Pay Dirt

TWO

The set-up was exactly as Leah had described it.

Wyatt had turned up on her doorstep six weeks earlier, on the run from a Melbourne job that had gone sour. His cover had been blown, he was wanted for murder, he’d had to leave the state. A few addresses and a wad of cash were all he had in the world.

Her home in the Adelaide Hills had been in darkness the night he arrived. He prowled around it warily, looking at the doors and windows. The ground-floor curtains were drawn, but there was a window open in one of the two upper-level rooms that had been built into the steeply pitched roof. He knocked and waited. No lights came on but after a while he’d sensed that she was behind the door. ‘Leah,’ he said softly.

Her voice came low and hard. ‘Yeah?’

‘Wyatt.’

She had opened the door, noted his hunted look and his paleness, and stood aside to let him in. She didn’t say anything, not even as he took out his.38 and prowled with it through her house. It was something he had to do, an instinctive thing, so she waited until he was finished.

‘How long this time?’ she said.

‘Not long. A week, two weeks.’

‘It’s been five years, Wyatt.’

He nodded. He had no use for this, then realised a beat too late that it was mostly a joke. He smiled at her briefly, a sharkish twist of the mouth.

‘Are you broke?’ she said.

‘Not entirely.’

She nodded. ‘You’re on the run,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a job.’

Wyatt watched her for a moment. She’d been sleeping and was wearing a thigh-length black T-shirt. She had black hair, cropped short so that it spiked. She was small and compact-looking, and he remembered her round brown belly and how quick and elastic she could be. He felt calm and safe now. He put the gun away and placed his hands on her upper arms. Instantly her ironical expression disappeared. She closed her eyes and breathed out. She opened them again. ‘Well, come on,’ she said, almost irritably.

It was the next morning when they were in bed, which was a mess, that she’d told him about the Belcowie payroll.

‘Godforsaken little place,’ she said, ‘in the middle of nowhere. Nothing ever happens there, except one day the government decides to put a gas pipeline through and the locals wake up to find a hundred and fifty randy construction workers living on their doorstep.’

‘That’s where you come in,’ Wyatt said.

‘Exactly. Fifteen hundred bucks a week and nothing to spend it on except beer and poker. I made Jorge an offer-I put a few girls in, you get ten per cent and a contented workforce.’

Wyatt leaned on his elbow and touched her. It was absent-minded, but she looked down her body, watching his hand. ‘The money,’ he said.

She flopped back. ‘I stayed on for a couple of weeks, helping the girls get settled, laying the ground rules, kind of thing, so I was there twice when the payroll came in.’

‘Details,’ Wyatt said.

‘Payday is each Thursday. The van arrives just before lunch. The security’s not very good.’

Wyatt nodded, beginning to shape the job in his mind. ‘Cops?’

‘The nearest cop shop is an hour away. I never saw a single jack the time I was there.’

‘What about the camp? Who’s around when the money arrives?’

‘Hardly anyone. The crews knock off about two-thirty on Thursdays to come in and pick up their pay, but the place is quiet until then.’

‘How many guards?’

‘I only saw two, same ones each time. They stay until the pay packets are made up, and leave about three o’clock.’

‘The town?’ Wyatt said. ‘Witnesses?’

‘The camp’s along one edge of the town, in an empty paddock. From memory there’s a bowling club and a few backyards opposite, that’s all. It’s a pretty dead place.’

Wyatt began to pay attention to her again. She laughed and wriggled. ‘You like it, huh?’

‘I’ll check it out.’

‘I can ask Jorge to give you a job there.’

His face had been tired-looking and distant, but now she saw it sharpen. ‘No! No links.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, stretching, closing her eyes.

A few days later she drove him down from the hills to the bus station in the centre of Adelaide. Buses going through to Broken Hill passed within twenty kilometres of Belcowie, so he caught one of those. He got off at a crossroads on a mallee scrub plain and started walking. A mail driver picked him up after an hour and dropped him on the outskirts of Belcowie. It was early afternoon. Wyatt knew motors and he looked strong and he could drive a truck. By four o’clock Jorge Figueras had given him a job laying pipes for $1500 a week.