by Roger Smith
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.
CHAPTER 29
Burn had Barnard by his greasy forelock, lifting his head up. He slapped the cop through the face with his free hand. “Open your eyes, you fat fuck.”
Barn
ard wheezed, but his eyes and, more important, his mouth stayed shut. Burn let go of the hair, and the cop’s chin dropped to his chest, its fall broken by the rolls of fat that hung from his neck. Barnard sat on the torn sofa, listing to the side like a melting snowman.
Burn wiped his hands on his jeans. He looked across at the watchman, who stood near the front door, sucking on a cigarette. “I need you to get him to talk, for Chrissakes. I need him to tell me where my son is.”
The watchman shrugged. He seemed to be getting some sort of perverse pleasure out of the whole scene. Burn lifted the Mossberg and jammed it against the cop’s head. The head flopped to the side.
The cop’s eyes stayed shut.
Disaster Zondi found himself driving back toward Mountain Road. Okay, he told himself, you’re obsessing. He could’ve hung around the crime lab and flirted with that forensic tech, whose almond eyes hinted at knowledge beyond comparison microscopes and bullet fingerprints.
Instead he had driven across town to Salt River, to Sniper Security. Wanted to talk to the night watchman, Benny Niemand. Nobody had seen the watchman since the night of the shooting when he had walked out of Somerset Hospital and disappeared. Zondi had found out that he was an ex-con, once a high-ranking member of the Mongrel gang.
A 28.
So why had Barnard shot him? The men in the red BMW were gangsters, Zondi was sure of that. And this watchman was another. Was this a drug deal gone bad? And why had it played itself out against the unlikely backdrop of an elite suburb in white Cape Town? And what was the American’s role in all of this?
He swung into Mountain Road and parked outside the American’s house. He wanted to ask him a simple question: why had he lied when he’d looked at his wife’s mug shots? Maybe the answer to that question would join a few of these disconnected dots.
Zondi, out of force of habit, shrugged on his jacket as he stepped into the furnace that was late afternoon in Cape Town. He rang the buzzer. Nothing. He rang it again.
He took a few steps back and looked up at the deck, where he had seen the man, Hill, earlier. The deck was empty, except for a hawk perched on the railing, forced by the fire to leave the mountain to search for prey. The hawk looked down at Zondi; then it unfurled its wings and kicked off, swooping up and catching a thermal. It hung there in a lazy glide.
Zondi went back to the street door, and even though he knew he was wasting his time, he rang the buzzer again. Nothing. He turned and headed back to his car. As he passed the garage, his eyes were drawn to a tread mark, printed cleanly on the short cement slope that joined the road. Zondi knelt and rubbed the tire tread with the index finger of his right hand; then he inspected his fingertip. It was smudged red.
He was looking at blood.
Burn took a piss in the squalid bathroom, the Mossberg lying on the cistern. Where was his son? If the old man had been brutally murdered, what had happened to Matt? Burn flashed on the bloody pajama top lying on the bed, and his imagination spun away from him; he had to fight it to reel it in.
The fat cop knew. Burn had to make him talk. It was as simple as that. He finished, rinsed the cop’s hair grease from his hands, grabbed the Mossberg, and walked.
As he stepped out of the bathroom, he saw the splintered front door swing open and three men come in. One of them, a big brown man with his hair cropped to his scarred skull, looked at him in amazement; then he raised a. 45 and shot a hole in the wall next to Burn’s head.
Burn let go with the Mossberg, and the force of the blast lifted the gunman off his feet and slapped him against the wall next to the door. He slid to the floor, leaving a wet smear on the wall.
As the door eased open, Benny Mongrel saw Fingers Morkel step into the room followed by two of his men. A. 45 boomed and the shotgun replied, and Benny Mongrel saw one of the men lift up like washing on a line and smack the wall. The other man dived toward the sofa, out of range of Burn’s shotgun. The barrel of the man’s chrome. 357 was looking straight at Benny Mongrel.
Benny Mongrel remembered Burn had slipped him the. 38. He brought it from his waistband and shot the man between the eyes. The man gave him a stupid look and dropped behind the sofa like emptied trash.
That left Fingers, who was standing open-mouthed, his scarred stumps moving in the air, his thumbs twitching like he wished to hell he could hitch a ride out of there.
Benny Mongrel felt the knife in his palm.
No guns for Fingers.
Rudi Barnard was in communion with the dead. He heard their voices; he saw their faces. They were calling his name, inviting him to join their number. He was fighting harder than he had ever fought in his life, fighting the tide that dragged him down.
The roars blasted his eyes open, and he saw the half-breeds before him, explosions of red reaching from their gaping mouths. Reaching toward him, trying to take him with them to join the legion of the damned.
Barnard found some last reserve of energy. He sprang from the sofa and hurtled headlong toward the living room window, and in an explosion of blood, glass, and fat he burst out into that bright, terrible light.
Silence. Burn realized that the weapons discharging in the confined space had momentarily deafened him.
He saw the fat cop leap from the sofa and smash through the glass, disappearing from view. He saw the watchman kick the legs from under the surviving member of the trio who seemed to be attempting a prayer for mercy without the benefit of fingers. He saw the watchman’s blade catch a perfectly angled beam of sunlight as it rose.
“Wait.” Burn’s voice sounded muffled to his own ears. He held the Mossberg like an extension of his arm, pointed at the watchman. The blade halted in midair.
Burn went to the kneeling, fingerless man and applied the Mossberg barrel to the side of his head. “Where is my son?”
The man stared at him blankly. He shook his head. Burn took the barrel back and smashed the man in the face, seeing thin beads of blood hang in space before they hit the dirty wooden floor.
He took the barrel back for another swing. He felt the watchman’s hand on his arm. “He don’t know nothing.”
He looked at the watchman. “Then what’s he doing here?”
“He come here so I can kill him. Old business.”
Burn believed him. For some reason this seemed a perfectly rational and satisfactory explanation. But the question of his son’s whereabouts remained. And the man who held the answer had justhurled himself out of a closed window.
Burn ran toward the door.
Benny Mongrel looked down into the eyes of Fingers Morkel and realized that a great tiredness had enveloped him. It was all he could do to hold the knife in his hand. But he knew, one last time, that there was something he must do.
He took Fingers by the chin and, with the precision of an executioner, lifted his head to bare the neck and sent the blade across the throat.
“Benny Mongrel say goodnight,” he said, and let Fingers slump to the floor.
Then he relaxed his hand and felt the knife slip from his grasp, and, perfectly weighted instrument that it was, it landed blade first in the wooden floor and quivered for a time before, at last, it was still.
By then Benny Mongrel had left the room.
CHAPTER 30
The fat man flew out the window, a trail of blood and glass in his wake, and landed heavily on the sand. As he lay on his back, his great naked chest heaving, the blanket floated down and covered him like a shroud.
People in the street and the adjoining apartments, drawn by the all-too-familiar chatter of small arms, paused when they saw the man plunge. There was a collective gasp when the blanket moved and he sat up. He hauled himself to his feet, and the blanket fell away.
A sharp pair of eyes recognized him beneath the gore, and his name was whispered.
“It’s Gatsby.”
Wheezing, bleeding, and foaming, the fat cop took off down Tulip Street as if he were being pursued by the devil, massive legs pumping.
The cry grew loud
er. “It’s Gatsby!”
A small boy rolling a bald tire fell in behind Gatsby, following him up the road as women in curlers, hanging over fences, put their gossip on pause as this demonic vision crossed their view.
Farther down Tulip Street, Donovan September lay under a car, parked halfway up on the sidewalk. He was adjusting the exhaust mount, while two of his friends passed him tools and offered advice. He put out his hand for a screwdriver, and it wasn’t forthcoming.
Then he heard one of his friends say, “Jesus, Donovan, you better come look at this.”
Donovan slid out from under the car. As he stood, he wiped the sweat away from his eyes with the back of his hand, not believing what he was seeing. Gatsby, the cop who had put his little brother in the ground, was running up the road, half naked, bleeding. People were trailing in his wake like pilot fish feeding off a harpooned whale.
Donovan picked up a hammer from the hood of the car and stepped out into Gatsby’s path. The fat man didn’t see him, ran straight on. Donovan had to sidestep, or the mountain of fat would have rolled right over him. Donovan stuck out a leg and Gatsby stumbled, teetered for a moment, then toppled like a great beast to the sand.
Donovan stver the felled man, the hammer in his hand. He looked around at the gathering crowd of his neighbors and heard their voice as one. “Do it, Donovan.”
He raised the hammer high and brought it down on the fat cop’s head.
Carmen Fortune walked back from the taxi toward her apartment, still feeling a buzz even though she knew the tik rush was waning. She knew, also, that she was going to have to face the mess in her bedroom. But she had done good. For once she had done the right thing.
After she had smashed the Virgin on Uncle Fatty’s head, she had grabbed the boy, Matt, pulled one of Sheldon’s T-shirts over his head, and run with him. She had not stopped to think until she was in a minibus taxi, the blond kid on her lap, watching the streets of Paradise Park slide past her.
The kid was still groggy from the Mogadon, which was a godsend. She hoped that he would have no memory of what Uncle Fatty had tried to do to him. She knew only too well how those memories burned into your consciousness like a hot wire into flesh.