‘Just coffee,’ Wyatt told the kid waiting on them at the corner table, near a door, next to a window.
Liz Redding looked at him across the table, a faintly amused expression on her face. What he read there said that she thought him abstemious, and not only because he hadn’t ordered anything to eat, so he said, ‘And an apple danish,’ seeing her mouth stretch into a grin.
‘Now I don’t feel so bad about ordering scones and cream,’ she said. ‘It’s been a while since breakfast, and it’s a long drive up here.’
This was small talk. Wyatt didn’t try to look interested. Liz Redding wasn’t someone who’d indulge in it for long, anyway.
He nodded pleasantly, looked around. He was sitting where he could see the room, each door, part of the strip of asphalt outside. Liz Redding had her back unconcernedly to the room. That was a good sign, it said she wasn’t expecting trouble. Then he realised that she could see all she needed to see reflected in the mirror behind him. He decided that that was a good sign, too.
There were no other customers. The cafй was the kind of place that did plenty of business on weekend afternoons, a little on weekday afternoons, virtually none before lunch. All that glass on three sides admitted plenty of warming sunlight into the room. Wyatt could detect coffee in the air. The waitress had passed their order through a serving hatch behind the cash register and was perched on a stool now, chin down, frowning over the split ends in her hair. A radio murmured on a shelf behind her, too low for him to isolate one word from another. No music, so he guessed it was a talk show. Crockery clattered in the distant reaches of the kitchen.
The tables, chairs and benches gleamed with a honeyed, piney light. It was a restful place for a transaction outside of the law. Wyatt scratched one fingernail across the tucks in the check-patterned gingham tablecloth and saw Liz Redding’s hand there, long-fingered, elastic, appealingly knuckly. They were good hands to look at and he imagined the rest of her.
One hand seemed to twitch in reaction to him, lift, fall to the cloth and pick at the material. She said, ‘They want me to check the stones.’
He’d expected that. He passed her the Tiffany but then their orders arrived. Liz Redding’s eyes were avid, full of appetite. ‘Just in time. I could feel crankiness coming on.’
Wyatt watched her spoon the chocolatey froth of her coffee into her mouth, take the first sip, lick away the residue from her upper lip. She leaned toward him across the table and he thought for a moment that she wanted to kiss him, but she propped her chin in her cupped palm and said, ‘What’s the waitress doing?’
Wyatt looked past her to the cash register. ‘She’s gone out the back.’
‘Good.’
Liz sat back, fastened her jeweller’s glass to her eye, examined each of the stones intently. Wyatt watched her hands, the clean, healthy pores like pinpricks speckling the brown skin. She looked up. ‘So far so good. You haven’t substituted pieces of cut glass for the stones. Now to see that you haven’t substituted cheap diamonds for expensive ones.’
She was twinkling, enjoying herself. She handled the Tiffany again, peering for telltale scratches around the settings. Satisfied, she rummaged in her bag and brought out a tiny set of scales. Wyatt watched carefully, but her hands were quick and covert this time and he glimpsed nothing of what else she might have in the bag.
‘Still all clear?’
He nodded.
She placed the scales on the table, effectively concealing them among the cups, plates, sugar bowl and a tall, matched pair of salt and pepper shakers.
‘She’s back.’
Liz froze. Her hands crept around the scales.
‘It’s okay. She’s staring off into space.’
Liz used a small tool to prise out a couple of representative stones. She picked them up with tweezers, weighed one and then the other in the tiny bowl of the scales.
‘Women’s Weekly seal of approval,’ she said. ‘Each stone weighs in as the real thing. Sorry,’ she said, meaning the rigamarole.
Wyatt was unconcerned. ‘It’s business,’ he said.
He had no appetite, for the transaction was not complete, but picked up the danish anyway and bit into it. The pastry was thick, binding, and it dried the inside of his mouth. The apple was too chunky. He drained part of his coffee, ate more of the danish.
It was then that Wyatt’s mouth seemed to fill with grit. He grimaced, tongued the stuff to his lips, removed it with his fingers.
‘What’s wrong?’
Wyatt placed the offending sludge onto his plate and separated pastry and apple from a jagged chip of tooth and new amalgam. His tongue automatically ran along his upper teeth, registering a rough hole and a loose fragment, all that remained of the tooth that had been making his life hell for two months.
‘I’ve lost a filling.’
Fascinated, Liz Redding stared at the chip on his plate. ‘More than that. Your tooth’s split. Is it the tooth that’s been bothering you?’
He nodded.
‘A new filling on top of old ones?’
‘Yes.’
‘It split open,’ she said. ‘They’ll do that. Which one is it?’
‘Top. Back,’ he said, his tongue busy.
“That’s not so bad. It won’t affect your chewing and you won’t need a false one in its place.’
‘You seem to know all about it.’
She was still leaning across the table, her upper body straining toward him. Unconsciously he leaned toward her. They seemed to be joined by this humble human catastrophe.
That’s why they failed to notice the junkie with the gun. He came in through the main door and a moment later Liz blinked and murmured, ‘Behind me.’
Wyatt looked past her shimmering black hair to the doorway. The man who stood there, a little rocky on his feet, wore scuffed boots, a torn T-shirt, greasy jeans and denim jacket. He needed a shave and a haircut. Wyatt expected to catch a whiff of him, a smell compounded of unwashed skin and clothing, oil and petrol, and something else, a rotten intestinal system leaking cheap alcohol and costly, impure chemicals bought in alleys and brewed in backyard amphetamine factories.
The man hadn’t seen them. He wiped the back of his hand across his nose, tried to focus, jerked the gun as if waving crowds of people aside. Wyatt watched carefully, following the gun. The size told him it was a.357 and it seemed to have the weight of a genuine.357, not a disposal-store replica. Then he saw the man stop wavering and focus on the waitress. She was rooted to her stool, uselessly opening and closing her mouth. The man giggled insanely and shuffled toward her. ‘Gimme,’ he was muttering, ‘gimme,’ showing a mouthful of healthy teeth, and that wasn’t right.
Liz Redding had her bag in her lap, bent over it protectively. She had the Tiffany in there, and Wyatt’s reward money. ‘We should do something before he hurts her,’ she said, beginning to turn her head.
Wyatt stopped her, his voice low and even, not wasting itself on unnecessary words or useless inflections: ‘Don’t move. Don’t attract his attention.’
They waited there, frozen, watching the junkie. Wyatt saw him push the waitress off the stool. ‘Gimme. Gimme.’
The shove seemed to wake her. She stumbled to the register, opened it, shrank back against the serving hatch. No one in the kitchen had noticed her. Wyatt heard dishes rattling, a cheerful whistle, water rushing into a sink.
The junkie crammed a few notes from the till into his back pocket. He was sniggering, maybe imagining the next fix. Wyatt saw him swing away again toward the door, then stop, greed showing on his face.
Liz breathed, ‘Oh God, he’s seen us.’
Wyatt watched as the junkie approached them slowly, keeping behind Liz Redding but beginning to circle so that he would soon be coming in on their flank.
Wyatt’s left flank. It seemed to be deliberate. Wyatt had the little.32 in his lap but the angle was bad. He’d have to shoot across himself, across the table, and, unless the man widened the circle, he’d have to place his shot close to Liz Redding’s shoulder.
So far the junkie was mostly bleary and unpredictable, as if he’d targeted them as a soft touch who’d hand over their wristwatches and spare cash and not kick up a fuss about it. But then the muzzle of the.357 came up, the man spread his legs and crouched, and he began to raise a steadying hand to the gun. He was clean and cool and focused suddenly, snapping out of his chemical trance more quickly than any junkie Wyatt had ever known.
All these things registered with Wyatt and he swung the.32 into view, catching his knuckles under the lip of the table, wasting a precious fragment of time.
He would have been too slow. It was Liz who shot the man. She didn’t do what amateurs do, turn her head first to find the problem then bring her gun to bear on it, but swung everything around-trunk, arms, eyes and gun-cutting the delay time, tracking the target, firing the instant she had him placed.
She shot the junkie twice, one a doubling-over punch to the stomach, the other straight into the crown of his head. This second shot blew the man back against a table. He rolled off, tangled with a chair, and fell, leaving a red smear on the tabletop. Wyatt saw that he was dead. The interesting fact about the dead man was his crooked wig.