The woman had looked away, a sure sign that she was about to be careless with the truth. Hell learn something to his advantage, she said. The thing is, its urgent. He has to be in Brisbane by mid-November at the latest.
Lawyer? Stolle wondered. He had waited a couple of beats, then said carefully, Is he a con man, a pro? Do the cops want him?
Shed looked at him sharply then. Stolles preference was for cheerful, leggy blondes, not brunettes. Your blonde is basically generous and uncomplicated. Still, hed had to admit that the woman from Brisbane had plenty going for her, from the shape of her ankles to her fine tilted head, framed with dead straight black hair. She knows and likes herself and gets what she wants, hed thought, and the only chink in her armour is this Wyatt character.
Im relying on your discretion, she said.
Which is?
Find him for me and not say anything to anyone and get a ten thousand dollar bonus. Cash.
Ten?
On delivery to me in Brisbane. I might also point out that hes hard and hes dangerous. If you snitch, hell get even somehow, even from prison.
Stolle flared suddenly. I dont like being threatened.
Its not a threat. Im just saying I know what hes capable of. All I want from you is for you to do your job.
Stolle had shrugged, said sure, pocketed the five thousand dollar retainer she handed him. Thats yours whether or not you find him, shed said.
Very generous of you.
Shed scowled, sensing sarcasm. And heres a further five. Tell him its his if and when he accompanies you to Brisbane, and tell him theres more where it came from. Do we have a deal?
We have a deal.
She had watched him for a while then, assessing him. Stolle stared back at her. He wondered if there was an inheritance behind all this. If Wyatt was wanted by the law, he could use that as a lever to get a percentage. Meanwhile, the woman was here on her own. If youre staying a few days, why not enjoy yourself?
She laughed. Mr Stolle, she said.
Encouraged, he kept pushing. It earned him forty minutes in an expensive cocktail lounge and that was as far as he got. Hed gone home feeling obscurely dissatisfied, and the next day she flew back to Brisbane and he had put Mostyn and Whitney on the Wyatt case.
Wyatt had been busy, very busy, leaving dead men and an agitated underworld in his wake. People were prepared to talk to Stolle, but they didnt know anything. The police now had prints that they supposed were Wyatts, but Wyatt had never been arrested and so they had nothing else on record. The man seemed to have no friends or family. It was rumoured that hed started his career in the armed forces in Vietnam, stealing a payroll from an American base, raiding high-stakes poker games, selling jeeps, radios and weapons on the black market, but when Stolle checked with Canberra, he found no Wyatt matching the man he wanted in army, navy or airforce records. Police in four states had him down for a string of hold-ups and killings but, as Wyatt operated largely outside the system of loose criminal groups and coteries, their investigations had taken them nowhere.
Wyatt didnt even have interests to speak of. Anyone looking for me, Stolle thought, would know to check out the casinos and sooner or later theyd find me.
But Mostyn and Whitney had got lucky. They knew the man had fled interstate, leaving behind a house on the coast and an identity for which thered been no paper record. The trail had gone cold for a while thenuntil the payroll heist north of Adelaide had hit the headlines. They were smart enough to trace him to the border near Mt Gambier. They werent smart enough not to get greedy.
Now Wyatt had disappeared again and hed be twice as wary and twice as hard to find.
Either Ill stumble on him by accident, Stolle thought, or someone will sell him to the cops.
Or hell make a basic mistake.
Stolle took down a Victorian accommodation guide from the shelf. He also got out a book of maps. Then he started dialling.
Eight
Wyatts private name for his old place was the farm, but real estate wankers must have dusted off the dented brass nameplate that had been tacked to the wall next to the front door and were calling it Blackberry Hill Farm. He slowed the Datsun, letting the little car roll to a halt opposite the shiny auction notice. This was Monday. The auction was midweek, Wednesday, 1 pm. The hype went on to spell out everything hed lost and had to run from: original weatherboard farmhouse; fifty hectares of pasture and bushland; running creek; original sheds; views to Phillip Island; seven minutes to Shoreham township.
A separate notice announced a clearing sale, 12 noon on the same day. It listed furniture, house fittings, wine collection, original paintings, tools, Massey Ferguson tractor, Rover ride-on mower.
It didnt list the Colt. 45 automatic or the two thousand dollars hed stashed away. Nor did it mention whod owned the place and why the real estate firm, acting under instructions from the Attorney Generals Department, was selling it.
Wyatt put the Datsun in gear and drove along the sunken road for a further fifty metres. He came to the driveway. It was lined with golden cypresses and made a lazy curve to the front door of the house. Wyatt didnt go in. They had bolted a new cyclone gate across the driveway and wrapped a chain and padlock around it. Nor did he climb the gate and go in that way. He didnt think the police would be watching the place any longer but the neighbours would still be jumpy.
Wyatt was wearing sunglasses and a decent enough op-shop suit, and hed scraped his hair back over his scalp. But it would not be so easy to shake off his loping walk, the articulation of trunk and limbs that would be like a signature to the people who once had accepted his right to be here, in the days before he had a running gun battle in the pine plantation behind his house and shot a Melbourne punk in the back of the head.
He followed the fenceline, driving slowly, looking the place over. There were twenty or thirty sacred ibis picking their way through the marshy ground at the base of his hill. Someone had put a slasher through the long grass and cleared the blackberry thickets. There was fresh paint on the house trim and the barn door was bright red. Wyatt had kept a car in the barn, facing the doorway, a spare ignition key under the dash, permanently ready for a fast escape. Thats how it had been, three months ago. Now some barrister would buy the place, park his air-conditioned 4WD there, use it as a tax write-off.
Wyatt drove back the way hed come. The farms and orchards rolled away on small humped hills toward the sea, and the land was divided by hedges, lanes and avenues of pines. It was a place where you could hide and learn to match a bird to its cry and be left alone by your neighbours apart from a finger raised from an oncoming steering wheel on the narrow roads. It had been a part of Wyatt and hed lost it. Bought from the proceeds of just one job, a gold bullion heist at Melbourne Airport five years before. He needed something like that again. He needed a new base, somewhere he could emerge from once or twice a year, pull a job that had plenty of money attached to it, disappear again.
But he needed that Colt first and he needed that two thousand.
Thats if they were still there.
Thats if the cops hadnt stripped the place. He had no reason to suppose they hadnt.
Wyatt took side roads back to Frankston and checked into an on-site caravan. Twenty-five bucks, grimy toilet and shower block, cars coming and going from the red-light van two doors down. He lay on the bunk, tuned everything out. He guessed thered be a big crowd at the sale and theyd stay on for the auction. It was almost November and thered be buyers there wanting a summer place close to the sea, thered be gawkers attracted to the blood spilt and the mystery, thered be neighbours curious to know how much their own places might fetch.
There could also be cops, wondering if sentiment would bring him back there.