When Burn saw the flashing lights of the police car, he felt a moment of blind panic. His first urge was to drive straight past his house and get the hell out of there.
Then he saw the cops were at the building site next door. An ambulance was parked in front of the cop car and an armed response vehicle up on the sidewalk. He saw the night watchman, the man with the disfigured face, being led to the ambulance. The watchman’s shirt was open, and Burn could see his arm was in a sling and his shoulder bandaged. The cops eyed Burn incuriously as he stopped outside his garage door and pressed the remote.
He nosed the car inside the garage, and the door rolled down. He sat for a moment and enjoyed the sense of relief. He was safe. For now. And he wasn’t going to leave tomorrow. Maybe, just maybe, once their daughter was born, Susan, awash in the sensation of motherhood, would change her mind. Give him-give them-another chance.
Burn remembered the birth of Matt, Susan digging her nails into his palm hard enough to make him bleed. He hadn’t felt a thing, so caught up was he in the drama of this new life.
Now it seemed impossible to him that he had thought of saying good-bye to his son.
He climbed the stairs up from the garage and came into the house through the kitchen. The familiar mayhem of the Cartoon Network blared from the living room, and two plates were laid out on the counter in the kitchen.
“Matt?” Burn dropped his keys on the counter and walked through toward the TV. That’s when he saw Mrs. Dollie lying sprawled on the tiles near the front door, her head at an impossible angle, eyes staring at nothing. The living room was empty.
Burn was running. “Matt!”
He ran through every room in the house, checked under the beds, in the closets. Knowing that his son was gone.
At last he returned to Mrs. Dollie, went through the futile exercise of feeling for her pulse. He let her lifeless hand drop to the floor. Burn checked his watch. He had been gone less than an hour. Whoever had taken his son would already have lost themselves in the sprawl of the city by now.
They were in the wind.
There were cops outside. He could walk out and ask for their help. Step back and let them handle it. He knew it would probably mean that he would be exposed. He didn’t care. All he cared about was his son.
But he knew that going to the cops could get his son killed.
Someone had taken Matt because they wanted something. This was no home invasion. Nothing had been stolen. Mrs. Dollie had been killed so she wouldn’t be able to identify his son’s kidnapper. Burn believed that somebody would contact him with a demand. He would wait for that.
It was the best chance Matt had.
Maybe the only chance.
They took Benny Mongrel down to Somerset Hospital. No fancy clinic for him, just the public hospital. It was underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded.
The paramedics left him sitting in the emergency room amid accident victims, men bloody from brawling, homeless people in distress, and, most memorably, a man who walked in with an ax embedded in his skull. Even the jaded ER staff took notice of that one.
A duty sister cast a disinterested eye over Benny Mongrel’s wound, saw that it wasn’t life threatening, and told him to wait.
Benny Mongrel waited. He had nothing better to do.
When he’d heard Ishmael Isaacs come pounding up the stairs like Clint Eastwood, his pistol in his hand, he had stopped crying, laid Bessie’s head down gently, and stood up. He had wiped the tears from his good eye. Isaacs was on the landing, pistol out in front of him, raking the area like he was auditioning for one of those fucken action movies they showed them in prison.
“They gone,” said Benny Mongrel.
Isaacs lowered the pistol, like he was disappointed he couldn’t shoot somebody. “What the fuck happened here?” As if whatever shit had gone down had to be Benny Mongrel’s fault.
“Two guys came in.” Benny Mongrel was pressing his fingers to the wound in his shoulder. It didn’t feel too bad. He tried to keep his eyes away from Bessie. He didn’t want Isaacs to see him crying.
“Who were they?”
Benny shrugged his good shoulder. “Pair of rubbishes. Lighties, little shits. Wanting to steal tools and go score tik, probably.”
“You okay?” Isaacs asked grudgingly.
Bennie nodded. “My dog went for them. They plugged her.”
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.”
“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.