Man Down (15 page)

23

Turner, sobbing, his vision blurring and lagging like bad video, a puddle of blood and puke on the wooden floor under his mouth, watched as the small man stepped away from him, breathing heavily.

Was this beating all in the name of verisimilitude or had it spoken to an unresolved fury bottled inside Bekker’s wiry frame?

Both, Turner suspected.

“Talking of fuckin phones, did either of you check what happened to Dead Meat’s cell?” Bekker asked Tard and Bone, gesturing toward Peter’s body.

The two men, suddenly reduced to chastised children, shuffled their feet and shook their masked heads.

“Too busy with a peasant revolt to earn your fuckin keep?”

Tard lurched across to the front door and opened it. After a minute he returned, holding up a cell phone.

“It was layin outside.”

“Take out the battery,” Bekker said speaking slowly, with great patience, “and toss the fuckin phone in the pool.”

Tard, his thick fingers made clumsy by his gloves, battled to open the rear of the phone.

Bekker stalked over to Tanya, his shoes scuffing through the pages of Lucy’s project, and prodded the prone woman in the ribs with the toe of his Reebok.

She groaned.

He nudged her harder.

“Get up.”

She didn’t move, her eyes still closed, but Turner saw her uninjured hand, the one hidden from Bekker’s view, crabbing
along the floor, disappearing under the magazine pages and knew she was conscious.

Standing over Tanya, Bekker unzipped his jeans and freed his penis. He pissed on her, wielding his cock like a hose, dousing her.

Tanya sputtered and her eyes guttered and opened, staring up at Bekker.

Bladder emptied, he stowed his prick.

“Welcome back, Professor. Now whyn’t you and me go into the bedroom and you show me your pretty things?”

When Tanya said nothing, Bekker toed her again in the ribs.

“Get up bitch.”

Turner pushed himself to his knees, his body aching, blood dripping in twin streams from his nostrils into his mouth.

“Leave her,” he said, still intent on acting out the role given him by Bekker, his voice made cartoonish by his broken nose.

Bekker laughed. “Well, ain’t he chivalrous.”

He looked across at Bone.

“You keep Daddy here quiet while I take Mommy on a little tour, okay?”

Bone nodded, stepping closer to Turner, raising his pistol and leveling it.

Tard, who’d finally loosened the back of the phone, removed the battery and walked toward the sliding door.

Bekker reached down and grabbed Tanya by the arm, ready to haul her to her feet.

She sprang upright, catching him off guard as she raised her arm high
and plunged the Messermeister ten-inch poultry shears—the ones that Lucy had purloined for use on her project—into Bekker’s left eye, the lever-locked curved and serrated stainless steel blades passing through his eye jelly and his retina and sinking deep into his eyeball and his brain, severing his brain stem from his spinal cord, stopping his blood and oxygen supply.

Bekker stood unmoving for a moment, the spring-loaded silver handles flaring in the cool beam of a downlight as they protruded from his face, his lips moving in the mouth hole of the mask, then his legs gave way and he dropped to the floor.

Dead.

Part Four

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed

in a prior state of existence.

―
Ralph Waldo Emerson

1

On that long ago December day, by the time Turner had listlessly serviced Tanya, who’d bucked and cursed as she climaxed repeatedly, her face as contorted as if she were undergoing an ordeal of exorcism, and withdrawn his still hard cock (the switchboard of his nervous system too jammed to patch through an orgasm) the Jack Daniel’s had stirred the residue of the rent boy’s drug that lay like mud in his liver and he was high again—not as ecstatically, transcendentally high as the day before, this time there was a sourness to the proceedings, a jaundiced depression that draped him like a shroud of bile colored fog and left his memory of the next few hours jumbled, like fragments of broken mirror swept into a dusty corner of his mind.

Animated by Bekker’s threats, dressed in the filthy, blood smeared clothes of yesterday, Turner emerged from the cottage into the lacerating light of African late morning to find his bike lying on its side in the driveway. Struggling to get it upright, his acid sweat thick in his nostrils, he kicked the Kawasaki to life and took off, his head throbbing.

His next recollection was sitting at a light at the wheel of the HiAce in an ugly suburb, window wound down, a yeasty, fermented stink reaching out to him from the open doorway of a liquor store, tempting him to leave the van and buy a bottle of booze.

The changing light rescued him but as he drove away he trawled the pockets of his jeans and found the stub of a joint, tendrils of weed wagging from its mouth, and fired it up on the crop circle coil of the van’s cigarette lighter.

The spliff dropped him down a wormhole and the next thing he remembered was standing hidden by the swollen leaves of the willow tree, watching the girl emerge from the pulsating green foliage and take her place on the bench by the stream, just like the day before.

In his memory the two days merged and he sometimes wondered if the tears that he’d given to the girl on the first day—the tears that he’d used to reassure himself of his own humanity and compassion—did not, in fact, belong to the second.

Which made his actions all the more monstrous.

No matter.

She sat.

She removed her iPod and put in her earbuds.

She cried or did not cry.

He felt in the pocket of his jeans and, incredibly, not only was the little bottle of anesthetic still there, but it was unbroken despite his cavils and sports of yesterday.

He uncapped the bottle and poured some into his handkerchief.

Turner approached the girl from behind and clamped the cloth over her nose, the burned almond smell of the drug overwhelming the sweet, clean fragrance that rose from the tight curls of her short hair.

She struggled and bucked, eyes wide and white in her bronze face, but he held firm and within seconds her eyelids drooped and she slumped onto her side, her gray skirt riding up on her dark leggings.

He patted her jacket and found a cell phone nestling beside a pack of spearmint gum. Fishing for the phone with his gloved fingers he tossed it into the river, seeing it sink amongst moss and reeds.

Removing the earbuds he shoved the iPod into his pocket, lifted the girl—she was as light as a child—and carried her to the HiAce.

He raised the rear door and laid her on the corrugated floor. Using a roll of silver duct tape (the screeching rip as it unspooled painful to his ears) he bound her wrists and ankles and taped her mouth shut.

She lay so still that for a second Turner feared she was dead and pulled the glove free of his right hand, placing his fingertips beneath her nostrils until he felt the warm wash of her breath on his skin.

Replacing the glove, he was about to close the door when something spiked his memory and one of Bekker’s instructions pierced the smother of substances.

Digging in his pocket again he found the trio of phones given to him by the rogue cop and he stared at them for a long time before he selected one, an entry-level Nokia.

He clicked it open, squinting at the face as he prodded and fumbled until he found the camera and shot a photograph of the prone teenager and sent it to the one number programmed into the phone’s memory.

By the time he slammed the door of the van the photograph had winged its way to Bekker. Turner walked a few paces toward the water and threw the phone into a little waterfall gurgling over rocks that had trapped a Simba chips packet and a flattened red and white carton of Joburg sorghum beer. The phone sank from sight.

Turner climbed up into the HiAce and, avoiding his bloated and bruised reflection in the rearview, drove the girl to her death.

2

Turner, still kneeling, as if offering a prayer to some false god, stared at Tanya who swayed over Bekker like a dervish, piss dripping from her spiky hair into the blood that oozed around the poultry shears jutting from the eyehole of the dead man’s mask, hyperventilating as she repeated one word in a blank, uninflected monotone, barely louder than a whisper: “Fucker. Fucker. Fucker. Fucker. Fucker. Fucker. Fucker. Fucker. ”

Bone’s eyes slid to Bekker’s corpse but his gun arm remained rigidly extended, as if it were cast in bronze, the eye of the pistol fixed on Turner’s forehead, index finger curled around the trigger.

When Tanya finally fell silent, Bone said “Tard?” and his gun arm drooped.

“Yessir?”

Turner located the gimp by the wash of his breath: stopped in his tracks en route from the kitchen to the sliding door, still holding Peter’s cell phone in his huge paw, the upturned table, Tanya and Bekker between him and Turner.

“What just happened here?” Bone asked.

“Bitch done stab Shorty in the eye with a scissor.”

“Aint no scissor.”

“It aint?”

“Nope.”

“What’s it then?”

“Shears, Tard. Cookin shears.”

“Okay.”

“But beyond the nature of the weapon, what happened?”

“She done kilt Shorty.”

“And what does that mean?”

“What does that mean?”

“Yeah. What does that mean?”

“Means the little sonofabitch is dead.”

“What it
means
, Tard, is that we are no longer in the employ of nobody. Nobody cept ourselves. We are self-employed.”

“Now aint that the god’s honest truth?”

“Guess this is what you would call a game changer.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“And that’s a
very
good thing.” Bone smiled. “We can now mold the course of events to our own will.”

Turner, before he had time to think, lifted one knee from the floor like a sprinter in the starting blocks and sprang, charging for the open door, cursing the leather soles of his loafers as they slipped on the polished wooden floor.

But he made it through the door, hurtling across the pool deck toward the darkness where his unfenced property gave onto the desert scrub.

He would run to his nearest neighbor’s house, a distant oasis of lemony light bobbing between the silhouettes of a posse of saguaro.

It was the only chance he and Lucy had.

As he rounded the pool he put in an extra burst of speed, filled with the crazy belief that he could outrun the bullets that whizzed past his head like enraged yellowjackets.

Then his shoe found a puddle of water, slung by the over-zealous
PoolShark onto the slick tiles of the deck, and he slipped and became airborne, arms thrust out before him, feet pedaling the empty night air.

He plunged to the deck, first his ribcage then his jaw striking the stone tiles, the breath smashed from his body.

He was trying to drag himself to his feet when a shadow blocked the light and he looked over his shoulder at the lumbering form of the fat man who fell upon him knees first, his enormous weight squeezing a pate of puke from Turner’s mouth, who came close to passing out, his eyes dark with blood and his ears suddenly deaf to the night creatures and the suck of the man’s breath.

The giant hitched his trousers, grunted himself into a sumo-like crouch and reached down and grabbed Turner, flinging him over his shoulders like a dead deer ready to be dressed, and wheezing and stinking he limped and lurched back toward the house. 

3

Turner was seized by a sudden terror as the jet javelined into the night sky and he found himself gripping the armrests of his seat so tightly that his knuckles blanched and the muscles of his forearms quivered, his breath as shallow and rapid as if he were fighting or fucking, his mind aswirl with images of impending disaster.

Images of the jet’s aging fuselage reduced to crumpled foil by metal fatigue; images of a terrorist bomb—cunningly assembled to evade sniffer dogs and airport X-ray machines—exploding at altitude, leaving remnants of the aircraft strewn like confetti across the black infinity of the desert.

Grace, seated at his side, laid a hand on his.

“Are you okay, John?”

He nodded, swallowed and found his voice.

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“You don’t like flying?”

“Not really.”

A lie. He’d never before had a problem with flying.

No, this sudden onset of aerophobia was just a stalking horse. A cover for a deeper, more profound dread.

In truth he was terrified of being alone with this woman for the next two days.

Terrified that the carefully constructed firewall that sealed off his inner darkness would be dismantled brick by brick, exposing what he had spent a decade hiding from the world and himself.

Exposing the catalyst for his transition from a numbed, addled, toxic stumbler to a man so parched and desiccated, a man who saw the world with a painful, hyperrealist clarity.

And exposing the truth about the fate of the girl he’d stolen from beside the stream.

There was a bright chime and the cabin lights faded up and Turner saw a mix of concern and amusement in Grace’s eyes.

“You going to be okay?”

“I’ll survive.”

Relax, he told himself. This is just a business trip.

But, as he watched a haggard stewardess battle a drinks cart down the aisle, his thoughts pinballed from elation to anxiety.

What he was doing was madness.

Which, of course, was its appeal.

After the morning in the hotel room a month ago—Turner retreating quietly (as much from himself as from Grace) leaving her asleep—their relationship had become at once more friendly and less intimate, her hand on his their first touch since he’d sat beside her on the bed the morning her lover had died.

In the last weeks they’d hunkered down at their facing desks in the office, diligently spreading the gospel of PoolShark, sharing their minor triumphs and setbacks at the end of each day without straying into personal territory.

When Grace had told him that she was moving out of the hotel into a furnished apartment he’d given her an advance on her first paycheck without being asked.

He’d had a stack of business cards printed for her that read
Grace Worthington, Vice President of Sales
and left the cards, fresh from the printers, on her desk for her to find one morning.

She sat down, staring at the them, the low sun catching her hair—who cared if the pale color was the work of a hairstylist’s peroxide?—and when she lifted one and inspected it, running a finger along its edge and over the embossed type, her face was earnest and almost sad.

But when she looked up at him she smiled and her eyes danced and he wanted to leave the zone of safety behind his desk and cross to her and crush her lips with his.

But he stayed marooned in his chair and told her that she deserved the title and the bump in pay that went with it.

As she digested this information her smile became uncertain.

She thanked him and excused herself to go outside and smoke, something she did only when she was agitated, pacing beside the pool, staring at the water, cupping her right elbow with her left hand, her arm like a metronome moving the cigarette to her mouth, gray fumes hovering in the still air.

As Turner had watched her from his desk he’d thought she had the look of a woman who knew that good things evaporated like mirages.

The stewardess was at their side and Turner requested a club soda and Grace a Coke.

“Why not add some Jack to that?” Turner said.

“Plain Coke is fine,” she said, sipping from the plastic cup the stewardess handed her.

“You can drink when you’re with me. It’s not a problem.”

Grace shook her head. “It’s not you. I haven’t been drinking much since . . .”

She waved a hand and looked out the window, watching the red light strobing on the wingtip as the plane rumbled toward Las Vegas.

A week ago Turner had been sitting at his computer pretending to analyze sales figures, allowing his mind to skim over the surface of his empty life like a hovercraft, listening to the soft, measured clack of Grace’s fingers as she typed, so different from Tanya who had to replace her keyboards regularly because she hammered at them as if venting an inner fury.

The typing paused and Grace said, “John?”

He looked up. “Yes?”

“I dunno if this interests you, but I have an invite here from the APSP.”

“What’s the APSP?”

“I’m sorry. The Association of Pool and Spa Professionals.”

“Why would they send us an invite?”

“Well, we’re members.”

“Since when?”

“I signed us up a few weeks ago.” She moved a strand of hair from her eye. “Is that a problem?”

“No, not at all. What’s the invite for?”

“To a convention. In Las Vegas.”

Gambling was one of the few vices that had never gained traction with Turner and Las Vegas held little allure for him.

He stood, laughing.

“Jesus, a bunch of pool people in Vegas. That sounds unmissible.” He saw her face and said, “You think it’s worth going to?”

“Well, maybe not.”

Her confidence evaporating.

Turner hovered over her shoulder, catching her scent mixed with the traces of stale tobacco. A mixture he found powerfully erotic.

On the monitor was a gaudy display of pools and spas and the words “Pool Con. Just add Water!”

“I thought maybe it would be a chance to network,” Grace said.

“You’re right. It is an opportunity.”

“Maybe I could go?”

A dangerous notion rose in Turner’s mind and he felt like a high diver approaching the board, stepping onto it, testing it, approaching the lip, taking a small jump and then landing back on the springy wood.

“Sure,” he said, ready to withdraw, “you do that.”

Then he felt the board bend beneath his toes as he launched himself into space.

“Hell, why don’t we both go?” he said.

She looked up at him. “You really want to?”

“Yes, I want to. Do what needs to be done.”

He walked out into the sunlight, his head spinning.

That night Turner sat alone at the dining room table, eating warmed-over chicken. Lucy was watching TV, picking at her plate, and Tanya prowled the open plan kitchen, spooning something from a bowl, half an eye on the reality program the girl was glued to, ready to heap scorn on this manifestation of America at its ugliest, half an eye on Turner who sat with his gaze on his food, not willing to be drawn into another bruising encounter with his wife.

She slammed her bowl down on table across from him and leaned her elbows on the wooden surface. He caught the tart wiff of her body odor mixing with something foul in the bowl.

“C’mon, spit it out,” she said.

He sighed. “What?”

“There’s something you want to tell me isn’t there?”

Tanya reading him like a body scanner.

He shrugged. “I’m going away for the weekend.”

“Where to?”

“A pool and spa convention in Las Vegas.”

She hooted. “Wow. Livin it!” The last words bellowed out in a nastily accurate impersonation of an American daytime TV host.

Tanya stood, running her hands through her cropped hair, a fall of dandruff floating to her shoulders like an upturned snow dome.

She sniggered. “Are you taking your
veep
with you?”

Turner narrowed his eyes in confusion.

“Your
vice president
of sales.” Tanya laughed. “She left one of her business cards out on the pool deck. Jesus, Johnny, is that what it takes for you to get into a woman’s pants these days? Calling her a
veep
?”

Turner glanced toward his daughter but she was lost in the netherworld of reality TV, inured to this warfare between her parents.

“Jesus, this fucking country,” Tanya said. “Everybody’s a fucking vice president of something.” She tapped her spoon on the table. “So? Is she going with you?”

“Yes.”

“What’s this, some kind of what happens in Vegas thing?” When he didn’t answer she shook her head and said, “Go. Go Johnny go to your little empire of kitsch with your fat blonde. Screw her. Get it out of your system, then come home and be a good boy, okay?”

Throwing the last words over her shoulder as she went to the sink and dumped her bowl inside with a clatter.

The plane had wandered into heavy turbulence, yawing and heaving as the cabin lights were doused. The jet banked and flung itself toward the earth, Las Vegas’s gaudy neon
bleeding into the night.

The landing was rough, the plane bouncing, tires mewling, the fuselage buffeted and rocked, before the jet gave a final shudder and trundled like a cowed animal toward a man in hearing protectors, waving reflective bats.

“Looks like we made it,” Grace said.

“Yes. We made it.”

She ran the pad of her index finger from Turner’s wedding ring toward his wrist, the pale hair that grew on the blade of his hand bending at her touch like wheat in a breeze.

The sensation was electric to his skin and when she removed her hand he had to fight the urge to seize it in his.

Grace stared at him and then she stood, reaching for her bag in the overhead locker and without looking back she set off down the aisle, leaving Turner with the certainty that something had been set in train that could not be stopped.