Pay Dirt

TWENTY-EIGHT

The blood had begun to coagulate and flies were gathering but the body was still warm. The fat driver looked less fat now that he’d been shot and dumped in a roadside ditch. Wyatt wondered why Venables had taken this route, why he had stopped, why he had left the van.

He examined the tracks. Apart from Venables’s heel scrapes in the powdery dirt, there were two sets of tyre tracks- the Steelgard van and a narrower set belonging to a car. Both had stopped here, something had happened, and both had gone on again.

Maybe they wouldn’t be far ahead. Wyatt started the utility again and put his foot down, the elderly suspension complaining, the sump smacking against the hard-baked ruts in the road.

He got to the end and stopped. The main road to Belcowie was empty. There was only a shot-up road sign warning of the T-intersection and indicating that Belcowie was four kilometres to the north, Goyder seventy to the south. He got out to see if he could read the tracks. There weren’t any. Gravel had been spread around the junction, too coarse to register tyre tracks. But something had been dragged across it recently. Wyatt followed the scrape mark into the thick grass leading to a strainer post in the fence on the left-hand corner paddock. Someone had dumped a road-closed sign there. It was cruder than the ones Leah and Snyder had made.

He returned to the utility. The intersection was on a slight rise. He could see Belcowie clearly, the wheat silos glowing white, sunlight flashing on windscreens and rooftops.

He turned his head the other way. South, he thought. That’s where they’ll be.

He was about to head after them when something about the scope and intensity of the flashing windscreens made him pause and get out the field-glasses. At one point between the intersection and Belcowie the road curved broadly to skirt a large limestone reef. Within a few seconds he saw what the fuss was about. Four of the Brava Landcruisers were pushing fast out of the town. He guessed there would be more like it setting out from the other end of the town. Jorge was sending out search parties. His men were volatile and wanted their wages.

Wyatt spun the utility around, cursing himself. He should have thought of that, should have realised Steelgard wouldn’t be alone in wondering where the money had got to.

He threw the Holden into the bends and over the bone-jarring ruts and holes of the track. He had to get out and onto a main road before they squeezed him from both ends. If they saw him they’d know the utility wasn’t one of theirs. If they found Venables’s body, they’d assume he’d done it. They’d call each other on their CB radios and box him in. They’d call the cops. If they caught him they wouldn’t find any money but they’d find Snyder under the sleeping bags and plenty of evidence of a planned job. They’d find enough to put him away for life.

For a few seconds, when the track was flat and smooth, Wyatt risked giving his attention to Snyder’s fancy radio. It was turned low, still tuned to the monotonous Steelgard dispatcher. He switched to the CB band and tuned it to the channel used by Brava.

Excited voices erupted in Spanish and English. They knew each other, so no one was bothering with formalities.

‘Jorge said no heroics, wait for the police.’

‘Fuck that. By the time the cops get here the bastards’ll be long gone.’

‘Maybe is no been robbed. Maybe is lost, is no more gasoline in the tank. Maybe the radio he is broken.’

‘So how come there’s no sign of the van? How come he changed his route?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

Then a voice said, ‘The chopper will find them.’

Wyatt went cold, remembering the gasfields helicopter. Several times a month it flew geologists and engineers down to confer with Jorge. If this was one of those times, it was probably already in the air, starting a sweep of the area.

‘Plus there’s an air ambulance coming down from Port Augusta,’ the voice continued.

‘No worries, then,’ said another voice. ‘We’ll find the bastards in no time.’

Half a dozen other voices agreed.

Wyatt pushed even harder along the track, feeling the old chassis bottom out on the outcrops of stone. If they spotted him from the air, he was finished. They’d guide the land party in until all his exits were closed. His only chance was to get to the farm, get the Holden into one of the sheds, then escape on foot across country.

Meanwhile Leah deserved a better chance. He called her. There was no answer. Perhaps she couldn’t hear him. She’d be kilometres away by now, probably well out of radio range. He called again, waited, and called a third time.

He didn’t try again. He felt the strain of listening, the strain of driving one-handed along the tortuous track.

For just a few moments then he had a clear view of the Vimy Ridge road. A lone Brava Landcruiser had braked beyond the turn-off and was backing up to it.

There was only one way out of this. Wyatt pulled up next to Venables’s body and turned off the engine. Ejecting the cartridges from Snyder’s pistol and using the butt as a hammer, he destroyed the big radio. Then he opened both doors wide and shot the front tyres with his own gun. He threw Snyder’s gun into the grass. He was still wearing latex gloves so he wasn’t worried about prints.

Part of the fence line along this section of the track was a stone wall built by shepherds in the nineteenth century. Flat stones the size of frying pans had been stacked chest-high for several hundred metres. Here and there parts of the wall had collapsed. Wyatt vaulted through a gap and got ready to wait, disturbing a tiny brown lizard. The lizard flicked away in the space of an eye blink.

It wasn’t much of a trap but it had the element of confusion-a stationary vehicle, both its doors open; a dead man in the grass; the fake Brava paint job; the empty road under the spooked sky.

They weren’t taking any chances. He watched as the Landcruiser approached slowly and stopped fifty metres short of the Holden utility. There were two men aboard. They didn’t get out but waited there, the engine running. One of them was calling on the CB radio. Wyatt recognised him. It was Carlos.

Half a minute later, Carlos got out and cautiously walked towards the body and the stranded utility. He was. carrying a heavy tyre iron. There were guns in the Brava camp, but they were kept under lock and key in Jorge’s safe.

Wyatt watched Carlos circle the Holden, look around apprehensively, his eyes passing over Wyatt’s hiding place, and crouch next to the dead driver. He seemed to recoil in shock then, stepping back from the body and signalling urgently to the other man.

Wyatt waited until they were both standing there in the road, looking down at the glistening skull, their guard down. He vaulted the wall again and took them at a run. They heard him and turned around. Slowly their hands went up.

Carlos spoke first. ‘They will catch you, my friend.’ He gestured at the sky and spun the tip of his forefinger. ‘The aeroplane, he comes now.’

The other man had red curly hair and a sneering mouth. ‘Mad bastard.’

‘Shut up. The keys,’ Wyatt said.

‘In the ignition.’

Wyatt nodded and began to back away from them.

‘Where’s the fucking money?’

Wyatt ignored them. When he was a few metres away from the Landcruiser he turned and sprinted the rest of the way. A minute later he was on the Vimy Ridge road again, just another mad Latin adding to the confusion on the ground.