Read Payback - A Cape Town thriller Online
Authors: Mike Nicol
Payback - A Cape Town thriller (14 page)
‘There’s a man,’ said Mace. ‘Well done.’ Then made Mikey repeat the address, bending close to his mouth to hear the panted words. Mace straightened. ‘Shows how wrong you can be. I guessed the northern suburbs. Paardeneiland factory land didn’t spring to mind first off.’
‘Great choice,’ said Pylon, rain gusting in spurts, the wind force rocking even the big Merc. He slowed to a crawl in Section Street, a deserted zone. Most of the factories and warehouses in darkness, some showrooms with display windows blazing.
‘Keep on,’ Mace told him, routing them from a street map open on his lap. At Calcutta indicated right, the buildings
thinning
out with vacant lots between them. At Bermuda got him to slow.
To the right the street was a cul-de-sac, ended by the Salt River Canal. Down there a one-storey building, empty land either side, the canal behind it. Had to be their destination.
Before they made the turn Pylon pulled over, killing the lights.
‘What’s the plan?’
‘Search me. Break the door down and get Christa out.’
He switched the wipers off and the street blurred. ‘There’ll be a guard.’
‘Sure.’
The rain drummed loudly over the car while they waited for the squall to ease. In the after-lull Pylon nodded towards the back. ‘And him?’
They had Mikey trussed and gagged in the boot.
Mace pulled out his Ruger, checked the clip and racked a load into the chamber. ‘Could be a complication. Probably best if he walks from here. Depending on how things go down.’
Pylon said, ‘Fair enough.’
From the glove compartment Mace took two full clips,
pocketed
one and gave the other to Pylon.
‘Shotguns would’ve been better,’ Pylon said. ‘Like a twelve gauge sawn-off.’
The door to the building was wooden, protected by a
concertina
security grille bolted into the concrete.
‘Hardly security,’ said Pylon.
He levered the grille open with a tyre iron, used much the same technique on the wooden door, except it made more noise. Behind the door was a small office, another door leading out of it.
They stopped, listened. Nothing but the rain, loud on the
corrugated
roof-sheeting.
Mace opened the door onto what might once have been a workshop. A ghostly light filtered through the windows from the street, enough to see racks for tools on the wall above a bench, the outlines of spanners, screwdrivers, power drills. Parked facing a roller door was a small delivery van with the decal International Flowers on the side. The floor was stained with patches of engine oil. In front of Mace a metal staircase spiralled up to the
mezzanine
floor.
Again they stopped. Rain noise. The rumble of wind over the roof. Mace gestured to Pylon that he was going up, disappeared into the shadows of the workshop.
He paused on every step, the metal creaking with his weight. At the top of the staircase, a door. He opened it, a light clicked on.
Abdul Abdul sat on a chair holding Christa tightly against his chest, his revolver in her mouth. Christa started at the sight of her father. Abdul tightened his grip, pushing the barrel deeper into her mouth.
‘Slowly, my friend,’ he said, ‘you gotta be careful.’
Mace put the pistol on him. ‘Let her go.’
The air smelt of cinnamon and something sweeter: dagga. The remains of a joint squashed in a saucer.
‘Take the gun out her mouth. Best thing is you point it at me.’
‘Best thing is you shut up,’ Abdul replied.
Mace took a step into the room, sideways towards a tier of bunk beds, away from where they sat other side of a table. On the table a microwave and a kettle, dirty plates in a basin.
He shifted the sight dead centre of Abdul’s forehead. ‘Give her up.’
Abdul snorted. ‘God is great.’
Mace took a step towards them.
‘No, my friend. Get back.’ He jerked at Christa and she moaned.
Mace stopped.
‘Back. Now, my friend. Back, back’ - his voice rising in pitch.
Mace did as he wanted.
Abdul gave a grin of pointy teeth. ‘Put your gun on the top bed. Like a good boy, lie down in the corner.’
Mace didn’t move.
Abdul stared at him, waiting, the grin unwavering.
‘This is your daughter,’ he said, cocking the hammer.
‘Okay, okay.’ Mace placed the pistol on the bunk. ‘Let her go. You can leave. I can’t stop you.’
‘Of course not. But you do not tell me what to do.’ He took the gun out of Christa’s mouth, gestured at the corner of the room. ‘Lie down. On your stomach.’
‘Papa,’ Christa yelled before he choked off her scream.
Mace paused. ‘It’s alright, C. It’s alright now, baby. He’s going to let you go.’
‘On your fucking stomach,’ shouted Abdul. ‘Come on. Come on.’
Christa whimpered. Mace could see scabs on her scalp where the shaver had nicked her, fresh blood leaking from a new cut. Abdul smothered her face against his torso, the gun at her bald head.
‘Lie down.’
Mace went over to the corner, knelt: the lino sticky beneath his palms. ‘Call it quits, Abdul. Let her come to me.’
‘Get flat,’ Abdul screamed. ‘Stop buggering around.’
His face was livid, a pulse working in his throat. He stood up, dragging Christa, kicked Mace in the small of the back.
‘Arsehole.’
Mace went down, the pain sharp, but braced on his arms and kicked out, catching Abdul off balance. He staggered against the wall and Christa screamed.
Mace heard a shot.
Heard her cry out.
Twisted into a crouch as she fell against him.
Abdul fired again.
A little after sunrise the storm was over, the sky clearing a thin blue line along the tops of the mountains. Mace stood among the rain puddles in the hospital car park, his hands warming around a
polystyrene
cup of coffee, dreading that Christa might not make it.
The what if unthinkable.
He paced across the car park to the fence. Over the road, sacred ibis and hadeda picked through a sodden field after frogs. He watched the birds, their quick stab, the small deaths. If Christa died he would lose Oumou too. Wouldn’t be able to live with her eyes, brown and sad, accusing. And why? Because he’d not considered the fanatics. Their madness. Never believed his family was in danger. Or that Abdul Abdul would have no worries about snatching a child.
He closed his eyes: saw Christa’s pain pulled across her face; Oumou’s tearless suffering. And remembered Techipa. Snapped on it suddenly: the faces of the MKs. Contorted, howling, bloody.
Mace opened his eyes, looked up at the Constantiaberg clear in the washed sunlight. Shook his head to clear the recall.
But the men were there, lying in the bush, in the sand, the sand in their wounds. The blood on the ground.
How they’d gone from one to the next, he and Pylon. One frightened young man to the next. The men begging for help. Three of them.
Half an hour earlier they’d sold the men guns. AKs, Russian and Chinese. Some Makarovs, some grenades. Twenty landmines. The deal was payment on delivery, Mace and Pylon rocking up in a Bedford, the MK commander paying in greenbacks. Ten men in the unit going to cause shit in the mountains. Hit and runs. Mine the tracks, take out some Boer armour. No fear in them then, only laughter.
Mace and Pylon hadn’t driven off three kays when they heard the firefight. Had returned to find three men alive, gut shot and going nowhere, a short way off eight Boer soldiers dead. A
hopeless
situation. No medicine. A day’s drive to the nearest town. They flipped a coin that fell two one to Mace.
Pylon’d said the men would be dead in hours anyway. Why have them suffer. Mace said nothing. Shot two men point blank, heard the retort of Pylon’s pistol behind him.
Afterwards they collected the weaponry from both sides. Trucked it to Lusaka for resale to other cadres heading over the border.
In all these years Mace hadn’t thought of the two men’s faces. Kept them in deep vaults he never opened. Would never have opened, he believed, if not for Ducky Donald Hartnell. Or had his daughter not been shot.
He threw the dregs of his coffee into the undergrowth. Crumpled the polystyrene cup in his fist.
A man coughed behind him. ‘Ah, Mr Bishop.’
‘What?’ Mace spun round. ‘For Chrissakes.’
Came face to face with Captain Gonsalves. ‘You alright?’ The cop peering at him. ‘You look like shit.’
Mace wiped a hand over his face, took a breath. ‘What’s it?’
The cop keeping up his stare, rubbing a plug of tobacco round the palm of his left hand. ‘Bit of a storm, hey, last night!’
Mace nodded.
Gonsalves popped the plug into his mouth, chewed tentatively. ‘Look, tell me if I’m outta line but a coupla answers to some questions would be useful.’
‘My daughter’s in ICU.’
‘I enquired. I’m sorry about that.’ He gave the plug a more
vigorous
chewing. ‘We could do it later at my office if you want. But now would be better. Abdul Abdul having such a, what you might call, high profile.’
Mace tossed the crushed cup into a refuse bin. ‘What about Pylon?’
The captain shrugged. ‘Due process, that’s all. No problem. Abdul had a bloody great forty-five in his hand. Had to be
self-defence
. What I hear there’s legislation pending that we’re gonna have to charge anyone who kills in self-defence. But we’re talking a couple of years’ time. Right now all we gotta do is file a statement. Know what I’m saying? For the autopsy.’
Mace sighed, looked up at the red tinge on the clouds. Sailors would get the horrors at crimson dawns.
‘Ten minutes of your time.’ Gonsalves spat out a stray strand of tobacco. Before Mace could respond he put his own spin to it. ‘This’s a follow-up on the Catastrophe bombing as I read it. Not so?’
‘Yeah,’ Mace said, ‘it is’ - and gave him a brief account of Christa’s abduction, how he’d tracked down Abdul through a lucky break.
‘Meaning?’
‘A mutual contact.’
Gonsalves looked dubious. ‘That right? Within twenty-four hours?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Going some.’ He gave the plug a suck. ‘Usually we’re talking days, weeks even.’
‘We got lucky.’ Mace pinched the bridge of his nose. Suddenly exhausted. ‘Anything else?’
The captain nodded. ‘Maybe. For instance, why’n’t you let us know?’
‘I was told to keep the cops out of it.’
‘They always say that. People think they can handle it, take their time getting to us. Only causes grief.’ He snapped closed his notebook. ‘This’s a help for now’ - offered his hand, and Mace shook it. ‘If I prayed I’d pray for your daughter. If I believed I’d say trust in God.’
As Mace turned away Gonsalves said, ‘That lawyer Sheemina February involved in any of this?’
Mace glanced back. ‘Not so’s you could pin it. Made some legal threats to the Hartnells I heard.’
Gonsalves said, ‘She was Abdul’s attorney.’
‘Then she’s got one less client.’
The captain opened the door of an old Cressida. ‘I’m expecting her call. Once she gets to hear, she’s gonna be all over us.’ He spat the tobacco plug into his hand and flicked it under a bed of shrubs edging the parking lot. The Cressida’s engine swung a couple of times before it fired.
Watching the cop drive off Mace thought, Techipa. He’d looked in the guys’ faces, seen fear and hope. Moved quickly from one to the next. Jesus Christ, to remember it now.
He went back into the hospital, took the stairs to the ICU wing. On the landing his phone rang: Sheemina February.
‘My flight’s just landed,’ she said. ‘I am told your daughter has been badly wounded.’
Mace walked to a corner, away from a group of people huddled on chairs, blank-eyed and stunned. He kept his voice low, controlled: ‘Then you know your friend Abdul Abdul is dead.’
‘Client, Mr Bishop. I represent - represented - him.’
Mace snorted. ‘Of course. The detached lawyer. Well, I don’t see it that way.’
‘Oh, how do you see it?’
‘I see your hand in this somewhere. I don’t know where. But somewhere.’
Sheemina February laughed. ‘How flattering, Mr Bishop. That you should think I have power over men such as Abdul.’
‘Get out of my life,’ said Mace. ‘Out of my life, out of my family’s life.’ He thumbed her off, thinking, leave it, walk away, when once he wouldn’t have. Once he’d have played it differently with Sheemina February, but that was once and elsewhere. Now he had to leave it. She was too high profile. Too connected. You touched her you got burned. Mace didn’t want that. He had too much to lose. Had almost lost Christa, didn’t want to think of losing Oumou. He put the phone in his jacket pocket, went off to find his wife.
Oumou sat in a chair, a cup of tea long cold at her elbow. The doctors were with Christa, she whispered. Mace sat beside her, held her hand. Until there was this woman, he thought, he had not known another’s pain; until there was Christa he had not known fear. The fear that a life might be lost to him. The fear of being without her.
An hour they sat there, watching blankly the trail of doctors and nurses in and out of the ward. Eventually a young doctor approached, dressed like he was heading off for a round of golf. Introduced himself as the surgeon who’d operated on Christa.
He sat opposite them, said, ‘Your daughter’s condition is stable. We need to keep her in ICU for a few more days. For monitoring. You see the bullet went through her intestines but that’s not the problem, the problem’s that it grazed her spine. Severed some nerves. At the moment, Mr Bishop, Mrs Bishop, your daughter’s paralysed from the waist down.’
Mace felt Oumou stiffen.
‘We’ll have to perform another procedure in a few days and maybe some things can be corrected. I’m not going to tell you she will walk again. All I’m telling you is we will do our best for her.’ He stood up. ‘I’m sorry I had to give you such news.’
There was something weird, Mace decided, about how things worked: that when you thought you were getting your life together, you weren’t.