Clay scanned the street both ways. There was no sign of Zuz. He took the stairs four at a time, burst out onto the street. He ran to the bakery, walked inside, through into the back-room darkness and the heat of the wood-fired ovens.
A heavy-set man in an apron glanced at his stump, brushed flour from his arms. His skin shone red with sweat. ‘You look for a girl?’ he said.
Clay nodded, relief pouring through him.
‘A man take her. White man.’ The baker raised a floured hand to his face and twisted his nose to one side. ‘He say you meet him at the boat.’
Relief congealed into dread. He shouldn’t have left her. The Boer must have been following them, watching them, just like Zuz had said.
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘Just this. Meet him at the boat.’
A kilometre and a half into town. Four and a half down the road, another kilometre and a half through the scrubland to the beach. Full-out run: twenty-six minutes. Too long. Winded after.
‘Do you have a car?’
The baker looked him up and down.
‘I can pay.’
‘A motorcycle.’
Soon they were flying along the coast road, south towards Stone Town, Clay riding pillion, clouds darkening the sky. The temperature had dropped. Rain was coming. Flour streamed from the baker’s arms and hair. At the giant baobab garage, Clay tapped the baker on the shoulder. He slowed and pulled to the side of the road. Clay pushed a fifty-dollar note into his hand.
‘Geraldine’s daughter’s little one?’ he said.
Clay nodded.
‘I thought.’ He pushed back the note. ‘I should have…’
Clay fended away the baker’s hand and started towards the coast at a run. As he reached the trees the first raindrops touched his face, pattered against the leaves. He kept going. Moments later, the clouds opened. Rain lashed his eyes, soaked his clothes, poured from the tips of his fingers. He’d been stupid. He was stupid. He’d always been stupid. At every point in his life, when choices had been offered, where courses of action, various and consequential, had been available, somehow he’d managed to pick the wrong one. Zuz had been right. They’d been waiting. And he’d obliged, come right to them. And he knew, as he ran through the scrub towards the beach, the wind and rain coming harder now, ripping through the palm fronds, shredding a hail of husk and leaf and branch from the canopy, that Zuz was of little importance to these people, and that if she wasn’t already dead, she would be soon. And even before he’d completed the thought he had already started to reproach himself for it; in its very nascence he could see the proof of his callousness and he hated himself for it.
As the sea appeared through the trees, he slowed. Flame was there, beyond the reef, where he’d left her, just visible through the downpour. She’d swung around to landward, head to the storm coming in from the ocean, across the island. As he neared the beach, he could see the dinghy, still where he’d left it, tied to the same tree. He crouched behind the trunk of a palm and pulled the binoculars from his pack, focused out across the rain-swept water.
The first thing he noticed was the boom, swung abeam as if in a following wind so that the leach end hung out over the water. Suspended from it, hanging from a rope, was a dark bundle. Clay wiped the lenses, refocused through the slanting rain. The bundle was tied and appeared to be weighted with chain and anchor. As the rain relented a little, details appeared. Arms. A face. A swinging ponytail. Clay’s heart valves tripped. It was Zuz.
Clay lowered the binoculars, scanned the beach left and right, tried to breathe. The coast appeared deserted. Flame swung at anchor as the storm passed over, Zuz hanging there over the water. Then, slowly, as Flame’s bow came around, the nose of another craft appeared. Clay raised the binoculars. The other boat had been tied alongside, and the two craft spun across the rain-pelted surface together, thunder exploding in the distance. As more of the boat came into view, he could see the stripe along its hull, the v-shaped windscreen. It was the jet boat Big J and Dreadlock had used before. Two black men huddled under a tarpaulin in the open cockpit. Clay shook the rain from his hair, tried again to wipe the lenses, scanned Flame bow to stern. The Boer was nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly, the wind veered hard, gusted. Flame jerked on her rode, swung hard so that Zuz dipped momentarily and the anchor touched the water, dragging her feet down into the water in a white wake. Then Flame righted and she was jerked clear of the surface. The jet boat was now in full view, tied amidships. The rain was coming hard again, pelting across Flame’s deck, ripping through the palms all around him. He had to go.
He replaced the binoculars in his pack, checked the G21, thrust it into his waistband and started towards the dinghy. They wanted him. That was the message. If he gave himself up, she might yet live.
He was a few steps from the beach when, above the screaming barrage of the storm, he heard a shout. He crouched, reached for the Glock, spun towards the sound, narrowed his eyes in the rain.
Again, a voice raised above the storm. ‘Straker. Stay where you are.’
Clay raised his weapon. ‘Let her go,’ he shouted into the rain.
‘Lower you weapon, Straker.’
‘Tell them to let her go. Then we talk.’
A figure emerged from the scrub. ‘It’s me, Straker. For Christ’s sake, put that thing away.’
Clay peered through the rain.
The figure moved closer. A big man, the shoulders broad and powerful, arms like hawsepipe.
It was Crowbar.