Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Silently she stood, passed by him, and he followed her to the back door. Rossiter shouted after them. They heard the little man’s voice again as they passed down the side of the house. On the footpath outside, Eileen stopped, mute and dazed, and let Wyatt guide her to Ounsted’s Peugeot. They strapped themselves in. She leaned abstractedly against her door.

‘Which way?’

She pointed. ‘Bridge Road.’

At Church Street they turned right and the Peugeot laboured up Richmond Hill. Then she took him into the side streets, to a broad avenue that had been a handy through-road the last time Wyatt had used it. Now it was a one-way street stoppered at either end by bluestone paving and slowed by speed-traps. He braked, changed back into third, eased the creaking springs and chassis over the first speed trap. A hundred metres farther on, Eileen pointed sullenly at a block of flats. ‘Number six, first floor.’

Then life came into her and she sat forward on her seat. ‘There’s Napper now.’

Ahead of them a battered Holden utility was pulling away from the kerb. Smoking badly, listing to one side, it swerved along the centre of the road as it gained speed. Everything about the driving suggested rage and hate, and Wyatt saw the brake lights flare as the driver noticed a speed-trap too late. The front tyres slammed into the up-slope. Wyatt expected to see the utility bounce cruelly over it but what he saw was a rip of vivid orange flame in the cabin and the old vehicle seemed to rear up and tear open, then fall broken-backed on the road, burning fiercely. The explosion blew out the windows of a nearby house and one wheel rolled down the footpath.

Wyatt braked gently and pulled into a gap between streetlights. This could be the end. He’d got the Outfit off his back, but what if his money was shredded and ablaze there in the utility, along with the twisting, ruptured policeman? Still, he got out, opened the door for Eileen, followed her into the block of flats. Napper’s lock gave him no problems. He went in.

Instead of pulling the flat apart, he stood there for a while, thinking his way into Napper’s skin. He thought, and one of the places it gave him was the bedside cabinet, the gap between the carpet and the underside of the bottom drawer. Two hundred and nine thousand dollars will crowd a space that size. He tugged hard on the drawer. Something was making it stick. In the end he simply tipped the cabinet over and got back his money that way.