The Heat Read Online Free Page A

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