Mixed Blood ct-1
Page 19
He left the bedroom and walked into the bathroom. The boy was still asleep, curled up on the blanket, lying in the fetal position, sucking on his thumb. Barnard lowered himself onto the pot, lid down, and sat looking at the kid. He couldn’t stand children. Maybe because he knew only too well what they grew up to become. Just another fucker who wanted to take away from you what was yours.
Barnard leaned forward and prodded the little brat with the shotgun barrel. No response. He prodded him again, harder, and the kid opened his eyes and looked at him. And his blue eyes widened in terror.
CHAPTER 23
Burn sat at the kitchen counter, an untouched cup of coffee before him. He couldn’t remember when last he had eaten. The thought of food made him want to puke. He was waiting for the minutes to pass so he could drive down to Sea Point and withdrawansom money. At least he would be able to fool himself that he was doing something. Not just sitting, passive.
His cell phone rang and vibrated, doing a slow dance on the wooden counter. When he saw Mrs. Dollie’s name come up, he grabbed at the phone. “Yes?”
“Just making sure you’re not doing anything stupid.”
“I’m about to get the money. As soon as the banks open.”
“Good. I’ll call you later. With details.”
Burn tried to manufacture some authority. “I’m not going to hand over the money until I get my son.”
“That so?” There was a pause; the phone bumped against something. Then he heard the man’s voice at a distance. “Say hullo to your daddy.”
Then Matt’s voice. “Daddy?”
He heard the terror in his son’s voice, and it was all he could do to reply.
“Matty, it’s going to be okay. Daddy’s coming to get you.” Then Matt screamed. A piercing scream, followed by sobs. Burn was shouting into the phone. “Stop it, you bastard! Don’t hurt him.”
The man was back. “Don’t worry, just a little pinch to bring some color to his cheeks. But you don’t give the orders; I do. Do you get me?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Now you get the fucken money, and I’ll call you.”
The line went dead.
Susan Burn woke up believing that she had lost her baby. She was sweating, her breath coming in rasps as she fought herself out of the nightmare. It took her a minute to remember where she was. In the private ward at the clinic, bright sunlight behind the curtains. She put a hand on her belly and felt her daughter kick.
Susan lay back, trying to slow her breathing, inhaling long and deep through her nose, the way she had learned in yoga. Her baby was fine. Then she realized that the dream, the nightmare, had not been about her unborn child. It had been about Matt. And a feeling of nameless dread grabbed Susan by the throat. There was something wrong with her son.
She told herself to calm down. She was feeling guilty because she’d been distant from Matt. She tried to convince herself that she had repaired her relationship with him over the last few days. Allowed him back into her heart. But there was no changing the truth. When she looked at her son, she couldn’t stop herself from seeing his father.
As she lay there she remembered when she had met Jack Burn. How he had wooed her, pursued her relentlessly. She was young, used to the clumsiness of men, boys really, her own age, and she was no match for this man of nearly forty.
There had been a moment, just before they married, when she felt a momentary chill, as if a cloud had crossed the sun. She panicked. It was all going too fast. Could she really trust this much older man she barely knew?
Jack had done whations always did: took her in his arms and reassured her. Told her he loved her. So they were married, and Matt was born, and she was as fulfilled and happy as she had ever been in her life.
When she found out about Jack’s gambling, she thought her premonition was being realized. But he swore to her he would never gamble again.
She had believed him.
Then came Milwaukee and the series of events that had led her to Cape Town. Now she felt a superstitious dread, an almost karmic presentiment, that her happiness had been a borrowed thing, a thing that had never truly belonged to her, that it had come at a cost to others.
And that a price was yet to be paid.
Burn was at the front door when the landline rang. He was ready to ignore it. He knew it wouldn’t be the kidnapper. But what if it was the clinic? What if there were complications?
He went back and answered. Susan’s voice, distressed.
“Susan, is everything okay? With the baby?”
“Everything’s fine, Jack. I want to speak to Matt.”
Burn had to fight to keep his voice level. “He’s not here.”
“Where is he?” Anxiety tightened her voice.
He heard himself lie. “He’s gone for a walk with Mrs. Dollie. She went down to the store to buy some milk, and he went with her.” It had happened often enough before.
“Is he okay, Jack?”
“Of course he’s okay. Why?”
She hesitated. “I had a bad dream. I dunno. I just felt scared.”
“He’s fine. You’re just… anxious is all. Susan, when are… when will you have the baby?”
“Later today. Sometime after lunch.”
He could hear the distance creeping back into her voice. She was bringing up the barriers again. “Promise me, Jack, that everything is okay with Matty.”
“I promise.”
She hung up.
Burn hated himself more than he had ever hated himself before.
Disaster Zondi breakfasted in his room, his back to the sweeping view of blazing Table Mountain, the harbor, and the Waterfront. He had no use for scenic panoramas. While he ate slices of ruby grapefruit off a small silver fork, he considered the fingerprint and its owner, displayed on the screen of his laptop.
In April 1997 Susan Ford, a student at UCLA, had been arrested in possession of ten grams of marijuana. She had pled guilty to a first-degree misdemeanor and paid a thousand-dollar fine.
That was all he’d gleaned from the FBI database.
Zondi wiped his fingers on ainen napkin before executing the series of keyboard commands that allowed him to zoom in on the girl’s mug shots. Blonde. Pretty. Not looking too fazed at what was going down in her life. In the front view she seemed to be biting back a smile, like she had just shared a joke with the cop shooting the pictures.
Where had Barnard picked up her fingerprint? Was she holidaying in Cape Town, drawn by the mountains and beaches and wine estates like so many foreign tourists? She’d be in her late twenties now, that youthful glow maybe just starting to dim, but she’d still be attractive, he’d bet. He liked that wholesome blonde look.
He was reminded of a boer girl he’d met when he was ending the career of the corrupt commander of a rural police station. She couldn’t get enough of Zondi in her parents’ bed while they were off at Sunday devotions. Each time she had climaxed, she yelled Disaster at the top of her voice. Her father would have echoed those sentiments if he could have seen what was going on between his sheets.
Zondi pushed that thought away, bit into the grapefruit, and winced slightly at the bitterness. He would e-mail a request to U.S. law enforcement, via Interpol, asking for an update on Susan Ford. From prior experience he knew that would take at least a week. If he was lucky.
Zondi had run a check on Deputy U.S. Marshal Dexter Torrance, the man Barnard had e-mailed Susan Ford’s print to. Torrance, a member of the Marshals International Fugitives Task Force, had been in Cape Town a few years ago to escort an American fugitive back home. The fugitive had hanged himself in his cell, and Torrance had ended up accompanying a coffin. The suicide took place at Bellwood South holding cells. Where, no doubt, Barnard and Torrance had met. And become friendly enough for the U.S. marshal to do Barnard a favor. Zondi wondered about the kind of man who would feel an affinity with Rudi Barnard. Probably some redneck who let his sidearm do the talking. No shortage of those, he was sure.
Forensics had given him very little beyond confirming that the victims were male and, based on surviving dental work, possibly in their twenties. They had found a. 38 slug still lodged in what was left of the abdomen of the tall man. It didn’t match the. 38 bullet they found in Ronnie September.
Two men in their twenties. Most likely from the Cape Flats. Most likely gangsters, given the world in which Barnard ran. Something occurred to Zondi, and he shifted windows, his fingers moving with deft certainty on the keyboards. There. Two nights before he disappeared, Barnard had put out an APB on a car, a red 1992 BMW 3 series with a CY registration plate. Wealthy Cape Town and the downtown area carried CA license plates; the working-class suburbs and the Cape Flats that sprawled north and east of the city carried CY plates.
So Barnard was looking for an early-nineties Beemer, car of choice for Flats gangbangers. It would seem that he had found it.
With two men inside.
Burn dove the Jeep up the hill toward the house, on his way back from the banks in Sea Point. Lion’s Head was above him to his right, etched against the blue sky. The slopes were blackened, and smoke rose like a funeral pyre. The helicopters were gone, but the wind was picking up, ready to carry sparks to the dry brush. The choppers wouldn’t rest for long.
Burn had the money crammed into a duffel bag on the seat beside him. It was after ten, and he had heard nothing from the kidnapper. He slowed outside his house, thumbing the garage door opener. Burn eased the Jeep into the garage. He stepped down from the car and reached across for the bag of money.
Out of the corner of his eye Burn glimpsed the silhouette of a man as he ducked under the descending garage door. The door bumped as it hit the cement floor. The man was locked in with him.
CHAPTER 24
Instinctively, Burn swung the duffel bag. The man was fast. He grabbed the bag with his left hand, deflected it, and pushed Burn back against the car.
It was then, when a shaft of light from the small window above the garage door struck the man’s face, that Burn saw the livid scar and the empty eye socket. The watchman from the building site next door. In that moment everything made sense to Burn. The ugly freak had spied on them. He’d broken in and killed Mrs. Dollie and kidnapped Matt.
All the pent-up fear and rage exploded in Burn, and he went for the bastard’s throat. His fingertips had just brushed the watchman’s neck when he took a massive blow in the abdomen and fell to his knees, useless. He knew now that the watchman would take the money and disappear. And he would never see his son again. Then, as he was gasping for breath, he saw the watchman squat down in front of him, their faces almost level, the dark man looking at him like he was some alien life-form.
“Where is he?” Burn asked, his voice strangled.
“Who?”
“My son. What have you done with my son?”
The watchman shook his head. “I don’t got your son.”
Burn was sucking air, trying to get to his feet. The watchman was standing, too, helping him. Burn pushed his hands away. “Look, stop playing fucking games. Tell me what you want.”
“I don’t got your son. But I saw who do.”
Burn stared at him. The watchman continued slowly, the heavy accent grating on Burn’s ear. “I use to work next door, by the building site.”
“I know who you are.”
“That night, I seen him. He come and take your boy; then he come and shoot my dog. And me.”
Burn remembered arriving home the night Matt was taken. Seeing the watchman bleeding as he was led to the ambulance. “Who was it? Who took my son?”
“The fat cop.”
Burn knew then that the watchman was telling the truth. “I’m sorry.”
The watchman sh
“Please, come into the house. Tell me what happened.”
Burn took the duffel bag of money and walked to the stairs, his stomach still tender. The watchman wasn’t big, but he punched like a heavyweight.
They walked into the open-plan living room, all glass and light and Scandinavian design. The watchman looked around, taking it in. He was out of uniform, wore a pair of jeans meant for a bigger man, cinched in at the waist and rolled at the cuffs that fell onto a very tired pair of sneakers. His check shirt was frayed, short sleeved, showing plenty of prison artwork. He wore a cap, which he took off now that he was inside, standing holding it in his left hand, like it was something he’d been told to do. Burn found it hard not to stare at the dented, ravaged left side of his face.
Burn put the duffel bag down. “What’s your name?”
“Benny.”
“Just Benny?”
“Jus’ Benny is okay.”
“I’m Jack.”
“Ja, you tole me.”
Burn invited him to sit, which he did reluctantly, forward on the chair, his elbows on his knees, hands fidgeting with the cap. He told Burn what he had seen, expressionless, no emotion when he gave the details.
“He locked him in the trunk?”
“Ja.”
“But he was still alive?”
“He was, like, kicking. Ja.”
Burn battled to process this. His four-year-old son trying to fight off the huge cop. “You didn’t tell the police any of this?”
A smile touched the watchman’s scarred face. “Me and the cops don’t talk.” Then he was serious, his good eye fixed on Burn. “The fat cop. He tole you what he wants?”
“Money,” Burn said.
“And when you gonna give it to him?”
“When he calls me. Later today.”
“I wanna be there.”
“Why?”
“He kill my dog. I’m gonna kill him.” Like he was saying he took milk in his tea. No emphasis. No emotion. And no doubt that he meant it.
“Look, I understand. But I have to get my son back. Alive.”
“You think he gonna give him to you?”
“Yes. If I pay him.”
The watchman shook his head. “Man like that, he take your money, but maybe he don’t give you your son.”
Burn heard the scarred man give voice to his deepest fears. Right now the fat cop held all the cards.
“Ja. I find out about this cop. His, his moves, like. Where he operate and such. He’s dangerous.”
“Okay, I get that much,” Burn said. “You have an idea? A plan?”
“I go with you when you drop the cash. To watch your back, like.”
Burn nodded, taking this in. Trying to figure out whether he could trust this man and whether he would be risking or saving Matt’s life by getting the watchman involved.
The wind howled across the Flats, picking up sand and grit and firing it at Zondi like a small-bore shotgun. He felt it in his ears, up his nostrils, and it sneaked in and found his eyes behind the Diesel sunglasses. He kept his mouth shut and his hands in his suit pockets as he followed the uniformed sergeant through the rows of cars at the police pound.
Wrecked vehicles, endless minibus taxis, and a surprising number of luxury cars spread out across the yard. The cop carried a clipboard and seemed to know where he was going. He stopped and pointed. “There’s your car.”
A red BMW four-door with all the gangsta accessories: chopped suspension, fat tires with chrome mags, louvers, spoilers, and tinted windows. Zondi saw that the side window on the driver’s side was smashed and the trunk lid banged in the wind. The lock had been forced.
“Did it come in like this?”
“That’s right, sir.” Calling this black man sir stuck in the throat of the colored cop.
“That window too?”
“Yes.”
Zondi opened the trunk and lo
oked inside. A spare tire and a jack. A couple of empty beer bottles and rags. An old newspaper and an empty brake fluid container. He walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door, looked inside.
“Who did you say this car was traced to?”
The sergeant consulted his clipboard. “A Mrs. Wessels of Table-view. She reported it stolen two years back. Wouldn’t recognize it now.”
“No, I bet she wouldn’t. Not something she’d use in the carpool.”
Zondi sat in the front seat. He popped the glove box: a couple of nipped joints and a half-empty bottle of vodka. He moved the bottle aside and saw a used condom.
“Pass me your pen, please, Sergeant.”
The cop obliged, and Zondi lifted the condom out with the nib of the pen and held it to the light. Damned if he was going to use his Mont Blanc. There was a good squirt of semen in the tip of the condom. He took a folded paper evidence bag from his jacket pocket and shook it open. He dropped the condom into the bag and held the pen out to the cop.
“Thanks.”
The sergeant hesitated, then shook his head. “You can keep it.”
Zondi dropped the pen onto the floor of the car. He had a quick look around the interior, saw nothing more of interest, then slid out, back into the howling ing “So this car was found up above Sea Point?”
The cop wiped sand from his eyes, then squinted at his clipboard. “Ja, we towed it from Thirty-eight Mountain Road.”
“Write that address down for me, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant muttered to himself as he bent to retrieve his ballpoint from the car.
Zondi was already walking away, back toward the shelter of the office. How did people live in this bloody place?
The wind whipped across the graveyard, blowing the imam’s Arabic chant back toward the Maitland railway line. Burn stood at the rear of a small knot of mourners-all men-some dressed in traditional Muslim garb, others wearing knitted kufi caps with Western clothes. Burn had been handed a kufi as he joined the group, and he had to hold it down with one hand to stop it blowing away. He stood with the duffel bag containing one million in notes between his feet. His other hand was on his cell phone in his pocket, to feel the vibration if Barnard called.