1
Wyatt was waiting to rob a man of $75,000.
It was a Friday afternoon in spring, and he was parked near a split-level house in Mount Eliza, forty-five minutes around the bay from the city. The house belonged to a harbourmaster for the Port of Melbourne and offered water views but was an architectural nightmare—not that Wyatt cared, he’d always known that wealth and crassness went together. He was only interested in the money.
So far, he was down $500, the brokerage fee he’d paid Eddie Oberin for the harbourmaster tip. The way Eddie explained it, the waterside union s were powerful, but so was this harbourmaster. It was in everyone’s best interests for ships to moor, unload, load and depart as swiftly as possible, but some delays were unavoidable—a Filipino sailor breaking his neck in a fall, for example; a customs raid, or a strike. And some delays were of the harbourmaster’s own making: three or four times a year he would quarantine a ship.
The guy’s salary was pretty good, but he had expenses— gambling debts, child support and the cost of running two dwellings. An apartment near the docks, where he lived five days a week, and this split-level monstrosity in Mount Eliza. He’d paid a lot for his view of the bay, the repayments were killing him, and so from time to time he quarantined ships. Another term for it was extortion: give me seventy-five grand, Mr Ship Owner, and I’ll give your ship a clean bill of health.
Time passed, Wyatt waited, and he thought about Eddie Oberin. Eddie had been a useful gunman and wheelman—a couple of credit union robberies, a payroll hit—but now he was mostly a fence and the kind of man who hears whispers and then sells or trades the things he hears. Five hundred bucks for a whisper in the right ear, thought Wyatt.
Just then a Lexus nosed out of the harbourmaster’s steep driveway, a smooth, silvery car quite unlike the man himself, who was pale, sweaty and beer-fed, with small features crammed together at the centre of a large, balding head. Wyatt knew all that from having shadowed him for several days, and everything said the harbourmaster would be no threat. Unless he’d brought a hard man with him this afternoon, riding shotgun.
He hadn’t. Wyatt turned the key in the ignition of a battered Holden utility with ‘Pete the Painter’ logoed on both doors and tailed the Lexus out of the street. Eddie Oberin had rented him the vehicle. There really was a painter named Pete, currently serving two years for burglary and unable to enjoy what Wyatt was enjoying: the bay waters smooth and shiny as ice, the distant towers of Melbourne like a dreamscape in the haze, the sun beating from the windshields of the vehicles toiling around the dips and folds of Mount Eliza, the opportunity to steal $75,000.
Soon the harbourmaster was heading down Oliver’s Hill to where Frankston lay flat and disappointed beside the bay. Frankston was testament to the notion that you couldn’t have too much commerce, but it was cheap, noisy, exhausted commerce, for this was an area of high unemployment and social distress. Wasted-looking junkies lurked around the station, overweight shoppers crowded the footpaths and sixteen-year-old mothers slopped along, snatching mouthfuls of cigarette smoke and urging their kids to drink Coke laced with downers to keep them docile. The fast-food joints did a roaring trade and little girls paid too much for plastic jewellery in the specialty shops.
And so Wyatt was surprised when the harbourmaster turned off the Nepean Highway into the shopping precinct. Perhaps he wanted a haircut or had run out of bread and milk, and wasn’t here to collect an envelope containing $75,000.
The Lexus turned and turned again, eventually pulling into an undercover car park beneath a cinema complex. Wyatt considered his unbending first rule: always have an escape route. He didn’t want to drive into the car park. He didn’t want to be boxed in by concrete pillars, people pushing shopping carts, delays at the boom gates. He parked Pete’s utility in a fifteen-minute zone, wiped his prints off the wheel, gear knob and door handles, and entered the car park on foot.
He found the Lexus in a far corner. The harbourmaster was locking the doors with a remote before pausing to glance around uncertainly. He was carrying a cheap vinyl briefcase. Was this the drop-off point? Wyatt hung back beside a pillar, where the weak light from outside and from a handful of overhead fluorescents barely penetrated. The air smelt of urine and trapped exhaust fumes. There was something sticky on the underside of his shoe. His hands felt grimy.
He waited. Waiting was a condition of Wyatt’s life. He didn’t fidget or get impatient but stayed composed and alert. He knew that nothing might come of the waiting. He continued to watch the harbourmaster, ready for a sound or a smell or a shift in the quality of the air that meant he’d better run or fight. In particular, he was watching for certain signs in the people nearby: the way a man carried himself if he was armed, listening to an earpiece or staking out the car park; the clothing that didn’t look right for the conditions or the season but was intended to conceal.