She breathed in sharply. ‘I know you’re angry. All I can say is, I wasn’t faking it with you.’
Wyatt pressed warningly with the gun. She changed tack immediately. ‘Oh dear, he’s in a sulk.’
The mocking voice was a tactic. She would try to get a rise out of him, then, bit by bit, try to turn him. Wyatt ignored it.
They were silent, then Anna said, ‘Why did he kill Finn?’
‘He would’ve learned from Hobba that there were no drugs in the safe, so he thought Finn was trying to pull something. Finn was already bad news for carrying on his kickback scam on the sly.’
She shivered again. ‘He tortured Finn too?’
Wyatt didn’t answer. He wasn’t interested in Finn.
‘I’m glad you got him, Wyatt,’ Anna said. She lifted a hand from the steering wheel. ‘Can I put my hands down now? My arms are aching.’
‘No. Did you kill Pedersen?’
‘God, Wyatt. What do you take me for? He’s waiting there for you. I told him I was going out for a while.’
‘Last Monday night,’ Wyatt said, ‘you came on to me so I’d forget my suspicions, right?’
‘No! That part was genuine.’
She took her hands off the steering wheel and turned in her seat and looked at him over the top of it. He leaned back, still keeping the gun on her. The wound in his side seemed to tear open and before he could control it, he breathed in sharply and groaned.
‘Oh, you’re hurt,’ she said. She reached a hand across the seat. He stared at it. She drew back again.
Then her voice took on its low growl and her face moved expressively. He remembered how desire had animated it. ‘All those things you said about working together?’ she said. ‘We still can.’ She picked up the bag on the passenger seat. ‘This would set us up.’
‘You’ve been doing fine by yourself.’
She put the bag down. ‘We can, Wyatt. It’ll be good. We’ll have a holiday first. No-one knows anything about us.’
‘There’s a dead man in your house,’ Wyatt said. ‘You’re the partner of a man who was tortured to death. The cops will find the connection. I’d say you’re fucked.’
‘If I go down, you’ll go too. Think about it. Come away with me, or help me get the body out of my house.’
Wyatt watched her for a while. He felt trapped, and he hated it. ‘One condition,’ he said. ‘You give up the drugs. If we plant them at Finn’s, the cops and whoever Finn worked for won’t look any further.’
She frowned at that. He waited. He heard the safety catch, very faint, as she apparently shifted position to get more comfortable.
When her face emptied of expression, he fired through the seat. Anna jerked back in shock and there was a crack as the windscreen frosted near her head.
‘I won’t give you a second chance,’ Wyatt said.
He reached over and dealt her wrist a numbing blow with the barrel of the Browning. Her.38 fell back in the bag again. All in all, he thought, he’d been a step ahead of her this time. It was like getting his sight back after a period of blindness. He watched her shake and moan. ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘You’ve still got your share of the money.’
Forty-three
‘What now?’ she asked flatly.
‘We mop up,’ he said.
He punched a hole in her shattered windscreen, gave her the keys to the Hertz Falcon, and told her to follow him back across the city.
At her house they worked in wary, hostile silence. She kept tools, ladders, paint, rollers and drop-sheets in her garden shed. Wyatt wrapped Bauer’s body in a drop-sheet and she helped him carry it out to the Falcon. Then she righted her furniture and replaced her drawers and he mopped up blood, his own and Bauer’s. Then he mixed plaster from a packet and plugged bullet holes and gouges in the hallway. Finally he dragged in a tin of white paint and a stepladder. He felt dangerously light-headed, and bone tired.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘Not me,’ Wyatt said. ‘You. You’re going to paint the hall. Not tomorrow, now.’
‘Now?’
‘You might have visitors in the morning. If they seem curious, tell them the hold-up upset you, you’ve been painting to relax.’
Anna Reid’s face took on a shut-down, sullen expression. It was still there when Wyatt nodded goodbye and let himself out the front door.
He drove the Hertz Falcon to Finn’s house in Hawthorn. It was a Federation-style house set behind a thick hedge. Finn was there, a swollen-tongued, leering, trussed-up shape on a king-size bed. Wyatt unwrapped Bauer and dumped him on the floor next to the bed. He also dumped the guns. Let the cops work it out. He distributed the coke and heroin packets behind heating vents, in shoeboxes, and among suitcases in a closet.
Then he left the city, driving the Hertz Falcon one-handed, his other arm wrapped across his body, his fingers cupping the wound in his side. Once or twice when he dozed, panicky horns and headlights warned him back into his lane. Sometimes he found himself driving very slowly, and in Frankston an angry motorist rapped on his window at a traffic light. With relief he dumped the Falcon and collected his car and headed for the back roads.
The sky was black. When moonlight struggled briefly through the heaped clouds he saw fog wisps like people in the road ahead. Fog hung over dams and creeks. Otherwise he felt that only he was abroad, only he awake.
He opened his window and filled his lungs with cold air. He dare not stop or he would sleep and risk being wakened by a tap on the glass and voices wanting to know if he was all right, had he been drinking, had he been in a fight, your licence, please, sir.
When Wyatt reached the coast road he followed it to Shoreham. He turned inland again, and on the hill slopes he felt that he was climbing to uninhabited reaches of the world. Then the headlights picked out his white gate, and narrow muddy drive and the image disappeared and he knew that in the morning there’d be cars going to church, and neighbours’ houses in the distance, and everything would be all right.
He reversed into the barn and shut the heavy doors. It was almost midnight. He was forcing himself now.
Inside the house he burned his bloodstained clothes and filled the bath with hot water. He washed the wound in the bath, then soaked for a while, letting the heat ease his knotted muscles. He got out, dried himself, dressed the wound. He felt mildly feverish. He dosed himself with brandy and aspirin and leftover antibiotic tablets.
He slept for ten hours. In the morning it was apparent that he’d tossed and perspired during the night. His pillow was damp, his sheets damp and twisted. He felt scarcely rested, but his thoughts and perceptions no longer seemed so freakish and he had an appetite. Before doing anything, he phoned the Drug Squad. He said they’d find something interesting at the house of David Finn, in Hawthorn. No, he wouldn’t give his name, and he broke the connection before they could trace the call.
Later he showered, dressed in slippers and an old tracksuit, and left by the kitchen door to fetch firewood from the pile at the back of the house. The sky was low, a succession of misty rainclouds sweeping across the hills. He went back inside and ate scrambled eggs, toast and coffee in front of an open fire.
There was a trace of Anna Reid in the air, a faint, troubling perfume. He had an unfinished feeling about her. She knew about him, where he lived, his involvement in the hit on Finn. Even if she went straight and he never heard from her again, he’d feel a pinch at the edges of his memory. It would be more distracting than desire. Desire is something that doesn’t last. She was like him, but he wondered if she’d ride out the investigation, and he wondered if he should have killed her.
He loaded more logs on the fire. By now the scent of heated sap and resin were spreading through the room and soon he couldn’t smell anything else.
Forty-four
The first shot came when he went outside to collect more firewood. The sound was hollow and deep, as if muted by the misty rain, but there was no mistaking the heavy calibre or the fury of the bullet smashing through the logs in his arms. The force of it spun him against the back wall of the house. The logs tumbled out of his arms. For a moment he felt helpless, pinned like an insect.