Ounsted looked at Wyatt professionally. ‘Wise man. You look knackered. I’ll give you something for the pain, it’ll help you sleep.’
‘No drugs.’
‘Suit yourself. The spare room’s through here.’
Ounsted took Wyatt to a small room at the front of the house. There were two narrow beds in it. Wyatt considered them: one was as good as the other. He stood in the centre of the room and stared at Ounsted. The doctor grew uncomfortable and moved toward the door. ‘Bathroom’s down the hall. I’ll see you in the morning.’
Thirty-six
Something woke him, some shift in the atmosphere. He lay on his back, feeling his skin creep, his nerve ends coming alive.
He knew where he was, and that he felt rested, the pain in his head less acute. No one was shooting at him, screaming at him to get on the ground, aiming lights in his eyes. In fact, the house was peaceful. But it felt wrong.
He lay still, feeling the blood pulse in him. Maybe he simply was cold. He pulled the bedclothes to his neck. The substance of his half-asleep, half-awake condition clarified with the movement, and he remembered that there had been the sound of a telephone, of a voice in the far reaches of the house.
Wyatt supposed that Ounsted’s nights were like that, sleep punctuated by calls to come save a life or inject a hit. He concentrated, eliminating the expected sounds of Ounsted’s life, his house, this street at night, to see what he was left with.
He heard Ounsted at the front door, then at the gate that opened onto the footpath. There were Venetian blinds in the window. He forced an aperture in the slats and looked out. Ounsted, wearing a coat and a hat, carrying the medical bag. Wyatt watched him get into the Peugeot, crank it into life, turn on the lights. Ounsted turned right at the end of the street and after that it was quiet.
Wyatt dozed. He would kill Kepler and leave it at that. If he went after Rose, after Towns, he would have to go after the whole bunch of them and he didn’t have the time or the energy or the resources to do that. The orders had come from Kepler to begin with. Towns would take over from Kepler. Towns was someone Wyatt could make a deal with that would stick. The money mattered but he’d never get the actual two hundred thousand back. He’d have to screw the money out of the Outfit some other way.
Ounsted was away for almost half an hour. Wyatt recognised the Peugeot’s rattling tappets and complaining differential, and checked the time: 11.02 pm. He clacked a gap in the blind, watched the doctor park the car, come through the gate, shut the door behind him.
There was the problem of getting to Sydney, getting at Kepler. It would take time and it would take money. Wyatt had all the time he needed but his funds were low. He would do what he’d done in the past, hire himself out to a crooked insurance agent or snatch the daily take of a restaurant in a suburb where nothing much ever happened, the kind of small-time hit that would earn him a bankroll but no credit at all.
Wyatt slept then, until Ounsted turned on the bedside light and prodded him awake-only it wasn’t Ounsted, it was Rose, wearing the doctor’s hat and coat and holding her own gun in her hand.
That explained the phone call. They’d called Ounsted out of the house and Rose had switched places with him.
Rose stepped clear of the bed and grinned down at Wyatt. ‘The legend himself. Shame he had to die in bed with his boots off.’ She centred the barrel on Wyatt’s forehead. ‘You can close your eyes if you like.’
She wasn’t good at this after all. She shouldn’t have stopped to speak to him. She was letting emotion and competition get the better of her. She was gloating, letting him know he’d lost, letting him see her, making sure he knew he was going to die and who was pulling the trigger. It was unprofessional and Wyatt shot her through the bedclothes. There was a spurt of blood and tissue and she slammed back against the wardrobe, then forward onto the floor. Her limbs thrashed but, as Wyatt watched, there was a final heave, an involuntary finger spasm and then she was still.
Wyatt found the keys to the Peugeot in her coat pocket. He checked that Jardine was sleeping peacefully in the surgery and a minute later he was in the alley at the rear of Ounsted’s house. He circled the block, saw no one. Rose had come without backup. He was the hunter now.
Thirty-seven
East Melbourne was leafy, damp and full of shadows, but a hundred metres away some light leaked into the darkness from the Outfit apartment building. Wyatt checked the time-11.30-and settled against the door of Ounsted’s car to wait.
Some time later he straightened. He saw the glass door open and a uniformed doorman touched his cap to a man in a hooded grey tracksuit. Wyatt didn’t know who the jogger was. He only knew that twice since Monday’s meeting he and Jardine had met with Towns late at night after watching the Mesics, and each time he’d seen joggers leave the building. The jogger padded past the Peugeot and out of sight.
A couple of minutes later a second jogger came through the door. He got closer. Wyatt had already removed the car’s interior light, so there was nothing to warn the man that the passenger door was swinging open. He smacked hard against it, the breath gushed from his body, and Wyatt watched him collapse onto the footpath.
There was no one around. Wyatt got out, poured ether from Ounsted’s surgery onto a handkerchief, and clamped it over the jogger’s face. He finished by stripping off the man’s tracksuit, putting it on over his own clothes, and hauling the man into the back of the car.
He waited. Fifteen minutes later, the first jogger finished his circuit of the nearby streets and approached the building. Wyatt slipped out of the car and caught up to him. They ran in place on the footpath, marking time, Wyatt with the tracksuit hood concealing his face. He let his breathing sound hoarse and strained. It was a sound of the city, and as necessary to jogging as two hundred dollar shoes, and it worked. The first man glanced around at him, nodded abstractedly, rapped on the glass door a second time. The doorman acknowledged them, the lock clicked open, and they were in.
The first jogger entered a ground floor apartment. The lift door was at the far end of the foyer. Staying in character, Wyatt trotted across the marble floor, pushed the up button, and touched his toes until the lift arrived.
The door slid open and he stepped into the lift. The interior walls were mirrors. He was disconcerted to see his reflection, a hooded figure wearing clothes he’d never normally wear. He turned his back on the mirror, stared out across the foyer, waited for the doors to close.
The lift was whisper quiet. Wyatt took out his.38. He was wearing gloves. The lift shook gently to a stop, the doors pinged open, and he Stepped out into the Outfit’s little entrance hall and pushed the gun under the chin of the man called Drew. There was a pair of suitcases in the bald accountant’s hands. He froze when Wyatt said, ‘Freeze,’ and dropped the cases.
‘Inside,’ Wyatt said.
He followed Drew into the apartment. Apart from Towns, who was in one of the bedrooms stacking shirts in a suitcase, the place was empty. He pushed both men face down onto the floor. ‘You seem to be leaving in a hurry.’
Towns said, as if that explained it, ‘Rose hasn’t come back.’
‘Where’s Hami?’
‘Fetching the car around.’
‘Towns, we had an agreement. I want my money back.’
Towns twisted his head around to stare at Wyatt, looking puzzled, his mind working but not finding answers. ‘I haven’t got your money.’
‘You knew about the house in Northcote and sent Rose after us,’ Wyatt said. ‘She jumped us and took off with the money.’
Towns shook his head. ‘There must be another player involved. We haven’t got your money.’
‘So she was acting alone?’
Towns put his cheek back down on the carpet. ‘Not her style.’
‘Her gun failed her the first time,’ Wyatt persisted, ‘and she came after us again. I’d like to know how she knew where we’d be both times.’