Cross Kill w-4 Read online

  He went in that way too, averagely noisy and unsuspecting, and turned on some lights. It was a small room and he could see that it was empty, but it didn’t feel right. He knew an expert had been through it, leaving no palpable trace, only a shift in the atmosphere. Maybe the Mesics were better organised than he’d thought, or some old score was being settled. There was always that risk in Wyatt’s game.

  He changed into black jeans, a hooded black windcheater and black running shoes. Since he hadn’t been hit when he came into the room it meant they’d scouted the place first and intended to come for him when everything had shut down for the night. At nine o’clock he climbed out by the bathroom window and slipped across the motel forecourt to the conference centre. He waited in the shadows next to the main car park. At ten o’clock reps and executives emerged tipsily from the function room, the men slapping one another on the back, the women kissing the men and the air near the cheeks of the other women.

  Wyatt watched them get into their cars and drive away. He didn’t know until the last minute whether or not his idea would work, but when only one car remained and the driver stumbled and had trouble finding his keys, Wyatt got ready.

  The man was trying one key and then another in the lock, and peering comically at his keyring. He gave up, leaned his arms and bald head on the roof of the car, and Wyatt heard strangled noises. The man was laughing.

  ‘Sorry, pal,’ Wyatt muttered, stepping out of the shadows.

  At that moment the man slid to the ground and began to snore. It sounded heavy and permanent and Wyatt put his gun away. He took the keys from the man’s fist and dragged him into the shrubbery separating The Overlander from the service road. The snoring stopped for a moment, started again.

  Wyatt paused. The snoring would attract attention. Let the poor bastard sleep it off in the car. He unlocked a rear door, dragged the man out of the shrubbery again, and half-lifted, half-tumbled him onto the floor behind the front seats. He got behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Behind him the snoring settled into a rhythm.

  Wyatt drove out of the conference centre car park and right into Whitehorse Road. At the Station Street lights he U-turned and came back. This time he steered into the courtyard where guests parked their cars. He slotted into an empty spot near the street entrance and got into the back of the car. He rested his feet on the bald man’s chest and pushed down gently. The snoring stopped. Five minutes later it broke out again, and again Wyatt prodded the man.

  It was deep and shadowy in the back of the car. Wyatt watched and waited. He could see the door to his room clearly. When they came they wouldn’t see him. The bald man stirred and muttered but didn’t wake.

  Time passed. Whether it passed quickly or slowly wasn’t a question that Wyatt asked himself. Waiting was something he did every day. It couldn’t be avoided.

  Several cars entered and left the courtyard through the evening. None of them interested Wyatt. Then at four minutes past eleven he did get interested. A Laser, windows tinted, lights off, entered from the service road and began to prowl the perimeter of the area. It circled once, rolled silently back across the courtyard, and parked near his room. Wyatt waited. Nothing happened for several minutes. Then, a slight movement: the driver’s door was opening. Wyatt expected to see the inside light come on but the interior stayed black. They’d sent a pro. He continued to wait.

  The driver was a woman and suddenly she was out of the Laser and pressing against the wall outside Wyatt’s room. She wore close-fitting black jeans and a T-shirt and had a silenced pistol in one hand.

  A memory trace stirred in his mind, an image of a swift, black, female shape. Ten months ago a man he’d sometimes worked with had shopped him to a Sydney crowd called the Outfit, and the killer they’d sent to get him was a woman. This same one. Wyatt had escaped then but he knew that she was good at her job and she would keep tracking him.

  She slipped a key into the door, then she was inside. Wyatt waited. No light showed behind the drawn curtains. He didn’t expect to see light anyhow. She was a pro; she wouldn’t shine a torch around.

  After a few seconds the woman came out fast, looking spooked, and got back into her car. The Laser muttered into life, backed away from Wyatt’s door, sped with a faint squeal out onto Whitehorse Road.

  Wyatt got out of the bald man’s car. He didn’t think there’d be a second gun to worry about. He loped, half-crouching, across the courtyard to his room. The door was open. He slipped inside, turning on the lights. He smelt the shots before he saw the damage. She had fired half-a-dozen shots into the spare blankets and pillows heaped body-like under the bedspread. Then she’d seen the trick and run.

  At least he knew now that the Mesics hadn’t set this up. But it did mean the Outfit still had a price on his head. He’d caused them some grief in the past and it seemed they weren’t going to let him forget it. Wyatt felt rare anger building in him. It came hot and hard and for a moment he was blinded by it. Nothing was smooth or easy anymore. No one would let him be.

  After a while he changed his clothes and packed his bag. He wiped the place clean of his prints and went back to the bald man’s car. Time to find another bolthole.

  ****

  Four

  There were always question marks hanging over the early days of a job. Until he knew that the ground was safe and the job feasible, and until he’d put a team together, Wyatt would spend a few hundred dollars here and there so that he had a few boltholes if things went sour on him. In addition to The Overlander he’d paid in advance for rooms at a hotel and a guesthouse.

  The hotel was behind the University in Parkville and it had a checkerboard facade of white marble slabs and tinted glass in aluminium frames. LONDON hotel was scrawled across the face of it in red neon. The lobby was deserted when Wyatt got in at midnight. He made for the stairs, attracting the attention of a clerk behind the desk. The clerk was slight, pale, his lips loose and red. He smiled wetly at Wyatt, but Wyatt’s return smile was cruel-looking across the stretch of maroon carpet, and the man looked away. Wyatt climbed the stairs, checked the corridor, let himself into his room, checked that.

  Unbidden anxieties plagued him then. He stretched out on the bed and tried to sort out what was wrong with him, wrong with the Mesic hit. He analysed the complications one by one. First, profit had always been his simple, reliable motive, but this time revenge had muddied it. Second, he couldn’t hit the Mesics while the Outfit still had a hard-on for him-he’d have to find a way to warn them off. Third, the old pattern was broken. He was forty and had spent half of his life pinpointing where the money was and putting together an operation to snatch it. He’d started small, honing his skills, and by the time he was thirty he’d become more ambitious, going for the big money-banks, bullion, payroll. For the past decade he’d worked no more than three or four times a year, resting between jobs. He had no ties to speak of, and when he wasn’t working he’d felt relaxed, inclined to find the appealing things in people, not their possible weaknesses or potential for treachery. All that was destroyed now. He was broke and nowhere was safe for him anymore.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to build up funds again, but for some reason lately he’d begun taking a long view. Did he want to keep doing this for the rest of his life? Would he always have the nerve for it? If and when he stopped working (he discounted being jailed, hurt or killed), would he have sufficient funds for a comfortable life? He shook his head. I’m like any man my age, he thought, worrying about the years until retirement, until death.

  ****

  In the morning he dressed in dark cotton trousers and shirt. He decided against a coat-coats get snagged on doorknobs, fences, branches-and put on a woollen windbreaker. He tucked his.38 into an inside pocket. He combed back his water-darkened hair. It had the effect of further narrowing his face.

  At nine o’clock he left the hotel. Automatically checking for a tail, he crossed the road into the grounds of the University. The students
were well-nourished and seemed very young to him. They shouted rather than spoke, as if they would eventually leave here with their heads full but without knowing anything at all.

  Wyatt emerged at the Swanston Street flank of the University and walked through to the bus-stop near Jimmy Watson’s wine bar. Again he looked to see if he was being tailed. He looked back along the street, looked at his watch, frowned, looked at the timetable. He hunched his shoulders, zipped up his windbreaker, glanced at the low, muttering clouds that were blowing in across the city. He wanted to look like an ordinary man on a busy street, his mind on his bus and the weather.

  A Kew bus came by soon after that and he climbed aboard. When the bus had crossed Hoddle Street into Abbotsford, he pressed the bell for the stop under the elevated railway line. Four people stood up with him. He let them get off first. It was something he did automatically.

  He entered the narrow side streets, passing small shoe factories and cramped fibro and weatherboard houses where Greek women hosed cement gardens. Five minutes later he came to a tucked-away corner pub.

  It was called The Wheatsheaf and it had been redecorated since he’d last seen it. There were pastel blue canopies over the doors and windows, a sign saying bistro and geraniums in window boxes. Wyatt went inside to wait. There were two patrons; both wore Breton fisherman’s caps and studded leather belts, boots and jackets. The barman was shirtless above leather trousers, setting off his biceps and his solarium tan with scarlet braces. His bare skull gleamed and an earring caught the light. Wyatt ignored the hothouse atmosphere of the place, the fussy paint job and new carpet. He ordered a glass of light beer, took it to the window that overlooked Rossiter’s front yard, and sat down to wait.

  Rossiter had been a small-time holdup man but he’d retired from that to become a small-time go-between and bagman. He knew more about the local scene than anybody and until a year ago he’d been Wyatt’s contact. Wyatt had been operating from a secluded farmhouse on the Victorian coast at the time, emerging every few months to pull a job using information and contacts provided by Rossiter. If anyone wanted Wyatt for a job they approached Rossiter, and Rossiter passed the message on. It had been a sweet life, but the situation had altered forever when a revenge-happy punk named Sugarfoot Younger had forced Rossiter to reveal where Wyatt was living. Wyatt had removed the Sugarfoot threat but he’d had to abandon the farm. He could never go back there and that was one of the disappointments of his life.

  Now he needed to make use of Rossiter again. But Sugarfoot had hurt the old holdup man. It was reasonable to assume that Rossiter blamed Wyatt for it. That was why Wyatt was watching before he went in. He needed to gauge the place first.

  It was a triple-fronted brick house set among small single-fronted weatherboard cottages. White paint was peeling from the eaves, window frames and doors. A carport at the side sheltered a souped-up Valiant Charger and a VW heavily streaked with carbon deposits around the exhaust pipe. The front lawn needed cutting. Dry grass and dead flowers choked the pitted stones bordering the path to the front door. A poorly laid brick wall divided the house from the buckled footpath. The gate was bent and off its hinges, caught in the strangling grass.

  Wyatt sipped his beer. He sipped it for forty minutes. He saw a tiny grey terrier from a neighbouring house cock its leg on Rossiter’s wall and a sparrow add to the slime coating the crumbling plaster Aborigine on Rossiter’s front lawn, but that’s all he saw.

  Finally a thin, sallow, ill-looking youth approached along the footpath, walking a dog. The youth wore the Action Front uniform of tight black jeans and T-shirt, Doc Martens, tattoos and a crewcut, and Wyatt knew by the weak chin, flapping ears and knobbly features that this was Niall, Rossiter’s son. The dog was a pitbull, head down, snuffling and pulling hard as it smelt home.

  Then dog and master froze. They’d spotted the grey terrier. An expression of cunning and greed settled on Niall’s face. He hunted around, saw no one who mattered, and let go the pitbull’s lead.

  The slaughter took no more than fifteen seconds. The big dog streaked away, low and snarling. It snatched up the smaller dog in its jaws, shook it, breaking its neck, smacked it against the footpath and wall, then dropped flat to gnaw at the head. Rossiter’s son retrieved the terrier, walked back along the footpath, and dropped the body into a yard several doors down.

  Wyatt watched youth and dog enter their yard together. Niall took the pitbull through the open-ended carport to the rear of the house. When Niall didn’t reappear, Wyatt guessed he’d gone in by the back door.

  Wyatt had intended to leave the pub and cross the road then, but an empty tip-truck pulled up outside Rossiter’s, partly obscuring his view. The truck was rust-coloured, the tray sides massively dented. Wyatt wondered idly if the old holdup man had got himself a new job or if he was moving in different circles now, but a man he’d never seen before, thickset and wearing overalls, climbed out of the cab and made for the house next door to Rossiter’s.

  Wyatt watched him through a gap between the truck and an old Hillman. Just as the man reached down to unlatch his front gate, Niall Rossiter reappeared on the footpath. He was carrying a crossbow, the bow pulled back tight. Wyatt could see the bolt sitting there. It was sharp and lethal-looking, and Niall Rossiter had the appearance of a man who wanted to let it loose on someone. Wyatt glanced around, saw that no one in the bar was paying any attention to him, and opened the pub window a crack.

  ‘I’ve fucking told you, park that heap of shit outside your own place.’

  Niall Rossiter was waving the crossbow around as he said it. He aimed it at the front tyres of the truck. He swung around and aimed it at the driver.

  ‘How can I, Niall?’ the man said. He pointed to the Hillman on a lean in the gutter outside his house. ‘This thing’s parked here. Don’t know who owns it.’

  ‘I’ve fucking told you, don’t park outside our place.’

  Then Niall paused. He prodded the crossbow against the truck driver’s chest. ‘In fact, don’t park here at all.’ He stepped back, waving his arm at the miserable street. ‘I mean, Jesus, it spoils the look of the place, let alone blocking the light.’

  He wheeled around and disappeared. The man got into his truck and started it. Wyatt shut the window, closing off the belching exhaust smoke. The man compromised. He shunted back and forth, turned the truck around and parked it several car lengths away.

  Wyatt waited, letting the street draw poverty and meanness around itself again, then ran lightly across the road and into the Rossiter place. He didn’t go to the front door. He edged between the Charger and the VW and came to a gate leading to the backyard, an island of cement with a Hills Hoist in the centre of it. Tracksuits, T-shirts, overalls and vast black bras and pants were pegged to it. They had been there a while. They flapped stiffly like cardboard cutouts. A bicycle with trainer wheels lay on its side at the base of the Hills Hoist.

  The pitbull lived in a lean-to kennel against the side wall of a poky granny flat at the far end of the yard. A sad-looking wattle dropped small, scaly leaves onto it. Two grimy bowls were nearby, both empty. The pitbull stiffened as Wyatt came through the gate. It came at him fast, low and silent. The back wall of the main house consisted of sagging masonite with two louvred windows and a barred screen door in it. Wyatt slipped inside and slammed the screen door. The pitbull hit the door, its jaws lunging at Wyatt through the torn flywire, its shoulders arrested by the bars. ‘The quick and the dead,’ Wyatt told it.

  ****

  Five

  He found himself in a gloomy region of dustballs, mould and feathery webs. Toys and rags were scattered on the cement floor. There were three doors. All were open. The first led to a bathroom with a dripping shower, the second to a laundry dominated by an expensive washing machine. Wyatt stopped at the third doorway and looked in.

  It was a large kitchen. Everything was on a large scale and none of it was cheap-the table, the built-in cupboards, the gleaming refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher,
microwave oven and gas range.

  The women were large. Rossiter’s wife, Eileen, was in her fifties but looked younger. There were no lines on her round face. Her lips were very red, her chopped short hair had no grey in it, the flesh on her robust bones hadn’t started to sag yet. But there was a lot of it, concealed under a flower-patterned sack-like dress. She was the healthiest, most unlikely looking grandmother Wyatt had ever seen. She watched him from the chair at the head of the table and didn’t flicker an eyelid.

  Next to her was the daughter, Leanne. She’d got married at seventeen and the expression on her face said she hadn’t been ready for the kids that came with it. She was short and dark, and looked cheap and sullen. On her, the fat looked grease-fed and unhealthy. She had black hair on the crown of her head, shaved to a stubble above each ear. Her singlet top was holed and grimy. A couple of dozen thin silver bangles clinked together on one thick arm. She moved suddenly, striking out blindly, clipping the ear of a grubby child who’d been whining for a biscuit. The child started screaming. Two other children, under the table, joined in. Then Leanne saw Wyatt in the doorway and her jaw dropped open.

  The men saw him too. Niall had a beer can raised to his mouth. He put the can back on the table. There were several other cans there, together with bowls of potato crisps, salted nuts and biscuits. This was morning tea. Leanne was visiting with the grandchildren, so they’d got out the nibbles.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Niall said.

  Wyatt ignored him. He nodded at the other man carefully. ‘Ross,’ he said.