Garry Disher: Two-Way Cut

The thing is, shed moved into this house only a few days ago, and yet they’d found her. Before that there’d been another house, and before that a couple of cheap and nasty flats. Cheap and nasty houses, too, so who was she kidding? The thing is, they’d found her at each of her boltholes and told her she was a dead woman.

This time they’d buried her car in a truckload of sand and placed a cardboard coffin on top of the heap. There was a doll dressed in a blue uniform cap and overalls inside the coffin. Overalls because some of them thought she was a lesbian. Lived alone, no boyfriend, didn’t mix, she had to be a dyke, right?

She was actually straight, but that wasn’t the issue, it was just their way of putting the boot in further. Some of them wanted her dead, and they were cops, and knew how to find her. Knew how to make her dead.

So there and then Leah Flood walked away from all of that. Literally. No more flats or houses in this city. She shoved clothes, toiletries, Swiss Army knife, sleeping-bag, tent and a couple of paperbacks into her pack and hit the road. Leah didn’t look back, not even at her buried car. It was a good car but a rope around her neck now. A rattly red MG with personalised plates, LEAH82 for the year she was born, shed not last five minutes on the open road.

Hitchhiking was a different matter. It was November, warm days and cool evenings, so she could camp in barns, under bridges, amongst ti-trees along the coast. Rent an on-site caravan or cabin whenever she needed to treat herself or put her clothes through a washing machine. Pay cash for everything so that she wouldn’t leave a trail of electronic records.

Lose herself, in other words. Vanish off the face of the earth.

And so the first thing she did when she left the house, ignoring the stares of the neighbours, was to take a bus ten blocks to Whitehorse Plaza, where she found a branch of the ANZ and cleaned out her savings. Five thousand dollars. Could she exist on twenty dollars a day? That would buy her over a year of freedom, and maybe by then her enemies would have forgotten her.

Next she altered her appearance. Her face was well known, so she couldn’t do much beyond going into a salon and asking them to cut her hair into a pageboy and put a red rinse through it. She didn’t need spectacles but bought a pair of sunglasses with bright green frames to distract attention from her features.

She examined herself in a restroom, liking the effect. Maybe with new looks Ill get a new personality, she thought then rejected the notion. She needed to be the person shed already become these last few months: vigilant, determined, solitary.

Finally she left the shopping-centre and boarded a bus and spotted the Subaru again. Shed first seen it from the bus window on the way to the shopping-centre and given it the benefit of the doubt, but here it was again and Leah didn’t believe in coincidences. It pulled in behind the bus and tailed it, staying well back. Leah thought rapidly. She needed access to an exit and a line of sight along the length of the bus, and so she moved seats, stationing herself on a side-facing seat near the drivers door. Would they try to take her on the bus? Phone ahead and put someone on board? She glanced around at the other passengers: a teenage girl with her mother, and an elderly man with a walking-stick. Leah couldn’t expect much help from them.

The minutes passed and the bus belched through the endless tracts of tiled roofs and drought-blighted lawns, more passengers embarking, and then on the other side of the river the houses grew smaller and older, the traffic heavier, and the air more toxic. Collingwood and then Fitzroy, two of the poorest of the inner suburbs, but in pockets also rich and desirable: certain streets with gentrified houses, outdoor cafs, expensive clothing, fancy coffee, Porsches at the kerb, the occasional TV star. But none of that interested Leah. In Fitzroy she could catch a tram to the main train station, which would give her access to the grasslands at the edge of Melbourne and the endless roads to the west. Just stick out her thumb and go.

But she couldn’t afford to let the men in the Subaru know she was going to the station. Several people got ready to alight at the stop for Brunswick Street. Leah let them get off first. She didn’t want them behind her but on the street where they could shield her. She paused on the top step, her head out, glancing back along the flank of the bus. The Subaru was waiting at the kerb a short distance behind.

She stepped down, jostling her way through a clump of pedestrians, and turned into Brunswick Street. A hundred metres down she paused outside a bookshop and gazed, without taking in the details, at a poster advertising the latest Isobelle Carmody novel, then switched direction and darted across to the other side of the street. She ran then, back toward Johnston Street, as if to catch the lights.

Leah was going to flush them out, see how good they were, see how many they were.

She turned right into Johnston Street, jogging along it to a sidewalk caf, where people were drinking coffee under striped umbrellas, and ducked left into a narrow side street. Halfway down she paused and looked back. The street was clear.

But she knew she hadn’t lost them. By running shed announced herself. They were out there, regrouping, setting up the next stage. She had to nip this in the bud, and the only way to do that was to let herself be the bait.

Back on Brunswick Street she headed south towards the city centre, keeping pace with the crowd. Half of the pedestrians were locals: yuppies, students and wannabe artists; the other half were tourists from the suburbs trying to look cool. In other circumstances, Leah would have found them irritating, but today she needed themas potential witnesses, obstacles or saviours.

She edged through some backpackers huddled outside an internet caf. There are ways of tailing people so you cant be spotted and ways of spotting a tail. A careless tail will always turn away abruptly, drop to fiddle with a shoelace, pause outside an unlikely shop window. Without drawing attention to herself, Leah began to scrutinise the people around her. She used reflective surfaces: car and shop windows, peoples sunglasses, store mirrors, car chrome and duco. Now and then she stopped abruptly and doubled back to see if that disconcerted anyone, made anyone change direction abruptly with her. She entered a vast, noisy pasta restaurant by one door, studied the chalked menu for a while, then left by way of an alley outside the kitchen. When a taxi pulled up outside a pub to discharge a passenger, she got in, told the driver to U-turn, and watched to see how her pursuers reacted.

Nothing. They were good. She didn’t see a thing that looked wrong.

She got out again near the bookshop, gave the complaining driver twenty dollars, and retraced her movements along Brunswick Street. Leah was prepared to do this for two or three hours if necessary. She assumed they’d have more than one man on her. There might even be a tail in front of her. Leah didn’t care who or where or when, she wanted to isolate just one man, disable him, and ask him some hard questions.

But they were good. Leah went through the main strip of cafs and boutiques a second time, heading toward the city, and was several blocks along, adjacent to the Housing Commission flats on Gertrude Street, before she spotted a tail. It was chance, and her instincts: just ahead of her a woman with a basket of dirty washing had propped open the glass-paned door of a laundromat with her hip, angling the glass sufficiently to give Leah a clear image of the man a few metres behind her.

It was not only his face but also the way he walked that she remembered not five minutes ago, crossing against her at a traffic light. A tall man with pouchy eyes and an elaborately casual gait, more easily identifiable here, where there were fewer pedestrians. Leah scratched her head with feigned absentmindedness: she didn’t want the tail to see the tension in her. She kept walking. The street was broad and open. Her eyes darting, she searched for a way of ambushing the man.