie and her lefty notions, and so the cartons stayed where they were.

The gelignite he’d got from the car bomber, three sticks of it, plus detonators. Napper closed the garage door, turned on the light above the work bench, and gingerly took it out of the shoebox. It was sweating. ‘Past the use-by date,’ his snitch had said, ‘so go real careful with it.’

Napper stared at the gelignite. He’d be better off using a plastic explosive, C4 or Semtex, something he could mould into shape and which wouldn’t blow up on him if he got careless. But he didn’t nave any, and where would he get some at this time of night?

Still, gelignite would do the same job. He ran through some of the possibilities. First, your car bomb. Wire it into a headlight or the ignition circuit, or set a pressure switch under the driver’s seat, or wire the boot so that when the lid was opened it pulled a slip of cardboard free from between the jaws of a clothespeg, thus closing a circuit. Or a bomb inside the house. The good old alarm clock device. The wired desk drawer. The string-tied parcel. Or some sort of remote control, like a radio signal, except he didn’t have signalling or receiving devices. Maybe wire it to the telephone, ring the house and kaboom. Or the good old bomb through the window.

The main problem was detonating the gelignite. Maybe he could use its instability somehow. Some sort of extreme and sudden shock or atmospheric change should set it off. He pictured the Rossiters’ house. They had gas-a wall furnace to heat the place and a gas stove in the kitchen. There would be a pilot light on the wall furnace. What he could do, plant the gelignite, turn on the gas in the kitchen, piss off, wait for the gas to accumulate, wait for the pilot flame to do its work.

An hour later the gelignite was sitting on the rusted-out floor of the ute and Napper was grinding the starter motor. He glanced up the street. It was a street like Tina’s, a block of flats, a lot of tarted-up cottages, a few double-storey terrace houses. It was full of yuppies who’d stacked the local council and forced it to put in a one-way system and speed-traps every fifty metres. He switched on the headlights and peeled away from the kerb. He had half an inch of vodka left and he toasted all the quiche eaters and civil libertarians and their dinky houses and their tin-can cars. He lived a cloaked and dangerous life, and they wouldn’t know if their arses were on fire.

Wyatt reached around and turned off the lamp. He tracked the footsteps: their crush-grind along the gravel drive, then a fainter snap as they passed under the carport at the side of the house. Then silence. The winking red numerals on Rossiter’s VCR read 2.04 in the morning. Four hours before dawn on day twelve of the Mesic job and he was no closer to the money.

He slipped through to the dingy rear of the house. The iron-hard cement floor seemed to drain all warmth from him, and as he crossed to the porch door, a bulky shape came through it.

Wyatt stepped to the side, into the icy laundry, and let the figure pass him. He moved out again, coming in from behind. The things that didn’t seem right about the intruder-smell, shape, susceptibility-were confirmed for him when the kitchen light blazed on.

‘Eileen,’ he said.

She turned sharply. Her hand flew to her chest. ‘I knew it.’

‘Are you alone?’

She backed away from him, reaching around blindly for a kitchen chair with the movements of someone brought down by resignation and fatigue. ‘Of course I’m alone.’

‘You’ve been splitting the money with your cop friend?’

Her head was bowed and she shook it. ‘Was it Napper? I knew it, as soon as Ross said your mate had been shot.’ She looked up. ‘I thought all he’d want was an arrest.’

‘That makes it better? Either way I get it in the neck, Eileen.’

An hour ago Wyatt had been prepared to kill the Rossiters. It was what he did to the people who sold him out. But now all he could see was their wretchedness and struggle. They were driven by the code of the family, and that was something Wyatt didn’t understand. He knew only that it was powerful and it had never applied to him. The Rossiters were stupid and dangerous, but it was mostly aimed inward. They would always shoot themselves in the foot. A final thing stopped him. He had to work in this town. If he killed Rossiter, Eileen and their son, he would look like a mad dog to the world. He would become one and be treated like one.

‘Why did you come back?’

She sat slumped in defeat. ‘Car broke down.’

That seemed to define the Rossiters. Wyatt dropped his gun arm. The movement caught her eye. ‘You might as well get it over and done with.’

Instead Wyatt said, ‘Where did you have your meetings with this cop?’

She looked away and he saw shame there. ‘His flat.’

‘Show me.’

Eileen scrabbled in her purse. ‘I’ll write it down for you.’

‘He’s not going to open the door to me, Eileen. You’re my ticket in.’

From the other room Rossiter yelled, ‘That you, Eileen?’

They ignored him. Wyatt motioned with his.38. ‘Get up.’

‘No.’

‘Eileen, is that you?’

‘Yes, so shut up!’ She dropped her voice again. ‘Why should I? I’m out of it now.’

Patiently Wyatt said, ‘Eileen, you’re a liability to him. He’ll realise that sooner or later.’

‘So shoot me and it won’t matter. What do I care?’

‘You care about Niall. Napper won’t feel safe until he’s got all of you. At the moment we’re ahead. Let’s keep it that way, let’s get to him first.’