Man Down (10 page)

But the carjackers had fled and so had she: escaping the madness of Africa for this country that she detested.

But it had come now and, as Tanya lay on the floor of the house in Arizona, watching through slit eyes as the masked men moved around her living room, hearing the low rumble of their voices, she tried to fight her way to consciousness, knowing she had to face down this terror to free herself, but a riptide took her and swept her back into the darkness.

6

When Turner, his eyes still on his unconscious wife and his mind in freefall, failed to realize that Bone, standing in the doorway near the corpse, had addressed him, the thickset man stepped forward and slapped him through the face to get his attention.

“Hey, fucker.”

Turner gaped at him, lifting a hand to his stinging cheek.

Bone pointed at Peter.

“Get this sack of shit into the house.”

Turner didn’t move and Bone slapped him again, hard enough to make him stagger.

“You hearin me?”

Turner nodded and, choking back his fear and distaste, kneeled, grabbing the body by the ankles. Peter wore tennis socks under wine-colored Dockers that were buffed to a neurotic sheen.

Turner dragged Peter into the house, the wound in his neck gaping on veins and vertebra as his head bounced when it crossed the threshold, a thick crimson swathe of blood following in his wake.

Lucy, glimpsing the dead man for the first time, screamed and twisted her way out of Bekker’s grip, running toward the front door.

She slipped in the blood and plunged to the wooden floor, panting in terror.

Bone, the knife still in his hand, bent at the waist and grabbed her, the blade sweeping toward the girl’s throat.

Turner launched himself at Bone, hitting him hard enough in the chest to get him to drop the child and the knife and tumble toward the floor.

Bone threw out an arm to break his fall and used it as a piston to drive his body upward, gaining his feet in a surprisingly athletic bound resembling a street dance move.

As he stood he drew his automatic and pointed it at Turner, who crouched, winded, keeping himself between the gunman and his child.

Bone’s finger tightened on the trigger.

“Wait,” Bekker said, seizing
Lucy again, dragging her away from the door.  “He’s the only one who knows the combination to the safe.”

For a few long seconds the pistol didn’t waver, then Bone lowered it.

“Later,” he said to Turner.

Lucy squirmed in Bekker’s arms and he said, “I wish to Christ the females in this goddam house would learn to behave.”

He squeezed the girl tight enough to make her gasp and she stared at Turner as her eyes teared up and he wondered if, finally, he had been presented with the tab for a very old debt.   

7

“Where the fuck did Jo’burg go, anyway?”

Turner, sipping at a dainty little silkworm of a spliff to soothe his nerves, his soiled Chuck Taylors up on the dash of the Toyota HiAce, gazed through the open side window as tracts of identical condos fortified with spike-topped walls and humming electric fences, gave way to an endless tumble of tin shacks sprouting from the sour veld like a fungus.

“It went to Africa, my friend, while we were looking the other fuckin way,” Bekker said, driving the van hard, throwing it at gaps in the rush hour traffic, his Ray-Bans reflecting twin sagging suns. “And it’s time for us to get our skinny white asses out of this fuckin country.”

The cop was wired, chain smoking and road raging since Turner had left his bike parked in the shadow of a puke-yellow McDonald’s arch at the bottom of Beyers Naudé Drive and climbed aboard the dented white van, the provenance of which had neither been questioned nor explained.

Turner sucked the last life from the joint, the hot ash at its end burning his lips and fingers and flicked it through the window, holding the smoke in his lungs until he coughed explosively, longing for something more powerful, longing to surrender himself to a riptide of chemicals that would degauss his memory, leaving him free, for a few hours at least, of the image of Mr. Paul’s hammer reducing the skull of the naked white man to something soggy and wet.

But he’d sworn to Bekker that he was going to get his shit together and had, by and large, succeeded.

A few joints and a belt or two of whiskey each day could be forgiven as a necessary palliative, the only workable alternative to the bucket full of snot he would have become if he’d gone cold turkey.

“You know when I made up my mind that I was gonna leave all this behind and get the fuck out?” Bekker said, the van shaking and rattling as he overtook a waddling mini-bus taxi swollen with black commuters.

“When?”

“When I watched my father spit a kudu turd fifty feet.”

Turner squinted at Bekker.

“You ever hear of dung spitting?” the cop asked. “The sport of my noble fuckin ancestors?”

Turner nodded.

“I saw it once on TV. Some fat Afrikaner guys in shorts spitting little black turds to see who could go the furthest.”

“That’s it. My miserable excuse for a father was a regional champion. Even had trophies in the living room. He used to train every evening in the backyard, my mutant mother shouting encouragement so loud her fuckin dentures would fly out.”

“Beautiful memories.”

“Kodachrome moments, my buddy.”

Bekker lifted a soft pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Texan plain, the red star logo encircled by lasso rope. He drew a smoke out with his teeth and set fire to it with the van lighter.

“When I’d just turned eighteen I went to watch my father compete, him and a bunch of drunken in-bred trash getting wasted on peach brandy and spitting fuckin turds and,
bam!
, something changed for me, just like that. I knew that not a fuck was I going to end up like him.”

“The buck shit stopped with you?”

Bekker laughed smoke.

“Next day I joined the cops. A month into training I snuck out of the academy one night and held up a darkie shebeen with my service pistol. Snuck back in and nobody was any the fuckin wiser. That’s how it’s been for me ever since. Used the badge. Used the gun. And I’ve done okay. But it’s getting tighter, Englishman. This is no country for a white man. I need a score like this. A major motherfucking score that’ll get my ass over to the States.”

“You’re seriously going to America?”

“Hell, yeah. Home of the brave, Englishman, land of the free.”

“Or maybe just a supersized goatfuck?”

“Sure it is. A nation of greedy, fat overconsumers ripe for the taking. Boo-fuckin-ya.”

The shacks were close enough now for Turner to catch the whiff of human dung that leaked into the stagnant black stream separating the squatters from their neighbors, the anxious and depressed suburbanites who had watched their property values tank as the shacks multiplied—their futile retort the fortifications and the handguns loaded with hollow point ammunition they kept under their pillows at night.

Bekker turned the Toyota onto a narrow road so cratered it could have suffered a mortar attack, and drove for a few minutes until the shacks stuttered to an end on the sun bleached grass.

He swung onto a dirt track flanked by an avenue of tired blue gums, the Toyota churning up a trail of red dust that had Turner cursing and winding up his window despite the heat.

A house rose into view through the trees, a squat, ugly mélange—an old Transvaal stone homestead with a wide porch that had fallen victim to a series of artless renovations and extensions.

The house was surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with coils of silver razor wire, set alight by the low red sun.

Bekker stopped the Toyota at a pair of gates held closed by a padlock. He stepped down from the idling van which shuddered and heaved and unlocked the gates, oxidized hinges shrieking like butchered pigs when he shoved them open.

Back behind the wheel he sped toward the house, dodging an empty swimming pool, its dark mouth open to the sky in a silent scream.

Bekker stopped the van near the front door and killed the engine.

“What’s it look like to you?” he asked, gesturing with his cigarette at the doors and windows covered with rusting lengths of heavy gauge rebar.

“A prison,” Turner said.

The cop laughed.

“Yeah. Fuckin beautiful, isn’t it?”

He rummaged in the van’s door compartment and fished out two pairs of surgical gloves.

Tossing one pair in Turner’s lap, he said, “Put those on,” while he rolled the other pair onto his hands, flexing his fingers like a concert pianist.

Turner followed orders as Bekker jumped down from the Toyota, came around to the passenger side and rattled open the sliding door.

Turner, who felt spaced and disassociated, sat staring out the windshield at the god-awful house, wondering if another joint would make him feel better or worse.

“Fuck, Englishmen, you’re not on holiday. Gimme a fuckin hand here.”

Turner climbed down and watched as Bekker hauled two military-style kitbags from the rear of the van and dumped them in the dust.

The cop gestured to the mattress that lay on the corrugated floor of the Toyota.

“Bring that inside.”

Bekker hefted the two kitbags and humped them to the front of the house. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the steel gate and the heavy wooden door.

Turner followed him into the empty living room, dragging the mattress, which was old and misshapen, its torn ticking a Rorschach of stale bodily fluids.

When Turner dropped the mattress clouds of dust rose from the carpeted floor making Jesus rays of the shafts of hot sunlight that lanced in though the two barred windows.

Bekker knelt, unzipping one of the duffel bags, removing two blankets and a gas lamp. Behind his head the plaster of the wall bore the unmistakable imprints of tightly grouped
bullet holes.

Looking more closely at the beige carpet Turner saw tracks of ominous, rust-colored stains.

“What happened here?”

Bekker lit a smoke.

“A white family got taken out a year ago.”

“Home invasion?”

“Yeah, fuckin savages from the squatter camp.”

“How’d they get in with all this . . ?”

Turner gestured at the bars that cast black shadows across the bloodstained carpet.

“Through the roof,” Bekker said, “like fuckin apes.” 

Bekker stood, walked down a short corridor and pushed open a door, revealing a small bedroom, the carpet still bearing the imprint of the base of the bed that had once almost filled the cramped space.

He looked at Turner through the fumes of his cigarette.

“This is where you’ll keep her.”

The reality of what they were about to do—what
he
was about to do—struck Turner with the force of a blow and he dropped the mattress and leaned against the wall, feeling the coolness of the plaster against his skull.

Bekker crossed the room to the single barred window that offered a view of the crumbling brickwork of the adjacent garage.

“No way she can get out and she won’t be able to see fuck all.”

He toed open the door of the windowless en-suite bathroom and a dank smell entered the room.

“The water and power have been cut, but she can piss and shit in here.”

“Jesus,” Turner said, “it’s foul.”

“What do you want, Englishman? The fuckin Hilton?” Bekker said, exiting the room. “Come, gimme a hand.”

Back in the living room he unloaded four packs of shrink-wrapped bottled water from a duffel bag.

“Take two through to the bedroom. The other two are for you.”

Turner stacked the water and humped it into the bedroom, dropping it on the floor beside the mattress.

Bekker followed him carrying a blanket and a Checkers plastic bag.

He tossed the blanket onto the mattress and emptied the contents of the bag onto the floor: potato chips, bars of chocolate, a hand of overripe bananas and two wrinkled red apples.

“Aren’t I just the host with the fuckin most?” Bekker said.

Turner didn’t answer, staring at the dirty carpet as if it would tell him something.

“Hey, Englishman, don’t fuckin vague out on me now.”

“No, I’m cool.”

“You fuckin better be. Okay, come on, we’ve got a lot to discuss.”

Bekker left the room and closed the door after them, pointing at the key in the lock.

“You put her inside and you lock this door and you don’t fuckin open it again until you hear from me, right?”

“Yes.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

Bekker looked
at him, then nodded and went through to the kitchen, snagging one of the kit bags on the way.

The kitchen, the air thick with mold and rot, had been stripped of anything of value, all that remained were chipped tiles, empty shelves and a counter on which Bekker set down the duffel bag, unzipping it.

The cop removed a photograph, a map and three cell phones.

He held up the photograph. A black kid with short hair smiling shyly at the camera.

“That’s her.”

“What’s her name?”

“What do you care? You’re kidnapping her, not dating her.”

“I just want to know.”

Bekker shook his head.

“Don’t fuckin humanize her, Englishman. She’s a piece of meat. A commodity. Our passport to a monster payday.”

Turner shrugged.

Bekker said, “You’ll recognize her?”

“I’ll recognize her.”

Bekker folded the photograph and pocketed it.

“This is where you’ll find her,” he said, tapping the map. “Her school’s here. During recess at noon sharp she climbs through a hole in the fence and goes down to the river and sits and listens to her iPod for half an hour.”

“You’ve seen this?”

“No, I’m fuckin psychic. Yes, I’ve seen it. I followed her for a fuckin week, trying to figure out a way to get at her. She’s chauffeured to school and back home. She has no close friends, just holes up in her house busy with fuck knows what. But she does this one thing. Goes down to the river every day and the beauty of it is that nobody except you and me knows she does it.” He smiled. “You be there tomorrow just before twelve and you take her.”

Turner stared at him.

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, Englishman, tomorrow. Why, you got plans? Having your hair done? Having your balls waxed?”

“It’s just sooner than I thought.”

“Leaves no time for you to get cold feet.”

Turner nodded.

“So, tomorrow morning you go to the McDonalds. The van’ll be parked where I got you today. I’ve checked, you’ll be out of range of any security cameras. You drive to the river, park under the trees. Then you walk down to the water and you wait for her. She won’t hear or see you if you come from behind and drug her.”

“Drug her with what?”

“Jesus, you’re the fuckin chemical expert. Figure it out. Then you carry her to the van.” He saw Turner’s face. “Don’t worry, she’s small for fourteen. When you get her in the back of the van you blindfold and gag her, just in case, and tie her up.”

He lifted one of the cellphones.

“Then you shoot a picture of her and send it to this number.” He fiddled with the controls of the phone. “It’s the only number in the memory. Okay?”