Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

weights in now. Got some heavy metal coming in to set into the concrete.” He indicated the forklift he was sitting in to show how this would be achieved.

The operators looked unimpressed, but they moved on to their cranes. The Marie Antoinette was now only a hundred metres from the edge of the quay and closing fast. The activity on the ground was building to a state of frenetic panic. Fat-Boy and I watched as the ship floated smoothly towards us, the hundreds of lights making it look like a floating city block. Crew members were moving along the decks and preparing their ropes, standing beside the cotton reel shaped winches.

“It’s not going to stop,” said Fat-Boy, and indeed the alarming way in which the ship was looming above us made it look as if the pilot had misjudged. But the propellers started churning up the water, and the approach slowed. A man threw a thin rope onto the quay where it was caught casually by a dockworker, who pulled it quickly and hauled up the attached heavy loop of rope as thick as the crane operator’s arm which was being rolled out from a mechanical winch on deck. Two more dockworkers joined the man in lifting the loop over a bollard on the quay’s edge, and the winch operator slowed the release of the rope. It tightened, and the crew moved on to repeat the process further down.

“Looks like our ship has sailed into harbour,” said Fat-Boy. “Our little soldiers have arrived.”

“We’d better get back to the warehouse,” I said. “At the speed this thing travels we’ll need the head start.”

Our crate was placed in the seventh position in row H. It was unloaded about halfway through the full load, and by then the warehouse had been converted from an echoing slab of concrete into a miniature city of stacked boxes with neat alleyways and officious men in helmets and clipboards showing the flat-bed trucks where to offload, while complaining into their radios that the boxes didn’t fit into the spaces they were meant to. Fat-Boy and I had been trundling up and down the alleys in our forklift as if we were engaged in some important work, and keeping out of sight of the operations staff. We hadn’t even spotted Chandler or Robyn who were masquerading as customs inspectors, which bothered me. Fat-Boy confirmed the stencilled manifest numbers, although the custom crate with the stickers declaring its live animal content was easy enough to identify. We waited until the next couple of positions were filled to provide us with some cover. As soon as the truck that had positioned a crate in the ninth position had turned, beeped, and left us in a cloud of exhaust fumes, we set to work.

Row H was a neat line of flat-bed trailers, uncoupled from their engine cabs but pointing towards the immense sliding doors as if they were lined up for the start of a race. The doors were closed now, but Fat-Boy and I approached from the far side because we didn’t want to be exposed to whoever might be on the other side of the doors when they opened.

Fat-Boy used the crowbar to rip open the structural beams, and we pulled the panel clear to reveal the narrow boxes hidden there. Fat-Boy’s lazy eye jumped slightly, and I was tempted to shout out loud with relief, but this was when we had to move fast. We would have only a few minutes to extract the two cases with the gold. We undid the latches that looked as if they held the sides of the crate onto the beams, but which actually ensured that our gold hadn’t slipped free en route. I could hear the gruff snuffling breath of a lion as it sniffed at us, and I pulled back instinctively. Fat-Boy’s eyes widened, but then he stuck his tongue between his teeth and chewed on it as he manoeuvred the forklift around to get the prongs under the first of our cases. It looked tiny compared to the scale of the other crates and containers that were filling the warehouse, and I worried again that it would be too obvious. It was very clearly a custom-built box.

Fat-Boy had the first baby box out in the open corridor and was getting the prongs of the forklift under the second when a voice called out over the echoing cacophony of the warehouse.

“No, you don’t,” called the voice. “Oh no, you don’t.”

I kept my head down but moved my eyes to look up at the man striding down the alley towards us, just in case he was someone who might recognise me. He wasn’t. Four and a half feet, excessively muscled, pockmarked skin and chewing gum so that his jaw muscles bulged rhythmically. He had a clipboard in his hand, which he was waving at me as if trying to flag down a moving vehicle. There was no danger of him recognising me, but a chill passed down my spine as I saw a cluster of men in the distance. They were dressed in khaki uniforms like overgrown boy scouts. An assortment of weapons were slung over their shoulders as if they were about to go on a hunting trip. In the centre of the group I made out the blond hair of Hendrik van Rensburg, radiating a sense of entitlement mingled with anger. The White Africans were a hundred metres away, and they might struggle to see past my helmet and overalls, but the combination of a pale-faced dockworker with a larger than average black man unloading unusually shaped boxes would cause problems. Where were Chandler and Robyn? Why hadn’t they blocked them?

“Don’t turn around,” I called out to Fat-Boy, and his eyes rolled towards me and showed their whites.

“There a problem?” I said to the clipboard waver, keeping him between me and the White Africans.

“Yes, there’s a problem,” said the man with the clipboard. “You cannot be dropping