Wyatt - 06 - The Fallout (15 page)

Why here? Steer thought. Are they
looking for me all over the state? The van ahead of him moved forward a car
length, then stopped. Steer moved with it. The car behind him moved.

He looked at his watch. 9.20. Hed
missed the nine oclock news and would have to wait until ten.

Five minutes later he reached the
roadblock, which consisted of three pursuit cars angled so that quick
acceleration forward was impossible. Half a dozen cops. Two further
motorcycles.

A face filled his window; eyes the
colour of slate gazed hard at him. Steer tensed, but there was no change in the
mans expression, nothing to betray recognition or action. Your licence and
registration, please, sir.

Whats going on? Steer asked,
knowing that everyone would ask it.

Your papers, sir, if you please.

Steer fished the papers Chaffey had
given him out of the glove box. He itched to bring out the pistol.

The cop passed the false papers back
to him. Would you open the boot, please, sir?

Steer leaned down and operated the
boot release. There was a faint clunk as the lock disengaged. He turned to
watch the cop, who stood to one side and gingerly, with his forefinger, raised
the lid. An overnight bag of nondescript clothing, thats all.

The cop shut the boot and returned
to the drivers window. On holiday, are we, sir? From New Zealand?

Lousy weather, Steer said. Might
as well be back home.

The cop stood back from the window. I
wonder if you would mind pulling off the road, sir, over there where those
other drivers have parked.

What for?

Just routine, sir, if you dont
mind.

Steer saw two cars in the mud behind
the pursuit cars. He guessed that he shared physical characteristics with both
drivers. He started the car, moved forward off the road, switched off. The rain
bucketed down. It was miserable, drenching rain, that seemed to reduce the
world to the dimensions of a phone box. Figures blurred in the drifting curtain
of water, and Steer removed the interior light bulb, pocketed the pistol,
opened the passenger door and walked into the rain and out of the police net.

* * * *

Twenty-one

His
overnight bag lay packed ready to go on the bed. Wyatt stripped off his clothes
and went into the bathroom. He prepared the way by hacking the hair from the
crown of his head with a pair of scissors. When the bulk was gone he took up
the razor, a cheap gadget with a high whine that seemed to cut at the nerves
behind his eyeballs. Facing the mirror with a hand mirror angled behind him,
Wyatt made long careful swipes until he was left with a bald dome and tightly
trimmed hair above his ears and at the back of his head. He looked thinner,
sharper, like a man who lived a life of the mind. Finally he put on a pair of
prescription glasses. He hadnt needed glasses, according to the one-hour
dispensing optician, and so the lens adjustment was mild, but what the optician
hadnt known was that Wyatt didnt want anyone to wonder why he had plain glass
in his lenses and that Wyatts real purpose in getting glasses was the heavy
black frame. It altered his face completely.

It was a one-hour drive to
Devonport. The ferrys departure time was 6 p.m., but the company asked
passengers to be on board well before that, and the hire car had to be
returned, so Wyatt left Flowerdale at 3 oclock in the afternoon. He wore light
cotton trousers, a polo shirt and a lined woollen windproof jacket. He looked
like a teacher or a priest in civvies. The heavy glasses transformed the cast
of his face, from prohibition and wariness to internal musing and melancholy.

At 5 oclock Wyatt found himself
being swept by a crowd of people past drink machines, video games, slot machines
and knots of smokers around barrelly chrome ashtrays, into corridors that led
to the staircase at the midpoint of the ship. It linked all of the floors, and
he plunged down to D deck. Here the air rushed in the vents and he bumped
shoulders with passengers who had nowhere better to go. His cabin when he got
to it was like a tomb, pinkish grey, as disagreeable as the holiday flat in
Devonport. He went in carefully, checking corners, checking the shadows. Wyatt
lived in corners and shadows and thats where the end would come for him.

He ate upstairs, at a table next to
a window, only the black night and the waves outside the salt-scummed glass.
Inside the glass it was a world of scratchy muzak, kids erupting through doors,
overweight men and women, smoke, and the mulish, quickly combustible emotions
of the herd.

He slept badly. The ferry shuddered
through the night. The next morning he made his way to the dining room but,
realising that he was to be penned like a sheep again and expected to eat like
a pig at a trough, he grabbed an apple and a banana and made his way out onto
the upper deck, where the wind was cold and clean and empty.

When the public-address system
crackled into life, asking drivers to go to their cars, Wyatt went below,
retrieved his overnight bag, and waited at the lifts. He chose an elderly
couple. They were tottering toward the lifts, fighting a clutter of string bags
and cases and each other.

May I help you?

Help the wife throw some of this
junk overboard, the man said.

Charlie, shut up, the woman said.
She smiled at Wyatt. That would be most kind.

The man looked Wyatt up and down. You
going to your car?

Wyatt laughed. I dont drive. Im
on foot. I just thought you might need a hand. He reached for a case. These
look heavy.

He saw that hed disarmed them. The
woman gave up a case and a shoulder bag to him, the man a second shoulder bag.

Most kind of you.

They stepped out of the lift into a
claustrophobic iron shelf, the air full of fumes and echoes, the cars lined up
like capsules in a pillbox. The elderly couples car was a small blue Golf.

If youd care to squeeze in with a
couple of doddery old fools, the woman said, wed be pleased to drop you
somewhere, wouldnt we, Charlie?

Of course.

Wyatt rubbed his bald patch,
feigning embarrassment. Oh, Im sure you dont want to

Dont be silly, the old woman
said. We live in Hawthorn. We could drop you right in the centre of the city.

In that case, Wyatt said, Id be
glad to take you up on your kind offer.

By 8.30 they were leaving the
dockland. Wyatt felt safe. He wouldnt have felt so safe on foot, eyes watching
him file off the ferry.

Wyatt didnt know what sort of hours
his nephew kept. Besides, he wanted to approach Raymond with better information
than the boy had provided at Hastings a week ago. Wyatt waved goodbye to the
elderly couple on Bourke Street and caught a taxi to the University of
Technology in West Heidelberg.

Twenty minutes later he was walking
through to a broad lawn at the centre of the campus. According to the map
displayed at the main gate, the R.J.L. Hawke School of Burmese Studies was the
building facing the lawn from the west. He found a bench near a pond and
stretched in the sun. There were few students about, fewer staff. The
university had once merely called itself an institute of technology, and it
appeared that the word technology had determined the creative hand of the
architects, for the place was universally ugly and pragmatic. No imaginative
spark could ever be nourished in its stolid buildings. They dated from the
1960s and squatted among untidy eucalypts like grey bunkers. Here and there an
external wall was pebble-dashed or set with glazed pink and grey tiles in
outdated attempts at a stylistic flourish, but the general effect was
depressing. No-one ran or whistled or walked with a bounce or conferred
earnestly with a friend. Wyatt imagined the humourless lectures and tutorials,
the staff down at the mouth because of budget cuts and job uncertainty and the
ever-present jibe: Its not a real university. Its just a tech.

He eyed the School of Burmese
Studies. It had a look of temporary flashness, an effect encouraged by a new
roof and plenty of smoky glass. Workmen were still renovating the interior;
Wyatt could see them coming and going with electrical flex, plasterboard, tins
of paint and ladders from a makeshift depot behind a cyclone security fence
adjacent to the side entrance. Power to the building itself had been turned
off. The workmen were relying on an external cable from the mains, looped like
a thick black snake to a wooden pole staked temporarily in the lawn outside the
security fence.

Chaos and clutter. He liked that. He
looked more closely at the building. There were half a dozen trades represented
by the workmen. Along with everyday tools they surrounded themselves with
specialist equipment, supplies and vehicles. In one corner of the makeshift
depot was a stack of plasterboard under a tarpaulin. In another was a portable
tin shed. Through the open door Wyatt could see buckets of paint. The
air-conditioning subcontractor had claimed a third corner, his lengths of
galvanised conduits, angle bends, grilles and ducts scattered as though to help
the earth exhale. There were ladders, copper and PVC tubing, reels of flex. In
the fourth corner was a rubbish skip, overflowing with broken plasterboard,
strips of wood, glass, aluminium window frames, tubes and hosing and empty
paint tins. Vans and small trucks and utilities came and went through the
morning. They bore stains and rust and crumpled panels, and they leaked unburnt
exhaust gases into the atmosphere. Some of these vehicles would be locked in
overnight, Wyatt guessed.

He began to formulate questions and
answers. At midday he strolled through to a cafeteria, bought a sandwich, and
prowled the perimeter of the university, mentally mapping the configuration of
roads and buildings. The campus wore a kind of down-at-heel, blue-collar
innocence. It wasnt geared to anticipating hold-ups, burglaries or heists of
any kind, only pilfering from the union building shops and theft from the
library.

By 2 oclock Wyatt was on a
different bench at a different point of the main lawn. He watched, read a
newspaper, sometimes ambled across to the mens in the library basement. The
newspaper carried an update on Steers break from prison. Hed first caught the
story from a discarded
Mercury
on the ferry. Since then a man matching
Steers description had disappeared near a roadblock in the Western District.
Wyatt had no thoughts on the matter of Steer other than that, no matter where
Steer went to ground, hed be difficult to find. Hed once trained with Steer,
and could attest to the mans gifts.

* * * *

Twenty-two

Ninety
minutes after breaking Steer from the remand prison, they had been back at the
house in Warrandyte. The drive in darkness across from the Hume Freeway had
been hell for Raymond. He had nothing in common with the Meickle woman and all
she could talk about was Steer, carrying on about how shed given up everything
for him, would walk through fire and water, so what was going on? Why had he
cleared out like that? Where was he going? When would he be back? Would he be
back? On and on.

They had left the car at the rear of
the little house and gone inside. There she had clutched Raymonds arm. Ray?
He will be back, wont he?

Raymond shook her off. How the hell
would I know? Im going to bed.

Wait with Denise until I get back,
that had been Steers instruction.
One thing was for sure, Raymond was earning his money on this particular job.

The next day had been hell, rained
all day, and now a new day was dawning, hell all the way, cooped up together,
no topic in common except Steer. The Meickle woman was all pink and damp, from
two days of bawling her eyes out. She looked like some small, hairless albino
dog, Raymond thought.

I gave up my career for him, she
said.

Raymond flicked through his Jaguar
Car Club magazine. He didnt know why hed joined. Okay if you wanted to wear a
tweed sports coat and go on a fun run through the Dandenong Ranges, stop in a
picnic spot and have your picture taken for the magazine. Okay if you wanted to
be buttonholed by some little twerp from the social committee. Okay if you
wanted to read a blow-by-blow description in jokey prose about changing the
diff oil in a 68 S-type. He yawned massively. The sun was pouring through the
glass wall at the rear of the house. Hed slept well, had toast and coffee, and
here it was, only 9 in the morning. The long hours lay ahead like a sentence.
Couldnt even call anyone on the phone; it had been cut off while the owners
were away. Raymond had the patience to stake out a country bank for a day or
more, no problem, but he didnt know if he could just sit around like this for
much longer. Casing a bank was different. There you had something to aim for,
to look forward to. Here it was all up in the air.

We could be waiting for nothing,
Denise said. He just used me.

Raymond stood, prowled the perimeter
of the little room, looked out upon the forest with his fists crammed into the
back pockets of his Levis. Look, hes probably got some dough stashed away
somewhere. Gone to get it.

Denise Meickle shook her head
emphatically behind him. He saw it like a moon reflected in the glass. Chaffey
takes care of Tonys money matters.