Ivory (32 page)

They threaded their way through the carnage of the emergency room and Novak was lighting a second cigarette off the first by the time they stepped out into the clear night air. A siren was getting closer and somewhere in the car park an alarm was screeching. ‘How is she?'

Novak shrugged. ‘You've probably seen as many head wounds as I have. You know how they go. Sometimes they kill straightaway, other times the
oke
lives. She took one shot to her neck, a through-and-through that missed her carotid and her windpipe, so that was relatively minor, though she lost a lot of blood. The doc says the other bullet deflected partially off some bone and lodged in what they call the dura matter – it's like a tough outer layer of the bone. He operated and got the bullet and skull fragments out and . . .'

He was like an engine that had run out of petrol. He leaned against the hospital's outer wall and coughed as he tried to drag on his cigarette. He raised a hand to his eyes.

‘She's tough, man,' Alex said.

When he moved his hand, Alex saw his eyes were red-rimmed and glistening. Novak shuddered and he drew a breath of fresh air and straightened himself. ‘
Ja
. I know. Anyway, like you see, she's still in a coma. The doc doesn't know when – or if – she'll come out of it, or what damage the bullet caused. He says there's a lot of brain tissue that's relatively underused and people can recover from hits to those areas. Man, I don't know, but I'm telling you, if I catch whoever did this, Alex, I'm going to peel the skin off his body while he lives.'

‘I think I know who's responsible.'

Novak dropped his cigarette and ground it out. ‘Tell me.'

‘George Penfold.'

‘The
oke
who owns that ship we boarded?' Novak sounded surprised.

Alex nodded.

‘Shit, man. We didn't even get anything and those goons of his nearly kicked our arses.'

‘Penfold doesn't know that. Whatever went missing from that ship, Penfold thinks we took it.'

‘Well if we didn't take it, who did? Was it that fucking woman?'

Alex bridled at Mark's description of Jane, though he'd been thinking similarly uncharitable thoughts during the drive to the hospital. He was still angry at the fallout from Jane's decision not to tell Penfold she
knew where the diamonds were, but if he were her he would probably have done the same thing.

‘You should have let Mitch get the information out of her.'

Alex shook his head. ‘You don't mean that.'

‘OK. But my Lisa is the one who's been hurt, and Trudy's dead. She was part of our family. This Penfold wouldn't have done the hit himself?'

‘The cops are looking for three white men and a black man who were driving a stolen Eskom
bakkie
. It was on the radio tonight. I'm betting it's the same gunslingers we ran up against on the ship.'

Novak nodded. ‘All right. I want them, but I also want the man who pays them – this Penfold
poes
.'

Novak was right, Penfold was a cunt, but Alex couldn't let him charge into the Melrose Arch Hotel with all guns blazing.

‘You really want to hurt Penfold?' Alex asked, unnecessarily.

‘Of course I do.'

‘Then what we do is get our hands on whatever it is he was prepared to kill Lisa for.'

‘The diamonds?'

Alex wasn't so sure that was all Penfold was missing, but he said, ‘Yes. I saw Jane this evening. She doesn't have them, but she's hidden them somewhere on board the
Penfold Son
. It's in dock at Cape Town.'

‘I want to see her.'

‘No. If you try and bully her she'll just go to the cops. She actually kept quiet about us being responsible for the ship hijacking. She's also worried that her boss is up to something criminal.'

‘But how did they know to go to my house, and what were they looking for?'

‘I don't know, but I do know what they found.' Alex relayed the information Jane had given him about the photo, and the fact that Penfold had been able to positively identify all the men in the picture.'

Novak slumped. ‘So what you're saying is, we're screwed.'

‘What I'm saying is that we need to bring George Penfold down – not only as payback for what his thugs did to Lisa and her maid, but to keep ourselves alive.'

‘But not in business. I'm finished with piracy if Lisa gets better. I've already promised God.'

This was a side to the South African Alex hadn't seen before, but Novak's wishes echoed his own. All he wanted was to go straight, but they couldn't run or hide from the threat George Penfold posed to them now. Even if he recovered his missing property he would still be out to eradicate the gang on Ilha dos Sonhos in order to remove the threat they posed to his shipping interests.

Novak snapped his fingers and looked as though he had just remembered something. ‘Hey, did you take some stuff from my wardrobe that you weren't supposed to?'

Alex had hoped Novak wouldn't notice the missing uniforms. When he'd called him in Mozambique he had offered to collect some clothes for him from his house. Novak had agreed, and had told Le Roux, the detective in charge of the investigation, by phone to allow Alex to collect a bag of clothes for him from the house, which was still being treated as a crime scene.

The car alarm that had been honking away out in the car park finally fell silent.

Novak continued: ‘Janine took me back to the house earlier this evening to get some more stuff. I'm staying with her – I can't be in the house without Lisa. I noticed all my old army uniforms were gone. What's going on, Alex?'

With Novak's fatigues and ones he'd stolen from Kim's husband he now had enough uniforms for what he had in mind. ‘I didn't think you'd care, and I didn't want to bother you, what with Lisa in hospital and all . . .'

‘Bullshit. Tell me, man.'

‘Go back inside. Your wife needs you.'

‘It's for a job, isn't it? What are you hitting? Why the army uniforms?'

Alex genuinely didn't want to involve Novak in the plan to steal the ivory from the Kruger National Park. The man belonged here in Johannesburg, at his wife's side.

Novak stood straight and poked a finger at Alex's chest. ‘You're always saying you just need one more job. A big one. Is this it, Alex? Have you got your white whale?'

‘We can handle it – me and the other guys.'

Novak shook his big head vigorously. ‘You can't cut me out, Alex. We haven't saved enough money, Lisa and me. We have the cars to pay off, and I want to help Janine and her husband buy a house. I need that last big job as much as you do. The doctor said . . . well, he said that when Lisa wakes up she might even be paralysed, man. I'll need money to look after her, to make things right for her.'

Alex clapped a hand on the South African's muscled, tattooed forearm. ‘I won't see you left poor, Novak. I'll take care of it.'

Novak shrugged his hand free. ‘Don't patronise me. And I don't want your bloody charity. The fact is that you need me if you've got a job, Alex. You're one man short now that psycho Mitch is off our hands. No one misses him, but you'll be two men down if you don't take me. Also, you saw the way Henri sided with Mitch. The Frenchy knows he was wrong and it was good of you to let him stay with the team, but we can't afford to have that sort of shit going on again – people doing things behind your back. It's not a criticism of you as a leader, Alex, but you need me to help keep them together and focused.'

Alex nodded. He knew Novak was right, about everything. The truth was that Alex
did
want out of the piracy game and Mitch and Henri had picked up on his weakening resolve.

‘When's the job on?' Novak pushed.

‘A week from today,' Alex said.

‘Tell me more.'

And when Alex had finished Novak said, ‘You've finally gone
fokking
crazy. Count me in.'

 

Piet van Zyl got into the driver's seat of the
bakkie
he had just broken into and popped the bonnet. He got out, opened it fully, found the car alarm and cut the wires with his pocket knife. At last the racket was
over but, predictably, he could see a security guard walking towards him beneath the diffused glare of the sodium lights. The African had his right hand on his pistol and carried a large torch in his left. He shone the beam on Piet.

‘It's OK, man,' Van Zyl called, raising his hand to his eyes. ‘It's my vehicle. Bloody alarm went off by mistake.' He repeated his explanation in Afrikaans, in case the guard's English was poor.

‘OK, sir. But I am required to ask for identification or proof of ownership.'

Piet turned around so the guard could see the red embroidered lettering on the back of the blue work shirt he wore. It said:
De Kok and Sons Plumbing
, in the same lettering as that on the side door of the pick-up. The guard smiled and nodded. ‘OK, sir. Goodnight.'

Van Zyl was winging this operation, which he wasn't happy about, but there had been no time to plan in any detail. The Novak woman needed to be silenced – tonight. The news report had said she was still in a coma, and Piet said a silent prayer of thanks for that small mercy. He was beginning to feel this whole operation was jinxed. He had put two bullets into the woman, including a head shot, but still she lived. He'd seen stranger things on the battlefield, but all the same, it shook him. He had thought he might try to steal a lab coat or some scrubs once in the hospital, and masquerade as a doctor or orderly, but the plumber's truck was a perfect alternative. He knew security would eventually come to investigate the blaring car alarm and he was pleased it was the gullible guard who had showed up first, rather than the vehicle's rightful owner.

The
bakkie
had yielded not only uniforms, but also a wallet, in the glove compartment, with a plumber's business cards, and a bag of tools from the floor on the passenger's side. From the centre console he grabbed a sweat-grimed baseball cap, also with the business logo stitched on it. He took his pistol from the holster on his belt and the silencer from the pocket of his jeans. He screwed the attachment to the barrel and cocked it. As the weapon was now too long to conceal, he placed it in the canvas tool bag under a pile of wrenches.

As he walked through the car park he pulled the cap down low over his eyes, which remained downcast as he entered the bustling, chaotic emergency room.

There was a plan on the wall next to the receptionist's desk. The woman looked harried, explaining to a distraught mother that her child would have to wait up to an hour to see a doctor. Van Zyl noticed a plastic container full of clip-on passes which each bore a capital
V
followed by a number. In smaller print below it said
Visitor
. While the receptionist was pointing out the toilets down the corridor to the woman, Van Zyl quickly leaned across the counter and palmed a pass. He clipped it onto the pocket of his overall shirt and returned his gaze to the plan. He found the intensive care unit and set off down the hallway.

‘Can I help you? Hey, you?' a voice said behind him.

He turned and saw a white woman in green disposable surgical scrubs. ‘There's a water leak in ICU,' he said.

‘Can I see some ID?'

Van Zyl kept his cool. He put a thumb under the visitor's pass and held it up for the woman to see, and fished in his pocket for one of the plumber's business cards, which he handed to her. ‘I'm a plumber, not a doctor. They don't give us fancy IDs.'

‘OK, sorry to trouble you, but we don't want just anyone wandering around the hospital.'

He nodded. ‘It's good to know your security's working.'

He smiled to himself as he carried on. He turned right, his shoes squeaking on the freshly washed linoleum floor. He wrinkled his nose at the universal hospital smell, the sharp odour of urine and disinfectant.

It was marginally quieter in this part of the hospital than the emergency room, though nursing staff still paced the corridors and as he pushed open the swinging plastic doors to the intensive care unit, he saw that relatives hovered by two of the ten beds.

There was an African woman with two small daughters standing at the foot of the bed of a skinny man with a tube draining from his chest. At the far end of the ward a young woman's face was lit by the greenish
glow of a monitor, attached to a patient whose head was heavily bandaged. He checked off the colour, age and sex of each patient as he moved quietly between the rows of beds. The only white woman, he now saw, was the one with the head wound. It had to be Lisa Novak. Looking at the girl, who he guessed was not long out of her teens, he saw the family resemblance. A man about the same age, with bleached hair and brand-name Australian surfing shorts and T-shirt, stood beside his partner, with his hand on her shoulder.

The man looked around as Van Zyl walked past, glancing across to positively identify the Novak woman.

‘Had a complaint about a leaky pipe in the bathroom. Sorry for the disturbance,' he said. The man nodded, stifled a surreptitious yawn, and returned his gaze to the unconscious woman.

Van Zyl was feeling the buzz now. The adrenaline was pumping through his veins, sending little jolts of electricity to his fingertips, but he forced himself to keep his emotions in check. The woman couldn't have been placed in a better position. Her bed was right next to the door of the toilet and shower that serviced the ward. Piet opened the door and knelt down. From the bag he took one of the plumber's wrenches and set to work on the cold-water pipe that fed the washbasin. He strained, then felt the connection loosen. As it came away from the wall he was pleasantly surprised by the force of water that jetted from the open end. Water gushed out onto the floor. To add to the realism he, too, was now drenched in water.