The Fallen

by Jassy Mackenzie

  The main building was actually part of an old railway station that looked as if it had been disused for years. Tall shoots of straggly, yellowish grass had pushed up through the bricks alongside the graffiti-covered outside walls. One train, with its engine, was permanently halted in a siding outside the building. The train itself looked ancient, although the tracks it was stopped on looked oddly shiny and free from weeds, and the railway cars smelled strongly of old, dirty engine oil.

  The harsh stink of it caught in her throat, and she found herself coughing as she hurried past. And then she stopped as, from somewhere inside the building, she heard another cough.

  Unlike hers, this one was deep, heavy, rattling. An old man’s cough—or a sick one’s. It was soon joined by another.

  The old station was obviously a refuge for homeless people or squatters.

  More disturbingly, though, the path didn’t lead where she’d thought it would. Instead of going past the building and up towards the main road, it ran along the side of the station, then down to the tracks and into the main entrance, where the railway tracks themselves led.

  Following the path anyway, Jade discovered that the station was locked. A pair of enormous doors prevented all access to the building itself.

  Above her, the clouds were starting to thicken. It wasn’t exactly raining, but the air felt damp, as if rain was just a click of the fingers away.

  She retraced her steps back to the road and set off at a run to go the long way round. By the time she arrived at the little shopping centre, David was already parked outside, tapping his fingers on the dashboard. His head was turned away from her, watching the shops, and when she yanked open the passenger door he jumped so hard he smacked his head against the driver’s window. He must have been deep in thought.

  Lunch, Patel-style, was laid out on the car’s dashboard. Coke, bottled water, a brown paper bag of biltong and a large packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

  ‘Where were you?’ he asked. ‘I was about to start driving round the area looking for you.’

  ‘I went for a walk,’ Jade said.

  David grabbed a handful of the biltong and crammed it into his mouth before starting the car.

  ‘Go on, take some,’ he said with difficulty around his large mouthful, handing her the bag. ‘It’s good stuff.’

  Jade tried a piece. She didn’t agree with David’s assessment. It was tough and tasteless; quite possibly the worst biltong she’d ever had in her life. But David often forgot to eat when he was stressed or upset and, as her father had always used to say, hunger was the best sauce.

  David joined the main road and sped up, his attention divided equally between the road in front of him and the brown paper bag on his left. Jade hastily fastened her seatbelt. David, of course, wasn’t wearing his.

  ‘Do me a favour and please don’t speed,’ she said, pressing herself back into her seat.

  David gave her a pained look as he reached for another fistful of the dried meat.

  ‘Jadey, I never speed.’

  ‘I don’t want to get a bunch of fines.’

  ‘But it’s a rented car.’

  ‘Rent a Runner keeps records of all their regular clients. Speeding fines get passed on to them as part of their monthly bill. They’re a small operation and they can’t afford to subsidise bad drivers. At least, that’s what they told me a while back, when I queried the extra thousand rands added to my invoice.’

  ‘And that was me?’

  ‘Yes. They emailed me the tickets and I had a look. Three fines. I checked the dates. Three hundred rands for doing ninety in a sixty zone when you drove us to the Local Grill in Hurlingham. Another three hundred for doing one hundred and forty on the highway when you were driving us back from the weekend in the Pilanesberg. And four hundred rands for doing one hundred and twenty-five in an eighty zone on a day when you borrowed my car. You were on your way to Pretoria, I think,’ Jade said, emphasising the city’s name meaningfully since that was where Naisha lived.

  There was a short, embarrassed silence.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jadey.’

  If he called her by her pet name once more, Jade decided she was going to slap him. ‘Don’t be sorry. Be careful.’

  ‘You should have said something before now.’

  ‘Things were different before now.’

  David gave another deep sigh.

  ‘I guess so,’ he said.

  Glancing down at the speedometer, David eased off the accelerator.

  They didn’t speak again. Wrapped in her own suddenly gloomy thoughts, Jade stared blankly out of the window at the lush foliage lining the quiet main road.

  After a while, hoping to distract herself from her relationship difficulties, she turned her mind to Pillay’s missing persons portfolio.

  One man had been reported missing and his truck had been found at a crime scene, having been driven by somebody else. But what had the detective told her so proudly when she’d asked him during their interview? He’d said that there were a number of missing persons in his files. Quite a few, from the sound of things. He’d been kept busy.

  That didn’t make sense. In a small town like Richards Bay, why would the number of missing people be so high? And if one missing person had been loosely connected to a crime through his vehicle, what about the others?

  She was about to share these thoughts with David, when he braked hard and swore.

  ‘Oh, crap. I don’t bloody believe it.’

  Jade’s seatbelt tightened hard across her chest. Ahead, she saw a tall police officer standing authoritatively in the road and waving their car over. His policeman’s cap was perched on the top of his head, as if it were a size too small.

  ‘This is KwaZulu-Natal,’ she reminded him. ‘Zero tolerance for speeding.’

  ‘But I wasn’t exceeding the damn limit. We just had that conversation, remember?’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Tell the cop. Perhaps he’ll let you look at the camera and you can see how fast you were going.’

  ‘I was not speeding,’ David muttered, changing down a gear. ‘The limit’s eighty here, isn’t it? The one time I’m actually keeping my speed down, I get pulled over.’

  ‘Maybe he just wants to see your licence.’ Jade said, even though she thought it unlikely. This didn’t look like a routine roadblock. Roadblocks had traffic cones and backup vehicles and groups of policemen on duty.

  This was a typical speed trap. Just one police car on duty, half hidden from view.

  David indicated left and carefully pulled onto the verge. Every bit the upstanding citizen, although it was surely a case of too little too late. Checking the wing mirror, Jade noticed a car some distance behind them. A black truck, which seemed to be driving very slowly. What irony it would be if this was the truck Pillay was looking for and the Metro policeman allowed the man they were hunting to go free, because he was busy writing out a speeding ticket.

  David stopped the car and turned off the engine. The police car was parked with its bonnet deep in the bushes, a big white BMW that looked more than capable of giving chase to even the speediest offender.

  ‘I’d get out and speak to him face to face, if I were you,’ Jade advised.

  David nodded. ‘Good idea. I’ll show him my ID and explain I’m busy with an important investigation. Hopefully that’ll get any fine waived.’

  Shifting onto his right buttock, he dug in his left back pocket for his wallet.

  Jade watched the Metro policeman stroll over towards their car. Big, dark wraparound glasses covered his eyes. His Metro Police uniform was ill-fitting; the collared shirt was too tight across his shoulders and the trousers too short. They showed off his beige socks and his shiny black shoes.

  And something else was unusual. What was that around his …?

  Alarm bells started to ring in Jade’s head.

  She glanced again at the BMW. It was difficult to see from this angle, but the car didn’t appear to have any Metro Police signage on its side
s. It definitely didn’t have any on its back and it didn’t have a rear number plate, either.

  The alarm bells were ringing louder and faster now. She should have realised something was wrong earlier. Would have, if she hadn’t been so preoccupied and out of sorts.

  David opened the car door, but, as he was about to swing his legs out, she grabbed his arm.

  ‘David, wait. Don’t get out. I think …’

  She was going to say—I think this might be a hijack attempt, but she didn’t have time. As David hesitated, she heard the roar of a powerful engine. She looked round to find the solid bull-bar and grinning steel grille of the black truck rapidly filling her view. It was speeding straight towards their vehicle, but at the last minute it braked hard and swerved to the right. The truck passed so close that its thick bull-bar caught the edge of the driver’s door and ripped it right off its hinges. Jade’s little car slewed to the left, rocking violently. Tyres screamed as the driver forced his truck into a tight handbrake turn and stopped just in front of their car. The driver’s window was wide open and through it, Jade could see a deeply tanned man aiming a gun.

  A neat, effective trap, and they’d driven unsuspectingly into it.

  ‘Down!’ Jade screamed. She tried to duck down, away from the pistol’s steel muzzle, but her seatbelt had jammed, holding her in a mercilessly upright position. For a moment, all she could think was that this was the way her father had died, trapped by his seatbelt and unable to escape his fate.

  And then she realised that David wasn’t ducking down either, and it wasn’t because he had a belt holding him back. In fact, he was leaning over towards her side.

  Leaning in front of her, offering a human shield.

  ‘Get down!’ Jade shouted again. When the clasp magically released its hold and the belt slid up and out of the way, she dived down at exactly the same time the gun went off.

  The sound of the shot was gigantic. It exploded in her ears; the force of it splitting the air, but it was followed by a blood-chilling noise—David’s shout of pain.

  Oh Christ, he’d been hit.

  In her doubled-over position, it was hard to wrestle the Glock out of her deep pocket, but she managed to wrench it free as another shot went off.

  It took a huge effort to suppress her panic, to sit up in one smooth, easy movement and aim her weapon unflinchingly at the place she’d last seen her attacker. There he was—stopped just a few metres away, leaning out through the window of the truck and frowning with concentration as he moved the muzzle of his gun towards her. In her peripheral vision, she could see blood. Blood on the soft fabric of his short-sleeved checked shirt, seeping through his tightly clenched fingers.

  Don’t think about it, don’t look at it. Focus.

  Jade squeezed the trigger.

  With a short cry, the deeply tanned gunman dropped his weapon. She fired again immediately, but his reactions were cat-quick. He ducked out of harm’s way and her bullet sped through empty air. The truck’s engine roared and, with a belch of exhaust smoke, the injured man sped away down the road.

  The other man—the fake cop—where was he?

  Gone. The white BMW was no longer half hidden in the bushes. Only two shallow tyre tracks remained.

  Jade put her gun down and turned her attention to David.

  He was slumped in his seat, eyes half closed and a river of blood welling from between his fingers. His breathing was fast, but shallow.

  ‘They’ve gone. We’re safe for now. Move your hands so I can see what’s going on,’ she told him, but he wouldn’t and she had to prise his slippery fingers away.

  ‘Jesus, Jade,’ he whispered. ‘My chest. I’m not …’

  He tried to press his hand back onto the wound, but his arm just slid back into his lap.

  ‘Shhhh. Don’t talk,’ she implored him. ‘Try to keep still.’

  When David tried to say something else, he coughed, and a splatter of bright blood landed on Jade’s sleeve.

  Oh shit, the bullet had pierced his lung. She needed to plug the wound with something, and fast. But what was there to be had, in this poxy hired car? All she could see was the biltong packet, and that wouldn’t do.

  After a frantic search, she found an old chamois leather under the back seat. She folded it lengthways, then widthways, and pressed the wadded fabric hard against David’s chest. Then she gently tipped him forward. She didn’t want to look, but she knew she had to. When she saw the fist-sized exit wound in his back, she couldn’t stop herself from gasping in dismay.

  The shooter had used a hollow-point bullet.

  The back of the seat was soaked with blood, and she could see the gash in the fabric where the slug had pierced straight through.

  She didn’t want to think about the damage that had been done to David’s lung as the bullet had flattened and mushroomed and tumbled its way through his body, ripping and tearing an ever-widening path until it shattered his shoulder blade on its way out.

  A sucking chest wound. And there was little else she could use as a plug. Except the clothes on her own back.

  Jade pulled off the T-shirt she was wearing. With difficulty, working one-handedly, she balled it up and then, with her right hand, packed it into the exit wound.

  ‘Is it … bad?’ David’s whisper was punctuated by shallow, gurgling breaths.

  ‘A good vet should be able to save it,’ Jade said, using a phrase that David occasionally used when telling a waiter how rare she liked her steak. He gave a weak smile, acknowledging the joke.

  ‘You should have ducked. Got away from him,’ she said.

  ‘Couldn’t … or he … would have … shot you.’

  Suddenly, Jade felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Tell Kevin …’ David mouthed the words. ‘Tell Kevin I …’

  ‘You can tell him yourself,’ Jade snapped, but David’s words had left her cold with fear. She lowered him gently back onto the seat again, keeping firm pressure on both the entrance and the exit wounds. Her muscles were beginning to ache and she was so hot she felt like she was in a sauna. Her face was dripping with sweat, and the warmth of the air flowing in through the gap where the driver’s door had been wasn’t helping. In contrast, David’s skin was alarmingly clammy and cool.

  Her major worry was that in order to phone for an ambulance she’d have to take her hand off the chamois plugging the entry wound. She’d have to press her knee into the front of his chest while she did this, because maintaining pressure on his chest wall was all that was preventing David from suffocating as his lung collapsed, or from bleeding to death.

  Jade shifted herself round, ready to make the switch.

  And then, as hard and shocking as a bull-bar crashing into a car door, she realised the truth. Her phone’s battery was dead and David’s was charging back at the chalet. She had no way of calling the ambulance.

  This was checkmate. She couldn’t leave David; couldn’t take her hands away from his wounds for even a moment. All she could do was wait to see which arrived first—help, or death.

  27

  ‘Take your hand off the wound and let me see,’ Bradley said.

  Kobus had his left hand clamped around his right forearm and his injured hand in his lap. His pants were rusty-dark with blood.

  ‘I was a fool,’ he hissed. ‘Should have put the girl down first. But how was I to know she was a goddamn shooter? I thought the man was more dangerous.’

  ‘You did right to take out the man first.’

  They’d both driven straight to Bradley’s flat—it was the nearest safe place—and were now parked in the building’s dank underground garage. The smell of the urine-stained concrete wasn’t as bad as the strong, metallic stink of Kobus’s blood. Leaning into the passenger side of the black truck, Bradley tried hard to breathe through his mouth and wondered how long he could keep himself from throwing up. He had never been good with blood.

  He reached up and turned on the car light. As gently as he could, he prise
d Kobus’s hand off the bullet wound. Now he had blood on his own fingers, too. The stuff was everywhere.

  ‘Got him, square in the chest.’ Kobus’s eyes squeezed shut. ‘Good goddamn shooting for someone who hasn’t handled a gun in twenty years.’

  Bradley didn’t know if he was telling the truth about handling the gun, but if so he suspected that the shot had been more blind luck than anything else. Squinting in the yellowish light, he examined the injury.

  From what he could deduce, the bullet had entered the outside of his arm just above the wrist and ploughed its way through his flesh, before lodging at a point on the inside a couple of inches further up where Bradley could actually see its shape through the bruised and reddened skin.

  Kobus had managed to drive the black truck this far, one-handed, but Bradley suspected he’d been on an adrenaline high. Now, the man was bent over in agony.

  Bradley couldn’t help thinking that if the bullet had hit Kobus in the head instead of the wrist, it would have saved him from having to do an unpleasant job later on.

  A job that he should already have done.

  Why was he delaying it? Any minute the heavy phone around his neck could start to ring, and Zulu or Chetty would be demanding to know if he had carried out their most recent orders.

  By deliberately knifing the wrong girl at the resort, Kobus had let him down in the worst possible way. And yet, back inside, he had been the most loyal of cellmates. He had saved Bradley from serious injury a number of times. From rape as well. When the weather-beaten Afrikaans man had taken him under his wing, protecting him from the violent lifers in the maximum-security wing, Bradley had known that this debt could never be fully repaid.

  Tonight, he told himself. I’ll do it tonight. For now, I must wait. I still need him.

  ‘We need to get you to a hospital,’ he said. ‘The bullet must have hit bone. It could have splintered inside you.’

  ‘Can’t.’ Kobus stared down at the still-bleeding wound. ‘The doctors will call the cops. Besides, nothing’s broken. Look, I can move my fingers.’ With an effort, biting his lip so hard Bradley thought his teeth would rip right through it, Kobus slowly closed and opened his hand.