Pay Dirt

THIRTY-TWO

Wyatt spilled off the bike sometime in the middle of the afternoon. It was a bad fall, leaving him bruised and winded. Partly it was the change in the terrain. As he pushed farther south the grazing land gave way to cultivated land-wheat, oats, barley, peas, lucerne, all tightly sown in coarse, ploughed furrows. The Suzuki’s front tyre hit irrigation piping concealed in thick lucerne. The handlebars were wrenched out of his grasp, and he was off. He landed heavily on his side, one leg twisted under the bike frame. He lay there for a minute, thinking how quiet it was without the engine screaming under him. The stubby lucerne, crushed and tangled under his cheek, smelt fresh and clean. He longed to stay there, but the exhaust pipe began to burn through his overalls.

He struggled free and stood up. It was more than the change in terrain, he realised. He’d been rough-riding the Suzuki for almost three hours and he was tired, his body so jarred that he didn’t trust his judgement any more.

The spill helped him decide-he needed to rest, and he needed to find a car. He looked around. The farmland here was more closely settled. There was a town in the distance. A bitumen road went through it. Wyatt counted the traffic. There seemed to be a vehicle every minute or so.

There were other reasons why he should dump the bike. The cops would have found bike tracks at the farm by now. Sooner or later they’d compare notes with the chopper crew and realise that the figure they’d seen looking at his sheep hadn’t been a farmer. They’d also got a good look at his face, so he’d have to do something about that soon as well. And he could smell petrol. Some had spilled onto the ground. He shook the bike: there wasn’t much in the tank. He would rather steal a car than a tankful of petrol for the bike.

He uprooted clumps of lucerne, covered the bike and set off across the paddocks on foot. He felt exposed. The sky above him was open, the flat land benign under the afternoon sun, but he knew it could turn bad quickly. Two men shot to death, signs of occupancy in an abandoned farmhouse nearby; a missing security van with up to half a million on board-it all added up to crusading cops, trigger-happy farmers and nervy civilians all over the state. The search would be big and thorough and there wouldn’t be any second chances once they’d found him.

Wyatt also wanted to get his hands on a radio. The ABC and the commercial stations would be running hot with this story. He might learn things about the police operation that would help him escape the net, and he might hear if there had been any arrests-hear if Leah or Tobin had been nabbed, or anyone else from the other team. Information was like blood to Wyatt.

He was not sure of the next stage. He walked until he came to the town, stopping just short of it and skirting the edge until he came to a quarry carved like an ugly bite in a hill half a kilometre behind the town. From there he had a clear view of the main street and the grid of smaller streets on both sides of it. It looked to be bigger than Belcowie. It had two of everything. He thought if he waited long enough he’d see a lapse in someone’s security.

The answer was a school bus. Soon after he settled down to wait, he heard three blasts of a siren. The sound carried clearly to him and he pinned down the school as the source. A few minutes later kids poured out of all the classrooms. Some boarded the three yellow buses parked with staff cars at the side of the administration block; the others walked or rode bicycles to houses in different parts of the town. As Wyatt watched, three men with briefcases left the administration block, boarded the buses and drove out of the town. Teachers, Wyatt thought, earning extra money driving a school bus.

He guessed that the buses did a run of the outlying farms and towns. Ninety minutes later, the first of the buses came back. This one parked outside the pub and Wyatt saw the driver go into the bar. The second bus parked outside a house on the other side of the town. But the third bus was delivered back to the schoolyard and the teacher driving it walked to his house from there.

Wyatt didn’t wait. Within fifteen minutes he’d hot wired the bus outside the school and was heading away from the town.

There were no roadblocks-he’d come too far south for that-but he was worried about his face. There would be an identikit of him by now. Cops would be at all the main stations, bus terminals and airports. He needed a bolthole, somewhere where he could rest and do something about his face. And get a radio.

But the country towns he was passing through were too small to provide that sort of cover. They’d be jumpy places too, he thought. So would the farms surrounding them. He needed to find a large place.

He entered Aberfeldie just as the street lights were coming on. The first indications were favourable, but he drove through slowly, to make sure. He was reminded of Goyder. Aberfeldie had the same range of motels, small businesses and flashing neon along the main street, the same sprawl of ugly new houses and flats at either end. There was even a mall. The town hall was as big as any he’d seen in Melbourne.

He had to get rid of the bus before he did anything. He didn’t dump it in the street-it would be like a signpost to the police if he did that. He always left stolen vehicles where they couldn’t be found until the trail was cold. Despite its size, the bus was easy to hide. He simply hid it in the open. He drove until he found the high school, then parked the bus outside the workshop of a service station on the other side of the road. The mechanics would scratch their heads over it in the morning, and eventually someone would ring the school and ask what they wanted done with it, but by then he’d be long gone.

It was seven o’clock before Wyatt found somewhere to spend the night. He wasn’t interested in a house-a house has neighbours who want to know what is going on. There are also neighbours in blocks of flats but they tend to come and go and expect others to come and go, so he wasn’t expecting anyone to ask him his business there.

There were six units in the first block he examined. Most had their lights on and all had empty letterboxes. He moved on to the next block. Flats 2 and 6 had not claimed their letters yet. He rejected flat 2 when he heard someone answer the telephone. He climbed to flat 6, listened for half a minute knocked on the door and listened again. Silence. He picked the lock and entered. There was no one home but the place felt lived in. Then he saw a movement in the corner. It was a cat stretching awake in a basket on the floor.

Wyatt let himself out quickly and walked down the stairs and along to a single-storey block in the next street. These he rejected immediately. According to a sign by the driveway entrance, the flats were let to elderly parishioners of the Uniting Church. They would all be at home.

His luck improved at the third block of flats. The letterbox for flat 4 was crammed with junk mail. He climbed up to the second landing and tried the door. When no one answered his knock, he picked the lock and went in. This time there were no pets or signs that people had been there recently. The place felt as if it had been empty for several days. The rooms were tidy. The refrigerator had been switched off and the door left open. The garbage bin was empty and clean. He examined the bedroom and the bathroom. The clothing, jewellery and cosmetics indicated that a youngish man and woman lived there.

But how secure was he? He checked the calendar pinned to a cabinet door above the sink. Notes had been scribbled in the blank spaces under some of the dates. Leave for Qld had been written under a date at the beginning of the month and a bold blank line cancelled the next two weeks. At the end were the words Arrive home. Wyatt understood that he had the place for a week if he wanted it. He hoped the key hadn’t been given to friends or relatives. He hoped the weather was fine in Queensland.

Before doing anything he turned on the transistor radio next to the toaster on the kitchen bench. According to the news, no arrests had been made yet. The money and the van were still missing. There was, however, evidence that several people had spent several days in an abandoned farmhouse not far from the area where the bodies were found. Police were broadening their search.

Wyatt switched off the radio and went into the bathroom. He stripped and washed at the sink, not in the shower, knowing how thin the walls were in these places, how noisy the plumbing. Then he went to work on his appearance. In the cabinet above the sink he found hair gel, an old razor, scissors, a comb and two boxes containing blonde hair-colouring cream and rubber gloves. He shaved first, removing not only the day’s stubble but also his sideburns. Then he shortened his hair at the top, front and sides. Finally he applied the cream to his hair, leaving it on for almost an hour before rinsing it off. He looked curiously at himself in the mirror. He was fair-haired now, his features thin and drawn. He finished by wiping away water drops and stains with toilet paper and stuffing the paper into a plastic shopping bag.

In a bedroom drawer he found a tracksuit that was short in the leg but otherwise fitted him. Dresses, slacks, blouses and skirts took up most of the wardrobe space, but there were also some trousers and shirts and a couple of suits and sportscoats. The chest and waist sizes looked to be about right; he was too tired to check just now.

Finally he went into the kitchen to get something to eat. He didn’t want to heat anything and release cooking smells, so he opened a tin of goulash and ate it cold from the tin. It had the consistency of glue. He washed and dried the spoon and put the empty tin in the plastic bag with the toilet paper.

Then he slept. He didn’t need an alarm. His instincts would tell him when to wake.

He woke at dawn. He washed and shaved again, then combed gel through his hair and parted it in the middle. He dressed in a white shirt, plain tie and a dark grey suit. The trousers were short in the leg, but he reflected that that wasn’t unusual in country towns. There were four pairs of shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe. All were too big for him. He put on two more pairs of socks and tried the grey suede shoes; they were soft and had a rubber sole and he figured that made more sense than stiff leather shoes. With the extra socks they fitted well.

He listened to the six o’clock news. The murders and the robbery were still the main items, but the situation was unchanged. Then he wiped the flat for prints, cleared any mess he’d made, and bundled his dirty clothes into the shopping bag. The occupants of the flat would be puzzled by the missing clothes, but if nothing else was missing and the place untouched, they probably wouldn’t report it. It wouldn’t matter if they did; the trail would be cold by then.

Wyatt opened the door to the corridor and listened. No-one else seemed to be up. He let himself out quietly and walked down the street. The station was ten minutes walk away. He dumped the shopping bag in a rubbish bin along the way.

The air was cool. Not many cars were about. He got to the station a few minutes before seven o’clock. There were four cars in the car park. The platform was deserted and there were no cops in the waiting room or the ticket office. The only people he saw were the station master making coffee in a room next to the ticket office and a bleary-eyed man in the waiting room.

Wyatt looked at the timetable. There was an Adelaide train at 7.35 am. The return train got in at 6.30 that evening.

Twenty minutes later, there were eight more people waiting for the train. Most were women who appeared to be going to Adelaide for a day’s shopping, but there were also two men in suits. All were yawning. One of the men coughed repeatedly. Another smoked, ignoring the sign.

When the train came in they all stood up and walked onto the platform. Wyatt went into the men’s. When the train was gone, he went out to the car park. There were now twelve cars parked along the fence. He chose a white Kingswood, knowing it was the easiest to break into and start. It wouldn’t be missed until 6.30. By then he’d be holding a gun to Leah’s head, asking what her story was.