Wyatt - 03 - Death Deal (4 page)

That came unstuck the night he got
clubbed by a nightwatchman. He got away, but the headache lasted six months.

Then two years ago he was
SecureSafe. It was a sweet operation, more or less legitimate. Hed show the
customer only top of the line security devices, but install look-alikes made in
some Bangkok sweatshop. The cheap gear worked just as well as the expensive
stuff.

More or less.

Most of the time.

There was the occasional pissed-off
letter, the odd rave on his answering machine, but if he ignored them they went
away after a while.

Until Inquiry File got wind of it
and investigative reporters started to poke around with microphones and video
cameras, camping on his front lawn, hanging outside his workshop, peering
through the glass doors into his office, some bitch screaming questions at him
three days in a row. He had rounded on her finally, shoving her to one side,
clamping his hand over the lens of the camera. Dont touch the equipment, she
squawked. Dont touch me or Ill have you up for assault.

Stolle had never felt such huge,
useless rage. Hed been unable to get his words out. Hed wanted to smash the
camera to dust, flatten the fairy cameraman, tear the clothes off the bitch
with her questions, questions, questions.

So now he was Stolle Investigations.
He didnt advertise. He ran a discreet business, installing security gear for
cocaine kings, tax dodgers, bent union bosses and bikie gangs, finding missing
persons, supplying bodyguards, anything for a buck. He even had a TAFE College
diploma.

The main problem was that he ran a
large staff of part-timers and a couple of full-timers, and they all cost
money. Hed bleed his customers where he could, spin the job out over three
days when it could have been done in two, charge for travel and faxes he hadnt
made, but what he needed more of were clients like this Brisbane woman. He
could smell more work there if he played his cards right. The fee didnt bother
her, forty-five bucks an hour plus expenses, plus she was offering ten thousand
bucks bonus if he could deliver Wyatt to her before the end of October. He
looked at the calendar. He had three weeks.

The door to the outer office opened
and closed. Stolle leaned back and waited. His secretary was out on a job,
store detective at a mink show in the city. He heard a knock.

Its open.

The man who came in had the
appearance and manner of a minor executivedark suit, plain white shirt, silk
tie. He was about forty, thin, a hollow look to his face and not an ounce of
humour in his bones. He said, Is your name Stolle?

What can I do for you?

I said are you Stolle?

If this was going to go anywhere
Stolle had to admit to being Stolle. He nodded, and repeated, What can I do
for you?

The words tumbled out. I heard you
were the best person for what Ive got in mind.

Oh? Whats that?

The man sat uninvited and folded his
arms as though to rein in powerful emotions. Theres this matter, this
person,
that needs fixing, if you know what I mean.

Stolle pulled his chair toward his
desk, using the movement to press a switch with his knee. The switch was
connected to a voice-activated tape recorder in his top drawer. The microphone
was the tip of a pen in a jumble of pens and pencils in a jar next to his
in-tray.

Go ahead.

Ill pay ten thousand.

To do what?

The man waited for a while. She has
to go. I dont care how long it takes. Five thousand now, five on delivery.

Youre not making yourself very clear.

My wife. The property division has
all but ruined me.

I still dont understand.

You want me to spell it out? Kill
the bitch for me, okay? I dont care how long it takes, just do it. I heard you
were the one to do it.

Stolle reached for his pad. Name
and address?

Jesus, youre not keeping a file on
this?

I cant start until I know who and
where, now can I?

Stolle said it sarcastically. The
man seemed to shut down in the face of it. Eventually he muttered his name and
address and the name and address of his ex-wife. Stolle made a show of writing
these on the pad and putting the paper into his pocket.

Now, he said, I want you to
listen to something.

He opened the drawer, pressed
rewind, pressed play, and their voices swelled from concealed speakers, filling
the tiny office. The mans face suffused with anger. As he came out of his
chair, Stolle waved an automatic pistol at him. To reinforce the point, Stolle
drew back the slide, jacking a round into the chamber. It was an oily click,
sharp and nasty. Sit down. Youre also on camera.

You bastard.

Youre the one who wants to kill
his wife, Sunshine. Give us your wallet.

The man tossed a fraying wallet
across the desk. As Stolle guessed, there was big money in it. Not the five
thousand upfront fee the man had mentioned, but seven hundred and fifty dollars
good-faith money. He pocketed it, tossed back the wallet.

This is as far as it goes, he
said. I keep the audio tape, the videotape, insurance in case you do anything
stupid. I also know where you live. Take my advice about the wifegrin and bear
it. I did.

You bastard.

Only the one payment, and youve
already made it. Im not greedy.

The man got up. He looked paler,
weaker. Maybe hell get his courage back and try knocking her himself, Stolle
thought. He could warn her. Then again, it was nothing to do with him.

The man stopped in the doorway. He
looked compressed and dark again. Was that bullshit, what I heard, that you
get rid of people for a fee?

Stolle rocked back in his chair,
grinned, laced his fingers behind his head. Youll never know.

* * * *

Five

In
fact, Stolle had carried out four contract killings in the past three years: an
errant wife; a junkie whod got a company directors daughter hooked on crack;
an investment banker whod developed a conscience during a Royal Commission; an
armed hold-up man suspected of killing a cop. Two had looked like accidentsthe
banker, the junkie. The wifes murder had been attributed to a burglary gone
wrong, the gunmans to an underworld score settling.

The point was, Stolle did referral
killings only. His clients didnt know who had been hired and he never met them
face to face. When he was wearing his private investigators hat, he liked to
meet his clients. He liked the fact that they needed him, and there was always
something more than the cash in it for him. But he wasnt interested in meeting
clients when he was wearing his killers hat. He wasnt interested in their
fear, greed, anger, their banal motives.

It was satisfying work, but he wasnt
making a career out of it. Four jobs in three years was about right for him.
The background research, the wait for the right moment, the swiftness of the
hitall those things were satisfying but they were no match for the singular,
prickling sensation he felt in his nerve endings when he was doing what he did
best: tracking somebody.

He didnt even have to be in the
field to experience it. A lot of the work was spent sitting on his backside,
reading faxes, leafing through files, peering at computer or microfiche
screens. When rumours first surfaced that things were crook in the National
Safety Council, hed been hired by an investment company to do a background
check on John Friedrich. He discovered that there was nothing on paper for
Friedrich before 1975. He reported back to the client, the client pulled out of
a deal with Friedrich, and Stolle earned himself a handsome bonus.

Most of his work entailed finding a
spouse, a lover, a creditor. There was a standard approach and it worked
eighty-seven per cent of the time. He started at the end: where was she last
seen, and who was with her? He handed out pictures, he talked to family,
friends, enemies, hotel and motel staff, taxi drivers, bus drivers, reservation
clerks. He looked at passenger lists. If that failed, he followed the paper
trail: credit card receipts, parking fines, passport applications, travellers
cheques. If people changed their ID, he dug deeper. There was always a
bureaucracy somewhere that had what he needed.

He liked the hunt, but he also liked
the hidden benefits. A bit of the old in-out with female clients whod gone
over budget; blow-jobs from sixteen-year-olds whod run off with boyfriends;
hush money from embezzlers who didnt want to be found.

Stolle liked to get inside the skin
of the people he was hired to find. He knew that a stranger in town didnt
attract curiosity anymore, the nation being so mobile, so what Stolle did was
not look for someone who was new to a place but look for that same person in a
different guise. More often than not the people he was looking for tried to be
the exact opposite of their former selves. Take his last case: a solicitor had
done a bunk with money from his trust fund. He had exchanged his Porsche for a fishing
boat and a Holden ute, his DB suit for jeans and thongs, his South Yarra
townhouse for a fibro beach shack, his smooth cheeks for a beard and sunburn.
What he hadnt changed were his basic tastes and habits. The man liked to play
tennis, bet on the horses, borrow music videos, subscribe to yachting
magazines. The stupid prick had even given himself a name similar to his real
one: Ross Wilson, Ray Wilkes. Stolle wouldnt have been surprised if Wilson had
eventually contacted his family or hung around outside his kids school.

Missing teenagers, mostly girls. If
they hadnt been murdered and their bodies dumped in the bush, they were the
easiest to find. More often than not the clients were exclusive boarding
schools or wealthy executives who didnt want the police brought in. Stolle
started with friends and relatives. If the girl wasnt shacked up with her
boyfriend or she hadnt convinced an elderly aunt that she was taking an
extended semester break, he checked railway stations, squats, refuges, the
morgue. When that failed, he went straight to St Kilda or Kings Cross. Once,
accompanied by a father, hed dragged a fifteen-year-old PLC girl from a
brothel and been attacked by pimps armed with fireaxes and knives. The girl was
doped to the eyeballs and HIV-positive. Stolle and the girls father went back
a week later and torched the place to the ground. It was the least Stolle could
do for the poor bastard. The girl? Stolle guessed she was dead by now.

Since the big-paying jobs were
scarce, and the money always found its way into the pockets of the bookmakers,
Stolles bread-and-butter income came from process serving and debt collection.
He worked 12 to 14-hour days sometimes, six or seven days a week. The car
became a mobile office and he was on the phone every few minutes, to his
snouts, his answering service, his staff. He flashed his ID twenty times a day.
He wasnt a cop but often people thought he was. It was in the words he used: Im
licensed by the State of Victoria as an investigator

Sure, it was obsessive, but it made
him feel connected to the street, in control of the flow of information, free
for a while from that permanent hunger that made him want to chance all he had
on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice.

Stolle had one advantage over his
competitors: he drank with a sergeant in the protective security group, the
crowd responsible for Victorias witness protection program. They supplied
anything from intermittent surveillance, around-the-clock guard and 008
hotline, to relocation under a new identity. Stolle had learned a lot that way;
the sergeant enjoyed explaining the job. Apparently the easiest people to hide
were the natural mimics. They knew how to fit their appearance, body language,
speech and manner to a new place, a new name, a new job, a personal history
saturated with solid information: passport, bank account, educational
qualifications, birth and marriage certificates, employment record, club
membership, Medicare and tax file numbers, drivers licence, photograph album, old
letters and Christmas cards. Everything was recorded on computer, every file
protected by an inbuilt code to prevent 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.