Pay Dirt

TWELVE

‘A woman is good cover, Wyatt. Think about it.’

Wyatt thought about it. Leah had a sharp mind and she liked to use it. He’d noticed that five years ago, when she’d done some background work for two jobs he’d pulled in Adelaide. And now she was bombarding him with ideas for the Steel-gard hit. Most of them made sense. All the same, he didn’t want her to be involved at an active level.

‘I’ve got a stake in this, Wyatt.’

He stared at her face. Intelligence and a kind of fury were animating it. Her eyes were alive. Her fists, clenched on her dining room table as she leaned toward him, looked impatient and ready for action.

Then her eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t think I can do it.’

Wyatt gestured irritably. He didn’t speak.

‘What, then?’ she demanded.

Wyatt wasn’t going to tell her that the job had become messier, costlier and more difficult than he liked. It had started off as an uncomplicated snatch, but the federal police raid had changed all that. He forced a smile. ‘We need someone useful here on the outside.’

She ignored the smile. ‘I’ll be more useful there with you than back here. I can drive, shop, take photos, whatever.’

Wyatt nodded slowly. They were drinking-his last drink before he started work-and he could feel his resistance slipping away. He watched Leah watching him. Her body was still but gave an impression of being charged with energy.

She was frowning faintly, and her eyes were restless.

‘I could keep watch,’ she continued. ‘You’ll need someone on a radio to tell you when the van enters the short cut.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Think about it.’

Wyatt regarded her calmly. He didn’t speak.

She went on. ‘Tell me more about this guy coming from Melbourne.’

‘He knows about locks. He’s also good with radios. The van will be equipped with long-range VHF on a constant band. We’ll need to jam it. With any luck the Steelgard base will think it’s a signal weakness.’

‘But you don’t know yet how you’re going to break through to the money.’

‘There’s always a way. I’ll set up a camp first.’

‘You’ll brainstorm the job first,’ Leah snapped.

Wyatt rarely got angry with other people. He didn’t get close enough to them for that. Their problems and opinions didn’t interest him. The sort of people who angered him were the punks he’d sometimes worked with, whose grievances and ignorance put his life at risk. But he felt angry now. He felt it rising in him.

Something in his face betrayed it. Leah blinked and jerked her forearms back from the table. She picked up her wineglass and drained it.

‘You don’t like working with a woman,’ she said.

But that wasn’t it. He didn’t like to be rushed. The answers always came to him when he was alone, concentrating hard. Just now he didn’t feel like concentrating. He was aching after riding the Suzuki all over the state and the wine made him feel sleepy and he wanted Leah to have her mind on him, not the job. Then he caught himself. He didn’t like that sort of thinking in himself.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ll brainstorm the job.’

‘Bribe someone on the inside,’ she said promptly.

‘Like who? The driver? The guard? What will you ask them to do? What if they talk? Do you actually know anyone at Steelgard?’

‘No.’

‘No, but if you approach them they’ll soon know you. Next idea.’

‘We put up a roadblock. When they stop we get the keys off them and open the back.’

‘A roadblock may come into it,’ Wyatt said, ‘but it doesn’t mean they’ll give us the keys. First, they don’t ride together in the cab. The guard rides in the back, which is a separate unit sealed off from the driver’s cab. Usually the guard opens from the inside. And I note that you said “we”.’

He said all this coldly and rapidly. Nevertheless, Leah grinned. She was enjoying herself. After a while, Wyatt grinned too.

Leah’s smile faded. She was thinking. ‘What’s the company policy when staff lives are in danger?’

‘These firms don’t want anyone getting hurt or killed. It costs them too much in compensation and bad PR. The money’s insured. They tell their employees, if it comes to the crunch, give in.’

‘So we drag the driver out and hold a gun to his head so the guard sees it, or we hold up a stick of dynamite and tell the guard if he doesn’t open we’re blasting the doors.’

‘The driver and the guard are linked by an intercom,’ Wyatt said. ‘We can jam their radio, but we can’t jam that. As soon as something goes wrong, the driver will warn the guard.’

‘So?’

‘So there could be a whole range of emergency shutdown procedures we don’t know about. Steelgard’s employees are slack, we know that, but the vans could be high-tech all the same. They might be fitted with door and brake locks that can only be opened by someone from their base office. They might be fitted with time locks. You never know. We have to expect things like that. Breaking through that sort of gadgetry takes time, effort, equipment.’

Leah was silent. Then she said, ‘So there’s no easy way in.’

‘There might be-we won’t know till the day itself. What I’m saying is, we have to be prepared for good-old fashioned force-cutting gear, blasting with nitro or C4 plastic, whatever. An effective, time-honoured, noisy, time-consuming, attention-grabbing method.’

Her face went rueful and she reached out and touched the back of his hand. ‘Don’t be like that.’

‘Like what? I’m telling it like it is. We sit in the middle of the road for twenty, thirty minutes, an hour, cutting our way in, hoping no roo shooters or local cops come along.’

She grinned. ‘Or we cut our way in somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘The hideout.’

‘The hideout. How do we get to the hideout if we can’t even get into the van and they’ve got some sort of complete shutdown in force?’

Leah poured more wine for them both, dragging it out, enjoying this. ‘We cart it there,’ she said.

There was a pause. He began to smile. ‘A breakdown truck or a low-loader,’ he said. ‘And someone to operate it.’

She smiled back at him. ‘I’ll just make a phone call.’

She left the room and went into her kitchen. Wyatt sipped his wine. She wanted to protect her sources, so he didn’t intrude. All the same, he felt vulnerable. Not about the fact that Leah had a say in things now, or about the quality of her opinion, but because he felt cut off from the people he normally worked with. He’d have to watch his back. He didn’t know Leah’s sources or if they could be trusted. He tried to tell himself this job was no different from all his others, when he had to rely on people like Eddie Loman for men and equipment, but it didn’t help. Eddie Loman was as capable of selling him out as one of Leah’s anonymous sources, but at least he knew Loman, knew where and how to find him. And Loman knew Wyatt-knew that if he crossed Wyatt he could expect a bullet that had no second thoughts attached to it.

Leah was dialling. An extension telephone sat on a coffee table in the corner of her dining room and it tinkled fussily as she dialled. Wyatt counted-nine digits, long distance. He heard her say, ‘It’s me, Leah,’ and then her voice went muffled. He didn’t try to listen in on the extension. The best he could do for the next two weeks was keep his back covered.

He started to think about the truck. It was a good idea. It had the kind of neatness he admired. The problem was, how would they transport the van on the back of a truck without being noticed? The answer came to him and it was as neat and simple as Leah’s initial idea. Brava Construction. Brava Construction’s distinctive vehicles, pale blue with a snorting black bull on each door, had been churning up the mid-north roads for so long now they were part of the landscape.

Leah came back into the dining room. She was wearing black tonight and looked good in it. Black ‘fifties skirt, black tights, embroidered Cambodian waistcoat over a black T-shirt. Her expression was light and cocky. She knew she was in now- she knew she would be there on the day. He realised that he liked her. He wanted her. This was his last drinking session until after the job, so it was partly the alcohol, but only a small part. ‘Well?’

‘It’s all arranged. I was given a name. We go to see him tomorrow. He’ll be expecting us.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘According to my contact the guy we’re going to see knows heavy vehicles. He’s also pulled semitrailer hijacks in the past, he’s a good mechanic and he’s reliable.’

Wyatt pushed his chair away from the table and began to stand. ‘Don’t,’ Leah said. The voice was low, almost a growl. Wyatt sat again.

She came around the table and stood looking down at him. She knocked her knee against his. Then she straddled him and when he put his hands under her skirt she arched her back. Five years ago she’d liked to do that. She’d been in the game then. He knew about it. It hadn’t bothered him. It hadn’t been an issue. He wasn’t curious about who she was when she was with her clients, or why she did it, or what those other men were like. It was business, that’s all. Somehow she’d known he wasn’t the type to get bothered about what she did. And she was too smart and careful to catch anything.

‘Wyatt?’ she said.

‘I’m here.’

‘Do you still go away every year?’

‘If it’s been a good year. Just lately, the pickings have been poor.’

‘But not with this job. You could be in Tahiti this time next month.’

She was asking to go away with him. He didn’t know about that. He stroked her with his fingers and her back arched.