Garry Disher - Kick Back

‘Storeman. Used to shifting things around, are you?’

Wyatt wished that Hickey would get to the point, about Hobba, or Finn’s safe, or both. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Is Rob all right?’

‘Rob’s doing badly,’ Hickey said. ‘You could say he got too close to some nylon rope.’

‘What do you mean? Did he hang himself?’

‘Hang himself?’ Hickey said. He laced his fingers together and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I read somewhere once what the human body is worth. Any idea?’

Wyatt said nothing.

‘Bugger all, in fact,’ Hickey said. ‘We’re mostly water and a handful of cheap chemicals. In old Rob’s case, very cheap.’

Wyatt kept silent, watching Hickey.

‘This afternoon we got a report about your mate pulling a gun on some kids outside the lifts,’ Hickey said. ‘We found him with a rope around his neck and ankles like he was a Christmas turkey. If he struggles, he strangles himself.’ Hickey smiled. ‘He struggled.’

Wyatt looked at Hickey neutrally, thinking that Sugarfoot Younger had been learning some nasty habits and was cleverer than he thought. ‘Christ,’ he said.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Hickey said. ‘I think it was someone else.’ He leaned forward across the table. ‘What interests me is, why go to that sort of trouble if not to extract information? You wouldn’t know anything, I suppose? Didn’t give his place the once-over?’

Wyatt said nothing. This was taking too long. Hickey was watching him sharply, registering his face. ‘I only know him to have a beer with,’ Wyatt said, shifting back in his chair.

‘Keep still,’ Hickey said. ‘Hands cold, are they?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I want to see your hands. Then I want you to open your coat. Then I want you to empty out your pockets.’

‘Why?’ Wyatt said.

‘Don’t fucking prevaricate. Just do it.’

Wyatt pushed back in his chair as if to make it easier. Hickey was standing a metre back from the table. He snapped his fingers. ‘Get a move on.’

Wyatt kicked out. The table slammed into Hickey’s thighs. He cried out and fell forward, and Wyatt seized his collar, pulled back, and pounded his face down on the table top. A bone cracked. Hickey groaned and slid onto the floor.

Wyatt waited, listening, expecting the young cop to come running. When nothing happened, he pocketed Hickey’s police radio, cut the telephone lead and walked quietly to the open front door. The young cop was questioning an elderly woman farther down the corridor. She had seen nothing, knew little about Mr Hobba except that he kept to himself and was never noisy, not like some she could mention.

Wyatt was judging how he’d disarm the young cop when he heard heavy shoes clopping along the corridor and into the stairwell. He heard them climb to the floor above. He stood at the door. The corridor was clear. He crossed to the stairwell, listened at the entrance, then plunged into the fetid air. He ran down the eight flights. At one point he shouldered through a knot of children apparently buying amphetamines from a teenage supplier. He heard a faint, alarmed in-drawing of breath behind him.

He slowed at the bottom, emerged casually onto the forecourt, and dumped the police radio in a rubbish bin. He paused. No one was paying attention to him. His car was where he had left it. But there was a police car all right, an unmarked Commodore parked beyond a builder’s skip. It was not the kind of detail he could afford to miss again.

But the thing now was, had Hobba tried to trade his way out of danger, given up Anna Reid’s name in exchange for his life?

Wyatt drove the Hertz Falcon hard along Royal Parade, working it out.

Hobba had been tortured for information, but what did he know that Sugarfoot could use? It wouldn’t occur to Hobba to mention the safe house-as far as he knew, it was finished with. He’d give Pedersen’s address and explain about Rossiter, but Sugarfoot would already know all that.

That left Anna Reid’s involvement. Sugarfoot would know about her by now.

Wyatt spurted through gaps in the traffic. There was a chance that Sugarfoot would be staking out Pedersen’s, but he’d lose patience eventually, or fade away when the cops arrived-as they would, they would check on all Hobba’s associates. Either way, Sugarfoot would go after Anna Reid.

Wyatt turned off near the University and entered a maze of side streets. Anna lived in a small Victorian house on a street of similar houses. He drove by slowly. Her house was in darkness. He drove the Falcon four blocks down, parked, and got out. The misty rain continued to fall. Water drops beaded on his clothes and soon he felt damp and cold for the second time that day. He remembered that he hadn’t eaten. He stopped at a milk-bar, bought a meat pie, coffee and a bar of Swiss chocolate, and gulped them down as he walked back to Anna’s street. The hot food and drink revived him. He told himself the chocolate would give him energy.

He crossed the first intersection bordering the block that Anna’s house was on, then circled around to walk across the intersection at the other end of the block. He looked down Anna’s street each time. He didn’t see any unusual activity.

He fastened the silencer to the Browning and entered the street, holding the gun inside his coat.

He did what he always did in these situations-checked every garden and the back seat of every car, and touch-tested for engine warmth. Three cars were warm, a small Mazda and two Holdens, but that didn’t mean much because there was a rowdy party at a house five doors from Anna’s. A stereo throbbed and several lights were on. Otherwise the street was quiet, almost deadened. The night air seemed to sit, sluggish and heavy, just above the rooftops. It smelt of the city’s toxins. The only movement Wyatt saw in any of the gardens was a cat flattening itself along a fence rail as he passed it.

He didn’t know how good Sugarfoot was at this kind of thing. Sugarfoot might have got lucky with Ivan and Hobba. But he was in none of the cars, and Wyatt couldn’t imagine him waiting outside in the cold, so if he had come he would be inside Anna’s house.

Wyatt had no wish to tackle him in a confined space. He decided to work on his nerves. He began pacing up and down on the footpath outside the house, pausing to gaze up at the front door and the windows on either side of it. He hoped Sugarfoot would notice him. He hoped to rattle him and force his hand. If he could entice him out of the house, even better.

After a few minutes of this he opened the gate in the picket fence and entered the little garden path, slamming the gate behind him. There might have been a twitch at a curtain, he wasn’t sure. He stepped onto the verandah and prowled heavily over its creaking boards, regularly knocking on the front door and both windows.

There was no response but the certainty grew in him that someone was inside the house. He stepped off the verandah and into the garden. He could see another reason why Anna wanted money. Where her neighbours had graduated to bark chips and Japanese maples, she had neglected, weed-clogged garden beds and lumpy gravel paths that went from the front yard to the back. Wyatt circled the house twice, gravel complaining under his shoes.

The next stage called for absolute silence. He wanted the contrast to shake Sugarfoot enough to make a move. He waited for ten minutes, crouched in darkness by the trunk of the fig tree at the back of the house. Anna’s cat came by at one point, purring, flexing his body back and forth against Wyatt’s legs. Wyatt said psst softly and Masher flicked his tail and stalked away.

Wyatt pictured the layout of the house, calculating where Sugarfoot might hide himself. The dark interior, the mocking noises outside, then the silence-would these be enough to drive him into a small, enclosed space, such as a corner in a small room? Would he stay out of the bigger rooms, their large empty spaces filling with imagined shapes and sounds?