Piranha. Rudie van Rensburg

      

      RUDIE VAN RENSBURG

      PIRANHA

      Queillerie

      Prologue

      It had all begun with a line of white powder offered on a prostitute’s compact mirror in Hanoi.

      Barnie Wolhuter had been pissed on bia hoi beer and had long since lost his ability to think clearly. Under loud encouragement from Phan Can Dung, the diplomat, who’d been at least as drunk as Barnie, he’d grabbed the mirror from the woman and snorted the powder up his right nostril.

      And here he was now, tied up, naked and shivering in a small, dark storeroom. That single thoughtless deed had been the dawn of his own private hell on earth. Since then he’d lost everything: wife, child, house, money, dignity and, finally, his mind. The plan he’d cooked up to keep feeding the drug demon was the signature on his own death warrant.

      Not eight years ago he’d been riding the crest of a wave. He’d been out of the police force for two years and was revelling in his newly monied life: the Merc, the Newlands mansion, holidays in Mauritius, platinum credit card. Plus, a radiant wife and their first-born on its way. His struggling existence as a detective in the South African Police Service had been put to bed. He’d become a jetsetter. Exports. Easy work. And undemanding, mostly thanks to Phan Can Dung’s political connections and smooth talking.

      It had taken a while for Barnie to discover how naive he’d been. Stupid, frankly. Why would someone like Montgomery Smith pay an insignificant little ex-detective that much money to handle his company’s exports, to make sure things arrived safely in Hanoi and a number of other destinations in the East? And why did a Vietnamese diplomat have to keep the machinery well oiled behind the scenes if the exports were innocent African curios?

      A year into his new job, he’d accidentally come across an open crate at the company’s Cape Town warehouse and discovered what was being sent over with the masks, shields, spears, pots and carvings. Everything instantly came sharply into focus: he was African Curio’s frontman – and its fall guy. Montgomery Smith and Phan Can Dung’s influence stretched far and, when things went tits up, it would be his word against theirs.

      If only he’d buggered off then. He and his wife could have disappeared. He’d had enough money. But he’d been too proud to admit to her that he’d made a complete and utter ass of himself. In any case, he had no desire to return to his previous life of scrimping and saving.

      A few months later, he inhaled that line in Hanoi. It soon became a habit. How else to ease the stress? Told himself he could stop whenever he wanted to.

      But the cocaine didn’t want to let him go … eight grams, thousands of rands per night, every single night. Not even the enormous salary he was earning then was enough. He started selling things, eventually going as far as pawning the jewellery Maria had inherited. In the end, he’d had to downscale to the more affordable khat.

      But his appetite for drugs was so insatiable, it started swallowing everything. Maria kicked him out. At work things started going off the rails. He made little mistakes that pissed Smith off. Time was running out.

      The linings of his ragged life unravelled completely when he switched to tik a few months ago. ‘More bang for your bucks,’ his drug buddies assured him. Tik had turned him into a goddamn zombie. He couldn’t work any more. He went AWOL. Thought he could quietly slip away … go and die alone in a corner somewhere.

      But dying’s not that easy. His son made sure of that. It was for Fransie’s sake that he tried one last time to turn things around. He set himself up in a different area, with new friends. He thought he’d start again, at the bottom. Find work. Win back his loved ones’ trust.

      That never happened. Like his vagrant buddies, he used the money from selling copper pipes and scrap to feed his tik addiction. He scraped by from day to day, barely surviving. It was a living hell.

      He knew he couldn’t carry on like that. That was when he’d come up with the crappy plan that had backfired so spectacularly. And here he was now, awaiting his fate. Scared shitless.

      He didn’t know this place they’d brought him to this morning. It was somewhere on the R44, out towards Wellington. They’d turned off onto a gravel road and then into a tree-lined lane that led to an old house and a yard behind high electric fences and heavy security gates. He’d caught a very brief glimpse of his surroundings before they’d locked him up. It appeared to be a neglected smallholding with a few chunks of rusted machinery abandoned in hip-high grass around a big concrete dam. No sign of life.

      The storeroom was dirty and stuffy. Two oil drums were pushed into a corner and, strewn across the dusty stone floor, were nuts and bolts, the odd tool and filthy rags. A bluebottle buzzed against the tiny window. In spite of the stifling heat, Barnie’s body shook uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered.

      He heard footsteps on the gravel outside. His heart jumped. He could barely breathe.

      The zinc door scraped across the floor and Montgomery Smith walked in. Behind him, Graeme West, his personal little doormat, and – of course – Wolf Breede. He was the one who’d manhandled Barnie into the car in Cape Town earlier.

      Smith looked the same as ever, his lean body poured into a perfectly tailored suit and a crisp white shirt. Red silk tie. Shoes polished to a high shine. As though he was briefly stepping out of a boardroom meeting.

      He glared at Barnie. His cigar-yellowed teeth were bared behind thin lips pulled into a half grimace. It chilled Barnie. He’d seen that grimace before. It had a name: evil.

      Barnie began pleading pathetically: ‘Please, Mr Smith, please! Give me another chance. I didn’t mean what I said … I promise, I’ll never bother you again.’

      ‘No one blackmails me.’ Smith’s gaze was icy.

      Barnie turned desperately to West. ‘Mr West, I’m begging you. Spare my life.’

      It was pointless. West wouldn’t dare cross his boss. He looked at Barnie quietly, the tiniest trace of sympathy in his eyes. Which wasn’t much comfort.

      ‘Let’s finish this, Wolf,’ Smith said.

      Wolf untied the ropes around Barnie’s ankles and jerked him up by the shoulders. He was led out the door with his hands still tied behind his back, through the tall grass towards the concrete dam. Barnie began to cry. Were they going to drown him? Tears ran down his cheeks and down his neck.

      Wolf forced him up the dam’s concrete steps onto the wide wall. Then he pushed Barnie, without ceremony, into the dark water.

      Barnie gasped for breath. His feet couldn’t touch the bottom. He tread water, desperate.

      Montgomery Smith appeared on the dam wall beside Wolf. He lit a cigar. They watched the struggling man with blank expressions as he tried to keep his head above water.

      Barnie felt a burning pain on his right calf … then on his little finger, his left thigh, a big toe. He watched in horror as the water around him turned blood red.

      1

      17 July 2014

      Two muffled shots rang out almost simultaneously. The bull expelled a high, pained bellow before it fell on its side and then rolled onto its back, a leg jerking in the air. Blood bubbled from its nostrils.

      The cow moved too slowly to escape. She ploughed nose-first into the ground when the first bullet hit her. Her bellow was bloodcurdling. It was as bad as the sound a pig made when its throat was cut. Another bullet silenced her.

      Freedom motioned to his companions to spare the calf. ‘Waste of time. Too small,’ he whispered.

      They worked quickly. Freedom drove the knife expertly into the skin around the horn’s base, wiggled the blade underneath and, after a few minutes of accurate cutting, lifted it out. Fourteen minutes later they were all done.

      The calf stood a little way off, trampling the ground restlessly and whimpering. It was the sound Freedom’s