Free The Heat by Garry Disher Page B

barely glimpsed through the intervening trees.
    The apartment’s sliding doors were open. He stepped in and felt private, shut away. He liked it. He didn’t want to converse or entertain. The kitchen benches, table and floor tiles gleamed dully. The cleaners had used eucalyptus-scented detergents, pleasant, not too strong.
    Down a short corridor to a bathroom and two bedrooms. The main bedroom looked over the rear garden, the crescent and the apartments opposite. Queen-size bed. Two single beds in the second bedroom. The bathroom was small: a shower and a vanity unit.
    He unpacked his few belongings: the lightweight summer suit, two pairs of chino pants, a pair of shorts, underwear, a jacket, a couple more T-shirts, the white cotton shirt he’d worn under the suit, a short-sleeved shirt, one tie, one pair of running shoes, one pair of business shoes, the makeup kit.
    At four-thirty that afternoon, Wyatt hired a Hyundai from the Budget on Mary Street, saying he’d return it in the morning. Driving to Gympie Terrace, he waited, window down, for Leah Quarrell to emerge from RiverRun Realty. At five-forty there was distant cheering. Perhaps the Lions had won their preliminary final?
    Twenty minutes later Quarrell locked up and drove off in a yellow VW. Wyatt followed her to a paint-peeling white bungalow on a side street in Tewantin, further along the river from Noosaville. He watched her park in the driveway, use a key to enter the house. She shut the door and didn’t emerge again. The lawn, bleached by the sun, needed cutting. Faded back issues of the weekly newspaper lay in the grass, on the path, against palings. Wyatt guessed she was scrupulous at work and a slob at home, and wondered what hungers drove her.
    At 6.30 p.m. a big Kawasaki burbled along the street and bounced through the gate and onto the lawn. The man who climbed off it and propped it on the kick stand was broad shouldered, solid, his hair pale and cropped. He was in love with his bike and his toughness, and Wyatt saw him climb the rotting steps to the front door, holding a gym bag and slapping his leather gauntlet against his thigh. He walked in. She’d left the door unlocked for him.
    Boyfriend?

10
    Trask strode into Leah’s house, found her in the kitchen, dressed in an apron over a T-shirt, slim bare legs gleaming below the hem. She didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t turn from the stove. Par for the course. And when he planted his lips on her long, damp neck, she wriggled her slim shoulders. It meant either Knock it off or Maybe later . It didn’t mean Do it again .
    ‘Ya hear? The Lions are in the grand final.’
    Leah ignored him. She was cooking, something she rarely did, and badly. Bolognese sauce by the look of it. Minced steak, onions, garlic, tinned tomatoes and tomato paste. No herbs, no dash of red wine, no salt or pepper or stock cube or pinch of sugar to take the edge off all that tomato. But she’d said they had to talk where there were no ears to listen, so they’d be eating in.
    Trask bent his large frame into the fridge, peered around without hope, but there was one beer can, Cascade Light. Letting go of the door, watching it swing closed, the magnetised seals kissing quietly, he pulled the ring on the can. Leah was drinking
gin and tonic, her glass on the window ledge above the sink. That one glass would last her the whole evening. She said nothing when he touched his bottle to the glass and said, ‘Cheers,’ simply shrugged her tiny upper torso again. What a pair, he thought: the butterfly and the brick shithouse.
    Nothing happened for a while. Trask sank his beer, Leah cooked. She didn’t ask him how it had gone with Wurlitzer.
    Bored, he used the bathroom. Bathrooms soothed him. He would sit and dream and gaze and read the labels on the tubes and bottles. Leah’s bathroom was full of expensive shampoos and lotions with obscure names written in scripts overloaded with umlauts and circumflexes. Designed to suggest exotic