Kick Back

Forty-three

‘What now?’ she asked flatly.

‘We mop up,’ he said.

He punched a hole in her shattered windscreen, gave her the keys to the Hertz Falcon, and told her to follow him back across the city.

At her house they worked in wary, hostile silence. She kept tools, ladders, paint, rollers and drop-sheets in her garden shed. Wyatt wrapped Bauer’s body in a drop-sheet and she helped him carry it out to the Falcon. Then she righted her furniture and replaced her drawers and he mopped up blood, his own and Bauer’s. Then he mixed plaster from a packet and plugged bullet holes and gouges in the hallway. Finally he dragged in a tin of white paint and a stepladder. He felt dangerously light-headed, and bone tired.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘Not me,’ Wyatt said. ‘You. You’re going to paint the hall. Not tomorrow, now.’

‘Now?’

‘You might have visitors in the morning. If they seem curious, tell them the hold-up upset you, you’ve been painting to relax.’

Anna Reid’s face took on a shut-down, sullen expression. It was still there when Wyatt nodded goodbye and let himself out the front door.

He drove the Hertz Falcon to Finn’s house in Hawthorn. It was a Federation-style house set behind a thick hedge. Finn was there, a swollen-tongued, leering, trussed-up shape on a king-size bed. Wyatt unwrapped Bauer and dumped him on the floor next to the bed. He also dumped the guns. Let the cops work it out. He distributed the coke and heroin packets behind heating vents, in shoeboxes, and among suitcases in a closet.

Then he left the city, driving the Hertz Falcon one-handed, his other arm wrapped across his body, his fingers cupping the wound in his side. Once or twice when he dozed, panicky horns and headlights warned him back into his lane. Sometimes he found himself driving very slowly, and in Frankston an angry motorist rapped on his window at a traffic light. With relief he dumped the Falcon and collected his car and headed for the back roads.

The sky was black. When moonlight struggled briefly through the heaped clouds he saw fog wisps like people in the road ahead. Fog hung over dams and creeks. Otherwise he felt that only he was abroad, only he awake.

He opened his window and filled his lungs with cold air. He dare not stop or he would sleep and risk being wakened by a tap on the glass and voices wanting to know if he was all right, had he been drinking, had he been in a fight, your licence, please, sir.

When Wyatt reached the coast road he followed it to Shoreham. He turned inland again, and on the hill slopes he felt that he was climbing to uninhabited reaches of the world. Then the headlights picked out his white gate, and narrow muddy drive and the image disappeared and he knew that in the morning there’d be cars going to church, and neighbours’ houses in the distance, and everything would be all right.

He reversed into the barn and shut the heavy doors. It was almost midnight. He was forcing himself now.

Inside the house he burned his bloodstained clothes and filled the bath with hot water. He washed the wound in the bath, then soaked for a while, letting the heat ease his knotted muscles. He got out, dried himself, dressed the wound. He felt mildly feverish. He dosed himself with brandy and aspirin and leftover antibiotic tablets.

He slept for ten hours. In the morning it was apparent that he’d tossed and perspired during the night. His pillow was damp, his sheets damp and twisted. He felt scarcely rested, but his thoughts and perceptions no longer seemed so freakish and he had an appetite. Before doing anything, he phoned the Drug Squad. He said they’d find something interesting at the house of David Finn, in Hawthorn. No, he wouldn’t give his name, and he broke the connection before they could trace the call.

Later he showered, dressed in slippers and an old tracksuit, and left by the kitchen door to fetch firewood from the pile at the back of the house. The sky was low, a succession of misty rainclouds sweeping across the hills. He went back inside and ate scrambled eggs, toast and coffee in front of an open fire.

There was a trace of Anna Reid in the air, a faint, troubling perfume. He had an unfinished feeling about her. She knew about him, where he lived, his involvement in the hit on Finn. Even if she went straight and he never heard from her again, he’d feel a pinch at the edges of his memory. It would be more distracting than desire. Desire is something that doesn’t last. She was like him, but he wondered if she’d ride out the investigation, and he wondered if he should have killed her.

He loaded more logs on the fire. By now the scent of heated sap and resin were spreading through the room and soon he couldn’t smell anything else.