Garry Disher - Death Deal

But a look of panic twisted the big mans face. He fumbled, started the engine, backed out. Wyatt reached the car, beat uselessly on the side panel, fell back as Phelps accelerated away from him.

All he could do now was get an answer to a question. He knelt. The man on the ground was dead, blood seeping from a wound in the temple. Footsteps sounded behind Wyatt. Using his body as a shield, he peeled off the mans stocking and pocketed it.

What happened?

Wyatt stood, pushing his hair back from his forehead and hooking the black-rimmed glasses on his face again. He turned. Four or five students. Loading distress into his voice he said, It was terrible. Hit and run. This man was knocked down and I was run off the road. They just took off like animals.

Animals, someone said.

Anyone get the number?

We should get an ambulance.

He looks bad. Anyone here know first aid?

Youre not supposed to move them.

Anyone a med student?

They were dealing with it. Wyatt stepped back. Hed recognised the dead man. It was a face from three weeks ago, on the Victorian/South Australian border. Mostyn, who worked for Stolle. Meaning Stolle had the money now. Stolle and Anna Reid.

Wyatt crossed the road to the joggers path next to the river and turned left, toward the city. There would be police soon, security men. His only way out was the Dutton Park ferry.

At this time of the morning there were no students waiting on the university side of the river. The traffic was all one-way, from Dutton Park to the university. Wyatt waited on the ramp that extended over the water. On the opposite bank cars were pulling into the carpark and students were gathering to cross. The ferry was in midstream. It swung around in a wide arc, drew in, and Wyatt stood back as the passengers filed off. There were one or two older people among them, academics or campus workers, but most were students wearing the puffed faces of recent sleep and anxiety and morning lecture panic. Some wheeled bikes. One or two looked curiously at Wyatt. You didnt get many suits on this ferry.

Wyatt paid his dollar and sat down. The ferryman waited a couple of minutes. When no-one else appeared, he cast off.

Ten-thirty. Wyatt found that he was trembling. Mostyns blood had streaked his fingers. He stood up, shoving them into his pockets, and remembered the loose cash from the vault. Standing where the ferryman couldnt see him, he counted it: fifteen thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds.

His heart stopped thudding and slowly the fright ebbed and a cold anger took its place. She had set this up with Stolle. They had brought him in to do the hard work, the kind of planning and execution work that he did better than anyone, then Stolle had stepped in at the point where Wyatt was most vulnerable, the final switch of vehicles. He thought bitterly about the code he worked by and how this time hed betrayed it. One: people who cross you once will do it againnever give them a break. Two: never let feelings affect your judgment. Three: never tell the people you work for more than they need to know. Hed told Anna Reid exactly how they would do the job and where the getaway vehicles would be waiting.

He heard the ferryman throw the motor into reverse. Water churned and the ferry edged with a bump against the rubber tyres on the Dutton Park landing. Wyatt stepped out, threaded through the students waiting on the ramp, and climbed the hill behind it.

He walked. He had fifteen thousand dollars that he could be spending on transport but it was enough that the ferryman had seen him without taxi or bus drivers pinpointing his movements any further.

Wyatt walked through Highgate Hill to South Brisbane and in thirty minutes he was at the rear of the State Library. He went in, found a mens room outside the Childrens Library, and cleaned the dirt from his clothes and shoes, the blood from his hands. Then he worked water into his hair and used his fingers like a comb, creating a new part and a lock over his forehead. He removed the tie and put the suitcoat over his arm, the. 38 in a pocket where he could reach it quickly. He walked over the Victoria Bridge into the city like any white collar worker in the sun.

Eleven oclock. Hed told Anna Reid not to do anything that would draw attention to herself on the day of the robbery, so shed be at work now. Her firm was in a building on Allenby Street. It had a flat, innocuous, concrete slab exterior that offered no pleasures for the eye. Wyatt went in through the main doors and straight to the lifts as though he had business there.

He waited. A lift arrived and he stepped in, pushing the button to close the doors, then pushing buttons for the seventh and ninth floors. He put on his suitcoat and tie again and moved the. 38 from his coat pocket to the waistband at the small of his back.

The lift climbed. In a panel above the door, green numerals formed and dissolved, formed and dissolved: 4… 5… 6… Then 7, where Anna Reid worked. Wyatt would not get out at 7 but he needed to know the layout, where the offices were in relation to the corridor, where the stairwell might be. He lounged at the back of the lift when it stopped, just a man on his way to an upper level.

The lift gave a shudder, the door seemed to hesitate, then the three panels slid back into the door recess and Anna Reid stood staring at him.

The blood drained from her face, as though she knew hed come to kill her.

Neither moved. Wyatt stared at her neutrally, then at the men standing with her, one at each elbow. One made to step into the lift, pulling Anna with him, but the other said, Its going up.

The first man nodded, resumed his position and his hold on Annas arm.

Not that she was going anywhere, handcuffed like that.

Wyatts expression was gawking now, the nine-to-five citizen finding a little vicarious drama in his day. He kept the look pasted there as the doors closed again, shutting off Anna, the plainclothes men, the uniformed cops in the corridor behind them.

Wyatt got out on 9, a long corridor with unmarked doors on either side. Somewhere he heard a racking cough but otherwise the place was deserted. According to a notice on the wall opposite, the toilets were to the left. Wyatt followed the arrow and came to the stairwell door. He opened it and went in. The air was musty. Somewhere far below him a door banged.

He took a first step down and then another. He couldnt stay in the building: she might say that shed seen him, use him to trade her way out of trouble. His head was pounding again. He wanted to run, but forced himself to go slowly all the way to the bottom. There could be a cop on the stairs, there could be someone snatching a smoke break. A running man in a stairwell would not look right.

At the ground floor he eased the door open. Through the main doors at the end of the foyer he could see the plainclothes men, an unmarked car, Anna being bundled into it. Thats it for her, he thought. Theyll give her ten years.

Wyatt closed the door and waited. He thought about his options. Hed pocketed fifteen thousand dollars of loose cash from the vault, which was better than nothingenough, anyway, to finance a hit somewhere that would support him until it was safe to return to Melbourne and get his money back from the Mesics. Stolle and Mostyn must have been operating alone, he realised. He began to picture Stolle, the mans place in Melbourne, the quarter million hidden away somewhere, and left TrustBank behind him forever.

Stolle whooped as he drove away from the city. He couldnt help it. He giggled and whooped and pounded the flat of his hand on his knee.

He owed it all to a combination of idle curiosity, hatred and lack of funds. Just over a week ago hed been blinking in the afternoon light outside Jupiters, wondering whether to run his last twenty dollars through the poker machines or buy a ham sandwich and take the first flight home, when hed seen Wyatt step down from a tourist coach.