Snapshot

2

There were two of them, wheelman and hard man, and they rolled down the driveway in a Holden Commodore, a model dating from 1983 but still plentiful on the roads, though maybe not in dirty white with one light yellow door.

A woman, that’s all Gent knew. He didn’t know what she’d done, only that Vyner had to sort her out, a warning, maybe a slap around the chops. That was Vyner’s expertise, not his. He was the wheelman, along to provide the car and knowledge of the twisting roads in and out of this part of the Peninsula, an area of small towns, orchards and vineyards. And a sea mist had rolled in, choking the roads and waterways, providing good cover for the job.

The driveway was a steep plunge from the main road above, the Commodore’s brakes dicey. ‘Shitheap car,’ said Vyner in the passenger seat.

Gent shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel. Vyner had told him to steal a decent car, plenty of power but nothing fancy. ‘Best I could do,’ Gent muttered, guiltily pumping the brakes of his cousin’s Commodore.

The guy’s a whinger, thought Vyner in the passenger seat, drawing out a pistol with one gloved hand and screwing on the silencer with the other. He waited with barely concealed patience for Gent to stop the car, then got out and advanced on the woman’s car, a silver Volvo station wagon. The woman got out; big, apologetic smile. Vyner despised that. Where he came from, you acted first and asked questions later. Children’s Court at thirteen, ward of the state at fourteen, sentenced to a youth training facility at fifteen. Then the Navy, where for a few years he channelled all of that energy into useful skills like long-range, technologically enhanced killing techniques. He was discharged in 2003, an incident in the Persian Gulf, the shrink who assessed him concluding: Leading Seaman Vyner possesses a keen intelligence but is manipulative, lies compulsively and has demonstrated a capacity for cruelty.

Well, as Vyner had noted in his journal this morning, No comet has showered sparks of joy and light over me. Life snapped at his heels even as he sought higher rungs of knowledge.

Like now, what it meant to gun a woman down in front of her kid-for there was a kid in the passenger seat, should have been at school, given that it was a Tuesday. The kid not scared yet, merely curious, but the woman was, the woman had seen the gun.

She held both hands out, pleading, ‘No, please, it was just a joke, I wasn’t going to show them to anyone, I wasn’t going to ask for money.’ Then she slammed the door on her kid and began to back away from Vyner. Said a few other things, too, like ‘You’ve got the wrong person’ and ‘What did I ever do to you?’ and ‘Don’t hurt my daughter’, but Vyner was here to do a job.

He strode on, and when the woman turned and scuttled around to the front of the Volvo, Vyner didn’t alter pace, merely raised the pistol and closed in on her. She rounded the front of the car, ducked back along the other side, towards the tailgate, so Vyner turned patiently, retracing his steps to meet her. It was cat and mouse, the woman whimpering, Vyner registering the measured rate of his own heart and lungs. Lines for his journal: Today I was served by angels.

Nathan Gent, behind the wheel of the Commodore, came to a shocking realisation. Sitting there with his mouth open, the Commodore shaking arrhythmically on about four out of the six cylinders, he finally twigged that this was a killing he’d been hired for. He closed his mouth with a click of rotting teeth and goosed the accelerator a little, hearing the motor idle more evenly. ‘A bit of business,’ Vyner had said. ‘Won’t take long.’ Vyner-as hard, thin and snapping as a whip-had always been tough, but Gent had never known him to kill anyone except maybe a few Iraqi ragheads. Gent felt himself go loose inside. He watched, squeezing the old sphincter, and saw Vyner and the woman reach the rear bumper of the Volvo simultaneously, from opposite sides of the car. The woman jerked, ran back the way she’d come, half bent over. Vyner, all the time in the world, went after her.

Then she broke cover. She knew the end had come and intended to draw Vyner away from the kid trapped there in the back seat-or so Gent hoped, an old bitterness rising in him as he flashed back to his own mother, who’d never sacrificed a thing for him. He watched the woman dart away from the carport towards a little garden shed, a tangle of rakes, shovels, fence pickets, whipper-snipper and mower-looked like a Victa to Nathan Gent, he could come back with a mate’s ute, load up, flog the mower for fifty bucks in the side bar of the Fiddlers Creek pub.

Maybe not. Crime-scene, police tape around it, the cops wanting to know what business he had on the property.

But a murder. Jesus, accomplice to a murder. For comfort, Gent rubbed the stump where his right ring finger had been, the finger torn off by a ship’s chain somewhere in the Persian Gulf.

Again he remembered what Vyner had said about stealing a car, and silently thanked God for the concealing fog. And for the location: the house was below road level, the road winding along the top of a ridge, the ground sloping steeply away on either side. Passing drivers would have to get out of their cars and stand at the head of the driveway and look down on the turning circle and carport in order to witness anything. No neighbours to speak of. But Jesus, why hadn’t he stolen a car like Vyner said?

While Gent watched, Vyner aimed at the woman, now cowering beside the garden shed, and shot her twice, a couple of pops, softened by dense fog and silencer. Then Vyner returned to the woman’s car, hurrying a little now.

The kid knew. A little girl, maybe six or seven, she came bounding out of the Volvo in her red parka, running, curls bouncing, Vyner tracking her with his pistol. Gent saw him fire, miss. Now she was heading towards the Commodore, Gent thinking, no, piss off, I can’t help you. He put his hand out of the window, waved her away. She gaped at him for a long moment, then darted towards a belt of poplars at the edge of the garden. Gent saw Vyner take aim, pull the trigger. Nothing. Vyner looked at the gun in disgust, then strode back to the garden shed, searching for ejected shells. A moment later he was piling into the Commodore, shouting, ‘Let’s go.’

Keep the prick moving, Vyner thought. Gent had been sitting too long-though it was what, less than two minutes, tops? He hoped the guy wouldn’t turn out to be a liability. Gent was only in his early twenties but going to seed rapidly through beer and dope; a pouchy, slope-shouldered guy who claimed to know every back road-and probably every backyard and back door, Vyner thought-of the Peninsula.

Well, Gent was getting $5000 for his part in the hit, and knew what would happen if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.

They neared the top of the driveway, Vyner removing the clip from his Browning and cursing it. You’d think the Navy would stock reliable handguns, border protection and all that. Not that he’d ever intended to hang on to this gun, keep incriminating evidence around. He’d do what he’d done before, seal it in a block of concrete, and toss it into a rubbish skip on some building site. There were two more Navy Browning pistols in the wall safe of his Melbourne pad, and he’d better examine and clean them tonight. Didn’t want them jamming on him, especially when firing in self-defence. Shit gun. Unfortunately it was too late to get back his $500 per weapon because the Navy armourer who’d sold them to him was dead. Shot himself in the head.

He unscrewed the silencer-at least that worked-and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket, then shoved the Browning into another pocket, the hammer catching, tearing the fabric. Useless fucking thing. Vyner had wanted something more cutting edge from the armoury, a Glock automatic or a Steyr short-barrelled carbine and a high-end night-aiming device, but all the Navy guy would sell him was three old Brownings from the stock used for cadet training and which were gradually being phased out. ‘I can lose these in the paperwork, no dramas,’ his mate had said, ‘but the new stuff, no way.’

Vyner removed his gloves and folded down the sun visor to check himself out in the vanity mirror. Nothing caught in his teeth. His old familiar face looking back at him. He pocketed his cap, smoothed back his hair.

‘Shit!’ shouted Gent, braking hard as the Commodore levelled out at the top of the driveway. It rocked to a halt just as a taxi came out of the fog and disappeared into the fog, gone in an eyeblink.