From Cape Town with Love (45 page)

Spider clutched at me, bucking like a bronco frantic to throw its rider. When my head hit the ground, hard, I barely noticed the shower of sparks. I bore down.

I held on for my life, and for Nandi's. I shifted my grip, and bore down against unresisting flesh. I couldn't afford to take a chance, not against someone as dangerous as this. I held on until Spider's twitching stopped.

Strange. The sound, when it came, was more crunch than snap.

For precious seconds, I heard only my rasping breaths. My whole body shook as I considered a marvelous thing:
No snapping sound. Who would have thought?

I pushed his limp body away. He looked very like a sleeping child. So small, now.

All of me hurt. Everything bled. I didn't think I could stand up, but I knew I couldn't stay on my knees.

Nandi was crying. There was still an army upstairs. This wasn't over, not by a long shot.

I forced myself up to my feet. My right leg was jelly, preoccupied with its pain. When calf muscles flexed, I felt Spider's knife afresh. With each limping step, he stabbed me again. But while I felt the pain, it was in my body, not in
me.

I know that sounds strange, but it's the only way I can describe what I was experiencing.

Nandi was crying, but first I needed my Beretta. I hop-jumped to the shelf as fast I could between pulses of pain, grabbing the magazine and loading the gun with fingers that were steadier than I had any right to expect. I trained the gun toward the stairs. I thought I heard six or seven sets of footsteps, but no one came. I thought I heard heavy breathing, but it was mine.

Nandi was crying.

I must have been a horror, covered in blood. I ran to the laundry room's sink, between the washer and dryer. The faucet was tight from lack of use, but I turned on a thin stream of water, glad when the pipes didn't moan. I grabbed an undershirt from a heap of dirty clothes on the dryer and wiped my face and hair. I cupped water in my hands and let it wash over me. I watched the sink fill with pink water. My blood.

Nandi was crying.

“Coming, honey!” I said.

I tore off my ripped and bloodied T-shirt. I grabbed at the first dark item I saw from the pile of clothes; it looked like a teenager's hooded black cotton jacket. The right leg of my jeans was soaked with blood, but the jacket covered the rest.

I probably needed a tourniquet, but Nandi was crying.

I ran to the tarp and pulled it off the playpen. I dragged the tarp to Spider and laid it over him. I didn't look at his face to see if his eyes were open or closed.

Nandi was sitting in filth in a corner of the playpen, her face bright red with terror as she stared up at me. But she stopped crying.

My smile was a damn good one. My smile was the only thing that might save our lives.

“It's Mr. Ten, Nandi,” I said cheerfully. “We're going now. You need to be very quiet.”

Nandi nodded, watching my smile.

She didn't cry. She wobbled to her feet on fat legs.

Her face aglow with trust, Nandi reached up to be lifted into my arms.

Nandi, it turned out, was small enough to hide in a laundry basket piled with clothes.

She wriggled restlessly, but her face and limbs didn't show. And the crying had stopped.

She weighed only about twenty-five pounds, but my slashed arms made carrying her a torture separate from walking. And walking was its own fierce challenge. Climbing steps was three times as hard as walking.

I listened at the door. The voices were gone.

“Remember—if we make noise, we lose,” I said.

Nandi didn't make a sound to answer. The basket trembled against my bleeding arm, but I tightened my grip around it. My Beretta was in my right hand, wrapped inside a T-shirt. Nandi was bundled in clothes, so I could afford to drop her in a hurry and squeeze off quick rounds, if it came to that. Then I would have to improvise.

My foot was bracing the door slightly ajar, and I pushed it open, emerging into the brightly lighted hall with the black hood pulled up over my head, shoulders hunched. Just a guy bringing up the laundry.

Should I go upstairs, or toward the back door?

The open window upstairs might have been easiest, but I didn't trust myself to carry Nandi safely down the tree. My body wanted to rest on the floor; that's the natural thing a body does when it's bleeding so much. The skin on my face was cold, and I felt dizzy when I breathed fast. If I was going into shock, losing too much blood, I couldn't count on climbing down the tree.

It had to be downstairs.

I staggered in place, staring toward the front doors. They were a straight walk twenty feet across the living-room tile, and mine for the taking. AK-47 would be curious, but his car was parked only a few painful steps from the front door. If necessary, I could shoot him.

The locks didn't need keys from the inside. The door might be unlocked
from AK-47's toilet break. He might not pay any attention to me and my basket of laundry.

I tried to see it unfold in a way I could believe.

“Hey!” a voice chided me. He was one of the men I'd heard before, approaching me from the reading room. I lowered my head, relying on my hood to shield me. I turned away, walking slowly toward the butler's pantry behind me, away from the front door.

“Molo,”
I said pleasantly in Xhosa, as I would speak to a friend. It only meant
hello,
and it sounded like I would need something stronger.

“‘Molo'?”
he mimicked me, and berated me in Xhosa or Zulu. Shit—wrong word. I kept up my steady pace, walking away. He followed me, his voice rising. He'd mistaken me for someone else, which had bought me a few seconds, but I would have to shoot him before long. I walked slowly to put it off as long as possible. Gunfire would only make everything harder.

In my mind, I was standing at the top of Table Mountain. That's how calm I got. Another phrase came back to me from a long-ago visit to Cape Town. A useful phrase.

I stopped walking, waiting for him to reach me. My back was still turned to him.

“Ndicela uxolo,”
I said.
Sorry.
It was the only clicking word I knew, with clicks on the
c
and
x,
which I'd practiced to impress Alice. I shifted my head toward him as if to make eye contact, stopping just shy of showing him my profile. I engaged him with sincerity, adding a dash of deference.
“Ndicela uxolo,
boss.”

He started to say something else, but I took another step forward and punted his balls up into his throat. He made a sucking-lemons face and dropped to his knees, clutching himself, a thin, strangled scream escaping his lips for the second before the ball of my foot struck his temple squarely. He hit the ground like a bag of bones.

I set the basket down, dragged his body to the cellar door, and threw him down the stairs.

A dark spot on the floor caught my eye.

I had left a smudged trail of blood from my bleeding calf. Trying to clean it up might only make it worse. The next person in that hallway would see the blood.

Moving as quickly as I could, I left the cellar door and headed back to the alcove, which led to the butler's pantry. I had reached the rear of the house.

A window inside the butler's pantry stared out at the backyard's night. I'd been beneath that window not long ago, where I'd overheard the boss and his adviser deciding to kill Nandi. The window was high and would have been an awkward climb, but I tried to unlock it. It might have been bolted, or maybe I was losing my strength. I wasn't sure. I was light-headed.

The sound of the breaking window would attract attention, too.

I walked through the length of the butler's pantry, which was large and well stocked, and emerged in the rear of the bright kitchen. The other end of the kitchen led to the sunroom. The summit between the men was still under way. I saw at least four, only twenty feet from the kitchen door. One of the Asian men paced in the doorway, and I barely ducked back into shadow in time for him to miss me.

The door I'd seen outside was the kitchen's back door, midway between the butler's pantry and the sunroom. Marsha had promised to unlock the door for me, and she would be waiting.

Thank God. Marsha is here.

She might be Nandi's last chance.

I would hand off the basket to Marsha, stay behind to cover them. Marsha could make it to the car with Nandi. The keys were with the car. The plan ended with Nandi getting home and me getting shot dead, but despite its flaws, the plan wasn't bad.

As long as Marsha was there.

Nandi was wriggling, so I bounced the basket to soothe her.
“Shhhhh . . . ,”
I said.

“I'm hungry,” she said, whining but not crying.

“Shhhhhh.”

Once Nandi had quieted, I moved to the kitchen. I tried to hide my limp, walking with an urgent pace, as if I had important tasks. It took two tries to get the knob to turn.

“Who's that?” someone said from the sunroom.

I was way beyond
Hello
and
Sorry.
Keeping my head down, my finger ready on my trigger, I pulled the back door open. It opened inside the
house, so I could shield myself longer. I couldn't see anything except gray in the darkness.

“I'm here!” I called out.

“Hey!” a voice challenged from twenty paces behind me, and closing. It might have been the same man who'd followed me earlier.

“I've got her!” I said, taking a step outside. I felt the air on my face.

I made out the pale flowers on the hibiscus bushes near the sunroom. I glanced up at the tree, silhouetted against a bright, swollen moon.

A man, unconscious or dead, lay on the ground outside the door.

But Marsha was gone.

OKAY,
I THOUGHT,
staring out at the dark, still yard. Impossibly calm.

All thoughts and plans halted while I watched myself move.

I tossed the laundry basket to the side of the house, where it rolled gently to the wall. Nandi cried out in protest, but she was clear. I whirled back toward the kitchen doorway and fired twice at the thin Asian man who was ten feet behind me. He dodged back into the kitchen, yelling as my second shot snapped his shoulder around. The T-shirt wrapped around my gun glowed hot. Fabric burned.

The security light came on like a noonday sun. Nandi crawled out of the laundry basket, crying in plain view. I pulled Nandi toward me by the back of her collar. I scooped her into my arms and ran for the darkness, and the fence.

POP POP.

Glass shattered as a gun was fired from the sunroom. Soil jumped beside my foot.

“He has the girl!”
the boss man said.

The gravel driveway back to the road was too far in the wrong direction, so the driveway wouldn't have worked, regardless of the headlights sweeping toward me on the road.

I ran in the grass. Downhill. So fast that my feet tripped as often as they didn't, like falling while upright. I caught my balance at the fence, and the basket fit through the rails with ease.

My body howled with pain, but the howl was far away, like a distant hurricane. I ran with Nandi into the vineyard.

When I collapsed, stumbling, to my knees, I was sure I'd been shot. The world rocked into focus. Grape leaves scratched my face and eyes. Nandi's grip on my neck nearly choked me, but the sudden drop to the ground stopped her crying cold.

“Shhhhhh,”
I said, resurrecting my smile. “It's okay. It's okay.”

That was the best I could do. Those few words drained my breath.

I waited for my heart to seize up, or for everything to melt away. The men shooting at me might kill me, but I was dying already. I'd killed Spider quick, but he'd killed me slow.

“Get lights out here!” the boss's English accent said.

They weren't firing anymore, but they were looking. Even in hunting country, gunfire will attract the neighbors' attention.

I checked the distant glow of Paso Robles's night lights to orient myself. They were east, and our car was parked northwest of the farmhouse. The keys were with the car.

“There!”
someone said.

I cradled Nandi over my shoulder, my hand resting across the tiny bones in her back.

When I crawled our first step since my knees had buckled, my leg cramped, and I nearly yelled out. The earth near my face smelled sweet when I stumbled down. Nandi wriggled against me, whimpering, but never fell or made a sound.

The voices were getting closer, a
swishing
of men walking briskly through the vineyard, closing in with regimented precision, just like at the football field.

“Shhhhh,
it's okay,” I lied. “It's okay, Nandi. It's okay.”

I rubbed her back, and Nandi's whimpering stopped. Her weight rested against me. Nandi was tired, too.

A crackle in my ear, a foot away. I made out a man standing over me, breathing hard. I raised my gun, but I knew I was too late. He had seen me first. I was already in his sights.

“Don't move!”
the voice said, a harsh whisper. “Mr. Hardwick. It is Paki.”

My gun's muzzle leveled on his chest, and my finger caressed the trigger.
The man I had become in the basement wanted to shoot Paki most of all.

But Paki hadn't called for his boss. For an instant of silence, hope danced.

“What do you want?” I said.

“Quiet,”
Paki said. “Is she safe? Let me see her.”

Paki stepped closer, out of the shadows, kneeling beside me.

We weren't dead yet. But someone had a powerful flashlight. The beam swept down the rows to our left.

“Give her to me!” Paki whispered, reaching for Nandi.

“No way,” I said, angling her away from him. My Beretta was in his face.

Leaves thrashed and soil danced behind us. Six gunshots, popping firecrackers.