Man Down (23 page)

5

Turner, at the wheel of the HiAce, its aging headlights yellow on the pitted asphalt, followed Bekker who piloted an anonymous white Honda.

They skirted the shack settlement and drove for a long time through the empty night on a deserted road that lay flat and straight as a spar on the land, the moon hidden by scudding silver clouds.

At a T-junction Bekker slowed and took a hard right. As Turner cranked the wheel of the HiAce, wrestling with the reluctant steering rack, he heard a hissing scuff as the girl’s body, wrapped in a blanket, slid in the rear of the van and bumped against the back door.

Turner clicked on the radio and found only static before a country station locked in, some Afrikaner wannabe Dolly Parton who’d never seen anything but veld yodeling about the lone prairie.

Before their departure from the death house Bekker and Turner, both wearing gloves, had worked in silence as they scoured the place clean of any sign of their presence, removing the mattress and bagging the provisions the cop had bought and dumping them in the HiAce.

Bekker had checked each room by the beam of a flashlight until he was satisfied that all trace of them and the girl had been obliterated.

Then, wordlessly, they had gone into the bedroom and lifted the blanket, carrying the body out to the van.

Bekker had locked the house and, in convoy, they’d driven for the road.

Turner, fighting terror and a suffocating dread, hadn’t asked where they were going and had meekly followed Bekker even though he understood that he was still in danger, that he could join the girl in whatever remote grave the cop was making for.

But Turner drove on, as if the HiAce were yoked to the Honda, with no thought of escape, all volition gone after the events at the house, his meth-addled head rattling with broken fragments of the last few hours.

The flasher of the Honda was blinking and Turner tailed Bekker onto a dirt road that twisted past a grassed mine heap, evidence of the city’s golden past.

The moon leered through the clouds silhouetting the stilled wheel of the rotting headgear and Turner was a boy again, pedaling his bike into a future of pain and confusion.

After a few minutes Bekker stopped his car and Turner rolled to a halt behind him. He clicked off the radio.

The cop stood up out of the car
and walked to the HiAce, lifting the rear door.

Turner stepped down, his feet crunching on gravel, catching the nostalgic whiff of the strychnine used in the gold ore reduction process still trapped in the cratered layers of a slag heap that resembled a stepped Mayan pyramid in the moonlight.

Bekker took hold of the blanket and dragged the wrapped body from the HiAce, Turner grabbing hold of the girl’s feet to stop her from falling.

“Walk carefully,” Bekker said, the flashlight held in his free hand. “There are open shafts here.”

Turner obeyed and they tramped for a few minutes through the rutted veld, skirting twists of rusted wire, piles of tumbled masonry and derelict old minecarts—his father had called them cocopans—before they passed the skeleton of a building.

Bekker stopped and they set down the body.

The cop played the flashlight over the buckled ground until he found a hole, partly obscured by spears of coarse grass, which yawned black into the earth.

Bekker reached down and grabbed the girl and Turner followed suit.

They approached the ventilation shaft, their shoes scuffing pebbles that fell into the darkness with the sound of rice in a sieve.

“On three,” Bekker said.

He counted and they swung and tossed the girl’s body into the dark maw.

It bumped a few times and then was gone, falling too far into the earth for the noise of its landing to reach them.

Turner stood by the
mouth
of the shaft feeling like a man who had dug his own grave and now awaited his executioner’s bullet. 

But Bekker turned and walked back to the Honda without a word.

Standing with his shoes on the sloping lip Turner felt the tug of gravity, felt the earth slide beneath his feet and for a moment he was ready to surrender, to let go and allow himself to fall into the blackness.

But he didn’t.

He stepped away from the hole and followed Bekker back to the vehicles.

6

Turner, kneeling on tiles awash with gore, vomited himself empty, the necklaces of acrid puke that dangled from his mouth yo-yoing with each heave of his gut.

To his side, against the red-splattered kitchen drawers, Grace’s body lay where it had fallen, a bare foot thrust out toward him, the burgundy varnish on its toes an echo of the viscous blood that swathed the tiles like pudding.

Turner focused down, reducing his universe to the scatter of fridge poetry magnets lying in the blood and puke, forming a jumbled sequence that hinted at some deeper significance.

A reflex had him looking up as the hard sodium lights caught Grace’s hair in motion, and for just a moment he was convinced that all of this was merely a mad hallucination and that she was dancing before him, pirouetting, her hair flying out the way it did when she was happy or high, and then he saw that the demented Tard, giggling like a castrato as he twirled and capered, held her severed head away from his body, letting it spin like a ribbon on a maypole, Tanya and Lukas Bone laughing at the gimp’s antics.

Turner, poleaxed by all he had wrought, moaned and folded, the warm blade of the stilled power saw nibbling at his cheek as he collapsed to the sticky floor.

Two gunshots, fired in such rapid succession that they could almost have been one, had Turner jerking upright and he saw Tard stagger but—incredibly—stay on his feet, even though his domed forehead had disintegrated, revealing his prefrontal cortex.

Turner panned left to Lucy kneeling beside Bekker’s body, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip, firing again from behind the giant, this time taking him in the upper back.

She fired a fourth time, the kick of the weapon sitting her on her ass, the bullet drilling into one of the exposed ceiling crossbeams.

Turner found the time to wonder how she had known to release the safety catch of the pistol.

One of the perks of consuming too much American TV, he supposed.

Then he saw Lukas Bone, stationed near the sink, delving for the weapon jammed into the waistband of his bootcut Wranglers.

Something must’ve snagged on the too-tight jeans—the front sight perhaps?—and Bone, snarling, had to yank twice to free the pistol, which gave Turner time to snatch the power saw from the bloody floor, hit the trigger and fling himself at the man, aiming the spinning blade at his neck.

Turner slipped on the slick tiles and the blade skimmed harmlessly past Bone’s throat but, as Turner fell, his full weight drove the blade into the blond man’s sternum, and as he plunged to the floor Turner dragged the saw with him, unzipping Bone from chest to pube—the Dixie belt buckle popping and frisbeeing away to lodge in the spindly trunk of the bonsai dogwood standing in the shadow of the Cuisinart where it would amuse the forensic team the following day—his intestines tumbling out of his abdomen in wet pendant coils.

With a speech bubble of blood spraying from his mouth Bone raised the pistol and loosed a shot which flew wide of Lucy but struck Tanya in the right eye, flinging a gout of blood and brain against the glass of the sliding door.

7

“Johnny? What the fuck are you doing?”

Turner, huddled on his mattress in the dark, shaking, looked up and saw Tanya in the doorway of the cottage, silhouetted against the moonlight.

“Go away, Tanya.”

But she didn’t go away. She stepped into the room and clicked on the light and stared at him.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

He looked down and saw that his T-shirt was streaked with gore and he couldn’t shut out the image of the girl’s head, a mush of blood and brain, as Bekker had wrapped it in a yellow Checker’s plastic bag and then rolled her body into the blanket.

“It’s not my blood,” he said.

Tanya stood over him.

“You’re in trouble?”

“Please fuck off.”

“Talk to me, Johnny.”

He looked up at her.

“Yes, I’m in trouble.”

“That cop?”

“Yeah, that cop.”

She closed the front door, moved dirty clothes and a coffee mug from a chair and sat down.

“Give me some money,” she said.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“How much?”

“Anything. Doesn’t matter.”

Turner, patting his jeans pocket, remembered he’d been ripped off by the hooker who’d blown him in the van and reached for the backpack he’d dropped by the bed.

The pack Bekker had handed to him when he’d left him on Ontdekkers Road near a taxi rank after they’d ditched the HiAce on the outskirts of Soweto, the cop saying, “Don’t make me regret this,” before he’d sped away.

Turner slung the pack across to Tanya who unzipped it and looked at the bulging notes.

“Fucking hell,” she said.

She reached in and took a fifty.

“Okay. Now you’ve retained me as your lawyer. Whatever you tell me is protected by attorney client privilege. You understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“So talk.”

He hesitated and then he spoke for a very long time and told her everything he had done.

She didn’t flinch, her shrewd little eyes never leaving his face.

When he was done she said nothing, gazing out the window into the night.

A light drizzle had started falling and Turner heard the muffled tapping of the raindrops on the blanket that shrouded the girl in her grave a mile beneath the earth, saw the cloth dampen and mold to her face, her mouth open in a plea.

“Johnny?”

Blinking, he focused on Tanya as she kneeled before him, staring into his eyes.

“Yes,” he said.

“I need you to do exactly as I tell you, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“How much is in the backpack?”

“Half a million.”

“Okay. I’m going to remove the fifty grand you owe this Nigerian guy . . .”

“Mr. Paul.”

“Right, Mr. Paul.” She placed a stack of banknotes on the mattress beside him. “You’ll pay him first thing in the morning. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Now I want you to strip off what you’re wearing. Underwear, shoes, the fucking lot, okay?”

“Okay.”

He did as she commanded and stood naked before her, shivering with fear and the early symptoms of withdrawal.

“Have you got a garbage bag?”

He pointed to the kitchen. “Under the sink.”

She burrowed amongst the empty bottles and trash until she found a black bag and shoved his clothes inside.

“Now go and take a bath. Scrub yourself. Wash your hair. Clean under your fingernails. You hearing me?”

“Yes, I’m hearing you.”

Tanya hefted the bag and the backpack, heading for the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to destroy the clothes and hide the money,” she said. “Now do as I say. I’ll only be gone a while.”

Tanya closed the front door and Turner heard her shoes on the gravel and the whine of her old Volkswagen’s engine as she drove away with enough evidence to send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Turner knew he should flee but he didn’t. He walked into the bathroom and ran a bath.

The cottage had once been part of the servant’s quarters of the grand house and the tub was ancient, the enamel stained black and red beneath the faucets and pitted as old skin. Grime circled the bathtub like tree rings, showing how many months had passed since it had last been scrubbed.

As water tumbled into the tub he returned to the front room and ransacked the cottage for bottles of booze, baggies of weed and stray blister packs of pharmaceuticals, which he dumped in the middle of the floor.

Turner stared at the little mound like a mourner at a graveside and then he forced his feet to move and found another black bag in the kitchen and filled it with the Tennessee whiskey, the Durban Poison, the Mumbai Mandrax and the twists of Bolivian blow. Knotting the top, he slung the bag out the front door, locked up after him and went through to the bathroom.

He kept the light off and sank into the tub.

Turner uncapped his most powerful carbolic, an anti-dandruff shampoo, and scrubbed himself from head to toe with the caustic selenium sulfide, as if it would wash him free of sin.

At last he stood and dried himself until his skin stung then he went through to the front room and dressed in the cleanest clothes he could find.

He sat on the chair, hands on his knees, staring at nothing until he heard Tanya’s car and then her familiar tap on the door.

He opened it and she entered, her short hair moist from the rain.

“It’s done,” she said.

“Where’d you take the stuff?”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask.”

He looked at her. “Why are you doing this, Tanya? I didn’t think you liked me very much.”

She spat a laugh. “I don’t like you, Johnny. You’re an okay fuck, but, Jesus, as a human being . . .”

She shook her head again.

“So, why?”

She stared at him, dragging one side of her mouth down in a bitter smile.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

He squinted at her.

“Yes, it’s yours. You’re the only person I’ve screwed in a year.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“I’m going to have it. The baby. I’m nearly thirty-five. I haven’t had much luck with men, even losers like you. This is probably my only chance and I’m not going to fuck it up.”

“What do you want from me?”

She shrugged a narrow shoulder. “Let’s take it a step at a time. For now, let’s just get you clear of this shit. Then we can work out what happens with us.”

“There’s an
us
?” he said.

She laughed again, that dry little bark.

“Yes, Johnny, get used to it.”

And in that moment a trapdoor opened beneath him and with it came that feeling of tumbling, of falling, that had been with him since he was a boy, but this time he plunged only a short distance before the noose at his throat arrested his fall, leaving him dangling, throttled, dying by degrees.