He’d been tired and wired then too, sitting in the car waiting. He’d also had that ache which told him he needed to piss badly, the urgency not helped by the constant trickle of water from some cheap rockery plonked in the house’s front garden. It’d got so bad he’d actually been searching the car for some kind of container when Bart reappeared with a face which said job’s a good ’un.
‘So what was that yesterday?’ Kees asks.
Bart grins. Then he actually winks whilst making a click sound out of the side of his mouth.
Kees doesn’t think much of Bart, especially as he’s spent the better part of the last year paired up with him. Not that he has any choice in the matter. It’s not like there’s an HR department he can go and complain to. For a moment Kees imagines walking into Van der Pol’s Portakabin office and saying he’d like to work with a different team member. Realistically, doing that would be little more than a death sentence. Probably, knowing Van der Pol’s twisted mind, he’d be dead within the day, pummelled by Bart and his baseball bat.
But he is alive, the drugs helping with that. They also mask some of the pain, but not all of it. He’s got another appointment with his specialist booked in later next week. Kees is not sure he can face going.
‘Secret,’ Bart says eventually.
Jesus fuck, Kees continues his telepathic conversation with the fish. The fish, maybe having choked on the cigarette butt, or averse to Kees’ choice of words, doesn’t respond.
‘No, seriously, I’d like to know. We do all these jobs, and they’re all kind of the same, but yesterday was different. What am I missing?’
Kees had caught a glimpse of the man, tall with dark curly hair and a scared look on his face.
‘The question is, what’ll you be missing if you keep on asking questions.’
End of.
Actually, Kees is impressed. Given that he assumes Bart would be out IQ’d by even the non-responsive fish, his reply was surprisingly eloquent.
Regardless, Kees still wants to know. Needs to know. He’d had a message two days ago telling him to watch for anything out of the ordinary and report back. That’s his job. His real job.
Which for the moment means he has to do as Bart tells him.
Which right now means not asking any more questions.
He focuses on the building they’re watching across the water, the single-storey prefab with round porthole windows blaring light out into the darkness.
It’s the only building for miles around, racks filled with slender canoes off to the right, two SUVs parked to the left.
They’re half an hour outside of Eindhoven, on a drainage canal, and surrounded by nothing. They’d had to leave their bikes on a dirt track and trudge across two fields to get here, one full of sheep ambling around like zombies, the other dotted with rows and rows of some kind of summer cabbage. Bart had made a point of using the plants like stepping stones, flattening each one with a soft crunch.
Kees knows that was stupid – why try and leave evidence, for fuck’s sake? – but hadn’t said anything, even though it had made him burn inside.
He thinks of one of the quacks he’d been to who’d told him his disease was caused by repressed emotion, probably anger, and that to fully heal he’d have to let go of it.
Kees had told him to fuck off and left without paying.
Maybe … a voice pipes up – Kees is unsure if it’s the fish finally come to life or his own thoughts – maybe he was right after all.
Across the water figures flit behind the portholes.
The moon, which has been lighting the sky from out of sight, starts to rise behind the building. It comes up fast, revealing three flag poles on the building’s roof. From each one hangs a limp flag. To Kees they look like victims of a lynch mob left hanging as a warning to others. Though what the warning’s about remains unclear.
‘Here we go,’ Bart says in a whisper as dirty as the Harley he rides.
Kees reckons Bart could get a job as a voice-over artist if this gig doesn’t work out.
Then again, he’s not convinced Bart can actually read.
They watch as a door opens at one end, light spilling out in a wedge. Shadows slice into it, then figures step out, one by one moving towards the two SUVs parked a little way off to the left.
Kees counts five, three men and two women. Their target is amongst them, unmistakable by his girth.
Kees had been briefed earlier, and though he’d forgotten the name of the guy, he knows that he’s the fat one, a minor player who’d made the mistake of encroaching on part of Van der Pol’s extensive turf.
In other words, tonight’s all about a little gentle persuasion.
The headlights catch the women as they clamber into the lead SUV, ducking their heads just as their hems rise. Bart stirs beside him. They’re just his type, long leather boots, short skirts and a history of being traded from an Eastern bloc country to here.
Where they have important jobs in the service industry.
Kees suddenly thinks of Tanya. He wonders what she’s doing, if she’s still with Jaap. Then he wonders how Jaap is. The last time he’d seen him he’d just found out his baby daughter and her mother had been killed. Kees had seen the mother, Saskia, thrown off the boat and he had swum out to her whilst Jaap chased the man who still had his daughter. But by the time Kees got Saskia to the shore and was pumping her chest and blowing into her throat, mouth pushed against her cold slippery lips, it was clear she wasn’t coming back.
For a moment, and not for the first time, Kees marvels at how things have got so fucked up.
‘Let’s go,’ Bart says as the SUVs pull out, nothing but two pairs of red lights bobbing away from them erratically on what must be a bumpy track.
They make the way back across the cabbage field, Bart crushing a few more just for the hell of it, and through sheep which have separated into smaller groups, each a small cloud in a dark sky.
They’re not hurrying, they’d scoped it all out before and know they’ve got at least another five minutes to get on their bikes and round to where the fat man’s SUV will pass on its way back to Eindhoven.
Kees doesn’t like the plan; he thinks that doing this kind of job on the road, even if the road runs through a small wood, is too exposed a place. Predictably, when he’d brought up his concerns, Bart had called him a pussy and told him to suck it up.
The way their relationship works is this, Bart’s more senior, he tells him to suck it up, Kees does.
For now.
Bart’s bike growls into life and then broods in a rhythmic idle.
One day, thinks Kees as he fires up his own bike and flips the headlight on.
The beam hits a sheep which turns to see what’s disturbing the peace. Kees stares at its eyes, the beige iris slashed with a black horizontal pupil, and for a split second doesn’t know who he is or what he’s doing.
They reach the designated spot a few minutes later and Bart pulls up on one side of the centre line, Kees bringing himself level on the other. They kick their bike stands down, the noise like a mouthful of grit. They kill the beams.
Now all they have to do is wait for the flicker of headlights through the trees to their left.
Kees reaches for his gun, Bart bends forward and clasps the handle of the baseball bat attached to the special clips he’s had installed on his bike. Kees doesn’t understand how a living person can be such a cliché.
But, he has to admit, Bart wields the thing with a certain grace.
And effectiveness.
Most of the people Kees has seen it introduced to find the whole experience motivational enough to change their behaviour – often permanently.
Attitude adjustment, Bart calls it.
And tonight the aim is definitely for a bit of that. The same as pretty much every day. Van der Pol has a lot people whose attitudes need adjusting. Only yesterday the guy Bart met with – ‘met’ being code for ‘putting pressure on’ – had looked, to Kees’ eye, like a civilian.
He thinks back to the message, Watch for anything out of the ordinary. Then something out of the ordinary happened. Only Kees doesn’t know what it was.
Next to him Bart coughs something up his throat and spits it onto the concrete.
‘The guy yesterday, did he agree?’ Kees asks.
‘Agree to what?’
‘Agree to whatever you went to tell him.’
Bart turns and looks at him, his long straggly goatee luminous in the moonlight filtering through the trees.
‘All right. You wanna know? How’s this? The guy yesterday—’
They hear a sound, both their heads snap up in time to see headlights strobing through the trees. They watch the SUV’s progress until it rounds the corner less than thirty metres away. As it straightens up, Kees and Bart flip their lights on in unison, two lasers firing right at the incoming vehicle.
Brakes scream into the night, and the SUV swerves, then skids sideways. The back end swings round and crunches into a tree. Kees is already off his bike running, gun trained on the driver. Bart’s by the passenger door, surprisingly swift and agile given his size. He hauls out their target and throws him to the ground. A phone clatters against the tarmac. Bart starts with that, grinding it with his heel like he’s a dancing hillbilly.
The driver hasn’t seen Kees, he’s fiddling under the dashboard for something. Kees fires a shot wide into the wood.
Muzzle flash sparks across the windscreen.
Now the driver sees him, he raises his hands and puts them at eleven and one o’clock on the wheel. Kees nods at him, That’s right. He keeps the gun trained, trying to ignore the sour taste in his mouth and the blood pumping through his throat.
He listens to Bart explaining what he wants. The man refuses. Bart goes to work, the thud of the bat and a grunt telling him the man is trying to tough it out.
Just give in, Kees thinks. It’ll be easier.
Then he hears something else, the sound of an engine. He glances towards Bart, but he hasn’t heard it, too immersed in his work. The man on the ground’s trying to protect his already beaten face with his hands. Bart goes in for a sideswipe, knocking his head left.
Kees hears the sickening crack, followed by a wet splat.
Bart had chosen this spot as it was pretty remote; the chances of someone else being here at this time of night were slim.
He’d said.
But lights are stabbing through the tree trunks, along the same stretch of road the SUV had come from. Kees yells at Bart as headlights swoop round the corner. Kees can see it’s the other SUV, the one which should have been taking the women back to Schijndel, in the opposite direction.
Something’s gone wrong.
Now Bart reacts.
They’re both running towards their bikes, Bart just ahead, when Kees hears the shot.
Or he doesn’t hear so much as feel it, like a missile screaming past his ear.
Ahead, Bart’s head explodes.
The second shot comes and misses.
Kees finds he’s on his bike, tearing into the night, unable to stop the slo-mo action replay of Bart’s head rupturing into a wet mess of gore unfolding in his brain over and over like a video in a contemporary art installation.
Later, when he’s sure he’s outrun them, Kees eases off the throttle, the wind softening on his face. He watches the repetitive on-off-on-off of the broken white line running along the middle of the road.
He’s mesmerized by it.
He’s not even sure if he’s breathing or not.
Then, as he accelerates, the broken line blurring to solid, streaming at him out of the darkness ahead, the fish finally responds.
DAY TWO
* * *
7
Now there are gulls.
They’re mobbing a small boat out on the choppy water. Jaap watches them wheel and dive, their cries carrying landward on the breeze, screams of drowning sailors.
He’d woken on Arno’s sofa worried he’d been tied in a knot, his spine complaining about the working conditions, and in the midst of an intensely erotic dream featuring Arno’s girlfriend, Kim. She’d been asleep when they’d turned up but had been woken by their pathetic attempt to enter the property quietly. She’d not seemed that surprised, had made the sofa up for Jaap then headed back to bed, Arno joining her.
After he’d shown Jaap around his home-grow operation.
Arno had explained that there was only one real dealer on the island and as he couldn’t, as a police officer, buy from him, he’d figured it would be less complicated to grow it himself. In the grow tent there were four plants coming into flower, the smell intoxicating when he’d unzipped it, pungent and almost overpowering.
Jaap had drifted off not long after, the soft fan from the grow tent lulling him to sleep.
The extra few hits he’d taken before turning in hadn’t hurt either, had mellowed things out nicely.
He breathes in and starts moving, down the same path leading to the empty beach as if it’s a rerun of the previous night.
He’d called Max first thing, checking up on the blood tests, but had been forced to leave a message.
He soon finds himself at the spot where the body was found. It’s no longer there, taken away after they’d finished, the location marked by four poles, a single strand of red-and-white police tape strung round the top.
He stares down into the marked-off area, his mind a jumble.
It looks to him like the sea has moved up several feet overnight and back again. Nothing really, but already the impression the body left in the sand is gone, a faint indent just beyond the waves’ reach the only clue she’d been there at all.
In the past he would have started thinking about the metaphor, how each individual’s life was like that, a tiny mark which would soon enough vanish as if it had never been there.
But all that had ended with the death of his baby daughter. The searing grief had consumed him for months, but it had also purged him somehow, made him less introspective, more alive to the moment.
He’d been seeing a grief counsellor – the department’s meagre apology – who’d been surprised when he confessed this to her; it was almost like she didn’t want him to have found a sort of peace, like she wanted him to struggle for longer. He got a strong impression she fed off other people’s sorrow.
After that he stopped going. Tanya had been what got him through; without her he doesn’t know what would have happened.
The breeze, up until now soft, toughens slightly and pushes at his face like the touch of invisible hands. He feels a speckle of spray, lifted off the waves, tiny microdots pinging any exposed skin. The gulls crescendo into an orgy of piercing shrieks and swooping sharp cries. The boat is moving – he can hear the blatblatblat of the outboard now – turning to the shore fifty or so metres up the beach.
The craft itself is small and made of wood, the hull painted white with an orange stripe running round the top. Jaap walks up the beach to intercept. The outboard is churning water at the stern like a jacuzzi. Gulls follow in frenzied hope.
Jaap watches as the man cuts the engine and the boat coasts forward until it’s close to the sand. He jumps over the side into the water and wades round to the front, hauling the boat landwards.
By the time Jaap reaches him, the bow’s well past the waterline and attached to a rope the man’s pulled out of the sand, stretching back in a taut arc to a stake anchored in the dunes.
As Jaap steps up, the man’s back in the boat, busy transferring lidded barrels over the vessel’s side.
‘Hey,’ Jaap says, having to raise his voice to compete with the gulls.
‘Morning,’ the man says. He doesn’t stop, keeps on offloading barrels.
‘Let me help,’ Jaap says as the man picks up one larger than the rest. The man nods and once he’s got it over the side Jaap takes the weight. It’s heavier than he’d thought it would be, and as he’s lowering it, one side sliding down the boat’s hull, he feels it starting to tip. H
e pushes hard against it, trying to jam it between him and the boat, but it’s not enough. It slips onto its side and the lid flies off, releasing a slick of silver fish, spreading out on the sand in a wet slither of flashing eyes and scales.
This is exactly what they’ve been waiting for; the gulls dive down, jabbing and pecking, each bird for itself, the noise deafening. The man jumps over the side with a loud roar, waving his arms about, knocking the birds up in a frenzy of wings, orange feet and dark glossy eyes.
Satisfied, he starts shovelling fish back into the barrel. Jaap goes to help, the gulls keeping close.
‘I got it,’ the man says, picking up a particularly large fish. He holds it up to Jaap and there’s movement, the gills vibrating fast, eyes twitching back and forth, aware perhaps that this new world it’s seeing for the first time is hostile. ‘Spent twenty years trading stocks, but this is better.’
‘I bet you keep that quiet.’
The man shrugs. ‘Everyone hates a banker,’ he says. ‘But really, hating bankers for being greedy is like hating a shark for eating baby seals. It’s what they do. The real people everyone should hate are the ones who allow the sharks to get anywhere near the baby seals in the first place.’
‘I’ve never liked politicians much either.’
‘Bunch of fuckers, they’re the real problem.’
He grabs more fish and tosses them in the barrel. Each one lands with a wet, slippery slap as they join their fellows.
He’s probably ten years or so older than him, Jaap decides, and has stubble on the cusp of graduating to a beard and a thin nose with peeling skin.
‘What made you change?’
‘My wife died. About six months later I took out everything, cashed it all in. Turns out it was a month before the crash. The plan was to travel the world, but I somehow ended up here.’
‘Life does that sometimes,’ Jaap says, finding a crab has scuttled in from nowhere and is challenging him to a fight, claws held aloft ready to strike, eyes, literally, on stalks.
‘Yeah, everything’s normal then one day, bang.’ The man slaps two fish together, a bit of water or fish slime hits Jaap’s cheek by his right eye. ‘It all goes crazy. Kind of like what you’re doing, I guess.’
Before the Dawn Page 4
