“Just look at that!” Nozipho grumbled. “It’s ruined.”
The tear was at the tightest spot. Nozipho’s slip now peeked through, but if she carried her purse just right, no one would notice it.
“Only whites run around like this,” she said, turning away slightly.
Thembinkosi could tell she was close to tears. Nozipho was always cool, methodical. Together they had robbed from both the rich and the not-so-rich for four years now. She was always up to the challenge and had always stayed composed.
“Wait!” he said, while at the same moment he managed to pull the body the rest of the way out of the chest. Only the shoulders were still resting on the edge. One last effort, a pull, and her head hit the garage floor. It sounded like a piece of china with a crack in it.
Nozipho screamed and now started to sob.
Thembinkosi dropped the corpse’s legs and took his wife into his arms. “Strange day!” he said.
“Shitty day!” she shot back. “I don’t want to do these crappy role-playing games anymore. I want to break in like I learned it from you. Grab the stuff and disappear. Secretly, as it’s supposed to be.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe we need to change our strategy a little.”
They kissed, and then looked back in the freezer. Spinach. Pizza. Shrimp in clear plastic boxes. Meat of all kinds. They glanced at each other. Nozipho was the first one to start laughing. “Corpse on a bed of spinach!” she said, drying her tears.
“White people are cannibals!” Thembinkosi added, snorting with laughter.
They hugged each other again. Kissed.
“I love you,” Thembinkosi said.
“I love you, too,” Nozipho said.
They stayed with their arms around each other for a few more seconds. “We have to get out of here!” Nozipho insisted.
“You’re right! But I still want to see what she has on her.”
Thembinkosi bent down, and for the first time, he examined the body closely. Facial bruising. She’d been hit. Or did that come from the deep freezing? A wound in her hair. She hadn’t been all that old. It was hard to tell when it came to age. However, Ma Jordan, who lived next door to his sister, was 65, and she was clearly older than the woman lying at his feet. She would never get to be 65. Her hair was gray, her face somehow… He thought she looked surprised, but chose not to say anything about it. The bright t-shirt and denim shorts screamed free time, her feet were bare. Thembinkosi flipped over the body. Reached into her back pocket and pulled out an ID.
“Celeste Rubin,” he said again. “She’s 57.” The photo was a few years old. Thembinkosi felt around the other pocket. Empty. “Let’s put her back in.”
“I can’t,” Nozipho declared. “The dress won’t make it.”
“True.”
He turned Celeste onto her back, then he reached under her armpits and slowly straightened up. A person like this is heavy, he thought. And this person was really cold, too. Much colder than she had been just a few minutes ago. He lifted the body over the edge of the freezer and released it. The containers of frozen food clattered.
Thembinkosi shut the chest. “Or would you like to take the shrimp with us? You love them.”
“But not frozen ones. Idiot!” Nozipho reminded him. She was holding the door open that led from the garage to the house.
38
Moses jumped down the last few steps to the lounge. He lost his footing on a runner that lay in his path. He quickly scrambled to his feet as he heard footsteps on the floor above. Also the couple’s voices, but he couldn’t understand anything they were saying. All he had to do was push open the terrace door. Out and back in the direction from which he’d come. Just had to make sure to not get any further away from the exit.
Rapidly cleared the hedges and walls. The other guy wouldn’t run after him. Moses had seen the condition he’d been in. Around the corner in the outer wall and right on going. Another jump, solid landing, keep running. All of a sudden, the man in the rugby shirt was standing in front of him. He wasn’t fit or all that fast, at least he didn’t look like it. But he was standing in his way. Moses knocked him down. And got caught. The sharks guy was clinging to him. He had wrapped his arms around both of Moses’ legs.
“We know what you did!” he cried.
Moses tried to kick free, but in vain. The other man had strong arms.
“You won’t get out of here!” the rugby man said as his breath grew shorter.
But the kicking still wasn’t helping. Moses swung at the man’s head. First with his hand, then with his fist. The man clutched at his head with one hand, trying to protect it. As he did that, he tightened his grip with the other hand. Moses was still lying half on top of him. Kick harder, break his grip. He was slowly gaining more maneuvering room. Moses only needed a second. He stretched out his right leg and then brought his knee up hard. It landed in the middle of the rugby man’s face.
He hollered in pain.
Then, there was another voice.
“Help!” a woman screamed. “He’s killing him! Hellllllp!”
Moses had already freed himself by the time the woman who had come out of the house nailed him with a plastic chair in his lower back. Keep running, he told himself.
But instead he stayed where he was and tried to deflect the next blow. Pulling back his arm, he slapped the woman hard across the face. As his body twisted with the momentum, he heard more than saw her glasses land somewhere. By the time Moses tightened his muscles for the next jump, the woman had begun to cry.
39
“They’re still standing there,” Thembinkosi said.
“More keep coming,” Nozipho added. “They’re going to a lot of trouble. How many do you think there are?”
“By this point? I’ve seen about fifteen of them. Maybe more.”
“And then there’s the ones you probably haven’t seen. Shit.”
“But why are they standing around here of all places?”
“I was wondering that, too,” Nozipho agreed. Outside, the older white man had gathered several uniformed guards around him. He was giving orders. “I think this has to be the central street through the gated community.”
“I’d stay up at the exit.”
“Another group is probably already set up there.”
“And you think the rest of them are staying around here because this is the main street.”
“Can you think of any other reason?”
“Shit,” Thembinkosi said. “Then it’s a good thing we did that with the clothes.”
“What should we do? Head straight for the exit?”
“Straight for the exit.”
“Now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And if something goes wrong?”
“What could go wrong?”
Nozipho had to think about this for a second. “Well… If the security people know this area, they might know that we don’t live here.”
“So? We could be visiting.”
“But what if they know that these people…” Nozipho hesitated. “Look around. They don’t have any black friends!”
“Fine. Then we’re business partners.”
“And what kind of business are these people in?”
Thembinkosi considered this for a moment. “We might be buying a car from them.”
“Okay,” Nozipho concurred. “We could be doing that. It might work.”
“Regardless, we won’t have to justify anything. We’re simply two people who have walked out of this house and want to go somewhere else. For example, to the exit.”
“But if we just bought a car from them… Why are we walking?”
40
Gerrit van Lange stood on the street that ran through the center of the gated community and thought about the fact he was slowly getting too old for situations like this. Not because he couldn’t get the upper hand anymore. He was an old hat at this, experienced in the struggles for physical safety and undamaged property. He had been through more than enough of these stories. But what could he do? He was still a few years away from retirement. And he had no training to do anything except the job he currently had. Security. When you managed a security company, you couldn’t simply retrain for something else.