D
ISCO WAS THE KING OF PARADISE PARK.
Living the dream, driving the Benz convertible and listening to West Coast rap on the radio, still buzzing nicely from the pipe he’d made before he went to the airport.
Fucken amazing how things can change in an hour or two,
he thought, filled with tik-fueled optimism. Now all he had to do was to figure out which button to press to send the Benz’s roof back.
Disco had washed the puke off the Diesels, pulled on a hoodie to cover him nicely—despite the heat—and made quick down to Popeye, looking over his shoulder for the men with guns he knew were coming. He found the dealer in his trailer, lying on a stained mattress with a couple of girls in school uniform, tik smoke curling from their mouths, their legs flopped open like rubber chickens.
Popeye had mocked Disco, being the Man in front of the jailbait, but he’d craved those Diesels a long time now. Disco swapped them for two straws—fucken rip-off—and made a pipe
right there in the trailer, his hands shaking so much he battled to feed the tube. His teeth tapped against the glass like dead men’s fingers when he brought the pipe to his mouth. The girls laughed at him, but their skirts rode higher on their puppy fat thighs, and he could have screwed them both for the price of a couple of puffs.
The last thing on his mind, as he set fire to the tik.
Then the smoke was in his lungs, and the spiders were a memory. Even Gloria Gaynor had shut her trap.
Disco took it careful, watching his ass as he hurried across White City. He had to travel six blocks to get to the apartment Goddy was living in when he died. Crashing with his auntie and his cousins.
The girl with the harelip opened the door to him, mouth pulled nearly to her nostril, exposing her teeth in a permanent snarl. She was alone in the apartment, which was good. And he knew she had the hots for him. So he played her a bit, nice and relaxed after the pipe, making her laugh behind the hand she used to cover her deformity.
She wasn’t so bad-looking when you couldn’t see that mouth, and she had nice little titties jiggling under her T-shirt. He felt the tik sending that warm glow to his balls, and for a moment he considered giving her one, doggy-style, so he wouldn’t have to see her face.
Definitely no blow job, though.
But then he remembered Manson, and a flash of Goddy’s bloody head came to him.
He was here for a reason, and it wasn’t this snarling girl’s snatch.
Disco got her to show him Goddy’s stuff: a bag lying next to the torn sofa he had slept on. The cousins had already helped themselves to anything of value. All the bag contained were a few pairs of dirty briefs and Goddy’s
Lifeguard
T-shirt, stinking of his sweat. Nothing else.
Despite the tik, Disco felt terror gnawing like drain rats at his innards.
Then the girl, still scheming she might get lucky, took him to a bedroom, a narrow piss-stinky cell, and showed him a Checker’s plastic bag she had hidden under the mattress of the bed she shared with her brother and sister. Said she’d seen Goddy stuffing it behind the wall unit that held the TV and the stereo in the sitting room.
Disco opened the plastic and found a bank baggie of the weed Goddy liked to smoke and—
thank you, sweet baby Jesus
—the keys to the Benz they’d jacked and the ticket from an automated parking machine. Disco saw CAPE TOWN INTERNATIONAL printed on the front. He flipped the ticket and could just make out Goddy’s scrawl in red ballpoint: T30. The bay number. Goddy knowing he couldn’t trust his tik-fried memory.
Better than a winning Lotto ticket right now.
The girl was lying back on the bed, ready for her reward, but he was out of there—not even thanking her. She stared after him, seeing her afternoon of nice times disappearing with Disco.
He cut through the dump to get to the airport. Stink didn’t bother him. Smelled like home. Disco had grown up with jets screaming low overhead, shaking his mother’s apartment like aftershocks.
Half hour later he was walking across the open-air parking lot at the airport: endless rows of cars crouched under little tents of shade cloth. Plenty of luxury models, some of them left there for days while their owners flew off to places Disco would never go. He found bay T30. And there it was: the Benz.
Disco checked around to see that he wasn’t being watched. A whitey in a suit wheeled his case away from an Audi higher up in the row, all his attention on the phone in his hand as he scrolled for text messages.
Disco saw the turn signals flash and heard the familiar tweet as he used the button on the key to open the Benz. He slid inside,
settled back on the cool leather, and started the car, feeling that nice, low rumble of the V8. Then he remembered he first had to take the parking ticket to one of the auto-pay stations outside the airport building. He killed the engine.
Fuck it.
He had no cash. Not a cent.
He opened the glove box and rooted inside. Got lucky. His fingers found a few hundred bucks in notes shoved under a pile of CDs and a packet of Stuyvesant. For once, things were going Disco’s way. With this cash he could pay for the parking, score some more tik, and even get his mommy’s picture back from the fat bitch.
He walked over and fed cash into the machine, and it spat back the stamped ticket. As he drove the Benz through the exit boom, Disco switched on the radio, quickly moved from a news bulletin—a second blondie had lost her head in Sea Point—and got tuned to Bush Radio. Nice pumping hip hop taking him out onto the road back to White City.
While he was trying to figure out how to open the Benz’s top, he caught the smell of that other blondie, the American one, a trace of her perfume still hanging in the car. The same scent he’d caught the day he and Goddy had gunpointed her. Maybe he’d still see her sometime. He knew she wanted him.
But first he had to see Manson. Take him this Benz and swap it for his life.
ROXY WALKED DOWN the stairs carrying a small Louis Vuitton suitcase. The house was full of people tagging furniture and the trash Joe had thought was art. A flabby man in low-slung jeans that showed his butt crack wandered around with a clipboard, taking notes. He lifted a bronze figure of a many-armed Hindu god, one of Roxy’s few additions to the interior of the house.
“What would you call this?” Speaking to a woman with a mustache.
“I’d call it fucken ugly.”
They both laughed. The butch woman looked up at Roxy, unembarrassed. Like she enjoyed putting this fancy American bitch in her place.
If ever there was a time to practice detachment, it was now.
The tough part had been leaving the pink room. The idea of a child, the dream of something good—something positive—had somehow remained in the air of that room.
Time to move on.
Roxy walked out the front door into the sun, too hot in her black dress. She saw Billy Afrika’s white car was gone, and she felt about as alone as she ever had. Had to stop for a second and work with her breath, consciously calming herself, facing down the wave of panic that threatened to engulf her, willing it to drain slowly away.
She had no friends in Cape Town. When she first arrived she’d hung out with other models, but they’d bored her. The endless talk of diets and designer labels and Brazilian waxes. After she married Joe and stopped working, she’d lost touch with them. Joe had a few friends, men in their fifties with wives who were beating back middle-age with Botox and scalpels. The women had closed ranks against the trophy wife—their greatest fear made flesh.
So, nobody to turn to for a bed and a DVD chick flick and a glass of white wine.
Roxy’s credit card was useless, but she had a little cash in her purse, enough for a cab and night at a cheap hotel. Her wedding band had to be worth something. She’d take it down to the Waterfront tomorrow and sell it for what she could get.
And then? Who knew?
She set the case down and extended the handle that allowed her to wheel it out to the street, past the police vans, castors clacking over the bricks still stained with Joe Palmer’s blood. She felt a sense of lightness after the panic. Realized how much
she hated this ridiculous house perched on the cliff, defying gravity and good taste. It was pure Joe, and she was glad to see the back of it.
She walked toward the cab she’d called, a small blue car idling at the curb.
Then she saw the pink bear staring at her through the side window. The driver’s door opened, and the pimply-faced cop stood up out of the car. She was about to wheel her suitcase past him, when he put a hand on her arm.
“I need to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Palmer.”
“This isn’t a good time.”
“Where’s Billy Afrika?”
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“Beats me. Gone where people like him go, doing what people like him do.”
She was wheeling again, but he still had her by the arm, holding on. Tight.
“Take your hand off me.”
“I need to talk to you.”
She shook free. “I’ve just buried my husband, and you people have grabbed everything I own. So, much as I’d love to hang out and chat, I think we should reschedule, okay?”
Roxy saw his face redden, the acne in violent bloom. A quick-tempered man running hot. He boiled.
“Roxanne Palmer, I’m arresting you for the murder of Joseph James Palmer.”
She almost laughed. This couldn’t be happening, could it? But it was. The zit-ridden little man was reading Roxy her rights. And those handcuffs she’d imagined the day of the lineup became real as he took her wrists and clicked the cold steel closed.
D
ISCO CRUISED THE BENZ THROUGH DARK CITY, THEN CROSSED Main Road into White City, heard the whistles of the punks who propped up the graffiti-scarred walls and junction boxes, some selling tik, others selling their sisters. Or their daughters. Heard that wet sucking sound, the mating call of the street girls on the Flats, tongues bulging through missing front teeth.
Teeth that were pulled to give better head.
Disco didn’t look right or left, just rode low at the wheel of the Benz, his tattooed arm lying on the top of the door like a painted snake, leaving a V8 growl and some Ludacris hanging on the thick air as he passed.
He was about to turn onto Lilac Road and drive up to Manson’s place, but at the last second he put foot and headed for his
zozo
. He wanted his mommy’s picture back, all of the morning’s nightmare memories washed clean away by the tik. Then he wanted to score another straw from Popeye, so by the time he
reached Manson he was surfing a wave of cool, calm, and fucken collected.
He eased the Benz past the rusted gates that hung crooked on their posts outside the fat woman’s house. Couldn’t wait to see the look on that ugly face when she cracked the drapes and saw him in these wheels. But the drapes stayed shut.
Disco vaulted out of the Benz and headed toward the backyard, ready to hammer hard on the bitch’s kitchen door.
An image stopped him. A flashback through the tik haze. The fat white guy locking a small silver case into the trunk of the Benz the night of the hijack. Goddy wouldn’t have seen, he’d been under the dash, hot-wiring the car. So the case would still be there. In the trunk. And who knew what was inside? Maybe his run of good luck was going to continue.
Disco was about to turn back to the Benz when he saw something else: his landlady’s skinny dog, lying sleeping on its side, a black silhouette on the white sand beneath the sagging washing line. But it wasn’t sleeping. Not with its insides trailing red and wet and glistening away from its body.
As the wind blew hot air onto the damp shirt that clung to Disco’s back, he heard a muffled smack. Turned and saw the kitchen door creak open on the breeze, then swing closed as a draft from inside the house caught it. It stopped against the thick brown leg that jutted out of the kitchen doorway, the sole of the bare foot smeared with blood. Blood that was still bright and fresh. The door yawned lazily open, revealing the fat woman lying on her back, with her guts spilling out onto the linoleum floor.
Then Disco heard the door of his
zozo
open.
Manson’s guys. They’d come for him.
Disco turned toward his hut, hands in the air, shit-eating smile in place. Ready to say, “Hey, it’s cool, my brothers. We can sort this, okay?”
But he stopped. Mouth gaping.
And it was Piper, leaning against the doorjamb—Okapi knife dangling nice and casual from his bloody right hand—who spoke.
“I come to take you home.”
DRIVING.
Through the endless smear of poverty. Desperation seemed to drag the phone wires lower and soak the flaking walls of the small houses. Roxy in the back of the car, feeling pretty sad herself, watching the Cape Flats pass her by. A beautiful blonde murderess in a black Nina Ricci and handcuffs. A long way from the catwalks of Milan and Paris on spring evenings.
Even South Florida seemed like a fond memory now.
The cop drove, puffing on endless cigarettes. The boy sat beside him, keeping up a constant, unanswered, babble of chatter. Incomprehensible to Roxy.
When they had driven away from Bantry Bay, she’d felt stupid and numb. Then it occurred to her to ask Maggott where he was taking her. He’d looked at her in the rearview and asked a question by way of reply: “Hear you were a model?”
“Yes. A long time ago.”
“A person can see it. You look very pretty in that dress. Pity you done such a ugly thing, hey?”
He’d fallen silent, driving onto the freeway and then into this windswept maze of small houses and open lots, littered with the carcasses of wrecked cars. Roxy found herself staring at the back of his neck, at the ripe pimples between his collar and the tight curl of his hair. Remembered her old model’s trick—used many a panicky night before a fashion shoot—of smearing a dab of toothpaste onto a zit to dry it out.
Jesus, this guy would need a couple of tubes
…
The kid was looking at her through the gap between the front seats. “Are you gonna come with us to the Spur?”
She shook her head. “No, Robbie. I don’t think so.”
“But it’s my
birfday
. And they give you a cake and sing ‘Happy
Birfday
’ and
everyfing
.”
The cop took the boy’s head in his hand and swiveled it so he faced forward. “Leave the lady alone, Robbie. She got other plans for tonight.”
She saw Maggott’s dark eyes in the mirror, pinning her. Roxy had to grab the front seat to steady herself as he sped into a turn. Something clattered at her feet, and she looked down and saw the porcelain head of the figurine she’d given the child. No sign of the body, just the head rolling as the car cornered.
Roxy trapped the head under her shoe. The Malay girl smiled up at her.
PAIN. ALL TOO familiar. Pain that tore deep into Disco’s innards, making him feel as if the next thrust would split him open like a peach.
Piper above him, eyes closed, the dripping black teardrops so close that he inhaled his rapist’s sour breath, felt the rasp of his beard. Disco watched as a drop of sweat swelled from Piper’s nose, dangling for a moment before it splashed hot and wet onto his cheek.
Mixed with his own, real, tears.
It was always face-to-face with Piper. The way a man made love to his wife. None of this rear-entry stuff. That was for rabbits,
mof fies
. Call Piper a
mof fie
, and you were dead.
Dead like Disco would have been if he had refused Piper.
Disco looked past Piper’s thrusting torso at the empty nail where his mommy’s picture had hung. Glad she wasn’t here to see what her son had become.
Piper’s eyes were still closed in ecstasy as he rammed himself into Disco, repeatedly, endlessly. Like back in Pollsmoor when Piper had ridden him for hours at a stretch, staying hard and ready from the tik.
Then the eyes flicked open. Black eyes, flecked with reddish brown streaks, like blood clotting on an oil-stained rag.
Terrifying eyes. Made even more terrifying by the mad love Disco saw shining from them.
BILLY AFRIKA STOPPED the rental Hyundai outside Popeye’s trailer.
He sat in the car for a while, getting focused, the Glock in his hand.
It was as quiet as this corner of Paradise Park, White City side, ever got. Friday afternoon, before the schools released those kids who’d bothered to attend. The housewives had taken their gossip inside, away from the dry heat that burned your lungs worse than smoke.
Even the jobless men who usually draped the street corners, swapping hard-luck stories and cigarette butts, were absent. The disabled ones—missing limbs, or eyes, or lungs, or reason—went to collect their handouts this time Friday, ready to drink the money dry by Sunday.
It was as if Paradise Park was pausing.
Once the sun slumped behind the thick layer of khaki smog that strangled the Flats, the boomboxes would crank out hip hop, and the cars without mufflers—chopped low enough to spark on the pavement—would own the streets. Gunshots would roll like thunder, the emergency rooms running red with Friday-night blood. But now it was quiet.
Billy sat for a while, getting his head straight. Finding the zone. He knew what he was about to do was crazy. But crazy was all he had.
He left the car, climbed two steps and filled the open doorway of the merchant’s rusted trailer. Popeye lay on his back on the filthy mattress, wearing only a pair of stained boxers. He was alone, and he was asleep, ribs like the pleats of an accordion jutting from his fleshless chest as he snored.
A tik pipe sat on the floor beside the coffee mug that served as an ashtray. A used condom, trailing slime like a slug, lay curled where it had been tossed. Popeye had been entertaining.
Billy stepped forward and stood over the dealer. A meat fly nibbled on a tik sore at the corner of Popeye’s mouth. Billy knelt and waved the fly away with the barrel of the Glock. It rose slowly, fat and reluctant, and droned its way over to the condom.
Popeye’s mouth sagged open in his sleep, tendrils of slime joining his lips like sutures in a badly stitched wound. Billy slid the Glock barrel between the lips. One of the dealer’s eyes flicked open. The other eye, infected and weeping pus, was glued closed.
But that one eye saw enough and threatened to bulge out of its socket.
Popeye hadn’t got his name from eating spinach.
AS HE TURNED onto Protea Street, Ernie Maggott’s eyes moved to the mirror, taking another look at the blonde in the rear. What was it with some people that no matter how much shit they were in, they still looked cool and composed? And fucken beautiful, he had to admit.
Like something out of one of those shiny magazines his bitch wife used to waste his money on. Paging through them while she lay on the bed smoking Rothmans Special Mild and eating fat-cakes, licking her greasy fingers, reading out loud about Britney and J.Lo and Paris like they were her buddies from the meat factory.
His wife had her charms—he still found himself dreaming of her on the long, parched nights—but this woman was from another universe.
Maggott knew he had done a crazy thing, arresting the blonde. Even though his intuition told him she was guilty as hell. He’d lost it, back there on the mountain. Acted on impulse, had her in
the car with the cuffs on before he knew what he was doing. He had nothing. All he could hope to do was scare a confession out of her.
But, Christ, this wasn’t some tik monster from Dark City who he could smack around until she cracked. She was an American citizen. The fucken papers would swarm all over this like tapeworms on shit. If he fucked this up, he’d be pulling the graveyard shift over in the squatter camps until he got his pension.
If the darkies didn’t kill him for his sidearm first.
His only lifeline was the missed call he’d seen on his phone when he got back into the car after cuffing the blonde. From Disco’s fat landlady. No message, just her number. He’d called a few times as he drove, but she hadn’t answered. He had to believe that Disco was home. The tattooed punk was his last hope. Pick him up, put him in the car with the blonde. Scare one of them into talking.
Approaching the fat woman’s house, Maggott found himself doing something he hadn’t done since he was Robbie’s age: he was praying. And his prayers were answered.
As he pulled up outside the house, he had to laugh. It was a sign, by God, that he’d been right: the jacked Benz—as out of place in White City as the blonde in the rear—was parked in the driveway.
Maggot went around to the back of the Ford and unlocked the cuff from the American woman’s right wrist. Then he looped it around the handgrip above the rear window and locked it again. He cracked the window an inch to give her some air.
“Just got me an errand to run, Mrs. Palmer. Won’t be long.”
Robbie was opening his door, wrestling himself and the stupid fucken pink bear out. Maggott shoved both of them back in and closed the door.
“You wait here, Robbie.”
“I wanna come
wiff
. See the doggie.”
Maggott leaned into the window and prodded the kid in the chest. “Any more shit from you, and no Spur tonight, understand?”
The boy’s bottom lip was wobbling and tears weren’t far away, but he nodded his head and sniffed.
Maggott hitched up his jeans and walked up the driveway. He edged past the Benz, running a finger across the hood. Warm. Checked out the interior of the car. No wires dangling from the steering column. Meant Disco had the keys. Nice and neat.
Maggott walked around to the backyard.
He saw the dead dog first. Heard the soft thud of the kitchen door behind him.
When he saw the gutted woman he reached for his Z88. First he had to unclip the strap on the police-issue holster at his hip. By the time he had the weapon in his hand, Piper had already severed the left ventricle of Maggott’s heart and was raising the blade for the next strike.
Maggott got off one shot that flew over the roof of Disco’s
zozo
; then he took the knife in the chest again. The ground beneath his feet tilted, and he fell back onto the white sand, pistol bouncing out of his hand.