Garry Disher - Pay Dirt

The work was dirty, the little town a joke, but Wyatt was interested only in the advantages-they didn’t know who he was, there were no cops, and no one was expecting a payroll snatch.

He was up to his elbows in grease when the money arrived. The Steelgard security van appeared at the cemetery corner in a cloud of dust, crept past the bowling green clubhouse, and slowed for the gate in the temporary fence that separated the construction camp from the town. He watched the van lurch through the gate into the camp and stop outside Brava Construction’s site office, fifty metres from where he was getting his hands dirty. He checked the time: midday. He saw two men get out. They began to haul cash-boxes into the site office. When one of them glanced in his direction, Wyatt bent over his work again and got some more dirt on himself.

He was in the Brava Construction repair shop, servicing gearboxes. On previous Thursdays he’d been with the crews laying pipes across the wheat flats north of the town, but this time he’d paid one of the Chileans fifty bucks to swap with him and now he was up to his elbows in grease, watching the money arrive.

Normally Wyatt never pulled a job from the inside. If he was in a city he’d base himself in some distant suburb and strike out of nowhere. But this wasn’t a city, this was Belcowie, population two hundred, a dusty farming town three hours’ drive north of Adelaide. It had a Four Square store, a post office, four massive grain silos, a garage with a solitary petrol pump, a bank open two afternoons a week, fifty houses, no police station, and a long, low pub that had never had it so good.

Brava Construction had hired one hundred and fifty men when it got the contract to lay the gas pipeline. All of them had a big thirst. Oddly, a third of them came from South and Central America. The boss was an Argentinian called Jorge Figueras, and he’d tell anyone who listened that it was his duty to help others who’d fled from poverty, death squads, generals and communists. It was a ten-month contract so the wages were high. One hundred and fifty men at $1500 a week, a further $50 000 in managers’ wages and expenses-$275 000. But the Steelgard van also did a bank run, servicing ten banks in a hundred-kilometre radius. Given that the run finished in Belcowie, Wyatt figured the total snatch could be worth as much as $400 000.

It had to be worked from the inside. He needed to plan and watch, and that took time, so posing as a tourist or salesman was out-no tourist or salesman ever stayed in Belcowie for long. This way, as one of the grimy hundred and fifty, Wyatt wouldn’t be noticed. And by the time the cops had got through interviewing a few hundred residents and construction workers next payday, he’d be long gone.

The siren sounded for lunch. Wyatt straightened the kinks in his back. He was tall and fluid-looking, with a hard edge that kept him out of trouble when the South Americans got rowdy. They were friendly, quick and sentimental, and he liked them, but some thought they had something to prove, and he could sense them watching him sometimes, looking side-on at his narrow, hooked face and loose, strong arms.

He crossed the shed and joined the Chilean mechanics at the stainless steel sinks. He measured hand cleanser into his palms from the dispenser and slapped it up and down his forearms and over his hands. Just then one of Leah’s girls walked past the shed on her way to her caravan. The Chileans began to whoop and whistle, and one of them nudged Wyatt, but the woman didn’t interest Wyatt. He was watching the Steelgard van, memorising all he could. When he hit next Thursday he wanted it to go like clockwork.

Steelgard had got slack, that was clear. They were based in Goyder, a rural city seventy kilometres away, and in all the years they’d been servicing the banks there had never been an incident to sharpen them. The van was a small, short wheelbase Isuzu with external rear-door hinges and ordinary locks. But the van wasn’t important. Wyatt wasn’t interested in the van, only in the slack security.

First, there were no cops keeping an eye on things. Sometimes a patrol car from Goyder showed at pub-closing time, but only for thirty minutes and usually on the weekend. There was no guarantee that cops wouldn’t show next Thursday, but they hadn’t come for today’s delivery, and Leah had never seen them come, so Wyatt was betting they wouldn’t show.

Second, the camp was almost deserted. The only people populating the wasteland of concrete pipes, fuel drums, earthmoving equipment and temporary buildings were Leah’s girls and a handful of clerks and mechanics. Everything would change at two-thirty, when the crews came in to clean up and collect their pay packets, but Wyatt intended to be a hundred kilometres away by that time next Thursday.

Third, the guards looked easy. Only two men, and they lacked that edge Wyatt had seen on his other hits. He noticed other lapses. Instead of one man unloading while the other stood guard, both unloaded. And Brava hadn’t assigned anyone to help them.

Then, as Wyatt watched, the guards shut the van, lit cigarettes and strolled across to the canteen. They’d have lunch and come back to supervise while the pay packets were made up, but right now the money was in the care of just one man, the pay clerk.

Wyatt would have hit then and there if he’d had a gun, a partner and a fast car.

The set-up was exactly as Leah had described it.

Wyatt had turned up on her doorstep six weeks earlier, on the run from a Melbourne job that had gone sour. His cover had been blown, he was wanted for murder, he’d had to leave the state. A few addresses and a wad of cash were all he had in the world.

Her home in the Adelaide Hills had been in darkness the night he arrived. He prowled around it warily, looking at the doors and windows. The ground-floor curtains were drawn, but there was a window open in one of the two upper-level rooms that had been built into the steeply pitched roof. He knocked and waited. No lights came on but after a while he’d sensed that she was behind the door. ‘Leah,’ he said softly.

Her voice came low and hard. ‘Yeah?’

‘Wyatt.’

She had opened the door, noted his hunted look and his paleness, and stood aside to let him in. She didn’t say anything, not even as he took out his.38 and prowled with it through her house. It was something he had to do, an instinctive thing, so she waited until he was finished.

‘How long this time?’ she said.

‘Not long. A week, two weeks.’

‘It’s been five years, Wyatt.’

He nodded. He had no use for this, then realised a beat too late that it was mostly a joke. He smiled at her briefly, a sharkish twist of the mouth.

‘Are you broke?’ she said.

‘Not entirely.’

She nodded. ‘You’re on the run,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a job.’

Wyatt watched her for a moment. She’d been sleeping and was wearing a thigh-length black T-shirt. She had black hair, cropped short so that it spiked. She was small and compact-looking, and he remembered her round brown belly and how quick and elastic she could be. He felt calm and safe now. He put the gun away and placed his hands on her upper arms. Instantly her ironical expression disappeared. She closed her eyes and breathed out. She opened them again. ‘Well, come on,’ she said, almost irritably.

It was the next morning when they were in bed, which was a mess, that she’d told him about the Belcowie payroll.

‘Godforsaken little place,’ she said, ‘in the middle of nowhere. Nothing ever happens there, except one day the government decides to put a gas pipeline through and the locals wake up to find a hundred and fifty randy construction workers living on their doorstep.’