Man Down (11 page)

“Okay.”

“Then you toss the phone in the river. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you drive over here and you put her in that room and untie and ungag her and lock her inside and you sit your ass down and wait until you hear from me.” He held up the other phone. “On this. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, if there are any problems—which I know there are not going to be—you call me on this phone.” Lifting the third instrument. “Again, there’s just one number in memory. But you use that only—and I fuckin mean
only—
in an emergency. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Pocket the phones.”

Turner obeyed.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, it’s getting dark.”

Turner didn’t move.

“What?” Bekker said.

“Why do I have to take her alone?”

Bekker sighed. “Jesus Christ, Englishman, are you brain damaged? I told you man, I have to be far from the whole thing with a rock solid alibi, stuck in a car somewhere with my dumb fuckin jungle bunny partner. There can never, fuckin ever, be any trail connecting the Lawn Jockey and me. Otherwise why the fuck would I need you? I’d just do it myself and make a whole whack more cash.”

“I’m doing all the heavy lifting.”

“Listen, dickbrain, you’re snatching a little girl and babysitting her for a night or two, tops. I’m the one who is orchestrating this whole motherfucking thing. Keeping the Lawn Jockey in line. Making sure we get the ransom money. Monitoring any law enforcement activity.”

“How’re we going to let her go? The girl?” Turner said.

“Night I get the money I’ll call you and then you mask up and you go into the room and you give her another shot or whatever and you dump her into the Toyota and then you drive her to a destination still to be decided.”

Turner eyeballed the cop. “We
are
going to let her go?”

“Fuck, of course we’re going to let her go,” Bekker said, zipping the bag. “Kidnapping’s one thing, but even in this fucked up excuse for a Third World shitpot killing a little black diamond is going to bring a whole lot of heat down on us.” He walked toward the front door. “Come, let’s move.”

Turner followed Bekker out into the gathering gloom, smelling wood fires and human shit.           

8

Bekker, still gagging Lucy with his glove, lifted her from the floor and wrestled her toward the kitchen, the child fighting like a dog in a sack.

Turner made to follow but Bekker, his back to Bone and Tard, mouthed the word “no” through the hole in his ski mask.

Turner, sick with all he had done, stood in the living room near the dead man, the stink of blood and voided waste thick in his nostrils, and watched as Bekker carried his daughter into the kitchen, battling panic that retreated slow as a mud tide.

Using his shoe, Bekker shoved open the heavy wooden sliding door to the pantry and the light clicked on, revealing the small, windowless space, the floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with canned foods, bottled water and glass preserve jars filled with the whole grain cereals, pulses and fermented soy products that were the staple of Tanya’s masochistic
diet.

Bekker tossed Lucy inside, slammed the door shut and locked it, pocketing the key.

The light was extinguished automatically and the child, plunged into darkness, pounded on the door, her screams muffled by the heavy wood.

9

Turner, feeling about as alien as he ever had in the years since he’d been in America, feeling adrift, stateless—a man who had lost his country twice—stood outside his office staring across the seared brown landscape.

The apartheid South Africa of his childhood and youth (like a brutal Ionesco play) had changed, become something even more violent and savage while his attention was elsewhere. 

And then Tanya—spurred into action after they were carjacked in their Johannesburg driveway—had wangled the position at the Tucson college and within months of staring down the barrel of a gun Turner had seen his life uprooted from the plains of the highveld and transplanted to the ditch-dry landscape of Arizona.

He’d never been to America before they relocated but he’d always felt he’d known it. South Africa, after the belated arrival of TV in the mid-70s, had shrugged off the stifling influence of its erstwhile colonial master, Britain, and the archaic civilities of BBC radio plays were swept away by
Dallas
,
The A-Team
,
Charlie’s Angels
and
Magnum PI
.

Little shops serving tea and scones were trampled beneath the invading army of KFCs and McDonalds and strip malls sprouted from the provincial cities that were suddenly ringed by a tangle of freeways.

Turner was weaned on a diet of American books, movies and music, and when he was barely old enough, had started ingesting American booze by the boatload, so he’d expected the move to be almost seamless, and at first it was.

Superficially the U.S. was everything he’d expected and the first couple of months were easy. Then he’d realized that there was a lot he would never fathom. An American code he would never crack, no matter how long he lived there.

After a year he had come to the reluctant realization that America had been a prize best viewed from afar, a loud, restless, relentless culture comprehensible to him only when it’d been strained through the muslin woven from the privations and absurdities of South Africa during the tragi-comic apartheid years and their disappointing and terrifying aftermath.

Unlike Turner, his wife had no desire to assimilate.

Tanya clung stubbornly to her foreignness.

She scorned America and Americans, convinced of her superiority, angered by Lucy’s inevitable shapeshift into one of them, the child young enough for the accent to stick to her like the syrupy candy she’d developed a taste for, Tanya telling her that she’d end up obese, good for nothing but an appearance on
Jerry Springer
or
The Biggest Loser
.

Turner, though he envied his daughter her ability to jettison her past like unwanted ballast and evolve into another person entirely, had long ago accepted that he would be never be settled, would always be homesick for a place that had never existed, but the appearance of Grace Worthington had disturbed him in a way he didn’t fully understand.

“Mr. Turner?”

Grace stood in the office doorway, golden and statuesque.

“John,” Turner said.

“John,” she said, her drawl transforming his curt, anonymous name—evidence of his parents’ lack of imagination—into something still exotic to his foreigner’s ear:
Jaaaahn
.

She went quiet and did that thing again with her hair, brushing it away from her forehead, betraying her nerves.

In the three days she’d worked in his office he’d had occasion to see it often enough to develop a healthy loathing for the about-to-be-ex-husband who, Turner guessed, had come close to beating the spark from this woman.

Turner found a smile.

“There’s something you want to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound too certain,” he said, working that smile.

“Okay, this isn’t really part of my job description . . .” Her voice trailed off again and he feared she’d lose her nerve entirely.

“Any input is welcome, believe me.”

“Well, I couldn’t help but hear you on the phone earlier, talking to HomePro.”

A home supply chain that could make him a lot of money.

“Not my finest hour,” he said. “The buyers aren’t interested in meeting me to discuss stocking PoolShark.”

“I know those people,” she said.

“You know the buyers at HomePro?”

She looked flustered. “Well, not personally, but I know who they are.”

“Okay,” he said.

“They’re a couple of brothers who came from nothing and built the chain.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“To people like that your British accent may be, well, intimidating.”

“I’m South African,” he said.

“Well, to us you sound British.”

He nodded. This was not news to him. Occasionally, people with keener ears thought he was Australian. In the years he had been in the States no American had correctly identified his origins.

“Okay, assuming you’re right, what can I do?”

“Why don’t I give them a call, see if I can get you a meeting?”

“Us.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Get
us
a meeting. You come along and let your all-American presence soothe them. Lull them into giving us a big fat order.” He smiled again. “There’ll be a nice chunk of commission for you if you get it right.”

She nodded and went back inside.

Standing by the pool, as he watched Grace on the telephone, Turner was ambushed by an absurd notion that only by leaving Tanya and making a life with this woman and losing himself in her American ampleness would he ever again find a home.

Aware of the danger of these thoughts he was busy shutting them down when Grace walked out of the office and said, “Okay, we have a meeting with HomePro.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“That soon?”

“They had a cancellation. Doesn’t it work for you?”

“No, it does. It works. Well done.”

As she grinned and disappeared back to her desk the thoughts started up again and Turner, despite the peril, let them carry him along like one of those runaway stagecoaches that had swerved, hurtled and bucked through camera-ready canyons and gulches just like those surrounding him.

10

As Bekker walked from the pantry toward the living room, Bone said, “Shorty, we got us a problem.”

“A problem?”

“Yeah, a problem with him.”

He pointed his automatic at Peter’s corpse.

“A problem with a dead man?”

“With him, yeah.”

“Now, would this be a philosophical problem or a spiritual problem?”

Bone shook his head. “He’s done changed the game.”

“Can’t say I’m getting your drift, Bone. All he’s done is bleed on the floor and stink up the room.”

“There’s gonna be people lookin for him.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. His kin.”

“His
kin
?”

“Yeah. When he don’t show up at home,” Tard said, lumbering forward, scuffing the floor as he dragged his bad leg.

“Were you listening to what he said? About where his
kin
is headed?” Bekker asked.

Tard shrugged, his man breasts and gut doing the hula inside his filthy yellow sweat suit.

“I had this skanky bitch up in my ear.”

He nudged Tanya in the ribs with his boot. Her head lolled and a tendril of bloody drool swayed like a suspension bridge between her lower lip and the wooden floor.

Bekker addressed Bone. “And you? You hear anything before you carved the fuckin turkey?”

Bone said, “I’m recallin somethin about a plane.”

“That’s right. A plane. A plane to where?”

Bekker’s eyes panned from Bone to Shorty who shook their heads like dyslexics at a spelling bee.

“A plane to Anchorage,” Bekker said.

“Anchorage?” Tard said.

“Yeah, Anchorage motherfuckin Alaska. So nobody is going to be wondering where our bald friend is for many a long fuckin hour.” He looked at Bone. “That solve your problem?”

Bone shrugged. “I guess.”

“Good. So why don’t we relax and enrich and entertain ourselves. Yes?”

The two men muttered and nodded.

“Okay, so here’s how it’s gonna go. I’m gonna take Daddy Bear here over to his office, get him to open the safe and hand over the cash. You two watch Mommy Bear.”

“Why don’t one of us get to take him to the safe?” Bone asked.

“We got us another problem?” Bekker said.

“Depends.”

“Depends? Depends on what?”

“Depends on you.”

“On me?” Bekker said, head cocked like the His Master’s Voice fox terrier.

Turner knew from old that this head gesture usually preceded a bout of extreme violence and saw the small man’s body tense for battle.

“Yeah, you’re treatin us like the help, man.”

“The
help
?”

“Yeah.”

Bekker nodded. “You’re right.”

“Okay, then.”

“I
am
treatin you like the help. Know why?”

“Why?”

“Because you
are
the fuckin help.” He got right up in Bone’s face. “I found this score. Means this is my party. And the two of you are invited guests. Do we understand each other?”

Bone swelled beneath his T-shirt and leather waistcoat and then he looked across at Tard and something unspoken passed between them and he shrugged and took a step back.

Bone said, “I don’t trust you being alone with that fucker,” jabbing a blunt finger at Turner. “What if he jumps you the way he did me?”

“He’s a pussy,” Bekker said. “He won’t give me no trouble.”

Bone swung on Turner, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip as he advanced.

“That right, fucker?” he said, a spray of spittle flying like ejaculate from the mouth hole in his ski mask and landing on Turner’s cheek and nose. “You gonna play nice?”

Turner didn’t reply and when the thick man lashed out at him with a boot to the groin he crumpled
and fell to the floor, face down.

Turner stared at Bone’s left boot as it flew in for another strike, the stitching unraveling, the black leather cracked and fissured, but the toecap—in some para-military conceit—polished to a mirror, and he saw his distorted reflection rushing toward him (like a frame grab from a manic Tex Avery cartoon) and
the boot caught him hard enough in the jaw to dim his vision and set his ears ringing.

“That’ll keep him cordial,” Bone said, stepping away.

Bekker approached Turner.

“Get up,” he said through the sound of bells and the fizz of static. “Let’s go break open your piggy bank.”