The Heat (12 page)

Half an hour later, he knew that Thomas Ormerod's painting was probably by David Teniers the Younger, 1610–90. His auction results ranged from eighteen thousand US to almost a million pounds sterling, with the majority between a third of a million and half a million. This particular painting wasn't listed. Which didn't mean it wasn't authentic, or worth stealing—or dying for.

15

On Wednesday morning, Wyatt walked along the river again, thinking. Joggers passed him, running grimly. Cyclists bullied past, undeviating. He tensed each time, waiting to see what they had in store for him, but they powered on mindlessly as if he didn't exist.

Then the balmy air and glistening water worked on his nerves and he stopped to look at the beauty and ordinariness of life along a waterway. Pelicans and oystercatchers;
barbecue shelters and wooden bench seats overlooking the river; a pirates' playground;
a vast, clawing Moreton Bay fig.

There was a sudden snap at his scalp. He ducked, thinking again that he'd been shot at. Saw a miner bird banking for another swoop at him. Probably had a nest nearby. He waved his arms about and made himself scarce, hating the sensation, remembering it from years ago, a hold-up he'd pulled in Brisbane.

Wyatt retreated to one of the shelters to think about Minto, Quarrell, the job itself. He needed to know about security patrols on Iluka Islet. Had Ormerod hired a gardener or cleaner to come in while he was away next weekend? And the house itself: did Ormerod have a misplaced faith in his location, on a tiny knob of land, a road behind him, the water lapping at his front lawn, houses on either side? He probably felt safe there, and that kind of thinking might lead a man to downplay security. Sensor lights on the outside walls, security company stickers, alarm box under the eaves, but what else? Maybe it didn't matter. A quick in-and-out before the police or security guards arrived.

Wyatt knew he could go in at any time between late Friday afternoon and Monday morning, but what if Ormerod changed his plans, came back early for some reason? He thought about that upstairs window: even if Ormerod shut and locked it before he flew south, it might not be wired into the alarm system. Home owners secured their downstairs doors and windows and forgot that burglars climbed trees—and scaffolding. And security installers often cut corners. They considered under-the-house crawl spaces, upper-level toilet windows and attic roof vents low-risk. Too inaccessible, dirty or time-consuming to wire up.

The other lazy or fallible person in the equation was the homeowner. Maybe Ormerod would forget to turn on his system.

Back from his walk, feet propped on the balcony rail, Wyatt sipped coffee and thought. The world was still: the tennis court, the pool, the caravan park beyond.

He tensed. A police car crept into the caravan park. Two young constables got out, crossed a patch of grass and called to the occupants of a tent. A theft? A complaint?

Wyatt relaxed. They were not interested in a man on a balcony a hundred metres away. The police were his natural enemy and his upbringing, such as it was, had been steeped in hostility towards them. But he did not hate or fear them. He'd rarely tangled with them. They had a job to do, and one day they might get him but he rarely thought about that. It would be self-defeating. If you showed your antipathy you drew attention to yourself. Wyatt liked to be invisible.

He drained his coffee, read the rest of the newspaper, checked the mobile for messages. One from Minto:
All okay?
He didn't reply.

At 9 a.m. he was in the Hertz office in Noosa Junction, using his Sandford ID to rent a Hyundai. He still had the Mazda, but if anyone went looking for him afterwards, he wanted to lay more than one trail.

Three hours later he was in a Brisbane shopping centre, flipping through clothing in a tradesmen's outfitters. Thinking of the house next door to Thomas Ormerod's, the scaffolding, ladders and flapping tarpaulin, he walked out with a hard hat, a pair of overalls, rubber-soled shoes and a nylon zip-up jacket stencilled front and back with the word security.

A gun was next on his shopping list. Couldn't buy one, Minto couldn't supply one. Back in Noosa he fished out a copy of the Yellow Pages and found the listing for gun clubs.

Late afternoon now, Wyatt parked where the sun threw shadows under a couple of silvery gums outside the Nambour Small Arms Club, on a secluded valley property surrounded by trees and a security fence twenty kilometres inland of the Sunshine Coast airport. Gunshots—a faint crackle—reached him in the scented air. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it.

The firing continued until 6 p.m. then stopped. Just after that the first vehicle appeared, a bulky Land Rover, followed by two other four-wheel drives. When the dust had settled, Wyatt followed. All three vehicles headed north to Yandina, then east to Coolum Beach, where vast resorts, set amid lawns and palms, faced the breakers of the Pacific. The shooters had no interest in that view, however. They probably saw it all the time. They turned into the parking lot of a golf course and went into the clubhouse to drink.

Wyatt parked where the CCTV cameras wouldn't find him and waited as darkness drew in, a strange brief period that deceived a man's eyes. When the timing and the light were optimal, he went hunting. The shooters might have left their guns locked at the clubhouse, but Wyatt was betting he'd find one in a lockbox inside one of the vehicles.

Nothing in the first vehicle, not under the seats, inside the glove box or behind the door panels. But there was a gun safe under a spare tyre in the second vehicle. The lock was a keypad. He viewed it at an angle, looking for tell-tale wear or griminess that might identify the four keys that, in one of twenty-four possible combinations, made up the passcode, but his luck wasn't running. A fine mist of talcum powder blown over the keys would have picked out the ones in constant use, but he had none with him.

He moved on to the Land Rover, the roughest, the oldest of the three. Inside was a toolbox with a false bottom concealing a fully-loaded .22 semi-automatic Ruger. It would have come from a visiting US sailor or a Tasmanian bikie on a run up to the mainland, probably. They were the two main sources of these Rugers that Wyatt knew of. He pocketed the pistol and strolled the long way around to his car, walking deeper into the resort and out again, watching and listening for the shout that said he'd been spotted, that he shouldn't have been there. He resisted the urge to run: he was playing the guest, out on his evening stroll.

Walking once around his rented Hyundai, checking the back seat and footwells, he got in and drove north to Noosa and his apartment. Curtains drawn as evening settled, he stripped and dry-fired the gun. It was well oiled, well cared for. But he was amused to see that the metal slide was a shade lighter in colour than the frame and the barrel, and carried no serial number. The gun had been rebirthed. Probably by a gunsmith Wyatt had once known who was in jail now. Wyatt recalled the guy had sent a dozen Ruger slides to the police, certifying they came from firearms that had been destroyed or stripped for parts, when in fact he'd merely made a dozen new slides and then sold the guns onto the black market.

Wyatt peered at the slide, shunting it back and forth. Nice job. The action was smooth, crisp, quiet. The Ruger would work. It would put a man or a woman down. If he or she came close enough. If it came to that.

He oiled the gun, then removed a couple of shells from the clip. He knew from experience how a full clip could depress the spring over time and affect the action of the gun, even lead to a jam.

He was thinking about where to stow the Ruger when the apartment phone rang.

‘Yes?'

Leah Quarrell, sounding cranky. She was out on his staircase with something to show him, so would he please open the fucking door and let her in?

16

‘I've been trying to reach you since Monday,' she said, striding in. She was carrying a heavy-duty flat carton with
SONY PLASMA TV
in large black letters on the side.

Wyatt ignored her. Standing to one side of the entranceway, he darted a look into the stairwell, his fingers firm around the butt of the Ruger in an instinctive expectation of trouble, listening for the sounds that didn't belong.

She was alone. No one charged from the shadows. And when she spotted the pistol in his hand, she curled her lip. ‘Oh, for God's sake.'

Wyatt ignored her, locked the door. For the sake of recording devices, he said, ‘We've been meaning to thank you for finding the apartment for us. It's perfect.'

Quarrell shook her head, elaborately fed up. ‘I'm not wired.'

She dumped the carton on the living-room table, lifted her blouse to her neck, her skirt to her waist, brown and lithe and slight. ‘See?'

‘What's the box for?'

‘You wanted a way to transport the painting? Perfect size. I needed a new TV anyway.'

Wyatt tucked the Ruger into his waistband and poked at the box. ‘Why did you come here?'

She reached a far point of endurance. ‘Hello? Some thanks are in order.'

‘We could have met tomorrow, somewhere neutral.'

‘Neutral? I thought you'd be after privacy.'

‘Does anyone know you're here?'

‘I don't believe this. Like who?'

‘Were you followed?'

‘You're paranoid. Look, let's have a drink, relax a bit. Think you can do that?'

Quarrell seated herself on the sofa, her white skirt and gleaming legs vivid against the drab floral upholstery. The hem rode high on her slender thighs and she knew it.

Wyatt had rules: no alcohol in the lead-up to a job. Small meals. Plenty of sleep. ‘Tea or coffee,' he told her.

‘You're like a monk.' She wriggled to get comfortable. As if realising he couldn't be untethered by her skirt, she tugged at the hem. ‘And what's with the gun? You're stealing a painting, not shooting someone.'

Wyatt watched her.

‘Unbelievable. Okay, anything else you need? A vehicle? We're a team, don't forget.'

‘I'm fine,' Wyatt said.

Then he realised that wasn't going to reassure her. He was good at reading other people's hopes and fears—had to be, in his profession. Most men and women were bundles of doubts and insecurities and therefore in constant need of affirmation. They sucked the oxygen from the air. Big dreamers barely capable of achieving small dreams. Mouths that flapped, saying nothing, filling silences.

But it didn't pay to ignore them. You had to gauge their needs and anxieties. Take a bank job: no good shouting at people, shooting off guns, pistol-whipping the customers and tellers. Panicked people screaming and stumbling around were a distraction, a hindrance. They'd find silence just as frightening. So you spoke to them. You spoke softly, soothingly. You might ask for a first name. You might say, ‘Liz, I'm not going to hurt you, no one's getting hurt, this will be over soon, so if you could just sit on the floor with the others and put your arm around that woman with the baby, we'll be out of your hair in no time at all.' And Liz would stop trembling. She'd even feel important. She would now be assisting you, in her small, unwitting way. If you screamed in her face, punched her, whatever, she could be your undoing.

Not that Wyatt had robbed a bank in a while, and it wasn't just the high-tech security. Good associates—men and women with the right skills, not given to screaming and pistol whipping—were impossible to find. Idiots robbed banks and payroll vans now. Stupid, drug-crazed, desperate men. Men who didn't understand psychology.

So Wyatt paid attention to what Leah Quarrell really wanted. She wanted acknowledgment. She wanted to be at centre stage.

He nodded at the empty TV carton. ‘I would never have thought of that. It's ideal.'

She accepted the compliment grudgingly. ‘Look, I don't want to get off on the wrong foot, but I don't think you quite appreciate your position in all this.
We
hired
you
. You work for
us
, me and my uncle. You're acting as if we're irrelevant.'

‘What is it you want, Leah?'

‘To be better informed.'

‘About what?'

‘About what? Timing. It needs to be smooth: the burglary, moving the painting, handing it over. Other people are involved, you know. I mean—I find you with a gun, as if you're intending to go in now, before Ormerod flies down to Melbourne. I thought we agreed on the weekend.'

Wyatt didn't want to have this conversation, but he threw her a bone, barely grinding the words out: ‘Yes, I've decided to follow your advice and break into Ormerod's house on Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, you need to know that I always carry a gun.'

She sat back. ‘Thank you. Was that so hard?'

The question was neither here nor there to Wyatt. He said nothing.

He should have offered some further confirmation of her centrality. Quarrell flared again. ‘Is that it? What about preparation?'

‘Everything's in hand.'

She reached out and wrapped his wrist in her slim fingers. ‘Tools, equipment…'

‘All in order.'

She withdrew her hand. ‘So what am I? A wallflower?'

Wyatt didn't understand petulance and sulkiness. They were pointless: outcomes invariably negative. ‘You've been a great help so far,' he said, trying to guess what she wanted to hear, ‘and I don't want to burden you any further.'

‘
I know I've been a great help
. But how are you getting to the house? How are you carrying the box away? Exactly when do you consider going in? Beginning of the game? Middle? End?'

‘Still to be decided.'

She sat back, hissed her words like a snake: ‘I hate this.'

Wyatt considered calling Minto, asking him to rein her in, but that would take time, effort and a degree of finesse. It could also cause undercurrents of resentment. Better to throw her a couple more bones. ‘When would
you
go in?'