Mixed Blood (13 page)

Burn drove the Jeep down to Sea Point, a grid of apartment blocks and office buildings that looked out over the Atlantic Ocean.

When Burn had seen Susan handling the photographs, he’d had to resist the impulse to grab them from her and wipe them free of her prints. Hell, her paranoia was getting to him. The cop looked like a moron. He’d been ordered to knock on a few doors, go through the motions. This was Cape Town, a dozen more people would die today; how much time was the cop going to waste on a couple of gangsters?

But what if he had lifted a print? Burn knew that Susan had been busted as a freshman at UCLA, smoking dope at a party. She’d told Burn the story soon after they met, laughing about being driven to Santa Monica in the back of a sheriff’s patrol car. Being booked. Kidding a cute-looking deputy about getting her good side when they took her mug shots. Flirting with him when he pressed her fingers down for the prints.

Burn remembered an irrational feeling of jealousy—about something that had happened three years before he met Susan. Now he couldn’t get the image of her hands black with fingerprint ink out of his mind …

A horn blared behind him. He was daydreaming at a green light. Burn pulled away, trying to calm himself. Even if Susan had been printed, where were those prints now? And how could some Cape Town cop get access to them?

Burn was on his way to a real estate office. The most important thing right now was to get out of that house. Being there reminded Susan of the dead men. It also made them a target for the fat cop.

He would relocate his family; then he would convince Susan about New Zealand. Once the baby had come.

Carmen Fortune almost gagged on the man’s dick. She tried to pull her head away, but it banged against the steering wheel. His calloused hands grabbed her by the hair and shoved the thing in deeper, like she was that sword swallower on the TV.

The day had started shit and got worse. The feeling of lightness and freedom that had come with the news of Rikki’s death evaporated when she couldn’t score a globe. There just wasn’t any money, now that Sheldon’s grant had disappeared.

She had done some casual hooking as a teenager, before she met Rikki. Most of her friends did it. It was an easy way to buy those designer jeans. But that was years ago.

So, when she caught the taxi to Voortrekker Road, she hadn’t known what to expect. She found a corner and stood there, eyeballing the passing motorists. It was payday, and she wasn’t ugly. Someone would stop. She knew it was a risk, hooking in daylight. She might have to blow a cop or two. But she couldn’t wait until dark. She needed to score. Bad. To get rid of that fucken scratchy feeling, like her nerves were on the outside of her skin.

A car pulled up. Nice new BMW. She stepped forward, ready with what she thought was a professional smile as she bent down at the driver’s window.

Her smile faded when she saw the Nigerian at the wheel. Before she could step back, the Nigerian grabbed her by the T-shirt and pulled her half into the car

“This is my territory, you understand? For me and my girls. I see you here again, I kill you.” To underscore his point, he swept aside his linen jacket and showed her the massive bloody gun in a shoulder holster.

She nodded, and he pushed her away, taking off fast, almost driving over her feet. Fucken Nigerians.

She went and hung around in the mall for a while. But she was going crazy, starting to scratch herself until she bled. So she went back to the road, a few blocks away from where the Nigerian confronted her, looking around nervously for his BMW.

She only had to wait a few minutes before a dented pickup truck pulled up next to her. The driver was colored, but dark. On the Flats, where the calibrations of color are precise, where the birth of a pale child is cause for celebration and women apply all manner of potions to their skin to lighten it, a dark skin is not a badge worn with pride.

Still, she went to the driver’s window. He wore a dirty juuit and smelled of sweat.

“How much for a blow?” he asked. Some of his teeth were missing.

“Hundred.” She doubled what she was intending to ask.

“Twenny-five.”

“Fifty.”

He grinned. “Fuck, you better suck like a vacuum for that.” But he reached across and opened the side door.

They drove down a side street, and he parked beside an open lot. He unzipped his jumpsuit and produced his pride and joy. It was massive, and it didn’t smell like roses.

Carmen took a condom out of her jeans and tore the wrapping open with her teeth. The man shook his head. “For fifty, no fucken rubber.”

“Listen, you think I’m going to put that filthy thing in my mouth without a plastic, you fucken crazy. Take it or leave it.”

He shrugged, and she tugged on the condom. Next thing she knew, he had her by the hair and was making her swallow the bloody thing.

Carmen was gagging, but she could hear that he was getting all excited. Now was the time. She knocked away his hands and came up for air.

“Why you stopping?”

“Just relax, speedy. Take your time.”

She pulled his jumpsuit down so that it bunched around his knees, then took the kitchen knife out of her jeans. She grabbed his dick with one hand and held the knife against the base with the other.

“Jesus, what you doing?” He stared at her. The thing in her hand was already starting to wilt, like a rubber snake.

“Get your wallet out and put it on my lap.”

“Fuck you!”

She gripped the softening dick and jammed the tip of the blade into his skin. He screamed.

“S’trues fuck, I’ll cut this thing off!” She jammed the knife in deep enough to draw blood.

“Okay. Okay.” He reached down into his pocket and came out with the wallet.

“Put it on my lap.”

He did as she ordered.

She kept the blade against his skin, freed her other hand, and opened the car door behind her. Then she grabbed the wallet and slid out backward. He tried to lunge at her but was held back by the jumpsuit around his knees.

“You fucken bitch, I’ll kill you!”

Carmen was running, out of the side street, back onto Voortrekker just in time to grab a minibus taxi as it was about to pull out.

The taxi wasn’t full, and she sat at the back, alone, catching her breath. She opened the wallet. Saw a picture of a smiling woman and a toddler. Bastard. She pulled out the money and tossed the wallet out the window. Three hundred.

That wasn’t going to last long.

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Berenice September fought panic as she followed Ronnie’s friend Cassiem across the veld. The afternoon sun blasted down on her, and sweat ran freely from her hair, down her face, pooling between her breasts.

The boy looked at her over his shoulder and stopped, seeing her red face and the blood on her legs where the thorns had torn her skin.

“Is Auntie all right?”

She wouldn’t allow herself to stop walking, because she knew if she did she would lose courage and turn back.

“Go, Cassiem. Take me there.”

Cassiem trudged on through the veld, the woman panting behind him.

Berenice had spent the day looking for Ronnie. She had gone to his school. He wasn’t there. She caught a taxi to the amusement arcade in Bellville, hoping for the first time ever that she would catch him cutting school. No sign of Ronnie.

After school she went to Cassiem’s house, two streets away from hers. Cassiem said he hadn’t seen Ronnie since yesterday. At first the boy denied all knowledge of the dead bodies. Only after Berenice had threatened to make trouble with his parents did he relent and tell her the truth. He had been with Ronnie when his friend had helped himself to the Nikes.

“I want you to take me there,” she told Cassiem.

“Why, Auntie? It’s horrible.”

“Because maybe Ronnie went back there.”

“But why, Auntie?”

She couldn’t answer the question. Just knew that she had to be taken to the bodies.

Cassiem walked through thick bush into a small clearing. He pointed toward a clump of thorns on the other side.

“It’s there.”

“Go on,” she ordered him.

The boy was reluctant. Berenice gave him a shove and he walked slowly forward.

Berenice caught the unmistakable smell of burned flesh. Then she saw a mound of something black, burned, unrecognizable.

Ronnie stopped. Berenice found the last of her courage and stepped forward.
Please, God
, she beseeched under her breath.

Berenice approached the bodies. It took her a few moments to make sense of what she was seeing. Two men, she assumed they were men, lying side by side, charred black. Then she made out a smaller form, somehow sprawled across them.

No features were recognizable. Blackened flesh burned off a skull. Scraps of cloth burned into the skin. Then she saw something that made her gasp.

Berenice fought back a wail and sank to her knees in the dirt, to get closer to the bodies, to see—
please, God
—that it wasn’t what she already knew it was. On the arm of the smallest body was a watch. A ridiculously large watch, way too big for the skinny wrist. The glass was shattered and the face was blackened and warped, but enough of it remained for hr to see the Caped Crusader.

Berenice lifted her face toward the blazing sun and let the wail break loose from her breast, screaming for God’s mercy.

C
HAPTER
12

Special Investigator Disaster Zondi sat in the interview room at Bellwood South Police HQ, waiting for Rudi Barnard, who was twenty minutes late. Zondi showed no sign of impatience or irritation. He spent the time rereading the file on Barnard. The file was as fat as the cop whose photograph stared up at him.

Disaster Zondi, despite the ridicule his name attracted, flat-out refused to change it. He wore the name, given to him by his illiterate Zulu parents, as a badge of pride. Every time he was mocked, it had made him stronger. Reminded him that he had dragged himself by his fingernails from a life of rural poverty and deprivation. He had won a bursary, earned a degree in criminology, and now answered only to the minister of safety and security. Few people laughed to his face now that power, like an invisible cloak, had settled upon him.

Rudi Barnard and Disaster Zondi were perfect opposites, book-ends in the struggle of good versus evil. Barnard was obese. Zondi was trim and athletic. Barnard believed in the power of God. Zondi believed in the power of Justice. Barnard was a glutton, a junk-food junkie. Zondi ate sparingly and was fastidious about what he consumed. Barnard had little interest in sex. Zondi was the owner of roiling passions that continually threatened to upset his equilibrium, but he suppressed and controlled them through sheer force of will.

The nearest Zondi got to a religious notion was the image he had of himself as an inquisitor, riding out through the battlefields of corruption in contemporary South Africa. There was one absolute about Zondi: he could not be bought. He had dealt with men in a much grander league than Rudi Barnard. Politicians and tycoons. He had been offered millions, which he had rejected without pause. He had been offered power and position. These held no appeal.

He had been offered women: wives, daughters, mistresses, the bodies of female miscreants themselves. These offers had been more difficult to resist. He had been forced to dig deep into his resolve. But he had stood firm. He had resisted.

Disaster Zondi believed that the police were the bulwark, the thin blue line that stood between society and anarchy. His mission in life was to weed out the bad cops merrily enriching themselves off the back of South Africa’s miracle of transformation.

Zondi was well aware that Rudi Barnard was a dinosaur who’d somehow managed to escape the ice age of apartheid’s end. He had carved out a fiefdom for himself here in Cape Town, murdering and extorting out on the lawless Cape Flats. It was extraordinary that he had got away with it as long as he had. Well, his time had come. Special Investigator Zondi was here to bring an end to the reign of Rudi Barnard.

The door opened, and the massively fat cop wheezed his way in. Zondi saw the little eyes, like cigarette burns in a pigskin sofa, scanning his dark features, white shirt, and Roberto Cavalli suit.

He saw that Barnard didn’t recognize him. Why would he? The last time Zondi had seen Barnard, through a veil of pain and blood, had been nearly twenty years ago. He had been just another faceless black kid.

Zondi rose and extended a perfectly manicured hand.

“Disaster Zondi,” he said.

They climbed onto the minibus taxi in Mowbray, two teenage girls crippled by skin-tight jeans, bumping past Benny Mongrel, taking the seat behind his. Their eyes widened at the sight of his nightmare of a face. As the taxi rattled away, they were whispering about him, sure that he couldn’t hear them over the racket.

But he could.

“You see his face?”

“Ja. It’s horrible!”

“Imagine waking up with that in the bed.”

“I would scream. Honest.”

“Think he got a wife?”

“If he do, she must be blind!”

They were giggling into their hands with false nails like claws.

Benny Mongrel wanted to turn and tell them that he didn’t need no mean-mouthed bitch of a wife. Scare the living shit out of them. But he did nothing, tuned them out.

Anyways, he’d had his fill of wives. In Pollsmoor Prison an officer in the 28s could take his pick. Benny Mongrel had walked among the newcomers, and when he saw a young body untouched by gang tattoos, he had pointed a finger.

The man would always follow.

Benny Mongrel would install the man in the bed beside him. He would give him protection and in return demand that his food was cooked, his clothes were washed and ironed, and his toenails clipped. And at night, in the crowded cell, Benny would lie face to face with the boy and bugger him.

The duties of a wife.

If you suggested that Benny Mongrel was homosexual, he would kill you. There were gay men in prison, outrageous queens who wore short T-shirts as dresses, grew their hair and rolled it in curlers, had lipstick and rouge smuggled in. These men—the prisoners called them
moffies
—were tolerated. They were amusing; they were part of the prison culture. But Benny Mongrel never went near them.

Benny Mongrel never kept a wife longer than a few weeks. There was never any question of intimacy. It was cold, brutal, and functional.

In the last few years he was in jail, Benny Mongrel had stopped taking wives. He had lost interest. He had no desire to touch or to be touched. He had lain alone in his bunk and tuned out the animal sounds of rape and lust.

It had meant nothing to him.

Now that he was out, the last thing on his mind was taking a woman. By force or otherwise. He saw the way they looked at him, like the little sluts sitting behind him in the taxi. Like he was a monster. He could take them at knifepoint, drag them into the bush by their hair, and have them. He had done it before. But he had no appetite for this any longer.

He had resigned himself to being a man alone.

Until he met Bessie.

To his surprise, he had found his still-point, a place of peace, with the old dog. Bessie was a constant. She was pleased to see him in the evening. She slept beside him, ate the food he gave her, and asked for nothing more. It was strange, but when he was with her he felt a different sense of himself. For the first time in his life, he could simply be.

Just two more days, and he could start the new life he had wanted since he got out of prison.

The taxi lurched to a halt in Salt River, and Benny Mongrel climbed out. It was a short walk to Sniper Security and the start of his shift.

The hot wind roared with a ferocity that got the nerves screaming like tight banjo strings. And the fires had started. A carelessly flicked cigarette, a spark, a shard of broken glass concentrating the sun onto the dry scrub—any of these was enough to get the mountain blazing.

Burn stood next to the plunge pool, watching as a helicopter hovered over the ocean, scooping water into the basket suspended beneath its fuselage. The chopper lifted, battling the weight of the water and the force of the wind, and passed almost directly over him. He watched as it banked over the fire that ate its way down Lion’s Head and released its load of water. Then, lighter, it flew down toward the ocean again.

Dark orange smoke blotted the setting sun, obscuring the top floor of the buildings in Sea Point.

Burn felt trapped.

The house on the mountain was like a magnet for Rudi Barnard. He couldn’t explain rationally why he was parked up the street from the American’s house, but he didn’t question the impulse. His hunches were usually right.

Barnard sat in his car watching the helicopter clatter over, so low that drops from the basket splattered his windshield. He finished the last drag of a cigarette and flicked the still smoking butt out into the street. Fuck it, he couldn’t give a shit if the whole bloody place burned to the ground.

His hemorrhoids were killing him, but his mind was on that monkey in a suit. Disaster Zondi. What a fucken name.

The face-to-face with Zondi had gone as Barnard’s intuition had warned. The darky had sat there and looked at Barnard like he was shit under his expensive shoe, tapping his fingers on the thick file that lay in front of him. The file that had Barnard’s name on it.

Zondi hadn’t confronted Barnard with anything, just said that he was under investigation. Called this a preliminary meeting. Said they would have some more face time. Used those words,
face time
. His voice, a kind of semi-American drawl, had grated on Barnard’s nerves like a hangnail on a blackboard.

He knew men like Zondi. Hell, he had spent a whole chunk of his life hunting, torturing, and killing them. Some had screamed like women, begged for their lives, but others had stared him down until death glassed their eyes over.

Zondi had that look. Like he wanted to take Rudi Barnard down and nothing would stop him. Least of all Barnard’s so-called superior officer.

Superintendent Peters was everything that Rudi Barnard hated. A half-breed who had benefited from affirmative action to pole-vault over the careers of more qualified white cops. A minor politician who wore a policeman’s uniform but wasn’t fit to direct traffic. A PR man whose tongue had grown permanently attached to the asses of his masters.

After the confrontation with Zondi, Barnard had gone straight to Peterson’s office. Barnard knew that his commanding officer was terrified of him. Barnard was a law unto himself, who kept his badge through cunning and manipulation. Those who could be bribed he bribed. Those who refused his bribes he intimidated. Over the years Barnard had built up a massive database of information about his fellow cops and his superiors. He knew who was crooked; he knew who had falsified arrests; he knew who was never booked for driving drunk; he knew who took favors from hookers; he knew who screwed brother officers’ wives.

As Barnard sat facing Peterson in the superintendent’s office at Bellwood South HQ, he was aware of the half-breed’s fear. The man had splashed himself with tons of aftershave, but he stank. Barnard, unaware or uncaring when it came to his own stench, was acutely attuned to others’.

Peterson, a happily married, churchgoing paragon of New South African virtue, had become involved with a much younger woman a few years back. Her husband was a scrap merchant who dabbled in stolen cars. Barnard knew for a fact that Peterson had planted stolen parts at the scrap yard and had used his influence to make sure that the man was sent away for a couple of years. The unfortunate bastard had died in prison, the victim of gang discipline.

Peterson knew that Barnard knew. Simple as that.

So Barnard wrote his own ticket, seldom bothering to come into headquarters. But today he was here for a purpose. He leaned in close to Peterson.

“I want this darky off my back.”

Peterson shook his head. “I have no jurisdiction here, Inspector.”

“You’re not hearing me, Peterson. Make the fucker go away.”

Peterson fidgeted with an expensive pen on his desk. “You have to believe that all of us are being kept out of this loop. It is being run by the ministry directly.”

“So, you’re saying it’s okay if he hangs me by my balls?”

Peterson shrugged. “I’m sorry. My hands are tied.”

Barnard nodded. He even tried a smile, which was terrifying to behold. “How’s your girlfriend?”