Wyatt - 06 - The Fallout (25 page)

Raymond had hauled himself to his
feet as Quincy manoeuvred the boat through the reef. He clasped the rail, pale
and blurry. This it?

This is it.

Quincy had taken another Stuyvesant
from Steer. He ground it into the deck and winked. Over the yard arm, boys.

Raymond stared at him suspiciously.

Time for a drink, son, Quincy
said.

Raymond groaned. Not for me.

Quincy turned to Steer. How about
you? Game for a swig of something?

Steer shook his head. Ill pass.
You go on and have one.

Dont mind if I do, said Quincy
delicately, and he waited, and he waited.

Steer understood. Sorry, didnt
bring anything with me.

Oh, mate, Quincy said. First
rule, a bottle for the captain.

Didnt know Id be sailing with
you, Steer said. He moved off. He was tired of this joker. I need the
bathroom.

He went below. When he appeared on
deck again he was carrying canvas carryalls from the house in Warrandyte.
Raymond was leaning tiredly on the rail. Quincy was waving his arms about,
giving Raymond a history lesson.

Steer unzipped one of the canvas
cases and pulled out the stun gun. As described in the mail order catalogue, it
fired a disabling jolt of electricity, useful for crowd control and subduing
violent men and animals. Steer walked up to Quincy, fired it at his head and
saw him drop, stunned, into the icy sea.

Raymonds jaw sagged. Jesus. Mate.
Steady on.

Shes been found, Ray. You think I
dont listen to the news?

Whos been found?

You thought you could knock Denise
and get away with it? I mean, what do you take me for?

Denise? I put her on a bus

What happened, you try to race her
off and she turned you down?

Raymond backed away, eyes wide in
pure fright. I didnt kill her. She was, you know, suicidal. I came back one
day and found her. Or maybe she was cleaning her gun and it went off. Anyway, I
panicked and dug

Or how about this, Steer said. You
and Chaffey cooked the whole thing up. Get rid of me, get rid of Denise, pocket
my dough. Only it went wrong, I didnt come back to the house with you.

I swear. Ask Chaffey. He

Chaffeys dead in his basement.
Steer grinned then, a glittering cold grin of arrogance and vigour. Raymond
looked away.

Hey, Raymond, why so long in the
face? Forget Denise. You tell me where Wyatt is and were quits.

Raymond turned, relieved. He started
to blabber out an address in northern Tasmania, then said, Mate, if you want
to waste him, be my guest. Whatd he do?

Steer stroked his chin, let the stun
gun hang loose at his side. You wouldve been a gleam in your old mans eye at
the time. Wyatt set up this job, an American base payroll near Saigon. Wed
done it before. Spent weeks putting this one together, a real perfectionist. I
couldnt see any holes in the job, but at the last minute he pulled out, said
it felt wrong. So me and a couple of others done it. The MPs were waiting for
us. A set-up, clear as the nose on your face. He wanted me out of the way. I
think he struck a deal with the MPs, something like that.

Bastard.

Steer saw the heat of strong
emotions rise in Raymond, as though the little shit shared his sense of
betrayal. Raymond shook his head in disgust and said, You reckon thats how
come hes stayed out of gaol so long? He makes deals with cops?

Bank on it.

Anyway he

Anyway, this is for Denise, Steer
said, and he zapped Raymond three or four times, backing him up to the rail,
propelling him over the side. Steer watched for a while. Like Quincy, Raymond
drowned quietly, his limbs feeble in the darkening water, as though stirring
molasses.

There was some daylight left. Steer
stripped, climbed into a wet suit, and contemplated the bottom of the sea. He
didnt find anything on the seabed, but among Raymonds things on board the
boat he did find a red vinyl Thomas Cook bag and a PVC cylinder with a couple
of paintings in it. He spent the night anchored in the calm waters inside the
reef. At dawn the next morning he sailed through the gap and headed south-west,
across Bass Strait to the northern coast of Tasmania.

* * * *

Thirty-eight

Wyatt
fired again, snapping off a shot through the open door as he rolled toward it.
For some reason, Steer was firing high, spraying the room, and there was
something unprofessional about that.

And then he realised why. As ejected
casings from the automatic rifle spun to the floor, Steer stumbled on them, his
feet threatening to slide away beneath him. Wyatt kept firing, more wildly now
to take advantage of Steers carelessness.

But he was also counting. With one
cartridge left in the cylinder, he stopped firing. He was listening now, and through
all of his faulty senses he heard a door bang shut, heard footsteps boom on the
verandah, then silence.

He lay there for a short time,
trying to blink away the muzzle flash on his retina, swallowing to clear the
ringing in his ears. Steers presence here told him that Raymond was dead. He
also knew that Steer would want to finish what hed started. He had run, but
probably to a safe place so that he could work out how to try again. The house
was isolated, the target a man wanted by the law, so he had no reason to fear
neighbours or that Wyatt would call the police.

But it didnt seem likely that Steer
would try again before daybreak, not when hed lost the advantage. Daylight was
a different matter. Steer could move more freely then, shoot with greater
certainty, place the house under siege.

Wyatt had no intention of allowing
that to happen. He would let Steer know that he was the hunter now, even though
he had only the patchy moonlight to work with.

He fumbled in the darkness for a box
of cartridges, whispered Stay there, at the wardrobe door, then hurried to
the window, pushed open the insect screen and dropped to the verandah. For a
moment he clutched the railing, waited for a wave of dizziness to pass, then
ran at a crouch to the corner of the verandah. He saw from the dewy grass that
Steer had returned to the clump of blackwoods, peppermint gums and manferns
below the house.

Wyatt guessed that he was about a
minute behind Steer. Yet he also had all the time in the world. It was 4.30, and
in the two hours before daylight broke over northern Tasmania, Wyatt went on
the offensive.

He began by letting Steer know that
he was in pursuit. His boots thudded on the open ground; once among the trees,
he tore through the undergrowth, his sleeves and trousers snagging on
blackberry bushes. He drew ragged breaths. He shouted a couple of times.

And then he would freeze for ten
minutes, letting the silence build, letting it work on Steers nerves. Panic
levels rise at night in the bush. You lose track of your quarry, lose track of
your own position, yetabsurdly, given the darknessyou feel that you are under
a spotlight, that all guns are trained on you. Thats how Wyatt read the
psychology of the man he was up against and he hoped for a careless rush
through the trees, or wild shots, but Steer refused to be drawn. He didnt even
slap himself against the swarming mosquitoes.

Wyatt sniffed the air, trying to
pinpoint Steer by smell, but got nothing. Steer knew all that Wyatt knew about
tracking and hunting. They had trained together as snipers, after all, and no
sniper will let himself be betrayed by insect repellant, dry-cleaning fluid,
tobacco, shampoo, soap, deodorant, aftershave or any other chemical.

Wyatt tried to recreate his own
odours. Sweat and tangled sheets and Liz Redding.

And in the act of recreating his
past few hours he saw the bedroom again, saw the spray of automatic fire
crisscrossing the bed and stitching the walls.

Stitching across the wardrobe door,
across Liz Reddings lovely torso? He wished that he could remember. He started
to reload the .38but something was wrong. The spare cartridges: they wouldnt
fit. In his haste hed grabbed 9mm ammunition for his Browning. A chill crept
over his skin.

He shook it off. He waited in
perfect stillness, like a fox, thinking about his next move. His mind flicked
down the years to his youth, the army, Steer, trying to focus on Steers weak
points. Reluctantly he admitted that Steer matched him. Steers only weakness
was that he was fixed on getting even with Wyatt, and that wasnt a weakness
unless he let his feelings get in the way of his intellect. Wyatts flickering
thoughts brought him to the present again, to the shot-up bedroom, and it
occurred to him that Steer had outfitted himself with the wrong weapon for a
cat-and-mouse game.

Wyatt hated automatic weapons. They
jammed, they were sensitive to dirt and knocks, they required no skill other
than to pull the trigger. Steer had simply stood back from the door, extended
the barrel into the room and fired. The natural kick of the weapon had done the
rest. The bullets, spraying at the rate of thirty per second, had striped the
room. It was an inefficient, noisy, careless way to kill someone, and it was
the wrong weapon for a stalking game. Wyatt would have fired only once and it
would have been a kill shot. He wondered if his .38, with one shot left in the
chamber, was the right weapon. But it wasnt his only weapon. He had his hands
and his head, after all.

His hands and his head. They were
not as efficient as they could be. His hands were no good if his head gave way
to blackouts.

He moved. Hed been still for long
enough. The daylight was coming and he needed to blend with the trees and the
grass and a variety of earthen colours. He drew closer toward the creek,
startling a bandicoot. Once or twice he mistakenly snapped a twig or brushed
against bark, but waited for several minutes before moving on again, hoping
that Steer would dismiss the noise as a random one.

At the creeks edge he found wallaby
and potoroo tracks in mud that was the consistency of axle grease. He scooped
palmfuls of the mud over his jeans and sweater, daubed it onto his face, scalp
and the backs of his hands. The clay seemed to bind itself to him like an outer
skin. It would be slow to dry, slow to flake away. He finished with leaves and
stalks of grass, distributing them over his body until he wore mud and flora
like a kind of gillie suit, as if he were a Scottish poacher or gamekeeper, not
a manhunter.

In full daylight, Wyatt began to
hunt Steer. The creek wandered through a gully several kilometres long, here
and there concealed by thickets of dense trees, bracken and manfern fronds but
mostly running through a trench across open ground with sloping grassland for
dairy cattle on either side. Starting at one end of the trees at the bottom of
the slope below his house, Wyatt passed silently and swiftly to the other.
Steer was no longer there. At the western edge he stopped and peered through a
fine, stubborn mist at the open ground, scanning quickly, not letting his eyes
rest for long, for fear that he might miss spotting a movement or a shape that
didnt belong there. The creek tumbled over stones; birds greeted the morning:
a grey thrush, crescent honeyeaters, satin flycatchers.

As Wyatt saw it. Steer had three
choices: to follow the creek across open ground to the next belt of trees; to
head left or right up a grassy slope to either rim of the little gully, where
hed be among trees again and have a clear shot downhill; or somehow conceal
himself and let Wyatt get ahead of him, so that he could become the hunter and
Wyatt the quarry.

Wyatt investigated this last option
first. The only shelter outside of the trees was a clump of bulrushes. Breaking
cover at a run, he weaved until he reached it. He saw at a glance that Steer
hadnt stopped here. The bulrushes sat undisturbed and there were no tracks in
the mud.

He crouched and stared out across
the grassland on either side of the creek. There were plenty of ways of playing
this. He could wait, letting Steer make the moves, the mistakes. If he kept
moving, on the other hand, hed maintain the advantage and maybe rattle Steer.
Hed broken cover to get to the bulrushes, something hed rather not have done.
But Steer hadnt fired. Did that mean Steer hadnt seen him? It could be that
he was on high ground, keeping watch on several locations at once, meaning that
his concentration was split. Wyatt would make Steer break cover if he could,
but why should Steer want to do that? Much better to stage an ambush.

Wyatt guessed that Steer was either
on the run now or intending to set a trap away from the creek. He peered at the
ridge on either side. Steer was up there somewhere.

He returned to the shelter of a
peppermint gum and began to think his way into the soil. He crouched and looked
along the grass, letting the slanting light of early morning tell him where
Steer had been. After a while, he found the signs: a bruised grass stem;
disturbed pebbles, their moisture-darkened undersides revealed to the light; a
patch of bruised lichen on a rock.

Wyatt began to track Steer, out of
the trees and parallel to the creek. He found more signs: an indentation where
Steer had knelt briefly; tiny grains of soil pressed to the bottom of a dead
leaf; the crust broken on a cow pat; finally a footprint, the heel deeper than
the sole, indicating haste.