by Tim Willocks
If Turner was killed, which Mokoena had been ready to accept, albeit with regret, that puzzle would now be complicated by Dirk’s lust and pride, not to mention whatever supposed virtues he was currently high on. Few impulses were more dangerous to the general good than heroism, particularly when the audience was the woman you loved. Unlike Margot, Mokoena had always sensed Dirk’s essential strength of character. She had mistaken that strength for weakness because it had failed to reflect her own combative and quasi-paranoiac personality. Dirk’s knowledge of the legal system was now sufficient to cause very great complications, should he so choose. And God only knew what Oedipal factors were in play – a province beyond Mokoena’s expertise.
So Turner’s death represented a slacker, thinner, longer tightrope, strung a good deal higher above the ground.
To his knowledge six armed men had died at Turner’s hands in the last twenty-four hours, and he doubted poor Hennie had died alone. The mighty and stone-hearted desert itself had failed to dispatch the intrepid lawman. He wouldn’t let a gang of glorified janitors take him down without a fight. More bodies. More paperwork. Even taller tales to tell.
‘I’m on my way to Jason’s,’ said Mokoena. ‘Reassure Dirk that I support his sentiments and tell him to take you home.’
He listened to her speaking but her voice was now distant, the words made inaudible by the propeller. He collected his car keys and headed for the door, his phone still to his ear. He thought of digging out his gun, but remembered Gaston Boykins. He was going to talk, not shoot. The gun could only increase his chances of getting killed. It was a mystery to him that so many were unable to appreciate this simple fact.
‘We’re on our way to Jason’s now,’ said Imi.
‘Tell Dirk that’s a very bad idea. Even better, tell him you think it’s a very bad idea.’
‘But I don’t,’ said Imi. ‘We’re going to do what’s right. We’re going to stand up to her. That’s why all this has happened, because we were all too scared.’
‘Imi, listen to me. I appreciate his intentions, but believe me, at this point Dirk can only make things worse –’
She hung up. Mokoena blundered through the front door without stopping to set the alarm and clambered into his Cherokee.
43
When Turner returned to the red Range Rover with his jug of eggs and fruit, a fly had entered with him. He wondered if its buzzing could be heard on his memo.
He realised he was glad of its company. The fly was alive and it didn’t want to kill him. As time passed the air con slowed it down until all it could do was scuttle around on Hennie’s face. Now it sat unmoving on his right cheekbone, just above his beard. Turner hoped it wasn’t dead.
He reactivated the recorder to finish the memo to Venter.
‘So I’m sitting in a car with a dead man who died with poetry on his lips.
‘I expect to die, but that doesn’t bother me. I’ll tell you what does.
‘I came here to arrest a drunk driver.
‘Not just because it was the law but because it was right.
‘For no good reason I gave them, nine men tried to murder me.
‘I killed them all.
‘And that was right, too.
‘So why does all this right feel wrong?’
Turner paused to drink the egg concoction in the jug. He’d swallowed nearly a litre and it had worked. He felt half human. He set the jug back in the footwell.
‘Maybe you can tell me, Captain. I remember the expression on your face when you saw Margot’s photo in the magazine. I didn’t know what it meant then, but I know now. It meant you saw your chance from the beginning. You saw it all. That’s why you agreed to send me up here. You knew how hard I would push. You knew I would never let it go. You used me like an enforcer in a cheap protection racket, except this racket wasn’t so cheap. They stuffed your mouth with gold. But you’re going to choke on it.
‘Because this case is still mine.
‘It’s always been mine.
‘And I am going to break your heart with it.
‘Yours et cetera,
Warrant Officer Turner.’
He saved the memo and started the upload to Cloud.
He put the phone in his pocket.
He felt as if his body had melted into the seat. To get out of the car seemed a greater challenge than crossing the desert. More guns. More killing. More right that felt wrong. He looked at the fly. He knew how it felt.
He heard the whine of the Cessna in the distance.
Dirk and Imi. They were still looking for him. Maybe they knew where he was. Jason’s hard-working ancestors had cleared the surrounding fields of stones. Just yellow grass. The plane could land here if they wanted to.
If Margot didn’t get here first. If she was coming.
He remembered her anguish.
She was coming.
Time to move.
He opened the glovebox and found a pair of binoculars. He slung them round his neck. He opened the door and recoiled from the heat. The fly buzzed to life and swooped past his face to freedom.
Turner set the jug in the footwell and heaved his legs out one by one. He pulled himself to his feet and leaned one hand on the roof and pulled it back. The metal was burning. He took the Steyr from the door pocket and stuck it in the back of his pants. He closed the door. He opened the boot and found a carton of shotgun shells. He put a half-litre bottle of water in his thigh pocket. All his movements were slow, his joints unsteady, his muscles threatening to cramp. He opened the rear passenger door and reloaded the Benelli and extended the stock. He propped the shotgun against the door. He raised the binoculars and glassed the length of the road.
Three white vehicles in convoy.
The plane droned directly overhead.
He took the UMP9 sub-machine gun from the rear seat and checked the chamber. He slung it across his back and stuck the spare magazine beside the Steyr. He closed the car door. He had chosen his death ground. He had cover most of the way there. Truck, shearing shed, tractor: to the redoubt of rolled silage. They wouldn’t see him but he would see them.
He glassed the road.
The convoy was a kilometre from the gate.
Turner felt sick. They didn’t need to be here. Most of the men in those cars could have no idea who he was or why they were coming to kill him. All they had to do was turn round. They were free to do so. They had the power. But they wouldn’t. They would do as they were told. Anger stirred in his chest. He had come here to do an honest job. He had played it straight. They had forced him to become a monster.
Turner picked up the shotgun and limped across the yard.
He would show them a monster.
44
Margot bent her head to peer upwards out of the window. The Cessna had circled the farm and she couldn’t see it but the noise of its propeller was getting louder. The convoy had just passed through the gate and was driving slowly towards the farmhouse. Margot was in the second vehicle. Simon sat next to her in the back seat, behind the driver.
‘What does Dirk think he’s doing?’
‘He’s going to land,’ said Simon. ‘My advice is to turn back. Forget this.’
‘We’ve been through that.’
‘This operation is dangerous enough. With non-combatants in the field it becomes even worse.’
‘Nobody asked them to be here,’ said Margot. ‘Move in now and they won’t be able to interfere.’
‘This could take hours,’ said Simon. ‘We can’t just drive up to the door.’
His caution infuriated her. Panic and rage pounded through her heart. He wasn’t even looking at her, he was studying the terrain ahead. He’s doing his job, she told herself; but she could hardly hear herself. She was going to lose. Even Pyrrhic victory was going to be snatched from her hands. She was going to lose it all. Total humiliation.
‘Stop. Let me out of the car,’ she said.
Simon spoke into his phone. ‘All units stop now. If y
ou come under fire, head back to the road at maximum speed.’ He turned on her. ‘Margot, stay here.’
He always called her Mrs Le Roux: his patience was at breaking point.
‘Turner could be anywhere. I have to assess the ground. We need to make a methodical sweep. Let me do what you pay me for.’
He stared at her until she nodded. He took his assault rifle in his left hand and opened the car door and stood up and out smoothly. She heard a hollow thump then a distant double crack.
Simon grunted and dropped from her sight.
Margot stared out of the open door as the double cracks continued and the men in the front seat shouted and the car lurched and swerved forward to clear the car ahead.
The car ahead wasn’t moving.
Sudden deafening bangs stunned her. A constellation of holes appeared in the windscreen and blood splattered the steering wheel and dashboard, the roof. Her face. The 4Runner slowed to a crawl. The driver swayed in his seat. He mumbled in Xhosa and the car lurched forward again in a curve and the open rear door swung shut and she saw the driver’s hands slip from the wheel. His companion, yelling, reached across to grab the wheel and again the car slowed into a creeping semicircle.
All the time the double pops in her ears, the slam of bullets through glass and sheet metal. Distant yells of agony and panic from the other cars, the first car now behind them to their left and still not moving.
She twisted to look through her window and saw the third car, its windscreen opaque with bullet holes and sprayed blood, also trying to turn. Its side window shattered and she saw the driver’s head burst open and suddenly the car lunged straight towards her. She threw herself across the seat as the third car hit her door broad-side with another shocking bang and the window collapsed and showered the seat with glass. The 4Runner rocked violently and tilted, then groaned back down, metal on metal, to sit at a shallow angle.
All three cars were now motionless.
In a few seconds her perception had been swamped with absolute chaos. She found herself gasping for breath. Get out. Get out. But she saw the passenger door open and the guard lunge out, his head down, plunging for the ground, crawling on his hands; watched him skitter across the grass, then fall on his face as a pair of bloody holes erupted from his side. He tried to get up and crawl on but two more slugs thudded into him and he went back down.
She crammed herself down into the footwell and clasped her elbows to her ears and panted in terror. Terror such as she had never known. The short pops continued; spaced, methodical, pitiless. Then they stopped.
The engine of the stranded 4Runner droned quietly. From outside she heard a man crying out in pain. Shouts in a language she had never learned, yet their meaning clear enough. Shouts of fear, of surrender. Shouts for mercy. More gunshots began, louder, closer; 12-gauge shotgun rounds. More shattering glass. The shouts abruptly cut off by the blunt, ugly blasts.
A sudden silence.
She sensed – perhaps saw, she couldn’t tell what she knew any more – a figure loom at the window. She closed her eyes. She tried to think but no thoughts came. The silence seemed unbearably long. Its unknowable meaning invaded and amplified her fears. She sensed the figure move on but dared not look.
She started at three rapid shotgun blasts, almost right above her head. She forced herself not to scream.
A pause, then another blast.
The awful silence returned.
The shotgun boomed again.
Margot lay there and waited to be killed like a sheep. The Mossberg was still propped upright in the angle of the door by her head but her limbs were paralysed, her insides liquid and melting. She could neither fight nor fly. No memories, good or bad, flashed through her mind. No images of her Dirk. Or of Hennie. Her whole life was erased. All she had been. All she had thought herself to be. Her identity. She could only imagine the car door opening, the muzzle of a gun pointing at her head. She was a dumb beast waiting to slaughtered. She had once seen a goat standing motionless, frozen, as a lion padded casually towards it. Now she understood why. It was easy. It was natural. It was wise. Just let it happen and be done. The experience, the pain, the horror, of fear vanished from her awareness, leaving a blissful void as her reward for utter acceptance. She was face-to-face with death, and she felt freed.
She heard the door open. Let it happen.
But nothing happened. She waited. And nothing happened.
She lowered her arms and opened her eyes and looked up.
A man stood watching her, framed by the doorway. He held a Benelli shotgun, muzzle pointed at the ground, in his right hand. She knew it was Turner – who else could it be? – yet for a moment, despite that certainty, she did not recognise him. He was as gaunt as a ghost. His skin hung slack from the bones of his face. His shoulders, his upper body seemed to teeter on his hips, seemed to sag as if a fair breeze would topple him over. But that wasn’t so.
As if from nowhere Simon Dube lunged into view, his shirt gleaming red, no weapons but his hands, fingers clawing for Turner’s throat as if only bare hands could settle the issue between them. Turner warded him off with a backhanded blow to the chest and Simon hurtled back down. Turner pointed the shotgun beyond her field of vision. His face twisted with despair as he fired. Blood spray darkened his pants. He turned back to her.
He reached up and took his shades off. His eyes were dark tunnels drilled into a vein of some unspeakable ore. In her state of naked being she could see everything as it was, without fear, without hatred, uncontaminated by any emotion at all, and what she saw was the immensity of his suffering. The suffering she had inflicted upon him. She felt a strange compassion. Not for him but for the pain he embodied. And yet perhaps that was all he now was. Perhaps that was all she had left him; that and the right to kill her. The blood debt she owed him could only be paid in blood.
But he didn’t collect it.
Instead he held her eyes for longer than she thought she could endure. His gaze the most awful sight she had ever encountered. But she did endure it. She was obliged to. All this horror was hers. No, it was his, too. It was theirs. It connected them as deeply as anything had ever connected her to anyone, except perhaps her son. But that bond was broken. For a moment they shared the immense weight of what they had done. And in that moment she loved him. She loved Turner. The contradiction was more than she believed she could bear. Yet bearing it was the only future she had.
If she wanted one.
If she reached for the Mossberg he’d shoot her and she’d be at peace. She wouldn’t have to mourn Hennie. She wouldn’t have to face Dirk. Or the triumph of his girl, who would probably become her daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t have to face the families of the dead. She wouldn’t have to help Mokoena shovel up the mess. She wouldn’t have to avoid prison. She wouldn’t have to live with total humiliation and defeat.
She could do all that. She could pay those debts and more. All she had to do was open her mouth and admit to them, admit them to him. To tell him the war was over. To surrender.
She opened her mouth but no words came out. She couldn’t speak. Some physical force squeezed her throat shut, she could feel it. That force was herself. Her truest self. Her. The self beneath all the other selves, who had driven her so far and who knew the taste of surrender and defeat, who had choked on it half her life and who had sworn never to swallow it again. She took a deep breath to try again, to try to conquer that self. Then Turner spoke and her choices were snatched away.
‘Go home,’ said Turner.
Turner threw his shotgun aside, put his shades back on and walked away.
Margot took the breath and clambered up onto the seat.
Go home?
She was calm now, calm with an ice-cold rage. Glass fragments clung to her hair and she shook her head to get rid of them. Her shirt was stained with blood; it was the driver’s – she wasn’t hurt. Turner was hurt. He could hardly stand up straight. One on one. Simon had been right. She could take down a wild rock d
ove on the wing, with a throat shot so as not to damage the meat. Jackals on the run by night.
Go home?
He hadn’t meant it unkindly, she knew. It was the best advice she’d had in days. Maybe she just needed a reason to do what she wanted to do, to follow her gut and her heart. But no one spoke to her like that. No one.
45
Turner watched the Cessna taxi across the grass towards the farm buildings.
The battle – they would call it a massacre, but only because he’d survived – had lasted less than two minutes. The convoy had halted sixty metres short of the silage rolls where Turner had taken cover. When Simon had stepped from the car it had been as good as over.
Two-round bursts. Two bursts for each driver. Front car, rear car, middle car. Copper fragments and lead cores tumbling through flesh-filled boxes, the doors and glass offering no more protection from the H&K rounds than a shirt. Within ten seconds he was shooting at three beached whales. He gunned down the escapees as they fled. Not a single round was fired in return. When the magazine was empty, he moved in with the Benelli and mopped up the survivors.
He had offered no personal threat to any one of these would-be assassins. For whatever reason – their pitiful wages, the thrill of the chase, blind obedience – they had travelled here to hunt him down. And he was weaker than any of them. He owed them no more mercy than they would have given him.
Even so.
An eerie quiet now lay across the farm. The firework tang of powder smoke tainted the air. He saw a black Jeep Grand Cherokee turn through the gate and drive slowly up the track. Mokoena leaned out of the window with his right arm raised and his palm open in a gesture of peace.
The Cessna trundled towards the windmill pump and stopped. The doors opened. He saw Dirk and Imi climb out. They stood in postures of shock and stared at the carnage. Imi turned her head and stared at him.
Turner walked towards the red Range Rover.