Paul swung the Toyota round a corner too fast. The tyres wailed and skidded. The black bags in the back seat, heavy with cash, rolled sideways and thudded against the door. In the cubbyhole where he’d thrown it, he could hear the strongroom key sliding and rattling as he drove.
It had all gone wrong. At the last minute, all of his carefully laid plans had fallen into disarray, like tenpins hit by a perfect strike in a bowling alley. Now he was driving away alone, with no clue what to do next, no idea at all.
God, he was a bastard. Why had he done what he did?
Tayla Anderson. She’d fascinated him ever since he’d first met her when she’d snuck into an over-21s nightclub at the age of eighteen. He’d sold her some coke, they’d shared a couple of lines. Spent the night dancing, spent the next day in bed.
They’d had a casual relationship for a few years, then it had started getting more serious. Soon after that, he’d broken it off. Why had he done that? He’d made up an excuse at the time. She’d flirted with another guy, she’d pissed him off by saying something out of line. He couldn’t remember what he’d accused her of and in any case, it wasn’t true. The woman had started to get under his skin, that was the reality. He was thinking about her far too often, and it was worrying him. It was a weakness.
So he’d called it off, just to see if he was strong enough to do it.
Then the little bitch had driven off in hysterics, wrapped her car around a tree, and been taken to hospital in an ambulance by his brother.
She couldn’t have known who Nick was to begin with. He’d wondered what she’d thought when she’d found out that the paramedic who attended to her after her accident was the brother of the ex-boyfriend who’d just broken up with her so callously. At any rate, she’d been smart enough not to tell Nick that she knew Paul.
Had she fallen for Nick? The question had always haunted Paul. Had she really fallen for him, or had she dated him because she’d just been dumped, and married him soon afterwards to spite Paul?
He didn’t know. Now he’d never know. The marriage hadn’t lasted, that was for sure. Hopefully he’d played a part in that. He’d taken up with Tayla again soon after her wedding because he couldn’t keep away. He’d still had feelings for her, and, as he found out when he made a surprise visit to the house one night while her good husband Nick was at work, she still had feelings for him, too. Passionate ones, as he had discovered.
Paul gritted his teeth. He pulled away fast from a traffic light a moment before it turned green, hearing the car’s engine roar in protest.
The strongroom key rattled in the cubbyhole. Rattle, rattle, rattle.
Tayla Anderson had stuck by him. When the investigation into Stronghold started and he knew he was going to end up seeing his arse in prison, she’d stuck by him.
She’d stuck by him just before his final sentencing, on the night when the three gang members whose names he’d given to the police – Vusi Ncube and the Botopela twins – had broken into Nick’s house when Paul was there with Tayla to try to murder him.
After the cops bust their cash-heist operation, those three had switched to house robberies. It wasn’t making them the same money and they were angry about that, but that wasn’t why they’d followed Paul and broken in on a night they’d known he’d be there. They did that because Paul had sold them out to the cops and they were now wanted criminals.
What else could he have done? He’d received a lighter sentence in exchange for those three names. He hadn’t wanted to betray his fellow gang members, but he’d given the cops the names of the three he’d considered the least useful. They would have done the same to him, he knew that. And besides, he hated prison. It was a terrible place. He’d have done anything to reduce his sentence.
He’d rather die than go back there again.
After the shooting, Paul had dragged the bodies down to his car – in those days, he’d driven a massive BMW. He’d been able to fit the bodies of the twins into the boot and he’d planned to put the other man and the boy in the back seat, which Tayla had helped him line with bin bags. She’d been crying, hysterical. She’d refused to help him with anything else, so he’d done it all. Wrapped the bodies in more bin bags, mopped the blood off the tiles and picked up the cartridge casings. Apart from the one that he couldn’t find anywhere.
He’d been on his final trip down from the bedroom when he’d realised that the little black boy who he had thought was lying dead on the rug in the lounge had disappeared. Damn him to hell.
Paul swerved, cutting in front of another motorist, ignoring her enraged hooting. How could that stringy youngster have escaped him – not once, but twice?
He should have died the first time, but he hadn’t. And there hadn’t been time to look for him. For all he knew, the boy could have escaped in a getaway vehicle. He’d had to leave it, forget about it, time had not been on his side. Clearing up the scene, he’d stuffed the rug in the washing machine, put it on a cold cycle to get the blood out and taken the bodies to a good hiding place he’d discovered near Pretoria West.
The same place where he’d dumped Abraham Jonas a few nights before.
Earlier that evening, at Rhythm Town, Jonas had told him his girlfriend Natasha had been asking questions on behalf of a friend. Questions about Vusi’s disappearance. Apparently, Natasha’s friend thought that Paul had something to do with it.
Jonas had regarded Paul with suspicion while he’d told him this. None of the other gang members knew what Paul had done to Vusi and the Botopela twins, but Paul had realised that Jonas was guessing now. Guessing fast.
So Jonas had had to go, and immediately. Paul had intended to keep him alive a little longer so that he could help him organise the cash heist, but he’d realised that if he was clever he could work around this.
First, Paul had found out who was asking the questions. It was a young guy called Khani, who Natasha had helped to get a job at the club. Khani had been on his trail courtesy of Sipho, the stringy youth who’d survived Paul’s bullets.
Paul had arranged for the other gang members to stage an armed robbery and take Khani out, and when Jonas had left the club, he’d followed him.
Jonas had soon picked up on what was going on and shot off in his souped-up Subaru with Natasha. Paul had followed him in the crappy Toyota, its engine howling, doing his damnedest to keep up.
He’d almost lost them when Jonas had crashed. His speed had been his undoing. Paul had caught up a minute or so later and had almost driven over Jonas’s body, which was lying right in the middle of the road. Paul had picked up the corpse, stashed it in his boot and made a run for it. He’d sorted Natasha out later in the hospital.
The next day, Paul had told the other gang members that Jonas was laying low, preparing for the diamond heist, and they’d believed him. They’d had no idea that Paul would ensure that they too would be ‘laying low’ by the time the Stronghold Security chopper had to make its emergency landing.
After all, twenty million divided by eleven was less than two million each. Chicken feed. An insult when you considered the risks.
Twenty million divided by one was twenty million. There was an added bonus – dead men couldn’t make deals with the police.
Nick had inadvertently disposed of three of the gang in Louis Trichardt, which Paul had been fairly confident his little brother would manage to do. He’d asked Tayla to plant the tracking device in Nick’s car, but hadn’t told her why. Then he’d ordered the guys to follow Nick and get rid of him.
If Nick got the better of them it would be no harm done – Paul had thought he’d had enough time to make other plans. In the end, it hadn’t worked out that way. Time had run out, Nick had survived Louis Trichardt, and when the gangly man and his accomplice had broken into his Lonehill townhouse complex late the following night, he hadn’t been home.
By then Paul had already had the stroke of luck that he’d known could deliver Nick straight into his hands – the men who’d gone to grab Sipho had also come back with his brother’s dark-haired girlfriend.
Until Sipho had somehow escaped from the boot of his car, Paul had been sure he was going to get out of this scot-free. None of the evidence pointed to him. He couldn’t be directly implicated in any of the killings and he had no connection with Rhythm Town. It was, in name at least, owned by Tayla Anderson’s company, Townside Administration.
And Tayla Anderson was supposed to disappear, presumed dead, after a terrible explosion in the strongroom at the security firm blew everybody inside to bits.
Now, thanks to his actions, she really would be dead after that blast took place.
Paul leaned on his hooter and swerved into the next lane.
He’d blown a gasket back at Stronghold when he’d opened the Toyota’s boot and seen he was one vital body down. He knew he should have killed his two prisoners before transporting them to Stronghold, but he’d wanted to keep the woman alive so that she could call Nick to come and rescue her. Knowing that he’d need her full cooperation, he’d decided to leave the black boy unharmed too, and to threaten to hurt him badly if she refused to make the call. In retrospect, that had been a stupid mistake. He hadn’t made many, but you didn’t need to make many in order for an operation to fail.
He’d raged into the strongroom, grabbed the cash, used the access keys to open one of the other boxes and set the timer on the Pentolite booster inside. The cashboxes that Stronghold had picked up from Rhythm Town had been tightly packed with Anfex. A metal cashbox was the ideal container, because there was no way to break it open and disable the timer once the lock was snapped shut. That idea had been a stroke of genius, one of the parts of the operation he’d most enjoyed.
He’d stashed the money in the car and then sprinted like a madman through the building searching for the little black bastard, but he was nowhere to be found. He’d whacked the unsuspecting radio operator on the head and dragged him down to the strongroom, and he’d put Nick’s girlfriend in there, too.
Tayla had started screaming at him, asking what the problem was, and he’d told her. The problem was that his escapee was a witness. He could identify Paul, for this and the other crime. Worse still, he would be able to alert the cops, which meant they needed to get out of there in a hurry. His carefully laid plans were completely screwed, just because he’d wanted to wait at Stronghold a little longer.
‘Wait? What do you want to wait for?’ she’d asked.
‘For Nick to arrive,’ he’d told her. He hadn’t meant to, but in his rage it had just slipped out. ‘He’s going in the strongroom with your friend from the control room and that dark-haired bitch.’
Tayla had started to cry. He could have slapped her. Why did she always cry at times like these?
‘Nick isn’t going to come,’ she told him. ‘I made sure he couldn’t get to Sandton in time. I put one of those Pentolite boosters under his car’s bonnet while he was in my house this morning, the way you showed me how to do if you wanted to disable a vehicle. I knew you wanted to kill him. He told me this morning what was happening. I didn’t want him to be here,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t want him to be hurt. He’s done nothing wrong. Leave my husband out of it.’
My husband.
That had done it for Paul.
‘Nick’s your bloody ex,’ he’d shouted, and punched her in the face.
Then, before he could think about what he was doing, he’d hauled her over to the strongroom too, and flung her inside.
He’d had one last desperate search for the boy before returning to the car. Which was where he’d found the Indian man, that same smug auditor who’d helped land him in prison after he’d discovered the fraud being committed at Stronghold.
When he’d shoved the Indian man into the strongroom with the others he should have let Tayla out right then and there. Taken her with him like he’d planned, but she was flat on the floor, screaming hysterically, acting so pathetically weak, and that he couldn’t handle. It had only fuelled his fury. Instead, he’d just driven away without her, watching the seconds tick past until he knew for sure that too much time had elapsed, that he couldn’t get back in time to free her before the explosives detonated, even if he’d wanted to.
At that exact moment, bitter remorse crushed him like a lead weight.
God, he was a failure. He really had intended to take her with him. The plan had been for both of them to lay low for a while, each hiding away from the cops. He’d be questioned by the detectives, he was certain of that, but he knew the evidence against him would prove insubstantial. He’d have no direct connection to any of the crimes, and he’d look like a poor guy. See the old banger of a car I’m driving, he’d say. No, he hadn’t stolen any money.
He’d planned to get Tayla a new identity and set them up somewhere nice, buy a big house on the coast and a fast car. Retire, gamble, live the good life.
He could still do that, but now he’d be doing it alone.
He remembered how she’d looked as he’d walked up the stairs. Lovely, excited, alive. Tayla had trusted him.
‘Oh, sod it.’
The Toyota’s brakes wailed as Paul skidded to a long, slaloming halt. He rammed the car into reverse and swung round. He had less than ten minutes left, but if he drove like hell he was sure he could make it. He was going back to get her out.
As he accelerated away, he heard the wail of a police siren behind him. Shit. The cops had spotted him, and now they were on his tail.