Man Down

by Roger Smith

  Also by Roger Smith

  Sacrifices

  Capture

  Dust Devils

  Wake Up Dead

  Mixed Blood

  Ishmael Toffee (a novella)

  Vile Blood (as Max Wilde)

  Roger Smith's novels are published in eight languages and two are in development as feature films. Visit his website

  Man Down

  A novel by

  Roger Smith

  © 2014 by Roger Smith All rights reserved

  Man Down is a work of fiction and names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without the express written permission of the author or publisher except where permitted by law.

  Part One

  There are no foreign lands.

  It is the traveler only who is foreign.

  ― Robert Louis Stevenson

  1

  An hour before the gunmen came John Turner stood beside his oversized swimming pool sipping a bottle of club soda, watching the sun droop toward the Tucson Mountains.

  The heat of the Sonoran Desert choked the valley, bearing down on the sand and the rocks and the saguaro cacti standing sentinel around his home. A tumbleweed, like something blown out of a Hollywood Western, cartwheeled across the bottom of Turner’s unfenced property.

  With an asthmatic gargle the automatic pool cleaner broke the surface of the water and sucked air, its circular rubber base slapping the tiled wall. The cleaner’s plastic housing was molded into the shape of cartoon shark, jaws agape on a row of jagged teeth.

  Dubbed—unsurprisingly—the PoolShark, it was inferior to many similar contraptions but its cartoonish appearance made it marketable (a TV commercial driven by Jaws sound-alike music had it chasing gleefully screaming kids around suburban pools) and it had sold in such number throughout the American Southwest that Turner—the sole importer of the device that was manufactured in exploitative non-union sweatshops in his native South Africa—could afford this absurd Frank Lloyd Wright/ Pueblo Revival mashup north of Tucson.

  Turner trod on the snout of the shark with his loafer and it slid under the water and went on its way, the white segmented hose that coupled it to the pool filter jiggling and spasming.

  A tall blonde woman carrying a cardboard box emerged from the building that contained Turner’s office, the last of the sun turning her hair to flame.

  She didn’t look at him as she walked toward the driveway where her dusty little Mazda sat dwarfed by his wife’s Subaru Forester.

  “Grace, wait!”

  The woman stopped when Turner’s nine-year-old daughter, Lucy, ran out of the living room onto the tiled deck.

  Turner heard his wife shout “Get your arse inside you little bitch” and looked on as Tanya grabbed Lucy by the shoulders and propelled her back into the house, slamming the glass door shut, berating the child, pointing her index finger like a weapon at the girl who stared out as the small car rattled to life and drove away.

  Tanya’s nasal South African voice was drowned by a jet rumbling overhead, its vapor trail like a line of cocaine against the darkening sky and Turner watched the plane until it was invisible, humming some old REM song that he couldn’t name.

  “Daddy?”

  His American-accented daughter was at his side, carrying a pack of clothes for her Friday night sleepover.

  “Is Grace coming back?”

  “I don’t know, kiddo.”

  “Mom says she’s not.”

  “Your mother says a lot of things.”

  “Yeah, she’s a real buzzkill.”

  Turner’s laugh was lost when Tanya sounded the horn of the Subaru. Lucy stood on tiptoe to kiss him and then trotted off.

  Finishing his drink Turner watched his wife and daughter drive away, the car disappearing down the road that wound between houses as large and ostentatious as his, built on sprawling tracts stolen from the desert.

  It was suddenly dark, night falling like a fire curtain, and he wandered into the house, shivering for a moment at the arctic blast from the air-conditioner, opening the glass door and allowing in the heat.

  He took another club soda from the refrigerator and sat watching baseball on TV, the rules still runic to him even after nearly a decade in the States. Ten minutes later he heard the growl of the SUV and the wheeze of its dusty brakes as it stopped.

  His wife appeared in the doorway.

  “Not a fuck am I cooking you dinner,” she said.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, eyes on the screen.

  “What? You all heartbroken?”

  Turner had no desire to get into this so he stayed silent, following a ball as it sailed into the crowd.

  Tanya went into the open plan kitchen and he heard the slap of the refrigerator and the seal breaking on the cap of a bottle of water.

  She reappeared, standing over the dining room table that was littered with the fashion magazines his daughter had been plundering for a school project.

  His wife lifted a pair of chrome plated cutters with serrated blades.

  “She used my poultry shears. Again.”

  “She’s a kid.”

  “Go on, defend her,” she said, dropping the shears with a clatter.

  “I’m not defending her.”

  “What the fuck?” Tanya said as the three men with guns appeared from the mauve darkness of the deck, their faces covered by ski masks.

  Two of the men were big and one was small.

  As Tanya lunged for Turner’s BlackBerry lying beside the magazines on the table one of the big men ran at her and struck her with the barrel of his gun, opening a gash on her cheek and a swoosh of blood flew from her face and landed against the white wall like some post-modernist flourish.

  Tanya sagged, dazed, blood dripping onto the wooden floor.

  When Turner rose from his chair and the same man forced him to his knees and shoved the gun barrel into his mouth, he had to believe that Fate’s thumb was on the scale.

  2

  This is such a fucking cliché, Turner thought when the pistol filled his mouth, the front sight raking his soft palate as he stood bleeding in the rain beside his felled Kawasaki midway along endless Louis Botha Avenue, the umbilical that yoked the dying ruin of swart, post-apocalyptic downtown Johannesburg to its golden love child, faraway Sandton, where wires of lightning ju-ju danced atop the gleaming office towers and palatial hotels.

  Even the slice of hard orange streetlight that anointed the rain-slick, glistening dome of his assailant was overfamiliar: the kind of noirish lighting design that spoke of meager budgets and warmed-over television actors and phoned-in screenplays.

  Like the tired crime fiction tropes that Turner kept falling into—regurgitating the retreaded plots of all the bad American TV shows and straight-to-DVD movies that had colonized his subconscious since he was a kid—when he’d get high enough (but not so high that he’d crash and burn, face down and drooling on the stained, stinking carpet of his room) to shovel aside his ennui and self-loathing, boot up his computer and try to write.

  Try to write something fresh and vital and, good Christ, yes, meaningful.

  For back then in South Africa, a few years into the new century, Turner had styled himself as a writer, even though his manuscript—Denis Johnson via Charles Bukowski via Hunter S. Thompson he would tell himself when he was wasted; pure shit he’d acknowledge in his increasingly infrequent moments of sobriety—lay moldering on the hard drive of his computer and he earned a sporadic income peddling party drugs to white hipsters.

  The bald black guy s
hoved Turner into the trunk of a showroom-shiny Bimmer, slammed the lid and the car took off into the night, leaving his old bike sprawled like a fallen horse in the overflowing gutter.

  Turner, lying cramped in the darkness, battled to keep his eyes open, two recently ingested Mandrax coupled with the rocking motion of the car lulling him to sleep.

  He’d popped the sedatives when he’d finished a cocaine delivery to a terrifyingly suburban couple who lived not far from his home in the belief that by the time he trod on the bike’s kickstand outside his cottage the disco biscuits would be wrapping him in their warm embrace and he’d stagger into his room and fall onto the bed, fully dressed but dead to the world and its relentlessly tedious parade.

  Things hadn’t gone according to plan.

  He’d stepped out of his clients’ house into one of those Jo’burg summer nights that stank of ozone and gasoline, low clouds obliterating the moon, the lightning putting on a show that the highveld—six thousand feet above sea level—was famous for, thunder rolling in like an artillery barrage.

  Turner gambled on getting home before the downpour but the rain, as torrential as a monsoon cloudburst, started to fall in blinding sheets only minutes after he’d booted his bike to life.

  Riding the Kawasaki up this river of water—buses and taxis aquaplaning by at great speed—was madness but Turner persisted until, just before Death Bend, a car, unseen by him, clipped his rear wheel and Turner was sent over the handlebars, skidding along the flooded blacktop until his helmet banged against the curb.

  His bike, on its side, sailed into him, rainwater sizzling on the hot exhaust that burned into his leg where the jeans had been sheared off during his slide.

  Pedestrians stared from under the cover of storefronts as Turner, leg bleeding, stood—vehicles, passing perilously close by, flinging dirty water at him—and removed his helmet.

  When he’d opened his mouth to hurl abuse at the car driver who appeared through the rain it had been filled with the gun barrel.

  And now he was in the BMW trunk, almost asleep.

  Some last trace of self-preservation, a dim, flickering pilot light in a dark ocean of ahnedonia, still burned and he fumbled around the trunk. When he saw a greenish glow he thought he was hallucinating, then, forcing his eyes to focus, he recognized it as a luminous pull tab.

  He yanked at it and the trunk popped, Turner having to scramble to stop it yawning all the way open on its sweet German hinges.

  Turner kept a grip on the inner lid, squinting out, trying to get his bearings.

  All he could see were streets wet with the rain that had ended as suddenly as it had begun.

  When the car stopped at a light he pushed up the lid and fell out in the path of a speeding mini-bus that swerved around him—the hot breath of its passing flapping his clothes—and scrambled to his feet, taking in the garbage and the destroyed streets and the gutted shells of once-grand Deco buildings.

  Jesus, he was in downtown Johannesburg, an inner-city hell of high-rise slums, crack whores, Nigerian drug lords and Zairian sex slavers that would have scared the crap out of Dante.

  A place he hadn’t ventured into for years, his white skin a beacon for the black commuters who were piling into taxis in the filthy street, staring at him like he was a voodoo fetish.

  Turner ran, limping on his bad leg, head thick with drugs.

  When he was tackled from behind he tucked and rolled, expecting the gunman.

  But it was worse.

  He was fallen upon by a pack of feral kids dressed in rags, stinking of filth and the glue they got high on, armed with broken bottles and twists of wire. They were kicking and biting and slashing at him, tiny hands tearing his clothes.

  A shot rang out and one of the kids, a woolly little Wookiee no older than ten, fell dead and the others peeled off into their nightmare world.

  The gunman panned his weapon onto Turner who shrugged and went back to the car. He briefly glimpsed the driver, oncoming headlights throwing his corn rows into relief, before he was shoved into the rear at the feet of the gunman whose Jordans stank as if small animals had died in them.

  They drove for another few minutes through the plundered streets and stopped outside a ruined building. The driver opened the rear door and Turner was hauled out, big hands gripping his arms.

  Scuffing through filth toward the apartment house—no electricity; guttering candles and paraffin lamps rendering the inhabitants as shadow shows thrown onto the bed sheets that hung over broken windows—it took Turner a moment to realize that he knew this building, that he had visited it in another lifetime.

  In the early eighties, years before the post-apartheid floodgates had opened releasing a deluge of the black and the brown and the foreign, when this small apartment house—Desroy Mansions—had still clung tightly onto an air of fading gentility, his pregnant mother had driven ten-year-old Turner in the family Datsun from their mining town into the city to visit with her aunt—Doris? Mavis?—who’d lived in an overstuffed old lady flat and smothered him repeatedly to her powered bosom, the bitter tang of medication and stale urine not quite disguised by her cloying cologne.

  She’d plied him with orange squash and animal crackers, too young and too sweet for him; Turner already a sliding-eyed boy who had more than once taken gulps from his father’s Scotch bottle—bitter and scalding to his tongue, but filled with illicit pleasure, like when he’d stuck his finger into the little apricot-colored gash between the legs of the girl who lived next door to him.

  His trip down memory lane was interrupted by a stench that hit him like a fist.

  They were in the lobby, the driver using a flashlight to negotiate the trash and the bundles of sleeping bodies that lay like cocooned silkworms.

  The elevator was now home to an extended family—its doors wedged open and its shaft filled with trash and human waste—so Turner was propelled up the broken staircase by the men, his leg throbbing.

  They climbed two floors as hissing, shadowy forms withdrew from the beam of the flashlight like vampires, hearing screams and grunts and then a Francophone African song sung in a female voice of such heartbreaking beauty that it gave Turner pause on the landing.

  His moment of musical appreciation was cut short when the bald man shoved him into a wrecked apartment.

  The door had been axed for firewood.

  The floorboards were torn up.

  A doorway framed a toilet empty of its bowl, the outlet pipe leaking a fetid black sludge that congealed beneath Turner’s shoes.

  The men walked him into what had been the living room, illuminated by a hurricane lamp, a torn khaki blanket covering the window.

  Mr. Paul, a slender black man in his forties flanked by two giant bodyguards, stood watching Turner.

  Mr. Paul’s henchboys were all blinged up and pumped but he was medium-sized and wore an ivory-colored golf shirt over black slacks and loafers. No jewelry, not even a watch.

  As anonymous as a clerk and just as unthreatening.

  Until you looked at his eyes and saw the deadness there.

  “Mr. Turner.”

  “Mr. Paul.”

  “You know why you are here?” the Nigerian asked in his careful accent.

  “Yes,” Turner said.

  “Do you have my money?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You sell my product but you do not pass on what is owed me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And you ignore my messages?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Paul.”

  “You are sorry?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m sorry.”

  “We shall see. We shall see if you are sorry.”

  The Nigerian turned toward the single bedroom.

  A naked man, trussed and gagged, lay on the floor.

  A white man.

  The sight of this pallid mirror image of himself shocked Turner who understood, now, the gravity of his situation.

  Mr. Paul clicked his fingers and one of his m
en helped him don a pale yellow raincoat and handed him a hammer.

  Tapping the ball of the hammer on his palm the drug czar crossed to the bedroom and regarded the man on the floor who writhed and blinked some desperate Morse code with his pleading eyes.

  Mr. Paul swung the hammer, connecting with a kneecap that shattered with a sound like ice cracking.

  A keening noise escaped the gag.

  Mr. Paul smashed the other knee.

  Then both of the man’s hands.

  Vomit dribbled from behind the gag.

  Mr. Paul appeared to grow bored because he left the extremities behind and went to work on the man’s head and in a frenzy of whaling reduced it to a mash of splintered bone, brain matter and gore.

  When Turner tried to look away the gunman held his face and forced him to watch.

  He puked, a bitter spray of booze and chemicals landing on his shoes.

  Mr. Paul stood back and dropped the hammer, his raincoat, face and hands dripping with blood and bone shards.

  “You have but one week to get me my money,” he said to Turner, a little breathless, “or . . .”

  He shrugged and adopted a spread armed, Christ-like pose and one of his men stripped him of the raincoat and handed him a plastic container of wet wipes and he used the scented towelettes to clean himself.

  Turner was taken back to the car that idled in a light drizzle.

  He was left this time to sit alone in the rear of the BMW, the car wipers mewling on the window glass and the tires hissing on the wet road, watching the city with unseeing eyes, the sky, made violet by light pollution, draped across the buildings like a sagging marquee at the end of some sad revel.

  Before he realized where he was Turner was flung from the still-moving Bimmer near to where his Kawasaki lay in the gutter.

  Turner fought his bike upright, kicked it a few times before it caught and rode into the rain, the bike sliding and bucking on streets stained purple by pulped jacaranda blossoms, heading for the genteel suburb of Houghton, home to the aged saint, Nelson Mandela.