The Heat (15 page)

There was Leah's yellow Beetle. She answered his knock on the back door, her usual bright, chirpy self. ‘You're late.'

‘And a
very
good morning to you.'

Also wearing overalls, she stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Did you remember to get an alarm decoder?'

Trask jerked his thumb at the van. ‘Yep.'

She pointed at an empty Sony plasma TV carton. ‘Put that in the back.'

‘It would be my very great pleasure.'

‘Shut the fuck up,' Leah snarled, and a minute later was in the passenger seat while Trask crouched in the back, transferring his Glock pistol, protein bars, police-band radio and infra-red security kit to the empty TV carton.

Then he clambered into the driver's seat, fired up the engine. Joined the sparse traffic on Noosa Parade, and finally crossed the little bridge to the circle of houses on Iluka Islet. A silent trip on his part, but Leah didn't shut up. She was down hundreds of dollars on TV sets and overalls, not to mention the money she'd fronted Trask for the van, guns, code reader, and it was coming out of his cut, and…

Trask stopped listening.

Eyes on the van's mirrors, he pulled into Thomas Ormerod's driveway and got out. Leah got out. It was like flicking a switch: the scowl vanished and she smiled and sang and whistled as she helped him slide open the side door of the van, remove the Sony carton and heave it towards the front door. Labouring as if it weighed a tonne.

Probably needn't have bothered. There was no one walking a dog, collecting the morning paper or spraying the roses. As soon as they were screened from the street by shrubs and a creeper on a trellis, they headed down the side of the house to the kitchen door, where Leah removed her overalls. She wore a Speedo one-piece under it, a sylph in a dark blue second skin, nipples clearly delineated and the hint of texture where her thighs met…

Leah shot him a look. ‘Focus.'

‘Oh, I am.'

She snorted and reached into the overalls pocket for a bottle of massage oil. Began to lubricate her legs, thighs, arms. Trask could scarcely bear it. He looked away.

Then heard a rubbery snap: she was pulling on latex gloves. She stared pointedly at his bare hands. He fished in his pocket and gloved up. ‘Satisfied?'

Leah ignored him. She dropped to her knees and began to slide her way through the pet flap. Trask watched, fascinated. He'd once observed a long, thick-bodied copperhead snake disappear down a narrow hole in a concrete slab. It seemed to flex its body in long, slow pulses, shrinking a section at a time as it slid out of sight.

Leah did that now, her right arm above her head, the left along her flank, as she eased first the extended arm through the gap, then her shoulder, head, neck, stretching and undulating until most of her trunk was through, then her tiny perfect rear, and finally her gleaming legs and, with a flip, both feet.

What unnerved Trask was waiting for an alarm to sound. What if Ormerod had installed motion detectors? He waited, barely breathing.

Still nothing.

Then her slender arm emerged, fingers snapping. He gave her the security decoder and the arm disappeared. Two minutes later, Leah opened the side door and let him into the kitchen. No alarm sounded. Trask checked the security box in the hallway: the light was green.

A sensation at his feet and his heart hammered.
Jesus
. A fucking cat twining around his ankles. He nudged it away and tipped the contents of the TV carton on the floor.

Leah pointed at the infra-red security system. ‘What's this for?'

‘Let me know when Wyatt gets close to the house.'

Leah shrugged, losing interest. She pulled on the overalls again. ‘I've got several clients this morning, so I can't hang around. I need to shower, change and stow the painting.'

‘Where?'

She said distractedly, ‘Where, what?'

‘Where are you stowing the painting?'

‘I told you.'

‘No you didn't.'

‘Tewantin self-storage,' she said offhandedly.

He might have questioned her further but Leah, capable of being nice for ten or twenty whole seconds at a stretch, gave him a full-body hug and a face-splitting grin, so that his doubts evaporated. She tugged his hand, leading him to the vast sitting room. Curtains drawn, it was a dim cave. Leah halted before the painting and gave an ironic bow and hand flourish. ‘Kind sir.'

Trask grinned. He reached up his hands, grabbed each side of the frame, and lifted the painting off the wall, his heart pounding. No alarm. Relieved, he slotted the painting neatly into the Sony carton. ‘Thank Christ for that.'

Leah was all business again. ‘You wait here and call me when Wyatt makes his entrance. I'll come back with the van.'

‘Got it,' Trask said.

‘You know he's got a gun.'

‘Yep.'

‘When you've whacked him, we load him in the van and dump him at sea.'

That's what Trask had said he'd do, but he hadn't thought how or where, exactly. ‘Not a problem.'

Leah had used up her twenty seconds of sweetness. ‘There better not be.'

Then she was leaving. With Trask waiting in the shadows, ready to intervene if she encountered trouble, Leah carried the crate out to the van, just as a woman walked by with a newspaper and a pint of milk. Leah didn't miss a beat: waving a cheerio at Ormerod's house, she called, ‘Enjoy the game, Mr Ormerod. If the set gives you any trouble, we're just a phone call away.'

22

The air was crisp, the early light hazy above the river as Leah Quarrell left Ormerod's house and turned towards Noosa Heads. Time was tight now, but as soon as she was clear of Iluka, she pulled the van to the side of the road, climbed into the back and tipped the painting out of the box.

Wanting to know what all the fuss was about, she angled it to the light, hoping to see past the muddy tones to the brushstrokes themselves. Hoping to see something that would speak to her of beauty and antiquity. All she saw was a couple of peasants getting their hands dirty in a field.

Back behind the wheel, she called Rafi Halperin, using an old iPhone stolen two weeks earlier by Gavin Wurlitzer, someone's overlooked bottom-drawer phone and still active.

‘I'll be there in five,' she said when he answered. ‘Meet me out on the street.'

She was there in six minutes. Halperin, clean shaven, freshly combed in linen trousers and a white Egyptian cotton shirt, raised an ironic eyebrow to see her alight from a van dressed in overalls. ‘I know, I know,' she said, blushing, aware that her hair was this way and that, her skin oily, her cheek smudged.

‘God, I could kiss you, I could eat you up,' he murmured, sending a current through her body.

She looked left and right as if for eavesdroppers and stepped closer. ‘Later, that's a promise.'

She turned to the van, slid open the side door, and was reaching in for the Sony carton when Rafi reached past her. His lovely tanned arms and slender fingers. A subtle hint of aftershave, something expensive, not the supermarket crap that Trask doused himself in.

Then he was backing away with the painting in the box, smiling at her. ‘Later.'

She climbed behind the wheel of the van giddily.

The plan was she'd shower and change in the RiverRun Realty bathroom. First she parked the van at the yacht club diagonally opposite her office and swapped the uniform for a simple cotton dress, just for the walk to her office. Then she tossed the iPhone and overalls into a nearby bin and crossed the road—feeling uneasy for the first time, as if something had broken loose in the world, the sun striking off every pane and chip of glass on the coast, burning into her brain.

Was Wyatt watching her? She unlocked the front door and hurried inside, feeling a small grain of satisfaction knowing he'd be dead soon. She was not used to indifference in a man—in such a lithe, prohibitive and quietly dangerous man. It was aggravating;
it made her want to disturb him. See the stony face fracture.

She showered, pulled on one of her Saturday real estate outfits, a sleeveless blouse, a tight, mid-thigh blue skirt and open-toed shoes, and settled in for a morning's work. The time was eight-thirty.

No alteration to the Saturday routine—apart from stealing a painting. With any luck, dozens of people would be more interested in buying a property today than watching some stupid football game.

This late in spring, the school holidays almost over, summer on the way, the market was unpredictable. The town would start emptying tomorrow and those who stayed on, or came here solely to house hunt, would be looking for bargains. But you had to go through the motions.

First up was a middle-aged couple from Melbourne who'd arranged to view a house listed for sale at Sunshine Beach. Leah, who'd been that close to telling them they couldn't afford it, showed them her dazzling teeth and walked them through the property. She pretty much felt contempt for all her clients, a side effect of working for her uncle. She was amused to find that attitude persisting today, of all days.

Payday.

Then a Maserati-driving hotshot and his gym-toned wife wanted to see an apartment in the French Quarter at the top end of Hastings Street. Leah met them in the foyer, feeling a tug to be so close to where Rafi was staying. She took them in, stood at the window with them—look how close everything is, the bay just a one-minute walk away, Noosa Hill behind the building, the national park a short distance along the walking track from Main Beach and Little Cove. Husband and wife shuddered prettily, as though they'd never walked on dirt in their lives.

But the guy actually bought the apartment. Didn't quibble, wrote out a cheque on the spot.

Her third appointment for the morning took her to a crummy house in a crummy part of Tewantin. A nuggety old woman from Brisbane who wanted to be close to her grandchildren. Full of doubts and misgivings, none of which Leah assuaged. God she was bored.

Then a marine biologist from Canada, looking to rent a place at Peregian Beach for six months, then a no-show, then a young schoolteacher from Mount Isa having a look-around because she'd requested a transfer before the start of the next school year. ‘Love the place,' she said, ‘hate the prices.' Leah gave an arid smile and zoned out.

Almost 11 a.m. now, and her final showing of the morning was a Castaways Beach nightmare, a dentist and his wife, both sixty, thinking of retiring, but her thoughts were on the Ormerod house operation. She didn't hear the man's question about something in the area.

‘Sorry?'

He looked at her oddly, one of those skinny, tough-looking retirees you saw powerwalking along the river. ‘Nursing homes.'

What did she know about fucking nursing homes? RiverRun didn't handle that kind of property. And if he was in the market for a house, why the hell was he asking about nursing homes?

The man's son was with him, a guy like Trask, the size of a refrigerator, hands like a bunch of sausages. A builder, he'd said, and Leah knew what that meant—he'd prowl over every centimetre of the house, poking and kicking and sniffing, and then he'd list all the faults and how much they'd cost to fix. Leah shook her head, glanced at her watch. ‘I'm sorry, I—'

The builder son stepped close to her, bending to her ear. Was he going to kiss her? ‘My mother,' he murmured, with a little jerk of his head.

And Leah understood. The woman had said nothing the whole while, merely followed the menfolk, looking stunned.

Dementia. Leah's skin crawled.

‘She tends to wander,' the son said.

‘That must be hard for you,' said Leah, who didn't give a shit. She checked her mobile.

Now the builder was screwing up his face and staring at the walls, the ceilings, as if everything was out of alignment. ‘I don't know…' he began.

Leah knew how to cure that kind of thing in a man. She'd move in on him with her lips glistening and the little moves that made them look at her tits, her body setting up a little hum, a vibration, in him. It was like flicking a switch, it never failed. Today, she didn't give a stuff. ‘Look, I have another appointment across town,' she said, glancing at her watch.

The builder flashed a smile at her chest and hurried to fetch the old woman away from the front door and finally all three of them were saying goodbye, not quite what we had in mind, so on and so forth.

Just after midday. Too early for a call from Trask, too early for Wyatt to go in. The game didn't start for another couple of hours and most of the locals were still finishing their Saturday morning chores before shutting themselves away for the afternoon. Leah, knowing she had to stay close to the van now, had ensured there were no more appointments on the books.

She headed back to Gympie Terrace. Breakfast had been hours ago. She needed energy for the next stage. So, after parking the VW, she walked along the street to the lunch bar near her office. Taking a table deep in the shadows, she looked around fruitlessly for a waitress. Eventually a slouched, gum-chewing kid with metal in her nose and navel summoned the energy to take her order for a green salad and a double-shot latte. Leah wanted to slap her.

She thought while she waited. Should she bother seeing things through to the end? She could drive to Rafi right now and they could dash for the airport and be in Singapore by midnight. Then on to Europe.

No. Her uncle would find her somehow. And she'd have Trask on her tail.

Leah was chewing the inside of her cheek when her salad and coffee were smacked down carelessly in front of her. She said to the girl, ‘Have you got a problem?'

The waitress blinked. ‘What?'

‘If you hate your job, get another one. If you hate your life, go and kill yourself. But do not bring your hang-ups and your grievances to your relations with your customers.'

The waitress was genuinely bewildered. ‘What?'

‘Forget it. Go away and spill coffee on someone else.'