Burn felt as if he were confronting a Table Mountain of fat. The cop was massive, tall and obese, and he stank, a mixture of acrid body odor and something vaguely medicinal.
“Can I help you, officer?”
“I’m Inspector Barnard.” The man’s body odor became a sweet memory when the force of Barnard’s halitosis hit Burn took an involuntary step backward.
Burn tried not to breathe. “Is there a problem?”
Barnard was squinting at him. “You American?”
“That’s right.”
“On holiday?”
“Yeah, I guess. We’re renting for a couple of months.”
“Nice part of town.” The cop smiled, showing yellow teeth beneath a mustache as bushy as a skunk’s tail.
“It is, yes. Look, Mr…?”
“Barnard. Inspector.”
“Inspector, is there something I can help you with?”
“Just routine, sir.” Barnard had a notebook out. “Can I have your name, please?”
“Hill. John Hill.”
“Mr. Hill, there have been a couple of break-ins in the area over the last few weeks. You notice anything out of the ordinary, maybe?”
Burn shook his head. “Nothing. No. This is a very quiet street.”
“Last night? You didn’t hear anything, or see anything unusual?”
“No. Sorry.”
Barnard was pointing at the red BMW. “You maybe see who was driving that car?”
“Sorry. Can’t help you.”
Barnard nodded, sucked his teeth. Then he fixed Burn with a stare. “You live here alone?”
“No, with my wife and son.”
“Okay. Can I maybe talk to your wife? See if she maybe heard something?”
“She’s in hospital.”
Barnard was looking interested. “Oh? What’s wrong?”
“She’s pregnant. A complication. We had to get an ambulance for her last night, in fact. I was pretty preoccupied with that, as you can imagine.”
“Of course, of course. Well, I hope she is going to be okay.”
“Thank you. She’s fine.”
“Okay, good.”
Burn stepped back, ready to shut the door. “Is there anything else?”
The fat cop seemed reluctant to leave. “No. Thanks.”
As Burn closed the door, Barnard put out a hand and gripped it. The door was going nowhere. “Mr. Hill, what hospital is she in?”
Burn studied the piggy eyes peering out at him from within the folds of fat.
“She’s in Gardens Clinic.”
“Maybe I can talk to the ambulance crew. They might have seen sv hYou have a good night now.” Barnard released the door and allowed Burn to close it.
Burn breathed easily for the first time, free of Barnard’s stench and the weight of his own terror. The cop had traced the car to the gangsters. Did that mean he had found the bodies?
Burn forced himself to calm down. He went back into the house and walked straight to the bottle of Scotch in the kitchen, poured himself a shot, and knocked it back neat. He felt like flattening the bottle, but he knew he couldn’t.
He had planning to do.
They were going to have to run again.
Barnard called in a tow truck to impound the BMW; then he drove away from wealthy Cape Town down to the flatlands he knew so well.
What Rikki Fortune and his friend Faried Adams had been doing up there on the mountain wasn’t difficult to imagine. They were predators. Always on the hunt. They had been down in Sea Point looking for a whore; then they had seen something as they cruised like shadows through that white suburb, something they desired. Animals like that, half out of their minds on drugs, never made plans. They acted on impulse. Raped. Murdered. Took what they wanted without thought.
But where were they?
Barnard drove to the Golden Spoon for his usual gatsby full house. It was dark by the time he walked out to his car, but the heat was still intense. He sat for a while, chewing like a hippo on a riverbank, washing the food down with the piss-yellow Double O.
Barnard had touched base with the cops at Sea Point police station. No violent crimes, home invasions, or murders had been reported in the last twenty-four hours. And they knew nothing about this John Hill.
Barnard thought about the American. There was something that worried him about the man, something he couldn’t name, something that nagged at him worse than the rash on his thighs.
Hill was hiding something. He was sure of it.
Benny Mongrel searched the black trash can and found a plastic container of potato salad. Next he found a half-eaten bar of Belgian chocolate. The greatest prize of all was a T-bone steak, cooked but uneaten.
Tomorrow was garbage collection day for the road on the mountain, and a bin stood outside each house ready for the dawn truck. Benny Mongrel was always amazed at what these rich people threw away. Uneaten food still wrapped in plastic, brand-new clothes, electrical equipment. Last month he’d found a portable TV that worked perfectly and had swapped it with his landlord for rent.
It was no wonder that squads of homeless people seeped from the doorways, gutters, and open fields, to sift through the trash cans of the privileged. Beatings from the police and rent-a-cops were a small price to pay for these rich pickings.
Benny Mongrel put his spoils in a plastic bag and went back to the building site. He climbed the stairs to where Bessie lay with her gray muzzle between her paws, staring silently into the night. The fat cop’s boot had hurt Bessie. When Benny Mongrel had felt her ribs, the old dog had moad and licked his hand. She was tough. Like him. And like him, she wore the visible signs of abuse and ill treatment. There was a scar across her nose. When he stroked her, he felt bumps and lesions from old wounds. The kick from the cop’s boot was just more of the rough treatment she had come to expect from the world. Her ribs would heal. That much Benny Mongrel knew. Even so, it pained him that she had been hurt trying to protect him.
Looking at the scarred old dog, Benny Mongrel saw himself.
Benny Mongrel unfolded a scrap of housepainter’s canvas in front of Bessie like a tablecloth. Then, with great care, he set the feast out before her, item by item. She sniffed at the potato salad but was not to be drawn. She granted the Belgian chocolate a cursory lick, then snubbed it. Benny Mongrel placed the T-bone steak in front of her. She feigned disinterest for a moment, but the smell was too much to ignore.
She grabbed the bone between her front paws and started working away at the steak, her jaws moving as she chewed. He squatted beside her and rolled a cigarette, sneaking glances at her as she ate. At last she was done, and she lifted her head and looked him in the eye.
Benny Mongrel could have sworn that she smiled at him.
Burn slept fitfully. His dreams were full of dead men, and the fat cop made a guest appearance. Matt wet the bed again, and in the early hours Burn carried him, still asleep, to the bathroom, where he cleaned him up and put him in a fresh pair of Disney pajamas.
He took Matt back to bed with him and lay listening to his son sleeping until gray dawn light washed the room.
At five thirty Burn was sitting out on the deck, watching the sunrise. Thinking. Thinking how he had been obsessed with chance, luck, the roll of the dice, the spin of the wheel. How he had convinced himself that he had been born with that extra edge, that extra percentage that would always swing things his way. That he was a winner.
Until that day in the bookie’s Cadillac.
The deal Nolan had offered Burn was simple: he was putting together a team to take down a bank in Milwaukee. Recruiting people who had no links with Wisconsin, who would leave no trail for the cops to follow. They were going in at night to blow the vault. Nolan needed a security expert to override the alarms and patch a loop into the surveillance cameras. He’d done his homework on Burn and knew he was the guy.
If Burn signed on, not only would his hundred-grand debt to Pepe Vargas disappear, but he would get a chunk of the six million they expected to lift from the vault. If he didn’t, Nolan would pay Susan and Matt a visit. There was a deadness to Nolan’s eyes that told Burn this was a threat to take seriously.
Burn had thought of running. But with what? To where?
So he had signed on. He told Susan he was attending a security convention in Dallas, and he went off with Nolan and two other men to Wisconsin.
Everything went perfectly. Burn sat outside the bank, in the back of a minivan, working the keys of a laptop. He disabled the alarm without alerting the bank’s security. For Burn, who built and installed these systems, bypassing them was easy. Then he fed a looped image of the empty bank vaultmonitors at the bank’s surveillance center. The security guys working the graveyard shift drank their coffee, read paperbacks, and dozed without any idea that the bank was being hit.
Nolan and the two other men went into the bank. Burn stayed in the van, in radio contact, sweating despite the freezing weather. Terrified. Every few minutes Nolan’s calm voice would give him a terse progress report. The vault door had blown. They were in.
It seemed like hours but took no more than forty-five minutes. The three men returned with the money in kit bags. There was an air of quiet jubilation. Nolan slid into the driver’s seat. A big guy who had hardly spoken sat next to Nolan. The third man, a skinny kid in his twenties, joined Burn in the back. He grinned and lit a smoke, offering one to Burn, who shook his head.
Nolan drove through downtown Milwaukee. He kept to the speed limit. He stopped at the lights. Then a prowl car nosed up behind them, and the cop driving whooped the siren.
Nolan pulled over. He looked back over the seat. “Keep cool.”
Nolan got out of the van to talk to the cop. The van had a busted taillight. There was another cop in the prowl car who didn’t bother to get out. Things seemed under control until the first cop stepped up to the van and shone his flashlight at the big guy in the passenger seat. Something about him must have set off alarm bells. Next thing the cop was asking Nolan to open the rear of the van.
That’s when Nolan shot the cop.
And the uniform in the prowl car shot Nolan, who fell down in the snow beside the dead cop. The big guy had a pistol in his hand, and he returned fire. He slid over to take the wheel of the van, and as he pulled away, half of his head disappeared and the van slowed, then stalled.
The cop in the car shot at the van, and one of his bullets pierced the door and caught the young guy in the stomach. He pitched forward groaning, bleeding over the bags of money.
Burn vaulted the seats. He shoved the dead guy out of the van, got in behind the wheel, and took off. The cop was still shooting. Burn floored the van, fishtailing, fighting to get it under control. As he drifted into a corner Burn saw the strobing lights of the cop car in pursuit. A block later it hit ice and spun one-eighty before collecting a lamppost and disappearing from Burn’s mirror.
Burn ditched the van in a side street, grabbed one of the money bags from the rear, and took off into the night, leaving the van and the dying kid.
He’d been given fake ID for the job, and he used it to rent a car and drive to Chicago. He called Susan and told her to get herself and Matt on the next plane to Miami and check into a hotel. He would meet her there. It still amazed him that she had listened, even when he refused to tell her what the hell was going on.
In Chicago it was his turn to look up Tommy Ryan, who was connected. Fitting that what began with Tommy ended with him. It cost Burn plenty, but he managed to get nearly two million dollars laundered and the bulk of it transferred to a Swiss bank account. The new identities came next.
He joined Susan in Miami. They both had news. He told her what he had really been doing. She told him that she was pregnant.
She cried, raged at him. wanted to go home. She wanted their life back.
Then she had stopped crying and agreed to go with him, and the three of them caught a plane to Cape Town.
The kid in the van hadn’t died. He’d sung a long and loud plea bargain, and Jack Burn had joined the U.S. Marshals’ MOST WANTED list.
The dogs found them first. A pack of strays roaming the Flats were drawn by the smell of the bodies. They ripped open the plastic garbage bags with their teeth and claws, then recoiled at the ripe stench of rotting human. They ran off to root in the trash cans of the nearby houses.
Ronnie September and Cassiem Davids came upon them next, sometime after eight in the morning. They were both eleven years old, in their school uniforms, but they had no intention of going to school.
They headed across the open veld, sucking on illicit cigarettes, putting as much distance between themselves and their homes in Paradise Park as they could. They were going to jump a taxi and head for Bellville to play arcade games.
It was Ronnie who saw the white Nikes sticking out of the grass. He stopped and pointed. “Check that, man.”
Cassiem stared. “Those is Nikes.”
“I know that. You think I’m stupid?”
The two boys edged closer to the body of a short, skinny man, only partly covered by black garbage bags. Boys their age who grow up on the Cape Flats are no strangers to dead bodies, but the stench was fierce.
“Look, there’s another one.” Ronnie was pointing to where the body of a tall man spilled from the torn bags. He ran a discerning eye over the lanky corpse’s outfit. “His clothes is shit, man.”
“God, but it stinks.” Cassiem was covering his nose with his hand.
Ronnie sucked on his cigarette and stepped closer to the small corpse. The dead man lay on his back, the jagged slash in his throat gaping at the sky. “Yaaaw. He was cut, hey?”
Cassiem was looking over Ronnie’s shoulder. “Those pants is nice. Diesel.”
“It’s full of blood, man.” Ronnie stooped a little lower. “Maybe he got a phone.”
“I’m not putting my hands in there.”
Ronnie was eyeing the shoes. “That Nikes is brand-new.”
“I saw them first!”
Ronnie gave his friend a shove. “So, you gonna take them off him? Do it then!”
Cassiem said nothing, took a step back.
Ronnie shook his head, disgusted. “My little sister got more balls than you, man.”
“Ja, okay, then let me see you do it. Come.”
Ronnie eyeballed his friend. He’d always kept a safe distance from the bodies he had seen before, watched as cops or paramedics had shoveled tm into bags and carted them away. This was different. Shit, this was fucken disgusting.
But he looked down at his torn and scruffy running shoes, inherited from his brother. There was no way he was ever going to afford a pair of Nikes like these.
Ronnie took a deep breath and knelt down and pulled loose the laces of one of the shoes. He almost puked from the stink. He untied the other shoe. Then he tried to get the shoe off. The corpse had bloated and stiffened, and the shoe was tight on the foot. Ronnie was tugging, and that set the dead man’s head lolling back, the wound opening even wider, and a fat white worm crawled out.
It was too much for Cassiem, and he spewed his breakfast of egg and leftover mince curry onto his shoes.
Ronnie wasn’t giving up. He tugged again and finally managed to get a shoe off, falling onto his butt in the process. Then he attacked the second shoe and separated it from the dead man’s foot.
Ronnie stood, triumphant. He held the shoes up in front of Cassiem, dangling them by the laces. “Gottem.”
“They fucken stink.”
“Yours stink, and you aren’t even dead yet.”
Ronnie walked away from the bodies, Cassiem tagging after him. Ronnie sat down and pulled off his old shoes and threw them as far as he could into the bush. He slipped on the new Nikes.
“They fit perfect.” He stood, lifting his trousers to his ankles, flexing his toes.
Then he grabbed Cassiem by the tie and pulled him close. “You keep your fucken mouth shut about this, okay?”
Cassiem nodded. Ronnie was already walking toward the road. Cassiem shot a look back over his shoulder at the red socks sticking out of the garbage bag; then he followed his friend.