The Heat Read Free Page B

brush, he applied foundation that suggested gauntness of the cheeks while emphasising the underlying bones. A dark brown pencil intensified the shadow beneath his lower lip;
a fine brush, applying a light colour to his eyebrow and temples, suggested grey streaks and a hint of middle-aged tiredness and experience. An educated man, perhaps. Faintly startled, essentially harmless.
    Armed with ID photos, he started on the paperwork. Each document made the next easier to obtain; none would be approved if he couldn’t supply a bona fide street address. A post office box was no good. Wyatt gave the motel’s street address. The manager didn’t mind his premises being a mail drop; minded even less when Wyatt slipped him
$100. The bureaucrats didn’t insist on a landline number, fortunately. They’d be happy with the number of the prepaid mobile Wyatt had purchased from an arcade kiosk.
    By the end of two weeks he was complete in his new identity. He had no history—only a certificate that said a man with his new name had been born in Ararat forty years ago. But history didn’t matter to anyone anymore. People would want to know who he was and what he did, not what he’d done. Assuming they were interested in the first place.

3
    Stefan Vidovic had spent two weeks nursing resentment, fear, desperation and a broken finger.
    The little finger on his left hand, snapped like a twig by one of Arlo Waterfield’s blokes, a pyramid-shaped giant who smelled of caramel milkshake and whose eyes only dully comprehended that the finger he’d broken was causing Vidovic pain. The finger was stage two, a reminder that Vidovic had failed stage one, which was to pay Waterfield Turf Enterprises eighteen thousand dollars within a week.
    Stage three was maybe death, the goon had said without apparent interest. ‘But just to show you how fair Mr Waterfield can be, you’ve got another week, by which time you’ll owe twenty-five grand. Is there a lesson to be learnt here, Stefan?’
    The lesson was to go into hiding. Vidovic couldn’t see any way of raising twenty-five grand in seven days.
    He thought about what Wyatt would do, and went to ground in a Rosebud caravan park. There he nursed his splinted finger and considered disappearing. It was possible;
it wasn’t like he’d be abandoning family and friends to Arlo Waterfield’s mercy. Vidovic was more or less alone in the world. He knew men like Wyatt, that’s all, and Wyatt wasn’t a mate. You didn’t, for example, call on Wyatt for a loan.
    Vidovic walked south along the sand, with the jetty and the distant, misty towers of the city behind him. If he walked far enough he’d reach Portsea, playground of the rich and not-necessarily-famous.
    Money. Vidovic’s thoughts veered back to the Pepper brothers’ armoured-car job. Wyatt was right, the brothers were amateurs—but the idea was good. Vidovic had met with them twice before bringing Wyatt in, and he’d seen their lists of dates, times and routes, their maps and charts. They even knew radio frequencies.
    It boiled down to this: they knew exactly which banks, building societies, credit unions, cheque-cashing joints and supermarkets were serviced by the SecureCor vans on any given day. And they knew how the van personnel worked the pickup. Three men: driver and two guards. One guard in the passenger seat, one locked in with the money bags. The driver never left the cab. His passenger would get out, secure the okay from the pickup point, then signal to the guard inside the rear of the van. Then that guard would shadow the first guard during the pickup or the delivery. The van would remain locked: driver’s door, passenger door, rear doors. Only the driver could let the guards back into the van.
    ‘Piece of cake,’ according to Jack Pepper, who’d declined to elaborate prior to meeting Wyatt. And look how that turned out.
    Seated on the steps of his caravan, Stefan Vidovic tried to see how overcoming armed guards and locked doors