Garry Disher - Kick Back

Then he left the city, driving the Hertz Falcon one-handed, his other arm wrapped across his body, his fingers cupping the wound in his side. Once or twice when he dozed, panicky horns and headlights warned him back into his lane. Sometimes he found himself driving very slowly, and in Frankston an angry motorist rapped on his window at a traffic light. With relief he dumped the Falcon and collected his car and headed for the back roads.

The sky was black. When moonlight struggled briefly through the heaped clouds he saw fog wisps like people in the road ahead. Fog hung over dams and creeks. Otherwise he felt that only he was abroad, only he awake.

He opened his window and filled his lungs with cold air. He dare not stop or he would sleep and risk being wakened by a tap on the glass and voices wanting to know if he was all right, had he been drinking, had he been in a fight, your licence, please, sir.

When Wyatt reached the coast road he followed it to Shoreham. He turned inland again, and on the hill slopes he felt that he was climbing to uninhabited reaches of the world. Then the headlights picked out his white gate, and narrow muddy drive and the image disappeared and he knew that in the morning there’d be cars going to church, and neighbours’ houses in the distance, and everything would be all right.

He reversed into the barn and shut the heavy doors. It was almost midnight. He was forcing himself now.

Inside the house he burned his bloodstained clothes and filled the bath with hot water. He washed the wound in the bath, then soaked for a while, letting the heat ease his knotted muscles. He got out, dried himself, dressed the wound. He felt mildly feverish. He dosed himself with brandy and aspirin and leftover antibiotic tablets.

He slept for ten hours. In the morning it was apparent that he’d tossed and perspired during the night. His pillow was damp, his sheets damp and twisted. He felt scarcely rested, but his thoughts and perceptions no longer seemed so freakish and he had an appetite. Before doing anything, he phoned the Drug Squad. He said they’d find something interesting at the house of David Finn, in Hawthorn. No, he wouldn’t give his name, and he broke the connection before they could trace the call.

Later he showered, dressed in slippers and an old tracksuit, and left by the kitchen door to fetch firewood from the pile at the back of the house. The sky was low, a succession of misty rainclouds sweeping across the hills. He went back inside and ate scrambled eggs, toast and coffee in front of an open fire.

There was a trace of Anna Reid in the air, a faint, troubling perfume. He had an unfinished feeling about her. She knew about him, where he lived, his involvement in the hit on Finn. Even if she went straight and he never heard from her again, he’d feel a pinch at the edges of his memory. It would be more distracting than desire. Desire is something that doesn’t last. She was like him, but he wondered if she’d ride out the investigation, and he wondered if he should have killed her.

He loaded more logs on the fire. By now the scent of heated sap and resin were spreading through the room and soon he couldn’t smell anything else.

The first shot came when he went outside to collect more firewood. The sound was hollow and deep, as if muted by the misty rain, but there was no mistaking the heavy calibre or the fury of the bullet smashing through the logs in his arms. The force of it spun him against the back wall of the house. The logs tumbled out of his arms. For a moment he felt helpless, pinned like an insect.

A second shot smacked into the wall next to his neck. He thought automatically, He’s pulling high and to the left. He’s shooting uphill and failing to compensate.

Wyatt threw himself onto the ground as a third shot slammed into the wall. There was the same powerful sound, the same double echo in the nearby hills.

Rifle shots were not uncommon here but it was usually Craig or his father, taking random pot shots at rabbits and foxes with their small-bore rifles. Soon Craig’s father or one of the other neighbours was going to notice the sound of a heavy calibre weapon and wonder who was making war at ten-thirty on a Sunday morning.

Not the cops-they wouldn’t come in like that. Not Finn’s Sydney connections-even if they knew where to find him they wouldn’t come so soon, so rashly. Sugarfoot Younger? In his pain and tiredness Wyatt had thought that Sugarfoot was dead or gone. He’d forgotten the dumb instinct and obsession that drove the useless hoon.

Dragging himself along by his elbows, Wyatt made for the side of the house. Multiple shots are easier to pinpoint than a solitary shot, so he knew where Sugarfoot was. Wyatt had one advantage: his house and sheds were on a slight rise. With no high ground to fire from, and wary of crossing open ground to the house and sheds, Sugarfoot would have positioned himself in the pine tree plantation.

But he would take some finding. He had plenty of cover. Wyatt’s property was almost completely surrounded by trees: the pine plantation, an uncleared tangle of scrub and blackberry bushes, and the neighbour’s apple orchard. The drive-way at the front of the house ran down an avenue of golden cypresses to the small Shoreham road, hidden by hedges and earthen banks. If Sugarfoot circled the house while closing in on it, Wyatt would have trouble keeping track of him. If he circled at a distance, he’d effectively keep Wyatt boxed in.

There was a flurry of wind and rain. Wyatt shivered. The tracksuit and slippers gave him no protection. The wound was bleeding again. He considered his options. If he made a run for it in the car, he risked a bullet. If he stayed in the house he’d have no flexibility. Better to go after the punk.

But his.38 was under the bed, in a holster strapped to the springs of the bed base. There was a little.22 rifle, but it was in the barn. Not that he intended going after Sugarfoot through undergrowth with a rifle he’d not fired for two years and then only at pigeons with birdshot.

He manoeuvred along the wall until he was behind a clump of bamboo. Beyond the bamboo was an old, unused dairy. If Sugarfoot had moved to the south-west edge of the pine plantation he would have a clear shot at the open ground between the house and the dairy, but Wyatt was guessing that Sugarfoot would station himself where he could get Wyatt if Wyatt tried to enter the house through the kitchen door.

Wyatt knelt, waited a beat, and ran at a crouch toward the old dairy. There was no point in zig-zagging, not if Sugarfoot was firing from the side. He heard a thudding, and realised it was his body straining-not shots, not his footsteps on the soft ground. He passed the bamboo, and splashed through the sodden area around a leaking garden tap. He felt the wound tearing. His slippers and tracksuit were splashed and soaked with water and mud. He wiped raindrops from his eyes.

He got to the dairy, his heart pounding, just as the shot came late. It hit somewhere on the other side of the dairy. It told him that Sugarfoot had him pinned down.

The only escape was to strike out in a straight line away from Sugarfoot, using the dairy as a screen. Then he could circle around the house and go in through the front. Sugarfoot would be expecting him to advance, not move away. Sugarfoot also had farther to travel if he anticipated Wyatt and circled around to meet him, and by that time Wyatt would be in and out of the house again, armed this time.

He set off at a lope, twenty steps running, twenty walking, remembering his old army training. His main obstacle was a high, tightly sprung stock fence topped with barbed wire. There was little give in the wires. They pulled cruelly at him as he pushed through to the other side.