Kill Shot Read online

  About the Book

  The latest gripping story in the popular Wyatt thriller series kicks off in Sydney and then unfolds on the beaches of Newcastle.

  Some people just work better alone. Wyatt’s one of them. He’s been getting by on nice quiet little burglaries—one-man jobs—when he gets wind of something bigger.

  A corporate crook, notorious Ponzi schemer, set to face court and certain jail time. He’s about to skip bail the old-fashioned way: on a luxury yacht with a million dollars in cash.

  Wyatt thinks it sounds like something he should get into.

  He’s not alone.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  for Chris and Pippa

  1

  WYATT WAS BASED IN Sydney this year. All the documents to prove he was a citizen of New South Wales. On a grubby night in late March—humid, toxins in the air—he stood watching a two-storey house in Rushcutters Bay. Light from the cloud-streaked moon threw busy shapes over the street and flared briefly on the face of Wyatt’s old Longines. He unstrapped it from his bony wrist, shoved it into a pocket. Now he was ready, a shadow among other shadows. A shadow you’d take for a bush, not a thief.

  He had no need of a wristwatch anyway; his sense of time passing was acute. He waited now for thirty minutes. He didn’t think the law was interested in Alan Hagger, even though the guy was bent. But still, he watched for a surveillance team—a van, a powerful sedan that hadn’t been on this street on any of the other nights Wyatt had been here. Or a movement, a twitched curtain, a dim light in a window overlooking Hagger’s house.

  Nothing. And no sign of another man like Wyatt, either, with the same job in mind. But Wyatt always planned for the unexpected variable—a rain storm; Hagger receiving a late-evening visitor; a junkie burglar setting off an alarm. Other things he couldn’t plan for he hoped to absorb, accommodate or outrun.

  About ten-thirty now and Hagger would be going to bed at eleven. The usual routine: take his elderly cat into the backyard and wait while it did its business. Lock up, set the alarm, teeth, bed. Wyatt moved. He knew how to wait, but in motion was calm and focused—with an edge that was not pleasure, exactly, but a cool, clear absorption. He wanted the money, of course. But he also wanted the thinking and the action.

  He drew closer to Hagger’s house, melting from shadow to shadow, his movements unhurried, unremarkable to a neighbour drawing curtains for the night. Then he was on Hagger’s side path, slipping into the backyard and crouching beside the patio deck as he drew on a silk ski mask. He gazed the length of the garden, eyes unfocused but ready for movements he might need to face or ignore. He was familiar with the property. He’d been watching for several days, knowing that something trivial might prove to be crucial. He watched in layers, too—the broad picture, then the details. This job, like all the others he’d ever pulled, boiled down to ordinary tactics, not an overthought master plan. He waited. He felt compact.

  He was merely a moon shadow to Hagger when the man emerged in summer pyjamas and a loose robe and placed the old cat on a garden bed. Hagger liked to relieve himself, too, and was watering the lemon tree when Wyatt slipped into the house.

  Wyatt moved unobtrusively, knees bent slightly, breathing deep and even. To the staircase first, creeping, placing the flat of his hand against a plasterboard wall. Then another wall, a third wall, feeling for the transmissions that might indicate movement elsewhere in the house. There was nothing. Hagger lived alone. No one was visiting.

  Plan for the best, expect the worst, note the exit points.

  Then swiftly up the stairs, keeping to the edges where the treads were less likely to creak, until he was in Hagger’s bedroom. Vast, lit softly by a bedside lamp. A king-size bed, a walk-in wardrobe, heavy curtains, a plain thick carpet, an ensuite bathroom. Of interest to Wyatt: several cabinets and chests of drawers. Some would contain Hagger’s clothing, others his ‘famed collection of Kellyana’—as the Sydney Morning Herald put it. A story that had been passed to Wyatt by a day-release prisoner named Sam Kramer. Most of Wyatt’s recent jobs had been brokered by Kramer.

  A quick check under the pillow and mattress and inside the bedside cupboards. No gun, knife, taser or alarm. Then he made sure the bathroom was empty and slipped into the walk-in robe. He waited. Hagger came up the stairs shortly after that, washed his hands, threw his gown on the chair beside the bed, climbed in and got settled, turned out the light.

  Fifteen minutes later the man’s breathing settled to a slow, laboured rhythm. Wyatt edged into the room and waited, assessing the dark void between himself and the bed. Ready to slip into and become absorbed by it. The handcuffs would stay in his pocket for now, the metal cushioned against any stray sound.

  He reached the bed and paused to let his eyes adjust. Hagger was faintly illuminated by the bedside clock. Supine; bulbous nose aimed at the ceiling, arms outflung above the bedcovers. Wyatt had already noted the bedhead, a plain but usefully laddered arrangement of wooden slats and uprights. Now he clasped Hagger’s right wrist gently, drew it across the soft, respiring chest, and manacled it to the bedpost behind the man’s left shoulder. Hagger stirred. Went very still. Tried to rear up when Wyatt turned on the bedside light and the shadows fled, but was thwarted by his own arm. Discomfort, a twinge of pain that might be eased if he flipped onto his stomach—but then he’d have his back to whatever trouble he was in. He subsided. Wyatt watched him work it out.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  That was expected, too. Wyatt knew there’d be more rage, fear and embarrassment. He was prepared to wait until it had all drained away and he could get on with the job.

  ‘What do you want?’ Hagger said. ‘Money?’

  Then, as if rethinking that: ‘My son’s due home any minute.’

  Wyatt waited.

  ‘There’s an alarm sounding at the nearest police station this very second, so why don’t you run off back to whatever hole you crawled out of.’

  A blusterer. You didn’t engage with them. It only worsened until they felt ridiculous. Then they’d go to some other extreme to counter that impression, and it would go on until someone got hurt. Wyatt waited.

  Hagger’s heavy chest expanded for another outburst, and then it all went out of him. ‘Are you going to hurt me?’

  Wyatt shook his head. No point in giving the man a voice to remember.

  Hagger said, ‘The newspaper story?’

  Wyatt nodded. It was a common mistake of collectors, the newly rich: boasting in the lifestyle sections. Wyatt crossed to the first cabinet in the room. Underwear, socks. Fresh and folded and, Wyatt was certain, ironed.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Hagger said. ‘It’s all in a safe deposit box in the bank.’

  No. An obsessive collector of anything related to the Kelly Gang would keep it all close by. If it wasn’t in the room—and why else were there so many cabinets?—
it would be downstairs somewhere. But this was where Hagger could grab the most valuable items if the place ever caught fire.

  ‘I mean it about the alarm.’

  Wyatt shrugged. He’d entered the house before it was set. It would go off when he left, but that was okay. This was the only way Wyatt had to get past a modern alarm, though. In the past he’d been able to disable most alarm systems, but technological advances had left him behind. These days he adapted to circumstances. Use a crowbar if he had to. Let a careless householder do the work for him.

  A glass-fronted bookcase caught his eye and he pulled experimentally on one of the doors. A magnetised latch—it popped open. He reached in.

  Hagger, straining to see, sagged again. ‘Please don’t take that. It’s very rare. I’d never be able to replace it.’

  Wyatt checked: first edition. Original—if slightly scuffed—dust jacket. Worth a quarter of a million. He thought about it for a very long moment. But a Gatsby coming onto the market any time soon would attract attention. He put it back.

  Reached in again and pulled out J. J. Keneally’s The Inner History of the Kelly Gang and G. Wilson Hall’s The History of the Notorious Kelly Gang. The latter was as priceless as the Gatsby, only four copies known to exist, but the next person to own it wasn’t likely to boast about it.

  Hagger tried to prop himself on an elbow. ‘Not the Hall. Please, mate, not the Hall. I can tell you’re a reasonable man.’

  Wyatt had never thought about it one way or the other. He ignored Hagger and crouched. Two plain wooden doors in the bottom half of the bookcase. He tugged. Locked. He took a slim pry bar from an inner pocket of his thin jacket and Hagger shrieked, ‘No! Please, that bookcase is worth seven and a half grand!’

  A man who knows the cost of a beautiful item of furniture. But does he know its value? Wyatt stood, turned to Hagger with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Please. The key’s here in the bedside cupboard.’

  Wyatt nodded, found the key, returned to the bookcase.

  Behind the doors he found crammed shelves. Grunted in satisfaction to see, on the top shelf, a legal brief titled The Queen v Edward Kelly. He removed it, verified the number of pages—fifty-five—and that it related to the murder of Constable Thomas Lonigan at Stringybark Creek on 26 October 1878.

  Worth up to fifty grand at auction.

  On the bottom shelf, certain objects. A Bowie knife, an East India Company cavalry pistol and a .32 calibre pocket revolver. Sam Kramer had been clear: not the knife. The name carved into the handle was ‘S. Harte’, who was not Steve Hart. And notwithstanding the poor education of a backblocks kid in the 1870s, there was no proof the bushranger had ever owned it.

  And not the revolver. Reputed to have been Joe Byrne’s—JB scratched along the barrel—and purportedly found under the floorboards of a house where Byrne grew up. But the pistol had been manufactured in 1884, four years after Byrne was shot dead.

  The cavalry pistol was the real thing, according to Kramer. 1876/Dan Kelly carved in the walnut handle.

  Wyatt took a nylon drawstring bag from his pocket, unfolded it, carefully packed it with the legal brief, the two books and the pistol.

  ‘You prick,’ Hagger said. Resigned, sullen—but with enough greed and panic to hope Wyatt might relent.

  Wyatt regarded him with cold interest. It was often like this, the layers of self-regard and caution peeling away until the true man or woman peeked out. He slipped back into the slumbering streets, which stirred as Hagger’s alarm began to wail. Wyatt had barely thought about Hagger while he’d been robbing him. Now his detachment was complete.

  2

  THE WAY IT WORKED was, Sam Kramer used information from his network of informants, lawyers, police and hard men, or just from newspapers and magazines, to identify an object worth stealing. He passed that information on to Wyatt. Wyatt pulled the job then used a fence to find a buyer. Sometimes a buyer started the process, but mostly the thieving came first, and a fence would have a buyer in mind. One fence might specialise in art, another in stamps or coins. The best man to move the Kellyana was Axel Blackstock. He’d take his cut and pay Wyatt the balance. Wyatt would pay Sam Kramer a brokerage fee. Twenty per cent.

  Or rather, Sam would get his twenty per cent at the end of the year, when he was due for release from prison. His cut amounted to about ninety thousand dollars now, stowed in a safe deposit box. Wyatt dipped into it every now and then. A thousand here, three thousand there, to help Kramer’s wife, daughter and son cover the mortgage or fix the roof or replace a gearbox. Never enough to pique the interest of state or federal police, who, lacking the evidence to charge Sam with a host of outstanding crimes, continued to monitor his family. The daughter, Wyatt’s age, looked after the wife, who was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. There was a son, but he was a waster. Slow horses, cocaine and punishing franchise agreements on half-a-dozen takeaway pizza outlets.

  ‘Deal only with Phoebe,’ Sam told Wyatt. ‘I love Josh, but money slips through his hands like grease.’

  WYATT DROVE STRAIGHT TO Blackstock’s rambling Bondi guest house on a steep side street. Vines, broad verandas, sea salt in the air. Blackstock owned the building and rented rooms to a mix of backpackers and other transients, and a few permanents. Cheap rent for rooms that were unadorned sweatboxes in summer and chilly holes in winter. Nothing was ever done out of the goodness of the heart in that building, but Axel was a fair and tolerant landlord and had no interest in selling to a developer.

  Wyatt stood at the top of the street for half an hour. Watching, as usual, for watchers. When he was satisfied, he sent a text from a burner phone to Blackstock’s burner. They’d meet in the cramped carpark under the building, accessed from the rear. He waited; Blackstock’s text arrived.

  He walked along the side of the building and down the slope into a region of stale air, oil-stained floor and scraped walls. Blackstock, a skinny guy with a grey ponytail, dressed in his standard outfit of shorts, T-shirt and paint-speckled Crocs, stepped out from behind a Kombi van. The handover was mostly wordless, the fence as dour and silent as ever—which was a sign to Wyatt that he hadn’t had unwelcome visitors since the last time.

  ‘Forty-five grand,’ Blackstock said, proffering a bulky envelope.

  Wyatt nodded and left. This was the dangerous time. Rather than re-enter the main street he took back alleyways and slipped over fences, quick and silent but with no time to melt from one natural pool of darkness to the next. Dogs barked. A woman yelled at him. There might be sirens if she acted on it.

  Reaching the side street where he’d left his car he waited, yawning once to clear his ears. The night was still and he wanted to distinguish the sounds of ordinary life from those that meant injury or death. Tunnels, stairways and basements always demanded extra caution, and this steep, narrow street was like a tunnel draining down to the beach.

  He could do something about his appearance. He shed the jacket after removing the envelope from the inside pocket. Untucked his shirt, turned up the collar, rolled the sleeves. Donned a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses with plain lenses. Altered his stride, too, hunching his shoulders, dragging one heel a little on the footpath. Past his car; left turn at the first side street. The sounds of the night were vivid to him: TV sets, a grumbling drunk outside a corner pub, distant traffic. But no sudden disturbances of the air—no hurrying footsteps or anticipatory intakes of breath, no cigarette flaring in a patch of darkness.

  A man appeared from around the next corner. Young, slim, a strut full of teenage potency. But Wyatt was looking at how he moved, how he wore his jeans and hoodie. No pistol or blade weighing down his pants, pressing against his spine, affecting his gait.

  ‘Evening,’ the kid said, and then he was past, and then he was gone.

  WYATT PARKED HALF A kilometre from his apartment on Coogee Bay Road and walked the rest of the way. He felt as calm and concentrated as he’d been earlier, in Hagger’s house, but a part of him was permanently alert for signs t
hat his current life was over. That he was on the edge of a situation better left alone. He knew not to ignore the feeling; it had always served him well.

  He came to his street, a tide of seawater odours and the semi-tropics in his nose, and watched for thirty minutes. His apartment was on the ground floor of a building that looked like a stack of CDs but less beautiful. A higher floor might have given him a glimpse of the sea and a better one of the traffic, but he wanted access to the exits if trouble came knocking.

  Nothing seemed wrong. The rubbish bin he’d carelessly placed half across the little crazy-stone path to his front door hadn’t been moved onto the patchy lawn. It was an old apartment, venetian blinds on the front windows, and the slats were still partially open. Someone poking around inside with a torch would have closed them.

  Still he waited, the night swollen with the sounds he was accustomed to. Another half-hour passed before he crossed the street and let himself in. He sat in an armchair for some time, thinking about the evening. He’d made no errors. There was nothing to improve on.

  3

  IN A SURRY HILLS wine bar, Joshua Kramer was saying, ‘Laz, mate. Great night.’

  Nick Lazar gave a noncommittal grunt. Laz. Fucking liberty. But he let it slide. Still gleaning information from the little prick.

  ‘Good acoustics,’ Kramer was saying.

  Pizza shop franchisee by day, rock star by night. He still lived with his mother and sister, but right now Josh Kramer was flushed, sweaty and elated. On stage he’d thrown himself around as if he didn’t know he was playing to half-a-dozen punters in a fucking church hall. More scrawny than wiry, more bum-fluff than designer stubble—and the band was crap: Springsteen covers and turgid originals. Lazar suspected the kid paid venues to book him and put the hard word on his pizza cooks, counter staff and delivery boys to front up.

  Lazar scratched the NightWatch Security logo on his T-shirt. Half an hour past midnight, the two men at the afterparty two blocks from the church hall. Piss-poor afterparty. The bassist and drummer had gone home, along with most of Kramer’s employees. Lazar’s security guys had also left—all two of them. The wine bar was too dark and too full of desperate singles to host a celebration, and the music, some kind of dire percussive techno, reached Lazar’s ears—blunted by years of front-line action in Afghanistan—like distant mortar fire.