by Roger Smith
At last Grace emerged, leaning against the doorjamb.
“You still here?” she said in a voice like broken glass.
Snagging a pack of cigarettes from a drawer Grace drew one out with her lips. She fired up, coughed, squinting at him through a veil of smoke as she sat on the bed, folding her long legs under her like a nesting swan.
Reaching across to the bedside table she held up a half-empty liter of Stolichnaya, wagging it at him questioningly.
When Turner shook his head Grace said, “Oh yeah. Mr. No Vices, huh?”
She took a swig directly from the bottle and closed her eyes for a second before she deposited the vodka on the table with a sharp smack.
She hugged herself, staring at the carpet. Then she looked up at him and Turner saw the black eye clearly.
“Did she do that to you?” he asked. “The woman in the BMW?”
“Aren’t you the clairvoyant? You read palms, too?”
Rising from the bed, he said, “I’ll go.”
“No don’t. Stay. Please.”
She reached out and touched him, her fingers trembling like the heart of a captive bird held in a cupped hand.
Turner sat.
“Yeah,” she said, “I weakened. Let her back in. It went the way it always did.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. She’s dead.”
“Things end,” he said. “Messily sometimes.”
“No, I mean it. She’s really dead.”
He stared at her.
“I got a call from her brother an hour ago to tell me Megan totaled her car up near Casa Grande on her way back to Phoenix. Died instantly.” She trickled twin vapor trails of smoke from her nostrils. “He cursed me out. Called me a dyke. Said I’d killed her and better not show up at the funeral.”
She was crying again, wiping mucous from her nostrils with the back of her hand.
Turner lifted a box of tissues from the vanity and handed it to her.
“I’m pathetic,” she said, blowing her nose.
When she reached for the bottle of vodka he took it from her hand.
“I’m thinking you’re not much of drinker?”
“No. Not much. Megan is. Was. She was loaded when she left here. I should’ve stopped her.” She shook her head. “I feel like I’m responsible.”
“You would feel that way. But you’re not,” Turner said. “Why don’t you lie down?”
She obeyed and he covered her with the comforter.
He wanted to touch her but was afraid of what he would unleash if he did.
“John, you ever done something you felt really bad about?” she said in a whisper as soft as the flutter of a moth’s wings.
“Yes.”
There was silence for a moment and then he heard the moan of her snores.
Turner crossed to the window, cracked the curtains and stood looking down at the dance of traffic on the muffled streets of the parched city, a grid of blank faced buildings that sprouted from the endless desert.
18
Turner, watching Bekker gunpointed by Bone and Tard, felt a bead of sweat break free of his hairline, trickle down his forehead, ramp onto his nose and then drop onto the wooden floor of the living room, its shiny meniscus reflecting the three masked men who stood in a frozen tableau, only their breath breaking the silence.
Bone taking loud sips of air—a mouth breather, indeed—Tard sniffing and snorting, as if he’d just vacuumed up a line of coke and was unclogging his nostrils; Bekker’s breath swirling in his throat, long and slow, as if he were using some esoteric pranayama to keep himself centered and calm.
Turner, his terror at being left at the mercy of these two rogue animals gifting him with acute powers of observation—like some whispering TV anthropologist in a hide at a watering hole—saw an almost imperceptible shift in Bone’s attitude as a tension informed his body, his gloved finger tightening on the trigger of his automatic.
Bone leaned in slightly, like he was driving his weight into his trigger finger, ready to activate the firing pin and send on its way the bullet that would end Bekker’s life, and—almost certainly—those of Turner and his daughter.
A tinny version of Sinatra’s “Witchcraft” blared out, cutting the silence, and it was only when the three men, the spell broken, all looked in Turner’s direction that he realized it was the phone in his pocket—Grace’s phone—trilling out the absurd ringtone.
19
Grace, patrolling her apartment, a cigarette in one hand and her cordless phone in the other, killed the call when the voice message on her BlackBerry kicked in.
She cursed herself as she slung the phone onto the couch.
Knew that, too freaked out to switch on the light in the office, she’d overlooked her cell phone when she’d packed her things after John dumped her.
Overlooked the phone that had her life on it: she’d never been smart enough to back up her contact list.
“Epic fail,” she heard Lucy Turner say and Grace couldn’t suppress a laugh.
And then she felt an awful emptiness, knowing she hadn’t just lost John today, she’d lost the girl as well.
She lit another cigarette from the butt of the old one—a voice from somewhere saying she shouldn’t be doing this and, again, she saw that little box on the sink in her bathroom, and pushed it away, unable, now, to face that—standing looking out into the night but back at the table beside the pool of John’s house at the end of the work day a week ago, paging through fashion magazines with Lucy, making silly girl talk, the kid’s laughter floating clear and light on the still air.
“Lucy!”
Grace had looked up and seen Tanya Turner standing in the living room doorway with her arms folded tightly, her mouth as thin as a hatchet blade, her dark eyes fixed on them.
The child, sitting with her back to the house, lost in their conversation, hadn’t heard Tanya and laughed again.
“Lucy!”
The girl’s smile faded as she turned to her mother.
“Get in here,” Tanya said. “Now.”
“Mom, I’m just looking at some pictures—”
“If you don’t get in here and clean up your room I’ll ground your fucking arse for a week. Do you hear me?”
Lucy sighed, grimaced at Grace and walked slowly into the house.
Tanya slammed the sliding door closed but Grace could still hear her voice, as nagging and insistent as a shrike’s, as she berated the girl, taking her arm and pulling her toward the bedrooms.
Grace gathered her magazines and went into the office where John sat at his computer.
“That poor kid,” Grace said, dumping the magazines on her desk. “I know it’s not my business but she deserves better.”
“You’re right,” John said.
“And so do you.”
John shrugged and nudged his mouse, fingers busy on his keyboard.
Grace stood by her desk worrying at a loose tendril of her hair.
“John, I’m not always going to be happy with the scraps from the table.”
He looked up at her, surprised.
“Meaning what?” he said.
“Meaning that I’m not getting a lot out of this.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“You know what I want,” she said.
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
Grace lifted her car keys, saying, “You have a good night, now.”
She’d walked out, leaving him staring after her.
And then yesterday at the motel she’d gambled everything. Inventing the job offer in Phoenix. Forcing herself to confront him.
Gambled everything and lost.
She lifted the phone and hit redial and when she heard her own voice again she said, “Dumb bitch,” and killed the call.
Grace stood a moment staring at nothing and then she speed-dialed John’s cell number and listened to it ring.
20
The phone rang as Turner was about to str
addle his Kawasaki outside a strip mall on Beyers Naudé.
He removed it from his jacket, silenced it, not up to the wrath of Bekker, ready to drop it into a garbage can when he saw a group of black beggars leaning against a car, eyeing him, and thought it more prudent to lift the seat of his bike and dump the phone in the recess beneath.
As the phone dropped it clanked against a little glass vial given him, in a weird role reversal, by an Austrian rent boy he supplied weed to, a vial Turner had forgotten about in the month since the queen had tossed it his way with the fervent promise that it would make him see God.
Turner lifted the vial, popped the cap and emptied the single pill onto his palm. It was without name or marking, looking as anodyne as an M&M, and he suspected that the little faggot, always batting his eyelids at Turner and whispering coquettishly, his Tyrolean accent making his sexual banter and drug lore sound like debased baby talk, was just hyping some insipid beta-blocker in an attempt to impress and (for Chrissakes) seduce.
What the fuck, Turner thought as he flicked the pill onto his tongue and dry swallowed it.
He could use a little God.
Or even just a little mindlessness.
He locked the bike seat and decided that he deserved a drink and when he spotted a small bar next to a 7-Eleven—definitely not one of Bekker’s watering holes—he walked in and ordered a Jack and Coke from a mixed-race barman graced with the glamorous trifecta of adult acne, dandruff and halitosis.
The man left Turner alone to drink and watch sport on TV while he moped in the shadows, ministering to the few traveling salesmen and faceless office workers who slid into the murk of the saloon from the blinding daylight.
After the girl had disappeared into the sanctuary of her schoolyard Turner had found himself sitting at the wheel of the Toyota, trying to scratch together a strategy that would keep at bay not only the murderous Mr. Paul but an angry and vengeful Chris Bekker.
When he’d come up empty he’d started the van and, in the absence of a better idea, returned it to where he’d fetched it that morning, at the McDonald’s drive-through.
He’d abandoned the HiAce, crossed Beyers Naudé and was about to get on his bike and ride to fuck knew where when the phone Bekker gave him yesterday started to ring.
And here he was now, drinking the day to death in this soulless bar, staring blankly at a game of rugby beamed from Auckland, feeling nothing more than a little buzz from the booze, deciding that the nameless mauve pill had been robbed of whatever potency it may have once had by the African sun blasting down on the bike’s seat, turning the cargo compartment to a furnace.
And then the thing that had lain latent in his gut like an unexploded depth-charge suddenly detonated with a rush so savage that, gripping the bar counter with white knuckled hands, Turner was certain his heart would burst and his skull fragment.
It hit with a force that staggered even him, a seasoned mariner on the chemical high seas, and time folded in on itself and reality cracked and peeled and flaked like the nitrate coating on a strip of celluloid left too long in the sun.
Turner had no recall of leaving the bar and his memory of the next twelve hours consisted of incendiary bursts, like flack explosions: dancing to Kwassa Kwassa in a lurid hotel room with a mulatto transgender hooker who fellated him while a trio of impassive African men in bespoke suits, tribal scars etched deep in their blue-black skins, stood watching, smoking cigars and drinking single malt; crawling on his hands and knees from an elevator on a red carpet so thick and luxurious that he flopped down and closed his eyes until he was lifted by powerful arms and raced toward an exit that shapeshifted into the doorway of a blue-collar night club—mindless techno the soundtrack—by two huge white men with shaven heads and goatees.
While Turner was on his knees in the gutter one of the bouncers kicked him in the gut, a crowd of revelers high on blood lust baying for more.
Turner, rendered deaf by agony and chemicals, stared up as the man kicked him in the head, sending him swirling and spiraling into a tunnel that dumped him, fully clothed, on the sheets of his filthy bed, hot morning sun blasting through the window and the barrel of a gun smacking him painfully on the base of his skull as Chris Bekker whispered in his ear: “Wakey, wakey Englishman. Rise and fuckin shine.”
21
It was a moment of pure slapstick as, to the soundtrack of “Witchcraft,” Bekker shook his head free of the two pistols and stepped away from his cohorts, leaving Tard and Bone pointing their weapons at each other before both their arms drooped and their eyes followed the small man as he crossed to where Turner lay.
Bekker looked down at Turner and said, “Is that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”
Turner said nothing.
Bekker kneeled down and extended a gloved hand. “Give it to me.”
When Turner freed his left hand from its entwining with his right he felt it shake as if it were palsied and it was a triumph of his will to command it to travel down to the pocket where Grace’s phone lay.
He held the now silent BlackBerry out to Bekker.
“You find this in the office?” Bekker said.
“Yes.”
“Who does it belong to?”
“My employee.”
Bekker fiddled with the phone, unlocked it and checked the recent calls list.
“Okay,” he said to the two men looking on, “Daddy here didn’t manage to send out and any distress signals.”
Still holding the phone Bekker stood and took his arm back like a baseball pitcher and hurled the BlackBerry across the room. Turner watched it spin and arc as it traveled through the open sliding door and dropped into the electric blue rectangle of the floodlit pool where it sank from view.
Bekker kicked Turner in the face.
Turner felt his nose break. His eyes filled with tears of pain, warm blood gushing from his nostrils.
Bekker, lashing out like a frenzied Cossack dancer, kicked Turner in the upper body untold times and Turner curled like a fearful centipede in a futile attempt to protect himself from the kicks that rained down on him.
22
“What the fuck is going on here?”
Turner squinted at the doorway and saw the skinny silhouette of Tanya against the glare.
Bekker holstered his automatic and stood up from the mattress where he’d been crouched over Turner.
“Police business,” he said, flashing one of his killer smiles along with his badge.
“Bullshit. Do you have a search warrant?”
“I’m not arresting him.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Listen, lady—”
“I’m not your lady, asshole, I’m a human rights lawyer and I eat fucking scum like you for breakfast. What do you want with Mr. Turner?”
Bekker raised his hands in a supplicating gesture.
“Mr. Turner is a confidential informant.”
“If he’s your snitch why were you holding a gun to his head?”
“Sometimes he needs to be incentivized.”
“You do this to him?” Tanya asked, taking in Turner’s bruised and swollen face.
“No.”
She looked down at Turner.
“You need help, Johnny?”
“I’m okay,” Turner said, sitting up, grimacing, snagging the bottle of Jack Daniel’s at his bedside.
“You don’t look okay.”
“I’m fine, Tanya. Thanks.”
With a shake of her head she was gone.
“Who’s the lefty dyke?” Bekker asked.
“My neighbor. And she’s not a dyke,” Turner said, gargling with the booze.
“You fucking her?” Bekker asked.
“Intermittently,” Turner said, entering the bathroom, taking a piss.
Bekker crossed to the front door and closed and locked it. Then he leaned against the doorjamb in the bathroom, watching as Turner shook himself dry, flushed and stood by the sink, inspecting himself
in the mirror.
His face was a mess; he had a black eye and a swollen nose. He opened his mouth and peered inside. A few teeth felt loose as toggle switches but none of them had been dislodged.
“So what happened yesterday?” Bekker asked, lighting a cigarette, shaking the match dead and flicking it into the sink where it sizzled and spluttered.
“I just couldn’t do it.”
“You went to the river?”
“Yes, I went to the river.”
“You see the girl?”
“I saw the girl.”
“She see you?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Turner faced the cop. “When I saw her it became too real.”
“Too real?”
“Yeah.” Turner shrugged. “This is just not my thing, man.”
“Not, huh?”
“No.”
Bekker punched him in the mouth, a blindingly fast left jab.
Turner smacked his head against the mirror and blood welled up in his mouth, falling in red dollops into the cracked sink.
“Fucking hell,” he said, around the pain and the warm, salty ooze.
Bekker had him by the hair, pushing his face against the porcelain, opening the faucet, Turner spluttering and gagging under the stream of cold water.
At last Bekker let him free and Turner stood, shaking moisture from his eyes, coughing like a drowned dog.
“You do fuckin understand that you no longer have the luxury of deciding what is and what isn’t your thing?” the cop said.
Turner said nothing, putting a hand to his mouth, his fingers coming away warm and red.
“I had to tap dance like Michael fuckin Jackson with the Lawn Jockey. Told him there’d been hassles, people got in the way, made it impossible to grab the kid. That it’ll go down today.” Bekker was right up in Turner’s face, exhaling smoke and stale coffee and garlic. “And it fuckin will.”
“Or what?” Turner said, stepping backward, “You’ll kill me?”
“No, I won’t kill you.”