Read Payback - A Cape Town thriller Online
Authors: Mike Nicol
She kept her eyes on him. ‘I know more than that.’ Slowly did a circuit of the wall art, stopping when her back was to him. ‘I know you. I know Christa. Adorable child, Mr Bishop. Friendly. Not afraid to talk to strangers.’
A shot of red crossed Mace’s eyes. The world went dark. Pylon checked him with a hand to his forearm. ‘Don’t.’ He whispered it, but she heard.
‘Don’t.’ She faced them. The blue eyes giving up nothing. ‘The comrades: Mace and Pylon. The ice men. Stone killers to some. The people’s heroes to others. Struggle veterans, arms smugglers for the glorious guerrillas of our movement. Nowadays VIP assistance. This is not your scene. Stick with the wrinklies, guys. Best to keep the pension scheme.’
‘You touch her … You touch my wife …’ Mace shook free of Pylon’s grip.
‘I don’t touch anybody, Mr Bishop. What I do is represent people against drug dealing. If you want to, some time I’ll show you good people who saw their kids become prostitutes, gangsters, criminals. Kids that were like Christa. What did the police do to help these people? Nothing. Because somewhere there’s police in the supply line. What do the politicians do? Nothing. Because the druglords are building schools. From where I stand they’re building a market-place. In here, this is a market-place.’
Mace took a step towards her, she held her ground. ‘How’d you get my name? How’d you get my wife’s phone number?’
‘I recognised you, Mr Bishop. As simple as that. There was a time we were on the same side. In the same camp, so to speak.’
‘Doesn’t answer my question.’
‘Come, come. Use your imagination.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘We’re in power now, we probably share contacts.’ She brushed past him heading for the door. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, held up her gloved hand, ‘I’m sorry you’ve taken a hardline attitude, I’d hoped for your cooperation.’
‘Hardline!’ Ducky Donald almost choked on his beer. But Sheemina February was gone.
‘Jesus,’ said Pylon, ‘I remember her. She got ten years for
treason
. Round about the late eighties. Almost died under torture, was the story I heard.’
‘Pity she didn’t.’ Ducky Donald launched across the room to slam the club door shut. ‘She’s trouble. Major trouble.’
‘You still going to open?’ Mace asked.
‘Nose of ten the doors swing wide,’ said Ducky. ‘What you say, Mattie?’
Matthew nodded, not the happiest club owner in town.
Outside it was dusk, but warm, a berg wind blowing.
Pylon said, ‘What’s with the February woman getting onto Oumou?’
Mace shrugged. ‘Intimidation. Christ knows. Maybe she thinks I hold some sway with the Hartnells.’ He paused. ‘You said she got done?’
‘The way I recall it, she and two sisters planned a car bomb, going to take out the president on his way to parliament.
Something
like that. Got them high profile attention in the papers. Mostly because of their pretty faces. And ten years for conspiracy. Come the political amnesty, they walked. Probably did no more than a couple of years.’
Mace rocked on the curb edge, irked by a detail he couldn’t get to. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Only I don’t know what. She’s familiar.’
‘She’s scary.’
‘No kidding. Her personally and what’s behind her. The crazies. One thing, Sheemina February’s not going to be hands on. She’s done that.’ Mace sighed. ‘Once it was so easy, hey. Us and them. Now us is them. Sometimes worse I think.’
‘Ah, come on.’
‘No, true as. Look at this shit Ducky Donald’s pulling.’
‘He said something more?’
‘Doesn’t have to does he?’
Pylon clucked his tongue, stared off at the end of the street before he said, ‘Time to talk? About you.’
The last thing Mace wanted. ‘Uh uh.’ He shook his head. ‘Tomorrow.’
Pylon looked dubious.
‘Tomorrow, okay.’
‘I’m not kidding, Mace.’ He flicked the automatic lock on the Merc, one of their luxury client cars. ‘And this lot?’ - jerking a thumb at the club. ‘They’re going to blow it?’
‘Probably. Probably tonight I’d guess.’
Pylon slid into the car. ‘That’s just so exciting.’ The side window came down. ‘Another thing I remember about that Sheemina February, in jail she sharpened a hairbrush, stuck it into a warder’s stomach.’
‘Dangerous lady.’
‘We should try the police. That Captain Gonsalves, maybe he’d be interested.’
‘Doubt it. Like the man said, no bomb threat. What’s to be worrying about? Gonsalves’ll tell me to piss off.’
‘Try him.’
‘You try him.’
‘He’s white. There’s your commonality.’
They agreed to meet at ten.
Three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday Mace swam with two others in the pool at the Point Health Centre. Tyrone impressed him as a suit, probably in management; Allan favoured chinos and polo shirts. He figured him for a marketing type. They didn’t talk much except to greet and maybe comment on the obvious: weather, news, sport. Their rule was swimming started at six-thirty. Five minutes grace if someone was late but they didn’t wait longer than this.
Tyrone and Allan were younger than Mace, Tyrone the stronger swimmer, Allan more in the iron-man league. They had a routine. For the first half-hour Mace set the pace in deference to the ten, fifteen years he pulled on them, then Allan took over for a quartile, and Tyrone hauled them through the final sector, powering it on until Mace’s arms screamed and he wasn’t sure if his lungs were big enough for the air he needed. At the end he was gasping, clutching the side of the pool with almost no strength left to get out at the steps. This wasn’t normal. But then, he reckoned, nothing was normal anymore.
His hours in the water were time out: a reptile locked on the blue ahead and the black line along the bottom. A crocodile. No past, no future, no thoughts. Only action, only the movement of his arms and his legs, the turn of his head to draw air. The efficiency of his body propelled smoothly through the water, noiseless, churning bubbles, intent only on motion. Mace the reliable, he thought of himself. Who got things done.
After the session the men dressed more or less in silence. Maybe some comments on if they could’ve done a better time, no
suggestion
yet that Mace was slowing them down. On the way out he stopped for a fruit juice at the health bar, Tyrone and Allan giving it a rain check.
It was dark when Mace left the centre, the Spider parked to the side of the parking ground near a hedge. No overhead lights, no perimeter lights at all. A number of cars still in the lot, but not a soul else around. He threaded his way through, thoughts of Sheemina February and the bomb she’d have her minions set off uppermost in his mind. Also that she’d recognised him. That he should’ve recognised her.
The kids, a pack of boys, were about him like they’d been
conjured
from another dimension, hissing, whispering, tugging at his sport’s bag and clothing, feral, stinking of booze and meths and glue. He didn’t sense them, glimpse them, hear them. They had him cold. In the Spider’s boot was a forty-five, but a forty-five in the Spider’s boot was about as much help as a prayer, Mace thought, taking in the situation.
They were a pack of fifteen or more, swirling among the cars, on the hunt. One jumped at his back, smaller boys either side, two bigger rat-faces blocked the gap. Crouched there, grinning.
He dropped the bag as a diversion, and the kids fell on it like jackals ripping bones from a carcass. He had house and car keys in his left hand, slid out the metal shafts to protrude from his fist. Before the kids could pinion this arm he slashed a
backhander
at the nearest rat-face, opening his cheek. Turned on the boy behind, knocked him down, put a boot to his head. It was the only advantage he got before they packed him. Yet he worked in two more jabs with his fist, from the screams believing the keys had punctured skin.
The boys clawed for his eyes, trying to drag him down. He tasted blood, felt its stickiness on his hands. His blood, their blood. Their blood thick with HIV, most of them rentboys for the
rough-trade
punters. The thought of mixing blood gave him comeback strength to shuck those racking at his chest and the momentum to crash back against a car, those behind him going down. The other rat-face was dancing foot to foot, feinting with a knife. He came in low meaning to spill Mace’s guts. Fast for a glue head, except Mace knocked his arm, the blade snagging on Mace’s belt-buckle, slid upwards through his shirt, finding skin. He felt it as heat. The boy skipped away, darted back to stick him. Again Mace feinted, the blade opening a cut along his arm.
From the centre came shouts. A shot. Rat-face hesitated but the pack scattered. Then he made off.
A guy ran up. ‘You alright?’
Mace looked at the blood dripping off his fingers.
‘Best thing would be to give them a chopper ride out to sea,’ said his saviour. ‘Drop them in the deep.’
Mace got cleaned up at the centre. The cut on his stomach needed only ointment and a plaster patch. The forearm slash was deeper. Merited a stitch or two, thought the first-aid guy. Definitely an anti-tetanus. On the HIV score he didn’t think there was too serious a risk.
‘Lucky,’ he said. In his experience he’d seen incidents where the corpse had his hands full keeping his guts from sliding about in the dirt while his valuables were stolen.
‘Who’s a corpse?’ Mace said.
The first-aid guy gave him a baleful glance. ‘It’s how the kids think of their victims. Even before the knife’s gone in.’
All the way home Mace kept thinking, corpse. Dead man walking. Goner. Cadaver. What also plagued him was how he’d walked into it. Not even noticed the kids until it was too late. In the line of business that sort of negligence was scary. Enough to get you killed in the old days. Enough to get you killed in the present days too. It happened when your mind was elsewhere.
Going up Eastern Boulevard out of the city, he pressed in Captain Gonsalves’s direct line. The phone went to five rings before the captain answered: ‘What?’
Mace told him what. Whenever he paused he could hear the captain chewing.
‘So?’ said Gonsalves when Mace had finished.
‘So d’you want to get there before or afterwards?’ Mace said.
Gonsalves laughed. ‘This’s a come down, Mr Bishop?’ The chewing got louder. ‘Last time I looked you were security, right? Protecting the stars. I got the catch-line there? Those facelift gals’re your speciality. Not so? You and that Buso fella playing wanker boys to the stars and celebs. Hey, Mr Bishop stick with it. The club scene’s fulla shit. Your scenario’s right, tonight you’re gonna get blown up.’
‘Which doesn’t concern you?’
‘You’re a big boy, Mace Bishop. You’ve been around.’ Chew, chew. Gonsalves laughed again and the connection went dead.
Mace took Hospital Bend in the fast lane, down the straight and up towards the Mill, tight against the centre barrier. Gonsalves he’d bump into from time to time. In security you did. There were people who said he was a good cop, kept his nose in real crime through the dark years. Nowadays the guy was staring his pension in the face, probably not a joyful prospect. Five years down the line, Mace
reckoned
, he could be knocking on their door pleading for a babysit.
At the entrance to the security complex, the nightwatch rolled back the gate. A new man, did it with more speed than the day guard. Mace pulled up behind Oumou’s estate. Even before he’d parked, Christa came running out. A kitten had died. She’d named them Cat1, Cat2, and Cat3. Cat1 was dead.
‘Probably Cat3 is also going to be dead,’ she said, nodding, her mouth purposeful.
She wasn’t teary, more interested in where they were going to bury Cat1.
In the back garden, Mace suggested. Or what passed for a back garden: a block of lawn surrounded by empty flower beds where only weeds grew. Once in a while Oumou had a man in to trim the grass but the neatness never lasted more than a week. Occasionally there’d been notes from the complex’s body corporate complaining about the neglect, suggesting that they plant daisy bushes.
‘You can put a candle on the grave,’ said Oumou.
‘And flowers?’
‘We can buy flowers, ma puce.’
Mace searched through the cutlery for an old spoon to use as a trowel and found one spotted with rust.
‘You want to dig?’ Christa nodded and they went into the backyard to dig a shallow grave. While she scooped a hole in the earth, Oumou brought out a candle and Mace fetched the dead kitten.
‘I will, Papa,’ Christa said, taking the body, putting it carefully into the hole.
‘Now you’ve got to cover it.’
She shook her head, suddenly clutching at her mother. Mace made to push a handful of soil over the body but Christa stopped him. He crouched to be face to face with her.
‘What’s it?’
Her eyes were teary, she clutched Oumou’s hand.
Oumou said, ‘You want to cover the kitten first, chérie, with a blanket?’ Christa nodded.
They wrapped the kitten in a kitchen cloth and put it back in the hole. This time Christa let her father push over the soil and build it into a mound. Her mother lit a candle, sticking it in the ground about where the kitten’s head would be. For a while they stood, hand-in-hand, watching the flame sputter, shadows dancing on the wall behind.
At supper Christa said, ‘Papa, do kittens go to heaven?’
Oumou reached out to stroke her daughter’s hair, her eyes fixed on Mace.
‘When kittens die, they die just like us,’ he said.
Christa looked at him. ‘We go to heaven.’
Mace shook his head. ‘We die, sweetheart. That’s it. Nothing happens afterwards.’
Puzzled she turned to her mother. ‘Oui, ma puce,’ said Oumou softly.
Christa’s face crumpled. The tears came, big slow ones.
Mace left once Christa was asleep. At the door into the garage Oumou stopped him.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she said. ‘They are not good men.’