“Did she tell you she suspected her ex-husband?”
The lines on Yolandi’s face deepened and she twined her fingers together.
“No, no. She didn’t tell me anything, as such. I happened to overhear her conversation. I walked into the office unex-pectedly while she was on the phone.”
“I see,” Jade said. She would have bet a substantial amount of money that Yolandi had been eavesdropping behind the door, since Annette was so secretive.
“Who was she speaking to?”
“I don’t know. I just heard her say, ‘I know I’m being followed.’”
“You think it was Piet?”
“I think that he was having her followed again. And that she hired the private detective to try and catch him. Probably, Piet had her killed too. She was a wealthy woman. And he’s just a bum. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
Yolandi gave Jade a small, satisfied smile. Then she lifted a page off the tallest stack of documents, blew the dust off it, and turned her attention back to her work.
6
The trunk of the car was heating up in the morning sun. The car turned off the tarmac and bumped along a rough road. Branches swished and scraped over its roof.
The man in the trunk was pouring sweat. His white golf shirt was drenched and clammy and no longer white. He could smell his perspiration and the stench of his own terror. For hours he had twisted and writhed, flinging himself against the carpeting on the sides and against the hard metal shell above his head.
The car had been parked somewhere overnight. At one stage, when he’d stopped struggling, he’d realized how cold it was. He’d curled up and shivered. He hadn’t slept. The long minutes had passed, quiet and deadly slow.
Then the car had started up and begun to move again. He’d renewed his efforts to make a noise, to produce some motion that might attract somebody’s attention. But the car was too big and heavy. Its new, springy shocks simply absorbed the impact of his rolling body. He had a gag in his mouth, but he hadn’t let that stop him. He’d grunted and bellowed, putting all his effort into getting his voice past the obstruction in his mouth, in the desperate hope that somehow, somebody might hear.
The gag was one of his own socks, ripped off his foot and secured in his mouth with sticky brown packaging tape. He could taste the sour sweat and dirt from his foot and his shoe. The sock’s coarse cotton fibers pushed against his tongue.
The man who’d gagged him had wound the tape round and round his head, covering his mouth and chin in a brown bandage. In the back of his mind, he thought that the gag would be agonizing to take off. It would rip out the two-day growth of stubble and his graying buzz cut. Then he realized how stupid he was to think that. Because if the gag ever came off, it would be a miracle. He would be glad of the pain.
He was a strong man and, although he was pushing fifty-five, still a tough man. He’d thought he was too hard, too experienced to fall victim to an attack like this. But he’d been taken by surprise because it had been slick, so slick, and com-pletely unexpected. Done with military precision. He’d done a few years in the army way back during apartheid. He knew training when he saw it. He’d been outnumbered. And he was familiar with the brutal intent these men showed.
They’d handcuffed and gagged him. They’d yanked his laptop from the power supply and taken his cell phone. Then they’d searched his files. He’d shaken his head and shrugged. Whatever they wanted, he wasn’t going to point it out to them. An operation like this, he was in deep shit anyway. He’d recognized the signs.
The tall man had shouted at him and punched him in the stomach with an iron fist, so hard that he’d doubled over in agony. He’d braced himself for a brutal beating, but the man with the gun had intervened.
“Leave him. Not here, not now.”
“We could take the gag off and question him.”
“And if he shouts?”
“We need the info.”
“It’s recent. Probably nothing’s been filed yet. Anyway, he’s all we need. And this.” He indicated the laptop.
Then they’d marched him down to the car and, at gun-point, forced him into it.
Slowly, fighting the gag, he’d screamed his voice away. Now his throat felt ragged and he could taste blood in the back of his mouth. Even if the gag was removed, there was nothing he could do now. He’d been stupid. He had wasted his voice.
The cable ties that bound his hands behind his back had been too tight to begin with. His hands had swollen now, which made the thin plastic even tighter. His wrists throbbed with a hard hot rhythm in time to the panicked beating of his heart. Every time he moved, a bolt of pain shot up his arms. He wondered if he’d ever be able to use his hands again. Then he realized that was the least of his problems.
He always instructed his clients to try to loosen the car-peting on the inside of their car’s trunk so that they could kick out a rear light if they were held captive in a hijacked vehicle. The carpeting in this vehicle was sturdy. In the dark-ness, it took him a long time to work out where the lights were. Eventually he followed the curve of the trunk’s lid and found the area by feel. He tried to grab the edge of the carpet with his swollen fingers and yank it away.
It didn’t work. He lost a nail. The red, tearing agony as it ripped out of his finger squeezed a flood of tears from his eyes. His nose blocked and he sobbed in desperation, fighting for breath as the gag threatened to choke him. Deep in his gut he knew that this was it. You didn’t get let out and set free when you were tied up in the back of a car. Only worse would happen.
The car stopped. The heat pulsing through the metal above him reduced just a little. The engine was switched off. In the shade, he thought, with odd clarity. They had stopped in the shade.
Then the lid was flung open.
He shrank away from the light that burnt his eyes, filtered only by a thin layer of dry leaves and twigs from the tree above him.
Blinking in the low rays of the sun, he looked up at the man who stood there. The tall man. The one with the cold, empty eyes.
He could only watch. The man lit a cigarette.
“Get out.”
He sat up, knocking his head on the top of the open lid, and a wave of dizziness caught him. The world spun, and for a moment he thought it would spin away. Then it righted itself. With legs that trembled so violently they could hardly work, he wriggled up until he was sitting on the rim of the trunk. Then he pushed himself over. He lost his balance and fell head first onto the stony ground.
“Get up.”
He swung onto his knees and staggered to his feet. His bare feet, bruised from kicking and struggling during the journey. The stones hurt his soles. They were soft, used to shoes. He stood bowed, swaying and snuffling through the gag.
“Walk.”
The other man climbed out of the passenger seat and trained the gun on him. There was nothing he could do. He stumbled into the trees. They were somewhere out in the bush, far from anywhere. Tears welled in his eyes as he walked. What had he done to deserve this?
“Stop.”
Trees were all around him. Their long trunks stretched up to a winter sky. Birds twittered in the branches. His feet were planted in a carpet of leaves.
The man shoved him backwards against a tree trunk. He had more cable ties with him. Long enough to stretch around the tree. Two were tightened around his neck. Another two pulled his ankles back against the rough bark.
He couldn’t speak, but his pleading eyes asked questions. The tall man laughed.
“You might be wondering what we’re going to do to you now.” He waited for a moment with his head on one side, as if expecting an answer.
“Nothing.”
The two men turned and walked away. He couldn’t move his head, only follow them with his eyes. They reached the car. Were they going to leave him on his own?
He closed his eyes for a moment, wondering if anyone would find him or if he would die slowly, strangled by the cable ties when his exhausted
legs finally gave way.
He heard scrunching on the leaves and strained his eyes sideways again. The tall man was returning. He was wearing a full-length protective mackintosh, the sort of coat that might keep you dry in a monsoon.
The man smiled. “Before I go, I think I’ll cut a little wood. It’s always nice to have freshly chopped wood in winter, for the fireplace.”
His eyes grew wide in horror and he struggled with all his might, bucking and fighting the cable ties.
The man had produced a heavy-looking, long-handled axe from under his raincoat.
The forest was still for a moment, seeming to hold its breath. Then the first blow of the axe landed. A shower of dry leaves fluttered to the ground and, in the tree above him, the birds took fright and wheeled away into the air.
7
Dean Grobbelaar had a hoarse, grainy voice. It sounded as if he had been chain smoking for decades. Jade couldn’t ask him if he had though, because he wasn’t answering his land-line or his cell phone. Each time she phoned, she got the same rasping growl of his voicemail. She left yet another message asking him to call her back. She’d just have to wait.
Jade clenched her fists in frustration. She didn’t want to wait. There was too much to do. She wanted to have this investigation finalized as soon as possible. Preferably before Viljoen was released from prison.
Thinking of Viljoen made her even more restless. She decided not to go back to the icy cottage. Instead, she drove to a shooting range for an hour of practice.
Her father taught her to shoot the day she turned thir-teen. It was a rite of passage. When he’d turned thirteen, his father had taken him shooting for the first time. Jade was his only child. He’d told her he didn’t see why he should make an exception for her just because she was a girl. Besides, Jade played football and took judo lessons and fought with the other kids in the area, just as she would have done if she’d been a boy. Maybe more, because being a cop’s daughter in a poor neighborhood wasn’t easy. Jade was as tough as any boy, and he wasn’t going to treat her any differently when it came to her first shooting lesson. Not when she was looking forward to it, pestering him about it every day.
That very morning he took her to a shooting range in Upington, where they were based for a few weeks. It was a place where daily temperatures regularly broke the forty-degree barrier and the distant mountains shimmered in the waves of heat. Her dad’s service pistol was boiling hot from the short trip in the car. The heat baked her feet in their thin sandals and billowed up from the ground onto her bare legs. Her baseball cap shielded her eyes from the worst of the glare, which meant she was able to see the owner of the range glow-ering down at her.
“How old is this child?”
“She’s thirteen today,” her father replied proudly.
“Well, she’s too young to be shooting on my range,” the owner said. “Fourteen years and over, that’s the rules here. I don’t want the police on my back, thank you very much.”
Commissioner de Jong didn’t tell the owner he was, in fact, the police. And he wasn’t discouraged. His daughter was going to have a shooting lesson for her birthday. They’d set their minds on it.
They ended up at a game reserve on the outskirts of the Kalahari desert. The game ranger there was an old friend of her father. Jade knew that because he called her father Rooinek and her father called him Doppies.
Doppies led Jade onto their range, which was just a long dirt track sloping down into a valley and up the other side.
He stopped to point out a large bird with rusty-red feathers on its head. It was perched in a wizened-looking tree.
“Do you know what bird that is?”
Jade shook her head. “No, sir.” She wasn’t going to call him Doppies.
“Red-necked falcon. We don’t often get them here. They like those camelthorn trees.”
Jade took another look. It looked just like any other bird to her.
“Come on,” her father said. “Enough about birds. Let’s get on to what we came here for.”
“She can have a go with this.” Doppies passed what he called an elephant rifle to her father. Jade looked at it in amazement. It was almost as tall as she was.
“It’s not an elephant rifle,” Jade’s father corrected him, shaking his head at the folly of a man who could think that species of birds were more important than types of gun. “That’s what he tells the ignorant tourists,” he said to her. “This is a Musgrave 30-06. Locally-made barrel. If you’re shooting lighter bullets at targets far away, you’ll kill a small buck with it easily. Close up, with heavier ammo, you’ll get a kudu or a gemsbok. I know people who’ve taken lions down with them at close-range. Now then, this one’s a bolt-action. What does that mean?”
“It means you operate it by hand.” Jade had swotted up on her gun knowledge in preparation for her big day.
“And is it more accurate than a pump-action shotgun?”
“Yes, it is. And it’s more powerful.”
“Good girl.”
Doppies watched this exchange. He muttered some-thing that Jade thought sounded like “Jesus Christ help the child.”
Her father showed her how to lie prone on the dusty track. Doppies put his jacket over a ridge on the ground and rested the barrel of the gun on it. Jade hefted the gun in her hands, her left elbow wedged into the ground for support. She pressed the butt of the gun against her cheek.
“If you do that, you’ll break your jaw,” the ranger told her, pushing the gun away from her face. “These guns have a massive recoil. Hold it against your shoulder, or you’ll be sorry.”
Jade didn’t want to break her jaw. Her nervousness and the weight of the gun made her arms start to shake. She looked through the telescopic sight. Far, far away through the milky glass, she could see a Coke can propped upright on the ground. It was on the track on the other side of the valley. It was so distant that if she took her eye away from the sight, she couldn’t see it at all.
The can seemed to be circling in a large orbit that took it way outside the crosshairs of the sight. She knew the can wasn’t moving. Her trembling arms were causing the rifle to circle. If it moved like that, there was no way she would hit her target.
Jade took a deep breath and steadied the rifle. She stared at the target and tried to calm her nerves. The circles became smaller. She pulled back on the trigger, feeling resistance. Now she thought it was ready to fire.
She focused on the target. It still moved in tiny circles. There was nothing she could do about that. She didn’t have the strength or experience to hold the big gun still. But she could judge the circles. The crosshairs moved in a pattern. Up, around and down. Up, around and down. As they came down, they passed straight over the blurry outline of the can.
As the hairs came down, Jade squeezed the trigger.
The gun exploded in her arms and bucked against her shoulder, thrusting her backwards along the dirt. She clutched the barrel and closed her eyes against the dust.
Doppies took the rifle from her. “Well done, my girl. Well done. Let’s go and see if that Coke can took any damage.”
She could sense he was humoring her. But she didn’t care. The proud smile her father gave her was enough. She had tried. She’d dared to do it.
They walked down the path, all the way to the bottom of the valley. Then they walked up the other side.
The ranger started looking anxious. He couldn’t see the can in the dirt ahead of them. He shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. He shook his head. He knew where he had put the can. There was no point in walking any further. Then he looked over at the grass on the left-hand side of the track. Jade looked, too. A glint of red and white caught her eye.
Doppies picked up the can. The impact of the bullet had flung it off the track and into the grass. There was a hole directly through its middle. The bullet had pierced it twice. Once on the way in and once on the way out. He held it up and shook his head in disbelief. The sun flashed at Jade through the doub
le hole her bullet had made.
“Keep shooting like that, you’re going to be a dangerous woman when you’re older,” Doppies said, stunned.
And Jade kept shooting like that. Straight enough to beat her father’s score when they practiced together. Accurate enough to win the provincial combat pistol-shooting cham-pionships three years in a row.
Since then, she’d never gone more than a few weeks without practicing, because that was another rule of her father’s.
The practice range she chose while she waited for Dean Grobbelaar to return her call was owned by one of Robbie’s contacts. He was a no-questions type of guy, which suited Jade fine. She didn’t want a friendly type who would engage her in conversation, request a copy of her identification, ask where she was from and where she’d got that handsome gun. Rob-bie’s friend was the exact opposite. He actually looked pissed off to see a customer, as disoriented as if he had just surfaced from a heavy freebasing session. He had dark shadows under his eyes, and wore a string vest that defied the cold and showed off his substantial belly.
She reloaded with lead-tipped ammo and spent an hour firing off a hundred rounds, ducking and diving, sprinting and crouching. She clicked fresh magazines into place on the run, double-tapping the metal targets and hearing them clang onto the uneven ground as they fell. On every target, she pictured Viljoen’s face. When she spun and fired, she imagined him behind her. Would she be fast enough when the time came?
By the end, she was sweating under her long-sleeved shirt. Her hands and arms were sore from the gun’s recoil and her ears rang despite the protective earmuffs.
She got back to her car to find that Grobbelaar still hadn’t returned her call. Just what kind of an investigator was he?
She thumbed the last of the lead-tipped bullets out of her gun’s chamber and inserted a magazine of copper-jackets. Real targets needed penetration and stopping power, not loud noise and surface splatter. Especially real targets that stopped their car outside her house in the middle of the night, engine idling and lights off.
Random Violence Page 4