Get Katja (2 page)

A wave of disbelief slams into DeBoer as he stares down at the cards Frank has just turned over. He had been certain he had the man beaten this time. Certain.

He looks back and forth from his cards to Frank’s, aware of the others gathered around the table smiling in schadenfreude. Their expressions are reflected in the mirrors which line one entire wall of the barbershop, white flashes of teeth floating in the dim light next to the chrome of the cutting chairs.

“One more,” DeBoer says, licking his lips and running a hand through his oil-slicked hair.

“No more,” Frank tells him.

He doesn’t even bother to drag his winnings towards him, just leaving them there in the middle of the table as if to tempt DeBoer into grabbing them back. The others get up, stuffing their own winnings into the pockets and finishing the last of their drinks and cigars.

“Just one more game.”

“And what do you propose to play with?” Frank asks him, pushing the table they had been playing at back to its usual place against the rear wall.

“I can get more money.”

“You’re already in the hole for twenty G.”

“So what? Water over a duck’s bridge. Just give me a chance to win it back, Frank.”

Frank gets up and places a hand on DeBoer’s shoulder, a gesture which should feel far more friendly than it actually does. It smells strongly of Barbicide and shaving foam. “Your trouble, DeBoer, is that you don’t know when to stop digging.”

He pats DeBoer then stacks the last of the chairs up next to the table. “Same time next week boys?”

The others murmur in agreement as they leave. The pile of cash and paper I.O.U.’s remain on the table before DeBoer. Sweat beads on his upper lip and he licks it away, unable to take his eyes from the loot.

“Can you give me a few days?” he asks.

“No,” Frank tells him, now clearing up the glasses and empty liquor bottles. “Twenty-four hours, same as always.”

“And if I don’t?” DeBoer asks with forced bravado. “What you going to do—call the cops?”

He laughs nervously. Frank smiles and stands before DeBoer.

“No, Detective,” he says. “I’ll call Lady Delicious.”

DeBoer laughs again, a desperate little snort. “That freak couldn’t—”

Frank snatches DeBoer by his flabby throat and forces him through the door and out into the street. DeBoer stumbles and falls backwards into some bags of trash, having to fight his way out of them as they shift and squelch underhand. He picks himself up, anger swelling within him and Frank looks at him, just waiting for a response, but DeBoer keeps it in check. He brushes his coat down.

“Here,” Frank says, holding out a bottle of liquor. “Think of it as a consolation prize.”

DeBoer takes it, resisting the urge to smack the crooked barber across the head with it.

“Twenty-four hours, Detective,” Frank says, then closes the door.

DeBoer stands there for several moments, paralysed with impotence. Then he mutters “Fuck you, Frank,” and unscrews the lid of the tequila. He takes a sip and spits it back out so that it splatters against Frank’s door and dribbles down in little golden rivulets.

He wipes the booze from his moustache then walks back towards his car, muttering further threats and obscenities, swigging what remains of the liquor as he goes.

“What the hell . . . ?”

He slows to a halt, looks at his car parked up on the opposite side of the road and sees a group of teenagers huddled around it.

“Hey!” he shouts, starting towards them. “Hey!”

They scatter as soon as they hear him, revealing the four slashed tires. He gives chase but they’re too fast. Within moments they’re gone, only the echoes of their laughter remaining, and he is doubled-up, desperately trying to recover his breath.

“Little . . . bastards. . . .” he gasps, then throws the bottle. The glass shatters somewhere in the darkness.

He staggers to his car, kicks at a deflated tire and notices the scratches in the paintwork too. He leans on the roof of the vehicle, wondering if the night can get any worse.

Then he spots the poster—and suddenly things start to look up.

DeBoer scratches his ass crack as he approaches the poster.

It’s pasted to the wall, competing for space with a dozen or so others. Mostly monotone with flashes of red and the words
The Broken
in large, jagged writing across the top, it is the rough image of the woman at the centre which catches his attention. In mid-swing of the guitar she wears, her teeth bared in a grimace or anger, a microphone to one side. Her hair emerges in random spikes from her head and there’s a strange tube emerging from her throat.

As he gets closer, DeBoer realizes that those last two details have been added to the poster in marker pen.

He squints, attempting to figure out why she is so familiar—and then the realisation hits him.

The girl from the island.

The girl who was responsible for the deaths of, among others, Wvladyslaw Szerynski, with whom DeBoer previously had a sweet smuggling deal on the go. Right up until she murdered the man in his own arcade, of course.

“Well, well, well, looks like every coat has a silver lining after all. You’re the reason I had to turn to gambling in the first place, you little bitch,” he says to the poster, his lip curling. He searches his memory for her name but it eludes him.

He slicks his hair back from his brow, reading the date and time of the advertised gig as well as the location, the Wheatsheaf. Hadn’t that place burned to the ground a few months back? He then notices an additional banner across the lower-left hand corner, the time of an open soundcheck. He checks his watch—it’s due to start in less than twenty minutes.

“Plenty who would be willing to pay up to have you in their hands from what I hear,” he says to the poster, running a hand across the woman’s face.

He turns and looks once more at his car tires. They are utterly deflated.

A set of headlights appear and he steps into the road, waving his arms to slow the vehicle down. It looks as if it is about to swerve to avoid him then the brakes suddenly squeal and it comes to a halt, a boxy old station wagon torn straight out of the 1980s Soviet Union. He circles around to the driver’s side and knocks on the window. It cranks down and an old man peers out from within, his nose is scrunched up in an effort to keep a pair of thick-lensed glasses from falling off.

“Get out of the car,” DeBoer says.

“Excuse me? You’ll have to speak up, I’ve . . .”

One liver-spotted hand goes to the hearing aid plugged into his ear.

DeBoer reaches into his pocket, pulls out his badge and holds it up. “Get out of the car, you old twat. Police emergency.”

“Officer, what seems to be the—?”

“
Detective
,” DeBoer says, finally losing his patience, snapping the badge wallet shut, shoving it back into his pocket and pulling open the car door. He grabs the old man by one shoulder and tries to drag him out but the man’s seat belt is still buckled and holds him fast. DeBoer reaches in and punches the release switch then tries again. The old man tumbles free of the vehicle and falls to the wet road beneath.

“Officer, please,” he protests, scrabbling for his glasses.

“Detective!” DeBoer shouts in his ear. “Fucking
detective,
you old coot!”

He steps over the man, straightens his raincoat, and gets into the car.

“Jesus Christ,” DeBoer splutters, the steering wheel embedded in his gut and his knees jammed against the console. He fumbles for the seat’s adjustment lever and attempts to slide the seat back to give himself more room but it’s jammed tight, probably rusted in place after too many years in the same position.

The old man gets to his knees, sliding his glasses back onto his nose. One lens is badly cracked and an arm sticks out at an angle. “Officer—”

DeBoer slams the door shut. It’s a struggle to manoeuvre his legs but at least it’s an automatic so he only has to fight with the accelerator and not worry about a clutch as well. He sticks the car into gear, then leans out of the still-open window.

“It’s
detective
!” DeBoer shouts one last time.

He hits the accelerator, leaving the old man stranded in the middle of the road and heading straight for the Wheatsheaf—and his way out of the hole he is currently occupying.

Katja.

Not long after he arrives at the bar the name comes to him as he stands in a corner next to a concrete column, as far from the main crowd as possible, but still with a good view of the stage.

She no longer sports the large spikes of hair she had in the photo he had originally seen in the Policie report which had come from the island and in the vandalised poster for the gig, but despite that, and the large tattoo that covers her neck and some of her chest, he has no doubt it’s her.

He watches her shriek and thrash about on stage, barking into the microphone as if she were an attack dog ravaging a coke dealer’s arm, the neck of her guitar gripped in one hand, and can’t help but feel contempt for everything and everyone around him. Sweaty, drunken, criminal fuckwits who think that making as much noise as possible is a valid substitute for melody. Those who are interested bounce around him like lunatics, almost colliding with him multiple times, but he resists the instinctive urge to grab them and punch the living shit out of them.

He refuses to let anything interfere with his reason for being there.

He bides his time, despite the agony of listening to the so-called music, beginning to wish he had taken the old man’s hearing aid as well as his car. Maybe there would have been some sort of white noise setting to block the cacophony out.

Fortunately the soundcheck is as quick as sex with the prostitutes he frequented and so soon enough Katja pulls the guitar from her shoulder, revealing a skull spray-painted onto the T-shirt she wears.

“Yeah, fuck you, too,” she says into the mic before she disappears.

DeBoer pushes through the crowd to keep her in sight, watches her vanish into the darkness of a corridor at the back of the stage. Thanks to a couple of busts he’d made on the place a year or so back, he knows where it leads and so hurriedly leaves. Scaffolding encrusts most of the front of the building and the scorch marks from the fire which had recently engulfed it remain like old scars, but everything is fine around the back.

He takes a dirty handkerchief from one pocket and then a small brown bottle from another. He removes a dropper from the bottle and places a few drops of liquid into the handkerchief then is about to head for the rear door to wait for her coming out when he hears footsteps.

He ducks into a doorway as four women walk past.

No. Wait.

He squints, his eyesight not what it used to be and his ears still ringing from the gig.

They aren’t women at all.

Lady Delicious and her mob, he realizes.

He thinks of Frank’s threat—his promise—to set the transvestite debt collector on him and decides to remain where he is. Ignoring his itching asshole, he watches the four confront Katja when she emerges from the Wheatsheaf and momentarily worries that he might miss his opportunity to cash in on her but in the end all they take from her is her guitar and perhaps a little self-respect. He leans farther back into the shadow of the doorway as they walk past him and a minute or so later Katja follows.

He lets her pass and turn onto the main thoroughfare then hurries to the car, parked up on the opposite side of the road to the Wheatsheaf and still with all its wheels intact. He squeezes himself back in, fumbling for the seat adjustment lever but finds it rusted into place, and so resigns himself to his discomfort. He watches Katja until she is a block or so away then starts the engine and pulls the vehicle onto the quiet streets. He drifts along as slowly as he dares, figuring that anyone seeing him will just assume him to be an old near-sighted coot, while always keeping Katja just in view and no more.

He almost loses her a couple of times as she makes her way through the streets via an unnecessarily complicated route, and wonders if perhaps she has spotted him after all. She slows as she approaches a row of buildings, once impressive three-storey homes now nothing more than brick and concrete bug shelters.

Without missing a beat, DeBoer stamps on the accelerator, having to wait several moments for the power to come through, then screeches to a halt metres away from her. He pulls himself from the car and she’s running now, across a weed-choked lawn. He jumps at her, almost missing but coming down on her hard enough to crash her to the ground beneath him. He pulls her hood away, revealing her closely shaven scalp. She manages to slam an elbow into his face before he snatches the handkerchief, freshly soaked in chloroform, and shoves it into her face. She
throws
her head from side to side but already the chemical is taking effect and her movements become sluggish. He loosens his grip on her and lets her turn herself onto her back. He fingers his cheekbone where she had struck him but the damage is minimal.

Katja looks up at him, her lids heavy, squinting against the light of a street lamp behind him. She says something but her words are slurred.

He leans into her, pressing the handkerchief to her face once more. “Stop fucking
fighting
, you little tramp.”

She claws at his hands but her fingers are limp and ineffective. Within moments her limbs slump to the ground beside her.

“I know who you are, Katja,” he says, unable to control his joy at having caught her. “And I think we both know that there are certain people who would just love to get their hands on you.”

He wants her to see him. He wants her to know what lies in store for her, to suffer that knowledge.

She murmurs slurred words and he turns his head to one side to hear her better. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up. I’m deaf as a tent-pole from that fucking racket you were playing.”

“Useless. Fucking. Junkie,” she says and then her eyes roll back in her head and she is gone.