He’d known Billy Afrika back when he was still a cop, as close to Clyde Adams as a butt boil. Maggott had respected Captain Clyde Adams. Hoped that the older man would recognize him as a kindred spirit, take him under his wing. But instead Clyde groomed Barbie, putting the right words in the right ears, fast-tracking Billy Afrika from uniform to detective branch in record time.
And what thanks had he got?
The person Maggot really wanted to talk to—no, fuck talking, wanted to shove his Z88 down his throat until he got the truth—was Manson. Find out if Billy Afrika was connected to the death of the 26, Godwynn MacIntosh, and where the American blonde fit into all of this.
But Manson was protected. You couldn’t touch him. He was
part of a pipeline that pumped tik money straight into the pockets of police chiefs and local politicians.
So Maggott had to work with what was available to him.
He’d made a turn by Disco’s place. The piece of shit wasn’t in his
zozo
, and the fat landlady, who smelled like the fish sticks, said the tik head had been busy packing his things. Like he wanted to run.
Maggott looked through the grimy window of the
zozo
and saw a plastic bag lying on the floor, crammed with clothes. Told the fat bitch to call him when Disco came back.
“And what’s in it for me?” she asked.
“The usual. Fifty bucks,” he said.
“Make it a hundred, lovey. Airtime’s expensive.”
Maggott cursed under his breath as he handed over a banknote. There went his cigarette money for the week. He heard a laugh and looked across at Robbie, who sat in the dirt playing with the fat woman’s skinny little mongrel.
Maggott still hadn’t been able to get hold of his bitch wife. He couldn’t afford a babysitter. He was an orphan, and he’d cut all contact with the human wreckage his wife called family. So he had to keep the boy with him, sitting at his side as he drove down Main Road.
Maggot sneaked a look at the kid and wondered, as he always did, how he could have fathered something like this. Saw nothing of himself in the child. The way his wife put her plumbing around Paradise Park, this was probably some other fucker’s handiwork.
“I wanna doggy,” Robbie said.
“Ja? What kinda dog?”
“Like that one now.”
“That’s not a dog. That’s a rat.”
The boy was shaking his head vigorously. “No. It were a dog.”
“How you know?”
“I seen his balls.”
Maggott snorted. “And a rat don’t have no balls?”
“Not big ones.”
“I’ll tell your mommy, and she can get you a fucken dog.”
The boy looked at him suspiciously, used to promises that weren’t kept. “Ja?”
“Ja. You just be good today. Okay?”
The kid nodded. They pulled up at Doc’s. The hovel looking as if it was being slowly claimed by the dump looming behind. The place stank worse than ten tik whores in a shithouse.
“Wait here, I won’t be long,” Maggott said as he left the car. The kid started to moan, but Maggott was already walking away.
He banged on the door, finally got the old boozer to open up.
“What’s wrong now?” Doc said, bloodshot eye peering through the crack.
Maggott walked him backward into the pigsty. As always, the big-screen TV flickered with images of men in white, endlessly smacking a red ball to nowhere.
“What did Billy Afrika want here yesterday?”
“He popped in to say hullo. What of it?”
“I’m asking again: what the fuck did he want?”
“Nothing. Just a visit, for old time sake, like. Watched some cricket.”
Doc’s gaze was drawn to the screen, where a bowler was jumping in the air, being hugged by his teammates. Then his eyes flicked across to Robbie, who came walking in the front door, staring around at the squalor with interest.
“What’s that?” Doc asked.
“My boy. Don’t worry with him.” He saw Doc’s questioning look. “His bitch mother dumped him on me. You wanna babysit?”
“Not me. Closest I ever got to one of those was with a coat hanger.” Doc laughed.
Maggott didn’t. “Barbie, he score a gun by you?”
Doc shook his head. “No ways.”
Maggott pointed a finger at Robbie. “You sit your ass down and watch the cricket, hear me?”
The kid nodded, and Maggott took off toward the kitchen, Doc limping after him.
“Where you going now?”
The kitchen was as filthy as the rest of the house. Stove full of dirty pans, sink overflowing with scummy dishes. The room was dominated by the huge box freezer Doc had bought cheap from a fishmonger who went bust. There was still a peeling sticker on the side: SOMETHING FISHY.
Described Maggott’s morning.
He lifted the lid of the freezer and leaned inside. A putrid smell washed the room, competing with the stink from the dump. Doc was plucking at Maggott’s shirt with soft, palsied fingers.
“Hey, what you doing?”
Maggott lifted out a black garbage bag. He took it across to the table, untied the knot at the top, and shook out a human arm, severed above the elbow. A black man’s arm. Frozen. It clanged when it hit the tabletop.
“Tell me what Billy Afrika wanted, or I phone the
Sun
. You know how they love shit like this.”
For sure it would make the front page—six-inch headlines and lurid color photographs—and send Doc’s body parts suppliers running.
The drunk shook his fuzzy head, wheezing.
Maggott caught a movement and saw Robbie standing in the doorway, staring at the arm. Fascinated.
“Don’t you got ears? I told you to fucken watch the cricket. Now go!”
Robbie took one last look, then fled. Maggott had his cell phone out, scrolling for a number.
Doc held up a shaking hand. “Okay, okay. Slow down to a panic. Ja, listen, I gave Barbie a Glock 17.”
“He say why he wanted it?”
“No.”
Maggott pocketed his phone. “You know where he’s staying at?”
“No. Never said nothing.”
Maggott stared Doc down, saw he’d squeezed all he could out of the old boozer.
“You see Billy Afrika again, you tell him I’m looking for him.”
Maggott headed toward the front door, grabbing a handful of his son’s T-shirt on the way out. The kid was stroking the fur growing on a long-forgotten plate of food like it was a pussycat.
A
S BILLY RAN, THE GLOCK AT HIS HIP RUBBED UP AGAINST HIS SCAR tissue, and he knew he would have a blister by the time they got back to the house in Bantry Bay. Doc’s service hadn’t run to holsters, so Billy had to improvise. Took the money belt he used in Iraq and tied it tight around his waist, hidden by his sweatpants and T-shirt. Shoved the Glock underneath the belt, against his skin. Not ideal, but the best he could do. No way he was going out into the world without a gun.
Roxy spoke without breaking stride. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Fucked if he was going to let her know he was suffering.
“Tell me if I’m pushing you too hard.” Her voice was easy, no strain. A trace of amusement.
Billy’s reply was to accelerate, trying to run his way through the pain. She cruised up next to him, matching him stride for stride.
He’d expected a short jog, the kind of thing these women did to con themselves into believing they were working out, but she’d surprised him. She hit the bricks hard, wearing her sweat-stained clothes the way she must have worn designer outfits on the ramp. No denying it, she was good-looking. Beautiful, even. And he’d seen too much of her body in the night. Pushed the image away.
Jesus, she was his asset. A piece of meat he needed to keep alive until he got his money. That’s all. Switched his thoughts from her body to his own.
As a kid Billy had been a pretty useful sprinter—needed to be where he’d grown up—but these days he worked out in private. So he wasn’t running fit, and by the time they reached the oceanfront his leg muscles were tight, and a stitch stabbed him beneath the rib cage.
He tried to breathe his way through it.
Billy heard the music first, the frenetic, banjo-driven sound of the Cape Flats. Then he saw a group of men in bright satin costumes, face paint, boaters and top hats, playing to a small crowd on the sidewalk beside the ocean. They finished the song to halfhearted applause. One man removed his boater and used it to collect small change, before they struck up another tune.
“What are these guys all about?” Roxy stopped, not even breathing hard.
“It’s a big thing this time of year. Minstrels,” Billy said. “There are thousands of them out on the Flats, and they have competitions, parades. Used to be called the Coon Carnival, but that’s not PC no more.”
“They look like Uncle Toms in blackface.”
“Ja. There’s a connection. Listen to what they’re singing.” Playing out the moment, giving himself time to breathe the pain away.
She tried to catch the words. “Something about Ali Baba?”
He laughed. “Close.
Allie—bama
. Alabama.”
“As in the state?”
Shook his head. “No, some American warship docked here hundred and something years ago. During your Civil War. There were black minstrels on board, so people say. And the whole look, the costumes and all, kind of became a big tradition.”
The banjos were at one another like fighting cocks, and Billy caught the dust in his throat as he ran next to the minstrels in a Paradise Park street, ten years old, letting the music and bright colors and dancing men transport him away from the ghetto apartment that stank of white pipes and his mother’s juices.
He came back to the now with Roxy staring at him, jogging on the spot, blonde ponytail swinging. “Guess you grew up with this stuff?”
He nodded. “Ja. Some of my mother’s clients were minstrels.”
“What did your mother do?”
“She was a whore.” Trying to shock her.
Roxy stopped jogging and gave him a cool look. “At least she got paid for it. Mine gave it away for free.”
She laughed. So did he.
“Where’s she now, your mother?” Roxy asked.
“Dead.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not. And yours? Dead too?”
“No, worse. Living in Daytona Beach, Florida, with a taxidermist, last I heard.”
She started running again, waited for him to catch up, and increased her speed. They ran on past the swimming pool, heading toward the lighthouse. The pain under his rib was like a hot blade, and his calf muscles were starting to scream. He saw her sneaking a look his way, amusement in her blue eyes. He pushed himself harder, deep into the pain. Pain he could understand. Pain he could trust.
They were nearing Rocklands Beach. A crowd of people stood up at the railing, staring down at the sand. The beach was
enclosed by crime scene tape, buzzing in the breeze, cops keeping the suntanned rubberneckers back.
Billy slowed. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll go find out what’s the story.”
Glad for the chance to suck air.
ROXY WATCHED HIM walk toward the uniformed cops. She knew he’d been struggling. That scar tissue must itch and burn like hell, and she’d seen him adjusting the pistol at his hip. Roxy had taken pleasure in his discomfort. Knowing she was pushing him. Wanting to pierce that bubble of cool. The certainty that he could invade her world and she had to keep her mouth shut.
Billy Afrika was different from most men she’d met. Men who saw her and immediately wanted her. Or what their limited imaginations told them she was. A beautiful canvas for them to project their fantasies onto. For nearly twenty years she’d populated her life with the Joe Palmers and Dick Richardsons of the world. Men with money, always older, using the lure of their wealth to have her on their arms and in their beds.
But Billy Afrika hadn’t given a damn. He hadn’t come on to her; no reflex calculation of her
fuckability
—as Joe used to say—appeared in his eyes when he looked at her. All he wanted was his money. When he’d told her he knew she’d killed Joe, he hadn’t blinked. The needle hadn’t moved. He’d stayed cool, detached.
She saw him over there, talking to a couple of brown cops. The three of them laughing as they looked over the railing at the beach below.
Roxy felt a sudden primitive dread, the fine down on the back of her neck rising like antennae. She turned to see the homeless black woman from the day before, standing with her shopping cart under a stick of a tree, watching her. Roxy tried to stare her down, but the woman’s eyes didn’t shift.
She’s just a crazy woman with a pimped cart, Roxy told herself. But it was creepy the way those eyes seemed to skewer her.
“There’s been a murder.”
Roxy turned, relieved to see Billy walking back toward her.
“What happened?”
He shrugged, half laughed. “Listen, I know this is gonna sound like one of those jokes, but there’s a blonde down there. Without a head.”