R
OXY RAN.
She sprinted down toward the ocean, the crucifix bouncing lightly on her collarbones. As she jogged on the spot down near Saunders Rocks, waiting for a luxury bus to pass—a tour guide mouthing mute as a goldfish behind the bulging windshield—her fingers felt for the silver cross. The bus rumbled on, leaving a trail of diesel that Roxy outran as her Reeboks hit the Sea Point beachfront, a strip of luxury apartment blocks facing the Atlantic.
Roxy wasn’t a Catholic, and it said a lot about her state of mind that she’d dug the cross, tarnished after all these years, out of her closet and strung it around her neck in the primitive hope that it would protect her. But she feared it wouldn’t be enough to stand up to the dark shit that she’d let into her life when she’d shot Joe.
Well, what did she want, a fetish of human bones and dried body parts skewered on rusted barbed wire? Available, she was
sure, somewhere in the endless maze of shacks growing like a rash on the dunes next to the airport freeway. This was Cape Town, but it was still Africa.
The crucifix had been given to her when she was fourteen by a neighbor in Miami, a woman named Mama Esmeralda, a Marielito refugee from Cuba who read everything from tea leaves to tarot cards. Mama had told Roxy—at the time when porno stepdaddy was doing his daily shoots—that her life was about to change. That she would leave Florida and never come back.
All true.
Years later in New York, Mama Esmeralda long dead, Roxy’s modeling career in free fall, and her bank account running on empty, she’d visited a Haitian woman on Fordham Road who’d practiced Santeria. Each night, at the woman’s instruction, Roxy had scrawled her dreams on a page of white paper and burned a yellow candle over it, watching the wax blot her handwriting as she sipped a Stoli.
Had it worked? She’d asked for a life away from the catwalk. A life without financial care. She’d come to Cape Town and met Joe. Answered prayers.
So, here she was, reaching for superstition again. She sure as hell needed some help.
Roxy had been in shock since she’d seen the man who gunpointed her. There was no mistaking that face. He stood in the lineup, wrapped in the aura those who are born beautiful carry with them, like he was expecting a makeup artist to appear and touch up the shine on his nose.
She’d sensed the eyes of the ugly cop, the one with the plague of zits, as she recognized the hijacker. Had she shown anything? She didn’t know. She’d dragged her eyes away from Mr. Handsome, concentrated on the other men. If the one who had shot Joe was there, she didn’t recognize him. At least she didn’t have to lie about that.
She’d studied all the men, carefully avoiding the beautiful
one, and shaken her head. The senior cop in the suit stood beside her. Was she sure? She nodded. Apologized. Wished she could help. She’d walked back to the car with the woman cop, anxious to escape.
Roxy told herself that the hijackers would take their lucky break and fade into the vastness of the Flats. Within a few days nobody would remember her and Joe, their story buried under a pile of newer, bloodier, more sensational crimes.
But the fear remained.
She lengthened her stride, driven by the Nirvana pumping from the pink iPod velcroed to her bicep. Music that took her back to her first year modeling in Europe, when the world felt new and anything seemed possible.
Roxy followed the walkway, the stone buffer against which the Atlantic beat itself to death, sending up plumes of spray that cooled her in the evening heat. Sea Point’s small, rocky beaches were hidden below the seawall, but the stench of kelp rotting in the sun clogged the air. She dodged other runners, roller bladers, dark domestic workers and the pale kids they minded, and the homeless people—unwanted humanity washed up on the shores of Africa’s most expensive real estate.
She flew past the miniature golf course and was in sight of the lighthouse, striped red and white like a bloody bandage, when she was felled by exhaustion. Roxy stopped, gasping for breath, lowered her ass to the back of a sidewalk bench and found herself looking up at the gym of a high-rise apartment block. A flabby man was framed in the window, chest heaving as he pounded a treadmill to nowhere. He looked like Joe.
She stood and walked across to the coffee shop that faced the ocean and Robben Island on the horizon. She took a table in the shade of an umbrella and ordered an Evian, gradually slowing her breath.
Her gray top was dark with sweat between her breasts, and
her ponytail dripped down her back. She kept in shape, but she’d run nearly three miles at full speed, fueled by panic.
Her drink came, and she sipped the water, feeling a breeze cooling her. Relaxing.
Somebody had left a
Cape Times
on the table. She flicked through it, happy to be distracted by a world with problems greater than hers. Then she saw herself staring up from page three.
Roxy was no stranger to seeing her photograph, but this was a first: wrapped in the paramedic’s blanket, dead husband lying in a pool of blood at her feet. If she’d been naked, in a pair of stilettos, it could have been a Helmut Newton. She remembered a man shooting pictures the night before. Assumed he was a cop. Not some paparazzo.
Roxy got the irony. She’d stepped away from the cameras after more than half a lifetime, tired of those flashbulbs leeching her soul. But she hadn’t escaped them.
Beneath the picture was a caption. A few bald lines. No outrage. Matter of fact. A Cape Town businessman killed in a hijacking. Joe’s name was mentioned. Hers wasn’t. Just a pretty face.
Sex and death sold newspapers.
The photograph unsettled Roxy, as if her guilt was somehow visible on her face for the world to see. She knew she was being crazy, irrational, but she tore the picture out, wanting it hidden. There was no pocket in her sweatpants, so she held the scrap of newsprint in her closed hand.
She became aware of the smiles of two swarthy middle-aged men, newly arrived at the table nearest hers. They wore loafers without socks, gold chains in their graying chest hair. Eurotrash looking to get lucky. She finished her water, left money on the table, and went out to the street, feeling the men’s eyes—like oily kalamata olives—glued to her ass.
As Roxy started to run toward home, still holding the crumpled photograph in her hand, she was startled by a blaring horn.
A black woman, bulky as a linebacker in her layered rags, stood staring at Roxy from the middle of the road, oblivious to the traffic that swarmed around her rusted shopping cart. The wire of the cart festooned with junk: broken mirrors, feathers and bone, a headless pink doll.
Roxy heard a shout from behind her. Spun. Just a taxi driver, yelling for passengers from the open window of a red minibus pimpled with dents. The taxi rattled off toward Sea Point, leaving smoke and hip hop hanging in the thick air.
When Roxy turned back, the woman was gone. Disappeared. Roxy thought she’d imagined her—some trick of sleep deprivation and paranoia—until she saw her limping down the ramp to Three Anchor Bay.
Roxy felt a jab of primitive fear. Too much bad stuff coming down. Mr. Handsome in the lineup. Her picture in the paper. And now this woman staring at Roxy like she was scanning her soul.
This is woo-woo bullshit,
Roxy told herself.
Just keep your fucking head straight.
Still, she found the fingers of her left hand reaching for the crucifix. Her right hand was clenched into a fist. When she opened it, she saw that the newsprint had started to bleed onto her skin. She balled the scrap of newspaper and threw it into a trash can.
Roxy headed home. Time to stop running.
D
ISCO DROVE. GODDY RODE SHOTGUN, ONE HAND ON THE COLT, THE other on the door handle, waiting for the right moment to jump out and grab the blondie. She ran ahead of them, along Victoria Road, her ponytail bouncing and her tight ass doing a slow dance beneath the black spandex.
“Not too fast.” Goddy was sweating, from the heat and the tension. He stank like cat piss and onions.
“I go any slower, I fucken stop.”
Disco didn’t like to drive, and the stolen Toyota was boiling and lurching in first gear, the clutch burning. Cars were honking at them as their slow crawl backed up the traffic. The blondie ran light and easy. Like she could go on for hours. He couldn’t help it: a picture of him riding that fit body just kept on coming into Disco’s mind.
An hour earlier they’d boosted the Toyota out Goodwood side and driven to the house up the mountain, same place where they jacked the Benz. Goddy had rolled over his feeble arguments, and
Disco did what he always did: he let himself be moved along by the strong of the world, passive as a straw in a stream.
They’d parked across from the house. Waiting.
“What the fuck we sitting here for?” Disco asked.
When Goddy ignored him, Disco crushed another Mandrax pill into the broken bottleneck that served as a pipe. Images of Piper oozed their way into his consciousness, and his tattoos ached and burned like they had when they were gouged into his skin. The only way to handle the fear was to whack his brain befuck with an up-down cocktail of meth and Mandrax.
Goddy glimpsed her, the blondie, walking on the upper level of the house and pointed a dirty finger. “There’s the bitch. We wait for her to come out. Take her when she’s away from here so the panic button don’t work.”
“What if she don’t come out?”
“Just shut the fuck up and wait.”
Disco fired up the pipe, hit it hard, and held his breath like he was going for Olympic gold, then released billowing smoke. He offered the pipe to Goddy, who shook his head, piggy eyes glued to those wooden gates. Which slid open and revealed the blondie in the tight top and stretchy pants that showed her ass and her crack.
“Follow the bitch,” Goddy had said.
Disco hadn’t needed a second invitation.
They shadowed her along the oceanfront, sat sweating in the Toyota while she had a drink, waiting for the right moment. Now they were right behind her, ready to take her. The chorus of horns blared, and Disco stuck a tattooed arm out the window and gestured for the cars to pass him. A white guy with a red face shot past in an SUV and almost collected a truck head-on.
Disco, made mellow by the pipe, had to catch a cackle at that.
“She’s turning, fucker!” Goddy smacked him on the shoulder with the barrel of the Colt, and Disco managed, just in time, to swing the wheel and follow the blondie into the short street that
died at the steps that would lead her to the road high above and home.
“Put foot!”
Disco did as he was told and the Toyota surged past her, just beating her to the steps, and Goddy was out of the car before it stopped. He shoved the Colt into the woman’s face and got a handful of her ponytail, dragging her toward the car. Disco reached over and cracked the rear door in time for Goddy to throw the blondie to the floor inside, then follow her in, leading with the gun.
“You move, you cunt, I shoot you.” Goddy’s knee was on her chest, and she was all but blowing the Colt barrel.
Disco slammed the car into reverse, backed up, found first gear, and sent the Toyota flying back the way they had come. Disco could hear the woman’s breath coming in rasps. He caught her fragrance, something sweet like flowers over the girl sweat. Then something sour and sharp.
The smell of fear.
B
ILLY AFRIKA WAS BACK IN PROTEA STREET, LATE AFTERNOON shadows lying heavy across Barbara Adams’s small house. Barbara came out the front door, locking the security gate after her. Billy opened the passenger side of the Hyundai, and she sat down next to him. Closed the door. Locked it.
She told him about Manson and his threats. Speaking quickly, her fingers worrying at a small rip in her dress. She cast nervous glances down the street. Eyes darting back toward her house. Looking anywhere but at Billy.
“He’s serious. He’ll rape her.” Barbara’s voice was tight, as if a hand squeezed her throat.
“It’s not going to happen,” Billy said, trying to sound like he meant it.
She still didn’t look at him. “Last week they got hold of a girl from Marigold Street. Twelve years old. Her mommy sent her to the store for bread, and when she came back they caught her by the park. Afternoon still. Not even dark. Six of them raped
her. The people in the houses knew what was going on, closed their doors and put their TVs up loud.”
A movement caught Billy’s eye, and he saw Jodie at the front door, looking out at them through the bars of the security gate. Barbara saw her too. Then the girl turned and disappeared into the house.
Barbara’s eyes were on Billy now. “I can’t let that happen to my child.”
“It won’t, Barbara.”
“I need to give Manson his money. You understand?”
“I understand. I’m on it,” Billy said. “He get it all? The money I deposited?”
She nodded. “Every last cent.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Barbara? What was happening?”
“Tell you how? I didn’t even know where you were. You just disappeared. Then that money was in the bank every month.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I was helping.”
Shaking her head. “It was a curse.”
He couldn’t find any words.
“I’ll keep Jodie back from school for a few days. But I can’t keep her locked up forever.”
“I know that. There’s cash I’m owed. I’ll sort this.”
“You’re all I’ve got, Billy.” Like she was damned.
“I won’t let anything happen to Jodie. I promise.”
Barbara was about to reply. Didn’t. Left the car, walking up to the house, crossing the pavement where her husband had died. She unlocked the barred gate, paused for a moment, watching Billy. Then she locked the gate and closed the door.
Two years before, Billy Afrika had stood there, over Clyde Adams’s gutted body, and made another promise. Swore he’d take care of his friend’s family. He’d handed in his badge and become a mercenary. No one had used the word
mercenary
, of course. You were a
contractor
, skilled in
close protection
.
Joe Palmer’s company, Strategic Solutions, had provided
bodyguards and security personal to trouble spots around the world. Iraq absorbed most of these men, often doing the work that the coalition forces couldn’t be seen to be doing. So Billy had been part of a deal brokered by SS, which hooked him and some other South Africans up with a U.S. company in Baghdad.
Billy had wanted out of Cape Town. To get far away from the looming mountain and the sea and windswept sprawl of the Flats. Away from Piper caged in Pollsmoor Prison and the dust devils that danced on Clyde Adams’s fresh grave.
Billy hadn’t cared where he was posted, as long as he was being paid in dollars. Sending the money home to Clyde’s wife and children. But all he’d done was leave them vulnerable to the vultures, made them prey by laying a boatload of cash on them. He had been a fucken idiot.
Billy started the car and drove away, feeling the weight of the Glock in his waistband. Fighting the temptation to drive across to Manson’s house.
He could tackle the gangster head-on, pull a High Noon on a dusty White City street. Maybe he’d get lucky and kill him. Maybe he’d die trying. Even if he took Manson out, it would solve nothing. Another tattooed punk with cloned MTV moves would pimp-roll his way up the food chain.
And Clyde’s family would be even more vulnerable.
Billy had to get Barbara and her kids out of Paradise Park, away from the gangs. Take them to one of the quiet fishing villages up the coast, where they could build new lives. That would cost money.
Billy drove up Main toward the city. Cape Town was putting on one of its shows, the evening sun painting the distant mountain a pale pink.
He reached for his cell phone and dialed his cop connection. Prayed he wouldn’t get voice mail again. The cop answered.
Billy said, “You got that address for me yet, for Joe Palmer?”
“I do, ja.” The man laughed. “Salt River morgue.”
“The fuck you saying here?” Feeling his hands tighten on the wheel.
The cop told Billy Afrika about the hijacking and the murder. Told him where he could find Joe Palmer’s widow. Up in Bantry Bay, where the sun was sagging behind Lion’s Head, sending up golden rays like the holy light itself.
ROXY LAY ON her back, trapped between the front and rear seats, the ugly man on top of her, forcing the gun barrel into her mouth. He stank, and a drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto her cheek, where it rolled down like a tear.
She couldn’t see the driver, from where she was wedged, but she had glimpsed his face as she was grabbed and thrown into the car. Mr. Handsome from the lineup. Meaning that the troll-like man had fired the first shot at Joe.
The troll was speaking, too quickly for her to catch the words, like a rabid dog barking. When she didn’t react, he twisted the gun in her mouth and she tasted blood. “I say gimme the fucken keys.”
She understood him this time and unclipped the keys from the cord around her neck. He grabbed them from her and held them up. A tattooed arm hooked over the front seat, and the driver took them. There was a panic button on the keychain that worked in a half-mile radius of her house. Not that she had thought of using it.
She had no idea where they were going. Maybe they were taking her out to the Cape Flats, the sprawling ghetto she’d glimpsed from the air, and come to know from crime statistics on TV. All she could see was the darkening blue of the sky through the side window. She heard traffic around her: the hiss of airbrakes from a truck, the incessant horn tapping of a minibus taxi—the wail of the doorman:
Caaaaaape Teeeuuuun
—and the distant scream of a siren speeding toward somebody else’s emergency.
They turned into a quieter street, and for a minute she heard only the rasping breath of the man above her, and the strain of the car’s engine as it fought an incline. When she saw Lion’s Head in the rear window, she knew they were taking her home.
The car slowed, and the squat man was speaking again. “What color you push to open the gate?” The gun barrel slipped, wet, from her mouth.
“Green. The green button.”
He pushed the barrel against her forehead, hard enough to dent the skin. “If it’s the panic, I fucken kill you.”
He watched out the side window, his body tense over hers. His stink almost suffocating her. She heard the rattle of the castors in their rails as the gates slid open, and the man relaxed. The car rolled through and came to a stop with a squeak of brakes.
Mr. Handsome had the rear door open, and the troll backed out. The barrel of the gun didn’t move from her. His T-shirt stuck to his paunch. She could see the word
Lifeguard
lettered across his flabby chest. She pulled herself upright and slid from the car into the perfection of a Cape Town summer’s evening. The beautiful man was leering at her, his eyes all over her body like hot hands.
The short one grabbed her by the ponytail and yanked her head to the side, bringing her down to his height. Jammed the gun into her neck. “There anybody in the house?”
“No.”
“The alarm on?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. You open the door, and you punch the code. You do anything stupid, and you dead, hear me?”
“Yes. I hear you.”
He let go of her hair and shoved her toward the front door. The other man handed Roxy the keys, and they watched as she unlocked the door, her hands shaking. The alarm started to pulse a rhythmic warning tone. She had thirty seconds to enter
the code into the keypad inside the door, or the alarm would activate.
She punched in the five numbers. The beeping continued. The troll was coming at her. She punched in the numbers again. Got them right this time, and the beeping stopped.
Mr. Handsome looked around. “Nice place you got here.” Like he was an invited guest.
The short man was up in her face. “Where’s your room?”
Roxy pointed up the stairs. He shoved her forward, and she led them up past the pink room, to her bedroom.
The troll said, “You got a girl?”
At first she thought he was asking if she had a child. Then she realized he was talking about a domestic worker. She shook her head. “She’s on vacation.”
The beautiful man laughed. “I can see that.”
The bedroom was a mess, the bed unmade, clothes strewn across the room. She had never been much for housework.
The short man grabbed a couple of pairs of tights that hung from the back of a chair and chucked them at his buddy. “Tie up her hands and feet.”
“I have to pee,” she said.
“Piss in your pants.”
“Please. Let me use the bathroom.”
Mr. Handsome, walking over with the tights in his hand, smiled at her. “Let her take a piss, man. I watch her.” Something filthy in that smile.
“I take her,” said the squat man. “You start checking through the closets.”
He pushed her toward the en-suite bathroom. Stood in the doorway, watching her. Roxy knew he wasn’t going anywhere. She sat down on the toilet and pulled down the lycra pants. Doing her best to keep herself covered.
He looked at her with disinterest. “Hurry the fuck up.”
At first she thought the pee wouldn’t come, with his eyes on
her, but she managed to let go. Felt the relief. She wiped herself, and they went back out.
The beautiful man had yanked open the drawers of the vanity table and found her jewelry: rings, necklaces, earrings. The spoils of having been married to Joe Palmer for five years.
“These real?” he asked, fingers dripping Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels.
“Yes.” She watched as he filled his pockets.
The troll shoved her to the carpet. “Tie her up. Come.”
Mr. Handsome enjoyed doing it, his hands lingering on her body as he bound her wrists behind her back and tied her ankles together.
The ugly man sat down on the bed. He stared at her, then he smiled, showing uneven black teeth. “We know what you done.”
She looked at him, shook her head.
“You kill your fucken husband and tell the cops it’s us.”
She stared him down. “What do you want?”
He shrugged. “Call it …
compensation
.” He liked the taste of the word enough to repeat it. “
Compensation
.” Then he laughed again. The beautiful one laughed too.
The troll stood. “Watch her. I gonna go check the place out.”
As soon as they were alone, Mr. Handsome came over to Roxy, took her chin in his tattooed hand, and forced her to look up into his face. It was a terrifying face. All the elements that determined beauty were there: almond eyes, a finely shaped nose, full lips, high cheekbones. His hair was only slightly wavy and fell across his forehead. But it was a face that lacked humanity. The eyes were empty and fogged. The face of a fallen angel. She could smell the chemicals on his body.
He smiled at her. The perfect smile ruined by a missing tooth. He squatted down beside her and traced a finger along the bare skin of her arm. She felt the faint blonde down stand in revulsion and fear as his hand moved along her shoulder and followed the
outline of her breast through the damp top. She could feel his stale breath on her face.
His hand dropped, caressing her inner thigh, smiling at her. Seductive. Believing she was attracted to him. He moved himself forward so she could feel his hard-on against her knee.
“You and me, we can make beautiful babies.”
She twisted away from him, tried to kick out with her bound ankles and only succeeded in toppling to the side. She lay with her face against the carpet and saw the short man walk back in.
“Leave her be. Plenty time for that.” He came over to her and grabbed her arm, pulling her upright. He tapped her chin with the gun barrel. “Where’s the safe?”
Roxy shook her head. “There is no safe.” She was telling the truth. If there had been, she would’ve emptied it by now.
“I said, where’s the fucken safe?” Holding the barrel against her cheek.