The last thing he saw were those black teardrops as Piper came in, slicing him open from pubes to sternum, saving the pathologist the trouble.
ROXY HAD TRIED, over the years, to meditate.
Her roommate in Milan, a towering Australian—all diphthongs and bushfire hair—had folded herself into lotus every morning, closed her eyes, and stared at her third eye for an hour.
She’d shown Roxy the basics. Roxy was naturally supple, so lotus came easy. The tough part was stilling her mind, keeping her thoughts from magpieying from one thing to another. The Aussie girl had taught her to count her breaths, to help keep
her mind quiet. And that had made it a little easier. But still a battle.
“That’s the challenge, Rox,” the Aussie had said. “Finding the calm in your storm.”
Through the years she’d tried to build a meditation practice. But it had never taken. Now, handcuffed to a cop car out in the middle of an African ghetto, she may just have got it right.
As soon as the cop walked away, some children who were playing nearby—kids a little older than Robbie—were attracted by Roxy’s blonde hair. They came up to her window.
One of them laughed. “Hey, she in a handcuff.”
Another pressed a snot-caked nose to the glass. “Hey, missus, what you done?”
The third, a girl with the face of an old woman, shook her head. “No, man. It got to be a movie.”
A boy shoved the girl aside. “And where’s then the fucken camera?”
The kids interrogated Robbie in Afrikaans, and Roxy closed her eyes and started breathing. Counting her breaths until she got to five. Then starting again. Tuning out the heat and the gabbling kids. Tuning out the handcuffs and the rising cramp in her cuffed arm. Slowly starting to detach herself from the nightmare.
Or maybe she was just calling denial by a fancy name. Shutting down, pulling back, the way she’d done as a kid when the bad things happened. Like she was looking down at herself.
That was okay, too.
She’d completed two sets of breath cycles when she heard the pistol firing.
Knew it was close by. Roxy opened her eyes, felt the calm and serenity leaking from her. The kids scattered like pigeons from birdshot, disappearing down the street.
Robbie was staring at her between the seats, hugging his bear.
Roxy saw drapes twitch in the house opposite. Nobody came out. A movement on the sidewalk to her left. She turned. Screamed.
A man, tattoos swarming across his naked torso, tore the car door open. Grabbed her by the hair and pulled her toward a knife blade aflame with sunlight.
She saw black teardrops etched into his face. And she felt the blade pierce the skin of her throat.
T
HUMP. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Popeye’s shaved head drummed against the bottom of the glove box as another spasm of terror shook him. The dealer was folded into the hollow beneath the dash of the Hyundai, skinny arms wrapping his legs, leaking nose squashed up against his knees.
Billy sat behind the wheel, watching the tik house, feeling salt sweat tracing the landscape of puckered scar tissue on his chest and back. Burning like a bastard.
A chopped Beemer, sporting fat tires and mags, bodywork sprayed a backyard shade of blue, was parked outside the house. As he’d slowed the rental car half a block back, Billy had seen two guys—probably still in their teens—leave the BMW and slope into the house. The designer wear that hung from their scrawny asses could feed this street for a week.
Merchants. Dealers. Higher on the food chain than the
pathetic fucker who shivered beside Billy. Or maybe less in love with what they sold. Give them time.
Money was changing hands in the tik house. Friday was a busy day, and the cookers would have been working a twenty-four-hour shift, supplying the dealers ahead of the weekend rush.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Another tremor rocked Popeye.
“Keep still, or I’ll shoot you,” Billy said, feeling the heat and the adrenaline starting to cook in his gut.
“You fucken crazy, Barbie. You gonna get both our asses dead.”
Billy lifted his left foot—still in the shoe he’d worn to the funeral—and kicked Popeye in the head. Just hard enough for the heel to draw a crimson crescent on the dealer’s skull.
Popeye put a finger to his scalp and took it away bloody. “The fuck you do that?”
Billy lifted his foot to kick him again, and the dealer folded in on himself and hugged his knees tighter. Billy brought his leg back and rested his foot on the clutch pedal.
Billy Afrika had arrested Popeye more than once back when he was a cop. But Popeye was small-time. He’d go into Pollsmoor, get another 26 tattoo and be back on the street in a couple of months, dealing again. Growing prematurely old from the tik, and more rancid by the day. Selling the brand of poison that had become the drug of choice out on the Cape Flats.
Easy to manufacture.
Cheap.
Deadly.
While Billy had waited for Popeye to pull on his stinking clothes, two kids had arrived at the trailer. A boy and a girl, in the uniform of the school Billy had attended twenty years before. They couldn’t have been older than twelve.
They stuck their heads into the trailer and asked for “lollipops.” The straws of tik that Popeye sold for thirty bucks a hit. Billy Afrika had thrown a scare into them, told them he was a cop and that he’d lock up their asses. They took off. Only as far as the next merchant, he guessed.
Billy watched as the two men emerged from the tik house. They each carried a backpack, loaded with product, ready for the weekend ahead. The men slung the packs into the rear of the Beemer, and the driver cranked the engine. Hip hop thudded, bass bins banging out the electronic beat that punched you low near your balls. Billy could feel his fingertips vibrating on the steering wheel.
The Beemer took off in a spray of gravel as the driver threw it into a U-turn and sped down toward Main Road, leaving dust and a last smash of percussion.
Billy started the Hyundai and drove the half block until he was outside the house. Just another squat White City bungalow. Only difference was, it had a high fence and a security gate with a buzzer.
He had busted this place a couple of times in years gone by. The security was there to give the tik cookers inside enough time to flush merchandise before they let the cops in.
They were always a joke, though, those raids. The tik house was owned by Manson and run by his sister, Charneze. The gangster had enough cops with their hands deep in his pockets to get advance warning. So the detectives would leave with a couple of bags of drain cleaner, radiator fluid, and head-cold medicine. The raw materials for cooking tik, available over the counter. And all legal.
Billy got out of the Hyundai and walked around to the passenger door, opened it to reveal the mess inside.
“Come, Popeye. We going to score.”
The merchant tried to burrow his head deeper into his folded legs, stinking up the car with his fear. Billy racked the slide on
the Glock. He saw a gummy eye peering from between the knees. The eye closed.
“Get out. Or I’ll shoot your knee fucked up.”
The eye stretched open again. Popeye knew that he meant it. The skeletal man unfolded himself like a mantis and stood up. Billy closed the car door, grabbed a handful of Popeye’s shirt, and got him moving toward the security gate.
“Now you do what I said, okay?”
The dealer nodded. They reached the gate, and Popeye stuck out an index finger—stained yellow from pipe smoking—directed it toward the buzzer, then stopped it in midair. Leaving it shaking, a hair away from the smeared red button fastened to the gate with rusted wire.
Billy prodded him with the barrel of the Glock.
Popeye pressed the button.
After a few seconds the drapes next to the door shifted, then fell back into place, and the gate buzzed and clicked open like a set of dentures in a wet mouth.
Another prod of the Glock sent Popeye forward.
To begin with it was as easy as Billy had hoped.
The front door opened, and Billy and Popeye walked in, welcomed by the sound of West Coast rap. A guy in his early twenties checked them out. Billy vaguely remembered him from a lineup, way back. He had sallow skin and a livid scar that traveled from the left corner of his mouth in a straight line toward his ear. He’d said something, sometime, that hadn’t been appreciated.
“What the fuck you want here, Barbie?” Smiley asked.
Hadn’t learned his lesson.
Billy arced his right foot in a low scythe and took Smiley’s legs from under him, sending him to the linoleum. He rested the Glock on Smiley’s flat nose.
“How many of you in the house?”
“Just me and Manny.”
“Where’s Manny?”
“In the kitchen. Cooking.”
Billy looked toward a closed door leading off the sitting room. He caught a telltale whiff of chemicals.
“And Charneze?”
“Gone shopping.”
Sounded so domestic.
Billy frisked Smiley. No gun. But there’d be weapons in the house. “Where’s the cash?”
Smiley shook his head. “Manson already collect.”
That earned him a smack on the nose with the barrel of the Glock. “I know he’ll only collect in the morning. Come. Get it for me.”
Smiley was looking at him through tears. “You a dead man, fucker.”
“Ja, but I’m a dead man with a gun. So, get your ass up.”
Smiley walked across the dingy sitting room, opened the cabinet beneath the TV. Billy was there with him and saw the .38 on the shelf before Smiley could reach it. Billy kicked him in the balls and took the .38 and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans. Stepped back, covering Smiley, who was cupping his nuts and sucking.
A bulging paper shopping bag was shoved into the cabinet.
“Take out the bag, Popeye.”
The merchant scuttled forward and grabbed the bag by its string handles and ducked away from Smiley.
“Show me what’s in it,” Billy said.
Popeye tilted the bag so that Billy could see the banknotes crammed inside.
Smiley was still holding himself when Billy brought the butt of the Glock down behind his ear. The scarred man fell to the floor like some switch inside him had been clicked off. He didn’t move.
The kitchen door opened, and a man in a surgical mask stepped out, followed by a trail of smoke and a chemical odor.
The Jamie Oliver of Paradise Park.
The cooker ducked back into the kitchen and reappeared with a sawed-off shotgun. Let go with both barrels leveled at where Billy had stood.
But stood no longer.
Popeye took the blast, raining a spray of blood and bone and brain over Billy as he came out of a roll and shot the cooker in the head. He heard the shotgun clatter to the floor.
The silence after the firefight was broken by Smiley groaning and puking.
Billy lifted the Glock, took a bead on his head. The man lay still and stared up at him. It would be a clean ending to all this if he shot Smiley. Stop that scarred mouth from leaking his identity to Manson. Buy him a whole lot more time.
He felt the trigger under his finger. Smiley’s eyes widened, his brain desperately trying to signal his muscles to move. Best he could do was scratch at the linoleum with his fingernails. But Billy couldn’t pull the trigger.
He lowered the Glock, and Smiley fainted, breath leaking from his nose like the hiss of airbrakes. Billy grabbed the bag of money and headed for the door.
The bullet took him in the meat of the left shoulder, and he dropped the bag. The second round clipped the wall where his head had been before he spun, dropped, and fired.
Saw a body fall back into the open bedroom doorway, a pair of bare feet left jutting out into the sitting room. Bare feet with toenails painted pale peach.
Billy followed the Glock barrel toward the doorway.
A girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, lay dying, blood in dark gouts pumping from her mouth as she coughed out the last of her life. Limp fingers still curled around a .44 Smith and Wesson,
chrome plated. It would have kicked at her wrist like she was trying to drive a jackhammer one-handed. That kick had saved Billy’s life.
Panting, bleeding, he saw who she was. Who she had been.
Manson’s daughter.
M
EAT FLIES BLACKENED THE HUT’S SINGLE WINDOW, BEATING their wings against the glass as they fought to get to the feast within. The sun sliced through this seething mass, throwing a shifting shadow across the three bodies on the floor of the hut.
The cop.
The cop’s son.
And Roxy.
The cop lay sprawled on his back, his guts spilling from him. The boy pressed up against his father, motionless. Roxy lying barefoot, her funeral dress riding high on her legs, blonde hair spread like a fan beneath her.
Her hands were cuffed behind her back, ankles tied with a length of cord that the terrifying man had torn from a bedside lamp, the wire cutting into her flesh. A soiled pair of briefs had been shoved into her mouth and taped in place. She gagged from
the ammonia on her tongue, battled not to vomit in case she choked. Drew air in through her nostrils.
The hut stank of the dead cop’s blood and innards and shit, and the flies that forced their way in through the gaps in the wood buzzed as they banqueted.
Roxy was tied up again, but this time there was no Billy Afrika to rescue her.
Why she was alive she didn’t know.
At the car the tattooed man had been about to cut her throat. Even before she heard the beautiful one use his name, she knew this was the man who had burned Billy.
Piper.
Then Disco had spoken a few words, a machine-gun burst in the local language. She had no idea what was said, but the knife had left her throat and Disco had run off, come back with the keys to her handcuffs.
The men dragged her and the boy from the car. When they walked her into the backyard, Roxy was numbed by the horror that confronted her.
The disemboweled cop.
A small black dog, lying dead a few feet away.
And a massively fat woman’s body a doorstop in the kitchen.
Piper threw Roxy to the floor of the hut. Disco came in carrying the sobbing child. He’d lost his bear.
Roxy tried to get to her knees, and Piper kicked her in the ribs. She lay on the floor, winded, staring up at this demonic vision, his entire body crawling with tattoos. He grabbed hold of her crucifix and yanked at it, snapping the chain.
He stood over her, the silver cross dangling from his bloody hand. Then he called the other one over and gave it to him, watched while he put it in his pocket.
Roxy waited for the inevitable, the rape and the torture that she knew must follow. When the man loomed over her again, knife drawn, she closed her eyes. But he reached across to the
lamp and sliced off a length of cord. They bound her and the boy, and Disco dragged the cop’s body into the hut.
The acrid smell of burning chemicals reached her nostrils, and she saw the men crouched beside the mattress, sucking on a small glass pipe held over a lighter flame. The smoke adding another layer to the foulness of the hut. After a muttered exchange in guttural patois, they had left, closing the window and locking the door after them. The heat and the stench bore down on Roxy, suffocating her.
Roxy knew she couldn’t wait for neighbors to sound the alarm. She didn’t know if anybody other than the kids had seen her and the boy taken into the yard. And even if they had been seen, her sense of this street was that the people here lived in fear of both the gangsters and the law.
Roxy was lying facing the boy. She tried to attract his attention, but his eyes were closed and his breath was ragged. She moved herself like a worm, inching in segments until she got closer to him, oblivious to the splinters from the unsanded floor that stabbed the flesh of her arms and legs.
She battled to flip herself, so she had her back to the boy. She was going to try and free his hands. Get him to untie her ankles. She’d be cuffed, but she could smash the glass of the window and run. It was their only chance.
But first she had to get herself close to Robbie, which meant that she had to squeeze her body between him and his dead father. She felt the dead cop’s viscera sticky and slick against her bare arms and legs as she pushed herself upward.
She tasted the vomit rising again. Breathed. Gagged. Breathed again.
Forced herself deeper between the man and the boy. Used her legs to push the dead cop away. Felt something soft and wet bulge beneath her knees. Breathed, the stench almost overwhelming her.
Found herself close enough to the dead man’s face to kiss
him. His mouth open in a snarl of disbelief, blood staining his lips like berry juice. His milky eyes stared at her, unblinking as the flies crawled over him.
Roxy closed her eyes. Touched her fingers to the boy’s hands.
And felt his small fingers respond, moving against her palms like sticky worms.
BARBARA ADAMS STOOD in her bedroom blow-drying her daughter’s hair. Even though it was past eight in the evening, the tin roof of the house sucked heat from the late sun like a solar panel, and the small room was airless and ovenlike. Made hotter by the hair dryer that howled in her hand as she brushed the natural curl out of Jodie’s hair.
Out on the Flats the straighter your hair, the paler your skin, and the lighter your eyes, the more desirable you are. Tonight Jodie had a social at the New Apostolic Church and refused to set foot out the door with a kink in her hair.
That morning before school, when a few low clouds had drifted overhead—broken loose from the mass that produced the unseasonal rain far away in the southern suburbs—Jodie had stared up at the sky in anguish.
“It’s gonna rain, and my hair’s gonna mince.” Meaning that the moisture in the air would cause her hair to tighten into corkscrew curls. Curls that would keep her away from the social.
Barbara had told her the clouds would burn away. But her daughter wasn’t happy until she returned from school and the sun blazed, a layer of pollution replacing the clouds in the hot blue sky.
Barbara hadn’t wanted Jodie to go to the social. Wanted her at home where she could watch her. But Billy Afrika’s words had calmed her a little, and she knew she couldn’t keep the girl
locked up like a prisoner. Anyway, these church events were patrolled by the deacons, who stood for no nonsense.
Still, she’d fret until the child was dropped home safe.
Jodie, sitting on the bed, wore a robe after a shower. Her white blouse and jeans—the decent ones that didn’t look as if they were sprayed onto her body—were draped over a chair next to the vanity table.
Barbara shook her head as a trio of orbiting flies tried to settle on her. She’d never known flies like this. There had always been flies in Paradise Park, drawn by the dump. But the last few days had been chronic. People said it was the slaughterhouse, across the veld. Or the squatter camp near the freeway, with holes in the ground for toilets.
Flypaper strips hung throughout the small house, black with insects. But still more came. Flies made her think of disease. And death.
The doorbell pierced the scream of the hair dryer.
“Shawnie!” Barbara yelled for her son, slumped in front of the TV in the sitting room, playing a video game. Even though he was right by the front door, it would be an effort for him to get up and answer it.
“Shawn!”
“Ja?” Mumbling over the noise of the game.
“See who’s there!”
It was probably that bloody Mrs. Pool from next door, come to bum a tomato or some cooking oil. The woman came around at least twice a week on the scrounge, her little monkey eyes flicking around the house for anything she could trade as gossip with the other wives in the street.
Mrs. Pool had witnessed Clyde’s murder, and it had turned her into a local celebrity for a couple of days. She’d even appeared on TV news, not bothering to remove her hair rollers before she went on camera to deliver her sensational report:
“He did gut him like a fish, the
Keptin
! Oooooh, it was too terrible!”
As Barbara smoothed the last wave from her daughter’s shining black hair, she closed her eyes a moment, trying to dissolve away the image of Clyde sinking to the sand.
Shawn pushed the door open and stepped into the bedroom.
Jodie, in a display of outraged modesty, pulled her robe closed. “Hey, don’t you even knock?”
For a moment Barbara stood staring at Shawn, convinced that some trick of memory had caused her to project the image of her dying husband onto her son. It wasn’t possible that he could be clutching at the white T-shirt that was turning crimson, looking at her with the light fading from his eyes.
Jodie screamed and jumped up from the bed as Shawn sagged to the floor.
Piper filled the doorway, with his knotted muscles and his tattoos. The bloody knife in his hand. The stink of death reaching out from him.