By Garry Disher
It started at my new place, night-time noises that didn’t sound right.
Ironically enough, noise is the reason I had moved there in the first place. Police helicopters, breaking glass, burglar alarms, the bass beat of stereos like repeated explosions underground, car alarms outside my bedroom window—some mornings in Fitzroy I’d wake feeling too wired to write. I was working on Kickback then, Jack’s first story, and I’d find myself staring out the window, picturing the little place he had near the coast, the clean air, the birds, the silence, the peace of it all before everything went sour on him and he was forced to run. The double irony is, he left the coast, I moved to the coast—not far from where he’d been living, in fact—and before too long things were going bump in the night and robbing me of sleep and composure.
By then I’d written Pay dirt, his second story, and Deathdeal, his third, and there were all those other yarns of his waiting to be shaped into novels, but my concentration was shot. The first wrong note, excuse the pun, was the wind chimes ringing out on a night when there was no wind. It was about 10.30 and I was in bed, reading. There was no wind but those chimes rang out with the kind of abrupt discordancy that made me think prowler, someone who didn’t know the chimes were hanging there on the verandah. The love/sex interest in this story flung down her Sisters in Crime newsletter, revealing her small but high, low-slung but pointed, melony but round, sloping but curved, tanned but creamy breasts and said, ‘What the fuck was that?’ I yanked back the curtain and spotlit the verandah with a torch, but all I got was light coming back at me from the glass and by then it was too late. I didn’t poke around outside; maybe I should have.
Then there were the other noises. You have to understand that although I grew up on the land I have lived nearly twenty-five years of my life away from it, so I was rediscovering the seasons, the animals, the birds. Especially the birds. They were nesting. I would look up from writing something—some stunt that Jack was pulling; some sentence where I was trying to convey the essence of stillness and dispassion in his face—and see sparrows and wrens angling up into the palm tree, trailing straw four times their length. The willy-wagtails intrigued me the most, their little grey mud egg-cup nests, their devotion to the eggs, the hatchlings, more than anything their fearlessness, the splatter of stuttering, scolding fury that said back off if you got too close. So who would they be sounding a warning to at one o’clock in the morning?
Then there were the messages on my answering machine. A couple of times the caller simply clicked off, so it could have been anybody, but twice there was no click, no voice, just a palpable sense of someone listening to the silence in the house, the silence that said the house was empty and open.
The voiced messages, they were something else. ‘You got it wrong, Wyatt.’ Not that I had got it wrong, Wyatt had got it wrong. If I’d been told that I’d got it wrong, the author had got it wrong, I’d have been able to relate to it, and it wouldn’t have been the first time. There had been the gun freak who left a message informing me that revolvers don’t have safety catches; the purist who believed Wyatt did things that Richard Stark’s Parker would never have done; the safe expert who pointed out that floor safes are bolted down, you don’t just wheel them out.
(Where did these people get my number from, that’s what I’d like to know.)
I can live with my fuck-ups being pointed out to me. It’s my job to get it right (just as it’s every crime writer’s job, which is why I won’t be lifting information about firearms and safes from other crime novels any more), but to say that Jack had got it wrong—Wyatt had got it wrong—is something else entirely. Of course he’s fucked up sometimes. He’s worked with people he couldn’t trust, he’s failed to see the wild balls coming in from left field, he’s limited himself to old-style bank and payroll heists when he could have made a mint from dealing drugs (if you could call failing to deal drugs a fuck-up). So here was this guy on the machine telling me Wyatt had got it wrong and I didn’t know what he meant. Four times he said it, four separate occasions, nothing more, just a low growl, cold and hard: ‘You got it wrong, Wyatt.’
There were other things. My cat on a cushion, his ears pricking up, every nerve ending along his spine registering something, someone, outside the house. A garden tap left running. Two flat tyres on the elderly Volvo, the twenty-five-year-old car I run because it’s built like a tank and show me the writer who can afford a newish car anyway. A gate left open, allowing the old ewe that came with the place to get out, so now I have to plant fruit trees all over again.
I tried to tell myself it was the neighbour’s kids, they’re a wild bunch, the family has bred horses here for generations whereas I’m new, no better than a Collins Street farmer or a January holidaymaker in their eyes, but you don’t see the neighbour’s kids with books in their hands, which is why, when I found a page from Paydirt knifed to the back door one day, I knew the problem was very real and nasty, the sort of problem that had imagination and flair behind it, which ruled out the neighbour’s kids.
The page? It was from Chapter 12, where Wyatt figures out how he’s going to ambush and rob a security van on a lonely bush track. It was a good plan, only things went wrong. It’s like that for Jack: he’s smart but too often he fails to account for the stupidity and duplicity of others. He’s preternaturally wary, he keeps his eyes open, his attitude says I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it, but you can’t cover all the bases all the time. Still, things-going-wrong is part of the appeal of his stories.
The knife? It was a kitchen knife. From the knife drawer. You could go into my kitchen and put your hand right on it.
So far I’m talking about gestures here, traces, signs, and all they added up to was a pissed-off character who wanted me to know that he was pissed off. Clearly he was pissed off with Jack, but I was easier to find than Jack and so he was taking it out on me.
Then a month later he stopped making gestures and tried to kill me.
It was a Wednesday evening and I’d driven up to Melbourne to take part in a crime-writing soiree organised by the National Book Council. It was held in Mietta’s, a restaurant and bar with the dimpled leather armchair and open fireplace atmosphere of a gentleman’s club. Anyway, the place was packed, but they were there to hear Kerry Greenwood, not me, so I got in a couple of gentle digs about the Phryne Fisher type of crime fiction and left to drive home.
I remember that I was somewhere around Abbotsford, stopped at the lights that would take me onto Hoddle Street, wondering how long it takes to establish a series character in the public’s eye, when I felt a vehicle bump into the back of the Volvo. Now, the light was red, and this was the gentlest of taps, and my car is old, so I didn’t bother to get out. I just waited for the light to change, idly thinking I was in Wyatt territory, things seem to happen to Wyatt in Abbotsford, when I felt another bump, much harder this time. I glanced up at the rear-view mirror and there were two implacable headlights there and an impression of bulk and muscle, it was a four-wheel drive, armoured with a massive bull-bar, and it was backing up, ramming me, backing up, ramming me.
It stopped. There must have been something wrong with the signal box, the traffic lights were still red, so I got out thinking, Right, I’ll have you, mate. It did me no good. The guy had locked his doors, his windows were tinted, and he’d plastered mud over his plates. He was impregnable. I looked at the damage. There was a pulley on the front of the 4WD, not only a bull bar, and it had scored an expensive-looking dent in the Volvo’s boot lid. I got back into the car, determined to U-turn out of there, but the moment I released the handbrake the 4WD rammed me again and this time he just kept going, pushing me metre by metre onto Hoddle Street, into the path of the ceaseless cross-town traffic.
Forget the U-turn. I spotted a gap and planted my foot, merging right, cutting in and out of lanes, heading north away from the freeway. At Langridge Street I turned right. My heart was hammering but by now I was calm enough to think I should do something about this guy. Besides, you’re obliged to report accidents. I think. The Collingwood police station is behind the town hall. I pulled in there, went in, stated my case. The scene went something like this:
Cop: Can you describe the vehicle?
Me: It was a four-wheel-drive.
Cop: Toyota? Range Rover? What?
Me: I’m not sure.
Cop: You’re not sure. How about the colour?
Me: Dark, possibly blue or black.
Cop: Well, blue or black?
Me: All colours look darker at night under street lights, so I can’t be sure.
That earned me a sour look. Then the cop said: What about the driver?
Me: I couldn’t see him.
Cop: Registration?
Me: The plates were covered in mud, I think deliberately.
A long look and the cop said: Why deliberately?
This was a tricky area I’d got myself into. I had no proof and there was a risk my explanation would drag Jack’s name into it, Jack who has never been fingerprinted, photographed or arrested by the cops but who nevertheless is known to them, number one, so I changed my tune quickly: Sorry, I meant to say accidentally.
Cop: Let’s take a look at your car.
Outside on the street the Volvo looked every one of its twenty-five years, and when the cop began doing a roadworthy on it, checking tyre tread depth, panel rust, windscreen chips, I began to wish I’d just gone on home with my tail between my legs. Then the cop said: Here’s your motive.
He was staring at the back of the car. I joined him. He indicated the Stop Uranium Mining sticker in the rear window (that shows you how long I’ve had the car) and said: There, see?
Me: You think so?
He was a beefy character, puffy and beer-fed, wearing a Merv Hughes moustache. The moustache bristled, that’s how I could tell he was grinning, and he said: Just asking for it, weren’t you, pal?
Me: It’s a free country.
Cop: And the other bloke was expressing his point of view. Look, I’ll make out a report if you like, it’s what I’m here for, but I’m telling you now, you’re wasting your time. We won’t be kicking ass on this one.
‘Kicking ass.’ Kicking arse sounds wrong, doesn’t it? It sounds weaker than ‘kicking ass’. I mean, I have my down-market characters—Sugarfoot, for example—use expressions like ‘kicking ass’, reality for them being shaped by or filtered through American film and TV, but, really, more and more people are talking like that these days.
Then again, sometimes when I’m writing Wyatt I find myself listening for the beat, the cool, flip, wise-ass tone or style or personality that works best and that makes American crime fiction so appealing and distinctive.
Anyway, I drove home then, my tail between my legs. You can understand why I want to give cops a hard time in my crime fiction. I can’t see myself writing police procedurals, somehow. Stephen Knight claims there’s a national wariness of the police in Australia, so they don’t figure very well in crime fiction. Maybe he’s right. Maybe this would have been a different story if I’d met a few Morses or Wexfords along the line or had a few beers with Carella and the guys from the old Eight-Seven.
I pushed through the dark night across the Mornington Peninsula, much as I’d imagined Jack had done in Kickback:
The sky was black. When moonlight struggled briefly through the heaped clouds he saw fog wisps like people in the road ahead. Fog hung over dams and creeks. Otherwise he felt that only he was abroad, only he awake, (p. 183)
That made me think this was a ghost story, maybe a horror story, I was in. If there was a human agency at work, I hadn’t seen the human. All I’d seen was the evidence of evil intent—signs and warnings—and that implacable throbbing 4WD like a living beast. Sure, the windows were tinted, but maybe there was no driver anyway.
It’s what you think at night but not in the clear light of day. The next morning I unbolted the house, checked outside—morning sun, the dew like diamonds, a clop of horses along the sunken road—and went back in and phoned Frank Jardine. Frank works with Jack sometimes. He can be trusted. There has to be someone Jack can work with, he can’t go a dozen books or even three or four without a reliable sidekick, someone like Grofield in the Parker novels. Jardine lives in Sydney, a hotel on Broadway, and I had to wait till he came on the line.
‘Yep.’
I told him who I was.
He sounded pleased. ‘Gaz, what can I do for you?’
I couldn’t say Jack’s name, maybe Jardine’s line was tapped, so I said, ‘I need to see Wyatt.’
‘Trouble?’
‘You could say that.’
I knew what Jardine was thinking, he was thinking cop trouble for Jack. Even with the elaborate artifice I’ve built around Jack—calling him Wyatt; the selection and shaping of the material; the invention; the tightrope walk between a story that is driven by character on the one hand and plot on the other—he still fears the cops might read the books, twig who Wyatt is, and use me to find him. In fact, in the early planning stages that’s where I thought this story was headed, it was a cop getting at me, but the evidence didn’t really fit that scenario and besides, I needed to bring Jack into it, and it’s not likely he’d come in if cops were involved.
‘I’ll tell Wyatt you called,’ Jardine said, and he broke the connection.
A note about the name. Jack wasn’t always called Wyatt. He was called Cody at first, as in the story ‘Cody’s Art’. He was called Cody in the first draft of Kickback, the second draft, the third draft, a year’s hard slog getting the story and the character to work, and every one of those drafts rejected. But by draft three I thought I’d got it right, so I tried a different publisher, Allen & Unwin, though I was also sufficiently demoralised to submit it under a nom-de-plume: I mean, what if the book was bad? I didn’t want too many people to know that I’d written a bad book. Fortunately they snapped it up, the book got rave reviews, and the only thing they wanted changed was Jack’s name. ‘ “Cody” is not hard enough,’ they said. I thought about it and came up with Wyatt. It sounds right, a whip snap, and a friend told me she’s reminded of Wyatt the meticulous architect, and Wyatt the poet: They flee from me that sometime did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber. (It can sometimes pay to drop quotes like this. To make it as a writer in Australia you have to become a darling of the English departments.) Jack didn’t care either way about the name. ‘Mate, you’re the writer,’ he said.
So I settled down and waited for Jack to contact me. I made notes for the next few Wyatts. It’s possible that if Jack didn’t exist I’d have been able to invent him, but not his capers. I mean, where can you pick up large amounts of cash these days? I wouldn’t have a clue, it’s all electronic transfer now. I’d have been able to invent obvious heists for him, banks and payrolls, but that would have been the extent of it. Fortunately Jack has always been able to sniff out other sources: a casino, an ALP frontbencher with $100,000 in his briefcase, a Medicare office in a large regional centre, the grand-final take from the MCG. If Jack can keep pulling these jobs I guess I can keep weaving stories around them. Once he stops, that’s it, back to ‘literary’ fiction, blood from a stone’ writing as Jean Bedford calls it.
Jack didn’t call me, he just showed up the next day. I didn’t hear a car, but I saw it later, a Hertz Falcon he probably rented with fake ID, screened from the road and the house by the leaves of the liquidamber. I didn’t hear his footsteps on the gravel drive or on the verandah, but then, silence is his element, he would have used the lawn, his shoes are rubber-soled. I didn’t hear the back door or any of the inner doors, I didn’t hear the board-creak of his passage through the house, he simply materialised in my study doorway. I looked up and there-he was, gazing at me.
‘Christ almighty.’
He smiled, a brief twist at the edge of his mouth. ‘Not quite.’
‘You could’ve knocked.’
‘Jardine said you were in trouble, so I came carefully, looking for the trouble.’
Jack is like that, flat and plain. I nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘You want to tell me about it?’
No small talk, he just gets right down to it. Anyway, he’s no good at small talk. He’ll engage in it for harmony’s sake or to keep someone from losing his nerve, but generally he can’t see the point of it.
So I explained what was wrong, all the details, leaving nothing out. Knowing Jack, I kept it clear and economical. ‘I want you to find out who’s doing it,’ I concluded, ‘and why.’
He looked at me, thinking it through. My brother is an enigma. I admire him, I always have, but I don’t know him at all. No-one does. He left home when he turned sixteen and never came back. I was ten and I felt the absence like an ache. No-one knew the life he lead, the thoughts he had, what drove him. He was private, like a western loner. Once or twice a year there would be a phone call and something about it, the darkness of the hour, signals from the atmosphere sounding distantly on the line, made me think of my brother in a far off place, the flat planes of his face in the wintry moonlight, the dark and watchful cast of him. I was at school, Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust was getting some airplay, and the line, ‘a booth in the mid-west’, ran in my head whenever my brother called home.
Years later he started to seek me out. Not often, just once in a while, sometimes hinting obliquely at what he’d been doing before he slipped away again. I know now, but our parents don’t, that he spent time in the army. He picked up skills there. He came out knowing how to kill, how to look after himself, but he also came out with a wad of cash—a base payroll, a couple of fleeced poker schools, a few black-market scams involving guns, radios, jeeps. He came out and he went to work and in a good year he’d spend four weeks pulling a couple of big jobs and take it easy for the other forty-eight. That’s how he acquired his place on the coast, his home before everything went sour on him. That part of it’s in Kickback, if you’re interested.
He looked at me and I looked back at him. Jack is tallish, six-one, and, like a cowboy archetype, he’s as long and hard and supple as a length of rope. He moves well, he thinks well, he perceives well. He doesn’t paralyse himself with scruples and inhibitions like the rest of us. People say to me, always with a smartarse look, ‘How much of you is in Wyatt?’ and I can’t tell them about my brother or alter egos or wish fulfilment.
‘Find out who and why?’ he said. ‘So now I’m a private eye, is that it?’
He can make a joke. Hear him talk about yuppies, other crims, contemporary values, and you’ll laugh; you’ll also go a little cold, recognising an unimpressed and pitiless eye. He can make a joke, but the delivery is flat, the smile if it’s there is brief and sharkish, so you have to learn to recognise it.
I smiled back at him. ‘You’re not so different from a PI,’ I said.
‘Okay, define the PI.’
I counted on my fingers. ‘One, you’re a loner, you’re not interested in collective solutions. Two, you’re sceptical about social redemption. Three, you do have some integrity, even if we can’t quite approve of you. Four, you’re the seeing eye, looking from below, but you’re also a participant, not just an onlooker. Five, you allay middle-class anxieties. There are some nasty people out there and we feel better when you get the better of them.’
Jack cut in. ‘Yeah, but I feed other anxieties, like if you happened to have a hundred grand sitting in the safe at home.’
I nodded, grinning. ‘True. Six, you’re street-wise, all those mental and physical skills we’d like to have.’
‘I’ve learnt them, built on them.’
I knew what he meant. Too often I’m irritated by fictional heroes, all that unexplained know-how, all those abilities. ‘Seven,’ I said, ‘you make sharp observations about contemporary life.’
Jack shook his head. ‘That’s you, Sunshine, intruding into the narrative.’ He poked his chest with a strong forefinger. ‘Me, I steal, simple as that. I don’t give a stuff about values, politics, the way people dress.’
I shrugged. I didn’t think he was right, but I said, ‘Suit yourself. Eight, the rest of us, we let ourselves get pushed around, we’re too polite, but you stand up for yourself. We’d like to be able to do that.’
The look on Jack’s face said he couldn’t see why that was so hard.
‘Nine,’ I said, ‘our heroes don’t let doubts and scruples and uncertainties hold them back.’
Jack’s expression said I was generalising. I thought then about V. I. Warshawski, how she carries a bundle of ordinary traits and frailties around with her; how family and friends, affiliation and cooperation, mean a great deal to her. I guess her life is closer to the lives of her readers than is the life of the majority of male heroes, loners, punishing the Scotch, emotionally crippled. Not that you could say Jack’s like that. He’s not so much socially or sexually blunted or awkward as emotionally unreadable. Not for the first time did I wonder what hurt drove him, if any. Our poor parents, they were convinced it was something they’d done. Anyway, does it have to be explained? Can’t he appear on the stage fully formed? This stopped me from listing number ten to him: an element of vulnerability. There’s Matt Scudder’s drink problem, Fred Carver’s gammy leg, Kinsey Milhone’s slapdash domestic life. Jack? I don’t know. It’s the not knowing that makes him appear isolated, unreachable, and I guess that can seem like some kind of ache, deep down inside him.
I don’t think of Jack as a reader but he must have read the odd book or two, for he said, ‘Private-eye stories are told in the first person. Are you going to have me narrate this story?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll use an observer narrator.’
He looked right inside me then, and I blushed. It’s as if he knew I’d tried to write about him in the first person but abandoned it: (a) because I didn’t know what makes him tick, even though I’d argue that it’s my job as a fiction writer to get inside the skin of someone who isn’t me, and (b) because a chill comes off the page when Wyatt is around and that chill penetrated like ice when I tried the first person, I felt a bleakness and it scared me. I tried the third-person and that worked, distancing the reader, distancing me.
Even so, people ask me, ‘How can a gentle-mannered bloke like you write books like that?’ Well, a lot of the material is stuff Jack tells me, but don’t these people read the daily papers? Don’t they listen to the news? Do they go around with their eyes closed or something? Besides, I’m admitting to private demons. I couldn’t write Wyatt if I didn’t. I couldn’t read Thomas Harris, James Ellroy. Maybe the people who ask me that question haven’t got any private demons. Pig’s arse they haven’t.
Anyway, Jack and I were still there in my study, having this stupid conversation, my years in the classroom showing, and he was getting restless. ‘How do you want to go about this?’ he said.
I thought about it. Peter Corris says he learned about PI methods from Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler. ‘Make a few house calls,’ I said. ‘Ask questions.’ Corris also noticed that the trigger in Ross Macdonald is often something way back in the past, now playing out its effects in the present, but I didn’t think that was relevant in this case. And Corris claims that ‘crime is a sort of backdrop to the real action, which is a resolution of some sort of disorder in the lives of a set of people.’ Well, that was true enough here, so I said to Jack: ‘Find out who’s hassling me, and why, and stop him.’
‘Motive, means and opportunity,’ Jack said.
‘Hell, this isn’t a murder story,’ I said. ‘Not yet, anyway. Just find me a mainspring that I can build, plot, structure and storyline around.’
* * * *
So Jack went to work. When he’s working, a film strip runs through my head, black and white, 1950s crime noir, something like Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). One thing was different this time. The question driving Jack— driving Wyatt—was Who is behind this? rather than his customary Can I pull off this robbery without getting caught?
He returned two days later, mid-evening. There was no hole-and-corner approach this time, he drove openly up the drive to the back of the house, letting his headlights cut across the windows. I went out. The engine was running, the lights still on, and as I approached he opened the passenger door and said, ‘Get in.’
‘Just a moment,’ I said. I went inside, told the love interest I was going out for a while, then returned to the car. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, strapping on the seat belt.
‘Frankston. His first mistake, lodging in the area he’s actually operating in.’
That’s one of Jack’s cardinal rules: never find a bed near where you’re pulling a job. ‘Who is he?’
‘I’ll let him tell you that.’
‘How did you find him?’
‘I asked around until I came up with a name, someone who’d had his fingers burnt recently’
I had to be satisfied with that. Jack taps into a network when he wants information or supplies—guns, explosives, getaway vehicles. I don’t know who these people are or how it works and he’ll never tell me, so I invent it.
Jack drove back across the peninsula to a hotel-motel near the seafront. It was a flash two-storey building with a drive-in bottle shop, restaurants, three bars, rooms. We got out. It was an ugly place, the air smelling of beer and scorched beef. Jack muttered darkly as he led the way across the poorly lit car park.
‘See?’ I said. You do comment on people and places and lifestyles.’
‘Forget that. We’ve got work to do.’
I followed him across the foyer. The receptionist smiled automatically but something about Jack, some prohibition, wiped it off her face. We went upstairs. There was a fire alarm at the top. Jack broke the glass, pressed the button, and took me downstairs and out to the car park again. He stood facing the building expectantly.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You’ll see.’
Sure enough, people started yelling Fire!, the restaurants, bars and rooms emptied, and everyone came storming out into the car park while sirens started up in the distance. Jack stiffened. ‘That’s him.’
I saw a guy of about thirty-five, wearing a moustache—not that that is unusual, these guys all watch ‘Wide World of Sports’—jeans, Nike runners and one of those vast collarless patterned shirts that look as though they’ve been inflated with a bike pump. In the darkness Jack pressed his .38 into my hand and said, ‘It’s up to you, now. You can’t be the observer any longer, finally you’ve got to be the active agent.’
I could see the sense of that, but still, I was shit-scared. I didn’t know how I was going to get answers from this guy alone, Jack somewhere around but not about to show his face. I decided to play it as Jack, as Wyatt, would play it. Under the cover of the darkness and confusion I became Wyatt, grinding the barrel of the .38 against the hinge of the man’s jaw and growling, ‘Into the car.’
Fortunately the gun and the sirens subdued the man. He got into the back seat. Wyatt slid behind the wheel. Wyatt didn’t do anything, just stared at the man over the seat, the cold mouth of the .38 trained at his gut.
‘You know who I am,’ Wyatt said, and there was no question mark at the end of it.
The guy nodded.
‘You irritated me finally,’ Wyatt said, ‘so I went looking for you. You’re stupid; it wasn’t hard.’
‘Don’t shoot me.’
‘That’s up to you. What’s your name?’
‘What?’
Wyatt used psychology in situations like this. When he had the drop on someone it was important to give them back some dignity, some identity, or they’d panic or be otherwise useless to him. ‘Your name: what is it?’
The man looked at him suspiciously. ‘Steegmuller.’
Well, that was a relief. If it had been Wilson or Collins, for example, the editor would have red-pencilled Two-syllable Anglo-Saxon names like this are too ordinary, too forgettable, they slide off the page. ‘What do people call you?’
‘Steeg.’
‘Okay, Steeg, why don’t you tell me what’s eating you?’
‘What are you going to do to me?’
‘That depends. You tried to kill me. To stop that happening again I should kill you now.’
‘I was just trying to throw a scare into you!’
Wyatt said, flat and cold, ‘It doesn’t work like that. I have to assume you’re serious. That means killing you. So start talking.’
There were red and blue lights in the car park by this stage—two fire trucks and a couple of divisional vans. Those lights were throwing the shapes from bad dreams around the interior of the car. There was enough light for me to see the man’s face clearly. If I say his eyes ran over the seats and up the side windows and across the roof of the car the editor will red-pencil Did they run on their little legs? so I’ll just say he looked around wildly for a way out. There wasn’t one. He said:
‘Twice you fucked me around. Like giving people valet parking cards outside restaurants so they think you’re parking their car for them only you’re stealing it. I tried that and the fucking bouncer came and kicked my head in.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘it was only a story.’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘So how did you know how to do it?’
‘I didn’t. I think I pinched it from an early Elmore Leonard novel.’
‘You never tried it?’
‘Not me, pal.’
He didn’t seem satisfied but went on and said, ‘Then when you climbed into the back seat of the car from the boot. I was going to rob this Seven-Eleven night manager on his way to the hole in the wall but I got trapped in the boot, I couldn’t fucking get out.’
‘I never actually tried it to see if it would work,’ I admitted. ‘I’d written Wyatt into a corner and I spent hours working out how to get him out of it.’
‘You could’ve written something “With a mighty bound he was free . . . “ ‘
I shook my head. ‘Your reader’s not going to buy that these days.’
‘Or someone turns up in the nick of time.’
Again I shook my head. ‘The reader won’t buy that, either. The main character has to be the active agent. The answer had to be in Wyatt’s hands. So I tried some lateral thinking and had him pushing through the window shelf into the back seat. I mean, I did do a bit of research. I went to car yards and looked in a few boots. It looked feasible. Maybe you chose the wrong sort of car.’
He was gloomy, full of doubt and regret. ‘Maybe,’ he said. Then some spirit came back into his face. ‘So you just like fucking people around?’
‘It’s not real,’ I said. ‘I’m not writing about myself, or things that happened to me. I’m making it all up.’
‘It seemed real. I went up north, thought I’d try hitting a security van.’ He shivered. ‘Nothing but saltbush and red dirt.’
Strangely enough the working title had been Red Dirt Snatch but the editor pointed out an unfortunate connotation with the word ‘snatch’, and they wanted uniform titles for the series anyway, so I accepted their suggestion, Paydirt. Who was I to quibble? It works for Sue Grafton, it worked for John D. MacDonald. I said to the guy, ‘I write entertainments. No message, you’re not meant to take it literally. When you put the book down there’s the phone bill to pay, it’s raining again, you forgot to buy milk.’
Here I was in an ending where the main players are brought together and there’s plenty of dialogue and everything’s explained and there are no loose ends. Just once in a while you’d like a shoot-out or something downbeat or morally ambiguous. I sighed. I was finished here. ‘Stay away from me,’ I said, pushing the guy out the door. ‘Next time I’ll kill first and talk later.’ I could have shot him, but the imperative was gone now, it would have been gratuitous. When he was out of sight I wound down the window and called softly, ‘Jack?’ Nothing, no response, as if my brother wasn’t there and had merely been some kind of device all along.
Time to go home. Lawrence Block, bemused by the Best This, That and the Other awards for crime writing every year, said that there were really only two categories, crime stories with cats and crime stories without. I went home to my cat.
And the love interest, of course.