Wyatt handed the man twenty dollars and wordlessly left the shop. The envelope had been inexpertly prised open and sealed again. That wouldn’t have helped the barber, for Jardine had simply passed on a message from Liz Redding, but any level of curiosity on the part of the barber was intolerable and so Wyatt went back into the shop.
The man knew and backed away, stammering, ‘Something else, mate?’
Wyatt’s eyes locked on him dispassionately. There were several ways he might play this. The most obvious involved a degree of risk. If he were to hurt the barber, damage his property, or take back the twenty, the little man would notch up another injustice and look for a way to collect on it-the police, some minor thug mate with ambitions.
Some sort of physical payback was what the barber expected, he was born and bred to it, so Wyatt’s stillness baffled him. Then he grew aware of Wyatt’s cold gaze. He began to splutter, close to tears: ‘I didn’t mean to. The flap was-’
A mistake. If the barber had admitted opening the envelope and stopped there, Wyatt would have nodded and left him in the jelly of his fear. But the little man was trying for an excuse.
Very slowly then, with chill deliberation, Wyatt raised the bony forefinger of his right hand. It was a slender, sunbrowned finger and the barber shut his mouth and stared, fascinated, as it seemed to float across the gap between them. His eyes tracked the finger. Wyatt stopped when it made contact. It was no more than a whispering brush against the tip of the man’s nose, but the effect was dramatic. The little barber seemed to spasm and smoke like a man in an electric chair.
Wyatt left. He still hadn’t spoken, and by the time he was out of the door and crossing the street he was thinking only of the next day, meeting Liz Redding in the ranges east of Melbourne and exchanging the Tiffany for twenty-five thousand dollars cash.
Sixteen
This time they drove through the night, dumped the van on the outskirts of Sydney, and collected Mansell’s Toyota. They entered the fuming traffic again, the spine of the Harbour Bridge an impossible distance ahead of them.
Mansell yawned. They’d been on the road for ten hours. He needed a shave. They both needed a wash and a change of clothing. He felt constipated and his eyes were prickly. They sat there in the creeping lanes of cars and buses, approaching the city in short, weak spurts between traffic lights.
After a while Mansell said, ‘What are you working on at the moment?’
‘Me? Same old shit,’ Riggs said indifferently, as though the night behind him had never happened. ‘Solicitors milking their trust funds, bank clerks ripping off cheques. There’s this one case, a bloke sets up a dummy company, gets his mates to invest in it, promising them it’s going to merge with a bigger company, meaning the shares will rise, only it’s all bullshit and his mates lose the lot. He’s into them for five million.’
Mansell shrugged. “Throw the book at him.’
‘Not that simple-he disappeared swimming off Palm Beach last month.’
Mansell looked at him briefly. ‘Faked it?’
‘A gut feeling.’
‘Follow the paper trail.’
‘Yeah. Piece of cake.’
For a while then they stared ahead. They were tired, their necks stiff with tension and hours of sitting. Riggs said, ‘What about you?’
‘Glebe doctor runs a hose from the exhaust pipe of the family car parked in the garage at the side of the house into the spare room where his wife’s sleeping-a room the size of a shoebox, the door and window easily sealed-then when she’s dead he carts her out to the car, runs a shorter hose into the car itself. Bingo. Verdict suicide.’
‘Will you get him?’
‘He left her too long on the bed. Her blood settled where it wouldn’t have settled if she’d died sitting upright, like we found her. We’re pulling him in this morning.’ He rolled his shoulders. ‘Shit I wish I’d rostered myself two days off instead of one.’
Riggs grunted.
They reached the harbour tunnel and the white car slipped like an oiled pellet past the slick tiles, drawn by the curving lights. Mansell tried to picture the metres of sludge above their heads, composed of mud, plastic bags, hubcaps, guns and skeletons, then metres of harbour water, all of it pressing down, down.
The light quality began to alter and the car climbed toward the sunlight. The sun was weak in the grey sky but Mansell was glad to see it. He took the North Sydney exit, winding automatically through the little streets. They had nothing to say to each other.
Until Riggs stiffened in the seat next to him. ‘Did you see that? Pull over, back up. Something’s going down in that side street.’
‘Riggsy-’
‘Just do it. There’s a punk down there about to get the shock of his life.’
Seventeen
‘The weather in Sydney today will be fair and mild, light winds, with an expected top of twenty degrees. All you peak-hour crawlers out there in radio land, stay tuned for today’s Rego Reward. If your plates are announced, you could win one thousand dollars.’
Baker stayed tuned, but they didn’t call his rego number so he slid in a cassette of Jimmy Barnes and lit a smoke. Then he took his foot off the brake, moved one car length along with everyone else, braked again. Judging by the scream-scrape whenever he braked, it was metal against metal on all four wheels. Still, it wasn’t his car. The cow had a job-let her fix her own car. He helped in plenty of other ways.
Baker twisted around on the collapsed springs of the driver’s seat. The brat was standing on the back seat, bumping his skinny rear against the torn vinyl of the seat upright, the same movement over and over again. Mouth open, shoelaces already trailing, vacant look on his pinched face. Baker’s arm, thick and gingery, shot out and grabbed a pitiful wrist. Skin and bone. ‘What’d I tell you? Eh? What’d I tell you?’
The brat seemed to wake out of a trance, showing confusion and fear. He stopped the bumping motion but wouldn’t look at Baker.
‘Fucking can’t keep still. I told you. What’d I say?’
Troy wouldn’t meet his gaze, just looked down at the UDL cans, parking infringement notices and McDonalds cartons on the seat and the floor. The cow was on early shift this week, so Baker had had to dress the brat himself: jeans, skivvy to hide a couple of fresh bruises, cornflaked windcheater, runners that wouldn’t stay tied. Baker stabbed a finger into the boy’s collarbone. He did it again. He hated the way the kid’s face would just shut him out. Never any gratitude, never acknowledgement of any kind. Like his flaming mother that way. Seven years old and Troy screened Baker out of his life as though Baker didn’t exist, was no part of the family at all.
Then the cars moved again and Baker turned back to the wheel. Why couldn’t the brat walk to school? He’d done that at that age. Hadn’t hurt him either. No geezer ever tried to snatch him off the footpath and play with his dick, and he’d grown up knowing how to look after himself. But oh no, not our precious Troysie Woysie.
Baker wondered who the father was. He bet Carol didn’t even know herself. Claimed he was an American naval officer, but that was more of her bullshit. Liked to say how she’d struggled for seven years, not easy bringing up a kid by yourself, blah, blah, blah. Which meant that Baker had a dream run when he first showed on the scene. She was starved for sex, just crying for it.
Now the rot was setting in. Wanted to know his job history, like she was his fucking dole officer or something. Kept looking in the employment pages, circling jobs for him in red biro. Told him it wouldn’t hurt to get out there and look, no job was going to come knocking on the door. Just lately she’d get pissed off over little things, like if he hadn’t cleared up or done any shopping by the time she got home. And she was really getting on his back about his addiction, as she called it, to dope and booze. Said he had a problem. Said he was getting worse, more unpredictable, his fuse shorter. Fucking bitch. Baker’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, as he thought of her scrawny neck.