Man Down (8 page)

“Even though there was that corruption thing, a few years back?”

“Allegations. Nothing was proved.”

“No, because you fell on the grenade.”

Bekker shook his head. “Now you’re just reachin for the low-hanging fruit, Englishman.”

“He paid you to take the fall, didn’t he?” No response. “And he’s still paying you. Part of that is babysitting me. To make sure I don’t open my mouth.”

“You’ve already opened your mouth.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You wouldn’t talk to the law.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you talk to them and you sink with us.”

Turner nodded. “But Tanya . . .”

“Yes, Tanya.” Bekker exhaled, his eyes never leaving Turner’s face. “Time to shit or get off the pot, Englishman. You want me to kill your wife, don’t you?”

There it was. The line in the sand.

Turner crossed it.

“Yes. I want you to kill my wife.”

Part Three

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

―
Jean-Paul Sartre

1

Dragged upward by the elevator Grace Worthington felt the relentless press of gravity, certain it would crush her bones and squeeze her heart to stillness.

Gasping, her forehead greasy with sweat, she grabbed her sad little box of things and escaped when the elevator docked, hurrying to her apartment, slamming the door after her, dumping the box and running for the bathroom where she knelt at the toilet and retched into the bowl.

Emptied, she sat shivering on the tiled floor. After a long time she got to her feet and stared at herself in the mirror and wondered how the hell she’d let this happen. How she’d just stood and looked on while her life had jumped its tracks.

Shutting down these thoughts she got busy with her electric toothbrush, its nagging whine and jackhammer vibration drawing her attention to the headache that had hold of her temples.

After fleeing John’s house Grace had been unable to face the thought of this anonymous furnished apartment and she’d stopped off at a bar on 4
th
Avenue where the jukebox—stocked entirely with lovesick old country songs—had provided a perfect soundtrack to her little ten-tissue weepie.

She’d knocked back a couple of Jacks and Coke that, rather than numbing her feelings of hurt and humiliation, seemed only to bring them into sharper focus and she couldn’t fight back the goddam tears.

When a withered guy in a bolo tie who looked like he slept behind the bandshell in Reid Park had started hitting on her she’d known it was time to collect what was left of her self-respect and head on home.

Grace shook two Tylenol from the bottle in the medicine cabinet and left the bathroom and went into the kitchen, blinking at the harsh fluorescent light. She took a pitcher of water from the refrigerator and swallowed the pills. When her eyes fell on the half-empty bottle of Riesling in the open door of the icebox she thought why the hell not? and poured herself a glass.

The wine had begun to sour but Grace took a long slug anyway and carried it through to the living room where she stood at the window watching tiny cars chase each other between the red lights.

Digging in the pocket of her jeans she found a pack of Virginia Slims and said, “You’ve come a long way, baby.
Not
.”

Sounding like Lucy Turner.

And thinking of John’s kid, of course, made her think of John and she didn’t want that.

No, she did not want that.

The pack of smokes was empty and she cursed before she remembered there were a couple more with the things she’d brought from the office, so she went over to the box lying near the front door and pushed aside the issues of
Cosmo
,
Vogue
and
Harpers
to find the cigarettes and found also the monogrammed ashtray from the hotel room in Vegas that she’d taken as a keepsake and knew she should ditch but hadn’t, not yet, and it teared her up.

“Fuck you, John,” she said as she set fire to a cigarette. “Fuck you and the jet plane you flew in on.”

She’d been out of the office all day, meeting clients, driving around thinking of what he’d said to her yesterday in the motel room, those three words like a narcotic drip feeding into her vein as she’d waited for him to call her.

It was after six and she’d been on her way home when, at last, her phone had rung.

John, asking her if she could swing by the office.

Sure she could.

When she got there he was sitting at his desk in the gloom and she said, “Hey, who died?”

He shook his head and she just knew what was coming.

“Talk to me,” she said even though she didn’t want him to open his mouth and let loose the words that were going to tear a huge, ugly hole in her life.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” he said.

“In my experience when somebody says that it means they’re not sorry. Not sorry at all. Or not nearly sorry enough.”

“I am sorry. There’s a situation.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. We need to hit the pause button.”

“The pause button?”

“Yes. The pause button.”

“I didn’t know there was a fuckin pause button. I thought it was all just pedal to the metal on the love express.”

“Grace, please.”

She realized she was breathing loudly and forced herself to sit on the edge of her desk, gripping the wood so hard her fingers hurt.

“What you asked for in the motel, yesterday, I can’t give you,” John said.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t.”

“And what happened to those three magic little words? Remember them?”

“I remember them.”

“Then say them to me again.”

“Grace.”

“Say them to me, John.”

“I do love you.”

“I’m not feeling it, John. Try again.”

“Grace.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ve deposited six months pay in your account. You’ll get all your commissions as soon as I calculate them.”

“You’re talking to me about money? Like I’m some cheap hooker?”

“I’m going to try and resolve this situation.”

“Bullshit.”

“Grace, I swear . . .”

He looked out the window and the fading light touched his face and she saw something, for just a second, that gave her hope and then he shut it down and said, “I need some time.”

“I don’t have time, John. I’m all out of time.”

She was fighting not to cry and clenched her jaw as she found an empty PoolShark box and started dumping her things into it.

He got up from behind his desk and came toward her and put out a hand.

“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”

He dropped the hand and walked out and she saw him wandering around the pool in the sudden dusk. 

Grace couldn’t bring herself to switch on a light, fumbling her way through emptying her desk drawers and throwing the contents into the box before she headed for the door of the office.

There’d been that awkward moment with the kid—Lucy running out to talk to her as she’d walked toward the driveway—and she’d almost been glad when the bitch wife had yelled from the house and stopped the girl in her tracks so that Grace could get into her car and let the tears fall like rain down her dumb, idiotic, gullible face as she’d sped into the coming night.

And they were falling now, again, as she stood at the window of her living room in the dark, and the empty wine glass fell from her hand and shattered and she crumpled into a snotty mess onto the couch and cried some more and wondered if things could get any worse.

When she remembered the test kit that had stood unopened for nearly a week on the sink in the bathroom she knew to a bone certainty that yes, if she ever found the courage to piss on it, they sure as hell would.

2
 

Turner, silhouetted against the cold light spilling from the doorway of his house, stared down at Peter who lay supine on the stone pathway where the looming Bone had dropped him, his bald head thrown backward stretching open the gash in his throat, the look of surprise in his eyes dimming as the capillaries began to break up.

When the dead man’s spreading blood threatened the toes of Turner’s loafers he took a step back and bumped into Bekker who stood behind him, holding his pistol to Lucy’s head.

Lucy whimpered, her blue eyes wide with terror as she looked up at Turner.

“Okay, it’s official,” Bekker said, “this is now a goatfuck.”

Turner, close enough to Bekker to see the tobacco-colored flecks in his dark eyes, was about to call a halt to this, to implore the Afrikaner to corral his psychotic hirelings and escape with them into the night, when the smaller man, as if reading his mind, shook his head in a barely perceptible warning as Bone stepped over the corpse and muscled past them into the room, the bloody knife still clutched in his hand.

Bone looked down at Lucy and said, “A child, Tard.”

The creature, smothering a struggling Tanya to his massive bulk, clamping her mouth shut with a black glove, said, “A
girl
child.”

“We have a fondness for girl children, don’t we, Tard?” Bone said, using the blade of the knife to lift a strand of Lucy’s pale hair.

“We do. A great fondness.”

Tanya drove the heel of her Nike into Tard’s groin and the giant slackened his grip sufficiently for her to eel free, her eyes fixed on the open glass door and freedom.

Tard flung himself forward and snagged her shirt, dragging her back.

With her good hand Tanya clawed at the mass of pink flesh that erupted from the beast’s sweat top and Tard giggled as he lifted her by the shirt and jeans, as if he were enjoying a bout of dwarf tossing, and hurled her at the dining room table. Tanya hit with such force that the ironwood table, still covered with Lucy’s homework, toppled, flinging her to the floor along with the kid’s magazines and notebooks.

Tard swung a heavy boot and kicked Tanya in the head and she sprawled facedown, motionless.

3

Turner, standing at the window of his office drinking a bottle of club soda, watching the dance of light on the surface of the pool, thought, as he had so many times over the years, about how his life would be if his wife were absent from it.

No sooner had this notion scampered
across his mind than Tanya appeared on the deck of the house, as if he’d conjured her.

As he stepped back from the window into the shadows, and observed her as she stalked the deck, blinking at the glare, he heard the click of heels on the paving and a tall blonde woman walked past the pool and hovered in the office doorway, removing her sunglasses.

“Mr. Turner?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Grace Worthington.”

“Please,” he said, taking his place behind his desk, indicating the chair opposite his.

As she sat, nervously tugging at the hem of her skirt, crossed her long legs—sun browned and free of nylons—and reached down to adjust a wayward gold sandal that had slipped adrift of her heel and dangled from her foot in a manner that Turner found ominously erotic, he felt an irrational flash of anger at her for reminding him that he was still capable of desire, an emotion he’d carefully deleted from his narrow, airless life.

It wasn’t that she played the coquette—that he would have found easier to ignore. Rather, she seemed ill at ease with her ampleness, folding her arms over her full breasts in an almost adolescent gesture of self-abnegation, which, of course, served only to amplify her charms.

“Ms. . .” Turner had forgotten her name and had to glance down at the printout of the resume the employment agency had emailed. “Ms. Worthington, why did you leave your last job?”

Hesitating for a moment, she said, “I felt I’d reached a ceiling there.”

She was lying.

Her tell was her left hand brushing the hair away from her forehead, hair that had been carefully blow-dried to cover a fading black eye that wasn’t quite disguised by make-up, her nerves causing her to draw attention to what she desperately didn’t want him to see.

Turner saw more than the black eye, he saw the circle of pale skin above the knuckle of her ring finger where she’d until recently worn a wedding band.

He was about to dismiss her as swiftly and politely as he could when his wife’s voice cut like a bone saw through the stillness of the afternoon: “Get the fuck out of my sight you spoilt little shit!” and Turner saw Lucy bolt from the house in tears.

When he looked back at the woman she was watching the girl sink down beside the pool, weeping, and when Grace Worthington met Turner’s gaze something passed between them, some unspoken acknowledgement of kinship.

She shrugged and said, “Mr. Turner, truth is I’m going through a really messy breakup and I no longer want to live in Phoenix. But I’m a hard worker and I’m honest.” She dragged one side of her mouth down in a wry smile. “Well, except for a moment ago, maybe.”

Turner found himself smiling, too.

Then his landline rang and he knew it would be a call from a distributor that he couldn’t ignore.

“I have to take this,” he said.

“Shall I . . . ?”

She gestured toward the pool deck and he nodded, saying, “Just give me a couple of minutes.”

He took the call and while he locked down an order for a shipment of PoolSharks he saw Grace walk out to where Lucy was sitting.

She said something to the girl and Lucy nodded and then she wiped her face and laughed and Grace slipped
off her sandals, sat down beside the child and dangled her feet in the water, kicking lightly, causing ripples in the pool.

Turner, finishing the call, saw the light on her hair and heard the laughter and something deep inside him creaked into life and before he’d even begun to take the measure of the consequences he walked outside and said, “Grace, when can you start?”