D
OC WALKED INTO HIS FETID KITCHEN, CARRYING THE BRANDY bottle like it was a pacifier. He took a long pull, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Removing the slug from Billy Afrika and stitching him up had leeched Doc’s energy.
You had to concentrate when you worked with the living. He preferred the dead.
But Billy had left him a thousand bucks, good money for what he’d done. Doc had told him to come back in a couple of days, and he’d remove the sutures. Billy had smiled like a man who wasn’t sure he was going to be around in a couple of days.
Easy come, easy go.
Doc set the bottle down on the kitchen table, shifting a few dirty dishes out of the way. If the squadrons of flies that swarmed over the greasy plates bothered him, he gave no sign.
He crossed to the old box freezer. The black garbage bag Maggott had fished out the day before lay on the closed lid. He’d put it back on ice after the cop and his brat had left. Taken it
out an hour ago, in the mood to work. But Billy Afrika had interrupted him, and he’d forgotten to make the trip back to the kitchen and return the bag to the freezer. Doc prodded at the plastic with a nicotine-stained finger and found that the contents hadn’t thawed much.
Good.
He set the bag down on the kitchen table, shifting a few dishes out of the way. Had another slug of brandy and untied the bag and shook the arm onto the table. Doc reckoned that the arm had belonged to a black man in his twenties. Well enough muscled, with all the fingers intact.
He was as incurious about who the man had been as he was about what had caused his death. He never questioned the cops who worked at the police morgue when they arrived with body parts. Just checked the merchandise and paid them. Judging from the tooth marks at the point of amputation, one of the cops had used a wood saw to take the arm off postmortem.
Doc opened a kitchen cabinet and lifted out a handheld circular saw. He plugged it in next to the kettle and flicked the power on, letting the blade spin and howl for a second before he killed it and regarded the arm.
He was about to harvest what he could from the limb, for use as
muti
. Traditional medicine. Despite Cape Town’s Western veneer—cell phones, satellite TV, superhighways—it was still Africa, where people believed that good luck was limited, and you had to steal the luck of another. The most powerful way to do that was to use medicine made from their body parts.
Doc thought about his clients, the
sangomas
—witch doctors—in the shack settlements sprawling alongside the airport road. What would make him maximum profit?
He could saw off the fingers and thumb and sell them individually—would have done it if the hand hadn’t been in such good condition. No, he decided, he would sever the hand just above the wrist. Sell it as a complete item.
He’d known a darky butcher once, over in Guguletu across the freeway, who had kept a human hand in his freezer along with his sides of meat. Each morning before dawn, he’d open his store and enter the freezer to enact the same ritual: walk among the hanging carcasses and slap them with the hand. Swore it called the spirits and helped him attract customers.
Fucken darkies.
Still, he shouldn’t bitch. It made him a decent living.
So he’d detach the hand; then he’d saw what was left of the arm into a couple of pieces. Let the meat thaw and debone it. Package and wrap the flesh to be sold separately. Sell off the pieces of bone as singles.
A nice score.
Doc was about to get to work when he heard banging on his front door. He set down the saw and left the kitchen, closing the door behind him. Went to the drapes and peeped. Recognized two of Manson’s crew, supporting a third man who slumped between them.
Shit.
Doc opened the door, and the gangbangers sloped in out of the gloom. They let the unconscious man slide to the floor. Doc could see fluid seeping from his nose. The skinny one, Boogie, gave Doc that look. The one that said: Do something. And fucken do it
now
.
“What’s up with him?” Doc nudged the man with his scuffed shoe.
Boogie shrugged. “We find him like so.”
Doc groaned as he lowered himself to the floor. He lifted each of the man’s eyelids, saw the unequal pupil size. Turned the head, revealing blood clotted in the short, fuzzy hair. Somebody had beaten the 26 unconscious with a couple of well-aimed blows.
“He’s probably got a fractured skull.”
“Can you wake him up?” Boogie asked.
“Depends. It’s going to take some time.”
“We don’t got no time. Somebody shoot Manson’s kid dead. This one know who did it.”
Doc sighed, rubbed his eyes. Paradise Park was looking at another gang war.
“Leave him with me. Come back in a half hour.”
“We just want the fucker to tell a name. Okay?”
Doc nodded, locked the door after the men left. He stood staring down at the man on the floor. It didn’t take a witch doctor to work out what name would emerge from that mouth if he regained consciousness.
Billy Afrika.
BOOGIE WAS AMBITIOUS. So when they got into the green Honda Civic outside Doc’s house, he decided to show some initiative.
“Make a turn by Shorty Andrews’s place,” he said.
The driver, Arafat, was slow, but not that slow. “What you scheming now, Boogie?”
“Who you think killed Bianca?” When Arafat shrugged, Boogie said, “Nobody but the 28s is going to hit the tik house, brother.”
Arafat stared at him. “Maybe we should wait …”
“Tell your mother to wait. Drive.”
Arafat sighed, knew from experience that arguing with Boogie was a waste of time. He could break the little fucker like a chicken bone, but Boogie was a dialogue merchant, made his head spin with his endless yakking.
Arafat cranked the Honda—low rumble of the V6—and they slid off into Dark City.
SHORTY ANDREWS LOVED Céline Dion. When he was hanging with his 28 crew, they listened to gangsta, maybe a bit of R&B if they
were chilling and smoking Mandrax. But when he was in his car, it was Céline all the way.
Shorty sat in the Beemer, parked in the driveway of his house, watching the last light fading from the sky, singing along with Céline. Effortlessly reaching those impossibly high notes as “The Power of Love” built to its climax. When the song ended he felt uplifted, as always.
Then he thought about Billy Afrika walking around Paradise Park with a Glock in his hand. That worried him. Things had been nice and quiet for a while, the uneasy truce between him and the Americans still holding. He didn’t want nothing to fuck that up.
The quieter life suited Shorty, now that he was getting older. Killing, raping, that was all young man’s stuff. He had a family. Responsibilities. He jabbed the CD player with a banana-sized finger and shuttled forward to another ballad to restore his good mood. He joined Céline in “Because You Loved Me,” his voice as sweet and pure as a choirboy’s.
He was waiting for his wife, who was in the house dressing the younger kid, Keegan. His other boy, the older one—his favorite—clambered into the rear seat and sat fiddling with a toy gun. A Christmas present. A .38 Smith and Wesson. Looked all too fucken real.
They were going across to Canal Walk Mall to eat, catch the latest Eddie Murphy, and maybe buy clothes for the kids.
Shorty stopped singing. Impatient now. “Whitford, go see where your mommy is.”
The boy opened the car door, and the dome light kicked in. Right then Shorty heard the sound he knew so well: small-arms fire at close range. The rear window of the Beemer starred, and Shorty threw himself out of the car, 9mm Taurus already in his hand, firing at the Honda that was taking off down the road.
He hit the driver, and the car slowed and stopped. Two wheels up on the sidewalk opposite, under a yellow sodium light. His
guys were coming out of the house, Osama and Teeth, blasting away at the Civic.
Shorty got to the car and saw the driver was dead. Boogie, that skinny little fuck, gut-shot but still alive in the passenger seat. Shorty finished him, sending his tik-fried brain onto the side window, slowly leaking down like a lava lamp.
Shorty stood up, catching his breath.
Teeth was beside him. “Boss.”
“I’m okay.”
“Boss.” Teeth said again, and Shorty saw where he was looking.
Whitford was walking toward them, bandy and already chunky, his toy pistol stretched out in front of him—the two-handed grip—firing at the car.
Just like his daddy.
Shorty saw his wife standing in the doorway of their house, impassive. He walked over to the boy, gently turned him, eased him back across the road. “You go to your mommy, okay?’
The boy was reluctant, looking over his shoulder at the wrecked car and the blood.
Shorty knew he’d have to watch this one. Send him to a school in the suburbs. Make sure he became a fucken accountant or something.
Shorty turned to Teeth. “Get all the manpower. Now.”
Teeth nodded, and he was reaching for his cell, speed-dialing. Calling the soldiers to the war. Céline still pumped from Shorty’s car, telling him that
good-bye
was the saddest word.
ROBBIE SAT CROUCHED before Roxy, tongue protruding from his mouth, as he concentrated on releasing the knot that secured the cord wrapped around her ankles. She’d had to keep talking to him, keep encouraging him as his fingers slipped, and tears flowed and tremors rocked his small body.
It was dark in the hut by the time he had worked the knot loose. Which was a blessing, the Technicolor horror of the dead cop now a muted monochrome.
Her ankles were free. Roxy shook her legs, trying to restore the circulation.
“You’re a brave boy, Robbie.”
He nodded, sniffing.
Now that her legs were untied, there was an outside chance she could work her handcuffed arms around her legs and bring them to the front of her body. She lay on her back and pulled her arms down toward her butt, her shoulders screaming on the edge of dislocation as she forced her hands past her thighs.
She lifted her left leg into the air, straight as a dancer, kept the right leg bent, and pulled the knee toward her chin. Her shoulder muscles were tearing, but she just managed to get the cuffs past her right foot. Then she could lower her left leg and slip her wrists past it. Her hands were in front of her.
She lay on the wooden floor for a few seconds, catching her breath. Her shoulders throbbing.
Roxy stood and found a three-legged wooden stool lying on its side next to the dead cop. She swung the stool at the window and smashed the glass. The flies massing on the outside of the pane lifted off in an angry chorus, before entering the room in thick formation. Roxy grabbed the reeking blanket that lay on the skinny mattress and used it to cover the shards of glass that spiked up from the window frame.
“Where you going?” Robbie asked. Panicked.
“To get help.”
“Don’t leave me here. Please, missus.”
Roxy grabbed him in her cuffed hands and lifted him through the window, grunted at his unexpected heft. She dropped him onto the sand below.
Then she dragged the stool under the window, hitched up her dress, and sent one leg through the broken window and
straddled the frame. She gripped the wood above her head as best she could, handicapped by the cuffs, trying to lift the weight off her leg, but she felt the glass pierce the blanket and slice into her thigh.
She bit back the pain and brought the other leg up, then pushed herself out of the window, landing hard on the sand.
Roxy got to her feet, feeling the blood flowing down her leg.
“I wanna come
wiff
,” Robbie said.
She had no time to untie his ankles.
“Please, Robbie, be a big boy and stay here. I’ll be back soon.”
She ran off toward the street, her cuffed hands held in front of her, the sand still hot on the soles of her bare feet.
The small houses, huddled in the pools of orange streetlight, were quiet. A snatch of laughter and a thump of percussion reached her. Then silence. Lights burned in a house to her left, and she headed that way.
Then she saw two men walking toward her. They were minstrels, like the ones she’d seen by the ocean when she’d gone running with Billy Afrika. Dressed in the gaudy festival outfits: satin trousers and tailcoats festooned with stars and stripes, more stars dancing on the brims of their top hats. She almost laughed. A pair of Uncle Sams. Sent to rescue her.