Kick Back

Thirteen

Later, when he was alone, Wyatt heard the knock, two soft, confident raps. He opened the door and Anna Reid was there, her low voice saying, ‘I waited in the lobby. I saw them leave.’

She regarded him calmly, her hands resting in the deep pockets of her jacket. Wyatt stared at her, then stepped back wordlessly to let her in.

At the centre of the room she removed the jacket and looked for somewhere to put it. She didn’t speak. No explanations or justifications, no ‘Are you surprised?’ or the other openings he expected.

But as she stepped by him to drape the jacket on a chair, her arm brushed against him. He tensed. In the silence she said, ‘Two things. First, I’ve been stealing from my trust account.’

He nodded.

‘To repay a bookmaker,’ she said. ‘I have to put the money back before I get found out. Second, I could take some polaroid photos of the layout and the alarm system if that would be a help.’

Wyatt ran through the possibilities. Perhaps she wanted him to trust her. Or she wanted to know if she could trust him. Or it was all a game to her. ‘Photos would be useful,’ he said. ‘Take them tomorrow. I’ll be in touch.’

She looked at him ironically. ‘You’ll be in touch.’

He nodded, refusing to smile. ‘About the money you owe,’ he said. ‘You just decided you’d ask Max to rob a safe for you.’

‘It wasn’t quite as blatant as that. I was explaining his parole provisions one day, and he told me I was wasting my time. He said he expected to be back in jail again sooner or later.’

‘That got your mind working.’

She smiled. ‘I didn’t say anything for a few days. He didn’t seem like an idiot, but I couldn’t be sure, so I sort of circled around the topic to see how he’d respond.’

‘What did he say when you finally mentioned it?’

She shrugged. ‘He didn’t seem surprised. I was just another crook; this was just another job.’

They hadn’t wasted time with small talk or hedging, and now they were silent. But Wyatt wanted to know more. After a while he said, ‘How come you’re Finn’s partner?’

‘He knew my father in Brisbane. When I came down here he took me on.’

She looked, briefly troubled, at his face, and he understood that she was unhappy. Beauty attracts the bad offers, he thought, and she’s accepted some of them. He said suddenly, ‘Finn expected you to go to bed with him.’

‘Well, well,’ she said, raising her eyebrows. She went serious again, wrapping her arms around her chest. ‘At first I didn’t mind. I was young, he gave me a start, he can be very compelling. Later on we stopped but he still looks at me like it’s there whenever he wants it.’

Wyatt was silent, waiting for her to say more. She cocked her head. ‘He lost a lot of money in the ‘87 stock market crash. After a while I realised he’d gone crooked. He started doing the planning kickbacks, and there were lots of little things- for example, every month he has the place swept for wiretaps and bugs. He tells us it’s Telecom doing maintenance.’

‘How did you know about Friday’s drop?’

‘He’s always very careful, but I overhear bits and pieces and I fill in the gaps. Some of his planning appeal work is genuine, but a lot of it’s rigged-straw objectors, inflated settlements, all earning him huge kickbacks. When something big goes through, he likes to brag.’

‘Using it as a come-on,’ Wyatt said.

Her eyes were large and when she smiled they seemed to lengthen and tilt upwards. She reached forward and brushed his chest almost as if she hadn’t done it. ‘I was thinking about you downstairs. Most people who aren’t straight eventually become wary and secretive. I think with you it was the other way around.’

‘So?’

‘So let’s hope it means you’re less likely to make mistakes.’

Usually when they started analysing him, understanding him, it was time to get out. But there were gaps in this job and he might learn something. Besides, she made him feel alive and well. Her knuckles brushed his chest again and he didn’t flinch. ‘You can afford to pick and choose your jobs,’ she said.

If he’d known her better he might have told her about scraping the bottom of the barrel with people like the Youngers. But he felt his luck had changed now; the Youngers were irrelevant. ‘I like working through the details,’ he said.

‘That’s obvious. Just now, when everyone was here, you seemed to be interested only in the job. Not them, not me.’

‘I keep the distractions till later.’

‘Uh huh,’ she said, nodding ironically.

He waited to see what she would do.

What she did was touch his chest on the way out and say, ‘I can do more than just take polaroids of the layout.’