The Heat (3 page)

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 might be a piece of cake.

There was always pyrotechnics. Take five men in hard hats and overalls, four to stand around a hole in the ground, a fifth to direct the van into a side street. Then block both ends with traffic barriers, jam the radio signals, blow the doors, grab the cash, hop onto a helicopter piloted by a sixth man. Or stash motorbikes nearby.

Too many men, too much equipment, start-up costs too high.

Or place explosives in the road, hope the detonation would flip the van. Hope the impact would jar the doors open.

You'd need an explosives guy. And a lot of hope.

Or dress as a security guard at the target location, get the drop on the SecureCor crew. But meanwhile where would you stash the real guard?

Okay: passer-by dressed as a woman pulls a shotgun on the bank or store employee whose job it is to coordinate the handover with the armoured-car guards. Second gang member driving a stolen car blocks the front of the van; a third, ditto, blocks the rear of the van. A fourth gets the drop on the guard exiting the passenger seat, a fifth gets the drop on the guard in the rear before he can close the doors.

Always five guys, and split-second timing, and a heap of preparation. Guns, disguises, reliable stolen car, somewhere to stash everything.

So what did the Pepper brothers know that Vidovic didn't?

Shireen Ijaz was pretty certain her son was using ice again. The fidgety behaviour, rubbing and scratching at the crawling under his skin. Teeth a mess. Stealing from her purse: not handfuls, just the odd ten or twenty and, once, the hundred-dollar note she'd folded into a tiny liner flap for emergencies. She'd almost forgotten it was there until an emergency did arrive, a few days ago—an unexpected taxi trip to see her brother in hospital. Never pay by credit card when you take a taxi, they could clone it or something, so she'd reached for the concealed hundred and it was gone.

She'd paid by credit card after all, watching the driver like a hawk.

Syed. What was she going to do with him? Filching money, staying out all night, making secretive phone calls. He was up to something.

He was her youngest, born in Australia. Shireen and her husband already had two boys when they emigrated from Pakistan in 1990. They'd struggled for many years. Their community was small, and Anglo-Australians were guarded, often racist. But adversity makes you strong. You face the challenges. Shireen and her husband ran three Mobil stations now, two motels; the older boys had university degrees.

But Syed…

He had less to prove, less to strive for. Didn't sound Pakistani when he spoke. Was spoilt, being the baby.

Was he a homosexual? Shireen believed so. But mainly he was a drug user. He needed money to pay for his habit. It started with eBay fraud, selling non-existent iPhones, but soon graduated to armed theft. Menacing women at ATMs with a blood-filled syringe. He was arrested for that. No jail time but a conviction recorded, and an order to pay compensation. Ten thousand dollars. Shireen might have paid that; her husband said no. A hard man, Ali. Unforgiving. Pray to Allah that he didn't learn of Syed's boyfriends.

And now Syed was giving off the troubling signals again. Shireen had seen it before, in the weeks leading up to the cash machine hold-ups.

Four days later, one thing was explained to Stefan Vidovic's satisfaction: Jack Pepper knew a SecureCor guard.

Vidovic tailed Pepper for four days. Early on the Wednesday evening he entered a gym near Alma Road. Smoked glass all around and, in daylight, a forbidding blank face. But when darkness settled, light blazed inside and Vidovic watched Pepper climb onto a treadmill. After fifteen minutes a man wearing a SecureCor uniform and carrying a gym bag entered the building, pausing to greet Pepper before moving out of sight. Then he was back, wearing an Everlast singlet and spotting Pepper on the bench press.

Vidovic already knew where Pepper lived, so it was the guard he followed. The man made no stops after leaving the gym but drove a nondescript family car to a nondescript house in Bentleigh. Vidovic waited. Lights went on and off, a teenage girl came home in netball gear, her hair escaping an elastic tie, and at ten o'clock a middle-aged woman emerged with an empty wine bottle, which she shoved into the recycle bin on the path outside. By midnight only one light burned in the home. The daughter?

Vidovic went away, grabbed some sleep and returned at six in the morning. He watched the garbage and recycle trucks grumble through and at seven-thirty the daughter came out. School uniform, backpack, tight ponytail, blinking as if stunned by fresh air and daylight. She walked to a bus stop on North Road and thirty minutes later her father appeared. Cheeks shining, hair shower-wet, wearing his uniform. Carrying a spare uniform on a wire hanger.

Spare uniform?

The question was soon answered. The guard made one stop on his way to work: EzyPress Dry Cleaning, on Warragul Road.

That same evening, with both Syed and her husband absent from the house, Shireen searched her son's room.

It was months since she'd set foot in it. She'd glimpsed the interior now and then if she happened to be passing when Syed was stepping in or out, or if he was in the bathroom and had forgotten to shut his door. It had always looked neat enough. No clothes or dust balls on the floor, no funky towels on the bed, no apple cores or overflowing ashtrays. But was that the whole idea? Keep the place neat so she wouldn't need to go in?

Eight p.m. and she went straight for Syed's window. Blind down, curtains drawn, only the light from the hallway for illumination. She stood for a moment, took her bearings. The air was stuffy, a strange odour. Something to do with the drugs? Some chemical leaching from Syed's pores? But the bed was made, a pair of jeans was folded neatly over the back of his chair, the papers beside his computer were precisely ordered. Posters on the wall: a Maserati, Shoaib Malik playing Twenty20 for the Hobart Hurricanes, some sultry pop singer or dancer or Bollywood actress.

Shireen checked under the bed first. One sock, one tissue. The wardrobe was tidy, ordered, with boxes piled at the bottom. Nike, Adidas, Asics. Stolen? Syed did love his shoes.

It was a wardrobe of the old kind, free-standing with a pelmet across the top high enough to conceal any kind of flat item you might want to put there. Shireen looked up at that pelmet. She dragged her son's chair over and stood on it and reached over the pelmet and found a sawn-off shotgun. Also a balaclava, a hard hat and overalls.

Jack Pepper had said the job was set for Monday 21 September, so on Monday 14, Vidovic followed the SecureCor van, picking up the tail at its first stop, a supermarket in Sandringham. He kept well back, at the wheel of a mate's LandCruiser, ladders strapped to the roof. The van made further stops: building societies, a bank, other supermarkets—the smaller independents, no Coles or Woolworths. That was okay. Those places still took a shitload of money, and twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, they handed it over to SecureCor.

From Tuesday to Thursday he shadowed the Pepper brothers and their tame SecureCor guy. More gym visits, more dry-cleaning stops. Must be a dirty job, hauling money bags around all day. The bags sat on dusty floors, Vidovic guessed. Rubbed against ink and paint and oily substances.

One thing: on Thursday afternoon, Pepper visited a used-car yard in Frankston and bought a decommissioned security van. He took it to a backyard operation in Footscray, where it was painted in SecureCor colours. Then it was driven to a shed at the rear of a backstreet factory in Collingwood and locked behind a pair of corrugated iron doors with a piss-poor padlock.

That same evening, Vidovic was unsettled to learn that Arlo Waterfield's guy was looking for him again. Looking hard. If he was going to pull this off, it had to be tomorrow, not next week.

Shireen started about it the wrong way. It was right not to tell her husband what she was doing, but wrong to tell the policeman at the reception desk of her nearest police station that she feared her son was taking drugs.

He yawned. ‘I'm not sure there's much we can do, Mrs Eejazz.' He waved at the wire racks bolted to the walls. ‘We do have some literature on drug counselling and specialist rehab clinics.'

So Shireen edged closer to the topic that worried her. ‘He tried to rob someone last year. What if he does it again?'

‘If we acted on what an individual might do, we'd never act on what others have actually done,' the desk sergeant said. Overweight and given to smirking, Shireen thought. Given to barely veiled contempt for people with dark skin, too.

That's when she told him about the shotgun and the disguise. After that things started to happen and she found herself talking to detectives.

On Thursday evening, Vidovic entered the change room of the gym and sat tying and untying his shoelaces until the SecureCor guard appeared. He stood then, contriving a clumsy stumble against the lockers and benches.

‘Phew,' he said. ‘Must have overdone it on the weights.'

The guard helped him up. ‘You got to work up to it.'

‘Yeah, I think I just found that out,' Vidovic said. He gathered his gear together, said, ‘Thanks, mate,' and left with the man's dry-cleaning ticket.

Next, he used fake ID to obtain a costume-hire pistol and gun belt, then went straight around to the shed in Collingwood and stole the van. It now had the SecureCor name and logo on the panels. Crudely done; okay from a distance.

On Friday morning Vidovic collected and changed into the guard's dry-cleaned uniform, strapped on the pistol and began to hit the supermarkets. Not the banks: they had security guards stationed front and back. The supermarkets—their rear entrances usually a grimy yard spattered with rotting vegetables—were less security-conscious, and by late morning he had $58,000.

He could feel it burning a hole in his pocket. Then he thought about his toes and fingers and drove to Arlo Waterfield's place of business. Paid his debt in full, Arlo demanding
twenty-eight
grand, the prick.

Still, Vidovic had thirty to play with. Place it wisely on sure bets, he could double it. Triple it, probably.

4

Late Friday morning, Wyatt took the shuttle bus to Melbourne Airport. He preferred to fly, if the journey was long. He wasn't a man given to self-reflection, but he was aware that driving long distances depressed him—mindless, tedious. And he'd been shot, stabbed and beaten at times in the past. His body bore the trauma, on the surface and deeper in his bones. Better two hours on a plane than two days at the wheel of a car.

The drawback was he couldn't take his pistol on board, and that might prove to be a problem at the other end. It would be impossible for a man like him to buy one legally when he arrived, and too risky to meet a stranger behind a pub. Ambush; undercover cops; getting saddled with a gun that was not only expensive but liable to have a nasty history or mechanical defects. He'd ask Minto to provide one.

Facing a long wait in the gate lounge at Melbourne Airport, Wyatt positioned himself in a chair that allowed a clear view along the branch corridor from the check-in counter. Two federal policemen strolled past at one point, chatting, barely interested in the waiting passengers. Still, he tensed a little, gauging where he'd run if it came to it. His gaze passed over the men and women streaming by, the children, the sports teams. None posed an immediate threat.