Pay Dirt

TWENTY-NINE

They were going crazy in the Brava camp. Eight of the pale blue Landcruisers with the bull logo passed Wyatt in the first five minutes. They were being driven carelessly and fast-but at least they weren’t stopping him to ask who he was. He drove slouched over the wheel, lifting a finger as they passed-a custom which the Brava crews had adopted from the locals. It helped that he was wearing the sunglasses and bright orange baseball cap left by Carlos on the driver’s seat, but what helped most was the high spirits in the Brava camp. Wyatt was driving a Brava vehicle so they assumed he was caught up in it too.

But Wyatt knew that the disguise was only good for another few minutes and wasn’t good enough to get him past a roadblock. He’d have to go to ground at the farm.

He was thinking it through when headlights on an oncoming car flashed at him and a blue light started to pulse on its roof. A policeman stepped into the middle of the road with his hand raised, waving him down. Wyatt got ready. Slowing the Landcruiser, he slipped his.38 out of his belt and onto the seat beside him, covering it with his hand.

He pulled up twenty metres short of the police car and left the engine running. He was about to put his foot down but something told him to think twice about it. The cop’s expression was wrong. He wasn’t wary. He wasn’t expecting trouble. If anything he was angry. Wyatt wound down his window. ‘G’day,’ he said.

‘Don’t g’day me. Do you arseholes know what you’re doing?’

‘Sorry?’

‘One of you blokes has already rolled over. I nearly smashed head-on with another one. You’re buggerising around inside an official crime scene. Piss off before I lock you up.’

‘Sorry, just trying to help.’

‘Go and do it somewhere else. If you see any of your mates, pass it on-anyone found farting around gets the book thrown at him.’

‘Sure, no worries,’ Wyatt said. He lifted his foot off the clutch, nodded at the cop and pulled away.

‘Bloody cowboys,’ he heard the cop say.

Wyatt watched him in the rearview mirror. He saw him shake his head, climb into the patrol car, and pull away fast, spinning tyres in the roadside gravel. The blue light faded in the dust like a special effect.

No one else bothered Wyatt after that. He came to the tin-hut corner a few minutes later, paused for half a minute, and bounced his way towards the farm gate. He saw dust in the distance, from all the excitement, but no vehicles were close enough to spot him. The helicopter was several kilometres away, sweeping back and forth across the valley. Eventually it would pass over the farmhouse, but now it was concentrating the search around the turn-off.

Wyatt first began to doubt Leah when he got to the implement shed and found the Suzuki there. The door was open, the bike on its stand in the corner. The doubts weren’t specific-he just wanted to know what she was doing there.

He drove the Brava Landcruiser into the musty interior, switched off, and got out, holding the.38 loose at his side. He didn’t go into the house immediately. He closed the massive shed door then waited outside it for a few minutes, testing the air, giving Leah a chance to come out of the house. The helicopter was now a few degrees left of where it had been. It was hovering, beginning to settle on the ground. They’d found Venables.

Wyatt turned and crossed the yard. He needed only a minute to see that the house was empty. He searched the sheds. Nothing. He told himself that she’d got spooked by the helicopter and made a run for it.

But it didn’t feel right. And when he found faint tyre marks on the track behind the property, the doubts set in and wouldn’t go away.

He went to the head of the driveway to sweep the valley with his field-glasses. The helicopter had just completed a sweep near the tin-hut corner. Beneath it the roads were dust-clogged.

The ground party was congregating. They’d be at the farmhouse soon, wondering if this was where the murderers had got to.