in. They had bolted a new cyclone gate across the driveway and wrapped a chain and padlock around it. Nor did he climb the gate and go in that way. He didnt think the police would be watching the place any longer but the neighbours would still be jumpy.
Wyatt was wearing sunglasses and a decent enough op-shop suit, and hed scraped his hair back over his scalp. But it would not be so easy to shake off his loping walk, the articulation of trunk and limbs that would be like a signature to the people who once had accepted his right to be here, in the days before he had a running gun battle in the pine plantation behind his house and shot a Melbourne punk in the back of the head.
He followed the fenceline, driving slowly, looking the place over. There were twenty or thirty sacred ibis picking their way through the marshy ground at the base of his hill. Someone had put a slasher through the long grass and cleared the blackberry thickets. There was fresh paint on the house trim and the barn door was bright red. Wyatt had kept a car in the barn, facing the doorway, a spare ignition key under the dash, permanently ready for a fast escape. Thats how it had been, three months ago. Now some barrister would buy the place, park his air- conditioned 4WD there, use it as a tax write-off.
Wyatt drove back the way hed come. The farms and orchards rolled away on small humped hills toward the sea, and the land was divided by hedges, lanes and avenues of pines. It was a place where you could hide and learn to match a bird to its cry and be left alone by your neighbours apart from a finger raised from an oncoming steering wheel on the narrow roads. It had been a part of Wyatt and hed lost it. Bought from the proceeds of just one job, a gold bullion heist at Melbourne Airport five years before. He needed something like that again. He needed a new base, somewhere he could emerge from once or twice a year, pull a job that had plenty of money attached to it, disappear again.
But he needed that Colt first and he needed that two thousand.
Thats if they were still there.
Thats if the cops hadnt stripped the place. He had no reason to suppose they hadnt.
Wyatt took side roads back to Frankston and checked into an on-site caravan. Twenty-five bucks, grimy toilet and shower block, cars coming and going from the red-light van two doors down. He lay on the bunk, tuned everything out. He guessed thered be a big crowd at the sale and theyd stay on for the auction. It was almost November and thered be buyers there wanting a summer place close to the sea, thered be gawkers attracted to the blood spilt and the mystery, thered be neighbours curious to know how much their own places might fetch.
There could also be cops, wondering if sentiment would bring him back there.
The cops didnt really know what he looked like. They shouldnt be a problem.
It was the neighbours, kids like Craig from the next farm. Wyatt would have to work on his face, work on his body language, move around unnoticed and check both hiding places. Hed know at once if theyd been disturbed. If they had, hed slip away.
If they hadnt, hed return when the fuss was over and retrieve his gun, and the money that would buy him some time until a big job came along.
Nine
Wyatt worked on three thingshe had to look as though he belonged; he had to draw eyes away from his face and body; he had to baffle those eyes that did look twice at him.
The first was easy enough. He was brown from the sunforearms, hands, face and neckand his hands were worn and roughened from weeks on the run. Added to that were faded khaki trousers, a worn army surplus shirt with a frayed collar, old, sturdy, highly polished brown shoes, a sweat-stained felt hat. Eighteen dollars at a Salvation Army op-shop and Wyatt resembled a smalltime Peninsula farmer, a man who slashed the blackberries and cleaned the horse troughs and weaned the cattle for barristers who spent the week on Queen Street making three hundred thousand a year and drove their teenage daughters to gymkhanas on the weekends.
The hat concealed his face but his height was a problem, the way he moved when he walked. He added a walking stick, a gammy leg.
That left his features, the thin, unsmiling, hooked configuration of eyes, nose and mouth, the dark, unimpressed cast of a face that someone there might know and recognise. Wyatt did two things. He shaved badly on the morning of the auction, leaving stubble patches on his neck and high on his cheeks, and he trained himself to mouth-breathe, resting his upper teeth on his lower lip so that he looked mild and slow and faintly stupid.
He checked out of the caravan park at eleven. Shirt, trousers, hat and walking stick were in the car; hed been wearing jeans and a T-shirt for the past two days and he didnt want to attract attention to himself now. When he was away from Frankston and on a back road, he pulled over and changed.
At the farm, parked cars, utilities and 4WDs choked the approach roads and were angled among the golden cypresses in the driveway. Wyatt had to drive several hundred metres past the entrance before he could slot the Datsun into a gap at the side of the road. He walked back, leaning on his stick, licking road dust from his upper teeth, and limped up the track to the house that had once been his. Eleven-forty. He had twenty minutes before the knots of people formed themselves into a crowd and followed the auctioneer around from one sale lot to the next.
He edged past them. No-one looked twice at him. Those who looked once were indifferent, maybe slightly sympathetic. He had some nice stuff, a woman said, resting her hand on a walnut sideboard. She looked puzzled, as though she thought a killer couldnt have a taste for fine things. Wyatt moved on. Hed once known every chip and scratch and loose thread in the furniture around him, but out here on the lawn it all looked dispossessed, running to seed.
He walked around the side of the house. The people were avid and suddenly he hated them. They were standing where a mystery man had lived and committed murder and something about it seemed to quicken their senses, make their lips wet, their eyes hungry. Wyatt scanned them as he limped past, searching for the face that didnt belong, the face that might blow his cover. But there was no-one.
Then a hand-held bell clanged and the auctioneer called the crowds attention to lot one, five dozen bottles of fine Mornington Peninsula wine. Wyatt hung back, then slipped away among the outbuildings like a farmer who had his eye on the tools and equipment, not the fancy stuff.
He stopped at the old dairy, a cobwebby log and corrugated iron structure as old as the farmhouse itself. The walls leaned to the left; the roofing iron was fringed with rust. Wyatt stepped inside. He was ready for an amiable, half-embarrassed exchange with any stranger he might encounter, but the dairy was empty. He crossed to the milking stalls against the far wall. It was clear from the floors unevenness that the police had prised up the flagstones. They had even torn parts of the inner walls away, revealing red-back spiders and decades of dirt and insect husks. What they hadnt done was check the upright bail posts. Wyatt reached up, hooked his fingers over the edge, felt the plastic sandwich bag with its wad of banknotes resting in the hollow.
Footsteps and someone whistling. Wyatt swung around and crossed to the opening. A shape blocked the sunlight. Wyatt nodded pleasantly, Good day for it, and limped past the man in the doorway. Youngish, about twenty-five, jeans, baseball cap, black Nike runners with a yellow stripe, an expression on his face of boredom and restlessness out here away from the city streets. He could be anyone, Wyatt thought, and made his way along the path to the pump shed. Behind him the man was idly stamping around inside the dairy.
The incident confirmed one thing: Wyatt would have to come back for his stuff when all this was over.
There was no-one in the pump shed. It was a small building, fibro, with a tin roof, cement floor, shelves and an electric water pump connected to an underground rainwater tank. When water pressure dropped in the house, the pump would cut in automatically. Wyatt leaned on his stick, regarding the pump carefully. It was bolted to an alloy support that was in turn bolted to the cement floor. His pistol was under the support itself, a gap five centimetres high sealed with a flap at each end. The area looked just as dusty and untouched as it always had.
Then the pump motor whirred, building quickly to its rattly full speed. It didnt die away, so Wyatt guessed someone somewhere had turned a tap on. Maybe the auctioneer was making himself a cup of tea, maybe a child was fiddling in the laundry. The noise seemed to fill the little shed, and Wyatts first indication that he wasnt alone was a sharp pain in the flesh high under his right arm. He stiffened. The pain increased a little, the cotton parted before the blade, and Wyatt looked down and around at the Nike running shoes.
