Wyatt leaned over her, scarcely brushed her forehead with his mouth, but she woke instantly and dragged him down. Stay.
No.
She sighed. Just testing.
He couldnt stay because this was an inside job and the police would look hard at anyone who knew about the bank transfer. They would look hardest at the branch staff and the security firm but when they drew a blank there they would look at other people in the know. They could conceivably question friends and neighbours and Anna Reid might find herself accounting for the strange man she was seen kissing goodbye in her dressing gown on a Sunday morning one week before the hit on the TrustBank in Logan City.
So Wyatt was leaving at 3 am. He leaned over, let her plant kisses around his neck, his ears. He tingled with it.
He caught a cruising taxi on Coronation Drive in Auchenflower and took it to a street corner four blocks from the Victoria Hotel. He walked the rest of the way. The lobby was deserted. He slept until 10 am, awoken by cleaning staff in the corridor outside his room. He felt a curious kind of peace and realised what it was. Tension like a second skin had bound him for too long but now hed torn through it. Hunted, crossed, destitute, he had been living a young punks version of viciousness and instinctive cunning. But his hours with Anna Reid, the promise of the job, had released him and now he felt compact and alert.
There was an express bus to Logan City at eleven oclock. Wyatt would have preferred a car but he didnt want to risk stealing one, he didnt want to squander Anna Reids five thousand on buying one that proved to be unreliable, and hed long ago lost all his fake ID so he couldnt hire one. There were six people on the bus: two men and a woman bleary-eyed from an all-night bender; an elderly couple dressed for church; a man in a tracksuit carrying an Adidas bag. Wyatt sat at the rear, under the push-out window where he could watch his back and his front.
The shopping centre had the blighted, end-of-the-world atmosphere of a cheap studio set. Someone had thrown a rock at a jewellers window, cracking but not breaking the glass. A pair of womens underpants cringed next to a half-consumed apple in the gutter outside the milk bar opposite the main TrustBank branch. The milk bar was open but the streets were long, broad, windswept and empty. Wyatt went in and bought coffee and a Sunday paper. He sat at a round plastic garden table by the window and drank his coffee.
Using the newspaper propped as cover, he scanned the bank on the other side of the street. It was constructed of plate glass, aluminium and prefabricated blocks of concrete, like any new bank anywhere. There was one front entrance, glass, next to an automatic teller machine set in windows screened by a broad-slatted vertical blind on the inside of the glass.
If he were a cowboy hed ram a truck through the glass and bring all hell down on his head.
Or go in with guns and watch futilely as security screens slammed downproviding there were security screens. But even if he were able to get behind the counter there was no guarantee hed have easy access to the strongroom. It would take time and patience to get cooperation or understanding from the frightened bank staff, and even then someone might trip an alarm. If the safe were on a time lock and the manager shut it at the first sign of trouble, it was all over, no access to the money inside unless he blasted or drilled through, or waited twenty-four hours for the locks to release again.
Still using the newspaper as cover, Wyatt left the milk bar and ambled across the street. An empty bus bellowed away from a bus-stop in the distance. A church bell rang out somewhere; it sounded electronic. He could smell toast and supposed that people lived in flats behind or above the shopfronts.
There were no doors or windows in the wall facing the side street. The inside wall was shared with a remainder bookshop. That left the rear of the bank.
Wyatt walked on. The side wall stretched for twenty-five metres and he came to a small courtyard carpark. A sign read KEEP CLEAR AT ALL TIMES. There was one door in the back wall, solid, made of steel, and one small, barred window set high up in the wall. Then Wyatt heard a toilet flushing and knew they had a permanent guard on the premises.
He idled past the little courtyard, reading the sports pages. A minimum of three men, himself and two others, preferably with a fourth man to drive them out of there, though Wyatt had been let down by drivers in the past. They got twitchy and drove into lampposts, they turned up in vehicles that belonged in a wreckers yard, they didnt turn up at all. If they could somehow get a reliable vehicle into that courtyard, they could load the money via the rear entrance to the bank.
Then Wyatt wandered back the way hed come. He paused outside the parking area and bent to tie his shoelaces. There were two rubbish bins and a number of empty cartons stacked in one corner. Otherwise there was space for only one vehicle and it was designated manager only in white stencilled paint on the wall facing it.
Wyatt knew how they were going to do it.