The Heat Read Online Free PDF Page B

hedges, fronting or backing onto a waterway—depending on your income. And the only way in or out was past a guard at a gate.
    Wyatt strolled part-way down the slope until he overlooked Minto’s place at a shallow angle. It was the biggest house, vaguely Dutch, vaguely New England colonial. Parked on the driveway was a black Lexus with a personalised plate, MINTY . Inside the open garage door was a beefy white Range Rover. Wyatt bent to retie one shoelace, and the other, then fussed with his backpack. He couldn’t spot anyone waiting or watching.
    Then he was at the bottom of the slope, and now his view of Minto’s gated community was of roofs and treetops above the high yellow wall. Still nothing, apart from the CCTV cameras at the gate.
    He’d attract the same kind of attention as a rogue brontosaurus if he arrived on foot. He climbed the slope again and down the other side to the shopping centre, about twenty minutes, then hailed a taxi as it dropped a woman and her children outside a department store. He directed the driver over the hill and down to the gate in Minto’s security wall. A five-dollar ride. The driver shrugged—the next ride might be worth a hundred. Anyway, five bucks was better than nothing. He pulled up at the gate, where Wyatt gave the name Warner. ‘Mr Minto’s expecting me.’
    The guard consulted an iPad screen, nodded, pushed a button, and Wyatt paid the driver and walked. There would be a record of the taxi, and his arrival at the gate, but no one knew who he was and he didn’t exist anywhere else. And if he needed to run there were scalable trees hard against the perimeter wall.

5
    David Minto waited, watching, as Wyatt paid the driver and stepped out of the taxi. He seemed faintly amused, perhaps by Wyatt’s altered appearance. Wyatt ignored it. The broker had always been well insulated, had never needed a new name or face. Probably thought Wyatt was overreacting.
    Minto came down the path from his front door looking well curated in trousers, a collarless white shirt and Italian shoes. A thin gold watch gleamed on his soft white wrist. He was about sixty, prosperous, untroubled. There was an ex-wife and others before her, but Wyatt had never met them. ‘She’s out shopping. I don’t mix business with pleasure,’ Minto had told him once, when he caught Wyatt watching doorways, listening for footfalls in the house. In fact, Wyatt had been satisfying himself that Minto’s armed driver and bodyguard was hovering nearby in case of trouble.
    Minto shook Wyatt’s hand. ‘Good to have you on board.’
    As though Wyatt were a member of something. Team Minto. Wyatt halted. He looked past Minto to the house, then back at the security gate, wondering who else was involved.
    ‘Keep your cool, mate,’ Minto said, faintly mocking. ‘Except for the client, we’ll be alone.’
    ‘Who is it?’
    ‘You’ll see.’
    ‘How did he get here?’
    ‘She, and she’s staying at the resort up the hill. She walked here.’
    They stepped out of the steamy air and into an arctic hallway, an echo chamber with a tiled floor, stark walls and a high ceiling. Minto liked to cycle paintings through the space: this time Wyatt spotted an Ian Fairweather, a Weaver Hawkins and a Brack. A scatter of oils and drawings by lesser artists. As he crossed to a doorway at the end, he felt a scraping sensation, grit caught in the tread of his left shoe. He stopped, removed it, pocketed it. He made a mental note not to wear these shoes when he worked: the scraping noise might alert a security guard or a householder. The grit itself could tie him to a location.
    Dump the shoes, in fact.
    Minto watched all this, still half-amused. He was a man who liked to keep people slightly offside, and possibly imagined that’s where he had Wyatt.
    The sitting room was L-shaped. The short arm, at the far end, was an entertainment nook: huge TV, iPod dock, speakers, earphones, shelves of books, DVDs, CDs, a couple of red leather