Port Vila Blues

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.

They ambled to his chunky rental Commodore, got in. By now there were sirens in the distance, an awareness of high drama telegraphing itself from person to person along the street. Wyatt started the car, signalled, U-turned slowly and took them out of there.

He was looking for somewhere to hole up overnight. Motels and hotels were out. So too-to a lesser extent- were guesthouses and places offering bed and breakfast. Wyatt and Liz Redding no longer resembled the couple who’d fled from the cafй, and their car was different, but the police would eventually begin a check of all accommodation addresses in the area and want to talk to all couples.

He found it outside the next town. The sign read ‘Expressions of interest invited for this outstanding commercial opportunity’, the hype referring to a half-built holiday lodge consisting of a mud-brick reception area and half a dozen mud-brick cabins. Weeds grew hard against the walls and plywood had been tacked over most of the windows. Here and there tin flapped in the wind. There was a lock-up garage at the rear of the property. The lock was flimsy. Wyatt forced it and drove in. Nothing inside but dusty drums and a stack of floorboards. They closed the door again, hurried across to the lodge, and began to check each of the buildings, keeping to the back walls. The cabins were empty but two rooms behind the main office had been set up as accommodation for a caretaker or nightwatchman in the days when the developer still had hopes for the place. They found a tiny kitchen with tins of Irish stew and peaches on a shelf, a gas burner, a kettle, three enamel mugs and half a packet of stale tea. In the other room there was a foam mattress on a lightweight tubular metal camping cot, two thin khaki blankets folded at the foot of the bed.

They stood there, turned, and contemplated one another gravely. Since fleeing the cafй, Wyatt and Liz Redding had scarcely spoken, communicating in snatched murmurs, a kind of shorthand that worked because they each wanted the same thing, each faced the same odds. Now they didn’t need to talk at all. Wyatt eased the reversible jacket away from her shoulders. He unbuttoned the black shirt. Liz Redding fixed her gaze on him, eyes dark in her strong, dark face. When the shirt was on the floor, Wyatt leaned his bony nose to the dark cleft between her breasts, kissed each upper slope, reached around to unfasten the strap. He was clumsy and she laughed once, quietly, not minding.

Then Wyatt was unbuckling the belt at her waist but he felt her hands on his, pushing him away with a queer, embarrassed kind of modesty. She finished the act for him, watching his face as she let the pants fall to the floor, weighted heavily by something, the belt, then slid her briefs to her ankles and stepped out of them.

When it was her turn to strip him she started slowly but grew impatient, all the constraint gone as if it were pointless. She was full of charging energy, and Wyatt was infected by it. He fell back with her onto the bed and let her straddle him.

She began. He saw her close her eyes tight in concentration, head tilted to one side as if she were listening for a voice. Then a little later she’d remember him, and grin and buck and lean down to bite his lip.

At the end of it, she dozed. Wyatt waited. Finally her eyes snapped open. ‘You were right, it was a setup.’

‘Yes.’

‘He was acting the junkie. Someone hired him to kill us.’

‘Or only one of us. Me,’ Wyatt said.

She stiffened in his arms. ‘Or me. I didn’t set you up.’

They fell silent, playing out the possibilities.

‘You’re good with a gun.’

He felt her shrug against him. ‘It pays to be. In this game you’ve got to be prepared for any contingency.’

Queer, formal wording. Wyatt rolled away from her.

She was alarmed, a little hurt. ‘Where are you going?’

He leaned back to kiss her. She smelt and tasted humid and salty from their lovemaking. He heard her murmur, the words unintelligible but affection and desire clearly there in them. He disengaged. ‘Handkerchief,’ he said.

She watched him, lazy-looking and tousled, propped up on one arm. That changed to alarm when she saw him reach for her trousers. ‘I haven’t got-’ she said, stopping when he uncovered the little revolver concealed there.

She seemed to slump, then rallied. ‘So? So what if I carry two guns?’

All the tenderness was gone from Wyatt. He fixed on her like a pin through a butterfly. ‘A crotch holster? Come on.’ He gestured with the little gun. ‘This is your backup piece. If you were wearing boots I’d also expect to find a gun there. But it was the way you handled yourself in the cafй. You’ve had training. And look at this, no front sight, thumb-bar filed off the hammer so it won’t catch on anything.’

‘Mack Delaney trained me,’ she muttered, mouth sulky.

‘Bullshit,’ Wyatt snarled, a slow hard rage building in him, narrowing his face and filling it with colour. ‘Delaney’s dead. You knew I couldn’t check on you.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Get up.’

When she was standing before him, tall and bare and defiant, he said, ‘Pick up your shoes.’

He saw it in her face at last, confirmation, a sense that she knew he had her. ‘Let’s talk about this.’

‘The shoes.’

He watched her pick them up. She half threw back one arm sullenly, as if she might smack him down with a shoe, but stopped when he ground the tip of the gun against her throat. ‘Let’s see it.’

She removed it from beneath the lining of her left shoe. She held it out, propped between thumb and middle finger so that he could read it. He read ‘Victoria Police’ and ‘Senior Constable’ and that was enough.

‘How long have you been working undercover?’

She shrugged. She wasn’t going to say, but then seemed to think that it wouldn’t matter what she said now. ‘A few months.’

‘If you knew the Tiffany was stolen, why didn’t you have me arrested at Southbank that day?’

‘Too soon.’

Wyatt stared at her fathomlessly until she said, ‘I thought you were part of the magnetic drill gang. I wanted the whole gang.’

‘Who knew you were meeting me today?’

‘That’s my problem.’

‘I’d say it was a problem for both of us.’

‘Let me handle my side of it. The cash is there in the bag. That part’s real enough. The insurance company wants the Tiffany and was prepared to pay to get it back. Take the fucking Tiffany too, for all I care.’

‘A deal’s a deal,’ Wyatt said. ‘You figured I belonged to this gang?’

‘I did. I don’t now.’ She paused. ‘At least tell me where you got the Tiffany.’

He smiled his brief vivid smile. ‘No. This way we find out who tried to kill us from separate ends.’

‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ she said, then seemed to wonder why she’d said it.

There were nylon restraining links in her bag. He let her get dressed then cuffed her to a corner of the iron cot. ‘I suppose you could always drag it down the road with you.’

She bit her bottom lip. ‘So you knew I was a cop before you had sex with me. That was pretty calculated of you.’

He touched her cheek with the flat of his hand, a tender gesture for Wyatt. ‘Calculation had nothing to do with it.’

She stared at him carefully for a few seconds. ‘I guess I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t. How did you know about the ID card in my shoe?’

‘I thought my way into your skin,’ Wyatt said, as fanciful as he’d ever got with his language. ‘I’d carry ID if I were working undercover. I’d want it for a situation like this. I’d want it if I had to bargain for my life.’

He saw the alarm in her face. ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ he said, moving to the door. ‘You helped Frank Jardine.’

‘You’re sparing me because I helped your friend? Is that what you’re saying?’

Wyatt couldn’t answer that.