Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal Read Online Free PDF Page B

printing or copying. One day the
sergeant showed a file to Stolle. Stolle wasnt interested in the file. He was
interested in the mechanics of identity creation. Once he understood that he
could anticipate, intercept or uncover the moves that people made.

    The hardest people to find were
those who shrank away from their pasts and ordinary human contact. It was as
though they no longer existed. They had no-one, wanted no-one, had no ego, didnt
want to be seen again. People like that left no paper trail, made no new
friends, ended up in paupers graves. They were running away from life or some
deep hurt. They were the sad ones.

    Then there was Wyatt, in a class of
his own.

    * * * *

    Six

    Wyatt
reached Melbourne at nine oclock and abandoned his stolen Kingswood in the
Spencer Street station car-park. There were advertisements for accommodation on
the station concourse. He called a number and at nine-thirty moved into a room
at The Abbey, a backpackers hotel near the parklands on Nicholson Street. It
was not the best roomonly metres from the tram tracksand now he had little
more than eighty dollars to his name.

    At ten oclock he walked through the
cobbled lanes to a Turkish restaurant on Brunswick Street. He bought a doner
kebab and ate it on the move. Something about the excursion unnerved him. It
had been a principle of his life that he operated in and cherished his dark
solitude at the edge of clamorous cities and people, but now he felt exposed.
He didnt dare eat at a restaurant table. That would be inviting
troublearrest, a blade in his neck, a bullet at the hairline.

    Back at The Abbey he leafed through
a telephone directory in the foyer. Mesic. In Melbourne it was a name that
meant small-scale racketeering and a vicious brand of muscle. Hed heard that
the Mesics lived in a compound in Templestowe, and there it was, Mesic K. and
L., on Telegraph Road. Wyatt was obsessed with them. He wanted to hit them hard
and get his money back. Tomorrow hed look at the place. That meant another
car. He was running close to the edge, stealing a set of wheels every day or so
like this. But there was no-one he could go to for help any more.

    He tried to sleep, his reflexes dull
and velvety, but he could not escape the trams and the mean, barren laughter of
young backpackers returning, shouts as people left the nearby pubs and looked
for their cars. Whenever he did wake, he supposed that some noise had caused
it, but an old heartache seemed to slink away at the edge of his consciousness
each time, like a trace of a badly remembered and comfortless dream. It left
him tense and sleepless for long stretches of time. He slept through the early
trams but at eight oclock there were trams every few minutes and he woke for
the day, haunted and distracted.

    He needed a car that would not be
missed for a while. There was a Mobil service station across the road from The
Abbey. He watched it through the morning. It was a busy place with a high and
rapid turnover of customers for petrol and simple service and tune-up jobs.
What interested Wyatt was that after the mechanics had finished working on each
car, they parked it in an adjacent yard and tossed the keys on the floor under
the drivers seat. At eleven oclock a Mobil tanker pulled into the forecourt
and filled the underground reservoirs. The obscuring bulk of the truck, the
distraction, gave Wyatt his chance. He loped across the road, slipped into a
nondescript Datsun, and drove quietly away.

    This was better. Planning an act,
carrying it off successfully, was work, the sorts of things he was good at. Yet
the sensation didnt last. He found himself driving the little car with his
head down, his shoulders hunched, as though every driver and passenger in the
city was primed to spot him and raise the alarm or crack open their windows
enough to train a gunsight on him.

    Thirty minutes later he stopped at a
milk bar on Williamsons Road and ordered takeaway coffee and a cheese sandwich.
Four