Wake Up Dead (26 page)

Authors: Roger Smith

A
S THE SUN BLED OUT AND DIED, THE SKY WAS TOUCHED BY A streak of emerald. The fabled green flash. Roxy remembered reading somewhere that this was the green of paradise. The green of hope.

She sat with Robbie at a window table in a Spur steakhouse. The boy was demolishing a double cheeseburger and fries. Washing it down with a chocolate shake. If appetite was any indicator of recovery from trauma, he was doing just fine.

Roxy had made a trip to the salad bar—the place where leaf vegetables went to die. Anything that was fresh and green was hunted down and drowned in a rich, sweet dressing. She filled a bowl with lettuce and a few potato wedges, color-coding her food to keep it away from the shades of blood and guts that had painted the backdrop of the last few days.

They were at the Spur in Hout Bay, across from the harbor, watching small fishing boats chugging in with their catch. There was a Spur in Sea Point, but it was within sight of the
beachfront, too close to the carnage. So she’d put Robbie in the rental car and driven away from the city, along a road that wound around the peninsula, mountain above them, ocean below. The boy fell asleep beside her, clutching the pink bear she’d bought him at the Waterfront. A replacement for the one that lay somewhere in the dust of Paradise Park.

Roxy hadn’t slept in two days. The idea of sleeping, even though her body was wilting with exhaustion, terrified her. As if the monsters who’d failed to destroy her during the waking nightmare would finally succeed if she closed her eyes. So she stayed awake. Focused on the road. Robbie whimpered in his sleep, and she lay a hand on his head, stroked his hair.

He had saved her life the night before.

The homeless woman had come at Roxy out of the shadow beneath the bridge, mumbling something as she sent her left shoulder into Roxy’s chest, smashing her back against the wall. The woman’s right arm was raised, knife etched in silhouette against a streetlight, and Roxy realized who she was. The blade dropped.

Roxy lashed out, managed to deflect the blow. Then the woman fell against her, heavy and stinking. Roxy couldn’t move, her right arm pinned at her side. The knife was lifting again, and Roxy screamed. The scream lost in the bellow of the foghorn that suddenly found its voice. Roxy managed to twist her left arm free, tried to grab the woman’s wrist, to stop the knife arm. It was like trying to halt a slowly falling tree trunk. The blade came down toward her with a terrible inevitability. Roxy heard herself panting in the silence as the foghorn died.

Then the woman made a sound too strangled to be called a cry. Something wet and glottal escaped her lips, and the knife stalled. Roxy saw Robbie punching and kicking at the woman’s leg. A leg that, even in this light, was fat with swelling. Roxy lifted her own leg and pushed her foot against the woman’s belly, shoved with all her weight, bracing herself against the brick wall
at her back. The woman toppled, falling against the cart, knife clattering to the concrete.

Roxy grabbed the boy, plunging on up the ramp.

She saw someone standing above, another woman—pale hair hot under the streetlight.

“Help!” Roxy’s voice sounded raw and foreign to her ear. “Help us!”

The light-haired woman was coming down the ramp. Coming toward them.

“Thank God. Please, help us!”

The woman held out a hand. Roxy saw what was in the hand: a small, black gun.

The Ukrainian whore said, “Where it is? The money?”

Roxy almost laughed as she edged around the Ukrainian, who circled with her, back to the ramp, weapon extended, dye job burning like a beacon in the streetlight.

The homeless woman, leaning on her wire cart for support, inched her way up toward them like some hellish wind-up toy, the sound of the wheels on the ramp masked by the blare of the foghorn.

The whore shoved the gun in Roxy’s face, shouting. “I say, where it is?”

The madwoman pushed away from the cart, wobbled, raised the long-bladed knife. Roxy, wrapped in shadow, had time to think that the whore wasn’t even a real blonde, then the knife was falling …

Roxy scooped Robbie up and ran for the Mercedes. She sped the city block to Sea Point police station. Her memories of the next few hours were like snapshots from a stranger’s photo album.

A hospital emergency room, smelling of disinfectant, booze, and blood, the cops jumping Roxy and Robbie to the head of a line of torn and broken brown bodies.

Billy Afrika motionless beneath a ventilator mask as he was
rushed by, gurney wheels tracking blood into a scuffed chrome elevator.

A young Cuban doctor stitching Roxy’s leg, staring up at her through sleep-deprived eyes, as if he was surprised to be entrusted with a skin as pale as hers.

After the medics were through with them, the cops took her and the boy back to Sea Point police station. A woman constable showed Roxy into an interview room and disappeared with Robbie. Roxy met her interrogator, a dark plainclothes cop with a mouth that sagged at the corners, as if it was being dragged down by all that he had seen men do. He drank coffee from a foam cup, listened to her, spoke hardly at all.

She fed him a version of the truth: how the detective, Maggott, had asked her to drive with him out to Paradise Park, to do a face-to-face with one of the men he believed had hijacked them and killed her husband. Thought that seeing Roxy might shock the man into dropping his guard. The dark cop stretched the side of his mouth in a sour smile. Shook his head.

Roxy saying that, after Piper killed Maggott, he and Disco abducted her and the boy. Left them in the hut, then came back and forced her to drive the men to Three Anchor Bay. Told him how Billy Afrika had tried to save her and Robbie. How she had stabbed Disco with the spike of glass. Last saw him lying facedown in the shallow water like he was snorkeling.

Then she stopped, sat silent, watching the dark man.

He stared at her, tapping the foam cup with his ring finger. “Know anything about the dead woman down there?”

Roxy shook her head. She’d edited out the attack by the woman with the knife and the whore’s ironic death. Let them make some sense of it. She couldn’t.

The cop said, “Beheaded like the other Barbies. Only difference is, she isn’t a blonde. Not a genuine one, that is.” He took a sip of coffee. Shrugged. “Maybe the carpet doesn’t match the curtains, if you know what I mean?”

Roxy did. But she played it all natural blonde and dumb. Shook her head, again.

The cop was staring at her again. Sensing there was more. Not pushing, for now. There may be further questions later. But she could go.

Go where?
Roxy wondered as she walked down the empty corridor. She passed an open door, glimpsed Robbie curled up on a wooden bench, asleep under a blanket that looked as if it had been dragged up from the cells. He sucked his thumb.

Roxy stopped. Felt the cop watching her, saw him framed in the doorway of the interview room, foam coffee cup still in his hand. She asked what was going to happen to the boy. He shrugged, saying the police were unable to trace any of his relatives. The mother had a bad history with social workers, and she’d disappeared. The kid would have to go to a place of safety.

Roxy heard herself speaking. “Can I take him with me? Care for him until you find his family?”

The mournful man took a while to nod his assent.

It was light by the time she left the police station with the groggy child. As she buckled Robbie into the Mercedes, Roxy saw that the oceanfront swarmed with blue uniforms. She started the car, then killed the engine. Went around to the rear and opened the trunk. Took a moment to convince herself she wasn’t imagining the small silver case lying where Joe had left it. Roxy popped the two catches and cracked the lid far enough to see the crisp, new hundred-dollar bills in neat piles.

She felt life’s current tugging at her again, ready to move her along.

Roxy took a deep breath, closed the case, and slammed the trunk. She drove down to the Waterfront, into the underground parking lot. This early, the Mercedes was the only car on the vast grid of white lines and oil stains. Roxy parked and retrieved the case from the trunk. The boy watched as she sat behind the wheel
and counted the cash inside. Exactly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

So she had gotten away with murder. And she had a chunk of money. The only person who knew she had killed Joe Palmer was lying in ICU. She’d go see him, tomorrow maybe, and give him fifty thousand dollars. More than he was owed, but she figured he deserved it. Believed Billy Afrika would keep his mouth shut, money or not. If he lived.

Roxy took the chrome case, held the boy by the hand, and headed into the Waterfront, the white confection that encircled Cape Town’s dockland. Cleaners buzzed the tiles with polishers, and brown girls on impossible heels clattered in to open the luxury stores, their breathless Cape Flats chatter channeling the ghosts of Disco and Piper.

Roxy led Robbie into a bathroom, sat him on a row of basins beneath the mirrors, and cleaned him up as best she could. A woman in a Stella McCartney dress walked in, took one look at them, and walked right out again. Roxy scrubbed at the blood on her face and dress, arranging her hair so that it covered most of the black eye. Stared at herself in the mirror: Courtney Love after a busy night.

At American Express, Roxy changed enough dollars into local currency to do what needed to be done that day. Buy clothes for herself and Robbie. Take him bear shopping. Pay for a nondescript rental car.

Roxy checked the two of them into a hotel at the Waterfront, hard cash and her American accent lowering the raised eyebrows of the desk staff. She locked the chrome case in the hotel safe and took Robbie up to their room, an off-white rectangle with a wall of glass framing the harbor and the distant Cape Flats. She closed the drapes.

Roxy spent a long time in the shower, scrubbed her skin and washed her hair. Came out in a clean white robe, towel turbaned around her wet hair, to find Robbie asleep on the double
bed, arms wrapping his bear. She lay beside the boy, watching the mute TV, listening to his soft snores. Whenever his breathing grew quiet, she found herself touching his throat. To convince herself he wasn’t dead.

Her body begged for the painkillers the bruised-eyed doctor had given her. But she didn’t touch them. Knew they’d make her sleep. She stared at the flickering tube—tennis and fashion and Thai beaches and men climbing Everest—but she saw blood and bone and fire. The AC seemed to suck the stench of death into the room.

Somehow the day slid toward dusk, and at around six Roxy roused herself. Sat at the makeup mirror and painted away the external damage. She undressed Robbie and carried him into the bathroom. Washed the boy and dressed him in his new clothes. Told him it was time for his birthday treat.

As they parked outside the Spur, he looked afraid for the first time that day. She thought it was the trauma taking hold.

Roxy held his hand. “What’s up, Robbie?”

“We not gonna get in trouble if they find out my
birfday
was yesterday?”

She laughed. The sound shocked her. She hadn’t laughed in days.

Roxy had reached over and kissed him on his forehead. He’d smelled of soap and small boy. “It’s okay; don’t worry. It’s our secret.”

Now that it was fully dark, the sparklers on the cake fizzed brightly, lighting Robbie’s face as the young waitress put the plate in front of him. All the serving staff, maybe ten guys and girls, gathered around the table and sang “Happy Birthday” to Robbie. He grinned up at them, and across at Roxy, through the fountain of sparks, and he looked delighted.

In that moment Roxy knew what she had to do. Knew it smacked of celebrities shopping for kids in the Third World—
think I’ll take a brown one to go with the yellow one
—but she
would adopt the boy. Then get the hell out of this country. Put a couple of time zones between them and the horror of the past days. Start a new life.

A reflection in the window caught her eye. A big man with dark hair, in a black suit and white shirt, bearing down on her. But when she turned, she saw he was just a guy with his wife and his kids, smiling as they passed. Roxy smiled back.

She took Robbie’s hand and joined in the singing.

ALSO BY ROGER SMITH

Mixed Blood

acknowledgments

I would like to thank my agent, Alice Martell, and my editor, Webster Younce. I am indebted to Sumaya de Wet for sharing with me her extraordinary accounts of growing up on the Cape Flats.

about the author

ROGER SMITH was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and now lives in Cape Town. He is the author of the thriller
Mixed Blood
and is writing a third novel. Visit his website at
www.rogersmithbooks.com
.