Man Down (22 page)

2

When Turner took a faltering step toward Lukas Bone, who applied his steel capped workboots to Grace’s head and torso with precision, purpose and undisguised glee, punctuating each kick with a “whore” or a “slut”, the giggling Tard, without moving his eyes from his husband’s brutal industry, sent out a hand and shoved Turner backward.

Turner’s hip struck the granite top of the kitchen island and he slid to the floor near his bloody, stinking wife who stood watching the assault with the avid attention of a cockfight addict.

Turner closed his eyes and thought about Tanya’s parents and he thought about Grace’s sister. And, thinking about what he’d done back in South Africa, he looked for the lines of intersection and had tried to make some sense of it all but he couldn’t.

Just couldn’t.

Turner opened his eyes and looked away from Bone and Grace toward Bekker’s body, his eyes seeking out the invisible gun.

A scream, very close to his ear, snapped him from his trance as Lucy yelled and flailed at Lukas Bone, shouting, “Stop! Leave Grace! Leave her!”

Turner grabbed his daughter and clamped a hand over her mouth.

“Lucy,” he said into her hair, his whisper lost in Grace’s cries, Tard’s cackles and Bone’s glottal curses.

Still the child fought him.

“Kiddo, I need you to listen.”

She stopped struggling and looked at him with wide eyes.

He put his mouth right up against her ear.

“Do you see that man lying by the table?”

He turned her face toward Bekker’s body.

“Do you see him?”

She nodded and he relaxed the grip on her mouth.

“He has a gun in the waist of his jeans. When nobody is watching you I want you to get it. Do you understand?”

The child nodded again.

“I want you get that gun and bring it to me.”

3

Turner, riding the helter-skelter rush of the second meth pipe (vacuumed up after he’d called the bent cop) backed against the bullet-scarred wall as Bekker delved beneath his shirt like a gunfighter and produced an automatic pistol, leveled it and fired in one fluid motion, Turner raising his hands in a pathetic attempt at defense as he watched—his drug-mediated terror slowing time to treacle—the blue-black instrument of his death escape the rifling of the barrel in a small, sour puff of propellant and spin toward his head, intent on adding his blood and brain matter to the soiled carpet of the death house.

“What the fuck did you think you were doing?”

Bekker, compact frame taut as a quivering wire, the hurricane lamp on the floor flinging his giant shadow across the walls and ceiling as he advanced on Turner with his hands spread in a gesture of interrogation.

Empty hands.

The pistol still holstered.

Turner, certain that the meth had blessed him with the unsought gift of precognition, relaxed only slightly as he lowered his arms.

The cop, breathing bile and brandy and Coke, shook his head.

“Jesus, you’re a useless fuckin cunt. You know that?” Bekker said, for the first time the guttural rasp of his roots infecting his voice.

Turner nodded, his slime gummed lips unable to release a sound.

The Afrikaner ran a hand through his sweaty hair, his normally stylish coif
dangling in inky tendrils over his forehead.

“I’ve got the fuckin money in the car,” Bekker said. “It went a smooth as silk, Englishman. The Lawn Jockey came through. All we had to do was blindfold the girl, release her somewhere in Sandton and drive off into our rosy fuckin futures, free and clear as little tweety birds.”

Turner said nothing, the air around the cop boiling with his agitation.

Bekker pointed to where the girl was hidden by the splintered bedroom door.

“She’ll identify you. And you’ll sing, you cunt.”

“I won’t. I won’t say a thing about you,” Turner said, the words torn from his throat.

“You will. You’ll sing about me to save your own ass.”

“I won’t, I swear,”

“That’s too much of a risk, Englishman. That’s playing Russian roulette with three fuckin bullets.”

Bekker’s hand moved, lifted the hem of the shirt that he wore untucked from his pants, and there it was, the gun, the cop cocking it with a glottal, tubercular sound.

Turner was trying to frame a plea, his raging brain fizzing and spitting like a downed power line as Bekker walked toward him.

Then the cop passed Turner by, crossing to the bedroom, pulling his mask over his face.

He stood a moment at the door before he toed it open and stepped inside, the dusty light from the lamp dribbling into the room, finding the girl who sat on the mattress staring up at Bekker.

4

Grace, her face hidden beneath a curtain of hair dark with sweat and blood, lay so still on the floor of the kitchen that Turner wondered if she were dead, and decided that it would be a blessing if she were.

But she moved, sobbing, and sat, staring up at him through eyes already swelling from the kicks Bone had landed.

Her nose was broken and her mouth leaked blood.

Her torn, bloody shirt gaped to the waist, revealing a breast sagging free of her black lace brassiere.

Turner, wanting to take her in his arms and tell her some soothing lie, was arrested in his steps when Lukas Bone lifted the power saw from the kitchen counter and spun it for a short, terrible burst.

“I think it’s time for a little more home improvement,” he said, looking down at Grace as he revved the DeWalt again.

“Let me do the fat cow,” Tanya said, stepping forward.

Bone shook his head.

“No. I have a better idea.” He grinned at Turner like a jack-o’-lantern. “We’ll let
him
do it.”

Turner held up his hands and shook his head and said, “No. No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“You’re certain of that?” Bone said.

“Yes.”

Bone turned to Tard, adopting the clubby tone of a late night TV host addressing his straight man.

“You hear that, Tard?”

“I hear it, Lukas.”

“Daddy is refusing my offer.”

“Right ungrateful.”

“That’s the word. Ungrateful. But, Tard, I will not be refused.”

“Nor should you be, Lukas. Nor should you be.”

“Tard, walk the darlin child this way.”

“We’re walkin, Lukas. We are walkin.”

The brute seized Lucy and lumbered toward where Bone stood spinning the saw again.

“Wait,” Turner said, his voice lost in the howl of the tool. “Wait!”

Bone ignored him and took hold of Lucy’s arm and forced it down on the counter, her shirt riding up revealing her skinny limb.

When Turner leaped forward he met the stinking wall of flesh that was Tard.

“You done had your chance,” Tard said.

Turner tried to fight himself free but Tard tittered and lifted him from the floor, smothering him to his body.

Bone cranked the saw and Turner watched the blade spin and screech, its jagged shadow falling across Lucy’s arm, his child staring up at him with eyes that leaked terror.

“Wait!” he shouted again, his breath squeezed from his lungs by the rancid giant.

Again Bone ignored him and the blade tugged at the flesh of Lucy’s forearm, opening the skin, blood flowing down toward her wrist.

The child’s scream pierced the whine of the blade.

Turner sucked air into his bursting lungs and yelled, “Stop! I’ll do it!”

Bone laughed and stilled the saw.

He freed Lucy and the child stood holding her bleeding arm, sobbing, blood from the gash dripping to the floor.

Tard released Turner and lowered himself to the floor, grunting and wheezing, until he squatted beside Grace who stared up at Turner through eyes seeing something beyond terror.

“You done changed your mind?” Bone asked.

“Yes,” Turner said. He couldn’t look at Grace.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Then kindly bring me the whore’s head,” Bone said, holding the saw out to Turner.

Turner took the saw.

Grace closed her eyes.

As Tanya focused on the screen of her iPhone (the idea to shoot this had come from her pathetic husband during their touching little goodbye session, and Lukas Bone had indulged her when she’d asked for the return of her phone and explained why she wanted it) framing the fat bitch’s face and the gray spinning blade that got ever closer to her neck, she remembered an interview she’d seen on TV with a war cameramen who’d said that as long as he viewed the carnage through his viewfinder he was distanced enough to be able to record it.

But Tanya had no interest in distance or distraction.

Fuck that.

She wanted to both record this event—her moment of sweet, bloody revenge (thank you Chris Bekker, you dead little cocksucker, for gifting me with these fabulous lunatics, like evil genies escaped a rubbing lamp to do my darkest bidding)—and participate in it on a visceral level.

Tanya framed up the shot of the whore’s head then panned across to Johnny, his face pale and haunted as he wielded the saw, moving in toward the milk cow. 

Turner had learned a dangerous trick that long-ago dawn when he’d stood beside the hole that ate his family: he’d watched himself from afar, locating himself as a character in the drama he was observing.

It was this facility that had led him to believe he was a writer, to believe that applying this gift of detachment would allow him to create memorable fiction.

But he’d been a bad writer and a worse man and he hadn’t written a word of prose in more than a decade because his life had proved to be more interesting than his work and, of course, his life was the one thing he could never write about.

After he’d gone clean and sober he’d found himself incapable of reading his unfinished novel, an ugly misshapen thing, a funhouse mirror reflecting the Turner he’d once been and—or so he’d managed to convince himself after reconstructing his life, mosaic-like, moment by moment—no longer was.

Before he’d left South Africa he’d taken his laptop to the bottom of the garden of his house in Johannesburg, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight, watching it burn, the screen cracking and exploding, the case buckling and melting, exposing its inner workings and then becoming just a small pile of clotted plastic and a few charred wires.

But it was this writer’s trick that a desperate Turner reached for now in his Arizona kitchen, standing over the only woman he had ever loved, her eyes filled with terror as he took the power saw from Lukas Bone.

He made himself a character.

He wrapped himself in the gauze of fiction.

Turner watched himself hovering above Grace, her pallid neck exposed by Tard, the freak’s one hand seizing knots of her hair, the other clamping her chest, his immensity crushing all the strength from her legs and arms.

Turner squeezed the trigger gently and felt the strength of the saw, grabbing it tightly before it flew from his grip.

He released the trigger.

Setting himself, he gunned it again, more prepared this time for the buck of the tool as it surged to life.

He made the mistake of looking into Grace’s eyes and in that instant he was himself again and he knew that what was being demanded of him was impossible.

As if reading his mind Bone thrust Lucy’s bleeding arm toward the blade.

“
Sophie’s Choice
, Daddy.
Sophie’s fuckin Choice
.”

Turner, blinking, panting, looked away from Grace’s eyes and detached himself again, the blade hovering millimeters from her throat, the savage teeth spinning over the ridge of her thyroid cartilage, the hollow beneath it—a fragrant trap for her sweat during sex—a place that Turner had loved to tongue.

He saw the light spoor of parallel neck folds encircling her throat like a choker.

He saw the blue stripe of her jugular vein swimming in her pale skin.

He saw the pulse at her throat counting her life away.

For a moment reality almost intruded again and Turner felt a little seismic shift in himself.

He could not do this.

But when he looked across at his daughter and saw not only his terrified child, but saw also the girl he had stolen all those years ago, he knew why it was that he must do this and he sealed the fault line and watched himself crank the saw as he reduced the universe to the stretch of skin between Grace’s clavicle and her hyoid bone.

Turner closed his eyes for a second and when he opened them he powered the DeWalt forward and the blade bit into flesh an inch north of Grace’s collar bone, meat and skin parting for steel in a spray of blood and if she cried out her didn’t hear it above the wail of the saw.

At first the blade found little resistance then it encountered bone and it stalled, the motor bellowing, and Turner reversed an inch and then bore down on the saw and muscled his way through the bone, the blade screaming—or was it Grace?—and then the DeWalt glided on smoothly and he had to stop himself from toppling forward into the hot fountain of blood that geysered up at him when he took his lover’s head.