Garry Disher - Kick Back

Pedersen snorted. ‘I like it.’

‘Had to be done,’ Hobba said, holding his arms wide.

They began to discuss it, grinning broadly. Wyatt watched them. After a while they felt it, and fell silent, settling back in their chairs.

‘Right,’ Wyatt said. ‘This is how we do it-a simple hijack.’

Pedersen began to nod, thinking it over. ‘It’s not fastened to the floor?’

‘No. I’ve seen the pictures.’

‘Then I like it. We’d be out quickly and we can open it or blow it elsewhere in our own time.’

Hobba frowned at Pedersen, playing devil’s advocate. ‘Like where? We can’t use your place now, in case the Youngers are watching, and I’m buggered if I’m going to wait on a side street somewhere while you work on it in the back of the van.’

They both looked at Wyatt.

‘We do it here,’ he said. ‘Downstairs in the lock-up garage.’

‘That’s a lot of coming and going.’

‘This place is like a tomb during the day. No-one can see into the garage. No-one knows who we are, where we’re from. I paid cash, the whole lot up front. We’ve got all the room we need, plenty of exits, privacy. It’s perfect.’

‘If you say so,’ Hobba said.

Pedersen leaned forward. ‘What if I have to blow the safe? You can’t hide that kind of a noise.’

‘We’ll take a chance,’ Wyatt said. ‘There’s no-one around and the lock-up is below ground level. While you two open the safe, I’ll keep watch up in the street. Can you get us some radios?’

Pedersen nodded.

‘By late tomorrow,’ Wyatt said, ‘we’ll have everything we need: the van, handcuffs, overalls, transfers, explosive, electric drill

He fell silent. They were all imagining the job. It seemed possible now.

Then Wyatt said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got on Finn. What time did everyone arrive this morning?’

Pedersen opened his notebook. ‘Anna and the girl arrived at eight-thirty. Finn at nine.’

Wyatt turned to Hobba. ‘What time did they leave?’

‘The girl at five, Anna five-twenty, Finn five-thirty.’

‘Anything unusual?’

‘Pretty ordinary. Between ten and eleven, all three cut through to the coffee shop and came back after about fifteen minutes. Then at three-thirty, Finn went out.’

‘We’ll check on that over the next few days,’ Wyatt said. ‘When we hit on Friday we want them all in the office.’

‘What about the time?’ Hobba asked. ‘You still want to hit when it’s peak hour?’

‘It ties up the cops as well,’ Wyatt said. ‘Accidents, cars parked in the bus lanes. If we know the short cuts, we’ll be all right. I want this to go like clockwork.’

Hobba shrugged. ‘You’re the boss.’

They eased back in their bright fabric chairs. Outside a misty rain blew against the thick glass windows. It was warm and sheltered up here, high above the greasy streets and headlong traffic.

On Wednesday morning Wyatt and Hobba hailed a taxi and went shopping. Their first stop was Eddie Loman’s. The N in EDWARD LOMAN HARDWARE was back-to-front and Loman himself had a drooping right shoulder and a stiff leg that swung out as he walked. When the taxi was gone he jerked his head to indicate a workshop at the rear, closed the steel door behind them, and said, ‘Got the balance?’

Wyatt handed him a wad of money. Loman counted it, six and a half thousand dollars, his lips moving in his grey, unhealthy face.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘your stuffs over here.’

He wheeled round on his left leg and led them to empty fertiliser bags heaped on the floor in the far corner. Under them was a grimy styrofoam Esky. Inside it were four pairs of police handcuffs, a block of Semtex explosive, and an electric drill and bits.

‘I don’t seem to see a van,’ Hobba said.

‘Out the back,’ Loman said. ‘Keep your shirt on.’

He took them through a small door to an empty lot behind the workshop. It was choked with weeds. Steel girders and a cracked expanse of cement indicated that this was a building that had never got beyond the foundations stage. A white Econovan was parked on it. The paint was clean. There was no rust and the tyres had been blacked.

‘What’s she like?’ Wyatt said.

‘What you ordered,’ Loman said. ‘Reliable, fair acceleration, untraceable.’

‘Let me check.’

‘No skin off my nose,’ Loman said. He handed Wyatt the keys.

Wyatt warmed the engine for five minutes before testing the handbrake and the clutch. Then he took the van for a ten kilometre test run. He listened to the engine’s response to varying conditions and ran up and down the gears several times. The Econovan was twelve years old and would not win any races, but it would do.

Back at Loman’s he nodded and said simply, ‘Okay.’

He let Hobba drive back to the city. After some minutes he began to look fixedly at Hobba’s face. Hobba began to squirm and shift in his seat, and finally he said, ‘Something wrong?’

‘You told me Pedersen’s clean.’

‘Far as I know’

‘He was feeding his face with uppers last night.’

‘Max was?’ Hobba shook his head as if to say human weaknesses caused him no surprise, only great weariness. ‘Stupid, stupid bastard.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ Wyatt said. ‘I don’t want him fucking up. At the first sign, I abort the job and I waste him. I want you to tell him that.’

Hobba drove with one hand and fished a mint from the tin in his pocket with the other. ‘Will do,’ he said around the mint. He had paled a little.

Wyatt sat back and closed his eyes. There was nothing more to be said. He was no good at small talk, though he knew how much other people depended on it. Small talk saw them through tension and assured them that they had a place in the scheme of things. But Wyatt wasn’t in the mood for Hobba’s observations about life and fate and God, and he knew that his closed eyes would dissuade the fat man from making any.

He thought about Pedersen and his habit and the Finn job. Wyatt liked to think that he never tempted fate. If a job didn’t look safe, he wouldn’t do it. But he wondered how true that was. Wasn’t he in fact addicted to a certain type of risk?

Then he thought about Anna Reid. It was unlike him to be distracted by a woman before a job, or to let himself get in a position where he was distracted. He realised that he enjoyed working with her. She had a role to play in this job, sure, but it was more than that. He wanted to please her, and he found himself thinking about the time after the job.

Hobba coughed. ‘Wyatt? We’re here.’

Wyatt opened his eyes. The van was travelling adjacent to a block on Elizabeth Street devoted to cheap car-rental firms. Hobba swung into the kerb.

‘You know what to do?’ Wyatt said.

Hobba nodded. ‘Take over from you at three-thirty.’

Wyatt got out and crossed the road to Economy Rentals. He heard Hobba put the van in gear and pull out into the traffic again. He pushed open the door of Economy Rentals and went inside. He looked at his watch. Midday. In half an hour he would be taking over from Pedersen.

Twenty minutes later he was turning into Quiller Place in a brown Falcon sedan.

Wyatt stopped at a customer carpark behind the shops that fronted onto Toorak Road, backed in, switched off the engine and opened a newspaper. He looked like a man waiting for his wife.

At first, Quiller Place seemed to be dead, but bit by bit Wyatt gained an impression of the daily rhythms of the little street. A postwoman came by soon after he started his watch. She wore a slicker, though it was not raining, and pushed her cart with an air of contempt for the street, the postcode. As soon as she had gone, all the elderly people in the houses on either side of Finn’s office came out to check their mail boxes. They greeted one another, or stopped to talk. One disappointed woman looked twice in her box, stepped out to watch the postie’s departing back, looked sourly up and down Quiller Place. An old man in a walking frame crossed to the shops. Five minutes later, a home-care nurse ran out, looking around wildly for him.