The Heat (24 page)

‘Without the painting,' Hannah said.

‘I don't know where the painting is. Someone else must have stolen it.'

‘This money you will give us,' Sten said, ‘it comes from the sale of the painting? You have sold it already?'

Quarrell's face slipped some more. ‘I don't have it and never had it. My money's on you, Wyatt. I bet you've got it and you're trying to deflect attention away from yourself.' She heaved up and onto her knees and leaned into the gap between the two front seats. ‘Hannah, he's conning you.'

Wyatt cracked the pistol butt against Quarrell's temple. ‘Sit down.'

She was crying. ‘I'm scared. I want to get out.'

‘Where is the painting?'

‘I told you, I don't have it.'

Wyatt tapped Sten on the shoulder. ‘Give me your phone.'

She handed it through to him. He activated the screen and showed it to Quarrell, who looked sick.

‘The painting,' he said. ‘Hanging not on Ormerod's wall but somewhere else.'

‘That doesn't prove anything. That photo could have been taken any time.'

Wyatt enlarged the image. ‘Yesterday's newspaper. Someone—you—removed the painting after Ormerod left for Melbourne on Friday afternoon and before I entered his house at 1 p.m. yesterday.'

‘Don't recognise the room.'

‘Is that the best you can do? Did Trask help you? A real estate agent, you'd have plenty of places to hide a painting.'

She swallowed and looked wildly at the door. The car was moving at ninety, traffic sparse, no help apparent anywhere. ‘No.'

‘Then an anonymous call to the police.'

She looked sick. ‘No. I swear.'

‘Come on, Leah, Trask's under arrest, he couldn't have sent this. You must have a second partner.'

She looked away. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Did you idiots work something with Ormerod? An insurance scam?'

She looked genuinely astonished. ‘What? No.'

‘Whoever this mystery person is, they were quick to cut you out of the deal. Happy to let you rot in prison, by the looks of it.'

Wyatt watched her face. Pain and fury fought the fake innocence and won. ‘That absolute shit.'

‘Who, Leah? And where's the painting?'

Quarrell's face hid nothing now. She said bitterly, ‘Rafi Halperin.'

Hannah Sten glanced up at the rear-view mirror, meeting Wyatt's gaze. She nodded. She slowed the car, glanced through the windscreen at an exit sign for Mooloolah, and took it.

The road wound between trees and hills, houses glimpsed on large blocks far back from the road. No traffic, only an impression of stillness in the world. Sten making another turn. Onto a track that led to the river.

Leah Quarrell really was frightened. ‘Please.'

Wyatt said nothing, letting it play out as Sten pulled up in a clearing. Trees, river and grass in harmony, not much else. No other cars and the water rushed unseen beyond the reeds that lined the bank.

‘Please, I'm begging you.'

‘Get out,' Sten said.

‘Please don't kill me. I'm really sorry. The thing is, we were both cheated.'

Wyatt prodded Quarrell out of the car, hard on her heels with the Ruger. Sten followed. They came to a wooden bench and table set on the grass overlooking a stretch of sluggish water. With Quarrell seated, Wyatt and Sten standing over her, the atmosphere seemed more closed in than it had inside the car.

Sten said, ‘Mr Halperin is still in Noosa?'

‘Yes.'

‘You were hoping to fly off into the great blue beyond with him?'

Quarrell swallowed and nodded desperately. ‘I was scared. It was all his idea. Wyatt was supposed to be killed and buried. Then you'd think he ran off with the painting and you'd eventually give up and go home and he'd sell the painting on the quiet.'

Sten was doubtful. ‘Rafi Halperin was supposed to kill Mr Wyatt? He's not a…He's a weak man.'

‘I had nothing to do with that side of things.'

‘What happened?'

‘He must have chickened out and tipped off the police to arrest all of us—me, Alan, Wyatt.' She looked wildly from Wyatt to Sten. ‘But no one got killed. And I can tell you where Rafi is.'

‘You took the painting to him?'

‘Yes,' Quarrell said, head bowed, looking distraught.

‘Where?' said Wyatt.

Still not looking at them, Quarrell gave an address in Noosa Heads.

‘He didn't waste any time, Leah. Things go wrong and he figures out a way to profit from it.'

Quarrell wailed. Sten stepped up to her, put an arm around her neck, another on her chin as if to tilt her face and exchange a glance of sympathy, and twisted sharply, the head one way, the shoulders the other. A crack of something crucial-sounding, and then Sten was lowering Quarrell along the bench gently, almost in pity and care.

Military training, thought Wyatt.

37

There on the bank under the tree canopy, he watched Hannah Sten's eyes. Her hands wouldn't tell him anything but her face would.

‘Relax,' she said. ‘I'm sure you're stronger than me.'

Wyatt didn't relax. He didn't and wouldn't trust her, not entirely. He knew her a little better, that was all.

‘At this point, we need each other,' she went on.

‘And then?'

‘We go our separate ways.' She walked up to him. ‘But now we find Mr Halperin before he disappears.'

A windy mid-afternoon in Noosa, on the last day of the school holidays. No parking available anywhere near the apartment where Leah Quarrell had said Halperin was staying. They left the car in the underground garage of the Pacific Grand and walked to Noosa Heads. Wyatt had the pistol tucked into the small of his back. Clumps of teenage girls passed them, heading with towels for Tea Tree Bay or returning to the Hastings Street shops, alive with expectation, one hand to the wind-whipped scraps of cloth about their waists, the other hand to their hair, their bags, their shrieking mouths. Boys clumped by, looking younger, clumsier. Fighting gravity as they descended the hill. They all eyed Wyatt and felt a chill they couldn't name.

The Flamingo Gate Apartments was halfway along Alderly Terrace, overlooking Little Cove. The hilltop buildings and trees seemed to screen all sounds but the murmur of traffic flowing between Hastings Street and the national park. Whitecaps flecked the distant reaches of the sea; swimmers dotted the shallows.

Wyatt and Sten halted opposite the Flamingo Gate in the shadows cast by mansion walls and sub-tropical trees. They saw four floors, two apartments per floor, curtains open in most of the rooms. And, in a lobby half the size of a tennis court, a doorman behind a high-fronted desk. Wyatt wondered, with mild irritation, why the residents thought they needed a doorman. Prestige? It was an obstacle.

‘We come at him from both sides and neutralise him,' Sten said, indicating the doorman.

With visions of another local with a broken neck, Wyatt shook his head. ‘We split up,' he said, and explained how that would work.

Wyatt loped, Sten ran, across the street and into the lobby. The lift and stairwell door were in the left-hand corner. Stairs up to all floors, guessed Wyatt, and down into the car park. The middle space was taken up by a pair of sofas facing one another across a coffee table heaped with the kinds of corporate PR magazines that are never read. Along the right-hand wall were the doorman's desk and a set of tenants' letterboxes. The doorman had little to do but flip through a newspaper and scan a CCTV monitor split into four frames. One camera on each floor, no cameras in the stairwell or the parking garage—or not being monitored just now. Otherwise there were a couple of fat white columns holding up the ceiling and interfering with the doorman's view of the lift and stairwell door.

Which suited Wyatt. He strode across the lobby with Sten as if they owned the joint, waving to the doorman, calling, ‘Just popping in on Rafi Halperin.'

The doorman gaped, a spotty kid, possibly a student. ‘Let me call up and—'

‘A surprise,' cried Wyatt, screwing his best shot at a grin onto his features. ‘It's Rafi's birthday. Do us a favour; don't tell him we're coming up.'

He knew the guy would. He reached the lift with Hannah Sten, noisily stabbed the button a few times, and saw, in the corner of his eye, the doorman turn his back and mutter into his phone. Then the guy's tone altered, taking on an aggrieved whine as if he were telling the man on the other end that it wasn't his fault.

Sten stepped into the lift, Wyatt into the stairwell. He ran noiselessly up to the second level, where he waited. If the doorman's call had spooked Halperin he'd leave by the stairs, thinking his visitors were still in the lift. The air was stale, scented with cigarette smoke. Butts had collected in the corners. Nothing stirred.

Then a series of metallic clicks and creaks that Wyatt mapped in his head. A metal handle is turned on the fourth floor. Hinges creak as the heavy stairwell door is hauled open. The handle is released and the door closes with a pneumatic whisper behind Halperin. He clatters down to the first bend, the third landing, the next bend.

Stops.

‘Ah, hell.'

Wyatt saw flight in Halperin's eyes, and aimed the Ruger. Halperin winced into the black mouth of the barrel and Wyatt saw acceptance begin to settle in his features.

But another part of him was still weighing options. Wyatt barked, ‘Don't.'

Halperin curled his lip. ‘You're going to shoot me here? A building full of people and your face on the lobby camera?'

‘Yes.'

Halperin thought about it. He shrugged. ‘You want to thrash it out here? What?'

‘I note you're not asking who I am.'

‘I know who you are.'

Wyatt nodded. ‘Let's go back up to your apartment.'

He wondered if the man was armed. Nothing showed at Halperin's waist or in the pockets of his snug shirt and trousers, but there could be a knife, a pistol, in the small of his back. Not wanting to frisk and disarm Halperin here, in a narrow space, Halperin with a height advantage, standing one step above him on the stairs, Wyatt aimed his gun at the man's trunk and said, ‘Lift your shirt.'

Halperin complied with a lazy grin. ‘Not armed, see?'

Wyatt gestured with the gun. ‘Turn around.'

Halperin turned full circle, his shirt tails bunched below his ribcage. ‘See?'

The man was claiming a pathetic victory. A small man, thought Wyatt. He gestured again. ‘Up the stairs.'

Hesitation, then Halperin began to retrace his steps to the top floor, Wyatt not too close but close enough to shoot him in the spine. Halperin seemed keenly aware of that. He kept glancing back, not at Wyatt but at the black snout of the pistol.

He said, ‘How'd you know about me?'

Wyatt said nothing.

‘Leah? Isn't she under arrest?'

The point of greatest risk for Wyatt was the door into the hallway leading to Halperin's apartment. People on the other side, the door as a weapon…

When they reached the top level he said, ‘I want you to drop your pants to the floor.'

‘Hey, I already lifted my shirt for you.'

‘If you want to survive this, leave your pants around your ankles, hobble through the door ahead of me and stop a few metres along the corridor. Then you can pull them up again.'

The trousers dropped to the floor, revealing slender legs, boxers and black socks. Halperin turned the doorhandle, pulled at it and shuffled through, Wyatt at a secure distance behind him.

‘Now we wait at the lift.'

‘The lift? Why?'

Wyatt didn't take his eyes off Halperin. ‘We wait,' he said.

The lift pinged, the doors slid open and Hannah Sten stepped out. ‘Hello, Raf.'

Halperin swallowed. ‘Hannah.'

Sten eyed his legs. ‘A good look for you.'

Halperin said desperately, ‘Is this necessary? Can I pull them up?'

Wyatt shrugged. ‘Sure.'

Halperin bent neatly, grabbed, pulled, zipped up, buckled his belt, smoothed down his shirt. ‘Now what?'

Wyatt said, ‘Hand your key to Ms Sten, then stay clear of the door while she opens it.'

He watched, and when the door was open, said, ‘I'll go first.' He halted in front of Halperin as he moved towards the door. ‘Don't try anything. I just watched her break your girlfriend's neck.'

Halperin paled. ‘Not my girlfriend.'

Wyatt ignored him and entered the apartment at a rapid crouch, down the short hallway, passing doors to a bedroom and a bathroom, and coming to an open-plan kitchen that gave onto a living area. Long and broad, a wall of glass looking out over Little Cove. It was a terrible place. Beige walls, vomit-yellow carpet over black tiles. Weird artwork on the walls, seashells painted a pastelly brown and glued onto particle board painted blue to suggest the sea. Displays of dried flowers drenched in an air-freshening chemical that seared Wyatt's nostrils. Curtains like heavy sacking, costly leather, steel and glass-slab furniture, a massive plasma TV set and an exercise bike.

And there was the David Teniers painting, set up as it had been for the ransom photo: a framed canvas on a wall, a chair, a newspaper.

He called the others to join him. Halperin entered first, flopping onto the sofa, watched by Sten.

‘Okay,' Halperin said, ‘you got me, now what?'

Wyatt ignored him. He stared at the painting. Smaller than he'd envisaged, its muddy tones emitted a queer sheen. Frowning, he closed in and peered at it.

Behind him, Halperin said, ‘Take it, it's yours, I'm done.'

Wyatt, alerted by a shift in the American's voice, turned to see Halperin burrowing under a cushion and Hannah Sten aiming and firing. Gun smoke drifted and Wyatt's ears rang. Halperin doubled over, dropping a little .32.

White-faced, he tried to straighten, craning his neck at Sten. ‘You gut shot me.'