‘Still all clear?’
He nodded.
She placed the scales on the table, effectively concealing them among the cups, plates, sugar bowl and a tall, matched pair of salt and pepper shakers.
‘She’s back.’
Liz froze. Her hands crept around the scales.
‘It’s okay. She’s staring off into space.’
Liz used a small tool to prise out a couple of representative stones. She picked them up with tweezers, weighed one and then the other in the tiny bowl of the scales.
‘Women’s Weekly seal of approval,’ she said. ‘Each stone weighs in as the real thing. Sorry,’ she said, meaning the rigamarole.
Wyatt was unconcerned. ‘It’s business,’ he said.
He had no appetite, for the transaction was not complete, but picked up the danish anyway and bit into it. The pastry was thick, binding, and it dried the inside of his mouth. The apple was too chunky. He drained part of his coffee, ate more of the danish.
It was then that Wyatt’s mouth seemed to fill with grit. He grimaced, tongued the stuff to his lips, removed it with his fingers.
‘What’s wrong?’
Wyatt placed the offending sludge onto his plate and separated pastry and apple from a jagged chip of tooth and new amalgam. His tongue automatically ran along his upper teeth, registering a rough hole and a loose fragment, all that remained of the tooth that had been making his life hell for two months.
‘I’ve lost a filling.’
Fascinated, Liz Redding stared at the chip on his plate. ‘More than that. Your tooth’s split. Is it the tooth that’s been bothering you?’
He nodded.
‘A new filling on top of old ones?’
‘Yes.’
‘It split open,’ she said. ‘They’ll do that. Which one is it?’
‘Top. Back,’ he said, his tongue busy.
“That’s not so bad. It won’t affect your chewing and you won’t need a false one in its place.’
‘You seem to know all about it.’
She was still leaning across the table, her upper body straining toward him. Unconsciously he leaned toward her. They seemed to be joined by this humble human catastrophe.
That’s why they failed to notice the junkie with the gun. He came in through the main door and a moment later Liz blinked and murmured, ‘Behind me.’
Wyatt looked past her shimmering black hair to the doorway. The man who stood there, a little rocky on his feet, wore scuffed boots, a torn T-shirt, greasy jeans and denim jacket. He needed a shave and a haircut. Wyatt expected to catch a whiff of him, a smell compounded of unwashed skin and clothing, oil and petrol, and something else, a rotten intestinal system leaking cheap alcohol and costly, impure chemicals bought in alleys and brewed in backyard amphetamine factories.
The man hadn’t seen them. He wiped the back of his hand across his nose, tried to focus, jerked the gun as if waving crowds of people aside. Wyatt watched carefully, following the gun. The size told him it was a.357 and it seemed to have the weight of a genuine.357, not a disposal-store replica. Then he saw the man stop wavering and focus on the waitress. She was rooted to her stool, uselessly opening and closing her mouth. The man giggled insanely and shuffled toward her. ‘Gimme,’ he was muttering, ‘gimme,’ showing a mouthful of healthy teeth, and that wasn’t right.
Liz Redding had her bag in her lap, bent over it protectively. She had the Tiffany in there, and Wyatt’s reward money. ‘We should do something before he hurts her,’ she said, beginning to turn her head.
Wyatt stopped her, his voice low and even, not wasting itself on unnecessary words or useless inflections: ‘Don’t move. Don’t attract his attention.’
They waited there, frozen, watching the junkie. Wyatt saw him push the waitress off the stool. ‘Gimme. Gimme.’
The shove seemed to wake her. She stumbled to the register, opened it, shrank back against the serving hatch. No one in the kitchen had noticed her. Wyatt heard dishes rattling, a cheerful whistle, water rushing into a sink.
The junkie crammed a few notes from the till into his back pocket. He was sniggering, maybe imagining the next fix. Wyatt saw him swing away again toward the door, then stop, greed showing on his face.
Liz breathed, ‘Oh God, he’s seen us.’
Wyatt watched as the junkie approached them slowly, keeping behind Liz Redding but beginning to circle so that he would soon be coming in on their flank.
Wyatt’s left flank. It seemed to be deliberate. Wyatt had the little.32 in his lap but the angle was bad. He’d have to shoot across himself, across the table, and, unless the man widened the circle, he’d have to place his shot close to Liz Redding’s shoulder.
So far the junkie was mostly bleary and unpredictable, as if he’d targeted them as a soft touch who’d hand over their wristwatches and spare cash and not kick up a fuss about it. But then the muzzle of the.357 came up, the man spread his legs and crouched, and he began to raise a steadying hand to the gun. He was clean and cool and focused suddenly, snapping out of his chemical trance more quickly than any junkie Wyatt had ever known.
All these things registered with Wyatt and he swung the.32 into view, catching his knuckles under the lip of the table, wasting a precious fragment of time.
He would have been too slow. It was Liz who shot the man. She didn’t do what amateurs do, turn her head first to find the problem then bring her gun to bear on it, but swung everything around-trunk, arms, eyes and gun-cutting the delay time, tracking the target, firing the instant she had him placed.
She shot the junkie twice, one a doubling-over punch to the stomach, the other straight into the crown of his head. This second shot blew the man back against a table. He rolled off, tangled with a chair, and fell, leaving a red smear on the tabletop. Wyatt saw that he was dead. The interesting fact about the dead man was his crooked wig.
Twenty-three
‘Oh no, oh no.’
It was Liz Redding and her face was white, dismayed.
Wyatt reached over, took her gun, turned her to face him, her chin clamped in his hand. ‘Liz, snap out of it.’
‘I’ve killed him.’
‘It was a setup. We can’t stay here,’ he said.
He had the voice of a convincer, flat, exact, experienced. Liz came with him into the sunlight and let him drive her out of there in her car.
He barrelled down the first side road, a winding channel between overhanging trees. Three hundred metres down he spotted a narrow parking bay and a pipe-and-glass bus shelter. He pulled in. ‘Take off your T-shirt.’
She looked at him numbly then nodded. She was mute, everything closed down now, but he was banking that elation and relief would flood in soon-and anger, and questions.
He was already taking off his jacket and reversing it, tan corduroy outermost, the plain weatherproof cotton now the lining. He stripped off his buttoned black shirt, pulling it over his head to save time.
Beside him, Liz Redding’s head and arms were briefly lost to view as she bent forward and removed the big T-shirt. He saw her flexing stomach, her breasts beneath her raised arms, squeezing together briefly, the brownness very brown against an unfussy white cotton bra. Wyatt felt a powerful urge to pull her against his chest. It was as much a symptom of his lonely state, a memory trace of friendly, uncomplicated intimacy with a woman again, as a need to feel her bare skin against his. Then she was shaking hair out of her eyes and swapping shirts with him. He also gave her the jacket and the sunglasses and seconds later was peeling the little rental car away from the parking bay, snaking down the road as he accelerated.
A short time later, he began to double back, turning right at each intersection until they were on an approach road to Emerald again. He slowed as they entered the town, looking left and right as he cruised past the side streets. Liz Redding was looking with him. ‘There,’ she said.
It was a small, high-steepled church with room for parking under a box hedge at the rear. No one would spot the car there for a few hours, maybe even for a couple of days. They got out, walked unhurriedly back into the town. Wyatt sensed the change in Liz Redding, an electric charge in her step. She was waking out of her shock and misery, engaging with the world and him again. Her arm went around him and he felt a ripple of energy in her flank.