Pay Dirt

FOUR

‘I’m good for it, Ray, you know that,’ Tub Venables said.

Raymond Trigg screwed up his eyes. He was lighting a cigarette and the smoke got him, every time. ‘I know you are, Tub. The question is, when?’

The car dealer and the security van driver were in the front bar of the Belcowie Hotel, a dim, beery room with laminex surfaces and cracked brown linoleum on the buckled floor. It was two-thirty and they’d been there since one o’clock, Trigg nursing small glasses of Southwark Light while Venables soaked up pints of draught. The Chileans would be crossing the road with their pay packets soon, but meanwhile Trigg had to keep Tub Venables from falling apart. ‘You got to be more responsible, my son,’ he said. ‘Five thousand bucks-it’s a lot of money.’

‘Interest,’ Venables said mournfully. He sweated when he was scared. He was also leaning on the bar cloth, getting his elbows wet. ‘I’ve paid back the principal, but you keep charging me interest on the interest. I’ll never catch up.’

‘That’s how it works, Tub. Five thousand bucks principal costs you five hundred a week interest. The five thousand has to be paid back in a lump sum-like you can’t pay five hundred interest and a hundred off the principal or something. I told you that at the beginning. You shouldn’t have borrowed so much.’

Venables’s face creased fatly in cunning. ‘I could just stop paying.’

‘Ah, come on, Tub. You know what happens if you do that.’

Venables looked gloomily back into his beer glass. He didn’t like Trigg. Trigg was a short, scrawny bloke who tried to compensate for it with his moleskins, Akubra hat and elastic-sided boots, as if he owned a sheep station instead of a car yard. But he knew it wouldn’t do to underrate the man, for Trigg also ran the local SP, loan-sharking and distribution rackets, and with the downturn in the economy he’d become mean and touchy. Hold out on him and he’d send in Happy Whelan, his mechanic, a mindless big thug who’d break your neck as soon as look at you.

‘You drink too much,’ Trigg said. ‘You want to watch it. That and the horses and fast women, Tub, you’ll keel over before you’re fifty. I’ll never get my dough then.’ He poked the fat man. ‘Joke, Tub, for Christ’s sake.’

Venables looked up. ‘All I want is a bit more time. I don’t want fucking Happy knocking on my door.’

Ray Trigg’s bloodless lips stretched in a smile. ‘You’re sounding like a cracked record, old son.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t you get back to work? Your mate’s going to be pissed off. I mean, someone could snatch the payroll.’

‘Never happen,’ Venables said, easing his buttocks off the bar stool.

He stood there, watching Trigg climb down. He felt a dangerous desire to lift the little man under the arms and deposit him on the floor. He hated Trigg’s staved-in face, the neat little rabbit teeth on his lower lip, the elevator heels.

Trigg seemed to catch his thoughts. He looked vicious suddenly. ‘The vans are booked in two weeks from yesterday, am I right?’

Venables nodded. Trigg’s garage in Goyder had the servicing contract for the Steelgard vans.

‘Pay me a thousand then, no less,’ Trigg said.

He turned and crossed the room, nodding at the licensee and the only other customer, a farmer sneaking a quick beer.

‘Something’s going on over the road,’ the licensee said.

Trigg paused. The licensee was wiping glasses and looking out the window at the camp beyond the vine-covered pub verandah.

The farmer turned to look. So did Trigg and Venables. They watched, fascinated. There were white cars and vans everywhere and knots of policemen struggling with angry construction workers.

‘It’s a raid,’ Trigg said.

As they watched, a tall figure loped unnoticed from a corner shed, scaled the fence as if it were nothing, and dropped this side of it. He seemed to land on the run. There was something skilled and resolute in the way he moved.

Venables and Trigg pushed through the old-fashioned swing doors. The road was empty. Shouts and struggling continued inside the camp, but the man had disappeared.

Then they heard a car start up. It entered the road in a controlled skid, fishtailed in the gravel, and sped past them, the engine working hard. It was a big, dusty Ford and they had an impression of intensity and jutting angles in the man behind the wheel.

Trigg, seeming to swell, stamped his little heels. ‘Bastard. He’s taken the LTD.’ He shook his fist at the receding dust cloud. ‘You’re history, pal.’