He had loosened his collar and was mopping his brow with a handkerchief. He laughed suddenly and tucked the handkerchief away in embarrassment. Winnings taken it out of me.
Carol stepped close to him and rested her palms on his chest. Why dont you get comfortable first? She fingered his lapels. Why dont you take a shower and let me make the drinks. Ill make us something long and cool and very alcoholic
What she did with her hand then was unambiguous and the mark gleamed like a schoolboy. She stepped back, evading him, nodded at the bathroom. But dont be long.
Im long now.
Now, now, none of that.
Theres this spot, Danny said, contorting absurdly, in the middle of my back. I can never reach it.
Well youll just have to wait, wont you?
She turned to the bar. It was well stocked. She would be able to make martinis. Behind her, Danny was whistling in the bathroom. He had left the door open. Did he seriously imagine that she wanted to watch him?
She took two glasses and tumbled ice cubes into them. She broke the seal on the gin bottle.
What are you making?
She judged that he was standing at the bathroom door. She would not turn around. A surprise.
There was the sound of Dannys hands slapping himself. The shower door rolled on its coasters. She heard the water gush.
After thirty seconds she peeked. The glass shower enclosure was steamed up and Danny was soaping his groin and singing.
Swiftly she poured measures of gin and dry vermouth into each glass, then took a tiny glass bottle from her bag. The label read eye drops. She removed the top and filled the dropper with fluid. Danny turned off the water. She had about a minute. She squirted the fluid into one of the glasses, stirred the drink by poking the floating ice cube, replaced the eye dropper, and tucked the little bottle away. Da dum, she said triumphantly, turning to him, holding the glasses aloft.
Danny had succumbed to modesty. He stood by the bed, pink with emotion and steam and too many carbohydrates, a voluminous towel around his waist. Great, he said lamely.
He didnt know what was expected of him. Come, sit here with me, Carol said. She patted the edge of the bed.
I feel at a disadvantage, said Danny, taking the glass she offered him and sitting down.
Carol dipped a finger in her drink and touched it to his lips. She brushed his hot cheek with the cool edge of her glass, then slipped the base under the towel and let it rest on his thigh. Danny sighed. He raised his own glass and drank deeply.
Youre tense, Carol said. Her voice was soft. Her fingernails scratched gently in the hairs on his leg. Ill give you a back rub. Would you like that?
Danny laughed abruptly and turned onto his stomach. Youre amazing.
Carol began working her hands along his spine toward his shoulders. There was a great deal of him, and none of it firm. He sighed again, and once or twice rolled onto one hip to sip from his glass. When she thought he might he losing interest she let him hear her peel off her stockings. He gave a little groan, drank deeply, and stretched.
In ten minutes he was drowsy. In twenty, asleep. He had been administered several millilitres of scopolamine hydrobromide, a chemical found in motion sickness pills, and would be unconscious for up to twenty hours. He would wake up feeling dopey and useless.
Carol went to work. She washed both glasses and let water run in the sink while she cleaned her fingerprints off all the surfaces shed touched. She stripped Danny of his ring and watch, and scooped up the cufflinks, lighter and gold chains hed left on the bedside table. She emptied his wallet. He had almost three thousand dollars in it. Not bad, but not great.
There was nothing of value in his suitcase. His toiletries bag was crammed with soap and shampoo sachets hed stolen from the Tradewinds. But in the wardrobe, next to a pair of carpet slippers, was a small briefcase. With a handkerchief wrapped around her fingers she pulled it out and upended it on the bed.
And found her ticket out of this dump.
Nineteen
Anna Reid had reserved a room for Wyatt in a hotel in Logan City, and the first thing he did after she dropped him off by car was check out of there and take a bus back into central Brisbane. He paid in advance for two nights at the YMCA, two nights at the Victoria Hotel on Astor Terrace, and by wire for two nights at a chain motel in Surfers Paradise. Wyatt made it standard practice to arrange more than one bolthole in any place he found himself, and he never made base close to where he intended to pull a job.
A standard precautionbut there was a concrete reason for it, this time. Until he knew for sure that Anna Reid was not working for someone or did not mean him harm, any contact with her had to be strictly on his terms.
For two days he did nothing. Then on Saturday he began to fix the geography of the place in his mind. He spent the day in a tourist coach: twenty Japanese, a handful of Swedish backpackers, a retired couple from Perth and himself. Pick-up was at 9 am and they spent the morning touring the city and nearby suburbs with stops at the Gabba cricket ground, the Fourex brewery, coffee on Mt Coottha, lunch on the South Bank. The retired couple from Perth seemed to adopt him for the day. They were fearful of foreigners. The man referred to the Nips in the party and Wyatt guessed hed been a serviceman during the war. The woman muttered under her breath about the accents, singlet tops and horny, dirty feet and white teeth of the Swedish girls. Wyatt let their words wash over him. He stared out of the window or sat at kiosk tables and let the sun warm his bones as he thought about Anna Reid and a bank vault that for one weekend only would have close to two million dollars in it.
The city itself was difficult to pin down. There was no fixed quality to it. If there were any buildings left standing from the colonial era, Wyatt didnt see them. The coach would hurtle down the snarling ribbons of freeway suspended above the rivers edge, crossing one bridge after another, giving him a clear view of rakish buildings bared like teeth, and he could feel flourishing energy in the place. Then they would be prowling the slopes and valleys of the suburbs and he would see colour-supplement mansions sharing a postcode with triple-fronted brick veneers and sun-blighted wooden hovels on stilts. The camphor laurels and jacaranda had finished flowering several weeks earlier, but there were plenty of fleshy, tropical, over-scented plants to make up for them. The light was drenching, draining all colour from the sky. They passed near Boggo Road prison more than once. It dominated one of the citys hills, colder, longer, harder and more miserable than any building Wyatt had yet seen there.
After lunch the coach ran them south-east to the casinos and boutiques of the Gold Coast. Wyatt used the drive to position Logan City in his mind. As they passed through the raw new suburbs that made up the satellite city, he took in the freeway exits, the strips of trashy, low-cost glass and concrete shops on either side, the patterns of first-home-buyers houses behind them. One thing was clearif he pulled this job he would stay well clear of these streets: they looped and curved like the edges of jigsaw pieces, not a right angle among them, a living nightmare to a driver who didnt know them well and had the law on his tail.
Wyatt slipped away from the others when they reached Broadbeach. He had a pocketful of vouchers entitling him to floor shows and chips at the Monte Carlo, but he tossed them into a bin and set out to explore on foot. If he hit the Logan City bank and got away with the money, he would hide out rather than run for it, leaving the state days, weeks later. He wanted to know if the Gold Coast would conceal him, if there might be an identity he could adopt, one that would slip easily over his existing skin and make him one of thousands and therefore invisible.
He saw enough in thirty minutes to know that it was possible. He could be a tourist, junkie, gigolo, gambler, boulevardier.
The coach drew into Brisbane again at six-forty-five. The city had undergone a change: the peak hour was over, the buildings empty, the long streets windswept and bare. Wyatt shook hands with the man and woman from Perth. Suddenly they were all friends. The Japanese beamed at him. Then, just as he was turning to leave, one of the backpackers planted a kiss on his mouth. She tasted of salt; he smelt her perspiration faintly, clean and disturbing. She laughed and he laughed with her and when the group left him he felt hungry and restless for
