He turned on the windscreen wipers. A misty rain was sweeping across the Mornington Peninsula. At Shoreham he turned north, taking a narrow road into a region of orchards and weekender farms set amongst trees and dams on small, humped hills. Here and there he saw a distant light, but it was almost midnight and most of the locals would be in bed.
Italy, the Pacific-he hadn’t been somewhere like that for a while. Things had started to fall apart about two years ago. Someone shot on a job, big jobs that fell apart even before he’d applied his mind to them, too many small jobs, too many cowboys like Sugarfoot Younger on the scene. Too much high-tech gadgetry around every door, window, safe.
He came to a hairpin bend, slowed the car and steered into his driveway, a narrow track winding through an avenue of golden cypresses. Below him were the lights of Shoreham. Beyond the town was the black mass of the sea. There were no ships’ lights.
Suddenly the rear wheels lost their grip on the mud. He steered into the slide, and when the car was righting itself he saw a rain-slicked figure glisten once in the headlights and disappear.
He also saw the rifle. He pulled on the handbrake, turned off the engine and headlights, and wound down his window. He listened for a moment, his hand drawing out the flat 9 mm Browning he kept in the car. He’d taken out the bulb of the interior light and had the door open when a voice called, ‘Mr Warner? Sorry, Mr Warner, it’s only me.’
The figure that stepped out of the cypresses and onto the track wore a stockman’s waterproof coat and carried a powerful torch and a hunting rifle. It was the neighbour’s son. Wyatt hid the Browning again. ‘Craig,’ he said.
‘Sorry, Mr Warner. That damn fox again.’
Now Wyatt could see Craig’s pimples and earnest face and the troubling raindrops in his eyelashes. ‘Did you get him?’
‘I tell you what,’ Craig said, shaking his head in wonder, ‘he’s a cunning bugger.’
Wyatt nodded. He started the car again. ‘Well, good luck,’ he said.
‘Night, Mr Warner. Sorry if I startled you.’
Wyatt continued along his driveway and across his yard and into the old shed he used as a garage. He backed in, to give himself that second or two of forward advantage if ever he had to run for it, and tucked the ignition key in a slot under the steering column.
He went to bed then and in his dreams gave way to impulses to hurt and kill. He woke up sweating. He tried to read but he felt dissatisfied, on edge. It was bad enough that he’d spent hours on a minor job with second-raters and come out of it minus the money, but he’d also been too close to losing control back there in Ivan Younger’s storeroom. A job was a job; there was no room for emotions. He had hurt and killed before, but only when necessary. Otherwise it became the solution to everything and that was dangerous.
In the morning he walked. He did this after every job. He tramped around his boundary fence as though defining and measuring his fifty hectares, his cottage and reedy creek, his trees, waterfowl, leaning gates and view of Phillip Island across the bay. The farm was his. He owed no money on it and his name did not appear on any documents or electoral rolls, but, for the first time, it was all he had-apart from $1000 and $2000 emergency caches in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, cities where he had pulled jobs and might again.
Only one person who counted knew he lived here, a retired hold-up man named Rossiter who passed on messages. Anyone looking for Wyatt knew to contact Rossiter first. The word was Wyatt was the best, he was available, but these days Rossiter rarely called with anything worthwhile.
The neighbours and the townspeople believed that Wyatt was a stockbroker named Warner who had got out at the top of the market but still dabbled in it between periods travelling overseas. They mostly ignored him. He wasn’t one of the loathed January holiday makers, but nor was he exactly a local. Whenever Wyatt travelled he paid Craig good money to keep an eye on his place. He was also quiet, courteous and reclusive, and that suited everybody.
At one o’clock he ate lunch sparingly and restlessly, then sat and brooded at his window. Sometimes, after a job, he brought a woman here for a few days, women who didn’t know who he was or what he did. They found him to be wary and emotionally invisible. When he tired of them he drove them to Hastings and put them on the train. He always took confusing back roads, and there was no number on his telephone dial, making it impossible for them to find him again. He had encountered one of these women once, in Bourke Street, and had responded so coldly that she flushed and drew back in anger. It seemed to Wyatt that he was only ever in intimate situations with strangers-a woman sometimes, a safe-cracker in a darkened room, a getaway driver after a job-and then only for short periods. He hid his past, from others and from himself. No photographs, diaries or letters; nothing kept for memory’s sake; no reminiscing.
The wind dropped in mid-afternoon and he went out in his boat, a five-metre aluminium dinghy with a Johnson outboard. He took with him fishing gear and a Nikon with a telephoto lens and puttered along the shoreline for several kilometres, stopping occasionally to fish or photograph the sea birds. But the dissatisfaction wouldn’t leave him.
At four o’clock he turned back. There would be a storm later. The sky was grey, heaving. He beat through the short, choppy whitecaps to the beach and hauled the dinghy onto the boat trailer. Fat drops of rain began to dimple the sand. An open fire tonight, he thought. Grilled fish and baked potatoes, salad, one of his dwindling dry whites. But then he felt cold, and thought again of his six months in the sun somewhere. This was a life of waiting, and he might wait forever.
The weekend passed. He gardened, gathered pine cones in the pine tree plantation, spoke to Craig, and started to clear the thicket of blackberry bushes on his southern boundary. But a sense of lucklessness seemed to wash around him. He was forty and felt that he’d lost the old easy pattern, become unrelaxed, caught up in complications and uncertainty. Nothing he touched seemed worthy of him anymore. He needed money. He needed luck.
The call came on Sunday evening. The telephone rang once and stopped. Wyatt stiffened, waiting for it to sound again, then fall silent, then sound a third time, the signal he’d worked out with Rossiter. Once, a year ago, the telephone had rung at length and at intervals all through the day and into the evening, leaving him edgy and alert, his gun at hand, the safety catch off. But nothing happened. He supposed it was a wrong number. Only Rossiter knew his address and telephone number.
The telephone rang again. Wyatt waited, and when it rang a third time he picked it up but did not speak. Rossiter said, without preamble, ‘Rob Hobba wants you to ring him,’ and read off a Melbourne number. Wyatt dialled, let it ring twice, hung up, and dialled again.
Hobba answered immediately. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m calling about your advertisement in the Trading Post,’ Wyatt said. ‘I need more details.’
‘It’s a Westinghouse,’ Hobba said, ‘very clean, large capacity but easy to shift. However, I have to sell within the next few days. Any chance you can come and see it?’
Wyatt thought about it. He’d worked with Hobba twice, a bank hold-up and an armoured-car hijack, and both had gone like a dream. Hobba was good; he wouldn’t be making contact unless he thought the job had possibilities. And it was an easy job he was talking about, a safe, but it had to be done soon.
‘Tomorrow morning would suit me,’ Wyatt said. ‘I’ll come up to Melbourne and ring you again when I get there.’