by Roger Smith
She saw the terror well up in his eyes as his sunken, toothless mouth searched for words. Her mother was hovering in the gloom at the bedroom door. Carmen heard a sharp intake of breath.
“We both know you’re going to rot in fucken hell for what you did to me.” Carmen laughed in his face and pushed past her mother. “And you’ll get yours, you bitch.”
Carmen fled the atmosphere of oppression and terror. She stood in the street sucking air, calming herself.
When she walked away, the sky seemed bluer.
Disaster Zondi drove along the freeway toward the airport. The shacks and mean houses of the Cape Flats sprawled on either side of him in the gathering darkness.
So, how did he feel, now that it was over?
He tried out that daytime TV word: closure. Was this how it felt? He felt lighter, he had to admit, but at the same time there was an inescapable sense of anticlimax. Was he still yearning for something more acute?
More transcendent?
What he did hear was the creak of the karmic wheel as it turned. For every action, you had better believe there would be a reaction. Like the American, Jack Burn, choosing Cape Town, of all cities, to run to. How different would it have been if he had parachuted his family into the safe, middle-class certainties of a Sydney or Auckland?
The wheel would have turned, no doubt, but probably in a more mundane way.
And as for Rudolphus Arnoldus Barnard getting sent off to the big barbecue in the sky, the punch line of that particular cosmic joke was irresistible.
Zondi laughed.
He found himself whistling as he drove to Domestic Departures. He was experiencing an unexpected feeling, a sensation that he was unfamiliar with. It took Zondi a minute of intense reflection before he decided that, quite possibly, it was happiness.
At dawn Benny Mongrel followed a footpath up the lower slopes of Table Mountain, etched into the scrub like a scar in coarse hair.
When he had walked away from the blackened horror that had once been the fat cop, Benny Mongrel had no desire to return to his cramped shack in Laender Hill. He’d spent too many years in confined spaces, with the stench and moans and sickness of other men mixed into the foul air he breathed.
So he had come to the mountain.
He had found an overhang of rock that gave him shelter, not far from a stream that hadn’t dried up despite the heat. He’d been down a little way now to where large houses clung to the slopes, their back gardens stolen from the mountain. Despite high fences and razor wire, he had come away with a shirt and a pair of jeans off a washing line. He needed no more than that.
As he walked up the path, he saw a movement in the scrub and slowed. He picked up a stone and crept forward, sure that he would find a rock rabbit for his breakfast.
The bush parted, and a puppy with a thick golden coat scampered out. It was too young to fear men, and it wagged its tail and pissed itself with happiness when it saw Benny Mongrel.
He knelt down and scooped the puppy up into his hands. The puppy licked him and wiggled like an uncoiling spring, pawing at him, trying to get to his face with its tongue. The paws were large, and Benny Mongrel knew that this puppy would grow up to be a big dog. The size of Bessie.
He stroked the puppy, feeling the smooth fur on its back. And feeling something that scared him: the thawing of his stone-cold heart.
Gently, he set the dog down. He stood up, gathered his stolen clothes, and walked on up the mountain. He never once looked back as the puppy tried at first to follow him, then stopped and sat down on the pathway and scratched at its ear.
Benny Mongrel was free.
Susan lay in the bed in the clinic, feeding her baby. Matt lay on the bed beside her, asleep, clean, dressed in crisp hospital pajamas. When the nurse had brought Lucy in for her early morning feeding, Susan had seen the uniformed policeman still seated outside the door.
Susan knew that the next phase of her life was not going to be easy. A man from the U.S. Consulate had come to see her the night before, a smarmy pretty-boy who looked like he’d been dragged from a game of tennis. He told her she would be escorted back to the States as soon as she was strong enough to travel. Aside from the court appearances and—if she was lucky—a period of probation, there were very real practical issues to face. Like money, or the lack of it.
Their house in Los Angeles had been seized and their bank accounts frozen. Susan was broke. She hadn’t worked since she had married Jack Burn, and she knew that facing life as a single parent was going to be tough. That was okay, though; her children were alive and with her. Even if her husband wasn’t.
Matt woke up and looked up at her. “You want something to drink, Matty?”
He shook his head, clinging to her hand. He sucked the thumb of his free hand. She gently disengaged the thumb from his mouth. He hadn’t spoken since Zondi had brought him to her the evening before. Something had happened to him in those two days out on the Cape Flats. He’d been examined at the hospital, and aside from a bump on his head there was no sign of any physical injury. He’d appeared a little groggy, and a blood test had confirmed that he’d been fed sedatives but not enough to be life threatening.
Susan knew that her son had been injured on a deeper, invisible level. The type of injury that had turned this happy and extroverted child into a frightened shadow.
God damn you, Jack, she heard herself saying. God damn you wherever you are.
The tire burst somewhere north of a parched town Burn blew through so fast he couldn’t catch the name.
He’d been running since the evening before. Since the call from Susan. When he had told her that last lie, knowing the cops were waiting for him at the clinic. He’d allowed himself a minute to feel relief that Matt was safe, to register that his daughter had been born; then he had turned Barnard’s battered Ford north and driven through the night.
The morning found him somewhere in the Kalahari Desert. An endless expanse of red sand, prehistoric trees reaching like clutching hands from the dunes toward the cloudless sky. The road was flat and straight, a length of shimmering black ribbon laid across the sand. Not since he’d been in Iraq had he felt this kind of dry heat. Each breath burned his throat and his lungs.
He was exhausted, but he couldn’t stop. He wasn’t only running from the cops; he was running from the memories. Images of Susan and Matt and fragile, imaginary snapshots of his new baby girl that threatened to dissolve and disappear. The farther he was away from his family, the better off they would be. Of that he was certain.
A semi swam toward him out of the haze, and the wind of its passing buffeted the Ford, dragging Burn from within himself.
He drank water from a plastic bottle and splashed some on his face. He didn’t have a plan, exactly. Knew only that he had to get out of South Africa, cross into neighboring Botswana, and catch the first plane out. It didn’t matter where. Just put as much distance as he could between himself and Cape Town. He had the money and the William Morton passport, and he knew that the border between the two countries snaked through the unpatrollable desert. There was a good chance he wouldn’t have to trouble immigration officials.
He just had to keep his foot flat. Keep on going.
He heard a tuneless version of “Good Vibrations,” and he realized that he was singing. When he caught himself waiting for Matt to join in the chorus, he shut up.
Shut up in time to hear the bang an instant before he felt the Ford veer wildly to the left. He fought the steering, trying to keep the car on the road. But the tires found the gravel on the shoulder, and the car was flying away from him, flipping, cartwheeling, in a dance of torn metal and glass and bloodred sand.
The last thing Jack Burn saw was the sun in his eyes.
Then nothing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor, Sarah Knight, and my agent, Alice Fried Martell.
OTHER SERPENT’S TAIL TITLES BY Rsmall>OGER SMITH
WAKE UP DEAD
A split-sec
ond decision with no second chance. Get it wrong and you Wake Up Dead
On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, ex-model Roxy Palmer and her gunrunner husband, Joe, are carjacked, leaving Joe lying in a pool of blood. As the carjackers make their getaway, Roxy makes a choice that changes her life forever.
Disco and Godwynn, the ghetto gangbangers who sped away in Joe’s convertible, will stop at nothing to track her down. Billy Afrika, a mixed-race ex-cop turned mercenary, won’t let her out of his sight because Joe owed him a chunk of money. And hunting them all is Piper, a love-crazed psychopath determined to renew his vows with his jailhouse “wife”, Disco.
As these desperate lives collide, Roxy is caught in a wave of escalating violence in the beautiful and brutal African seaport.
“A stellar thriller” Publishers Weekly
“An intricate Robert Altman-like narrative that, when the pieces finally connect, forms a terrifying portrait of the Cape Flats” Kirkus Reviews
OTHER SERPENT’S TAIL TITLES BY ROGER SMITH
DUST DEVILS
An unflinching portrayal of the dark side of the new South Africa
Framed for murdering his family, Robert Dell’s only ally is his oldest enemy: his father. Bobby Goodbread, ex-CIA hitman, joins his son on a bloody road trip, bringing with him his hunger for revenge. From Cape Town to a Zulu tribal valley where AIDS, savage feuds and poverty have left the population decimated, they hunt assassin Inja Mazibuko, uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of the state.
Disaster Zondi is also on a desperate mission, returning to the place he fled as a youth to rescue a teenage girl – who may or may not be his daughter – sold into marriage to Mazibuko. These men are thrown together in a spiral of violence and retribution in a country where anarchy has replaced tyranny and human life has never been cheaper.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
