Bad Seeds

by Jassy Mackenzie

  “Why?” Jade asked, surprised.

  “Because he spends all his money elsewhere,” Botha said, with no warmth in his smile.

  And then the blare of a horn came from outside.

  “What the hell?” Botha asked.

  They hurried to the large window, where they saw a red Subaru was parked outside the warehouse gate.

  “Did they follow us?” Behind her, Botha’s voice was sharp. “I thought that tracker didn’t work here.”

  “It doesn’t,” she retorted. She was certain of it. And in any case, this wasn’t the same type of car. Their pursuers had used big, heavy SUVs, and she hadn’t recalled them honking the horn, either. They’d arrived in silence.

  This low-slung sports car was different. The spoiler hadn’t come standard. It was an add-on, something that the boys in the southern suburbs of Johannesburg liked to flaunt. As they watched, the horn blared again.

  Decision time.

  “I’m going out to talk to the driver,” Jade said.

  “No! You’re crazy. Don’t go out there; you’ll be shot.”

  “Whoever’s honking isn’t here for me or for you. They’re here for the owner of this place. They’ve seen the gate’s padlocked from the inside, so they know somebody’s here, and they’re going to stay out there making noise until they get answers.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “One hundred percent,” she said confidently, although it was really about ninety.

  “I’m coming with you.” Botha reached for his shoes.

  They were halfway across the parking lot when the door of the souped-up vehicle swung open. A tall, lean black man climbed out. His head was shaven, and it gleamed in the morning light. He wore a studded jacket, blue jeans and expensive-looking boots. “Hey,” he called.

  “Hey,” Jade responded. She stopped by the gate. Botha stood half a pace behind her, his arms folded, looking every inch the tough, silent bodyguard.

  “You open for business?”

  She shook her head. It was an innocent enough question. But Robbie’s businesses had never been innocent.

  Sure enough, the man’s next question was, “Robbie there?”

  “No. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Funny, ’cause I heard he was back in town.”

  Jade remembered her wish for him to appear just a few minutes earlier and suppressed a laugh. But this was bad news for her; Robbie never brought good things with him.

  She shook her head in response.

  “Who are you?” the man asked. There was a hint of a threat in the question. She wondered if he would have been more aggressive without Botha there—it was probably the silent, muscular presence behind her that commanded this stranger’s respect.

  “I came here to get something.”

  “You got a key?” His voice was sharp.

  “Security let me in,” she lied.

  “Never seen security here before,” the man said.

  Jade shrugged.

  “I want a cell number,” the guy said. “For Robbie, I mean.”

  “The one I have won’t help you. He told me it was getting disconnected,” Jade said.

  “I don’t care. An old number’s better than no number.”

  Jade took her phone out of her jeans pocket and read him the last number she had for Robbie.

  He punched it into his phone. Without speaking to her again, he got into his car and roared off. She noticed that he was already making a call.

  “We’ve got an hour, maybe,” she told Botha when they were back in the garage. “That guy’s going to be back with his friends.”

  “Who is he?”

  “One of many people Robbie’s screwed over.”

  “Screwed over how?”

  Jade shrugged. “Robbie never specialized in doing business honestly.”

  Botha nodded. “We need to get going, then. But I’d like to make you a counteroffer to Gillespie’s, Jade. Work only for me. No more running, just fighting back. Your job—our job—is to find those hit men. Have them arrested, whatever. I want to be able to sleep at night, and I’m sure you do, too.”

  Jade stared at Botha, wishing she could be sure of his intentions. “The tracking device could be useful to draw them in,” she said eventually.

  Botha picked it up and examined it closely. “You said it’s not accurate? That the signal comes and goes?”

  “In my experience, yes.”

  “We could help it along a bit.” With his fingertip, he loosened the SIM card. “Now it’s disconnected. Signal is gone. Damn this unreliable GPS.” When he glanced up, she was surprised to see wicked humor in his expression. He eased the card back into its slot once more. “And there you are. Signal’s back again. Now all we need is a plan.”

  “Coffee to help you brainstorm?” she asked jokingly.

  “I think I’ll pass. Never tasted such disgusting coffee,” Botha said.

  Disgusting coffee . . .

  “Of course!” Jade laughed out loud, causing Botha to stare at her in surprise.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I think I’ve worked something out,” she told him.

  She picked up the coffee tin and carried it to the sink. She upended it there, letting the thousands of granules stream out into the stainless-steel bowl until it was empty and only a trace of acrid dust floated up.

  She looked inside the can.

  Stuck to the bottom with a piece of duct tape was a long, narrow key.

  She peeled the tape away. The shaft of the key felt cold and sticky to her touch. She grinned in triumph. Robbie and his warped sense of humor. Had he known she’d find it? Or had he been laughing at the thought that she never would?

  She slotted the key into the safe’s keyhole and swung the heavy door open.

  Inside was the gun.

  Not her first choice of firearm. It wouldn’t even have been her second choice. It was a large, heavy Desert Eagle in a leather holster. This weighed three times what her Glock 19 had. But it sure as hell would have stopping power.

  The gun smelled faintly of oil. The magazine was full: eight bullets. She had no idea how accurate the gun’s aim was. She was unfamiliar with this weapon. But she had eight chances to get to know it better.

  Jade relocked the safe and taped the key back in the bottom of the coffee tin. Then she scooped a few giant handfuls of grounds out of the sink and dumped them back in the container. She replaced the lid, turned on the tap and let the remainder wash away. “I want to do one more thing before we go,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Botha asked.

  “Come into the warehouse, and I’ll show you.”

  Gun in hand, Jade walked the length of the warehouse past the hydraulic lifts and the pits; the oil smell was stronger here. Past the rows of shelves. She could see Botha’s footprints in the dust. Two sets there and back. In the center of the floor, on the far side, was the trodden evidence of his workout. The large circle of footprints had stamped the dust away, allowing the industrial gray floor paint to gleam.

  She stood in the middle of the circle and turned her back to the window. She raised the barrel and focused on the office wall. The gun was heavy; it felt unwieldy and awkward in her grasp. The serial numbers had been filed off. No proof of this weapon’s history, or where Robbie had obtained it, or how long it had spent in the safe. Jade didn’t want to know. For now, she was lucky to have something usable.

  The back wall was about twenty paces away. Botha had already drawn a large X on the bricks and stood near it.

  She only had eight bullets, but she’d rather waste a couple now than have a misfire or a wide shot when her life depended on it.

  The middle of the X was at about his chest height. Center mass. With a gun like this, heavy and powerful, that would be the most se
nsible place to aim. A head shot would be too risky.

  Jade exhaled. She didn’t give herself much time to aim, because it wasn’t likely that she would have any in an emergency. She simply squeezed the trigger and felt the weapon kick, slamming painfully back into the heel of her hand as the noise of the explosion filled the warehouse.

  Dust billowed out where the bullet hit the wall, and fragments of brick tumbled to the floor. When they cleared, she saw the shot was a few inches too high. She’d overcompensated for the gun’s heaviness.

  “One more,” she yelled, hoping Botha could hear her, because she couldn’t hear herself over the ringing in her ears. He waved, indicating understanding, and she fired again.

  This time she was more familiar with its weight, even though nothing could help with the vicious, bone-bruising recoil. When the dust had cleared and she’d picked up the shells, she followed Botha’s footprints back across the warehouse floor.

  The second bullet had hit a half-inch from the intersection of the lines in the X.

  At that range, this was more than good enough. She’d familiarized herself with its action. And the experiment had taught her that the gun was reliable.

  As if Robbie would have kept a faulty or damaged weapon in his possession. There would never be a reason to doubt him on that score. Guns weren’t toys or status symbols to him. They were tools that served to do a job.

  “That was very good shooting,” Botha said. “Exceptional, in fact.”

  “Thanks,” she told him.

  “You practice often?”

  “Every week or two, usually. Unfortunately, my gun was confiscated a few months ago. It was registered,” she added hurriedly, seeing his sidelong glance. “There was a quibble about documentation. Now police red tape is delaying its return.”

  “Why do you shoot so often?” He sounded genuinely interested.

  “Because I choose to carry a weapon,” Jade told him. “I need to have it with the line of work I’m in. My father was a police detective who taught me to shoot. He always told me that if I owned a gun, it was my responsibility to make sure I was skilled at using it.”

  “Sounds like sensible advice,” Botha agreed. “But what did your mother think?”

  “I never knew my mother. She died when I was very young. But based on what I know of her, I think she would have approved of that decision.”

  She wasn’t about to tell Botha any more. She hadn’t told anyone that she kept a photo of her mother in the cottage and looked at it every day. And when she did, she always wondered how the gentle-looking woman smiling into the camera had spent part of her life working as a contract killer.

  Who had she murdered, and why? What had driven her to do it? Jade would never know. These secrets were hidden somewhere behind her mother’s serene features and sparkling green eyes. But she had passed at least one of her traits on to Jade, a talent that had proved to be a blessing and a curse. The ability to kill.

  She thought about that as she holstered the gun.

  Killing in self-defense was something most people could do if their lives were threatened, especially if they were trained in handling a firearm. Killing in cold blood was another matter. Even if you knew the man you were aiming the weapon at was a murderer himself, an evil psychopath who deserved to die, many couldn’t pull that trigger.

  And there were only a few who could sight and aim with a steady hand, fire calmly and send a bullet straight into the bastard’s brain.

  They walked back to the office. There wasn’t much to pack, but she wanted to leave the place as tidy as they had found it.

  “Tell me about your parents,” Jade said to Botha as she plumped up the couch cushions. He had found a broom in the bathroom and was sweeping the floor.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said. He smiled, but there wasn’t much humor in it.

  “Well, now that you’ve put it like that, I really want to know,” Jade said, and saw his expression warm slightly.

  “I never really knew my dad. He was a career soldier—a mercenary. Spent most of his life out of the country. When I was twelve, he got into a fight with a civilian, ended up killing the guy and went to prison, where he died a year later. Another fight, I believe. My mother took on various jobs to try and keep us afloat, including working as an escort at one stage. She wasn’t home much. Not that home was a great place to be.”

  “I can imagine,” Jade said.

  “She remarried when I was fourteen. I think it was to one of her clients, although she never said. He wasn’t a nice guy. I left home at sixteen and hardly saw her after that, which I’ll always regret, because a year or so later, they got into an accident on a drive down to Durban for the holidays. He was speeding, lost control, collided with a tree. They were both killed instantly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jade said softly.

  Botha shrugged. “You make decisions, you live with them. I decided I was never going to be like either of them. Not like my dad, not like my stepfather. I got myself an education. I practiced martial arts. I like the discipline. The calmness of it, I suppose you could say. Focused energy.”

  “I saw you this morning,” Jade said.

  “Like you, I believe in continuously sharpening one’s skills,” Botha said. “Especially since it takes years of hard work to achieve them in the first place.”

  Jade put the mug back on the shelf and hung the dishcloth on the hook where she’d found it. Botha shouldered his laptop bag. It was time to go.

  Before they reached the door, he turned to her and said, “May I?”

  She blinked in surprise as he took her hands in his own. She felt his fingers brushing over the ridges of callus on her palm and the heel of her hand. Hundreds of hours of practice at the shooting range had formed them, and they had been there for years. Even a couple of months away from the range hadn’t been able to rid her skin of the thickened scars it carried, the protection it had developed to cushion the repetitive kick of her firearm.

  “That’s a lot of shooting,” he observed. “No wonder you’re so accurate.”

  Jade nodded.

  “You can feel the difference between the left and right,” he said. “But your left is slightly callused, too.”

  “I shoot with it sometimes,” Jade told him. “If one hand is injured or I can’t use it for some reason, I need to be able to shoot with the other. So I do a session with my left hand every so often. I’m not nearly as accurate, but I’m working on it.”

  “Ambidexterity’s hard to achieve.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Botha let go of her hands, and Jade took one last look into the office before closing up.

  There was something creepy that had settled over the room, not because it had been abandoned, but because it was as if it was waiting. In limbo. A leather-furnished hideaway that would remain untouched until its owner’s return. Robbie might walk in, turn on the kettle and make himself a cup of that abysmal coffee, then slouch down onto the couch—and just like that, the place would have its heart back again.

  Or perhaps not.

  Maybe Robbie was dead. Maybe the place would wait forever.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  David paced his office. Back and forth, back and forth. He gripped his cell phone in his fist, wishing he could use it as a weapon to break through the distance and the silence that existed between him and Jade. Simply making a call on it was futile. His attempts had rung straight through to her voice mail.

  Carlos Botha.

  His background alone would have aroused David’s suspicion. A broken home, a troubled childhood. A highly intelligent renegade who’d turned his back on society’s norms and chosen a different, more dangerous path.

  Wait a minute. This sounded awfully familiar. Was it Botha he was researching, or Jade?

  Stop it, David told himself.

  Ja
de was not the spider who’d spun this complex web of deception. But she could well end up being the fly caught in it.

  The sheets of paper, the online links, the information David had obtained by calling in favors from contacts who owed him, assisted by two of his sergeants, represented a full twelve hours of work. Hours he should have been spending on cases that were bigger priorities. Instead, he had single-mindedly, obsessively hunted down every available scrap of information on this man. David’s fourth cup of coffee in as many hours stood forgotten on his desk as he collated the facts.

  Botha had begun his career in intelligence, working for two private military organizations. Read: mercenary groups. Groups that specialized in brutal killing for money in godforsaken places, even though they liked to justify their actions by claiming they kept the peace.

  Botha had then gone back to civilian life, becoming a security systems specialist, but as David well knew, a leopard couldn’t easily change its spots. He interviewed one of Botha’s ex-employers, who said that Botha had been hired by the company’s former director just before she had resigned, and that certain major software had been stolen from the company while Botha was working there—software for a blueprint that was about to be patented. Botha had left straight afterward, and the previous director had secured the patent for the lucrative blueprint.

  The man stammered as he told the story, and reading between the lines, David guessed that the previous director had, in fact, written most of the software before being forced out of her job. But even so, it was company property, and Botha had stolen it. The fact it was a Robin Hood–type of maneuver didn’t make it right. It was clear that Botha was prepared to take money in exchange for breaking the law.

  Like somebody else you know? the little voice in David’s head asked.

  David ordered the voice to shut up.

  To cover all angles, he had requested the case file on the sabotage at Inkomfe, and now he was going to call in another favor.

  He had obtained Botha’s cell phone number and was hoping to view a list of the recent calls he had made.

  This information was kept confidential by the service providers, and a subpoena usually had to be issued before the records could be made available. But David had a contact who worked for Botha’s cell phone provider. His name was Fanie. He was an ex-police reservist who now worked in data management and had access to all his company’s online systems and call information. He understood the pressure of police work and the fact that obtaining a subpoena took time, and was generally willing to bend a few rules in order to help out. Of course, if these phone records were found to contain important information and David needed to use them in a case, he would request them again through the official channels.