Free Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues by Garry Disher Page A

reflecting the
late-morning sun. There was a handful of student pilots in the air, circling
the field, touch landing and taking off again. Wyatt watched for a couple of
minutes then entered the terminal building.

    Island Air was a desk front three
metres long, staffed by a young woman wearing a polka-dot dress. According to
her name tag she was called Nicole and she smiled at Wyatt. I hope youre Mr
White.

    Wyatt agreed that he was.

    We thought you werent going to
make it. The others are just boarding now.

    Wyatt looked at his watch, then at
the clock on the wall behind her. The difference in time was twenty minutes and
that meant his watch was faulty.

    Nicole was all smiles. Battery?

    Must be, Wyatt agreed.

    It wasnt the kind of mistake he
could afford to make. It wasnt the kind of mistake hed normally anticipate,
either. He gave Nicole his ticket and watched her fingers on the VDU keyboard.
Island Air flew to King Island twice a day, at 11.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. He was
booked on the eleven-thirty, timed to connect with a TasAir flight from King
Island to Wynyard. It was a long way home, costly and tedious, but Wyatt liked
to avoid showing his face in the terminal building of major airports. He had a
car at Wynyard. From there to the flat he rented in Hobart was a three or four
hour drive.

    Nicoles smile was a wide seam of
white teeth. She leaned on the counter and pointed to double-glass doors at the
side of the terminal. Through there, Mr White.

    Island Air flew twin-engine,
ten-seater Chieftains on the King Island route. The flight took fifty minutes
and Wyatt ignored the other passengers and read about the magnetic drill gangs
raid on a bank in the Upper Yarra region outside Melbourne. The Age gave
it a bare, three-sentence outline. The Herald-Sun police reporter gave
it ten sentences and was inclined to be hysterical. She finished the story with
a quote from a man in the street: It certainly makes you think. If thats a
gauge of the ordinary Australians powers of reflection, Wyatt thought, then he
deserves everything he gets.

    King Island looked green and hilly
in the water below, dairy farms stitched together in irregular patterns by
narrow roads. The Chieftain touched down at twelve-twenty; ten minutes later,
Wyatt was aboard a fifteen-seater Heron. He was offered sandwiches and coffee
but his first hesitant bite of the sandwich fired up his bad tooth and his
first sip of the coffee made it worse. He swallowed two paracetamol tablets and
closed his eyes, the thin planes of his face drawn together in strain and
exhaustion.

    He awoke, senses dulled, when the
Heron bounced down at Wynyard. On the drive south, Wyatt judged that he had
about another twelve months with Jardine. They wouldnt have a falling out,
they wouldnt get caught Jardine would simply run out of good jobs for him.
What then? Wyatt couldnt see any big scores on the horizon, he couldnt see
himself doing contract work for organised people like the Sydney Outfit, he
couldnt see himself putting teams of unknowns together again. The old ways
were gone, it seemed. Men like himprivate, professional, meticulouswere
anachronistic in a world given over to impulse and display.

    A great deal was at stake. Ten,
fifteen years ago, Wyatt had been able to pull just a few big jobs each year,
living on the proceeds, spending weeks or months at a time in places where no
one knew him. He liked having a safe haven, a place where he was unknown and
overlooked, a place he could slip home to between jobs. Hed had it once, a
comfortable old farmhouse on fifty hectares on the Victorian coast south-east
of Melbourne, bought with the proceeds of a bullion heist at Melbourne airport.
His windows had looked out over the sea and Phillip Island, and for Wyatt living
there was like a rest from running.

    Then everything had gone wrong and
hed been forced into a life of mistakes and betrayals and looking over his
shoulder for the man carrying a gun or a knife or a badge. For three