Chapter 29

From along the street Lindy spied a man and woman walking towards the Wimpy. And for a second, with the dipping sun reflecting off a shop front and silhouetting them, she thought the woman might be Charlotte. But it wasn’t her. The couple entered the restaurant and looked around, and to Lindy’s surprise, came right over and sat at her table. Lindy was stunned.

“Are you Stefan’s people?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” replied the man in Afrikaans, pulling out a chair and taking a seat.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” asked Lindy.

“A woman paid us two hundred rand each to come in here and sit with you for five minutes – you’re not some weirdo without any friends are you? We just figured five minutes here in the Wimpy was worth the money. Unless you want to talk to us about religion.”

The man looked around for the waitress, caught her eye and ordered the all-day On The Go breakfast, then looked over to the woman with him. She was still reading the menu.

“Give me a minute,” she said. “Wait, I know ... No ... Everything has eggs with it. What can I swap for the eggs?”

The waitress listed just about everything on the menu in her strong Xhosa accent.

“Banana, bacon, cheese, hash browns, sausage, beef steak – even yoghurt.”

“Yoghurt? I can’t have yoghurt and toast.”

“The choice is up to you.”

Lindy just sat in amazement as this conversation went on. Who were these people?

It was while the waitress was listing all the beverages on the menu and fielding questions from the woman that the two men sitting across the room stood up and walked over to their table.

“You’ll all have to come with us,” said the man in the brown suit, interrupting the waitress and surreptitiously revealing a gun beneath his jacket.

Across the street in a travel agency with a magazine held up in front of her face, Charlotte watched the events unfold.

“Shit, shit, shit!” she whispered. “Eugene was right. It was a bloody trap.”

She watched as the two men escorted her sister and the two strangers she’d paid out onto the street. The men threatened them with guns and directed them to walk along the pavement while the strangers protested, no doubt telling the men that some woman had paid them to sit at that table. Thankfully, the men would hear nothing of it. Charlotte left the travel agency and followed the group along the road.

They walked for some time and eventually turned into a side street. Charlotte crossed the road and followed them. It led into an all-but-empty parking lot. A dilapidated caravan was parked in the far corner, and beyond the lot fence was an unkempt plot with building rubble and rusted pipes dumped on it.

Charlotte stopped and peered around the entrance to the parking area. The men were now waving their guns more freely than they had done on the street, and even from this distance Charlotte noticed the long, thick-barrel nozzles. Silencers. These mad space agents were going to execute her sister in a filthy, weed-ridden parking lot.

What to do? What to do?

A rusted pole from a car-smashed street sign lay on the ground at her feet. She picked it up and tiptoed out into the tarred lot. The men were facing away from her – one was on the phone finalising orders, the other had his gun aimed at Lindy’s forehead. She saw Charlotte but her face showed no emotion.

Charlotte figured she’d get one good swipe in. She’d make sure it was a solid hit. Then she’d go for the second man, though she was sure that she’d get a bullet in her stomach for her trouble.

She crept closer.

“Yes sir, the one we followed from Kimberley. She met up with a man and a woman in the Wimpy here. We have them. Do you want a Code Black?”

Closer now, stepping gently on the tar – careful to avoid stones and bottle caps.

“No sir. We have no way of positively identifying the man and the woman. But it happened as you said.”

Almost there now, Charlotte gripped the pole tightly. Her arms were weak with nerves.

“If we do the Code Black we can id them later. They just won’t be so belligerent ... Yes sir.”

Charlotte’s foot brushed a shard of glass. Clink. The two men turned. She swung her weapon with all of her strength. The rusty pole smashed into the black cellphone held against the man’s head, so that it splintered into shards of circuit boards and buttons and screen glass. Charlotte felt the crack of splintering bone as well and the man fell sideways, his feet lifted from the tar by the impact. Charlotte raised the pole again, flinching in anticipation of the gunshot from the second man.

Crack! The sound echoed around the parking lot, scaring a dozen nesting pigeons into the air. Charlotte collapsed. But she wasn’t hit. She searched her shirt for blood. There was none.

The agent with the gun stood motionless, his face shocked into an unnatural contortion of wonder and anger and disbelief. Around his shiny black shoes was a swelling pool of blood. Then he fell first to his knees and then backward onto the tar, staring madly at the empty sky as though what had just befallen him was unjust, as though the universe had tricked him. His pay cheque, and therefore his stillborn career as a poet, was not a fair exchange for his life. He wanted to do it over. He wanted to be content behind a desk in an insurance firm. Jammed photocopiers. Artificial light. Even indoor pot-plant leaf cleaners. But instead, his leaking blood had attracted flies – and one, seeking moisture in the desert, sat on his unblinking eyeball. The huge, hairy underside of it was the last thing he saw before the blackness of death.

Charlotte looked around to see who’d shot him. Standing behind her was Eugene – still pointing his gun at the fallen man. And behind Eugene was a man in shorts and slops with an orange beard and eyes as wide as his gaping mouth.