Garry Disher - Cross Kill

Wyatt waited, crouched behind a thicket of staked tomato plants. The garden was empty. He couldn’t see anyone inside the glass windows that extended along the back of the truck driver’s house.

But things wouldn’t stay that way. He chinned the alley fence and looked both ways along it. Worn cobblestones, a filthy drainage channel, abandoned mattresses. A torn-eared cat, spooked by him, crouched belly-down on the cobbles. Wyatt swung his legs up, rolled his trunk along the top of the fence and dropped into the alley. No one saw him do it. No one cried out.

Wyatt considered his options. To the left the alley formed a T-junction with a brick wall. To the right it opened on to a broad street next to a playground. Not that way-too open, too enticing. He loped toward the T-junction.

The gunman was young and he was snatching a quick leak against an open drum of sump oil when Wyatt came around the corner. He splashed his jeans as he tucked himself back in and went for the pistol in his belt holster.

Wyatt stopped, eyeing the man and the gun warily.

‘Come any closer and I’ll call in the others,’ the gunman said.

He had an acned face and hair the colour of his pasty skin. He licked his lips. ‘I mean it,’ he said. He lifted his head to shout.

Wyatt knew he had nothing to fear from a man who’d prefer to call for help rather than use his gun. He advanced, taking out his own gun, chilling and deliberate. He dug the barrel under the scarred chin and let the gunman hear him thumb back the hammer. ‘That oil drum-I want you to drop your gun in it.’

A soft splash and the man’s pistol slipped under the scummy surface. Wyatt thought about questioning him, but changed his mind. The man was only a soldier, following orders; he wouldn’t have answers to the questions Wyatt wanted to ask him. Wyatt smacked him to the ground with the flat edge of his.38 and got out of there.

He walked back to wait at the bus-stop under the railway overpass near Hoddle Street. Two minutes later, he saw the blue Laser again, edging out of a side street a few blocks away. It pulled into the kerb. No one got out.

If they were going to take him they wouldn’t do it here. Too open, too many witnesses. Obviously they’d picked him up in Lygon Street and tailed him to Abbotsford, but it could have started earlier than that, at the motel.

A bus pulled in and he climbed aboard. He wanted access to an exit and a line of sight along the length of the bus, so he sat on a side-facing seat near the driver’s door. He didn’t know how well prepared this mob was. If they had a radio or a car phone they could call ahead and put someone on the bus.

The minutes passed and the bus belched its way along Johnston Street. Not many people boarded and none of them looked like trouble. They were pensioners, deadend teenagers, women with shopping trolleys and small children. The Laser stayed four car lengths behind the bus through Collingwood and Fitzroy and up into Carlton.

Several people got ready to alight at the stop on Lygon Street. Wyatt let them get off first. He didn’t want them behind him but on the street where they could shield him. The Laser had closed in on the bus. Wyatt walked for a hundred metres along Lygon Street toward the city, and paused outside Readings bookshop. He gazed without taking in the details at a poster advertising the latest Claire McNab, then switched direction and darted across to the other side of the street. Let’s see how good you are on foot, he thought. Let’s see if you’ve got any backup.

He jogged along Faraday to Genevieve’s, where people were drinking coffee under sidewalk umbrellas, and ducked left into a narrow side street. Halfway down he paused and looked back. The street was clear.

But he knew he hadn’t lost them. By running he’d announced himself. They were out there, regrouping, setting up the next stage. He had to nip this in the bud, and the only way to do that was to let himself be the bait.

On Lygon Street again he headed south, keeping pace with the crowd. Half of the people were fashion plates, the other half wore Reeboks and tracksuits the colour of poster paints. Once Wyatt would have despised them but he didn’t have the energy for that anymore. The mass of the population was vulgar and herd-like and some of them had money. That was enough.

He edged through the students huddled outside the room-to-let notices in Readings’ window. There are ways of tailing people so you can’t be spotted and ways of spotting a tail. Wyatt used reflective surfaces-car chrome and duco, shop windows, people’s sunglasses-to check movement behind him. He double-backed twice, and occasionally lingered outside shop windows, glancing casually along the stretch he’d just come. Careless tails always gave themselves away, breaking rhythm with the crowd, pausing outside an unlikely shop window, diving into a phone box. Nothing. He entered a vast, noisy pasta restaurant by one door, read the chalked menu for a while, then left by a side door. At the Grattan Street intersection he saw a taxi pull over and discharge a passenger. He got in, told the driver to U-turn, and watched to see the response. Nothing. They were good. He didn’t see a thing that looked wrong.

He got out again near Jimmy Watson’s wine bar, gave the complaining driver twenty dollars, and retraced his movements along Lygon Street. Wyatt was prepared to do this for two or three hours if necessary. He assumed they’d have more than one man on him. There might even be a tail in front of him. Wyatt didn’t care who or when-he wanted to flush out just one man, disable him, ask him some hard questions.

But they were good. Wyatt went through the shopping precinct a second time, crossed Grattan Street and was opposite the Argyle Square park before he spotted the tail. It was a face he remembered from a shop window, more easily identifiable now where there were fewer pedestrians. Wyatt stiffened, then absently scratched his backside: he didn’t want the tail to see tension in him. He kept walking. The street was broad and open. He couldn’t see where or how he’d be able to take out the man behind him.

Then he did go tense. The man he’d disarmed in the alley behind Rossiter’s house was keeping pace with him on the other side of the street. Wyatt knew instantly what the plan was. Neither man was bothering to conceal himself now, meaning they had backup nearby. They were hunting him as a team, prepared to hand him over to one another until they had him boxed in.

Wyatt put his right hand in his jacket pocket and fitted his keys between his fingers like spines. The.38 was in the inside pocket, but only a mug would want to shoot it out in the middle of Lygon Street. He didn’t think the other side would want a shooting either. He kept walking.

It was a classic herding action. The second tail paced him step for step on the park side of the street. Wyatt took note of the man’s arms: they looked unrelaxed, hanging out from the stocky trunk, indicating he’d rearmed himself. Wyatt looked back over his shoulder. The first tail was twenty metres behind him now. They were shepherding him to where he could be ambushed by the rest of the team, presumably farther down the street.

Wyatt wanted to run but controlled the urge. He walked. Cars, taxis, a bus, a courier motorcycle, people shopping, a kid on a skateboard-it was an ordinary, moderately busy street, and it was about to turn chaotic. He felt a bleakness settle in him. Nothing was finished yet. Nothing was ever finished.

A block closer to the city were two rows of faded terraces, home to several struggling shops under the rusted verandahs over the footpath. The terraces were separated by an alley. The Laser was parked just beyond the alley. Then someone stepped out, blocking Wyatt’s path. It was the woman who’d tried to kill him ten months ago and again last night. A fourth figure stood near the car. He had blunt Melanesian features and the build of a weightlifter. Wyatt saw him rub his hand once over his cropped black hair then crouch slightly, waiting to see what Wyatt would do.