by Roger Smith
The fat cop took off up the road, his legs chafing together and his ass shaking like a belly dancer’s. The thing under his arm was moving, writhing. Benny Mongrel watched the fat cop stop and change his grip, right under a streetlight. That’s when Benny Mongrel saw what the cop was carrying. A boy with blond hair.
The American’s kid.
Fucken little bastard. He was small, but he was fighting like a cat in a sack. Barnard held him in both arms, squeezing the boy’s face against his chest, smothering him. That seemed to calm him down a bit. For good measure he brought the side of his hand down into the kid’s guts, hard. He felt the boy jerk, knees digging into Barnard’s fat; then he was still.
Barnard arrived at the Ford, went back to holding the kid in a one-armed grip while he fished in his pocket for his keys. While he was battling to work the keys past the rolls of fat that hung from his hips, the kid kicked his bare feet against Barnard’s paunch and propelled himself out of the cop’s grasp. The little shit fell to the pavement and hit his head, hard. Barnard saw blood, dark against the kid’s blond hair.
Wheezing, Barnard popped the trunk. Then he bent, his legs spread wide like a sumo wrestler getting into first position, as he grabbed the boy and threw him into the trunk. He heard the kid gasping and saw the tears and snot streaking his face.
Fuck him.
Barnard slammed the trunk closed and leaned on the lid, fighting to get his breath. Sweat rolled freely from his forehead, into his eyes. His shirt clung to his back, and the itch between his thighs stung like a thousand mosquitoes had nailed him.
When his breathing was easier, he stood up and looked straight at the building site. Was that half-breed bastard with the dog up there, watching? Barnard couldn’t take the chance, couldn’t risk being tied to this kidnapping.
He was sure the American would keep his trap shut. But if the cops got wind of a foreign kid being abducted, there would be hell to pay. Very bad for the tourist industry. This wasn’t the Flats, where a child’s life was cheap. There would be a manhunt, pictures on TV and in the papers. Rewards offered. All of which would severely fuck up Barnard’s plans.
He got into the car, didn’t start the engine, just freewheeled down until he was level with the entrance to the building site and pulled up the brake. He wiped his sweating hands on his jeans, moved his wet shirt out of the way, and slid the. 38 from the holster.
He stood up out of the car.
The knife was in his hand. Benny Mongrel waited at the top of the stairs, behind the half-built wall, listening. He heard the crunch of heavy feet as the fat cop walked across the builder’s sand and gravel.
Benny Mongrel was in a place within himself that he had been in many times since he had killed that American gangster when he was a boy. It was a place of perfect focus, all his senses honed, every muscand sinew waiting for the command that would send the blade deep into flesh.
The cop had entered the building site. He was making no attempt to move quietly. From where he stood, two flights up, Benny Mongrel could hear the wheeze of the fat cop’s lungs as air sucked through phlegm like a clogged pool filter. The cop coughed and spat.
The fat man walked the two planks that spanned a plumber’s ditch and led to the ground floor of the house; the planks creaked and bounced under his weight.
Benny Mongrel heard the cop’s voice. “Hey, watchman. You there?”
Bessie growled behind Benny Mongrel. The growl was low and deep. She had rolled up and was trying to stand, the nails of her back paws scrabbling at the cement floor as she fought to lift her hips. Benny Mongrel stared at her, willing her to be quiet. He held out a warning hand. She seemed to understand, and the growl died in her throat. She raised her long snout and sniffed the air. But she stayed where she was.
“Watchman? I got something for you, man. Some cash. Want you to gimme a hand with something.” The fat cop was heading up the first flight of stairs, his boots heavy on the cement.
Benny Mongrel stood dead still. Let the bastard come to him. The moment he stepped onto the landing on the top floor, Benny Mongrel would strike.
He heard the cop reach the landing on the floor below. He was wheezing like he’d climbed Table Mountain, his breath coming in short gasps. “Watchman? Don’t make me fucken come and look for you…”
The sound of the cop’s boot on the first step leading up to the top floor. Not long now. Benny Mongrel was ready for him.
And then, before he could stop her, the old dog was flying past him, digging deep into muscle memory and finding some last echo of the speed and strength she had once known. Benny Mongrel made a leap for Bessie, tried to grab her by her thick coat, but his fingers found air and he hit the cement hard, his knife spinning away from him.
Barnard was on the second step, panting toward the top floor of the house, when he saw the dark shape flying down toward him. The fucken dog. He raised the. 38 and got off a shot, knew he had missed.
The dog’s paws hit him in the chest. A smaller man would have been sent flying backward, but Barnard did nothing more than lean, before righting himself. The dog bounced off him and hit the stairs with her back. He heard the crack as her left hip shattered. The dog moaned, but she was still fighting to get up at him, snarling, yellow fangs visible in the spill of the streetlight.
Barnard shot her at point-blank range, in the chest.
The shot almost deafened him, bouncing off the hard cement walls, reverberating through the unfinished rooms and escaping out into the night. Unbelievably, the dog was still coming, a sound somewhere between a growl and a scream coming from her bloody muzzle. He shot her again.
She was still.
Dogs in the houses next door started to bark, a chorus that kept collecting new voices as it rolled across the suburb.
When he heard the first shot, Benny Mongrel was racing across to retrieve the knife that had spun from his grasp and come to rest against a cement bag. He grabbed the knife, felt the reassuring shape of the hilt as he curled his fingers around it.
Then the second shot.
Benny Mongrel took off for the stairs.
From where he stood Barnard could see out through the unfinished rooms and across the streets and houses below.
An armed response patrol car, hazards flashing, barreled down the street three blocks away. The shots had been heard.
Barnard needed to go upstairs and finish this.
He looked back toward the patrol car, saw it brake, skid, and fishtail as it avoided an SUV that had reversed out of a driveway into its path.
The moment he needed.
Benny Mongrel was at the top of the stairs. He knew he would be silhouetted against the light from outside. He knew the cop would have a perfect target. He didn’t care.
He launched himself at the stairs, and the bullet smashed into his shoulder. It was his knife arm, and he heard the knife clatter as it fell from his grip. He had been shot before, but it wasn’t a feeling you got used to, the smack of the bullet into your flesh. The deadness. No pain at first. But you knew it was coming.
He managed to twist and throw himself backward and sideways, so that he landed away from the stairs, shielded by the low wall. Benny Mongrel lay on his side, waiting for the fat cop to come up the stairs. His right arm was useless. He could feel the blood flowing from the shoulder, down his arm, pooling onto his fingers.
He reached out his left hand and found a half-brick. At least that was something.
He heard a car in the distance, driving fast, racing through the gears. He heard the cop, coming up one step. Then another.
Barnard climbed the stairs. He looked down at the street. The patrol car burned rubber as it started toward him again. Two blocks away. Barnard made up his mind. He turned and ran, moving as fast as his huge frame would allow.
He burst from the building site, hurtled across the planks, and took off for the road, legs pumping, heart threatening to explode from within its housing of fat and cholesterol.
The Ford wa
s ahead of him. Not far.
He looked over his shoulder. The patrol car wasn’t there yet, hidden from sight, around the corner. He could hear it, though, screaming through the gears.
He was at his car. Unlocked it, dropped inside, feeling it sag under his weight.
Key in the ignition. Smashed gears into reverse and took off, away from the house, away from the patrol car, clutch burning.
Then he was "›He looke rise and reversing down out of sight.
When he heard the planks bounce as the fat cop ran away, Benny Mongrel dragged himself to his feet, the brick still in his left hand. He went down the stairs.
Bessie lay on the landing below. She wasn’t moving. Benny Mongrel stood over the dog, dropped the brick, and slowly knelt down. He knew she was dead before he touched her. The streetlight shafted onto the landing, and he could see her mouth drawn away from her bloody teeth in a rictus of death. Blood matted her coat and spread like a dark stain away from her body.
Benny Mongrel knelt down in the blood, and with his good arm he cradled the dead dog. Then he did something that he hadn’t done since he was thrown on the garbage dump all those years ago.
Benny Mongrel cried.
CHAPTER 18
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.