For a few seconds, when the track was flat and smooth, Wyatt risked giving his attention to Snyder’s fancy radio. It was turned low, still tuned to the monotonous Steelgard dispatcher. He switched to the CB band and tuned it to the channel used by Brava.
Excited voices erupted in Spanish and English. They knew each other, so no one was bothering with formalities.
‘Jorge said no heroics, wait for the police.’
‘Fuck that. By the time the cops get here the bastards’ll be long gone.’
‘Maybe is no been robbed. Maybe is lost, is no more gasoline in the tank. Maybe the radio he is broken.’
‘So how come there’s no sign of the van? How come he changed his route?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
Then a voice said, ‘The chopper will find them.’
Wyatt went cold, remembering the gasfields helicopter. Several times a month it flew geologists and engineers down to confer with Jorge. If this was one of those times, it was probably already in the air, starting a sweep of the area.
‘Plus there’s an air ambulance coming down from Port Augusta,’ the voice continued.
‘No worries, then,’ said another voice. ‘We’ll find the bastards in no time.’
Half a dozen other voices agreed.
Wyatt pushed even harder along the track, feeling the old chassis bottom out on the outcrops of stone. If they spotted him from the air, he was finished. They’d guide the land party in until all his exits were closed. His only chance was to get to the farm, get the Holden into one of the sheds, then escape on foot across country.
Meanwhile Leah deserved a better chance. He called her. There was no answer. Perhaps she couldn’t hear him. She’d be kilometres away by now, probably well out of radio range. He called again, waited, and called a third time.
He didn’t try again. He felt the strain of listening, the strain of driving one-handed along the tortuous track.
For just a few moments then he had a clear view of the Vimy Ridge road. A lone Brava Landcruiser had braked beyond the turn-off and was backing up to it.
There was only one way out of this. Wyatt pulled up next to Venables’s body and turned off the engine. Ejecting the cartridges from Snyder’s pistol and using the butt as a hammer, he destroyed the big radio. Then he opened both doors wide and shot the front tyres with his own gun. He threw Snyder’s gun into the grass. He was still wearing latex gloves so he wasn’t worried about prints.
Part of the fence line along this section of the track was a stone wall built by shepherds in the nineteenth century. Flat stones the size of frying pans had been stacked chest-high for several hundred metres. Here and there parts of the wall had collapsed. Wyatt vaulted through a gap and got ready to wait, disturbing a tiny brown lizard. The lizard flicked away in the space of an eye blink.
It wasn’t much of a trap but it had the element of confusion-a stationary vehicle, both its doors open; a dead man in the grass; the fake Brava paint job; the empty road under the spooked sky.
They weren’t taking any chances. He watched as the Landcruiser approached slowly and stopped fifty metres short of the Holden utility. There were two men aboard. They didn’t get out but waited there, the engine running. One of them was calling on the CB radio. Wyatt recognised him. It was Carlos.
Half a minute later, Carlos got out and cautiously walked towards the body and the stranded utility. He was. carrying a heavy tyre iron. There were guns in the Brava camp, but they were kept under lock and key in Jorge’s safe.
Wyatt watched Carlos circle the Holden, look around apprehensively, his eyes passing over Wyatt’s hiding place, and crouch next to the dead driver. He seemed to recoil in shock then, stepping back from the body and signalling urgently to the other man.
Wyatt waited until they were both standing there in the road, looking down at the glistening skull, their guard down. He vaulted the wall again and took them at a run. They heard him and turned around. Slowly their hands went up.
Carlos spoke first. ‘They will catch you, my friend.’ He gestured at the sky and spun the tip of his forefinger. ‘The aeroplane, he comes now.’
The other man had red curly hair and a sneering mouth. ‘Mad bastard.’
‘Shut up. The keys,’ Wyatt said.
‘In the ignition.’
Wyatt nodded and began to back away from them.
‘Where’s the fucking money?’
Wyatt ignored them. When he was a few metres away from the Landcruiser he turned and sprinted the rest of the way. A minute later he was on the Vimy Ridge road again, just another mad Latin adding to the confusion on the ground.
TWENTY-NINE
They were going crazy in the Brava camp. Eight of the pale blue Landcruisers with the bull logo passed Wyatt in the first five minutes. They were being driven carelessly and fast-but at least they weren’t stopping him to ask who he was. He drove slouched over the wheel, lifting a finger as they passed-a custom which the Brava crews had adopted from the locals. It helped that he was wearing the sunglasses and bright orange baseball cap left by Carlos on the driver’s seat, but what helped most was the high spirits in the Brava camp. Wyatt was driving a Brava vehicle so they assumed he was caught up in it too.
But Wyatt knew that the disguise was only good for another few minutes and wasn’t good enough to get him past a roadblock. He’d have to go to ground at the farm.
He was thinking it through when headlights on an oncoming car flashed at him and a blue light started to pulse on its roof. A policeman stepped into the middle of the road with his hand raised, waving him down. Wyatt got ready. Slowing the Landcruiser, he slipped his.38 out of his belt and onto the seat beside him, covering it with his hand.
He pulled up twenty metres short of the police car and left the engine running. He was about to put his foot down but something told him to think twice about it. The cop’s expression was wrong. He wasn’t wary. He wasn’t expecting trouble. If anything he was angry. Wyatt wound down his window. ‘G’day,’ he said.
‘Don’t g’day me. Do you arseholes know what you’re doing?’
‘Sorry?’
‘One of you blokes has already rolled over. I nearly smashed head-on with another one. You’re buggerising around inside an official crime scene. Piss off before I lock you up.’
‘Sorry, just trying to help.’
‘Go and do it somewhere else. If you see any of your mates, pass it on-anyone found farting around gets the book thrown at him.’
‘Sure, no worries,’ Wyatt said. He lifted his foot off the clutch, nodded at the cop and pulled away.
‘Bloody cowboys,’ he heard the cop say.
Wyatt watched him in the rearview mirror. He saw him shake his head, climb into the patrol car, and pull away fast, spinning tyres in the roadside gravel. The blue light faded in the dust like a special effect.
No one else bothered Wyatt after that. He came to the tin-hut corner a few minutes later, paused for half a minute, and bounced his way towards the farm gate. He saw dust in the distance, from all the excitement, but no vehicles were close enough to spot him. The helicopter was several kilometres away, sweeping back and forth across the valley. Eventually it would pass over the farmhouse, but now it was concentrating the search around the turn-off.
Wyatt first began to doubt Leah when he got to the implement shed and found the Suzuki there. The door was open, the bike on its stand in the corner. The doubts weren’t specific-he just wanted to know what she was doing there.
He drove the Brava Landcruiser into the musty interior, switched off, and got out, holding the.38 loose at his side. He didn’t go into the house immediately. He closed the massive shed door then waited outside it for a few minutes, testing the air, giving Leah a chance to come out of the house. The helicopter was now a few degrees left of where it had been. It was hovering, beginning to settle on the ground. They’d found Venables.