‘Go along Whitehorse Road.’
‘Got you.’
It took them thirty-five minutes. For the first fifteen they were caught in peak-hour traffic, crawling bunched from light to light. When they were away from the city centre, Wyatt looked out at the high hedges and red tiles, the decent small businesses and family homes, and knew they were a world away from him. At the white horse in the shopping centre he said, ‘The Overlander.’
The taxi took him to a sprawling 1970s hotel-motel a kilometre past the TAFE College on Whitehorse Road. It was built of pastel-brown brick and consisted of a dining room, private function rooms, swimming pool and three blocks of guests’ rooms. Wyatt paid the driver and walked through. His room faced a courtyard car park. The location was good. Wyatt never put a hit together close to where he actually pulled it.
Monday evening, six o’clock. Wyatt rested for an hour then showered and changed and went to the dining room. There was a conference function room to the left of the main doors. A board on an easel said: ‘The Overlander welcomes On-Line Computing’ and Wyatt could hear shouted laughter inside.
He asked for a corner table and sat where he could see the rest of the dining room. There were solitary men like himself there, a married couple, a family celebrating a birthday. Wyatt ate sparingly and nursed a glass of claret. He perplexed the waitress. She was drawn to him but he was grave and courteous and offered her nothing.
At 8.30 he left the dining room. Someone was making a speech in the function room. Wyatt crossed the car park, paused at his door, looked to see that no one was watching him, and crouched to peer at the bottom edge. He had sealed the door to the doorjamb with a strip of scotch tape a centimetre above ground level, but now the tape was sticking only to the door. Wyatt stood, listened, went through the motions of a man fishing a key out of his pocket and fitting it to the lock.
He went in that way too, averagely noisy and unsuspecting, and turned on some lights. It was a small room and he could see that it was empty, but it didn’t feel right. He knew an expert had been through it, leaving no palpable trace, only a shift in the atmosphere. Maybe the Mesics were better organised than he’d thought, or some old score was being settled. There was always that risk in Wyatt’s game.
He changed into black jeans, a hooded black windcheater and black running shoes. Since he hadn’t been hit when he came into the room it meant they’d scouted the place first and intended to come for him when everything had shut down for the night. At nine o’clock he climbed out by the bathroom window and slipped across the motel forecourt to the conference centre. He waited in the shadows next to the main car park. At ten o’clock reps and executives emerged tipsily from the function room, the men slapping one another on the back, the women kissing the men and the air near the cheeks of the other women.
Wyatt watched them get into their cars and drive away. He didn’t know until the last minute whether or not his idea would work, but when only one car remained and the driver stumbled and had trouble finding his keys, Wyatt got ready.
The man was trying one key and then another in the lock, and peering comically at his keyring. He gave up, leaned his arms and bald head on the roof of the car, and Wyatt heard strangled noises. The man was laughing.
‘Sorry, pal,’ Wyatt muttered, stepping out of the shadows.
At that moment the man slid to the ground and began to snore. It sounded heavy and permanent and Wyatt put his gun away. He took the keys from the man’s fist and dragged him into the shrubbery separating The Overlander from the service road. The snoring stopped for a moment, started again.
Wyatt paused. The snoring would attract attention. Let the poor bastard sleep it off in the car. He unlocked a rear door, dragged the man out of the shrubbery again, and half-lifted, half-tumbled him onto the floor behind the front seats. He got behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Behind him the snoring settled into a rhythm.
Wyatt drove out of the conference centre car park and right into Whitehorse Road. At the Station Street lights he U-turned and came back. This time he steered into the courtyard where guests parked their cars. He slotted into an empty spot near the street entrance and got into the back of the car. He rested his feet on the bald man’s chest and pushed down gently. The snoring stopped. Five minutes later it broke out again, and again Wyatt prodded the man.
It was deep and shadowy in the back of the car. Wyatt watched and waited. He could see the door to his room clearly. When they came they wouldn’t see him. The bald man stirred and muttered but didn’t wake.
Time passed. Whether it passed quickly or slowly wasn’t a question that Wyatt asked himself. Waiting was something he did every day. It couldn’t be avoided.
Several cars entered and left the courtyard through the evening. None of them interested Wyatt. Then at four minutes past eleven he did get interested. A Laser, windows tinted, lights off, entered from the service road and began to prowl the perimeter of the area. It circled once, rolled silently back across the courtyard, and parked near his room. Wyatt waited. Nothing happened for several minutes. Then, a slight movement: the driver’s door was opening. Wyatt expected to see the inside light come on but the interior stayed black. They’d sent a pro. He continued to wait.
The driver was a woman and suddenly she was out of the Laser and pressing against the wall outside Wyatt’s room. She wore close-fitting black jeans and a T-shirt and had a silenced pistol in one hand.
A memory trace stirred in his mind, an image of a swift, black, female shape. Ten months ago a man he’d sometimes worked with had shopped him to a Sydney crowd called the Outfit, and the killer they’d sent to get him was a woman. This same one. Wyatt had escaped then but he knew that she was good at her job and she would keep tracking him.
She slipped a key into the door, then she was inside. Wyatt waited. No light showed behind the drawn curtains. He didn’t expect to see light anyhow. She was a pro; she wouldn’t shine a torch around.
After a few seconds the woman came out fast, looking spooked, and got back into her car. The Laser muttered into life, backed away from Wyatt’s door, sped with a faint squeal out onto Whitehorse Road.
Wyatt got out of the bald man’s car. He didn’t think there’d be a second gun to worry about. He loped, half-crouching, across the courtyard to his room. The door was open. He slipped inside, turning on the lights. He smelt the shots before he saw the damage. She had fired half-a-dozen shots into the spare blankets and pillows heaped body-like under the bedspread. Then she’d seen the trick and run.
At least he knew now that the Mesics hadn’t set this up. But it did mean the Outfit still had a price on his head. He’d caused them some grief in the past and it seemed they weren’t going to let him forget it. Wyatt felt rare anger building in him. It came hot and hard and for a moment he was blinded by it. Nothing was smooth or easy anymore. No one would let him be.
After a while he changed his clothes and packed his bag. He wiped the place clean of his prints and went back to the bald man’s car. Time to find another bolthole.
Four
There were always question marks hanging over the early days of a job. Until he knew that the ground was safe and the job feasible, and until he’d put a team together, Wyatt would spend a few hundred dollars here and there so that he had a few boltholes if things went sour on him. In addition to The Overlander he’d paid in advance for rooms at a hotel and a guesthouse.
The hotel was behind the University in Parkville and it had a checkerboard facade of white marble slabs and tinted glass in aluminium frames. LONDON hotel was scrawled across the face of it in red neon. The lobby was deserted when Wyatt got in at midnight. He made for the stairs, attracting the attention of a clerk behind the desk. The clerk was slight, pale, his lips loose and red. He smiled wetly at Wyatt, but Wyatt’s return smile was cruel-looking across the stretch of maroon carpet, and the man looked away. Wyatt climbed the stairs, checked the corridor, let himself into his room, checked that.