Mixed Blood

by Roger Smith

  Isaacs grunted and gave Bessie a disinterested kick with the toe of his boot. “Saves the vet the work.”

  That’s when Benny Mongrel hit him, a looping left to the nose. Benny wasn’t a big man, but there wasn’t much you were going to teach him about fighting. He felt the foreman’s nose break under his knuckles.

  Isaacs’s hands flew up to his face, blood dripping between his fingers. “You fucken bastard.” This came out muffled. Benny Mongrel kicked him in the balls.

  That was when the two cops came in, with their guns out. There was confusion when they came upon the pair of bleeding security men and the dead dog.

  It took a bit of explaining. One of them even took notes.

  Then the ambulance was there, and they bandaged Benny Mongrel. The paramedic working on Benny Mongrel said he was lucky; the bullet had passed straight through.

  The other medic was having a look at Isaacs, told him his nose was broken.

  “I fucken know that,” said Isaacs, seriously pissed off. Then he looked at Benny Mongrel. “You come pick up your pay next week, Niemand.”

  “Shove it up your ass,” said Benny Mongrel as they walked him out to the ambulance. He had looked back over his shoulder at the dog.

  Bye, Bessie.

  He didn’t want Sniper Security’s money or its fucken job. He wanted that fat cop. He was going to cut him open like a pig from his balls to his throat and let his guts fall out, let the fat bastard try to hold himself together while Benny Mongrel watched him die.

  They finally got to stitch him. Benny Mongrel was stripped to the waist, his prison tattoos making quite a statement under the harsh hospital fluorescents. The bullet had taken a chunk out of his right shoulder, removed part of his tattooed rank.

  The doctor was a young woman, probably just out of medical school. Benny Mongrel made her nervous. Her hands shook, and her stitching wasn’t going to win any prizes. She saw him looking down at her handiwork. “It’ll look better when it’s healed.”

  He said nothing.

  They told Benny Mongrel that they didn’t have a bed for him. He could sleep the night on a bench in the emergency room. Maybe they could find him a blanket.

  But he was already walking away, out into the early hours of another Cape Town day.

  Carmen Fortune stood in the doorway of her apartment and stared at Gatsby, then at the little blond kid lying limp in his arms, tied up like a Christmas turkey. “What in fuck is that?”

  “It’s a kid. What does it look like?”

  Gatsby shouldered her aside and went into the apartment. He threw the boy onto the sofa next to where Uncle Fatty was passed out in his briefs.

  “Is it dead?”

  “If it was dead, I’d throw it in a fucken ditch. Not bring it here.” Gatsby was panting and stinking up the room even more than he usually did.

  Carmen closed and locked the front door and went over to the child. A white kid with light hair. Blood clotted on the side of the head. The boy’s hands were tied behind his back and his feet were bound. Carmen could see that the circulation was cut off.

  The kid was unconscious.

  Carmen looked up at Gatsby. “Why you bring him here?”

  “You going to look after him for me.”

  “Like fucken hell!”

  “For a day or two.”

  He pulled out a wad of notes from his waist bag and threw them at her. Carmen caught them with surprising deftness.

  She looked at the money hungrily, running a thumb over the notes wrapped in an elastic band. There must have been five hundred there. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  He laughed one of his sucking laughs. “All you people know is fucken trouble. It’s in your blood.”

  He sat down on the arm of the sofa, his arms dangling limply between his legs like he was a big ape. Carmen shoved the money into her bra, circled the sofa warily. “Whose kid is it?”

  “You don’t need to know. You keep him here, keep him out of sight till tomorrow, maybe day after, I give you another grand.”

  She stared at him. “Don’t talk shit to me.”

  He wiped a huge hand across his face, moving his pudding-bowl fringe aside. “I’m serious.”

  “I just got to look after him?”

  “That’s all. Give him something to eat. Keep him quiet.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I come and get him again. And you can go buy you some tik and have a fucken party.”

  “Your mother. I don’t tik.”

  Gatsby raised his bulk from the sofa, lifted his shirt, and pulled his jeans down. For a horrible moment she thought he was going to expose himself to her, but he was letting her have a look at the pistol at his waist, surrounded by a mass of mottled pink flesh.

  “You be a good little girlie, and you get your grand. You let anybody know this kid is here, and I’ll kill you. You get me?” Those dead pig eyes were latched on to her. It made her want to have a bath.

  “Ja. I get you.”

  He dropped the shirt and trudged to the door.

  “Hey,” she called out to him as he reached for the door handle.

  He turned. “What?”

  “What’s his name?”

  “How the fuck must I know?”

  “Can I cut him loose? His feet is going blue.”

  “Do what the fuck you like. Just keep him hidden.” And the fat boer was gone, slamming the door after him.

  Carmen walked back to the sofa and stood looking at the kid. She reached out a hand, tentatively, and touched his throat. She could feel a pulse, fluttering like a bird. His eyelids flickered but stayed shut.

  She pulled the tape from his mouth, then worked the cloth free. He sucked air through his mouth but still didn’t regain consciousness. He was a prr h boy, she could see, in his Disney pj’s. A soft little whitey whose nice life just went all to shit. Not her fucken problem. To her he was a godsend. A bonus.

  She went across to the kitchen and got a knife so she could cut him loose.

  Burn sat in front of the TV. Local news. Images of a child’s body found in a drain out on the Cape Flats. The child had been raped and murdered.

  Burn reached for the remote and changed the channel. MTV. Some writhing Latina singing about love gone bad. Jesus, he wished he was back in the States, where he understood the codes. This fucking country was all about angles that he didn’t get. He had the dead gangbanger’s pistol next to him. For some reason it made him feel better. Maybe because he knew that if things got too bad he could use it on himself.

  He had to believe that his son was still alive. Matt had been taken for a reason. This was about money. About greed. It had to be.

  His cell phone rang, and when he saw Mrs. Dollie’s name come up on caller ID, he allowed himself to believe, for one split second, that she was calling him from her home, not lying dead near the front door.

  He answered the phone.

  “Mr. Burn?” The man knew his real name. The voice on the other end, heavy with a guttural local accent, was distorted. As if the caller was talking on speakerphone and had muffled his voice to disguise it.

  “Who is this?”

  “Never mind. I’ve got your kid.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The boy is okay. And he will stay that way if you do exactly what I say. Understand?”

  “Yes. What you want?”

  “I want a million. Cash. By the end of tomorrow.”

  “I don’t have that kind of cash lying around.”

  “Listen, Burn, fuck with me, and I start cutting off his fingers and stuffing them in your postbox. You get me?”

  “I understand. Please, I’ll do as you say. Don’t hurt my son. I need to transfer money, from offshore. I’m going to need more time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Until the day after tomorrow.”

  All Burn heard was the wheezing of breath. Then the man spoke. “Okay, but no longer than that. Understood?”

  “Yes.”<
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  “Now, I know who you are. I know the U.S. Marshals want your ass. So you’re not going to do something fucken stupid now, are you? Like go to the cops?”

  “No. I won’t do that.”

  “Okay. Because if you do, I’ll kill your brat.”

  “I give you my word.”

  “Can I at least speak to my son?”

  “Not now. Just get the money.”

  And the man was gone. At least it was about money. Greed Burn could comprehend; it meant there was still a chance that he was going to get his son back alive.

  Something about the voice reminded him of the fat cop. Barnard. It made sense, the man prowling around, showing them photographs. Maybe even lifting Susan’s fingerprint. Barnard was foul enough. But Burn couldn’t be sure. Still, he felt the urge to do something, to take action. Try to track the fat cop down. Find out if he had taken his son.

  He calmed himself. Making those kind of moves would be the quickest way to get Matt killed. Tough as it was, he had to wait. Take it step by step.

  Burn crossed the living room, trying not to look at Mrs. Dollie where she lay under a blanket. He went into the spare room, booted up his laptop, and accessed his anonymous Swiss bank account.

  The kidnapper wanted one million in South African currency. That was about one hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars. Not a lot of money, but double what he had lying in the safe in the bedroom. He completed the transactions, transferring money into two different Cape Town banks. He would attract less attention that way. He logged off and stood up. He needed to do something about Mrs. Dollie.

  For the second time that week, Burn had to get rid of the dead.

  CHAPTER 19

  Disaster Zondi battled his frustration. He prowled the cramped office at Bellwood South HQ, the strip lights buzzing like angry insects. The building was deserted, way after midnight.

  The fat man, the very reason for him being in this bloody painted tart of a city, had disappeared. Rudi Barnard, previously so visible, so present with his fat and his stench, so much part of the corner of the Cape Flats he’d made his own, was nowhere to be seen. He never went back to his apartment. He made no contact with those of his informers who could be relied upon to cooperate with the police. Even the woman who supplied him with his junk food had noted with relief that she hadn’t seen him.

  Gone.

  Zondi, via Peterson whom he used like a glove puppet, had mobilized as much manpower as possible to scour the Flats for the rogue cop. They had come up empty.

  Meanwhile Zondi’d had to distract himself by interviewing the other two bent cops on his list. They were nothing, small-time nobodies who had their hands in a few pockets. Run-of the-mill. Boring.

  His prey was Barnard. And his prey had slipped off the radar.

  He knew he had to be patient. Barnard was too used to writing his own rules; he would screw up, and then they would have him.

  Zondi stood at the window staring out at the lights of distant Cape Town. He fought an urge to go out into the night and prowl for sex; the more alienated the encounter, the better. Zondi had never married and had no companion. He had become slful at fending off the sexual advances of the female hunter-gatherers of affluent black Johannesburg. So skillful, in fact, that many thought he was gay.

  He wasn’t, but he did nothing to contradict the rumor.

  Zondi had no use for the comedy of manners that a relationship, or even an affair, would demand. The mating dance, the shared intimacies, the endless conversations about careers and status and, God forbid, where the relationship was going. The idea of waking up with a woman in his bed, her body slack from sleep and sex, her expensive perfume mixing with other more pungent smells, frankly revolted him.

  Zondi was a hit-and-run man. When he couldn’t suppress the urge any longer, when it became too insistent, he went on the hunt. A pickup in a bar, or even a street corner—he had no qualms about paying, liked it in fact—a quick and brutal coupling in the back of his car or an anonymous hotel room and then out of there. Back to his place for a shower, a thimbleful of Glenmorangie, and, with the smoky tang of the barley and the peat fire still on his palate, a peaceful sleep alone in his bed, his appetites satiated. For the moment.

  But he had made a pact within himself before he left Johannesburg. No sex, no distractions, until his work in Cape Town was done.

  He had to be disciplined.

  His cell phone rang. It was the computer technician at the police lab. The man, an Afrikaner barely out of school, surprised Zondi with his efficiency. “Uh, Mr. Zondi, I’ve traced that IP address, via an ISP in the States.”

  “In English, please.”

  “Okay. I tracked back the Yahoo address to a person in the USA.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “He is a deputy U.S. marshal in …” The technician paused; Zondi could hear fingers tapping a keyboard. “In Arlington, Virginia.”

  Now Zondi was interested. “How do you know that?”

  “The IP address is registered to the U.S. Marshals’ headquarters.”

  Zondi reached for his notepad. “You have the name of this marshal?”

  “Torrance. Dexter Torrance.” The technician spelled it for Zondi.

  Zondi thanked the technician and killed the call. All thoughts of his howling libido were gone as he sat down in front of Barnard’s laptop. It was in sleep mode, and he drew a fingertip across the touchpad, wiping his finger on his silk handkerchief in unconscious fear of contamination.

  The image of the fingerprint faded up onto the screen. Why had Barnard sent it to a deputy U.S. marshal in the States? And who the hell did it belong to? The first question might take some time to answer. The answer to the second question was within his grasp.

  His own slimline laptop chimed the arrival of an e-mail. It was from his commanding officer, Archibald Mathebula. His boss had called in a favor and acquired an encrypted password for Zondi, a password that allowed him to access the FBI fingerprint database.

  Burn slowed the Jeep and eased it into a parking spot between streetlights. He switched off the interior light of the car before he opened the door. He stood a moment in the quiet street of houses much like the one he rented, watching and listening. It was after 2:00 a.m., and the world was asleep. Aside from a dog barking in the distance and a car whining up an incline blocks away, all was quiet.

  Burn walked around the Jeep and came to a steep flight of steps that connected the road he was on to the one below. They were a feature of this suburb built on the precipitous slope. The steps were used by joggers and dog walkers and domestic workers taking a short cut down to High Level Road and the minibus taxis. They were also used by homeless people as a place to sleep. Burn walked halfway down the steps. He saw no dispossessed bundle of humanity.

  He went back to the car, looked around once more to make sure he was alone and unobserved before he opened the rear door of the Jeep. Mrs. Dollie lay in the same spot he had stowed the last two corpses. She was wrapped in a blanket. He bent down and lifted her. She was small and thin, easy to carry.

  Burn hurried down the stairs. He lowered her gently to the concrete steps and unwrapped her from the blanket. Enough streetlight reached him to see the look of terror on her face. For a moment he felt he couldn’t do this, leave this decent woman who had treated his son so tenderly lying like refuse dumped on the steps. Then Burn took the blanket and went back to his car. He checked once more that he hadn’t been observed and drove away.

  He knew that when the body was found on the stairs in the morning, it would be called a mugging. When the police came, he would add substance to that fiction, tell them that she had left his house at around seven, refusing his offer of a ride, saying that she enjoyed the walk down to the taxi. That it did her good, the bit of exercise. It would be easy enough to reproduce the dialogue that had passed between them many times before.

  As he pulled the car into his garage, Burn felt sick. Because of him Mrs. Dollie had unwittingly been drawn i
nto something that had taken her life. He had met her husband, a timid and self-effacing man who could not be persuaded to call him anything other than Mr. Jack. He’d also met her daughter, Leila, a young woman in her twenties who was pursuing a career in business, the product of her parents’ years of selfless dedication.

  Burn knew he couldn’t afford the luxury of guilt. He had to keep one thing, and one thing alone, on his mind.

  Matt.

  Carmen Fortune woke in the morning with the tik craving chewing at her nerve ends. Fuck, she had to score. Then she remembered the white kid, her little present from God. She sat up, the greasy sheet falling from her naked breasts. Where was he?

  The night before, she had put him in the bed next to her and locked the bedroom door from the inside. He hadn’t woken when she had released his hands and feet. He probably had a concussion. She had made a token effort of cleaning the blood from his blond hair. The hair was so fine and soft under her fingers, not like her Sheldon’s, which had grown out hard and wiry, like steel wool.

  She saw the boy sitting on the dirty linoleum in his pj’s, staring vacantly into space, sucking on his thumb. He didn’t look at her when he got out of bed and crossed to the closet, pulling a T-shirt over her nakedness.

  She crouched in front of him. “Hey,” she said.

  He didn’t react. She saw that he was sitting in a pool of piss. Jesus, was it her curse to be surrounded by men who couldn’t control their fucken waterworks?

  She shook him by the shoulder. “Hey, little guy.”

  Slowly, his eyes tracked up to her face. Carmen, even in her state of low-grade tik withdrawal, could see they were beautiful eyes. Blue, with something almost like purple in them. Like her week-old bruises from Rikki.

  “How’s your head?” She reached out and parted his hair to see if the cut was healing. The boy flinched and pulled away.

  He took the thumb from his mouth and spoke for the first time. “I want my mommy.”

  The accent was American, like one of those smart-ass kids on the sitcoms. It made Carmen want to laugh. Was this for real? “You’ll see your mommy later, okay?”