Free Wyatt - 06 - The Fallout by Garry Disher Page A

her.

    Hed gone below, first to the packet
of Mogadon in the medicine cabinet, then to the wall oven in the galley. It was
set into the bulkhead and worked perfectly well as an oven, but it also slid
out to reveal a small waterproof safe. Wyatt pocketed a roll of $100 notes, his
.38 revolver and a distinctive necklace, and closed everything again, just as
Liz Redding had called down to him, Wyatt? Is everything all right?

    Coming now.

    Hed laced her coffee, then added a
dash of Scotch, and carried it to her in the wheelhouse.

    She let him take the wheel. She
sipped her coffee. Ah, hot, foul and bracing.

    Wyatt said nothing. He watched the
heaving sea. It was not a companionable silence. All of the topics between them
had been pushed as far as he was able to take them, and he was waiting, with
sadness, for his final act of betrayal to take effect. In a mood of
disconnection and apathy, they had sailed through the night.

    Someone had once accused him of working
from an emotionless base. He mused on that now, as the plane banked above the
Bass Strait islands. He mused on it for half a minute, all it was worth, trying
to picture the face he presented to the world. He knew it could be assertive,
prohibitive, sometimes chilling, giving nothing away. Most peoples faces were
a barometer of their feelings. They bulged in all directions, chased by doubts,
scruples and conflicts. But it was not true that Wyatt was emotionless. He had
room only for the essential ones, thats all, and he kept those to himself. Up
until now, that hadnt been a problem.

    The pilots voice broke in upon his
melancholy. They were descending.

    Ten minutes later, Wyatt discovered
that he would have to spend the night on the island.

    The next morning, he was on the
first flight out. When the plane touched down at Hobart Airport, Wyatt climbed
into a taxi. There was always the risk that a cab driver would remember his
face one day, but Wyatt had no intention of taking the airport bus to the city.
Wyatt knew all about that bus. Hed been caught before. A good ten years older
than airport buses anywhere else in the world, it would hum along the freeway
and over the bridge and into the tight, one-way streets of Hobart, encouraging
a sense of mission accomplished in its passengers. But then, unaccountably, it
would begin to stop at the hotels, the motels, the casino way to hell and gone
down Sandy Bay Road, dropping off passengers, before finally winding its way
back to the downtown bus station, scarcely emptier than when it had set out,
the majority obliged to wait for the chosen few. There was nothing democratic
about that bus.

    He paid off the taxi at the wharf
opposite Salamanca Place, leaving him with a ten-minute walk to his apartment
building. Hed never taken a cab all the way to the door in his life. He always
concealed his final destination and covered his tracks. That was second nature
to Wyatt. It was part of an automatic checklist that had kept him alive and out
of gaol and mostly ahead since the day he was born.

    The Mawson base supply ship was in
dock. He idled for a while, watching crated food and equipment being winched
aboard. The bow looked scraped, freshly wounded, as though the ship had
ploughed through ice recently, leaving paint smears in its wake.

    Wyatt turned to go. He stood for
some time on the footpath, waiting for the traffic to clear, and came close to
witnessing a death. A boy had ambled onto the road from the opposite footpath.
He was about ten, undernourished, cheaply dressed, hair cropped short as though
for fashions sake but probably to control head lice. He was cramming a
hamburger into his mouth, and the car that braked to avoid him, snout dipping
with the raw, smoking bite of its tyres, skewed violently and finally stopped,
its front bumper gently knocking the boys knees.

    The world held its breath. One
second. Two seconds. There was something wrong about the boys reaction time.
Then suddenly he spasmed with fright. One