by Roger Smith
“Hey!” He heard the cop shouting down in the street. He ignored him. Bessie growled a low growl. He quietened her with a pat. “Hey, up there, I’m fucken talking to you!”
Benny Mongrel knew it would be better to show himself. He stepped forward. The fat cop was standing with his hands on his hips, looking up.
“Come down here. I want to talk to you.”
Benny stared at the cop, saying nothing. The cop was getting impatient. “What, haven’t you got fucken ears? I said get your fucken ass down here. Now.”
Benny Mongrel let go of Bessie’s chain, took the knife from his pocket, and slid it under a cement bag. Better not to have it on him in case the boer searched him. Gut instinct told him not to take the old dog down there with him.
“Stay, Bessie,” he told her softly. She whined as he disappeared down the stairs but did as he ordered.
Benny Mongrel stepped out of the unfinished house and approached the fat cop. It was instinctive for him to hunch slightly as he walked, like a tire deflating, and he fixed a submissive look on his face. He deliberately didn’t look the cop in the eye.
“Evening, boss.”
“This car, when did you first see it?” The cop pointed to the red BMW.
“This morning, my boss.”
“Never saw these guys arrive?”
“No, my boss.”
“You fucken lying to me?”
“No, my boss.”
The fat cop was scanning Benny Mongrel professionally, taking in the scarred face and the tattoos. “When did you get out?”
“Pollsmoor?”
“Yes, my boss.”
“You a fucken 28?”
“No more, my boss.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m clean, my boss.”
“My ass is clean. You see anything last night? This car?”
“No, my boss.”
“You fucken lying to me?”
“No, my boss.”
The cop hit him with an open hand, right across the face. It was like being struck by a speeding taxi. Benny Mongrel had to put a hand to the wall of the house to stop himself from falling.
The cop raised his hand again. “You better not fucken lie!”
It was then that Bessie, normally the most pathetically docile of creatures, dragged herself from the house. She threw herself at the fat cop, baring her teeth at him, growling.
The cop was wearing heavy boots, and he took his massive leg back and kicked her in the ribs. Benny Mongrel could hear the air explode from her lungs as she spun in the air, her teeth clacking as she hit the ground. Bessie lay there panting. The cop had a pistol in his hand, pointed straight at Bessie, his trigger finger tightening. Bessie lifted her head and showed him her teeth.
Benny Mongrel grabbed her chain, dragging her away from the fat cop. “Please, my boss, no. Please.”
The cop was panting like a midnight donkey, still pointing the gun at Bessie. He looked up at Benny Mongrel. “Now tell me the fucken truth. You see the guys who came in that car?”
“No, my boss. I was sleeping.”
The cop stared at Benny Mongrel for what felt like forever before he lowered the gun and holstered it. “Fucken useless piece of shit.”
Suddenly, he seemed to have grown bored with the interrogation. He threw Benny Mongrel a last contemptuous look and then turned toward the street.
Benny Mongrel knelt down beside Bessie. She was gasping for air, trying to get up, her claws scratching at the cement, her crippled hips sagging under her weight.
He stroked her and crooned softly. “Easy, Bessie. Easy, old thing. Easy now.”
Burn took a beer from the fridge. Mrs. Dollie, the middle-aged domestic worker, was chatting in the kitchen with Matt. Mrs. Dollie had come with the house. At first Burn had wanted to get rid of her, not wanting a stranger in their lives. But Susan had felt sorry for the woman, and they decided to keep her on.
She was short and skinny with olive skin and gray hair that escaped in tendrils from beneath her Muslim headscarf. She looked frail but was not. Burn had seen her effortlessly moving furniture as she vacuumed. She spoke rapid-fire English with the local accent that had Jack and Susan esiually asking her to repeat herself. Which she did, with a great show of patience, as if, shame, it wasn’t these foreigners’ fault they were so slow, was it?
Matt loved her and seemed to have no problem understanding her. He watched as she dusted the leaves of the potted plants in the kitchen.
“Now look it here, Matty, when youse is by the house and I’m not here, you must look nicely after the plants, okay?”
Matt nodded, earnestly. “I’ll water them.”
“Ja. Nicely. No matter what they say about water restrictions. A plant must get its water.”
Mrs. Dollie grabbed a bucket and a mop and headed to the tiled dining room, Matt trailing after her. Burn watched as she attacked the tiles energetically, her thin arms pumping as she mopped the area where the bodies had lain. He felt a moment of panic. Had he cleaned the blood properly? Had some of it caked in the grout between the tiles? But Mrs. Dollie noticed nothing. She never stopped chatting to the boy as she mopped, and he heard Matt laugh.
Burn walked away from the conversation, out onto the deck, sipping the beer. His son seemed okay, but how could he be? His world had been upended; he had been dragged across the planet and had witnessed something last night that he wouldn’t be allowed to watch on TV.
Burn stood drinking his beer, watching the sun sagging down toward the ocean. Unbelievably, it was less than twenty-four hours ago that those men had come.
The door buzzer sounded, startling Burn. He hesitated, instinctively wanting to ignore it. Then it sounded again. Whoever was down there kept his finger on the buzzer.
Burn walked across to the wall-mounted intercom monitor. On the screen he saw a huge man crowded into the street door recess. Burn picked up the phone.
“Yes, can I help you?”
The man held up an ID to the camera. “Police. Can I talk to you, please?” He had a guttural accent, hard to follow through the intercom.
Burn hesitated. “Okay. I’ll be right down.”
Burn felt sick in his gut.
He walked across to Mrs. Dollie and Matt. He ruffled his son’s hair. “I have to talk to somebody outside. You stay here, with Mrs. Dollie, okay?” Matt nodded.
Burn locked the front door to make sure that Matt couldn’t follow him and walked down the pathway.
Was this it? Was this where the whole thing ended?
He opened the street door.
CHAPTER 7
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.”
&nbs
p; 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.