Wyatt - 05 - Port Vila Blues Read Free Page A

bag. I
found a piece of jewellery hidden with the money. Valuable, Tiffany butterfly.

    Nice.

    We need someone who can offload it
for us.

    Jardine laboured to his feet and
shuffled into the adjoining kitchen. A short time later, Wyatt heard his voice,
a low murmur on the telephone.

    He stared across the room at the
little computer perched mute on a card table. Jardine used it to
cross-reference jockey weights, track conditions, blood-line and other
horse-racing factors. In five years he claimed to have won $475,000 and lost
$450,000 using his system. What people didnt know was that Jardine had also
spent the past few years selling burglary and armed holdup plans to
professionals like Wyatt. Wyatt didnt know how many jobs Jardine had on file,
but he did know that they were all in New South Wales and that all would grow
rapidly out of date the longer Jardine stayed in Melbourne with his sister.

    Jardine came back. A sheila called
Liz Redding, eleven this morning, a motel on St Georges Road.

    Wyatt watched Jardine carefully.
Jardines face had grown more elastic in the past few minutes, as if his mind
worked well if he had something to stimulate it. Wyatt even recognised an old
expression on Jardines face, a mixture of alertness and absorption as he
calculated the odds of a problem.

    Fine.

    * * * *

    Three

    They
took a taxi to meet Jardines fence. Wyatt wound down his window and leaned
into the wind. Every after-hours lapse and misery the car had ever seen was
leaking from the seats into the confined space behind the driver. Jardine,
foggy in the head again, leaned back into the corner and appeared to sleep. It
irritated Wyatt. First the vicious, jabbing pain in his upper jaw, and now
this, his friend well under par when he needed him to be sharp with the woman
who would be fencing the Tiffany for them.

    Whats she like? Wyatt had asked,
before the taxi arrived.

    Never met her.

    A chilling kind of dispassion was
Wyatts style, but this time hed given in to his impatience and his throbbing
tooth. Mate, how do you know shes any good?

    I checked around. Mack Delaney
trained her.

    Macks dead.

    Yeah, but he was one of the best.

    Wyatt conceded that. Hed used
Delaney once in the old days to move stolen gear. Delaney had specialised in
ransoming silverware, paintings, watches and coin and stamp collections back to
the owners or to the insurance companies, but now and then hed forge the
provenance of a painting and sell it at auction overseas. As hed explained it
to Wyatt, art thieves had it good in Australia. Insurance premiums were
prohibitive, meaning galleries and private owners were often not insured,
relying on cheap security systems to protect their paintings. They also tended
not to keep good photographs of the items in their collections, or at best only
kept handwritten descriptions. An international magazine called Trace tackled
art theft by maintaining a computerised recording system, but subscription
costs were high and there were on-line compatibility problems, and, as a
result, few of the Australian galleries, dealers, auctioneers or private
collectors had joined. Many paintings stolen in Australia were shipped overseas
to private buyers. Mack had explained that in Japan it was possible to gain
legal title to a stolen art work after only two years; in Switzerland, after
five years. Then there were the buyers who had no interest in aesthetics. They
used the paintings to finance drug deals. In Wyatts eyes, everything boiled
down to that, these days.

    Wyatt peered at the motel as they
passed in the taxi. There always was a motel, in Wyatts game. He hid in
motels, outlined hits in motels, divided the take in motels. Motels made sense.
The other guests left you alone, coming and going just as you did. If the truth
be known, half of them were probably up to something illicit or illegal anyhow.
Unfortunately motels were also easy to stake out and potential traps. They were
stamped from the same mould: layout, carpet,