“Get back!” I said. “Stand against the wall!”
Under different circumstances, the childlike O of surprise on Spider’s face might have been comical. His hands flew above his head, and he fell back against the wall, blinking.
When the startled moment passed, Spider grinned at me as if we’d just shared an adventure. His teeth grew large. “Shit, man, you got me, eh? It’s just you! The one from Skylight? I thought you were the FBI! Oh, you scared me . . . I saw your face on television. You’re the actor who works for Sofia Maitlin! I should have known you.”
His easy banter was a ruse to distract me. Even knowing that, I almost forgot.
“Shut up, Mhambi,” I said. “Step away from the stairs.”
The grin was gone. “Or what, cowboy? Is that what they call you in movies? The white cowboy?”
“Live or die. Your choice.”
For five excruciating seconds, Spider didn’t move. He was already testing me. Spider gave a bitter laugh. “After you shoot me, then what? Who’s outside that door, actor? You shoot me, they all come running. Tell me: Then what?”
“Then you’ll still be dead.”
“I should be dead ten times over,” Spider said, shrugging. “What’s death to me? What about you, actor?”
“If you die, too?” I said, also shrugging. “Why not?”
Spider tsk’d. “Is that what you want for Nandi? Bullets and blood?”
“Better than starvation.”
“Nobody’s starving this girl!” Spider said. “Eish! She’s very fat, this one. Put down your gun. My conscience won’t let me kill this little girl. I was coming to take her to her father—her real father. He’s going to take her where she belongs.”
He didn’t try to hide the lie in his voice, but I still wanted to believe him. Nandi wailed, clinging hard to my neck. She might not have known everything, but she knew enough.
“Conscience?” I said. “Try again.”
“You’re a madman to come here,” Spider said, his voice tinged with admiration. “I told my boss we should have killed you before. Look how far you’ve come, actor!”
“You think I got here by myself?” I said. “The feds are arresting everyone at your meeting right now, including Yi and your boss. It’s over—get down on the floor.”
A glimmer of hesitation in Spider’s eyes. My gun felt heavier with its growing power.
I had logic on my side, after all: What kind of fool would try a rescue without backup?
But when Spider spread his arms akimbo, my heart plummeted.
“That’s what you want?” I said. “You’d rather die than let me take her?”
Instead of answering, Spider stepped toward me, his face placid. Taking his time, Spider lifted his tunic to reveal his knife sheath. With a flourish of his fingers, he reached for his knife. He slowly fanned it in the air.
My gun arm was so rigid that if I breathed too hard, I would pull the trigger.
“Don’t make me!” I said. “I will shoot you before I let you hurt her.”
I heard voices upstairs, and I realized that Spider had left the door ajar. The two men I’d heard near the kitchen were only a few yards from the basement door. Right above us.
“Where’s your FBI raid?” Spider said, voice low. He was enjoying his game.
Suddenly, my Beretta felt light enough to float away, powerless. All of the moisture in my body turned to dust. No single gun would keep me alive in a basement with only one exit. The basement was my prison.
Where was Marsha? Was there a chance that, even now, she was making her way down the stairs? Could she have already called for backup? How much time did I need to buy us?
“You have a problem with your rescue, actor,” Spider said. “A big problem.”
I took a step backward, maneuvering the picnic bench between us. I’d already killed Spider in my mind, imagining how Marsha and I could prop the picnic table up to stave off the bullets from upstairs as long as we could. Bullets and blood were surely coming. My eardrums sang from Nandi’s cries; I was sure they must be bleeding inside.
“You pull the trigger,” Spider sneered, “we both die. My way, one of us has a chance.”
“Your way?”
“No gun,” he said. “No bullets. Just you and me.”
“Mhambi!” a voice boomed from upstairs. “Still so much noise! My ears!”
I dodged back to the corner, out of sight. My gun never left Spider, and I’d pinned him. He couldn’t make it past me to the stairs without getting shot. We were stuck with each other.
Spider’s unblinking eyes stared through me.
“Then close the door!” he called upstairs. “Or come do it yourself!”
The men complained, but the door slammed shut.
“Put the gun down,” Spider said.
“Not so fast.” Warily, I made a wide circle away from Spider, toward Nandi’s overturned playpen. Spider twitched like a batter ready to steal second, but my steady gun barrel and unblinking eye held him in place.
“That’s the agreement—no gun,” Spider said. “You will do this thing.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you,” Spider said. “I knew you in the dressing room. At the nightclub. You have trained for many years. But you have never had the moment I offer you.”
“And what the hell is that?”
“You will not do this to save your life. Or the child’s life. You will not do it for Sofia Maitlin, or the FBI. You will use all of those things as an excuse.”
“Why?” I was only half listening, trying to think of a better way to save Nandi.
“Because you are tired of playacting,” he said. “Of pretending to be men you are not. You want to know who you really are.”
“And you know who I am?”
“No,” he said, voice seductive. “I know who I am. All your life you have sought the answer to a question you could never speak. You have trained, and sweated. I know. I did as well. The difference between us? I did not seek this out, trying to become something I feared I was not. My father gave me this, Ummese Izulu, the Zulu knife. As his father gave it to him. What did you do? What is the American way? Did you drift from school to school, digging shallow holes while the gold you sought was just a few strokes deeper beneath your feet?”
Shit. Had he been talking to Cliff? “You’re talking nonsense.”
“After we dance, you and I . . . if you survive, you will understand my words.”
He was wrong. He didn’t know me. I knew who I was, and his head games couldn’t change that. This wasn’t about whatever warped significance a monster like this might find in the death games he had played from the cradle. This was about a child’s life, and there, he had offered a possibility of survival.
I could do it. I could take this fool.
I ignored the stench from the playpen and righted it. Nandi could get out by herself, but maybe I could keep her clear for a while.
“Just wait,” I said. “Don’t you fucking move.”
“This is how you talk in front of a little one?” Spider said, and tsk’d again.
Nandi struggled as I lowered her into the playpen with one arm. I had to drop her without being careful, pushing her away when she tried to hoist herself back to my arm. Nandi’s cries turned to shrieks. She hated the playpen.
With one of my arms finally freed, I backed to the wall and grabbed the end of a tarp, yanking on it. Paint cans fell over loudly, one of them spilling white paint across the carpet.
“Hey!” Spider said. “Clumsy man. Don’t shoot me if it’s your fault that they come.”
I dragged the tarp to Nandi’s playpen and tossed it over her. Nandi’s cries became more frantic once she was denied light, but the tarp was heavy enough to mute the sound and hold her in place longer. It gave me more than I’d expected.
I just hadn’t wanted Nandi to see what was about to happen in the basement.
Spider’s eyes were like a cat’s as he watched my gun. “Gi
ve me your decision!” Spider said, irritated. “You prolong her suffering.”
“Like you give a damn.”
“Even a dog should not suffer,” Spider said. “I never make innocents suffer.”
“She’s already suffering!” I said, scanning the shelves and the floor for something I could fight with. But I always had one eye on Spider. For all I knew, he could throw that knife as well as stab and slash. A single blink, and that deadly blade could fly.
“There!” Spider said, pointing.
I didn’t look. “What?”
“A knife for you.”
Instead of turning my head as Spider had probably hoped, I stepped toward the wall where he was pointing. I never lost sight of Spider’s body mass in my target sight. For half a second, I peeked where he had pointed: A knife in a leather sheath hung on the wall beside a tall box of Borax. A hunting knife, by the look of it. It was about nine inches overall, with a five-inch blade and black Micarta handles and a nickel-silver finger guard.
All right. I could work with this.
Nandi was rocking and shrieking in her dark playpen, but it was harder to hear her.
Where was Marsha? Is there another way out of this?
My heart was making up new rhythms. If I’ve ever been more afraid—facing off a killer with Nandi at arm’s length—I don’t know when it was.
But Spider was right about one thing: I was a fighter. I was afraid, like all fighters, but fighters have more than their fear when they face an opponent. I had training and hard-won experience, and no part of my mind could accept failing Nandi. My fear was my power.
Yeah, you scare me. But I’ve trained too long and too hard to just get chopped up. It ain’t gonna happen.
With one eye on Spider, I shook the knife free from its sheath. I had the blade in one hand, the Beretta in the other. I wanted to save Nandi so badly, I struggled to control the wall of breath that held back a nauseating ocean of adrenaline. Concentrate on exhalations only.
Don’t gulp air.
“Relax,” Spider said. “Put down your gun. No matter what happens between us, I will take her to her father. The girl will live.”
He’s gonna call for backup as soon as you put the gun down, my Evil Voice said. You should have shot him already. No one will hear.
But I couldn’t believe my lies, or Spider’s. Anyone on the ground floor would hear a gunshot. And just as Spider recognized me, the story from Xolo Nyathi in Little Ethiopia had shown me who Spider was. Ceremony mattered to him. Killing Nandi was just his job.
Nandi’s shrieks spurred me on. Even muted, the noise would bring the others back soon, with or without Spider.
I ejected the magazine and laid it on the shelf, out of easy reach. I rested the gun beside it. Spider and I stood a dozen yards from each other, both armed with knives. Spider didn’t move at first, staring at me with what might be awe, or just pity.
“A man crazy enough to come here . . . ,” Spider began, “. . . is worthy of a dance. But I warn you: This will not be quick.”
A shudder went through me, the memory of pain, starting at the small of my back.
Spider gave me a small bow, his eyes never leaving my face.
Our race to death began.
TWENTY-SEVEN
TIME, NOISE, AND thoughts vanished.
The basement. Nandi. Everything, forgotten.
Spider was my world, tunnel vision collapsing everything to a single bright point. He made a loud clicking sound, advancing, his arms swirling like a Bollywood dancer, two arms waving like snakes—one harmless, one deadly.
I watched the center of Spider’s chest, soft focus, watching his hands with my peripheral vision. He came straight in and I flinched back, startled.
It had been a feint. Spider grinned, as if in that moment he had learned everything he needed to know. But the grin was only for an instant. His bearing had changed since his bow. He planned to kill me with meticulous elegance. And glee.
Spider stalked me, left, then right. I tried a low cross kick at his ankle, Filipino style, and grazed him. He slid away like Astaire, recovered, and drew me in with a pretense of imbalance. I slashed at his left wrist, aiming at the radial nerve and brachial artery. But it was another feint, and his hand wasn’t there anymore. I never saw how he did that, but suddenly there was pain in my left forearm.
I retreated in a flurry of low kicks, anything to keep him from coming straight in as I wrapped my mind around the pain. How had he stabbed me? He had known where a visual blind spot would be when he pulled my attention right.
Fuck! This wasn’t a self-defense art. This was a killing technique, for hunters of men. Wake up fast, or you are dead.
Spider twisted behind me, and I felt another jab as he stabbed me in the ass—only two inches of fierce pain, but a world of humiliation. He could have killed or crippled, but had instead chosen to shame me. The hunting knife flew out of my hand, skittering six inches away.
Spider sighed, as if my dropped knife annoyed him. The world stood still. I swear he allowed me the two seconds I needed to grab the knife as he closed in.
He grinned at me. “You are not as entertaining as I had hoped,” he said.
My foot struck the backpack, and I kicked it up into his face. He had moved sideways left, but for a moment his lethal right wrist slowed, and I grabbed it with my left. I should have twisted then, but the damaged forearm failed me, and he twisted free—but not before I shot the fastest kick to the groin I could manage. He twisted his thigh into it, blocking, and almost stabbed the calf before I could retract it.
Damn, he’s fast!
I had to kill him. I’d always known it, but now it sank in: I had to kill him, and soon. He could have killed me twice already. The next time he brushed against me, I would die.
My left arm and stabbed gluteus throbbed, but I forgot my injuries when Spider’s snake dance advanced again. Spider was angry now, and that knife came so fast that my counters to his ankles barely disrupted his rhythm enough for me to stay away.
Spider stabbed at me six times from six directions in less than two seconds. I needed every bit of evasive footwork I had ever practiced to stay at a distance. I knew where his kill zone was: I just couldn’t get close enough for mine.
When Spider’s blade sank into the meat of my right calf, I thought my leg had been cut off. Only fear of alerting Spider’s friends stanched the scream in my throat. A red cloud of dizziness tried to cover my eyes, but I blinked it away. I stumbled over my backpack, and went down. The knife spilled from my hand. Again.
Spider’s eyes glittered. He was having the time of his life. He stared down at me, savoring the moment.
I was about to die.
Nandi’s crying had stopped, as if she knew.
A tiny voice from beneath the tarp: “Mis-ter Ten?”
My world turned to water from fear, shame, and pain. This is it.
“She will not suffer as you will,” Spider said, weaving around me, choosing his killing position. “You made this happen. You fools shot the boss’s nephew. Eish! Why didn’t you keep the agreement? You have forced me to do this terrible thing! We have children, too. You have felt nothing yet. For forcing me to kill a child, I have more pain for you. I will give you a thousand cuts, and piss in every one of them. When you are an eyeless, lipless thing, I will make you crawl across the floor and kiss my ass to end your agony. Or . . . you could beg me now. Up, onto your knees and beg me to make it quick. Go on, actor. Play the coward. The role of hero doesn’t really fit, does it?”
He was monologuing, ready to lay me and his sins to rest. I groaned as I rose to my feet, right leg buckling a bit. I bent down one vertebra at a time to reach—
But I didn’t go for the blade. Instead, I collapsed back down to the floor with all the untelegraphed speed gravity could offer, rolled, and lashed out with both feet into Spider’s crotch. Or would have, if Spider hadn’t stumbled back, flowing with me like my own shadow. I thumped his right thigh, and his
blade nearly cut my ear off, slashing my right cheek instead.
Shit!
My calf was on fire. I shut down the pain and closed in for a head butt so hard that it echoed. I was in so much pain already, I barely felt it. I somehow wrapped firm fingers around Spider’s knife hand, avoiding the blade.
Finally—my kind of fight.
We went to the ground, a ball of knees and elbows. We rolled three times. I elbowed him in the nose once, trying to drive it through the back of his head. His eyes crossed. Damage. Good. I slammed my back into one of the metal shelves, pulling Spider with me. We were twisted up, my right arm behind the leg of the shelf, and he didn’t give me room to pull it around. I was trapped on the floor between Spider and the shelf.
Spider was no longer stunned. He began stabbing at my left wrist, scraping and cutting. I yelled out when he hit bone, but he missed the arteries. In a moment he would orient, and work himself free. Then I’d be dead.
The back of my head thumped against my backpack. My right arm cast around, looking for the items that had spilled out. A cylinder? The torch? I needed to grab something.
My fingers found the cold metal canister, nearly as big as a can of hair spray.
Liquid nitrogen.
I flipped up the nozzle on the can, snaking the arm that held it around the leg of the shelf.
Almost blindly, I pointed and pressed.
Spider saw the can coming a half second before the blast hit him from ten inches away. His eyes opened wide, and he tried to turn his head. But even Spider wasn’t that fast.
The liquid nitrogen hit the left side of his face in a blast, freezing his skin faster than it could send pain signals. His left eye sealed shut. For a precious second he was shocked, body rigid. Then he convulsed, as if he’d been struck by lightning, throwing me off.
But he still held his knife.
I unhooked my arm from the shelf and rolled clear. I seemed to be floating above the room, watching both of us. Outside myself. Time was frozen.
I had never met the man facing off with Spider, his bloodied face as impassive as a block of ice. That man frightened me, but I was glad he was on my side.
Spider’s right eye blinked hard, shedding tears from stray flecks of frozen hell. His left eye wasn’t working, and I saw something other than pain on Spider’s face: fear. No other opponent Spider faced might have lived long enough to see that expression.
From Cape Town with Love Page 33