There was not a day that Fingers Morkel woke without excruciating pain in his missing digits. The fingers that Benny Mongrel had cut off with his knife. As he lay in bed, Fingers lifted his two scarred stumps up to eye level to make certain-yet again-that his fingers really were gone. They were, but they still hurt like fucken hell. Doctors had told him that he was suffering from phantom limb syndrome. That he was experiencing phantom pain.
They made all sorts of smart-ass sggestions: apply heat to the stumps, flex what was left of his hands to improve the circulation. Some white fucker had even told him to imagine that he was exercising the missing fingers. Fingers had imagined he was raising the middle digit of each hand to the asshole doctor, but that hadn’t got rid of the pain or his anger.
The way Fingers dealt with this whole sorry mess was to shove as many drugs down his throat as he could. And to imagine killing Benny Mongrel.
By removing his fingers, Benny Mongrel had deprived him of many pleasures. No longer could he put a gun to some motherfucker’s head, feel his index finger curling around the trigger as he blew him away. No longer could he wrap his hands around some bitch’s throat until he half killed her before he screwed her.
And then there were his monkey nuts. He loved the fucken things so much that he’d previously been known as Peanuts. A nickname he much preferred to the present one that reminded him constantly of what had been inflicted upon him and by whom. He had refused to eat the nuts unshelled. The pleasure had been in cracking open the shell, letting his fingers find the two nuts inside, each in its own little compartment, and bringing them to his lips.
Now if he wanted to eat monkey nuts, he had to get one of his guys to break the shells open for him, and put them in a little pile on a paper plate, so he could grab the plate between his two thumbs and pour the nuts into his mouth. It was humiliating. He was sure his guys laughed about it behind his back, so he had stopped eating monkey nuts.
Benny Mongrel. The way the ugly bastard had walked into the Lotus River tavern last night and sat and stared at him, as if daring him to do something. Like he still had the power he’d had in Pollsmoor. He was nothing on the outside. Fuck all. The only reason Fingers hadn’t had him killed there and then, in the tavern, was out of respect for Llewellyn Hector. He didn’t want to make a mess on Hector’s doorstep.
But that was then. This was a new day.
When he was finished inspecting his stumps, Fingers sat up in bed. The sun baked down on the tin roof of his small house, and he was parched.
“Rashied,” he yelled. After a few seconds a tattooed Mongrel with buzz-cut hair stuck his head into the bedroom. “Bring me some Coke. The whole bottle.”
Rashied went to do his bidding, and Fingers trapped his cell phone with his left thumb, using the right thumb to speed-dial for his messages. He hit speakerphone and listened. There were a couple of messages from girls, which he skipped over, and a message from Leroy, the little punk who sold tik for him, which made him sit up. Something about Gatsby. And Benny Mongrel.
Fingers played it again.
Then he went through the laborious process of dialing Leroy’s number with his thumb. Leroy was small-time; he didn’t rate a speed dial. He got Leroy’s voice mail, some smart-ass message with LL Cool J jawing away in the background. Fingers killed the call with a jab of his thumb.
By the time Rashied came back with the bottle of Coke, Fingers was busy with the clumsy business of dressing.
Burn drove the Ford through the sprawl of the Cape Flats, the endless monotony of poverty stretching in every direction. It was a good thing he’d been forced to leave his Jeep at the Waterfront. The only people who drove Cherokees on the Flats were drug dealers. Way too visible.
Burn had flown over the Flats and skirted past on the freeway, but he had never ventured down these mean streets. The small houses huddled together, their foundations unsure in the sandy ground. The watchman’s curt navigation led them past rows of soulless ghetto blocks, where the relentless wind danced washing on lines strung across concrete walkways. They passed sandy, open patches, trading spots where young men huddled behind concrete walls scarred by gang graffiti.
Burn had taken the Mossberg shotgun from Barnard’s bag in the trunk of the Ford and shoved it next to his seat. He’d used a Mossberg in the military and welcomed its added firepower. He found himself touching it, for some kind of reassurance.
Burn slowed at a stop sign. A small boy, around Matt’s age, stood on the corner in front of a faded blue mosque. He twirled a homemade toy, a piece of string with a rock tied to the end, his nose glued to his face by unwiped snot. He stared at Burn in blank fascination.
As he pulled away, Burn checked his rearview mirror. The fat cop was barely visible under the blanket.
“Is he still alive?” Burn asked.
The watchman reached over and lifted the blanket, nodded, then stared straight ahead. Burn needed the fat man to live until he found his son. Then the watchman could do whatever he needed to do.
They were heading deeper into the Flats, moving into the cloud of sand the wind threw over the maze of small houses and narrow streets.
Sometimes Zondi wished that he smoked, to give him something to do at times like these. He was at the police lab, watching as a technician worked a comparison microscope, trying to identify similarities between the slug Zondi had dug from the wall at the building site and the one that had killed Ronnie September.
The technician was a startlingly beautiful woman with burnished copper skin. Her hair, black as squid ink, fell across her face as she leaned forward, peering into the microscope. Zondi had an image of that black hair spread like seaweed over a white pillow.
He was relieved when his phone chirped in his pocket. He walked out into the corridor as he took the call. He listened to the cop at Sea Point station, nodded, asked a couple of questions, and wrote a phone number down in his notebook. He killed the call and found himself at the end of the corridor, staring out a dirty window at the city below.
When he’d driven away from Mountain Road, he’d called the Sea Point police and asked them to check if anything linked back to the American. Hill. It was a long shot, a trial balloon. He knew he was an anal-retentive control freak covering all bases. Even imaginary ones.
But it had produced a hit.
A woman, a domestic worker, had been found murdered the day before on the steps in Greenpoint. Her name was Adielah Dollie. She worked for a Mr. and Mrs. Hill at Thirty-six Mountain Road.
“Investigator Zondi?”
He turned to see the technician waving to him from down the corridor. Her long nails were painted a deep red. Zondi pushed away the image of those nails collecting skin samples from his naked back. He walked up the corridor.
“There’s a match,” said the technician. “The bullet you brought to us is a. 38 caliber, the same as the one retrieved from the child’s body. The lands and grooves on both of these bullets are identical. They have the same signature.”
So Barnard had shot the night watchman. And his dog. What exactly did that tell him? “Thanks. Now, about that condom?”
The technician shrugged. “The DNA testing will take a little longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Try three months.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No. There’s a backlog at the DNA lab.”
“So I’ll jump the queue. Like I did here.”
She gave him a smile. “You won’t have the luck with them that you had with me. They’re a lot stricter.” She was flirting with him, something dancing in her almond eyes. Waiting for him to make a move.
Zondi walked out.
In the lab parking lot he popped the trunk of his car and grabbed his laptop. He slid behind the wheel and got the engine idling, aircon on high. He booted up his laptop while he dialed the dead domestic worker’s daughter on his cell.
The conversation was brief. He voiced formulaic words of sympathy; then he asked Leila Dollie if she had ever met Mrs. Hill. Yes, she had met Susan Hill, more than once. Two Susans? The coincidence count was higher than in a cheap paperback.
He wanted to know if she was close to a computer with e-mail. She was. He e-mailed her a JPEG of Susan Ford’s mug shots from his laptop. She received and opened the mail while he was still on the line.
“That’s Mrs. Hill,” said Leila Dollie. She sounded confused. “Does this have something to do with my mother’s death?”
Deep in his gut Zondi knew that it did. He just didn’t know what.
“No, we’re running a background check on the Hills.” He was ready to end the call when he tried one more question. “You don’t perhaps know where I could find Mrs. Hill, do you?”
“Well, the last I heard she was at Gardens Clinic.”
“She’s sick?”
“No, she’s about to have a baby.”
Zondi thanked her and sat there in the car, his mind alive with loose ends like snakes fleeing a mountain fire.
Susan Burn lay on the bed in the delivery room, being prepared for the cesarean section. Her gynecologist, a sandy-haired man in his forties who had worked as hard on his bedside manner as his golf game, was clearly used to dealing with a succession of mothers-to-be for whom the cosmetic risk of the cesarean section was the major issue. In a city of beaches and health clubs, an abdomen that looked like an early Frankenstein movie wasn’t desirable.
He started going into detail about how the lower midline abdominal incision-the bikini cut-would heal, leaving nothing but a hairline scar, which, with the diligent application of tissue oil, would disappear completely.
This was the last thing on her mind, but she nodded appreciatively.
Then the anesthetist arrived to do the epidural. Susan had asked to be awake during the cesarean; even though she wasn’t going to push the baby out the way she had Matt, she still wanted to witness that first moment of her daughter’s life.
The anesthetist was beefy, with hands like a plumber, but he proved to be gentle and reassuring. He asked her to roll onto her side and lifted her smock. He rubbed anesthetic liquid on her lower spine and then inserted a very fine needle. All the while he was humming a tune. Susan eventually recognized it as the old Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” She almost laughed but stopped herself, frightened that the needle would snap in her spine.
When the anesthetic started to numb her skin, the humming man approached with a much larger and more intimidating needle. Susan closed her eyes, and she allowed herself to remember when her daughter had been conceived.
It had been after the gambling trouble, as it had become known by her and Jack. After he had come clean, fessed up, she’d allowed him to whisk her off for a weekend to a hut in the Sierras. Just the two of them, Matt left behind in the care of her sister.
It had been an idyllic weekend. Hiking during the hot days, lying in front of a fire as the coolness of the night crept into the hut. They had made love in front of the fire. It was corny, cheesily romantic, and she had loved every minute of it. And she’d loved Jack more than she ever had. She’d opened her heart to him again, and that was the night they made this child.
When they went down the mountain, back to the sprawl of L.A. below, she felt a renewed optimism. Okay, so a bad thing had happened. But they had worked it out. They had cut the cancer from their lives and healed their marriage.
All was well.
Of course he had gambled again. And then came Milwaukee and that terrifying phone call when he demanded that she and Matt meet him in Florida. She had heard something in his voice that made it impossible to argue. So she’d dropped the dog off with her sister and driven with her son to the airport.
They never went home again.
Life became a succession of transit lounges and passports doled out like playing cards, the man she’d married becoming as strange as the names that stared up at her from the fake passports.
The anesthetist was trickling the anesthetic into her spine. There was a moment when the catheter touched a nerve and produced a brief tingling sensation down one leg; then she felt a not unpleasant numbness from the waist down.
There was something reassuring in handing herself over to this process, suspending her own volition, letting others chart the course.
She allowed herself to enjoy this lull. She knew that it wouldn’t last for long.
They were deep in the Flats now, driving into Paradise Park. Benny Mongrel reached over the back of the seat once again and lifted the blanket off Barnard. His breathing was shallow and labored, but he was still alive.
Benny Mongrel was a connoisseur of pain. As others in the Cape could roll a glass of wine over their tongue and wax lyrical about its provenance and subtlety, so he knew exactly how to appreciate the effects of the pain he was administering.
And he knew that he had caused the fat man more pain than any of his other victims. Even if the results, initially at least, were less dire than some of his previous exercises. The fat cop’s limbs were still connected to his torso, his tongue still lay in his mouth, and his organs were still encased by muscle, fat, and skin. But the relentless insertion of the wrapped blade, piercing each layer of epidermis, moving through subcutaneous fat and flesh, finding nerve ends and connective tissue, had built to a greater symphony of pain than he had ever inflicted on any one body.
The fat man had taken it for an extraordinary amount of time. It had amazed Benny Mongrel. Looking at Barnard, he’d made the quick assessment that, stripped of his badge and his gun, he was nothing but an overgrown fat boy with no spine. He’d expected him to talk as soon as he was shown the blade. But each time the duct tape was pulled from his face, the fat cop had repeated the same two words, fuck youse, as if they were a prayer.
Then the fat man had seemed to pass over into a world not quite connected with the brutal reality of Burn’s garage. He closed his eyes. He spoke a name or two, then gave voice to a babble that sounded to Benny Mongrel like the crap that some of the happy-clappys in prison had produced when talking to their gods.
That’s when Benny Mongrel had thought that he had lost him, that whatever information the fat man had about the missing white boy was gone forever. Benny Mongrel had been ready to unwrap the blade and draw it, once and for all, across that fat throat. Let the American do what he liked. But one of those eyes, like a fly in a plate of prison porridge, had flickered open and fixed itself on Benny Mongrel. And the voice had wheezed out of the chest like the last gasp of a cheap accordion.
“You wanna boy?” It took Benny Mongrel a moment to understand. Then he nodded. “Then I’ll tell you. Jus’ to shut them up.”
“Who?”
“The dead fuckers.”
Barnard had given him an address in Paradise Park. Benny Mongrel knew the ghetto block; he had once killed a man in one of those cramped apartments on Tulip Street. Remembered it well as Burn stopped the Ford in the shadow of a wall with thug life sprayed across it.
Benny Mongrel wasn’t completely sure why he’d even agreed to come on this trip. He could’ve finished things in the garage and walked away. But no, he was here. Maybe this was how things were meant to end. He had started it, and now he had to see it through.
As he was about to get out of the car, Burn passed him the. 38. Benny Mongrel shook his head. He had no use for gunut Burn thrust it at him. “Take it.”
Benny Mongrel checked that the safety was on and jammed it into the belt of his jeans. Then he opened the rear door of the Ford and aimed a kick at the shape that lay on the seat like a beached and bloodied whale.
The three men walked up the stairs. The watchman went first, then Barnard, stumbling, still wrapped in the blanket. Burn brought up the rear. He held the Mossberg close to his leg, hiding it as best he could. Barnard was mumbling, delirious, his great body racked by bouts of shivering. His boots left bloody footprints on the stairs that stank of piss.
They came to a corridor, open to the wind, which chose that moment to gust and blind them with a blast of sand. Burn wiped his eyes and stumbled into the back of Barnard. The stench that rose from the man was beyond fetid, and bile scalded Burn’s throat.
The watchman stopped at a warped door and nodded at Burn. Burn leveled the Mossberg. The watchman tried the door handle. It was locked. The watchman stepped back as far as the narrow corridor allowed, lifted his foot, and kicked the door, right up beside the lock. The door sprang open, banging against the wall inside. Burn rushed in, the Mossberg raking the interior. The dingy room was empty.
The watchman stepped inside, pushing Barnard in front of him, and closed the splintered door. Burn passed the empty kitchen, stuck his head into the bathroom, then went into the bedroom.
A man lay on the bed. Burn leveled the Mossberg, stepped cautiously into the room. The man, old and wrinkled as a tortoise, was naked except for a pair of stained briefs. He lay in a pool of blood that came from the gaping wound in the back of his head. His brains had been beaten in. Burn nudged him with the barrel of the Mossberg. Nothing. The man was dead.
It was then that Burn saw the pajama top that protruded from beneath the dead man. Burn yanked it free and held it up. A collection of Disney characters against a blue background, smeared with blood.
Burn had watched Mrs. Dollie slip that pj top over Matt’s head two nights before. The last time he had seen the boy.
His son had been in this apartment.