They left the Mazda two blocks away from the Northcote house and walked the rest of the way. Jardine hadn’t understood the need for this. He’d said to Wyatt that afternoon, ‘You can trust me. I won’t run out on you.’ Wyatt told him, ‘I know that. I don’t trust the Outfit. We stick to each other the whole way with this. If you’re in sight and you get attacked, I know what to do about it. If you’re out of sight and they jump you, I won’t know it.’
Jardine had nodded. ‘You cover all the angles-some might say obsessively.’
‘It’s how I stay alive,’ Wyatt had told him.
It was 8.55. The streets were quiet, settling into darkness as front-porch lights went out. Wyatt and Jardine slipped into the grounds of the house and went around it twice. The first time they searched the small yard; the second time they checked the strips of tape Wyatt had pasted to the windows and outside doors. Nothing had disturbed them.
They finished at the front door. Jardine went in first, the money in the bag over his shoulder. ‘Made it,’ he said, half-turned to hold the door for Wyatt.
‘We’ll see,’ Wyatt said.
They were home, they had the money, but still Wyatt didn’t let go of his expectation of trouble. He followed Jardine into the hallway and waited crammed up against him as Jardine put his hand to the light switch. The switch clicked once, then again, but there was no light and Wyatt started to say, wait.
The words froze in his throat. He heard a smooth metallic snap as someone in the shadows jacked a shell into the firing chamber of a semi-automatic pistol, and then he heard the shot.
The pistol had been fitted with a suppressor. The baffles contained the sound as a flat cough, and Wyatt connected it to the sudden jerk of Jardine’s body ahead of him. He tried to avoid the big man, tried to twist away and find his.38, but Jardine slammed backwards into him and they both went down, Wyatt face down on the dusty, fibrous carpet. His back muscles knotted together, expecting a follow-up shot.
It didn’t come. Instead, there were useless tugging sounds and Wyatt could sense panic behind them. The pistol had jammed. Semi-automatics will do that. It was why he rarely used them. He pushed up, snarling, ridding his body of Jardine’s weight.
It did him no good at all. He saw an arm swing at him, the pistol held like a club, and hunched away as if that would make his skull elastic. The rest was all pain.
Thirty-five
He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there. He blinked awake and turned his head to check the time. That was a mistake. The pain cut through him and he felt a faint tug on his scalp as the blood crust broke. 9.15 pm. He hadn’t been out for long. He didn’t remember Jardine until he became conscious of distressed, shallow breathing and felt the weight of his friend’s body across his legs.
This time Wyatt was ready for the stabbing in his head. He rolled out from under Jardine and found a light switch in the front room. It leaked enough light into the hall to tell him that Jardine had been hit in the head and that his upper body and the carpet under him were blood soaked. He reached around and explored Jardine’s scalp with his fingers a little at a time. It didn’t tell him anything, only that Jardine’s hair was clogged with blood.
Wyatt leaned against the wall to think about it. The bag with the money was gone. Jardine needed attention. The Outfit gun had jammed, meaning they might come back to finish the job. Rose, he guessed. She’d been his dangerous shadow from the start. A smudge on the wall caught his eye. He looked up to see a series of them, shoe marks reaching up to an open manhole in the ceiling. She’d got in through the roof, and she’d taken out the light bulb.
Wyatt used the telephone in the kitchen. He was expecting Ross or Eileen to answer, not the son. The son was supposed to be in remand. He didn’t give his name. ‘Your dad there?’
‘I’ll just get him,’ Niall Rossiter said.
When Rossiter came on Wyatt said, ‘I need a doctor who won’t ask questions.’
Rossiter took that in. ‘You hurt bad?’
‘Jardine’s been head shot.’
‘Let’s see,’ Rossiter said, and Wyatt listened to him thinking. ‘There’s Ounsted.’
‘I’ve heard the name. How can I get hold of him?’
‘He does a moonlight flit every few months,’ Rossiter said. ‘Hang on a sec,’ and Wyatt heard the receiver clatter onto some hard surface before he could warn Rossiter to keep his trap shut.
Rossiter came back on the line with an address and telephone number in North Carlton. ‘According to the wife it’s still current.’ There was a pause. ‘What went wrong?’
‘I’ve got some sorting out to do,’ Wyatt said, with a chill that seemed to reach Rossiter on the end of the line. Rossiter said, ‘Right,’ hurriedly and rang off.
Wyatt took Jardine to the North Carlton address in the rental car. The doctor lived in a small, flat-faced, cement-rendered place sandwiched between a couple of stately brick terraces on a leafy street. It was a street of academics, TV writers and yoga fanatics who drove Landcruisers and soft-top VWs, but Ounsted’s car matched his house. It was parked outside it, a Peugeot station wagon, ancient, soft-springed, rust in the doors.
The man who answered his knock was slight, undernourished, dressed in a crumpled suit with broad lapels. He smelt of whisky and cigarettes and tried to hide it with fluttering, gingery hands. His face had the chalky shut-away look of a man who shudders at the sun. He looked about sixty, but was probably younger. Ounsted had been struck off the register fifteen years ago and now he treated patients who suffered from the kinds of injuries and ailments they couldn’t let the authorities know about. He supplied morphine, plugged gunshot wounds, sewed up knife cuts.
‘There’s a lane behind the house,’ he told Wyatt. ‘Drive around while I get the surgery ready. We’ll bring your friend in the back way.’
The lane was narrow; the Mazda juddered on the bluestone cobbles. Wyatt stopped halfway along, the engine idling, waiting for Ounsted to open the gate. Every back wall except Ounsted’s had been replaced in the past ten years. Some were topped with jasmine-choked lattice. Ounsted’s rear entrance was a warped, padlocked wooden gate on hinges, four metres high. He’d coiled barbed wire around the upper frame.
Wyatt could smell booze and tobacco inside the house as well, but there was a layer of antiseptic under that and one of the rooms was clean enough: a drugs cabinet, stainless steel trays, lights, an operating table. The rest of the house was like the doctor himself, battling and apologetic.
They put Jardine on the operating table and Ounsted gave him a painkiller and a sedative. ‘He’ll be okay for the moment,’ Ounsted said, a kind of clipped professionalism entering his voice. ‘Now you’d better let me look at you.’
Wyatt sat where Ounsted could examine his head. ‘You’ll live. Bruising, swelling, and a small patch of broken skin. A painkiller and you’ll be okay. Just take it easy for a while. Rest up for a couple of days.’
‘I’ve got things to do.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ Ounsted said. ‘I was just going through the motions, that’s all.’
Then he went to work on Jardine, Wyatt helping him to wash the blood from Jardine’s head and clean and bandage the wound. The bullet had scored a shallow trench above the right ear. Ounsted murmured as he worked: ‘A fraction further to the right and he’d be in worse shape than this. He’ll need to stay here for a few days. He’s a lucky man. But it’s amazing what the body can withstand. I remember…’
The man wanted to talk. Wyatt screened him out. He thought about his options. He’d start with Kepler, but it didn’t have to be immediately-the Outfit would always be there. What he needed most now was rest, a safe house for the night. When Ounsted was finished he said, ‘How much do I owe you?’
Ounsted seemed to take an interest in the carpet. ‘Two fifty should cover it.’
‘I’ll give you three hundred,’ Wyatt said. ‘I need a bed here for the night.’