The hardest people to find were those who shrank away from their pasts and ordinary human contact. It was as though they no longer existed. They had no-one, wanted no-one, had no ego, didnt want to be seen again. People like that left no paper trail, made no new friends, ended up in paupers graves. They were running away from life or some deep hurt. They were the sad ones.
Then there was Wyatt, in a class of his own.
Six
Wyatt reached Melbourne at nine oclock and abandoned his stolen Kingswood in the Spencer Street station car-park. There were advertisements for accommodation on the station concourse. He called a number and at nine-thirty moved into a room at The Abbey, a backpackers hotel near the parklands on Nicholson Street. It was not the best roomonly metres from the tram tracksand now he had little more than eighty dollars to his name.
At ten oclock he walked through the cobbled lanes to a Turkish restaurant on Brunswick Street. He bought a doner kebab and ate it on the move. Something about the excursion unnerved him. It had been a principle of his life that he operated in and cherished his dark solitude at the edge of clamorous cities and people, but now he felt exposed. He didnt dare eat at a restaurant table. That would be inviting troublearrest, a blade in his neck, a bullet at the hairline.
Back at The Abbey he leafed through a telephone directory in the foyer. Mesic. In Melbourne it was a name that meant small-scale racketeering and a vicious brand of muscle. Hed heard that the Mesics lived in a compound in Templestowe, and there it was, Mesic K. and L., on Telegraph Road. Wyatt was obsessed with them. He wanted to hit them hard and get his money back. Tomorrow hed look at the place. That meant another car. He was running close to the edge, stealing a set of wheels every day or so like this. But there was no-one he could go to for help any more.
He tried to sleep, his reflexes dull and velvety, but he could not escape the trams and the mean, barren laughter of young backpackers returning, shouts as people left the nearby pubs and looked for their cars. Whenever he did wake, he supposed that some noise had caused it, but an old heartache seemed to slink away at the edge of his consciousness each time, like a trace of a badly remembered and comfortless dream. It left him tense and sleepless for long stretches of time. He slept through the early trams but at eight oclock there were trams every few minutes and he woke for the day, haunted and distracted.
He needed a car that would not be missed for a while. There was a Mobil service station across the road from The Abbey. He watched it through the morning. It was a busy place with a high and rapid turnover of customers for petrol and simple service and tune-up jobs. What interested Wyatt was that after the mechanics had finished working on each car, they parked it in an adjacent yard and tossed the keys on the floor under the drivers seat. At eleven oclock a Mobil tanker pulled into the forecourt and filled the underground reservoirs. The obscuring bulk of the truck, the distraction, gave Wyatt his chance. He loped across the road, slipped into a nondescript Datsun, and drove quietly away.
This was better. Planning an act, carrying it off successfully, was work, the sorts of things he was good at. Yet the sensation didnt last. He found himself driving the little car with his head down, his shoulders hunched, as though every driver and passenger in the city was primed to spot him and raise the alarm or crack open their windows enough to train a gunsight on him.
Thirty minutes later he stopped at a milk bar on Williamsons Road and ordered takeaway coffee and a cheese sandwich. Four dollars. He asked for directions to Telegraph Road and got back into the Datsun.
Telegraph Road was a broad, self-satisfied ribbon of clean black bitumen and white-grey kerbing. It curved around a gentle slope in the land and the houses were set far back behind thick hedges and red brick walls. The houses were ugly, the bad-taste homes of people whod acquired sudden wealth and nothing else.
He found number eleven. Everything about it suggested that the Mesics hadnt lived in the area for long. Theyd taken a hectare of dirt and turned it into a family compound: raw landscaped terraces, young trees, shiny lockup garage and a couple of blockish cream brick houses with colonnades grinning across the faces of them like stumpy teeth. The grounds were surrounded by a wire and girder perimeter fence three metres high.
The place looked deserted. It looked vulnerable to a hit: the neighbouring houses were concealed by trees, there were plenty of exits, he couldnt see dogs or guards. They had his money in there. The payroll heist in South Australia had gone wrong because someone who owed money to the Mesics had got to it first. Three hundred thousand. That would set him up again, enable him to buy a place, live in comfort while he concentrated on the big jobs again, the way it had been for him before it all went sour.
But it was pointless. He couldnt hit the Mesics alone, even if he did have the time and the funds to bankroll it. He couldnt put a gang together because he didnt know who he could trust. Everyone wanted a slice of him: he could feel the heat of it. Melbourne was unsafe. Victoria was unsafe. Maybe in six months, a year, he could come back.
Wyatt turned the car around and headed back into the city. He was on the freeway when an idea edged into his mind. It was foolish, born of desperation, which is why hed been suppressing it. But now he admitted the idea and let it grow, and it took on the configuration of possibility.
There was money hidden at his old place on the Mornington Peninsula and there was a pistol. Three months ago hed been forced to run, to abandon the farm and that part of his life. Hed thought it was permanent. It was permanent, he could never go back, but there was money there, and a gun. They were well hidden. Police and reporters would have climbed all over the house, the sheds, the little block of land with its view over the water to Phillip Island, but there was a chance they hadnt found anything. At this point that was the only chance he had in life.
Seven
Six weeks back, Stolle had started with what the client had given him: that bare name, Wyatt, and Lake, a name he went by sometimes; an old address; a description; and the names of two men hed worked with recently. Both men proved to be dead. No photograph.
But the description shed given him the day she came into his office was clearer, more impressionistic than he normally got from a client.
Wyatts tall, shed begun, with dark hair and eyes and a kind of dark cast to his face, making him look watchful and sometimes almost lonely. Does that help?
Youre doing fine, Stolle had assured her. Go on.
Slender build, but strong. He moves easily, a sort of fluid grace. She didnt even blush. Like Robert Mitchum, the actor, except not so pleased with himself. The thing is, he adapts to places and people. In a room of lawyers hed be a lawyer. In a room of wharfies hed be a wharfie. A pair of glasses, a change of clothes, hair parted a different way, youd have to look twice to realise you knew him.
Jesus Christ, Stolle thought. Why do you want him?