Unbidden anxieties plagued him then. He stretched out on the bed and tried to sort out what was wrong with him, wrong with the Mesic hit. He analysed the complications one by one. First, profit had always been his simple, reliable motive, but this time revenge had muddied it. Second, he couldn’t hit the Mesics while the Outfit still had a hard-on for him-he’d have to find a way to warn them off. Third, the old pattern was broken. He was forty and had spent half of his life pinpointing where the money was and putting together an operation to snatch it. He’d started small, honing his skills, and by the time he was thirty he’d become more ambitious, going for the big money-banks, bullion, payroll. For the past decade he’d worked no more than three or four times a year, resting between jobs. He had no ties to speak of, and when he wasn’t working he’d felt relaxed, inclined to find the appealing things in people, not their possible weaknesses or potential for treachery. All that was destroyed now. He was broke and nowhere was safe for him anymore.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to build up funds again, but for some reason lately he’d begun taking a long view. Did he want to keep doing this for the rest of his life? Would he always have the nerve for it? If and when he stopped working (he discounted being jailed, hurt or killed), would he have sufficient funds for a comfortable life? He shook his head. I’m like any man my age, he thought, worrying about the years until retirement, until death.
In the morning he dressed in dark cotton trousers and shirt. He decided against a coat-coats get snagged on doorknobs, fences, branches-and put on a woollen windbreaker. He tucked his.38 into an inside pocket. He combed back his water-darkened hair. It had the effect of further narrowing his face.
At nine o’clock he left the hotel. Automatically checking for a tail, he crossed the road into the grounds of the University. The students were well-nourished and seemed very young to him. They shouted rather than spoke, as if they would eventually leave here with their heads full but without knowing anything at all.
Wyatt emerged at the Swanston Street flank of the University and walked through to the bus-stop near Jimmy Watson’s wine bar. Again he looked to see if he was being tailed. He looked back along the street, looked at his watch, frowned, looked at the timetable. He hunched his shoulders, zipped up his windbreaker, glanced at the low, muttering clouds that were blowing in across the city. He wanted to look like an ordinary man on a busy street, his mind on his bus and the weather.
A Kew bus came by soon after that and he climbed aboard. When the bus had crossed Hoddle Street into Abbotsford, he pressed the bell for the stop under the elevated railway line. Four people stood up with him. He let them get off first. It was something he did automatically.
He entered the narrow side streets, passing small shoe factories and cramped fibro and weatherboard houses where Greek women hosed cement gardens. Five minutes later he came to a tucked-away corner pub.
It was called The Wheatsheaf and it had been redecorated since he’d last seen it. There were pastel blue canopies over the doors and windows, a sign saying bistro and geraniums in window boxes. Wyatt went inside to wait. There were two patrons; both wore Breton fisherman’s caps and studded leather belts, boots and jackets. The barman was shirtless above leather trousers, setting off his biceps and his solarium tan with scarlet braces. His bare skull gleamed and an earring caught the light. Wyatt ignored the hothouse atmosphere of the place, the fussy paint job and new carpet. He ordered a glass of light beer, took it to the window that overlooked Rossiter’s front yard, and sat down to wait.
Rossiter had been a small-time holdup man but he’d retired from that to become a small-time go-between and bagman. He knew more about the local scene than anybody and until a year ago he’d been Wyatt’s contact. Wyatt had been operating from a secluded farmhouse on the Victorian coast at the time, emerging every few months to pull a job using information and contacts provided by Rossiter. If anyone wanted Wyatt for a job they approached Rossiter, and Rossiter passed the message on. It had been a sweet life, but the situation had altered forever when a revenge-happy punk named Sugarfoot Younger had forced Rossiter to reveal where Wyatt was living. Wyatt had removed the Sugarfoot threat but he’d had to abandon the farm. He could never go back there and that was one of the disappointments of his life.
Now he needed to make use of Rossiter again. But Sugarfoot had hurt the old holdup man. It was reasonable to assume that Rossiter blamed Wyatt for it. That was why Wyatt was watching before he went in. He needed to gauge the place first.
It was a triple-fronted brick house set among small single-fronted weatherboard cottages. White paint was peeling from the eaves, window frames and doors. A carport at the side sheltered a souped-up Valiant Charger and a VW heavily streaked with carbon deposits around the exhaust pipe. The front lawn needed cutting. Dry grass and dead flowers choked the pitted stones bordering the path to the front door. A poorly laid brick wall divided the house from the buckled footpath. The gate was bent and off its hinges, caught in the strangling grass.
Wyatt sipped his beer. He sipped it for forty minutes. He saw a tiny grey terrier from a neighbouring house cock its leg on Rossiter’s wall and a sparrow add to the slime coating the crumbling plaster Aborigine on Rossiter’s front lawn, but that’s all he saw.
Finally a thin, sallow, ill-looking youth approached along the footpath, walking a dog. The youth wore the Action Front uniform of tight black jeans and T-shirt, Doc Martens, tattoos and a crewcut, and Wyatt knew by the weak chin, flapping ears and knobbly features that this was Niall, Rossiter’s son. The dog was a pitbull, head down, snuffling and pulling hard as it smelt home.
Then dog and master froze. They’d spotted the grey terrier. An expression of cunning and greed settled on Niall’s face. He hunted around, saw no one who mattered, and let go the pitbull’s lead.
The slaughter took no more than fifteen seconds. The big dog streaked away, low and snarling. It snatched up the smaller dog in its jaws, shook it, breaking its neck, smacked it against the footpath and wall, then dropped flat to gnaw at the head. Rossiter’s son retrieved the terrier, walked back along the footpath, and dropped the body into a yard several doors down.
Wyatt watched youth and dog enter their yard together. Niall took the pitbull through the open-ended carport to the rear of the house. When Niall didn’t reappear, Wyatt guessed he’d gone in by the back door.
Wyatt had intended to leave the pub and cross the road then, but an empty tip-truck pulled up outside Rossiter’s, partly obscuring his view. The truck was rust-coloured, the tray sides massively dented. Wyatt wondered idly if the old holdup man had got himself a new job or if he was moving in different circles now, but a man he’d never seen before, thickset and wearing overalls, climbed out of the cab and made for the house next door to Rossiter’s.
Wyatt watched him through a gap between the truck and an old Hillman. Just as the man reached down to unlatch his front gate, Niall Rossiter reappeared on the footpath. He was carrying a crossbow, the bow pulled back tight. Wyatt could see the bolt sitting there. It was sharp and lethal-looking, and Niall Rossiter had the appearance of a man who wanted to let it loose on someone. Wyatt glanced around, saw that no one in the bar was paying any attention to him, and opened the pub window a crack.