The Fallen

by Jassy Mackenzie

  ‘You could tell the doctors it was an accident. That you were cleaning your gun.’

  ‘No. Too dangerous. They might already have a description of me, thanks to that bitch. We need to go and finish her off now. Get this bullet out of me and give me some painkillers. I know a GP who will give me antibiotics later, no questions asked.’

  Bradley shook his head, unhappy with the situation.

  ‘Go on,’ Kobus urged.

  ‘All right.’ He didn’t want to let Kobus inside his flat, because that was his private world. But he had no choice now. This was urgent. How the hell had the woman from the resort discovered who he was and arrived at the flats where he lived, barely an hour after Chetty had told him that she and Patel, the Jo’burg police detective, had been snooping around at the harbour? He wanted to ask her, to get the truth out of her, but finishing the job efficiently took priority. Failure was not an option that Bradley wanted to entertain.

  And Bradley had some strong painkillers in his place, because he suffered from terrible, blinding headaches. Dilaudid, Fentanyl, Dolophine. One or more of those might just be able to keep the agony at bay.

  ‘Come on, let’s sort this out upstairs,’ he said. ‘The stuff I’ve got will have to do. Here. Put this jacket over your arm. Try to walk normally, and don’t let anyone see you’re bleeding.’

  ‘David,’ Jade said.

  She sat in the passenger seat, half turned towards him, pressing as hard as she could on the makeshift plugs that covered his wounds.

  Sweat beaded David’s upper lip and trickled down his temple. As she spoke, he gave a shallow cough, and another bright spatter of blood landed on his chin and dripped down onto the front of his shirt.

  ‘We don’t have a phone. I’m going to have to drive us to the hospital. I’ll need you to help. Do you think you will be able to work the accelerator and the clutch?’

  ‘Can … try.’

  This was going to be an impossible task, but she had to try, because the only alternative was to sit here and watch him slowly dying.

  It would be far better to die trying. She knew David would agree with that.

  The hospital was a ten-minute drive away. Fifteen minutes if they limped along at a slow speed. Hopefully she’d be able to jam the car into second gear, keep it there, and somehow manage to steer while maintaining the pressure on David’s wound with her hands.

  Jade leaned across the central console, preparing to relinquish her grip on the bloodied chamois on David’s chest in order to start the car. One … two … now. A quick twist of the key and the engine grumbled into life.

  ‘Clutch,’ she called, shoving the gearstick into second. Then, ‘Accelerator, hard.’

  The car lurched forward. Her plan had worked. David had managed to get his foot on the accelerator and they were on the move.

  But to Jade’s horror, instead of following a relatively steady path in the middle of their lane, the car kept veering right. The steering felt impossibly heavy and mushy, and she found herself having to fight it every metre of the way. She could hear an ominous bumping noise coming from the right front wheel.

  Her heart sank.

  The right front tyre must have punctured in the collision with the truck, effectively crippling the car. Her plan was impossible. Driving on one rim would mean she’d need both hands on the wheel, and it would take three times as long to reach their destination.

  David grunted in pain and the car slowed abruptly to a crawl and then stalled as his foot slipped off the accelerator.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Try … again.’

  And then his head slumped sideways and his body toppled towards her as he lost consciousness.

  ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ Jade shouted, because the movement had prompted a fresh surge of blood from the exit wound in his back. Damn it to hell, he was going to die, and there was nothing more she could do.

  And then, glancing across the road, she saw the sight she had been praying for.

  Another car, a modest white Toyota, was pulling slowly over onto the verge opposite.

  Relief flooded through her as she realised help had arrived. Two Zulu youths leapt out and jogged across the road. Lithe, strong-looking young men in shorts and T-shirts who, judging from the carefully applied white paint they had on their faces, must have been taking part in a tribal dance display.

  One of them had a cellphone in his hand.

  ‘Accident?’ he asked as he approached. ‘Are you hurt, sisi?’

  ‘Thedriveris,’ Jadesaid. ‘Attemptedhijacking. Weneedanambulance—he’s been shot in the chest and is bleeding to death.’

  ‘Eish!’ the young man exclaimed. He dialled the number and a moment later Jade heard him speaking to the emergency services.

  He gave the location, listened, and then said, ‘Yes. She’s already doing that. She’s pressing on the wound.’ And to Jade, ‘They are on their way right now.’

  Then he spoke swiftly in Zulu to his friend.

  The other man ran back to the car and returned carrying a smart-looking leather waistcoat. He held it shyly out to Jade.

  ‘Do you want to put this on?’

  Jade glanced down. She’d forgotten she was shirtless, clad only in her bra, and had gouts of David’s blood splattered across her torso like a bad body-painting job.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t wear that. It’s a nice garment. It’ll be ruined.’

  But the young man kept holding it out, his face anxious.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Jade said. ‘When the paramedics arrive, give me your T-shirt and you put on the waistcoat.

  She spoke half jokingly, the humour a desperate attempt at concealing her worry. The makeshift fabric plugs in David’s wounds were saturated and each breath David took seemed shallower. She could feel his heart beating valiantly, but he was losing too much blood. Soon, his heartbeat would weaken and start to fibrillate before giving up completely.

  She had no idea how long he had left, or whether his failing respiration would outlast his heart. She felt air bubbling from out of the folds of the shirt and tightened her grasp. Her arms were burning, but she couldn’t let go now. She must hold on. Firmly enough to control the escape of air, but not so tight that he couldn’t breathe.

  More people were arriving now. Glancing up, Jade noticed another car stopping, this one with a Free State number plate. A seemingly infinite number of noisy, sun-bronzed children were leaning out of the windows and goggling at the scene. They were pulled back into the vehicle and their windows were swiftly closed when their mother saw all the blood.

  Finally she heard the sound she’d been waiting for—the urgent wailing of the ambulance siren. Within a minute, a paramedic was by her side. Gently, he moved her hands away from David’s torso.

  Blessed relief. With an effort, Jade lowered her arms, which were now so stiff and sore that she could hardly move them. Her fingers were coated with congealed blood and felt as if they were permanently rusted into their clamped position. She wriggled backwards out of the car through the passenger door and was helped to her feet by one of the tow-truck drivers who had arrived on the scene. A stretcher and spinal board were standing at the ready, and the paramedics were now busy attaching life-support equipment to David.

  Someone handed her a plastic bottle of mineral water, and Jade used it to rinse most of David’s blood off her hands, arms and chest. As her adrenaline ebbed, she felt cold all over. Gratefully, she accepted the threadbare shirt that the Zulu dancer handed to her.

  With the action over, the finality of the situation had started to sink in. She could lose him now. Not lose him to his wife, the scenario she’d always dreaded the most, but lose him forever.

  It couldn’t happen that way. It just couldn’t. David was too contrary to die, too much of a fighter.

  But looking at the paramedic’s grim face as he turned to confer with his colleague, she realised that it might have already happened.

  28

  Just five mi
nutes after the ambulance left, taking David to the same hospital that Jade had so recently visited to ask about her mother, Inspector Pillay arrived at the crime scene in his unmarked Ford. He climbed out, nervously clutching the holster of his gun, looking as if he’d just walked back into his worst nightmare.

  ‘Was this an attempted hijacking?’ he asked Jade.

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I recognised the gunman. I’ve seen him before, twice. The second time was last night, at the resort, when he tried to run me down with his truck.’

  After taking down a full account of the shooting, Pillay loaned Jade his cellphone so that she could contact the car-hire company and arrange for the tow-truck driver to remove her damaged vehicle. He then offered Jade a lift back to the resort. Carefully, she got into his clean car. There were stiff, blotchy stains on her borrowed shirt where the last of the blood had soaked through, but hopefully it wouldn’t stain the sedan’s grey fabric seats.

  She found her mind kept flashing back to the instant of the shooting. The explosion of the gun, the way David’s face had looked as he’d attempted to stem the bleeding with his own hands. What could she have done differently? How could she have saved the situation?

  Irritably, she shook her head, trying to banish the thoughts. There was no point in hashing it over. She couldn’t rewrite what had happened. All she could do now was to hope against hope that he would make it through surgery. Assuming he was still alive.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Pillay glanced at her, looking concerned. ‘If you need trauma counselling or any …’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jade interrupted him, aware of how snappy she sounded, but equally aware that she could do nothing about it.

  They drove in silence for a while. Then Pillay cleared his throat somewhat nervously, as if anticipating another sharp response from his passenger.

  ‘The paramedics told me that if you hadn’t done what you did, Superintendent Patel would have died before they’d arrived,’ he said. ‘If he makes it, it will be thanks to you.’

  Jade suddenly felt a huge lump rise in her throat. ‘I did what I needed to do,’ she said, but her voice sounded wobbly and not like her at all.

  ‘Are you trained in first aid?’

  Damn it, he was being deliberately nice to her. Trying to chat, to take her mind off the horror she’d left behind. Jade didn’t know whether it was his kindness, or her reaction to the shock, that was making her want to lay her head in her arms and bawl her eyes out.

  ‘Only a basic first-aid course,’ she replied. Her voice was still unsteady, and it was in an effort to say something without seeming to be on the verge of hysteria that prompted Jade to share a piece of her past that, until now, she’d never spoken about. ‘But I’ve dealt with that particular incident before. I’ve worked a number of assignments as a bodyguard. There was a security breach on one of my jobs and a man was shot in the chest at close range. I helped keep him breathing until the ambulance came.’

  ‘They must have been glad to have you there,’ Pillay said, sounding impressed.

  Jade didn’t add that she had also been the one who had shot the man.

  She had been part of a security team guarding a rock band while they toured Europe. A British heavy-metal group from Birmingham, infamous for what many considered to be their Satanist lyrics. It had been an attempted assassination in Cologne, Germany, as they were leaving a concert venue. Two-thirty A.M. on a rainy morning and they had all been tired. Among the mass of fans waiting outside huddled in raincoats, but cheering and singing, had been one man who she had noticed immediately, because of his stony expression and the fact that his eyes were fixed on one person only—the lead singer.

  His two personal bodyguards were too far behind him and, for just a few seconds, the wild-haired star had been left unprotected. She had seen the would-be killer raise his gun. He hadn’t looked at her; hadn’t noticed her at all. She was deliberately low profile, unobtrusive, dressed to blend in. Most people had thought she was a backstage coordinator or a wardrobe assistant.

  At any rate, she had her own weapon unholstered as his finger touched the trigger, and her bullet slammed into his chest as he pulled it. Her shot punched him backwards and his own bullet went harmlessly high, over the heads of the singer and his entourage.

  There had been momentary silence after the man went down. Then pandemonium had ensued. Screaming, shouting, hundreds of people all trying to flee in different directions. The police and bouncers had their hands full trying to control the panicking crowd. She had knelt down beside the dying man and packed a shirt into the entry wound in exactly the same way she did for David.

  Ironically, the shirt she used had had a death’s head logo on it, and had been ripped off the back of the singer the man had been trying to kill.

  ‘Will ’e be OK?’ the metal-head had asked her, over and over again in his Brummie accent, and she’d heard the guilt in his voice, as if he was worried that all of this had somehow been his fault. ‘D’you think ’e’ll make it?’

  She’d given him the only answer she could. She just didn’t know.

  But the man had died while in surgery. During the investigation that followed, it had emerged that his gun had been fully loaded with hollow-point bullets and that the would-be killer had spent months practising his marksmanship. Without a doubt, the bullet would have hit his target had she not intervened.

  As a result, she’d been cleared of all blame. She’d been twenty-six years old then, and it had been the third time she had killed someone.

  ‘Pillay,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you interviewed Neil yet? You know, the resort owner.’

  A slight frown creased Pillay’s smooth brow. ‘Not yet, actually. We’ve spoken to him, of course, and he has been very helpful in providing us with all Amanda’s details, but we haven’t been able to schedule an official interview yet. He’s a very busy man, it seems. I’ll probably try and speak to him this afternoon.’

  ‘Have you been into his house?’

  ‘No. Only as far as the reception area in the small front room. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘No reason,’ Jade said. ‘Just curious.’

  ‘Well, you’re welcome to ask anything you like. If I can answer it, I will. But I would like to know why.’

  ‘All right then. I do have another question or two.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘The cases of the missing people you’ve been dealing with.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘You said there were a number of them.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘You don’t think that’s odd, here in a small town like Richards Bay?’

  ‘Definitely. To have nine individuals reported missing in the space of six months is most unusual. But it’s not unheard of.’

  ‘Do they have anything in common?’

  ‘Well, all are male, apart from one missing female. That’s unusual, statistically. And all the men are in their twenties or thirties. The woman too. She’s twenty-six, and a waitress at a seafood restaurant in town.’

  ‘Backgrounds? Do they come from the same area?’

  ‘Various areas, and there doesn’t seem to be any connection between them, apart from the fact that most of them disappeared while on the way to or from work. I did look at the possibility that a serial killer might be targeting a certain profile of person, but …’ Pillay shrugged expressively, ‘no bodies have been found.’

  He turned off the main road and made his way down the winding lane that led to the resort.

  ‘Isn’t that unusual too?’ Jade asked.

  ‘Come to think of it, yes it is,’ Pillay said, looking suddenly thoughtful.

  Bradley’s flat was small and badly lit. Kobus choked on the stench of blocked drains as he followed the tall blond man past a closed door and into the small living room.

  He was bent over his injured arm, cradling it in the crook of his left, gasping with the pain. Swe
at was trickling down his temples and he couldn’t wipe it away; couldn’t make any move that might jar his injured limb.

  Carefully, moving as slowly as he could, he laid the arm on the coffee table and rested one of his knees on a wooden chair.

  ‘Those pills,’ he gasped.

  ‘Yes?’ Bradley was rummaging through a bag emblazoned with a pharmacy logo on the tattered-looking Formica counter, from which he produced disinfectant, gauze and Elastoplast. Kobus blinked. Had the guy been shopping specially for him, or what?

  ‘I need them. Now.’

  ‘Hang on a minute. I’ll get them for you now.’

  Bradley opened a drawer and pulled out a big white box of prescription painkillers. Kobus could read the label, but in his haze of pain the words made no sense to him. All he could see were the tablets themselves. A foil package containing two rows of pills.

  Bradley snapped two of them out of the foil and poured a glass of water. He gulped them down.

  ‘How long do they take to work?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Wait a sec. I can’t deal with this. I don’t want you to touch it until they’ve … Hey! What the hell’s that?’

  Bradley had produced a medical syringe, which he was filling from a small brown bottle.

  ‘Local anaesthetic. This will numb the area fast.’ He peered down at Kobus’s arm; at the shape of the bullet pushing up against the skin. Then he looked back up at Kobus, his face serious.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to take that out for you?’

  Kobus didn’t want the slug left inside him, that was for sure. And surely he couldn’t be in worse pain than he was already?

  ‘Do it,’ he said, forcing the words out through clenched teeth. ‘Then let’s go and get the bitch.’

  29

  When Jade arrived back at the resort with Inspector Pillay in the late afternoon, the first thing she noticed was the smart security boom that had been erected at the bottom entrance gate. Nearby, four uniformed security personnel were offloading a mobile guard booth from a short, flat-bed truck. Before Jade and Pillay were allowed through the boom, one of the guards hurried over and asked to see their identification.