Random Violence Read online

  “You can’t have chili with everything,” she said.

  Perhaps just a pinch would do. To liven it up a little.

  Jade stirred in a heaped teaspoon and tried the soup again. Now it was perfect.

  As she turned to the cupboard to find a bowl, she saw the fuzzy glare of headlights through the steamed-up kitchen window and then heard a honk outside her gate. She hurried to the door, expecting to see David.

  It was Robbie, sat behind the wheel of a black BMW. He leaned out of the window when he saw her. His hair was gelled back on his head. The product had tamed the tight curls into uneven waves.

  “Come here, Jade,” he called. “I want to show you something.”

  Jade grabbed the keys and locked the security door behind her. She hurried over to the gate, bracing herself against the cold and wondering with an uneasy shiver how the hell Robbie had managed to find her. Was there a GPS tracker in the ammo bag?

  He grinned at her and swung open the passenger door.

  “I got connections who tell me things,” he said.

  Jade climbed into the car. The interior smelled of expen-sive leather.

  “Your connections tell you there’s a cop living next door?” she asked.

  Robbie’s grin widened. “They told me he’s not home.” He reversed out of the driveway and kicked up gravel as he pulled away.

  “I thought you wanted to show me something in the car. Not take me somewhere in the car.” Jade tugged her seat belt across and clicked it into place.

  “We’ve got to go somewhere before I can show you.” He sniffed the air. “What the hell have you been doing? It smells like an Italian just farted in here.”

  “I was squeezing garlic cloves. For soup.”

  Robbie made a face. “There’s a bag in the back. Grab it, will you? I got us grilled chicken takeaways. Good food. Not this garlic crap. I got extra spicy for you. We can eat while we drive.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Wait and see.”

  Robbie turned onto the main road and flattened his foot on the accelerator while reaching for a piece of chicken. They flew past another car, overtaking on a solid line, Jade staring in horror at the headlights of the oncoming truck.

  The driver blared his horn in warning. The BMW’s engine roared as it surged forward. They nipped sideways just before the truck rattled past. It was carrying a full load of river sand. Water dripped from the tailgate.

  “They must be doing night work,” Robbie observed, lick-ing his fingers. “Do you know there’s actually a shortage of cement in the country? Too much construction. It’s a great opportunity for black market product. I’m looking into it seriously.”

  “Robbie, that’s interesting, but please drive slower.”

  “No worries, babe. This car has got airbags and stuff.”

  “Airbags are not designed to protect people from twenty tons of mass in motion.”

  “Chill. I’m a great driver, you know.”

  Jade trusted Robbie’s driving skills about as much as she trusted Robbie himself. Fortunately, the traffic was on her side. When they turned onto the highway heading for Pre-toria, a wall of red taillights ahead of them signaled a serious jam. Cursing, he hit the brakes. Jade loosened her grip on her seat. Now that they were moving at the same speed as an old ox-wagon she could relax.

  “We’re going the other side of the boerewors curtain,” Robbie said.

  “The boerewors curtain?”

  “C’mon, Jade, you must have heard that expression before.”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s a great description. You know what boerewors is-don’t tell me you’ve forgotten just because you’ve been out of the country for so long. Well, northern Pretoria’s all farmers and traditional Afrikaners now. Little suburbs full of poor whites. In the old days, they’d have worked on the farms. Nowadays they still have that same mentality. I’m surprised we don’t need passports to get there.”

  “Get where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Robbie went through a tollgate and turned off the highway. A few minutes later, they were driving through suburbia. Small houses, narrow roads lined with trees. Jade remembered that Pretoria was also known as Jacaranda City. She wondered whether, in early summer, this street would be transformed into a purple-lined avenue as the trees produced their distinctive flowers. The branches were bare now, so she couldn’t tell.

  Robbie pulled up at an intersection and parked on the pavement.

  “Come on. This way.”

  Pretoria’s more northerly location meant it was usually a couple of degrees warmer than Jo’burg. It didn’t feel warmer now. Outside on the street, Jade felt cold and exposed. Her foot-steps seemed very loud on the tarmac. The small houses were situated close to the road. Close enough for people to watch them walking past in the yellow glare of the streetlights.

  The air smelled of burning charcoal and crisping fat. Somewhere, someone was braaing meat outdoors. She sup-posed that people on the other side of the boerewors curtain were too tough to be driven indoors at night just because it happened to be winter.

  “Here,” Robbie whispered, pulling her arm. He pointed to one of the houses and crept forward.

  Jade looked through the fence, across the narrow strip of garden. In the pool of light cast by the street lamp, the grass looked dry and untended. Behind the net curtains, Jade could see a shape moving slowly across the dimly lit front room. It looked odd—squat and square. It took her a moment to realize that it was the silhouette of an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

  “What’s this about?” she muttered, staring at the outline of the old lady.

  Robbie’s grip tightened on her arm. “Viljoen’s mother,” he hissed back at her. “This is where he’ll be staying when he’s out of jail. He’s going to live with his old mum. I’ve heard it from a reliable source.”

  Jade continued to stare through the curtains. The old lady’s head was bowed as she struggled to maneuver her wheelchair across the small room. When she came to a halt by the window, Jade saw that Mrs. Viljoen was ancient and shriveled, beaten down by age and ill health. Her two sons were murderers. One was completing his jail sentence. The other one was dead. She watched the old lady lean forward and switch off the light. Her arm trembled from the effort. Who would have thought that a frail woman like this could ever have given birth to two such monsters?

  “Come on. You’ve seen the place now. Let’s go.”

  Jade waited a moment more, contemplating the humble little house. Then she turned and hurried back to the car.

  Robbie started the engine. The fan blew warm air into Jade’s face.

  “You brought me all the way just to see Viljoen’s mother?”she asked.

  He glanced at the dashboard clock, then back at her.

  “Not exactly. Just killing time.” His eyes flashed in the dim light. “I’ve got a job to do close by. Verna’s busy tonight. I need your help, I need you to hold the wheel.”

  He climbed out of the car, opened the trunk and took out a set of number plates. Jade watched while he swapped the plates onto the front and rear of the car and threw the origi-nals back into the trunk.

  Her palms were suddenly slick with sweat. Her mind was racing. It had been ten years since Robbie had held the wheel for her. Ten years since she’d leaned out of the passenger window and stared, with cold and merciless accuracy, down the barrel of her gun.

  She’d worked and traveled all over the world since then, always on the move, uneasy about spending time in any one place. She’d told herself she was running from Viljoen, that she wasn’t prepared to return to South Africa until he was freed. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps she was running from herself.

  “Well?” Robbie drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “You up for it? We’ve got to get going. Deadline’s in half an hour.”

  Jade didn’t reply. She was remembering how she had lined up the gun on her target. How she’d squeezed the trigger, her hand steady,
her finger caressing the cool metal, arms absorbing the recoil, sighting, firing again. How the shots had echoed off the buildings in the dark street.

  The second time, the third time, both deliberately wide. Winging him, only because the first head shot had been deadly accurate, and criminals who could shoot straight were rare. Why narrow the field of suspects? Let the police think it had been a random hit. A lucky bullet.

  How she’d been thrown forward as Robbie slammed on the brakes. She’d grabbed the dashboard, yelling at him. What was he doing? Why had he stopped? He’d jumped out and rifled through the dead guy’s pockets, his shadow looming over the body in the glow of the headlights, darkening the blood that had splashed crimson onto the pavement. “Gotta make it look authentic,” he’d told her, swinging into the driver’s seat with a bulging wallet in his hand. “Let’s get out before the cops arrive.”

  Jade shook her head to clear the memory. She’d done it once. She’d do it once more. But that was enough. Never again.

  “Well?” Robbie asked again, his voice sharp.

  Jade lifted her chin and stared him down. “No. I’m sorry, Robbie. I can’t do this with you.”

  He looked straight at her, eyes narrow and predatory in the leather-scented gloom.

  “Babe,” he said, “I’m going to make you change your mind.”

  15

  Before she could reply, Robbie pulled away from the curb and drove in silence, threading his way through the narrow winding roads, following a tortuous route that Jade couldn’t memorize. She’d told him no. He hadn’t accepted her answer. What was she going to do? Jump out of a moving car and try to find her way in late-night Pretoria with no phone and no money, and only an illegal gun for help?

  She waited, watching the road, forcing herself to stay relaxed, stay cool, and not betray her rising anxiousness. After a while, Robbie began to talk.

  “So this guy’s got a daughter. Sixteen years old, pretty girl, good grades. No problems till she goes to a nightclub and some asshole pushes a few grams of coke up her nose and takes her to a motel for a night of fun.”

  Robbie glanced at a street sign and turned onto a main road.

  “So now daddy’s little princess is hooked. Instead of writing her Matric exams she’s coke-whoring in Hillbrow, shacked up with a bunch of Nigerians. Then she climbs the ladder, meets a bigger supplier, moves in. He feeds her drugs, lets his friends play with her.” He accelerated through a traffic light as it turned red. Jade didn’t recognize any of the street signs, but she had a feeling they were heading south. Back towards the wealthy side of Pretoria.

  “So all’s well and good for her. Except one day,” Robbie snapped his fingers, “something clicks in Princess’s head and she runs away. Back home to Daddy, skinny as an Auschwitz prisoner and pregnant. So he gets her into rehab, sorts out the baby problem, and decides he’s going after the main man. Princess agrees to testify, the police make an arrest, and every-one’s looking forward to a day in court.”

  “Then what happened?” Jade asked, although with a sinking heart, she knew.

  Robbie grinned, without warmth. “What do you think? Princess is home alone one afternoon, and there’s a break-in. She gets five bullets in the chest. No key witness and, sur-prise, surprise, no case. There was a problem with it. Seems one of your friends in the police service didn’t follow correct protocol so the file got trashed.”

  Jade watched the streetlights flicker over the windshield. Who’d been paid to quash the case? She swallowed, trying to keep a check on her mounting anger.

  “So Daddy hired you?” she asked.

  Robbie shook his head. “Daddy’s dead.”

  Jade shivered. She’d been convinced that she wouldn’t change her mind, regardless of threats or blackmail, although she’d been expecting both from Robbie. She was back for one reason, to take care of Viljoen. That was where it began and ended. Her burden of guilt weighed heavy enough already.

  But the part of her that screamed with triumphant glee a decade ago, as she watched her victim slump onto the side-walk, justice finally done, shouted in outrage now. What had happened to this girl was wrong and foul and vicious. And she could help avenge it.

  Robbie’s latest mission echoed Jade’s own past. Was that why he’d known he could rely on her to help?

  “There’s a problem with the Viljoen case,” her father had told her when she arrived home one night during a February heatwave to find him hunched at his little desk surrounded by sheaves of papers and notes.

  He rubbed his eyes and closed his notebook. Two beetles buzzed and banged around the lamp, casting crazed shadows onto the wall.

  “Probably won’t sleep tonight at all.” When he looked at her, she saw the deep rings under his eyes. His lean face was lined with stress and his dull skin emphasized the grayness of his hair. At fifty-five, her father looked a decade older when he was worried or tired.

  “Anything I can do?” she asked. She was familiar with the Viljoen case. She had flown to the little town of Redcliff, north of Warmbaths, in a mosquito-sized airplane along with her father, to help him with the initial investigation.

  The Viljoen brothers were farmers and right-wing extrem-ists, desperate to fly the Afrikaner flag and overthrow the incipient threat of black empowerment. They had a history of violent treatment and intimidation of their African staff. One day, finding equipment missing from the shed, they had accused two of the workers at random and summarily fired them on the spot.

  Poor and shabbily dressed, the workers spoke very little Afrikaans. But they understood enough to know that their jobs were in jeopardy. Using the unfamiliar language of their employers, they attempted to defend themselves in halting and trembling speech. All they wanted to do was explain. But their defense became their sentence. The burly farmers were outraged that anyone would dare to question their judgment, especially two lowly black workers.

  The older Viljoen was a giant of a man with massive shoul-ders, a square beard and a mane of silver hair. His temper was legendary. He grabbed the offenders and bludgeoned them to the ground in a frenzy of rage. At first, his brother tried to stop him, but the older man shouted at him and hit him in the face with his rifle butt. Bleeding from the injury, the younger brother buckled down and helped him tie the workers’ legs together and fasten the ropes to the truck.

  Viljoen senior then drove across the property to the fenced-off series of ponds where the brothers were experimenting with their latest money-making scheme, crocodile farming.

  Behind the truck, the men shouted in anguish as their bodies were ripped raw and their heads and chests battered by the stony road.

  Their wives and children ran behind. The women screamed and begged, holding out their hands as they tried to keep pace with the cloud of dust and the dreadful thudding of the bodies in its center.

  At the crocodile enclosure, the Viljoens pushed open the gate that led to the biggest pond, the one where the adult breeders were kept. The three bulls and five females were sunning themselves on the opposite bank. Alerted by the noise of the gate, the crocodiles moved to the water’s edge and launched themselves into its fetid depths.

  Barking out instructions to his brother, Viljoen senior slashed through the ropes, and the two men dragged the workers, semiconscious and bleeding, through the gate and dumped them on a heavily stained concrete ledge. As the ripples grew larger and small waves began lapping against the edge of the pond, the brothers headed back outside and waited to see what was going to happen, rifles ready, just in case.

  The biggest of the crocodiles reached the ledge first. It gave one of the weakly struggling workers an experimental shove and then clamped its jaws around a leg.

  The pond was a churning mass of crimson by the time the families arrived, panicked and breathless, a couple of minutes later. One man had already been torn apart by four of the thrashing beasts. The other worker was trying to pull himself forward along the concrete ledge, clutching at the fence and screaming for help. But as
the families watched, another levi-athan surged out of the pond, tore him away from the metal rails and dragged him down under the water.

  One of the wives ran forward, shrieking in anguish, her skirt flapping, to try and fight her way into the enclosure. She never reached the gate. The elder brother raised his rifle and shot her in the chest. She was dead before her husband finally drowned.

  Before any whispers about this atrocity could reach sur-rounding farms, the Viljoen brothers fired all their workers, threatening them with a brutal fate if any of them dared to speak about what had happened. All the same, over time, word filtered out. Tracing and interviewing the witnesses was a lengthy process, because many of them were too terrified to say anything at all.

  Commissioner de Jong had never been worried about race, gender or any other factors that differentiated one suspect or witness from another. He was only concerned with the dogged pursuit of the truth. Gradually, his dour patience and kind manner reaped results and the Viljoen brothers were taken into custody and formally charged with murder.

  But now there were problems with the case. Standing in their little house on that hot February night, Jade was trou-bled by her father’s words.

  “What problems?” He might not be allowed to tell her, but if she never asked, she’d never know.

  “Sabotage. Two important reports are missing. Other evi-dence has also disappeared.”

  “Any suspects?” Jade pulled her T-shirt outwards to let some air circulate around her body. The house was stiflingly hot.

  For a while, she didn’t know if he was going to answer. Other than the persistent trilling of the crickets outside, there was only silence.

  Then he shook his head. “I can’t tell you, Jadey. It’s confi-dential. One way or another, it’s my job on the line. This is a high-profile case. If anything goes wrong, I take the fall and then I’m out. I’ve got to get the investigation back on track and prosecute the person responsible for the sabotage.”