Pay Dirt

TWENTY-THREE

Wyatt normally did nothing on the day before his big heists, but this one was different. He’d never worked with this team before and, knowing what a killer boredom could be, he’d deliberately made the lead-up time short. When Wednesday morning came, he still had plenty of things for them to do.

The most pressing was another question and answer session. He wanted them fresh and rested for that. After breakfast he gathered them at the table with maps, notebooks and cups of tea. Leah, he noticed, looked calm. Snyder’s puffy face was creased with recent sleep, but he sounded alert. Tobin had been difficult to wake. He’d held them up for fifteen minutes while he got up and ate a bowl of breakfast cereal, and now he was yawning repeatedly and asking, ‘Could you run that past us again?’

Wyatt took them step by step through the job. ‘When we leave here tomorrow morning I want the place to look unused in case something goes wrong and we can’t come back. I want everything to be buried, prints wiped off every surface, dust spread around. It won’t stop a thorough search but there shouldn’t be a thorough search if the place looks unused. Even so, I don’t want them uncovering the little thing that leads back to one of us. I don’t want them realising the scale behind this. If all goes well we come back here again for a few days and clean up again when we finally leave.’

Tobin yawned. ‘Just a hassle if you ask me.’

Wyatt ignored him. ‘At about ten-forty-five we drive the ute and the truck across to the short cut and put up a road-closed sign behind us.’

Snyder’s eyes seemed to sink deeper into his fleshy face and frown lines appeared above them. ‘Let’s hope no one reports it to the local council.’

‘It’s temporary. We don’t want anyone using the short cut while we’re getting set up. Leah will be tailing the van on the bike. When she calls to let us know the van’s a few minutes away from the turn-off, I’ll go back and take the sign down.’

Snyder nodded. ‘Meanwhile I monitor the radio in the van?’

‘Correct’

‘What about the Belcowie end of the short cut?’

‘You and I’ll drive along it to check there’s no one around. If it’s clear, we place the second sign there at the Belcowie end. If someone is on the road, we wait. If they look like being a problem, I either call the whole thing off or remove the problem.’

Tobin shot the air with his finger. ‘Pow, then chuck them in a ditch.’

Wyatt said nothing. He looked bleakly at Tobin until Tobin started to mutter and shift in his chair. ‘Nothing like that,’ Wyatt said. ‘If some old geezer’s feeding his sheep on the road, we tie him up till it’s over, nothing else.’

It wasn’t scruples or sentiment behind his thinking. There would always be innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time. What Wyatt cared about was the hue and cry that followed a shooting. The cops were always more energetic when guns were involved.

‘So we’ve cut off the road at both ends,’ Snyder said. ‘What then?’

‘Tobin here parks the truck where the road dips down into the creek and we hide the ute ready to box in the van.’

‘You want me to help load?’

‘When the time comes. Meanwhile you’ll be monitoring the Steelgard frequency ready to jam it.’

‘Tricky timing.’

‘Leah won’t be far behind the van. She warns us in time to take the sign down, and as soon as the van’s on the short cut she puts the sign up again.’

‘Then I keep watch from that hill opposite,’ Leah said.

Snyder nodded that he understood. He glanced once at Tobin, twisted his mouth in contempt, looked away again. ‘Sounds good.’

‘Okay,’ Wyatt said. ‘Let’s run through it again.’

Tobin hadn’t kept still all this time. He continued to yawn at intervals and twist restlessly in his chair. He wore brief shorts and a singlet, so he seemed to be a mass of flesh, all of it bored. ‘Ah, pack it in. We’ll be right.’

Wyatt leaned forward. He kept his voice low. ‘If you fuck up tomorrow, I’ll kill you.’

Tobin threw up his arms and rolled his eyes. ‘Fucking charming. You others hear that?’

‘Can it, Tobin,’ Snyder said.

Tobin turned to Leah. He leaned an elbow on the table and rested his head on his hand. ‘What about you? Want to come outside, leave the boys to do the thinking?’

Leah smiled coldly at him. ‘Want to stay here like a good boy and listen to the men? You might learn something.’

Tobin flushed and jerked back. ‘Yeah, well I know all about you, you moll.’

No one moved, waiting to see what else Tobin would do. Leah stared at him neutrally. Snyder tipped back in his chair, watching like someone interested but not involved. Wyatt held himself ready to smack Tobin down if it came to that.

When nothing happened, he said patiently, ‘Let’s run through it again. This time you each tell me.’

One by one they described their part in the heist. Tobin surprised them by summarising his role exactly and leaving nothing out. But he didn’t look at anyone, and his tone was choppy and contemptuous.

When they were all finished Wyatt said, ‘Now the period after the job.’

He was looking at Tobin. He expected trouble from him. He didn’t think Tobin would have the patience to wait around after the job. But Tobin was unusually compliant, swirling his cup, looking at the tea-leaves.

Wyatt explained it anyway. ‘Time and distance are against us. When the van goes off the air, and it doesn’t show in Belcowie, the whole of the mid-north will go on alert. Patrols, roadblocks, you name it. We’d never make it.’

He paused, watching Tobin. Tobin’s face was changing expression rapidly, as though he were having a conversation with himself. Wyatt went on. ‘We stay here until it’s safe to leave. I don’t want anything to show from the air, and we don’t go outside unless it’s safe to do so. We post a lookout, four-hour shifts around the clock. I doubt if there’ll be a ground search here-it’s off the beaten track and with any luck they’ll think the van’s been driven interstate or something-but if there is, we’ll see them coming in time to get out the back way.’

He stopped, looking at Snyder. Snyder had been listening, but it had been polite, as if he were going through the motions. Now he seemed to sharpen. ‘Plan B?’ he said.

Wyatt knew what he meant. ‘If something goes wrong, if I’m recognised or Leah spots cops in the area, we abandon. We don’t come back here at all.’

Snyder gave him a complicated look. ‘That would be a pisser. What about the van? What if it changes route?’

‘We’ll soon know if it does.’

‘And?’

‘We abandon.’

Snyder shrugged fatalistically. Wyatt looked at Tobin. Tobin had his hands behind his head. He continued to look bored, as if none of this had anything to do with him.

‘You taking this in?’

‘Fuckin’ A,’ Tobin said. ‘If I fuck up, you’ll waste me.’

He looked at the ceiling and began to whistle silently.

The danger signals were clear. But Wyatt had covered everything, so he closed the meeting. It was almost midday. They had lunch, then spent the afternoon taking care of the finishing touches. While Tobin painted the Brava logo on both vehicles, Wyatt and Snyder fitted and tested the radios and the radio jammer, and Leah collected and buried rubbish and cleaned the brushes. Tobin was silent and aggrieved for most of the afternoon but at five-thirty he got out his football again. This time they all kicked it around.