Garry Disher - Pay Dirt

‘That’s where you come in,’ Wyatt said.

‘Exactly. Fifteen hundred bucks a week and nothing to spend it on except beer and poker. I made Jorge an offer-I put a few girls in, you get ten per cent and a contented workforce.’

Wyatt leaned on his elbow and touched her. It was absent-minded, but she looked down her body, watching his hand. ‘The money,’ he said.

She flopped back. ‘I stayed on for a couple of weeks, helping the girls get settled, laying the ground rules, kind of thing, so I was there twice when the payroll came in.’

‘Details,’ Wyatt said.

‘Payday is each Thursday. The van arrives just before lunch. The security’s not very good.’

Wyatt nodded, beginning to shape the job in his mind. ‘Cops?’

‘The nearest cop shop is an hour away. I never saw a single jack the time I was there.’

‘What about the camp? Who’s around when the money arrives?’

‘Hardly anyone. The crews knock off about two-thirty on Thursdays to come in and pick up their pay, but the place is quiet until then.’

‘How many guards?’

‘I only saw two, same ones each time. They stay until the pay packets are made up, and leave about three o’clock.’

‘The town?’ Wyatt said. ‘Witnesses?’

‘The camp’s along one edge of the town, in an empty paddock. From memory there’s a bowling club and a few backyards opposite, that’s all. It’s a pretty dead place.’

Wyatt began to pay attention to her again. She laughed and wriggled. ‘You like it, huh?’

‘I’ll check it out.’

‘I can ask Jorge to give you a job there.’

His face had been tired-looking and distant, but now she saw it sharpen. ‘No! No links.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, stretching, closing her eyes.

A few days later she drove him down from the hills to the bus station in the centre of Adelaide. Buses going through to Broken Hill passed within twenty kilometres of Belcowie, so he caught one of those. He got off at a crossroads on a mallee scrub plain and started walking. A mail driver picked him up after an hour and dropped him on the outskirts of Belcowie. It was early afternoon. Wyatt knew motors and he looked strong and he could drive a truck. By four o’clock Jorge Figueras had given him a job laying pipes for $1500 a week.

Now, drying his hands and watching the camp dog cock its leg on the Steelgard van, Wyatt knew how the snatch would go. He would hit as soon as the money was unloaded and the pay office more or less unattended. Any later and he’d be dealing with armed men and a hundred and fifty pay packets. He had seven days to put a good team together and stash some cars between Belcowie and Adelaide.

‘Hey, gringo, lunch.’

It was the repair shop foreman. His name was Carlos and he was standing with the other Chileans, waiting for Wyatt.

But Wyatt was concentrating. He stared at the Chileans as if they weren’t there. The Chileans shrugged and turned away and set out across the dusty yard to the canteen.

Wyatt looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes later he left the shed and took a roundabout route past the site office and the front gate. He was still concentrating, fixing in his mind the timing and the geography of the town and the camp. Leah’s girls worked from caravans a few hundred metres from the men’s dormitories, in a corner of the camp screened from the town by peeling gum trees. The boundary fence went along the eastern edge of the town and the town itself straggled north and south for three kilometres. After that it was nothing but dry farmland and distant hills.

His attention was caught by a movement in a dusty lot opposite the camp. A month ago the lot had been vacant, and it would be vacant again when the camp moved on, but now it was a branch of Trigg Motors, a struggling car dealership based in Goyder. Half a dozen used Holdens were gathering dust under a string of sun-faded plastic flags, and a caravan annexe bellied in the wind. Trigg himself was there today, a short, ferrety man dressed like a grazier, pasting a sale sticker to the windscreen of a 1973 Kingswood. Trigg was always there on payday, when the South Americans had money in their pockets. Apparently he enjoyed haggling with them. Wyatt turned away. Trigg would see the snatch next week but he was no hassle.

Wyatt’s next step was to get a fix on the driver and the guard. Just as he was approaching the canteen the driver emerged. Wyatt saw a big, soft, fleshy man, with large worried features crammed together on a small head. The name tag on the uniform said ‘Venables’. Wyatt turned, watching him go. Venables grunted as he walked. He looked tight and knock-kneed, his vast behind stretching his trousers.

Wyatt had no interest in Venables, beyond the man’s potential to foil a holdup, but then Venables did a curious thing: he didn’t go to the pay office but out the front gate, across the gravel road and into Trigg’s yard. He conferred with Trigg for a few seconds, then both men left the lot and walked along the road to the pub on the corner.

Wyatt heard a clatter behind him. Carlos emerged from the canteen. He tapped his watch and grinned when he saw Wyatt. ‘Fifteen minutes, okay, gringo?’

Wyatt grinned back at him. ‘Si seсor,’ he said, and he went into the canteen to get a look at the guard.

At three o’clock it all came apart.

Although the pipe-laying and trench-digging crews were back in camp and the showers were running hot and men were lining up outside the pay office, Wyatt was still in the repair shop, stripping a gearbox. Permanently suspicious and wary, he was the first to notice the upset. It started with the unmarked cars and vans. There were ten of them, all white. Half entered the camp, the other half took up positions around the perimeter fence.

Wyatt didn’t know what they wanted but he did know his prints and description were now on file somewhere, so he wasn’t going to stick around to find out. His gun and most of his cash were at Leah’s so he wasn’t bothered about the few things in the locker next to his bunk. He stepped back to where he couldn’t be seen and watched as thirty men got out of the cars and vans. There were plainclothes among the uniforms, but what interested him most were the insignias on the uniforms. These cops were federal, not state.

Then a group of Chileans outside the pay office made a useless run for the gate. A scuffle broke out. Soon all the cops were involved.

Illegals, Wyatt thought. Fucking Jorge has been employing guys who’ve overstayed their visas.

He crouched in the shadows. There were a couple of Kings woods across the road in Trigg’s yard. Wyatt could hot wire Kingswoods with his eyes closed.

‘I’m good for it, Ray, you know that,’ Tub Venables said.

Raymond Trigg screwed up his eyes. He was lighting a cigarette and the smoke got him, every time. ‘I know you are, Tub. The question is, when?’

The car dealer and the security van driver were in the front bar of the Belcowie Hotel, a dim, beery room with laminex surfaces and cracked brown linoleum on the buckled floor. It was two-thirty and they’d been there since one o’clock, Trigg nursing small glasses of Southwark Light while Venables soaked up pints of draught. The Chileans would be crossing the road with their pay packets soon, but meanwhile Trigg had to keep Tub Venables from falling apart. ‘You got to be more responsible, my son,’ he said. ‘Five thousand bucks-it’s a lot of money.’

‘Interest,’ Venables said mournfully. He sweated when he was scared. He was also leaning on the bar cloth, getting his elbows wet. ‘I’ve paid back the principal, but you keep charging me interest on the interest. I’ll never catch up.’