Wake Up Dead: A Thriller (Cape Town Thrillers)

by Roger Smith

  Finish it once and for all.

  DOC EASED THE saw across the arm, just above the wrist, the blade screaming. He kept his head back, but a fine mince of bone and flesh patterned his face and glasses. He killed the saw and heard a moan. The 26 was moving, trying to get up from the dirty tiles. Groaning.

  After the others left, Doc had dragged the scarred man into the kitchen and shot him full of adrenaline. Risky stuff. Knew it would either kill the fucker or shock him awake. Doc crossed to the man and lowered himself into a crouch, his arthritic bones clicking out a Cape Flats flamenco.

  The scarred man’s eyes were fluttering. Then they opened. And opened wider. Doc realized he still held the severed hand. He reached up and put it on the table. The man was blinking, looking around, like he was trying to decide what kind of afterlife he’d checked into.

  “Who hit you?” Doc asked.

  The man tried to focus his eyes. “It were Barbie.”

  Doc stood up in stages, using the table for support. He reached for the Eriksson in his back pocket and speed-dialed 26 for Manson. He lived by the good graces of these gangsters, and it always paid to keep building credits in the game. Especially when a war was coming.

  He’d get points for passing on the news.

  And a few more for telling Manson that Billy Afrika was wounded.

  HER EYES OPENED. A yellow lightbulb, dangling naked from the ceiling, smeared and lagged as she turned her head. Pain. A fire behind her eyes.

  Pain was her friend. It meant she was alive. Barely conscious, struggling to stop herself from sliding back into darkness. But alive.

  Roxy lay on the floor of the wooden hut again, on her right side, her hands still cuffed in front of her, her legs splayed where she had been thrown. At the extreme of her vision she saw a blur that was Disco slumped on the mattress, Piper standing over him. A shape, like a bundle of discarded clothes, lay near her. Robbie. Unmoving. She had no way of knowing if he had survived his birthday.

  She tasted blood in her mouth. And bile. The neckline of her dress was wet with vomit and blood. She sent her tongue exploring her teeth. None missing. Her lip was swollen, and stung when her tongue found a gash.

  Piper had punched her under the streetlight. Smashed his gloved hand into her mouth with enough force to whiplash her neck and send her flying, her skull hitting the curb. Then he took his foot back and kicked her in the head. Darkness was already closing in, like a black shroud enfolding her, when she had felt him lift her slack body and sling it over his shoulder. As she passed out she’d drawn his stench into her lungs.

  The stink of death and decay.

  Now Roxy felt a cough rising in her lungs, fought to stifle it. As she lay there—the lightbulb multiplying, blurring, then resolving into focus—she heard his voice, low and guttural. Insistent. Hammering at Disco, whose halting replies were crushed by the force of Piper’s words. She turned her head an inch, saw Piper’s shadow move against the wall. Quickly shut her eyes. But he’d caught the movement.

  She heard him coming, felt the wooden floor sagging under his weight, her body bouncing slightly as he loomed over her. From the whisper of fabric, she knew he had squatted at her side.

  “Blondie.” Like a dog growling low in its throat. She didn’t move. “Blon—dee.” His hand on her neck. She willed herself to be still.

  Something clicked beside her ear, the sound of a catch locking home.

  As she understood what she was hearing she felt the pain, a searing burn as the tip of the blade pierced the flesh of her left thigh. Her eyes opened wide and with them her mouth, ready to scream. His hand clamped down on her face, squeezing the scream away. She sucked air through her nose, panted into the gloved hand that imprisoned her jaw like a vise.

  Saw the painted face close to hers, felt his breath like the stagnant fumes of an exhumation as it touched her cheek. He worked the knife into her flesh, twisting with delicately calibrated movements of his wrist, playing her wailing nerves like a minstrel’s banjo. She felt a hot stream of piss rush down her thighs, and she writhed and brought up her legs and tried to kick out at him. He laughed, easily evading her limbs, never once taking those eyes from hers. Eyes so dead they needed coins laid on them.

  Then he withdrew the knife. Slowly.

  She gasped, her screams still choked back into her lungs by his hand. Piper held the knife up for Roxy to see. A stream of her blood traveled down the blade, flowed into the groove, and then dammed against the guard, before a drop fell onto the white glove. He moved the blade away from her face, and she felt it cool and sticky against her thighs, the tip of the knife sliding the fabric of her dress high up on her hip.

  He ran the blade softly over her flesh. Caressing her. Teasing her.

  She waited. Steeled herself for the agony that was coming.

  “Fucken Jesus, Piper.” Disco’s voice, urgent, spooked. “Come check this out.”

  PIPER, IN HIS Stars and Stripes outfit—top hat cocked at a jaunty angle—walked from the zozo to the street, already smelling the smoke. The minstrel costumes had hung above the dead woman’s sewing machine like they were waiting for him and Disco. The moment he saw them, Piper knew the disguises would buy them time, keep them—especially him—hidden in plain view.

  To surrender before the tabloids got hold of the story would be suicidal. Piper had no gang protection outside prison. The cops would kill the men who had slaughtered the family of one of their own. He had no intention of joining the dead just yet. No, let the scandal sheets be his insurance policy. Lie low until the bodies were discovered. Wait until the Sun screamed out the headlines in nice fat letters across the front page, the story rolling across the Flats, picking up momentum.

  Then take Disco, go to Bellwood South, and surrender. Smiling for the cameras, the glare of publicity shining too bright for the cops and the courts to do anything but send them back to Pollsmoor.

  For life. Until death did them part.

  But now, as Piper saw the blaze consume the dead cop’s house, he knew his plan had changed. Seeing the inhabitants of Protea Street running like headless chickens, the people in the neighboring houses wetting down their roofs with hoses to stop the fire leaping through the tinderbox air.

  As he watched the flames he saw another body burning twenty years ago. Heard the name Disco had spoken to stop him from cutting the blonde woman’s throat: Billy Afrika.

  He felt a moment of rage so hot, it was as if he was on fire in that house.

  Piper knew who had torched the house. He put all questions aside. It didn’t matter how he knew. All that mattered was what he did next. He would have to start all over. Enact another ritual. Understood now why he wasn’t meant to kill the blonde. Not yet. She was the key, and her connection to Billy Afrika carried a weight that he could not ignore.

  For Piper there was no God. But there was order. From action came control, and things left incomplete accumulated their own power and lay in wait out in the darkness, ready to ambush you.

  His failure to kill Billy Afrika when they were teenagers was such a thing. A failure that had given Billy the opportunity to shoot Piper as he stood over the body of the cop two years before. That Billy had been too weak to do it didn’t change the fact that Piper had left himself vulnerable. And now, again, a line of connection joined the blonde to the same man. Time to grab hold of that line and reel Billy Afrika in. Shut his squealing mouth forever.

  Piper tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and sniffed at the smoky air, sensing shifts in the atmosphere, looking for readings. Like a predator.

  BILLY AFRIKA SAT behind the wheel of the Hyundai and fed rounds into the magazine of the Glock. He had fired twice in the tik house, and he wanted a full load of seventeen when he drove to Disco’s hut, two blocks down the road, and finished what needed to be finished.

  It wasn’t easy work, one-handed. He clamped the magazine between his knees and inserted the bullets with his right hand. Then did the same with the body of the Glock, while he
pushed the magazine home. The magazine missed the grooves, and he had to grip it with his fingernails and pry it loose. He forced himself to be patient. Freed the magazine and aligned it. Heard it click home.

  Billy looked up. He was still parked near Barbara’s house. The flames had spread now, licking the roof, fanned by the wind. Neighbors were yelling. A man tried to open the front door and was forced back by the inferno. Billy lay the Glock beside the bag of money on the passenger seat, started the car, and drove.

  Everything had a simplicity now. A symmetry. He cared nothing for his own life. If it ended tonight, it ended. As long as he took Piper with him. Billy slowed, avoiding people streaming into the road, drawn by the fire.

  He sped up as he hit the crossroads before Disco’s zozo. He never saw the other vehicle. Just felt the impact as it T-boned his car on the passenger’s side. Glass rained down on Billy, and the Hyundai rolled, shaking him up like he was in a snow globe, banknotes floating around him as the bag split open.

  The Hyundai rolled twice, came to rest on its roof like a dying beetle.

  Billy hadn’t bothered with his seat belt, and he found himself covered in money, lying on top of the dome light of the flipped car, looking at the chrome wheels of a Hummer. He felt for the Glock. Found nothing.

  The Hummer’s rear door opened, and Billy saw white Pumas step out onto the blacktop, followed by legs in shiny gold sweatpants.

  chapter 36

  THE CANNIBAL WATCHED THE HEAVY YELLOW MOON RISE OVER THE apartment blocks in Sea Point. Back home his people believed that the full moon was the eye of God watching over the sinners below. God would have a lot to observe in this low-rent part of Cape Town.

  From where he sat on the cramped balcony, the cannibal could see into the apartment opposite, only partly obscured by three lines of washing. Loud music blared, and men and women danced their knocked-kneed kwasa-kwasa dance.

  His name was Bertrand Dubois Babakala. He was a prince, educated at the Sorbonne. Now reduced to living in a backstreet apartment, surrounded by these Congolese refugees with their loud clothes. Cocaine dealers who stood too close in the elevator, treating him with overfamiliarity. As if he were a fellow countryman. He was not.

  His country wasn’t even a country. Not on any map, anyway. Rather a province of a larger entity that had shape-shifted countless times since the French fled, borders redrawn in blood as alliances formed and split. In truth, if he was pressed, he couldn’t give a coherent reason for his belief that this toe of land—no mineral wealth, a population decimated by poverty, warfare, and AIDS—would be any better off independent. But he would give his life for that dream.

  Or, rather, the lives of the ragtag army of boys who had come to believe in him as some kind of hip-hop Selassie. A bunch of weed-crazy kids wearing everything from women’s bathrobes to the ragged remnants of camouflage, decorated with human body parts. They ran wild in the jungle, slaughtering everyone in their path, chopping off heads and using them as soccer balls.

  He’d made good use of the photo-ops during his few brief sojourns with them in the jungle. Made himself infamous when he ate that human heart. He’d just smoked some fabulously powerful ganja—part of a prebattle ritual the boys enacted—and the drug had given his actions the surreal flavor of a dream.

  The heart hadn’t tasted that bad, really. A little like carpaccio. And his actions had whipped his boys into a fervor.

  The briefcase of cash he gave to Joe Palmer was the last of the money fraudulently obtained from a gullible food aid organization based in Paris—anxious to assuage postcolonial guilt. Money to buy weapons for his jungle boys. Boys who had sworn to overthrow the government and usher Babakala to power. And, by God, wouldn’t he look grand in a tailored uniform, with a leopard skin sash and a fly whisk, as he stood in the back of an open Mercedes, riding into the capital?

  He sighed a very Gallic sigh. Today had not been a good day.

  Earlier, while it was still light, they had taken the whore’s dented little Fiat Uno up to the big house in Bantry Bay. Babakala, of course, didn’t drive. But the whore, Tatiana, did. Badly.

  Hunched over the wheel, peering ahead, shortsighted but too vain to wear glasses. Tatiana hadn’t told him where she had got the address, but he guessed that one of her clients at the massage parlor was a policeman, and a phone call and a whispered promise would have been enough to secure the information.

  It was difficult for Babakala to accept his loss of status. Exiled in Cape Town. Living off the earnings of a Ukrainian whore. He had felt so optimistic that night he had dinner with Joe Palmer and his beautiful American wife. It seemed that the money from the aid organization would flow merrily, improving his prospects. But then, yesterday, he had intercepted that brusque e-mail at the Internet café in Sea Point. Making it clear that no more funds would be made available. Ever. And that he had been blacklisted throughout the international aid community.

  Merde.

  The little car had strained up the hill, the whore talking incessantly. “We must kill that bitch.”

  “We just want the money, cheri.”

  “But when we get it, we kill her. Then I want to get into that closet of hers.”

  He sighed, tuned her out. How he missed his bodyguard, Jean-Prosper, working now as a waiter in a Congolese restaurant in Johannesburg. The man had stayed loyal for months, without pay, but eventually Babakala had to let him go. This would have been Jean-Prosper’s job, scaring that blonde into making good on her husband’s debt.

  They arrived at the house, and the whore bumped the Uno to a halt, just past the open gates. A removal van was parked in the driveway, men loading the contents of the house.

  Tatiana was fighting her way out of the car. “The bitch she is running!”

  Babakala held her back. And they both saw the uniformed cops milling around. The cannibal understood these things. He knew what was happening and explained to the whore as best he could that the property had been seized.

  “Drive on, cheri. There is nothing for us here.”

  She had started the car and taken off back toward Sea Point, casting furious glances in the rearview mirror.

  Not a good day.

  Now he took his eyes from the yellow moon as Tatiana came out and stood on the balcony, dressed in a low-cut top that accentuated her breast augmentation. He’d paid for that, back when times were good, and he could keep her at home to tend to his needs.

  “I go work, Bert.” His skin crawled, as it always did, when she called him that. But there was no stopping her.

  “Au revoir, my dear. Don’t work too hard.” Don’t enjoy it too much was what he really wanted to say.

  She bent to kiss him, battling the jeans that sliced into her flesh like a delicatessen blade into cold cuts. “Don’t worry, my darling. This bitch, I will still have her.”

  He flapped an elegant wrist. “It’s over, Tatiana. C’est la vie.”

  “Over, my fucking ass.”

  She clumped off in her high heels, and he sat on the balcony, contemplating his future. Perhaps a job as a doorman at one of the exclusive hotels that encircled the Waterfront like stones in a Cartier necklace? There had been offers.

  He sighed, and the rubber-legged people danced and laughed and cavorted like monkeys.

  ROXY WAS AT the wheel of Joe’s Mercedes, driving through Paradise Park in the direction of Cape Town. The top was up, and Disco sat next to her, still dressed in his full minstrel outfit. Piper was squeezed into the rear, his top hat bending against the low roof. He had Robbie on his lap, the knife held to his throat.

  The night had moved into a zone beyond reason.

  Yet Roxy felt a strange sense of calm. A weird detachment, as if she was hovering up near that heavy moon, looking down at herself. Maybe that’s what happened when you came close to death and survived. She kept on waiting for the shock to hit her, but it didn’t. Not yet.

  She’d known, as Piper had played the knife over her body, that he was about to kill h
er. She could see it in his eyes. He was already looking at her as if she was dead. Then Disco had spoken, rapid-fire local patois, and the two of them had left the hut. She’d lifted her cuffed hands and reached across and touched Robbie’s neck. Said a silent prayer when she felt his pulse trembling against her fingertips. How badly hurt he was, she had no idea.

  Roxy stood, looking around the hut, searching for a weapon. She saw something shining, catching the yellow light. A sliver of the broken window. Most of the glass had exploded outward when she’d smashed the pane with the stool, but this piece lay inside, on the wooden floor. A shard about the size of her index finger, tapering to a sharp point. She had the glass in her hand when she heard them in the yard, and managed to lift her dress and slip it into the elastic of her panties before the weight of the two returning men rocked the hut.

  She sat down, watching as they came back inside. Agitated. Disco speaking more now, as if he was trying to convince Piper of something. Piper’s voice hammered back at him, but Disco never shut up as they smoked another meth pipe. And it seemed he had gotten his way.

  Piper grunted, shrugged. Then he walked across to Robbie and kicked him. The child opened his eyes and sobbed. Piper kicked him again.

  Roxy stood. “Leave him. Leave him alone.”

  Piper laughed at her, kicked the boy again, harder. Roxy shut her mouth, knew that her protests would only make things worse for Robbie.

  The child sat up. Piper grabbed him by his T-shirt and lifted him, kicking and twisting, into the air. The knife was in Piper’s hand, and he placed it against the boy’s throat, his eyes fixed on Roxy.

  “Do how I say, or I cut him. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  Piper lowered the child, who was sobbing, gasping for air, but the man still held on to the T-shirt, blade flirting with the skin of Robbie’s throat. Disco came and unlocked Roxy’s handcuffs. Brought her a bucket of tepid water and a cloth that stank of piss. He shoved her in front of the broken mirror leaning against the wooden wall.