Cross Kill

Thirty-six

Something woke him, some shift in the atmosphere. He lay on his back, feeling his skin creep, his nerve ends coming alive.

He knew where he was, and that he felt rested, the pain in his head less acute. No one was shooting at him, screaming at him to get on the ground, aiming lights in his eyes. In fact, the house was peaceful. But it felt wrong.

He lay still, feeling the blood pulse in him. Maybe he simply was cold. He pulled the bedclothes to his neck. The substance of his half-asleep, half-awake condition clarified with the movement, and he remembered that there had been the sound of a telephone, of a voice in the far reaches of the house.

Wyatt supposed that Ounsted’s nights were like that, sleep punctuated by calls to come save a life or inject a hit. He concentrated, eliminating the expected sounds of Ounsted’s life, his house, this street at night, to see what he was left with.

He heard Ounsted at the front door, then at the gate that opened onto the footpath. There were Venetian blinds in the window. He forced an aperture in the slats and looked out. Ounsted, wearing a coat and a hat, carrying the medical bag. Wyatt watched him get into the Peugeot, crank it into life, turn on the lights. Ounsted turned right at the end of the street and after that it was quiet.

Wyatt dozed. He would kill Kepler and leave it at that. If he went after Rose, after Towns, he would have to go after the whole bunch of them and he didn’t have the time or the energy or the resources to do that. The orders had come from Kepler to begin with. Towns would take over from Kepler. Towns was someone Wyatt could make a deal with that would stick. The money mattered but he’d never get the actual two hundred thousand back. He’d have to screw the money out of the Outfit some other way.

Ounsted was away for almost half an hour. Wyatt recognised the Peugeot’s rattling tappets and complaining differential, and checked the time: 11.02 pm. He clacked a gap in the blind, watched the doctor park the car, come through the gate, shut the door behind him.

There was the problem of getting to Sydney, getting at Kepler. It would take time and it would take money. Wyatt had all the time he needed but his funds were low. He would do what he’d done in the past, hire himself out to a crooked insurance agent or snatch the daily take of a restaurant in a suburb where nothing much ever happened, the kind of small-time hit that would earn him a bankroll but no credit at all.

Wyatt slept then, until Ounsted turned on the bedside light and prodded him awake-only it wasn’t Ounsted, it was Rose, wearing the doctor’s hat and coat and holding her own gun in her hand.

That explained the phone call. They’d called Ounsted out of the house and Rose had switched places with him.

Rose stepped clear of the bed and grinned down at Wyatt. ‘The legend himself. Shame he had to die in bed with his boots off.’ She centred the barrel on Wyatt’s forehead. ‘You can close your eyes if you like.’

She wasn’t good at this after all. She shouldn’t have stopped to speak to him. She was letting emotion and competition get the better of her. She was gloating, letting him know he’d lost, letting him see her, making sure he knew he was going to die and who was pulling the trigger. It was unprofessional and Wyatt shot her through the bedclothes. There was a spurt of blood and tissue and she slammed back against the wardrobe, then forward onto the floor. Her limbs thrashed but, as Wyatt watched, there was a final heave, an involuntary finger spasm and then she was still.

Wyatt found the keys to the Peugeot in her coat pocket. He checked that Jardine was sleeping peacefully in the surgery and a minute later he was in the alley at the rear of Ounsted’s house. He circled the block, saw no one. Rose had come without backup. He was the hunter now.