Kick Back

Twenty-four

On Wednesday morning Wyatt and Hobba hailed a taxi and went shopping. Their first stop was Eddie Loman’s. The N in EDWARD LOMAN HARDWARE was back-to-front and Loman himself had a drooping right shoulder and a stiff leg that swung out as he walked. When the taxi was gone he jerked his head to indicate a workshop at the rear, closed the steel door behind them, and said, ‘Got the balance?’

Wyatt handed him a wad of money. Loman counted it, six and a half thousand dollars, his lips moving in his grey, unhealthy face.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘your stuffs over here.’

He wheeled round on his left leg and led them to empty fertiliser bags heaped on the floor in the far corner. Under them was a grimy styrofoam Esky. Inside it were four pairs of police handcuffs, a block of Semtex explosive, and an electric drill and bits.

‘I don’t seem to see a van,’ Hobba said.

‘Out the back,’ Loman said. ‘Keep your shirt on.’

He took them through a small door to an empty lot behind the workshop. It was choked with weeds. Steel girders and a cracked expanse of cement indicated that this was a building that had never got beyond the foundations stage. A white Econovan was parked on it. The paint was clean. There was no rust and the tyres had been blacked.

‘What’s she like?’ Wyatt said.

‘What you ordered,’ Loman said. ‘Reliable, fair acceleration, untraceable.’

‘Let me check.’

‘No skin off my nose,’ Loman said. He handed Wyatt the keys.

Wyatt warmed the engine for five minutes before testing the handbrake and the clutch. Then he took the van for a ten kilometre test run. He listened to the engine’s response to varying conditions and ran up and down the gears several times. The Econovan was twelve years old and would not win any races, but it would do.

Back at Loman’s he nodded and said simply, ‘Okay.’

He let Hobba drive back to the city. After some minutes he began to look fixedly at Hobba’s face. Hobba began to squirm and shift in his seat, and finally he said, ‘Something wrong?’

‘You told me Pedersen’s clean.’

‘Far as I know’

‘He was feeding his face with uppers last night.’

‘Max was?’ Hobba shook his head as if to say human weaknesses caused him no surprise, only great weariness. ‘Stupid, stupid bastard.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ Wyatt said. ‘I don’t want him fucking up. At the first sign, I abort the job and I waste him. I want you to tell him that.’

Hobba drove with one hand and fished a mint from the tin in his pocket with the other. ‘Will do,’ he said around the mint. He had paled a little.

Wyatt sat back and closed his eyes. There was nothing more to be said. He was no good at small talk, though he knew how much other people depended on it. Small talk saw them through tension and assured them that they had a place in the scheme of things. But Wyatt wasn’t in the mood for Hobba’s observations about life and fate and God, and he knew that his closed eyes would dissuade the fat man from making any.

He thought about Pedersen and his habit and the Finn job. Wyatt liked to think that he never tempted fate. If a job didn’t look safe, he wouldn’t do it. But he wondered how true that was. Wasn’t he in fact addicted to a certain type of risk?

Then he thought about Anna Reid. It was unlike him to be distracted by a woman before a job, or to let himself get in a position where he was distracted. He realised that he enjoyed working with her. She had a role to play in this job, sure, but it was more than that. He wanted to please her, and he found himself thinking about the time after the job.

Hobba coughed. ‘Wyatt? We’re here.’

Wyatt opened his eyes. The van was travelling adjacent to a block on Elizabeth Street devoted to cheap car-rental firms. Hobba swung into the kerb.

‘You know what to do?’ Wyatt said.

Hobba nodded. ‘Take over from you at three-thirty.’

Wyatt got out and crossed the road to Economy Rentals. He heard Hobba put the van in gear and pull out into the traffic again. He pushed open the door of Economy Rentals and went inside. He looked at his watch. Midday. In half an hour he would be taking over from Pedersen.

Twenty minutes later he was turning into Quiller Place in a brown Falcon sedan.