Burn stepped into the kitchen.
Susan and the fat cop watched him. Susan looked scared. “Jack, I was about to call you.”
The cop leaned his massive gut against the kitchen counter. Susan was on the other side of the counter, keeping her distance.
“How can we help you, Inspector?”
Burn tried to stay cool, relaxed. He didn’t want to give anything away. Just aaw-abiding guy surprised to see a cop in his kitchen first thing in the morning.
“I just want you and your wife to look at a couple of photographs.” Barnard held a large yellow envelope at his side. He lay it down on the counter and slid out two glossy prints.
He handed them to Susan. She took them, one in each hand, and stared at them. Then she closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she stared at Burn. Her face was bled of color.
Barnard had not taken his gaze off her. “Do you recognize either of these men?”
She shook her head and put the photographs down on the counter as if they were toxic.
Burn stepped closer and saw the faces of the men he had killed. Jesus, they had been found. So soon. They looked bloated, mottled. Decomposition already doing its work. He forced himself to stay calm, not allowing his face to tell anything.
He didn’t touch the photographs.
Barnard was looking at Burn. “How about you, sir?”
“Never seen them before.”
Then Burn was in behind Susan. She was trembling. He eased her onto a stool.
“Look, what’s this all about? My wife isn’t in any condition to be upset like this.”
Barnard slid the photographs back into the envelope. “You know that car that was outside? The red BMW?” Burn nodded. “I think these two men drove it here. To your street.”
“I’ve told you already. We know nothing about the car. Or these two men.”
Barnard was heaving his gut off the counter. “Well, I’m glad about that. They weren’t nice people.” He leered at Susan, yellow teeth like bone fragments in an open wound. “I’m sorry if I upset you, Mrs. Hill.”
Susan said nothing, stared at him blankly.
Burn’s hands tried to soothe his wife. Her shoulders were tight with tension. She shrugged him off. The cop noticed. Matt came into the kitchen. He looked at the fat cop, then gave him a wide berth and went to the fridge.
“This your boy?” The cop watched Matt help himself to juice.
Instinctively, Burn put himself between his son and the cop. “Is there anything else, Inspector?”
Barnard shook his massive head. “I’ll be in touch if there is.”
He was hauling himself to the front door. Burn went after him to buzz him out and make sure he left.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Susan exit the kitchen. He heard the bedroom door slam.
Berenice September was at the satellite police station at seven in the morning. There was no sign of the cop. The sun beat down on the commuters on their way to work. A group of kids in school uniform walked past, shouting out at one another.
Her son Ronnie hadn’t ce home. Every parent on the Cape Flats lived in fear of this moment. Scores of children went missing every year. Most of them turned up in the veld, raped, sodomized, murdered.
By seven fifteen Berenice was fretting. She was already late for work. She wouldn’t be able to pay her bills at the end of the month if they docked her pay. Then she saw the cop, strolling up from the taxi rank like he was with his girlfriend at the Waterfront. Berenice waved at him. This did nothing to speed his pace.
She walked toward him, pushing through a bunch of commuters shoehorning themselves into a taxi. “You remember me? From yesterday?”
It took a moment before the cop nodded. He carried on walking, and Berenice fell in beside him. “I haven’t seen my son since I left him by you.”
The cop shrugged. They had reached the container, and he fished in his pocket for a set of keys. “I haven’t seen him.”
“What happened last night, after I left?”
He unlocked the door to the container and pulled it open. The hinges screamed for oil. “Nothing happened.”
The cop stepped inside and Berenice followed him. It was like walking into a wall of heat. She was already perspiring, from the sun and from the tension. She felt faint and stepped back out, getting her breath. The cop looked at her with blank disinterest.
She tried again. “Last night, you said somebody was coming. I left my boy, Ronnie, here so he could speak to them.”
“Ja. But he fucked off. The kid. Before they got here. He waited for you to go; then he ran.”
She was staring at him. “Ran where?”
“How must I know? He’s your bloody son.” The cop set out the occurrence book and a pen.
Berenice shook her head. She turned and walked back home. She was going to phone in sick. They could dock her pay. She had to find her son.
“That cop knows something, Jack.” Susan paced the bedroom, anger flaming her cheeks.
“How could he?” Burn stayed still, deliberately, to counterbalance her motion.
“Then what was he doing here?” she asked, demanding that he make sense of this mess.
“He probably went to every house in the street. It’s just routine.” In fact, Burn had seen the fat cop get in his car and drive away, but he didn’t tell her this.
“Where did you put them? Those men?”
“In an open field. Behind the airport. Miles from anywhere.”
“Apparently not. Jesus, Jack.” She stopped, put a hand to her stomach, caught her breath.
He moved toward her. “Look, calm down. Sit down on the bed.”
“Just get the fuck away from me!” The words stopped Burn as if he’d been struck. Susan never spoke like this.
“Susan…”
“Okay, Jack, here’s the thing. I, we, Matt and… and her”-she pointed at her belly-“had to carry the can for the cop you killed. But we are not, not, going down for what you did the other night. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you. But nobody is going down.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Jack. You’re going down. You’re going straight to fucking hell, and you’re not taking us with you!”
Beautiful. The fingerprint formed on the monitor of Barnard’s computer. The American woman had left a bloody near-perfect right index finger print on the photograph of Rikki Fortune.
Before Barnard had gone to the American’s house, he had carefully wiped the photographs clean, then slid them into an envelope. He had hoped to get Hill to touch them, but the man had made a point of leaving them lying on the counter. Which made Barnard all the more suspicious. The woman’s prints would have to be enough.
Barnard had left the Americans and headed straight to the police lab. A technician owed him a favor, and he lifted the prints and e-mailed them to Barnard within two hours.
Barnard sat at the laptop at a desk in his apartment. Most people who knew him would have automatically assumed that those sausage fingers wouldn’t know their way around a computer, but his hands moved with surprising delicacy across the mouse and the keyboard. He’d skilled up on the latest technology with none of the reluctance of most cops his age; he was smart enough to know that if you were out of the tech loop, you were dead and buried.
People would have been surprised by his one-room apartment, too. It was spartan, and scrupulously clean, almost monastic in its simplicity. The bed was made, a Bible squared up on the bedside table. The dishes were washed and put away. There was no ring of grime around the bathtub.
If Barnard had no control over the rank and noxious odors his body produced, or remained oblivious to them, he imposed order and discipline on his living environment.
Barnard checked his watch. It would be early morning in Arlington, Virginia, but Dexter Torrance would have finished his prayers. He reached for the phone.
It wasn’t often that Rudi Barnard met somebody he felt an affinity with. Mostly he felt scorn and loathing for the rest of humanity, as if their mere presence stood between him and his eternal reward.
Dexter Torrance was different. Outwardly, Barnard and the deputy U.S. marshal couldn’t be less alike. Where Barnard was massively fat, Torrance was small and looked to be perpetually hungry. Not for food, but for the succor of the version of Jesus Christ he believed in with a quiet fervor.
Torrance, a member of the Marshals International Fugitives Task Force, had come to Cape Town a few years before to take back to West Virginia a man wanted for the rape and murder of a Charleston Sunday school teacher. The man had jumped bail and, through a series of increasingly idiotic actions, had got himself arrested in Cape Town. The South African authorities had no reservations about extraditing him to West irginia, a state that, like South Africa, had abolished the death penalty.
It had fallen to Rudi Barnard to hand over the prisoner to Dexter Torrance simply because his senior officers were attending some political shindig hosted by the commissioner of police.
Torrance and Barnard had spent little time together, but very quickly they realized that their worldviews were uncannily similar. Torrance didn’t have to say much, merely express his disillusionment that the state in which the crime had occurred had seen fit to abolish the death penalty, for Barnard to recognize a kindred spirit. Barnard felt the same about his own country’s liberal constitution, trying his best to remedy the situation by executing as many deviants as he could.
Torrance shook his head while they eyeballed the prisoner in the holding cell. The deputy U.S. marshal was of the opinion that when this sack of crap got back to the States, he would be jailed for ten years and then walk out and do it all again.
Torrance and Barnard found their collaboration to be as easy and pleasurable as a doubles team who had played together for years, each knowing precisely when the other would move to the net. Barnard held the prisoner down while Torrance strangled the man with his own belt, bought for his trip home.
Barnard then held the prisoner up off the ground while Torrance looped the belt through the bars of the cell and around the dead man’s neck. They left him dangling there and went and drank tea and spoke as if on first-name terms with the interventionist God they both loved so much.
A constable doing his rounds found the man hanging.
The drunken district surgeon, irritated to be dragged from the youthful juices of his latest catamite, wasted no time in calling the death a suicide and signing the death certificate.
Torrance had flown back to the United States accompanying a coffin. It had pleased him greatly to hand the body over to the dead man’s family for burial.
A job well done.
He reserved a special place in his esteem for Rudi Barnard, his brother soldier in the army of Christ, and when Rudi called him that morning and asked him to run a fingerprint through the FBI’s database, he said it would be an honor.
Burn drove the Jeep down to Sea Point, a grid of apartment blocks and office buildings that looked out over the Atlantic Ocean.
When Burn had seen Susan handling the photographs, he’d had to resist the impulse to grab them from her and wipe them free of her prints. Hell, her paranoia was getting to him. The cop looked like a moron. He’d been ordered to knock on a few doors, go through the motions. This was Cape Town, a dozen more people would die today; how much time was the cop going to waste on a couple of gangsters?
But what if he had lifted a print? Burn knew that Susan had been busted as a freshman at UCLA, smoking dope at a party. She’d told Burn the story soon after they met, laughing about being driven to Santa Monica in the back of a sheriff’s patrol car. Being booked. Kidding a cute-looking deputy about getting her good side when they took her mug shots. Flirting with him when he pressed her fingers down for the prints.
Burn remembered an irrational feeling of jealousy-about something that had happened three years before he met Susan. Now he couldn’t get the image of her hands black with fingerprint ink out of his mind…
A horn blared behind him. He was daydreaming at a green light. Burn pulled away, trying to calm himself. Even if Susan had been printed, where were those prints now? And how could some Cape Town cop get access to them?
Burn was on his way to a real estate office. The most important thing right now was to get out of that house. Being there reminded Susan of the dead men. It also made them a target for the fat cop.
He would relocate his family; then he would convince Susan about New Zealand. Once the baby had come.
Carmen Fortune almost gagged on the man’s dick. She tried to pull her head away, but it banged against the steering wheel. His calloused hands grabbed her by the hair and shoved the thing in deeper, like she was that sword swallower on the TV.
The day had started shit and got worse. The feeling of lightness and freedom that had come with the news of Rikki’s death evaporated when she couldn’t score a globe. There just wasn’t any money, now that Sheldon’s grant had disappeared.
She had done some casual hooking as a teenager, before she met Rikki. Most of her friends did it. It was an easy way to buy those designer jeans. But that was years ago.
So, when she caught the taxi to Voortrekker Road, she hadn’t known what to expect. She found a corner and stood there, eyeballing the passing motorists. It was payday, and she wasn’t ugly. Someone would stop. She knew it was a risk, hooking in daylight. She might have to blow a cop or two. But she couldn’t wait until dark. She needed to score. Bad. To get rid of that fucken scratchy feeling, like her nerves were on the outside of her skin.
A car pulled up. Nice new BMW. She stepped forward, ready with what she thought was a professional smile as she bent down at the driver’s window.
Her smile faded when she saw the Nigerian at the wheel. Before she could step back, the Nigerian grabbed her by the T-shirt and pulled her half into the car
“This is my territory, you understand? For me and my girls. I see you here again, I kill you.” To underscore his point, he swept aside his linen jacket and showed her the massive bloody gun in a shoulder holster.
She nodded, and he pushed her away, taking off fast, almost driving over her feet. Fucken Nigerians.
She went and hung around in the mall for a while. But she was going crazy, starting to scratch herself until she bled. So she went back to the road, a few blocks away from where the Nigerian confronted her, looking around nervously for his BMW.
She only had to wait a few minutes before a dented pickup truck pulled up next to her. The driver was colored, but dark. On the Flats, where the calibrations of color are precise, where the birth of a pale child is cause for celebration and women apply all manner of potions to their skin to lighten it, a dark skin is not a badge worn with pride.
Still, she went to the driver’s window. He wore a dirty juuit and smelled of sweat.
“How much for a blow?” he asked. Some of his teeth were missing.
“Hundred.” She doubled what she was intending to ask.
“Twenny-five.”
“Fifty.”
He grinned. “Fuck, you better suck like a vacuum for that.” But he reached across and opened the side door.
They drove down a side street, and he parked beside an open lot. He unzipped his jumpsuit and produced his pride and joy. It was massive, and it didn’t smell like roses.
Carmen took a condom out of her jeans and tore the wrapping open with her teeth. The man shook his head. “For fifty, no fucken rubber.”
“Listen, you think I’m going to put that filthy thing in my mouth without a plastic, you fucken crazy. Take it or leave it.”
He shrugged, and she tugged on the condom. Next thing she knew, he had her by the hair and was making her swallow the bloody thing.
Carmen was gagging, but she could hear that he was getting all excited. Now was the time. She knocked away his hands and came up for air.
“Why you stopping?”
“Just relax, speedy. Take your time.”
She pulled his jumpsuit down so that it bunched around his knees, then took the kitchen knife out of her jeans. She grabbed his dick with one hand and held the knife against the base with the other.
“Jesus, what you doing?” He stared at her. The thing in her hand was already starting to wilt, like a rubber snake.
“Get your wallet out and put it on my lap.”
“Fuck you!”
She gripped the softening dick and jammed the tip of the blade into his skin. He screamed.
“S’trues fuck, I’ll cut this thing off!” She jammed the knife in deep enough to draw blood.
“Okay. Okay.” He reached down into his pocket and came out with the wallet.
“Put it on my lap.”
He did as she ordered.
She kept the blade against his skin, freed her other hand, and opened the car door behind her. Then she grabbed the wallet and slid out backward. He tried to lunge at her but was held back by the jumpsuit around his knees.
“You fucken bitch, I’ll kill you!”
Carmen was running, out of the side street, back onto Voortrekker just in time to grab a minibus taxi as it was about to pull out.
The taxi wasn’t full, and she sat at the back, alone, catching her breath. She opened the wallet. Saw a picture of a smiling woman and a toddler. Bastard. She pulled out the money and tossed the wallet out the window. Three hundred.
That wasn’t going to last long. ht="2em" align="center"›
Berenice September fought panic as she followed Ronnie’s friend Cassiem across the veld. The afternoon sun blasted down on her, and sweat ran freely from her hair, down her face, pooling between her breasts.
The boy looked at her over his shoulder and stopped, seeing her red face and the blood on her legs where the thorns had torn her skin.
“Is Auntie all right?”
She wouldn’t allow herself to stop walking, because she knew if she did she would lose courage and turn back.
“Go, Cassiem. Take me there.”
Cassiem trudged on through the veld, the woman panting behind him.
Berenice had spent the day looking for Ronnie. She had gone to his school. He wasn’t there. She caught a taxi to the amusement arcade in Bellville, hoping for the first time ever that she would catch him cutting school. No sign of Ronnie.
After school she went to Cassiem’s house, two streets away from hers. Cassiem said he hadn’t seen Ronnie since yesterday. At first the boy denied all knowledge of the dead bodies. Only after Berenice had threatened to make trouble with his parents did he relent and tell her the truth. He had been with Ronnie when his friend had helped himself to the Nikes.
“I want you to take me there,” she told Cassiem.
“Why, Auntie? It’s horrible.”
“Because maybe Ronnie went back there.”
“But why, Auntie?”
She couldn’t answer the question. Just knew that she had to be taken to the bodies.
Cassiem walked through thick bush into a small clearing. He pointed toward a clump of thorns on the other side.
“It’s there.”
“Go on,” she ordered him.
The boy was reluctant. Berenice gave him a shove and he walked slowly forward.
Berenice caught the unmistakable smell of burned flesh. Then she saw a mound of something black, burned, unrecognizable.
Ronnie stopped. Berenice found the last of her courage and stepped forward. Please, God, she beseeched under her breath.
Berenice approached the bodies. It took her a few moments to make sense of what she was seeing. Two men, she assumed they were men, lying side by side, charred black. Then she made out a smaller form, somehow sprawled across them.
No features were recognizable. Blackened flesh burned off a skull. Scraps of cloth burned into the skin. Then she saw something that made her gasp.
Berenice fought back a wail and sank to her knees in the dirt, to get closer to the bodies, to see- please, God -that it wasn’t what she already knew it was. On the arm of the smallest body was a watch. A ridiculously large watch, way too big for the skinny wrist. The glass was shattered and the face was blackened and warped, but enough of it remained for hr to see the Caped Crusader.
Berenice lifted her face toward the blazing sun and let the wail break loose from her breast, screaming for God’s mercy.