Feeling his own finger tightening on the trigger of the automatic.
But not squeezing it.
Billy looked up from the photograph when Barbara stood and left the room. Too proud to cry in front of him. He heard a bedroom door close. Billy scribbled his cell number on the back of the Emirates boarding pass he found still folded in his pocket. Put it on the table beside the picture and walked out.
A boy of ten, dressed in school uniform, kicked a tennis ball
in the sandy patch of garden, foot to knee to head to foot. Never letting the ball touch the ground. Billy waited until the ball angled off the boy’s head, bouncing too high for him to control, coming to rest in the sand.
“Shawn.”
The kid looked up at him.
“Let’s walk,” Billy said.
“Why for?”
“I want to ask you something, is why.”
The boy shrugged and followed him out the gate, tossing the ball in the air. Billy leaned against the Hyundai, felt the harsh sun unsoftened by the gauze of dust.
“Who comes here? To visit your mommy?”
Shawn bounced the ball off his knee, ready to get into his routine again. Billy stood up from the car and kicked off his flip-flops, the sand hot and familiar beneath his bare feet.
He waited until the boy lost the ball, then felt old muscle memory kick in, and the ball was on his foot and looping up against the burning sky. He nudged it with his head, let it drop to his knee, bounced it, took it with the other knee, let it fall to his foot again, then sent it back to Shawn, who stepped in and intercepted it seamlessly.
They went on like this for a couple of minutes, a perfect duet—a little ghetto ballet—ball only touching the ground when Billy faked a miskick.
Shawn laughed. “You okay for a old man.”
Billy gave him a shove in the chest, and the kid laughed again. Billy leaned against the car.
“So? Who comes here?”
Shawn nodded at a busty woman who watched them from a neighboring yard. A woman born to hang on a fence and leak gossip and cigarette smoke from the side of her mouth.
“She come. Mrs. Pool.”
“And?”
“The pastor.” The skinny hypocrite who had spat God’s name all over Clyde’s grave, even while he pocketed gang money.
“Nobody else?”
The boy hesitated. The hesitation that comes from fear.
“You know I worked with your daddy?”
Shawn nodded. “Ja, I remember.”
“He would want you to tell me.” Feeling sick in his gut for manipulating a kid with his dead father’s name.
“Manson. He come on here in his Hummer.”
Billy knew now where the money had gone. Knew why Clyde’s family still lived on this squalid street.
“Thanks, Shawn. Your daddy would be proud of you.”
The kid shrugged and kicked the ball into the air.
Billy got into the car and drove away, watching in his rearview mirror as the boy was swallowed by the dust.
AS IT TURNED out, before the day ended, Disco was posing for the cameras.
He’d gone looking for Godwynn and the money he was owed. He found Goddy at a shebeen on Poppy Street, but instead of money he’d got a story that scared him shitless: Godwynn telling him he’d lied when he said the Benz was an order from Manson. Jacking the car was strictly a freelance deal. He was ambitious—tired of doing the hard graft, risking his ass, while Manson made the fat profits and threw him the scraps.
“Fuck that,” said Goddy, all pumped up, drinking Scotch. “This time I find a buyer, and we make the big bucks.”
Disco stared at the dark man.
Goddy saying, last night after he’d dropped Disco at home he’d driven over to Cape Town International and parked the Benz in the open-air parking lot, under a tent of shade cloth. Just another fancy car left in the company of the Beemers and SUVs parked there for days on end.
Saying he could hotwire cars, but he didn’t know shit about finding, never mind disabling, tracking systems. So he’d leave the Benz to cool off for a day or two. Then he’d go back, and if the car was still there he could drive it away safely, without guys in black uniforms and pump-action shotguns surrounding him like Dallas SWAT on fucken TV.
Disco shook his head, the anger he felt quickly swamped by fear. “Jesus, Goddy, Manson gonna kill our asses.”
Right there in the shebeen, people watching, Godwynn backhanded Disco across the face. “Shut it, you fucken rabbit. I dunno why I bother with you, s’trues God. Now fucken relax.”
But Disco hadn’t relaxed; he’d fled the shebeen, itching, the spiders running across his skin. Desperate to get back to the
zozo
and smoke the small stash of tik he had left.
Any other day he would’ve checked the unmarked car and let the wind blow him far away. But his head was full of only one thing: hitting on that tik pipe.
He didn’t have a chance to run. The first cop grabbed him as he came into the backyard and threw him against the wall, Z88 9mm held to his temple. The other uniform frisked him. A plainclothes looked on, ugly little fucker with zits. Everybody knew this cop was bad luck.
“What I done now?” Disco asked as he saw a curtain twitch in the house. Fat squealing bitch would get hers.
“You know what you done, you piece of shit,” the plainclothes said as they cuffed Disco and hauled him to the car. “You and your bushman buddy.”
So the day ended with photographs. But Disco wasn’t vibing. He was at Bellwood South cop shop, having his mug shots taken.
Held for hijacking. And murder.
ROXY WAS STANDING naked in the walk-in closet when she heard the gate buzzer. She ignored the rails of designer dresses that
hung like ghosts from her past and stepped into a pair of shorts, pulling a T-shirt over her head, hair still wet from the shower.
Whoever was down at the gates kept their finger stuck to the button. Roxy crossed to the intercom phone next to the bedroom door.
“Yes?”
“It’s Jane. Open up.”
The moment Roxy had been dreading.
She released the gates, watching from the window as a sporty little jeep snorted into the driveway. Roxy walked down the stairs and opened the front door to Joe’s daughter.
Jane Palmer, eyes invisible behind black Armanis, crossed the bricks. She had her father’s jaw, which was okay on a man built like a light-heavy run to fat, but it didn’t sit well on an eighteen-year-old redhead.
Roxy saw Joe as the bullet drilled into his forehead. Pushed the image away.
“I’m sorry, Jane.” She lifted an arm to hug the girl but dropped it again.
Jane bumped past Roxy into the expanse of Italian tile and bleached walls, the sun turning the ocean to broken glass on the horizon.
“I didn’t come here for your fucken sympathy.” Her father’s jaw. And his mouth.
“Then why did you come?”
“There’s things I want. Stuff of my dad’s. It belongs to me and my mom.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Papers.”
“If you’re looking for his will, you’re wasting your time. It’s at his lawyer.”
Roxy felt a jolt of guilt when Jane removed her sunglasses, revealing swollen and bloodshot eyes.
“We’re not all fucken gold diggers. I want his personal things. Old pictures, things he kept from when I was a kid.” Tears were welling in her eyes.
“Help yourself.” Roxy gestured toward the interior of the house.
“We’re going to organize the funeral. My mom and me.”
Roxy tried not to show her relief. “If there’s anything I can do …”
“You can stay away.”
She shook her head. If only she could. “He was my husband, Jane.”
“Ja, right.” That jaw lifted. “I just want you to know that me and my mom are going to fight you over the will. No fucken ways are you going to get all this!”
Jane’s freckled hand swept the house; then she set off toward Joe’s office, chunky legs emerging like tree trunks from her shorts, Birkenstocks clacking on the tiles.
Roxy went into the kitchen and took a bottle of Evian from the fridge. She hadn’t killed Joe to get his money, but she wanted what was hers. She’d earned it.
The phone rang, and she picked up the kitchen extension. Spoke to a cop with an accent as thick as glue. Two suspects were being held at Bellwood South police headquarters.
She was needed at a lineup.
T
HE GOOD NEWS REACHED PIPER IN THE MORNING AS HE LAY IN THE bath, washing off the last of the blood, real tears flowing over the tattooed ones etched beneath each closed eye—one for every life he had taken—as he submerged his head in the warm water.
He would be adding a new teardrop, number nineteen, to mark his latest killing. Gutted the man like the pig that he was.
The lights had still burned the night before in the communal cell in Block B, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison—thirty brown men crammed into a cell built for ten. All members of the 28s prison gang.
All doing hard time for murder and worse.
Three competing stereos blasted out the East Coast gangsta rap favored by the 28s. Some of the men were watching soft-core porn on late-night TV: white women with tits like melons pretending to screw dickless men who looked like they wanted to be someplace else. The prisoners urged the women on, the rapid-fire gang patois—Afrikaans and English welded together
by slang incomprehensible to an outsider—bouncing off the walls in a profane call-and-response.
Other men in the cell were fucking for real. The couples doing it half hidden by the blankets that draped the double bunks, grunts and moans mocking the TV sex.
Piper watched none of this.
He lay on his bunk smoking a tik pipe, eyes closed, in a zone of quiet, exhaling a cloud of meth that blurred his face. He was maybe thirty-five, spare and sinewy, with a prison pallor. His brown skin tinged with gray like meat gone rancid, bearing the scars of twenty years of gang warfare.
He had the stillness that comes from being on intimate terms with death.
Piper wore only a pair of briefs, every inch of skin alive with gang tattoos: hands cocked like guns in the two-fingered salute of the 28s; sickle moons; a burning candle; the words
I hate you Mom
and
Spit on my grave
rendered crudely across his chest. Stars of his rank tattooed on his shoulders. The noose dangling down his right arm showed he’d once lived in the shadow of the gallows.
Piper’s eyes opened, and he looked across at Pig, a big dark man with a skin condition that left vivid pink blotches the size of a splayed hand across his face and upper body. Pig sprawled on his bunk, wearing sweatpants, watching the porn while his sex-boy, a delicate youth with dead eyes, spooned him peach halves from a can.
Piper stood and stripped off his briefs, so they wouldn’t be stained by Pig’s blood. The tattoo of an erect penis, black and serpentine, rose from the fuzz of his pubic hair and ended, one-eyed, above his navel. He reached under the blanket of his bunk and came out with the prison shank, a spoon with the handle sharpened to a spike.
Other men in the cell, Piper’s lieutenants, knew what was coming. Two of them took up positions at the door to listen for prison guards.
Piper walked naked toward his target.
Pig’s boy saw him coming and shrank away. Pig was swallowing a peach and laughing at the antics on the tube, so it took him a moment to understand what was about to happen to him.
Piper held a hand over the man’s mouth and cut his throat. Then he plunged the knife into Pig’s abdomen and disemboweled him. Blood sprayed across Piper’s tapestry of tattoos. The blaring of the TV and the pumping stereos masked the snorts and cries of the dying Pig.
The last thing he saw were those black tears on Piper’s cheeks.
Piper had killed for money, greed, lust, and power. And just for the hell of it. But this was the first time he had killed for love. Ended the life of the man who had spoken obscenely of Piper’s feelings for his wife. Disco.
While Disco had been with him in prison no eyebrows were raised—a 28 of Piper’s seniority was allowed his choice of young flesh. True, it was unusual that he kept Disco as long as he did, but that was no cause for concern. But after Disco was released six months ago, Piper had refused to take another wife. He lay alone in his bed. Lovesick.
The men started whispering that he had gone soft. There was talk that a new general should be elected. And that meant only one thing: Piper would have to be killed.
Piper, lovesick or not, wasn’t about to let that happen. Pollsmoor Prison would be his home for the rest of his life, a life he intended to be a long one. He needed a demonstration, something that would scare the shit out of the men and encourage them to keep their traps shut. So he had ritualistically killed the leader of the whispering campaign, the man who dreamed of wearing the general’s stars on his shoulders. Pig.
Piper, dripping with blood, had stepped back from the body and, with due ceremony, handed the shank to one of the young soldiers, an ambitious man who wanted to rise through the ranks of the number gang.
“The blood has saluted,” Piper said, bloody right hand in the cocked gun sign of the 28s.
“Salute, General,” the soldier said, his hand mirroring Piper’s.
In South Africa the death penalty had disappeared with apartheid. The soldier would stand trial and see another life sentence added to the one he was already serving. He wouldn’t flinch, secure in the knowledge of the rank—and attendant power—that awaited him.
Piper had risen through the 28s the same way.
In the morning the guards carried away Pig’s body. They beat the soldier who bore the knife, and the blame, senseless. Cuffed and shackled him and dragged him off to solitary.
Piper walked the exercise yard in his acid-orange jumpsuit, men shrinking back from him as he passed. Word had already got around. And men feared him again. It was as it should be.
But his heart was heavy. So Piper went to the laundry room.
Each morning at this time an ancient lifer named Moonlight, a 28, prepared a bath for Piper in the industrial washer, a giant chrome vat bolted to the tiled floor of the laundry. Piper stripped off the prison jumpsuit and climbed up into the washer, lowering himself into the water inside.
He scrubbed off the last of Pig’s blood.
As he lay in the warm water he wept like he never had as a baby. Wept because he knew that the only person he’d ever loved, his wife, had lied to him.
Before his release Disco had sworn he would commit a crime on the outside. Something serious enough to get arrested and returned to Pollsmoor and the arms of Piper.
But the months had passed. He’d heard nothing from Disco. No visit. No letter. No phone call. Piper didn’t even know where Disco was. He had used up his phone privileges trying to find him. Sent countless messages to men on the outside to search for Disco. Information that came back was scant.
Disco was somewhere on the White City side of Paradise
Park. The turf of the 26s. Americans. An enemy stronghold. That much Piper knew. What he didn’t know was how to stop the pain of being without his wife.
He heard banging on the side of the washer. “Ja, come.”
A face as crumpled as an old shoe bent down close to Piper, and Moonlight whispered in his ear, the sound of rats’ claws on concrete. Piper was used to stench, but even he recoiled from the decay that hung on the old man’s breath. But he could have kissed that rancid mouth when he realized what Moonlight was telling him.
A 28 who had spent the night in one of the Bellwood South holding cells had been brought in to the awaiting-trial section of Pollsmoor. He had passed on a message, and that message had reached the ears of Moonlight.
Disco De Lilly had been arrested.
“Arrested for what?” Piper asked.
“Hijacking and murder, General.”
Piper’s heart leaped. His wife was coming home to him. Forever.
DISCO SPAT BLOOD and an incisor with it. He lay prone on the floor of the interrogation room, his vision still blurred from the last kick. He looked up in time to see the uniform’s boot swinging again, and he managed to cover his head with his arm, taking the kick above the elbow.
“Talk to us, Disco.” The plainclothes sat on the edge of the wooden table that was bolted to the floor. He smoked and picked at one of the zits on his neck.
“What you want me to say?” Disco got to his knees, still trying to cover up.
“Tell us who shot that whitey. You or your buddy.”
“I tole you. I don’t know nothing about no shooting.”
“But you were in the car? The Benz?”
“I wasn’t in no Benz in my fucken life. Not even by a wedding.” Disco tried to fall back on his charm and flashed a grin, less appealing with the missing tooth.
The uniform wound up for another kick. The plainclothes shook his head and lowered himself down, squatting in front of Disco, right in his face. “Your buddy says it was you what shot him.”
The cops were bullshitting. He and Godwynn had been kept apart, in different rooms. They had no chance to get their stories straight. But Goddy wouldn’t talk. Or would he?
The plainclothes reached over and took a newspaper from the table. He opened it on page three, held it up. It took Disco a moment to make sense of what he was seeing. A color photo of a blondie. Quite hot. Felt his nut sack tighten like a pair of raisins when he recognized her. The blonde from last night, standing over a dead man.
Disco was no reader, but the words
hijack
and
murder
were within his range.
The fat white fuck was dead. Jesus. He fought panic.
The cop dropped the paper and saw the look on Disco’s face.
“Talk, Disco, or we gonna throw that fucked-out ass of yours back in Pollsmoor. For life, my buddy. You’ll be able to park a truck up your butt when Piper’s finish with you.”
The uniform laughed. The plainclothes didn’t. Disco could smell Kentucky chicken on his breath. Disco saw a face coming at him, a face crying tears like black rain …
“I tole you. I don’t know fucken nothing.”
The plainclothes stared at him, then sighed and stood up. He nodded at the uniform, who stepped forward again.
“Don’t fuck up his face; I want the wife to recognize the little cunt.”
So the uniform worked Disco’s body.