Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues (21 page)

At least they were easy to roll.
Baker simply waited until they were finished and the kid was getting out of the
car, then shoved the kid aside, dived in, punched the guy in the guts. The
first one he rolled thought Baker was a cop, actually offered two hundred bucks
to keep it quiet. Baker accepted. He topped the two hundred up with a cash
advance of four hundred from a hole in the wall using another guys PIN number.
The third one had a gold band on his ring finger so Baker threatened to tell
the mans wife if he didnt pay up. Another four hundred from the automatic
teller machine.

It was hard work and it was tricky
and he had to deal with the dregs of humanity in the process. All in a good
cause, but hed hate to make a living out of it, not when there were easier
ways to score some cash. Not this much cash though, or so quickly.

Baker went home to bed, feeling
dirty, and had a shower. He woke Carol up, really wanting to wipe the evening
from his mind. Apart from a bit of soppiness after, it was pretty good.

He got up early on Thursday morning,
showered, shaved, told Carol he was going for a job interview, took the bus up
to Shopping Town. He had a short back & sides at Hair Today, bought a
sports coat, strides, sunnies and an overnight bag from Target, joking Tarzhay
with the girl on the cash register, who looked at him with deep boredom. Then
he went to the Edinburgh Castle to score some speed, and finally took a taxi to
the airport, where he slapped cash on the counter at the Ansett desk and said, I
believe youre holding a ticket in the name of Baker?

Hed always wanted to say that.

* * * *

Thirty-one

Wyatt
had spent all of Tuesday night staking out De Lisles apartment in Woollahra.
By dawn it was clear that the man wasnt coming back. That left the house on
the coast.

As the first Coffs Harbour flight on
Wednesday afternoon banked over the sea, wing tip angling at a thread of white
sand between the breakers and the green hinterland, then levelling for the
touchdown, Wyatt swallowed, and swallowed again, to clear his ears. He ran an
internal gauge over himself, alighting again on the tooth. There was no pain
there but his tongue would not let the jagged edges alone, automatically
testing for sharpness and further erosion. Hed eaten fruitcake twenty minutes
out of Sydney. The fleshy remnants of a raisin were lodged in the crevice and
he knew he should take Liz Reddings advice and have the stump pulled.

These obsessions got him onto the
ground and through the terminal building and into a taxi. Coffs Harbour
straggled over the ranks of coastal hillocks that rose to the mountains behind,
the buildings predominantly white in the sun. White stucco, with terracotta
tiles, he noticed, as the taxi weaved through the outskirts of the town. Then
the houses gave way to ochred-brick shopping precincts, flashy takeaway places,
car yards and pylons, with only palms and spreading overblown tropical flowers
to suggest that he was in a holiday paradise. The place had a swagger born of
sun-dazed greed and hedonism, not intellect. It was all desperation underneath,
as superannuated retirees from the south struggled to keep small businesses
alive during the off-season. If you had money and sense youd build yourself a
gangsters fortress back in the hills. Exactly what De Lisles house looked
like, according to Cassandra Wintergreen.

Wyatt got out at a small rental car
concession, no more than a transportable hut in the back corner of a Caltex
station. Hed reserved the car by phone from Sydney and had documents and cash
ready, giving the rental man the name of a motel on the Esplanade. He bought a
map in the Caltex shop, drove half a kilometre to a shopping mall, checked De
Lisles address in a call-box phone book. The time was midday and the town was
gearing up for the afternoon trade, cars and vans adding to the endless burden
of the heavy traffic on the Pacific Highway which split the town from the
hills.

On impulse then, Wyatt dialled De
Lisles number. He counted ten rings. He was wondering if that meant that De
Lisle was still on his way to Coffs Harbour or had already left when a voice
grunted, Yeah?

Wyatt tried to read the voice.
Someone unused to the phone? A driver, gardener, bodyguard? He didnt want to
alarm the man by hanging up, so loaded breeziness into his tone and said, How
are you today? My names Jason, Im calling from the Pacific Spa Fitness Centre
and this month were featuring

The boss isnt here. Call back
another day.

The phone went dead. Wyatt replaced
the receiver and returned to the car. The road he took inland from the coast
passed steeply banked banana plantations, crossed a river and skirted a
rainforest. There were roadside stalls around every bend, signalled by misspelt
blackboards advertising
marigoes, pineapples, tomatoes.

After twenty minutes on the blacktop
he turned onto a dirt road. Here the forest had been cleared a century ago,
leaving stands of tall gums along the roadside and pockets of jacaranda and
native pine along the creeks and gulliesthe only vegetation apart from rich,
close-cropped grass, cattle growing fat on it. Here and there Wyatt spotted big
houses set into the hillsides, overlooking the Pacific.

The grounds of De Lisles property
suggested broad, cultivated parkland. The house itself sat far back from the
road gate, a vast, softly gleaming slate roof showing above glossy trees and
tangled, white-flowered creepers. It suggested new money and De Lisle clearly
didnt want strangers coming in: a three-metre security fence topped with
barbed wire ran around the property and the driveway was barred by a massive
locked gate. It was an incongruous structure there in De Lisles vulgarian
landscapethick twin wooden doors higher than the security fence and shaped to
fit an archway. Very old and worn but sturdy enough to withstand a battering
ram, they had probably come from a seventeenth-century Italian courtyard,
admitting carriages, men on horseback.

Wyatt drove back to Coffs Harbour.
In what remained of the afternoon he went shopping, paying over the odds for
some items because he couldnt produce the necessary forms and authorisations.
Then he slept.

By 5 a.m., one hour before dawn, he
was back on De Lisles hillside, concealing the rental car behind an abandoned
tin hut in the gully below the house, where the looping road forked.

He got out and began to climb the
slope to De Lisles perimeter fence. Dressed entirely in black, hed also
blackened his cheeks and forehead and the backs of his hands with greasepaint
from a theatrical suppliers. Hed washed in plain water before leaving Coffs
Harbour: no soap, shampoo or deodorant, no chemical odours or perfumes that
might betray him. He carried twin oxyacetylene tanks strapped to his back and a
knapsack in one hand. When he reached the fence he stared up at the lumpy
shadows that defined the house and the trees around it. A faint light was
showing. It didnt mean anything. People burn lights in their garages and on
verandahs every night of the year.

Power to the property came from a
branch line that finished at a steel and cement pole adjacent to the fence. A
smaller line ran from a transformer at the top of the pole to the house itself.
If Wyatt could cut the power hed throw De Lisles house and grounds into
darkness and cancel any alarms or traps the man might have set for someone like
him. The dawn hour gave him an extra edge, for it was the hour when people were
blurry with sleep. If there were guards, one would be coming off duty tired,
his replacement coming on tired.

Wyatt used a thermite charge to
destroy the transformer. Thermite burns, it doesnt explode, and he contained
the fuse inside half a metre of two-centimetre PVC pipe to conceal the sparks.
De Lisle would only know that his defences were being breached if he happened
to be standing under the transformer. Nothing would be seen or heard from the
house. For a while, at least, theyd assume there was a legitimate power cut.

It was a fifteen-minute fuse. Wyatt
heard the transformer blow and saw De Lisles light blink off among the black
trees.

He was ready to cut through the
steel fence now, the torch head attached to the tanks, welding glasses over his
eyes, heavy gloves on his hands. As soon as the transformer blew he lit the
torch head with a sparking tool, opened the valves on the tanks, and turned the
petcock on the torch head, keeping the sparking tool in the thin stream of gas
until with a whump he had a flame on the torch, cobalt blue in colour, tinged
at the edges with yellow. He adjusted the valve on the oxygen slowly until the
yellow disappeared. The flame was at its hottest now, and he applied it to the
steel. One by one the bars turned orange, then cherry red, parting finally with
a spray of molten sparks. Wyatt cut himself a hole big enough to escape through
without having to duck or crawl, and went in.

For two minutes then, he rested his
eyes. The goggles had protected them from damage but, until his vision cleared,
the dawn seemed to consist of fiery red bars across the dark slopes and the
darker trees beyond.

His breath, he realised, was
wreathing around his head like smoke on each exhalation in the low dawn
temperature. He got out a handkerchief, masked his nose and mouth with it,
shrugged the knapsack onto his back and began to make his way across the grass
to the outer edge of the trees.

Wyatt reached the house
unchallenged. He climbed a set of steps to a broad verandah and heard only the
softly rising wind clacking the palm fronds against the roof of the house. Then
a sudden gaseous stench reached his nostrils and he heard the first heavy rush of
urination. A man was standing where the verandah was darkest. In that same
instant, he seemed to register that Wyatt was there. He cried out, fumbling at
his crotch.

Wyatt head-butted the smear of face
in the darkness and disappeared down the steps. Behind him, the man bellowed.
Ahead of him were the trees. Thats where hed be expected to run. Instead, he
ducked under the verandah and, when two men clattered like horses down the
steps and into the trees after him, torches probing, Wyatt slipped back onto
the verandah and in through the open door.

* * * *

Thirty-two

Wyatt
went through the house, rapidly checking each room, automatically noting the
gun cabinet bolted to a fieldstone feature wall in the study. De Lisle wasnt
there. A short, soft, middle-aged man running to fat, the Wintergreen woman had
described him. Thered been enough early light outside the house just now for
Wyatt to see that neither of the men hunting for him had been De Lisle. They
were the wrong age and size, more like athletes or cops who hadnt lost their
fitness.

Bodyguards? It didnt seem likely.
Theyd made a makeshift camp of the sitting room, leaving cans of beer on the
carpet and the smeared-foil remains of microwaved frozen dinners on the coffee
table. Apparently theyd been taking turns to sleep on the sofa: cushions piled
at one end, a blanket bundled at the other. Theyd been waiting for De Lisle by
the look of it.

Wyatt was armed only with Jardines
little .32. Otherwise all he had was a rope and a jemmy in the pack on his
back. He needed to improve the odds a little, especially if the action moved
out into the grounds of the property. He returned to the gun cabinet,
splintered open the glass door with the jemmy. There was one shotgun, two
rifles with telescopic sights, a little .22 for shooting at rabbits. He
selected one of the rifles, a Steyr-Mannlicher SSG, .30 calibre, capable of
planting a six-centimetre grouping in a target at five hundred metres, and was
just pocketing a box of shells for it when he felt a faint vibration under his
feet. The men were crossing the verandah.

Look at the floor, Manse. I told
you, hes in the house.

Wyatt looked down. The grass had
been dewy out there. Hed left the damp evidence of his presence on the carpets
of the house. The men entered the hall, tracking him. He wiped the residue of
moisture and sodden grass from his shoes, looked wildly for an exit, somewhere
to hide until he knew where he could find De Lisle.

There was a place. The main bookcase
reached almost to the ceiling. It was heavy, mahogany, with cupboards beneath
the shelves and an elaborate carved facia about forty centimetres high across
the top. Wyatt climbed the shelves, gently placed the rifle in the hollow space
behind the facia board, tumbled in after it.

The men came in a few seconds later.
Wyatt heard only a couple of whispers, a scrape of fabric as they moved, a soft
swish of feet in the thick wool pile on the floor.

Then a murmur: See that? Hes armed
himself.

I dont like this, Riggs. Who the
hell is he?

The man called Riggs said heavily, We
know its not De Lisle, we know hes a threat, end of story.

Okay, keep your shirt on.

They were gone again, whispering
through the house like ghosts. Wyatt waited for ten minutes, staring at the
ceiling as dawn light gathered in the room. When he heard them again they were
not bothering to be silent.

Grab yourself that shotgun. Ill
take the rifle. Hell be outside somewhere and I dont intend to tackle him
with a .38, not when hes got a rifle himself.

Where?

How the fuck do I know where?
Jesus, Mansell, use your eyes. If hes gone back across the grass therell be
tracks.