Wyatt - 06 - The Fallout

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The Fallout

[Wyatt 06]

By Garry Disher

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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Prologue

By
the fifth hold-up the papers are calling him the bush bandit. An inspector of
police, flat, inexpressive, resistant to the pull of the cameras, is less
colourful: We are looking for a male person who is armed and should be
considered dangerous. His method of operation is essentially the same in every
case. He targets a bank in a country town within an area covering west and
south-western Victoria and east and south-eastern South Australia. He selects a
quiet period when there are few if any customers, then menaces bank staff with
a sawn-off shotgun, demanding cash from the tills. To date, we have no reports
of an accomplice. I repeat, this person is armed. On no account should he be
approached.

There are things that the inspector
doesnt say. He doesnt say that the police are at a loss to pinpoint an
operating base for the man. Given the area he moves in, the bush bandit might
be holed up in Mount Gambier, Bordertown, Horsham, even somewhere up on the
River Murray. Or he might be operating from Adelaide, even Melbourne.

The inspector doesnt say how
effective the bandit is. First, the shotgun, its blunt snout, those twin black
staring mouths. Everyone knows about shotguns, knows the massive damage they
inflict at close range, the spread of the pellets, scattering and cutting like
hornets. The dull gleam of the metal, the worn stock, the smell of gun oil. A
shotgun spells gaping death, and so you are quiescent before it. You spread
yourself out on the floor, you empty the till, you forget about being a hero.

Then there is the bandit himself.
Witness descriptions tally for each of the five hold-ups. The man is tall and
slender and he moves well. Athletic, one bank teller said. No wasted
motions, said another. Other than that there is no clear description of the
bush bandit. He varies his dress from job to joba suit, jeans and a check
shirt, zip-up windproof jacket and trousers, overalls, tracksuit. And something
always to divert attention away from his face glasses, sunglasses, cap,
wide-brimmed Akubra, a bandaid strip.

He also speaks in fragments, so that
bank staff are never able to get a clear fix on his voice: Face down . . .
fill the bag, please, no coins . . . foot off the alarm . . . dont move . . .
dont follow. Its a quiet voice, thats all they can say. Calm, patient,
understandingthese are some of the words the witnesses use. And young. They
agree that he cant be more than about twenty-five.

Although they dont say it, the
police believe that hes probably not a junkie. First-timers and junkies, they
barge in screaming, pistol-whipping staff and customers, generally encouraging
a condition of panic and instability that can tip over into hostages and spilt
blood.

Its agreed that the man rides a big
Ducati. No, a Kawasaki. Maybe a Honda. Big, anyway. Plenty of guts and very
fast. Hard to track. On a bike like that he can be miles away before the alarm
is raised. You can put up a chopper, send out a pursuit car, but all the bush
bandit has to do is simply wheel off the road and under a gum tree or behind a
windmill until the danger blows over.

Where does he store the bike? The
police have no answer. Could be anywhere. Maybe their man has a dozen bikes
stashed away, all around the country.

One thing we do know, the
inspector says, one day hell slip up. And well be there when it happens.

* * * *

It
was a wheat and wool town on a dusty plain. According to the local paper, the
parade would pass down the main street between midday and half past twelve,
turn left at the tractor dealership and wind its way on to the showgrounds next
to the Elders-GM stockyards. This was the first anniversary of the Australia
Day fire that had burnt out an area the size of Luxemburg and almost destroyed
the town. In fact, the front actually licked at the edges of the high school,
destroying a portable classsroom. Later the wind had changed, sweeping
unseasonal rains in from the west, but not before Emergency Services personnel
had lost one unit and two volunteer firemen. The shire president had wanted to
run the parade on a Saturday, but feelings were still raw in the town and
councillors voted for Australia Day itself, which this year fell on a Friday.

The man known as the bush bandit had
never felt welling pride or sentiment for anything, but he knew how to read
emotions. He walked down the main street, stopping to buy a newspaper, a half
litre of milk, a packet of cigarettes that he would never smoke. A banner
swayed in the wind, thanking the volunteer firemen. People were lining the
footpaths, yarning and joking, cameras ready. Half of them were farmers and
their families, and thats who the bush bandit was today, a pleasantly smiling
farmer dressed in elastic-sided boots and clean pressed work shirt and
trousers. He wore a stained felt hat pushed back on his head. He looked
work-worn and weary. He wasnt alone in wearing sunglasses. Its just that his
were anachronistic, a flash narrow strip of mirrored glass across his eyes.
They belonged on a roller-blading kid at St Kilda or Bondi or Glenelg. If
anyone thought about it, they thought the man had eccentric taste. Certainly it
was the only thing memorable about his face.

He watched the parade trumpet past:
police, firemen, ambulance crews, the two widows in the back seat of a squatters
black Mercedes. It was over in ten minutes. In ten minutes the main street was
deserted, the tail end of the spectators disappearing around the corner and
away from the centre of the town. There was only one bank, and the bandit
walked into it at 12.25, removed his sawn-off shotgun from his bag of shopping,
and announced that he was robbing the place.

There were no customers, only two
tellers. One said, Oh, no. The other froze. The bush bandit trained the twin
bores of the shotgun on the one whod spoken. Hed picked her as the likely
source of trouble, so he said, Face down. Not a sound.

He watched her sink to the floor.
She stretched out awkwardly, one hand holding her skirt from riding up.

The other teller watched the gun
swing around until it was fixed on her stomach. The bandit placed a chaff bag
on the counter. Fill it.

Friday. There would be more cash
than usual, though not enough to make him rich. But that was a thought for the
edge of his mind, a why-am-I-doing-these-pissy-jobs? thought for the dark
hours.

He watched the teller, the shotgun
now back on the woman on the floor. The meaning was clear: She gets it if you
stuff me around.

At one point, the teller hesitated.

Move it, the bandit said.

Travellers cheques, she burst
out. You want them?

Hundreds of cheques, crisp,
unsigned. The bush bandit could almost conjure up their new-paper-and-ink
smell. Hed take them to Chaffey. Chaffey handled wills, property conveyancing
and sentence appeals in his front office; in his rear office hed pay twenty
cents in the dollar for anything the bush bandit turned up that wasnt cash or
easily negotiable.

Yes, the bush bandit told the
teller.

When it was done, and both women
were on the floor, he said, Remain there, please. Five minutes.

One woman nodded. The talkative one
said Yes, but the man was already gone.

The motorbike was on the tray of a
farm ute. Hed turned it into a farm bike with mud, dust, dents, a cracked
headlamp. He drove the ute slowly away from the town, his elbow out the window,
an irritating figure familiar to interstate coach drivers, truckies and
travelling salesmen, and soon had faded into the landscape, faded from memory.

He ditched the ute on a dirt track
and switched to the bike. This time it was a Honda and hed stolen it in
Preston. He ran into a storm, strong winds and driving rain, on the way back to
the city, but by evening was in his balcony apartment, looking out over
Southgate and the stretch of the Yarra River between the casino and Princes
Bridge.

At 8 oclock he went out into the
storm again and made his way to the casino, to see if he could improve on the
12,000 bucks hed taken today. By morning hed have the early edition of the
Herald
Sun,
another bush bandit story for his scrapbook.

The bush bandit, that was his public
name. Ray, or Raymond, those were the names his mother and father both now
deadhad called him. What Raymond wanted was simply to be called Wyatt. He
liked the whiplash quality of the word.

But his uncle was called Wyatt.

* * * *

One

One
hundred kilometres south-east of the city, the hold-up man called Wyatt brought
a crippled yacht in from the storm-tossed seas of Bass Strait to the calmer
waters of Westernport Bay, bringing to an end a seven-day voyage from Port
Vila. It was 4.15, almost dawn. Just five hours earlier, the bent police
inspector called Springett had been washed overboard. Wyatts only other
passenger, the woman who had arrested Springett in Port Vila, was asleep on her
bunk. Wyatt furled the torn sails and switched to the auxiliary diesel. The
yacht burbled quietly between the red and green markers, following the channel
to the little jetty on the Hastings foreshore. Liz Redding didnt stir, not
even when Wyatt dropped anchor, bundled his clothing inside a waterproof jacket
and slipped over the side and away. She was too tired, too warm, too lost to
the grains of Mogadon hed fed her for that.

Wyatt dragged himself shivering from
the water and wiped himself down with a handtowel from the yacht. He dressed
rapidly in the shelter of a concrete retaining wall, occasionally poking his
head above it, looking for fishermen, patrol cars, insomniacs. There were
street lights behind a screen of foreshore trees; shire offices ghastly white
in the sodium lamps; rows of slumbering small houses; a swimming pool and
kiosk; a hut on the jetty that sold fish; and, to his left, a stiff forest of
drydocked yacht masts behind a cyclone security fence.

What he wanted was a car.

If he left now, he would be in
Melbourne by the time most peoples alarm clocks were rattling them awake. If
he were not so conspicuousa stranger with wet hair appearing from the
direction of the marina at the break of day hed take one of the towns taxis.
Otherwise, there was the train, the local from Stony Point, connecting with the
Melbourne express in Frankston, but that meant too many factors that he could
not control, and which threatened to bring him unstuckaltered timetables, nosy
ticket inspectors, faulty boom gates. Or he could hitchhike. But who would pick
him up? Wyatt knew that the dark cast of his face and his fluid height and
shape and his materialisation at the side of the road would spell prohibition
and risk to any motorist.

And so his only option was to steal
a car, one that would not be missed for the next couple of hours.

He ventured a short distance away
from the little dock, into a region of humble side streets where the houses
huddled together and the family car sat in the driveway or in the street
outside it, straddling nature strip and gutter. But a dog barked. Wyatt backed
out of there.

He couldnt see any service stations
nearby. As he recalled it, they were mostly on the outskirts of Hastings. There
are often cars parked outside service stations, keys on a hook somewhere
inside.