Pay Dirt

EIGHTEEN

The more Letterman thought about it the more pissed off he felt about Loman. Loman knew about Wyatt but hadn’t said anything. Loman had made him look foolish.

The feeling grew after his meeting with Snyder. He’d settled in at the motel to wait until the flight left on Monday morning, but he’d made the mistake of reading an 87th Precinct novel and that had been the last straw. He had to do something about Loman.

On Sunday evening he backed the Fairmont out of the motel car park and drove to a service station on Beaconsfield Parade. Here he bought two one-litre containers of engine oil. He drove out of the service station and turned left into a dark, narrow side street. He parked the car, got out, poured the oil into the nearest stormwater drain. He got back into the car and made the long drive to Loman’s hardware business in Preston. Just before he got there he pulled into a Mobil self-serve and filled the tank with unleaded. No one saw him also fill the two empty oil containers with the fuel. He filled them to the top: he didn’t want fumes building up in them.

Loman ran a big place, taking up one-third of a block at the end of a shopping centre. The N in his name on the sign above the entrance was back to front. The main building was a long, low hardware supermarket fronting onto the street. Behind it was a large storage shed next to a paved area cluttered with do-it-yourself garden shed kits, sample brick walls, and piles of soil and gravel in shades ranging from pinkish-grey to black. A high pine-board fence surrounded the whole place.

In the far corner, well back from the street, was Loman’s house, a four-room transportable building resting on wooden blocks. Letterman approached it cautiously, alert for a dog or a nightwatchman, or kids taking short cuts home from the video library. Holding a container of petrol in each hand, he waited for five minutes, watching and listening. He could hear the sound of a television set coming faintly from inside Loman’s house. When he was satisfied, Letterman ran doubled-over to the back door. He didn’t trip-there was nothing to trip on. The yard surrounding the house looked as if it had been swept to within an inch of its dull life.

Letterman never ate or drank before a job. He felt concentrated, full of nerve endings.

This had to look right. He went from window to window of Loman’s house, checking for security alarms. He supposed a man as neat as Loman was, a petty crim like Loman, would have some sort of security fitted, and he found it on every window, a silver strip that would activate an alarm if it were cut.

In other circumstances windows like these were no problem for Letterman. He’d simply pry out the putty surround and-move the whole pane aside. But this had to look innocent all the way.

He went around to the front door. It was in darkness and faced a side wall of the storage shed. Putting the litre containers down, he bent to examine the lock. It looked pretty standard. He took out his folder of lock picks and went to work.

There were twenty picks in his kit. He’d got them-and lessons in how to use them-from a crim he’d put in Long Bay five years ago. They were long, flat gunmetal strips with small indentations at various stages and angles along both edges. The kit also contained key blanks, small pry bars and ratchets, but he wouldn’t be needing them tonight, only the raking bar. He selected a pick, inserted it into the lock and pushed against the first tumbler pin. Then, inserting the raking bar, he raked the tumbler pin open. He repeated this operation several times, pushing the pick deeper and deeper past the opened tumbler pins.

He reached the end, straightened to ease the strain on his back, and opened the door. He didn’t push it fully open but waited and listened. Satisfied that no alarm had gone off, he pushed the door open in stages. Still no alarm sounded. It probably meant that Loman had separate systems for the door and the windows. He’d turn off the door system when he was at home, but generally leave the window system on.

Letterman closed the door. He had stepped straight into a lounge room. The television set wasn’t here, though, it was in one of the other rooms.

The bedroom in fact. Through the partly open door he could see Loman stretched out on a monastic-looking single bed, watching a night football game. He wore short pyjamas and a dressing gown. His ‘good’ leg was horribly scarred. The other was a stump. The plastic leg was on a chair next to the bed. Apparently Loman felt the cold, for a bar heater glowed on a floor rug in the centre of the room.

Letterman didn’t waste time. He didn’t bother with pointing out Loman’s sins to him but ran into the room and stunned him with a heavy blow to the temple. He hit him again.

When he was sure that Loman was fully unconscious he turned off the bar heater. Next he took out his knife and gouged holes in the caps of each petrol container with the sharp, narrow point. He squirted the room with petrol-onto the walls, the wardrobe, the ceiling and the curtains. Apart from the area around the bar heater on the floor, he sprayed high, knowing that the arson squad would be suspicious of intensive burning on the floor or low down on the walls. He made sure the ceiling got plenty. He was relying on it catching early and collapsing on Loman.

Finally he soaked the quilt and dragged a corner of it down to touch the bar heater. Then he turned the heater on and hurriedly stepped back into the doorway. The bed caught at once. When the flames were strong, he tossed the petrol containers onto the bed. They wouldn’t last long.

By nine o’clock Letterman was back at his motel arranging an early wake-up call. He showered, packed his bag, and checked his reserves of cash. Thirty thousand dollars-eighteen for Snyder, twelve for expenses. He thought about informing Sydney where he was going but changed his mind. He was his own boss, after all. He didn’t have to report in every five minutes like one of their goons. They’d get their report, their pictures, when the job was done.