Wake Up Dead: A Thriller (Cape Town Thrillers)

by Roger Smith

  Doc set a course for the front door, moving carefully. He flapped a shaking hand.

  “Bring it inside then.”

  Osama knelt, produced a switchblade, and cut the rope tied to the man’s ankle. He and Teeth each grabbed the man by a foot and dragged him into the house. Billy could hear him crying.

  Maggott was still standing too close, and he dribbled smoke into Billy’s face. “Gonna go put flowers on Clyde’s grave?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or you gonna go Pollsmoor side? See Piper’s got all he needs to be nice and comfy. Food and bed. TV. Enough young flesh to fuck.”

  Billy kept silent, as if he was watching all this from a distance. Maggott drew the last life out of the Camel and spoke around a mouthful of smoke.

  “You sleep at night, knowing you couldn’t finish that bastard?”

  “Like a baby,” Billy lied.

  The cop flicked his burning cigarette butt at Billy. It bounced off his shirt, sparking, and fell to the ground.

  Maggott shook his head. “Fucken chickenshit.”

  He walked back to his car and drove away, smashing through the gears like he hated them. Billy stepped on the Camel and killed it, his eyes far away.

  Shorty said, “Don’t worry with him; he’s sexually frustrated. His wife finally left him.”

  “The little nympho from the meat factory?” Billy asked, coming back from wherever he’d gone.

  “Ja. Miss Sausage 2002.” Shorty laughed. “Would you marry somebody won a fucken competition like that?”

  Osama and Teeth sloped from the house and got into the Beemer. Shorty squeezed himself behind the wheel, looking like an inflated airbag. He flashed Billy a peace salute and drove away, the rope snaking after the car, a bloody umbilical cord.

  As Billy walked into Doc’s house, he heard the mutter of a TV—the muted thwack of a ball on a bat and a thin cheer. He took in the mess around him. Sagging sofa, plates of half-eaten food black with flies. The familiar squalor was almost reassuring.

  In the early nineties Doc and a syphilitic nurse had performed backyard abortions, fishing for fetuses with wire coat hangers. A couple of their patients went septic and died, and the nurse had turned state witness. Doc was struck from the medical register and spent eight years in prison, which left him alcoholic and palsied.

  Now he stitched up gangbangers and, it was rumored, trafficked in human body parts. He also dealt in illegal firearms, mostly acquired from the cops who confiscated them from the gangsters. The cops sold them to Doc, who sold them back to the ’bangers and dug lead out of the survivors.

  Billy heard a low moan from the kitchen, where Doc did his surgery, then the old alky ambled in.

  “He gonna make it?” Billy asked.

  “Man, he’s mincemeat. But you know these tik heads. They too fucked up to know when they dead.” Doc lifted a bottle of brandy from the table and waved the dregs at Billy. “You learned to drink yet?”

  Billy shook his head. “No. But don’t let me stop you.”

  “No chance.” Doc lifted the bottle, chugged back what was left, and wiped his mouth on the back of the hand. “So, Barbie, what’s up?”

  “I need me a gun.”

  “Ja, and why don’t you go buy you one? You licensed.”

  “I’d rather go under the counter.”

  “Not like you.”

  “Things have changed.”

  “You know what they say, Barbie: you can’t change nothing but your underpants.” Doc coughed up a wet laugh. “Sit your ass down, lemme see what I can do for you.”

  He wandered off into the dark bowels of the house.

  Billy stayed standing, watching the cricket on TV. Doc was addicted, spent hours boozing in front of games stretching over five days sometimes. And mostly ending in a draw. Like gang wars, just less bloody.

  Doc came back and held out something wrapped in cloth. Billy opened the cloth and saw the gleaming barrel of the Glock 17.

  “Okay?” Doc asked

  “Sweet.” Billy checked the action. Smooth. “How much I owe you?”

  “For you, five hundred.”

  Billy handed over the cash and slid the automatic into the waistband of his jeans, covered it with his loose shirt. Doc’s eyes were on the TV. A batsman had smashed a ball into the crowd.

  Billy took a moment before he spoke. “You seen them? The woman and the kids?”

  Doc shook his head, still watching the game. “You know me. I don’t get out too much.”

  “You hear anything, then? Why they still living White City side?”

  Doc fixed him with those eyes like poached eggs. Eyes that had seen it all and had lost interest. “Barbie, all I wanna hear is the cricket score. Understand?”

  Billy nodded, turned toward the door, Doc following him. “You keep it cool now.”

  “Always, Doc.” He patted the Glock under his shirt. “Thanks for this.”

  Doc shrugged and closed the door after Billy, who stood awhile looking out over the dump. Hovering seagulls mocked the lines of broken people who prospected for anything to convert into cash for food and shelter and tik.

  chapter 5

  SHE PULLED THE TRIGGER, SAW THE BULLET ENTER JOE’S FOREHEAD.

  As Roxy floated on her back in the pool, eyes closed, she didn’t force the image away. Just stopped paddling and sank beneath the water as she saw Joe fall, dead by the time he hit the pavement. She drifted slowly upward and felt the sun on her face as she broke the surface.

  Opened her eyes to Lion’s Head, the rocky peak that flanked Table Mountain. The house clung to a cliff on its lower slopes, an engineering marvel. Joe’s pride and joy. She kicked once and flowed to the side of the infinity pool, water merging seamlessly with ocean and sky. With an easy motion she pressed her hands down on the edge and lifted herself out, sitting naked and dripping on the tiles.

  As she felt the sun warming her body, she caught her fingers tracing the bruises beneath the ribs on her right side. A month ago they were as purple as pulped berries, but they had faded to a mottled yellow-brown, blending with her tan.

  The numbness that kept reality at a distance since last night was receding. A word came to her: culpable. No, fuck culpable. She was a killer. A murderer. Roxy was shocked by what she had done the night before. Shocked that she had killed her husband, sure, but astonished that she had managed to do something so out of character. So fucking vivid.

  Life had always been something that happened to Roxy. It was easy, when you were beautiful, to just lie back and let the current catch hold of you and wash you up someplace you never even knew existed.

  But she had never expected to end up here.

  She felt a surge of panic. Pure terror. Knew she was going to pay for what she’d done. Big-time.

  Told herself to calm down. Take it easy. Nobody suspected her. Crime was epidemic in this absurdly beautiful city. She’d been here long enough to know that most of the criminals and their victims lived out on the Cape Flats, the ghetto that had turned its hatred and fear in on itself. But crime touched the privileged, too. Home invasions and hijackings left tanned and well-fed corpses in the sitting rooms and driveways of the suburbs that adorned the slopes of Table Mountain.

  The cops the night before had seemed bored. She had felt they were going through the motions, the crime already solved for them, even if the hijackers had disappeared into the sprawl of the Flats. All she had to do was keep cool. Let Joe’s estate be processed and buy herself a ticket out of here. She’d overstayed her welcome, anyway. Came for a summer and stayed five years.

  Back when she was modeling, Roxy was always being touted as the next somebody, but her career hadn’t caught fire the way it was meant to. She did okay, but by the time she was twenty-eight she knew that she wasn’t going to have a fragrance named after her, and she felt ancient next to the starved fifteen-year-olds who haunted the studios and catwalks.

  So Roxy migrated south to Cape Town, where the modeling scene was big, bu
t not flooded with the huge names like Europe and the States. Catalog work and the odd TV commercial came her way. But she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Then she met Joe Palmer in a beachfront bar, an older guy with the confidence that money bought. He gave her a pair of Cartier earrings on their first date, and they were married six months later.

  She’d never loved him.

  Learned to hate him later.

  Roxy stood and wrapped herself in a printed cloth, shaking the water from her hair. It was hot, the dry heat that scorched Cape Town this time of the year. The wind had died during the morning, and she could see a smear of brown smog hanging over Robben Island and the Flats.

  As she walked up the staircase to her bedroom, Roxy found her fingers probing her bruised ribs again. Remembered flying down these stairs, hitting, rolling, ending up unconscious on the tiles below. She stopped at the door to the room at the top of the stairs. The pink room. Thought about opening the door, closed since that night a month ago. Went as far as touching the doorknob with her fingertips. Knew she wasn’t ready to turn it.

  Roxy withdrew her hand and went toward her bedroom.

  DISCO DE LILLY woke up looking straight into his mommy’s eyes.

  She said, Why you mess up your life like so?

  Lying there, staring at the framed photograph that hung on the wall of the wooden zozo hut—all that was left of his mother, dead these fifteen years—he flashed back to the smack of the gunshot, saw the white man grabbing his leg, sinking to his knees.

  Panicked, Disco stood his bare ass up from the bed and turned his back on the photo he couldn’t bring himself to remove.

  But he still heard his mommy: You know where you going? Straight to hell.

  Never mind hell; unless he got his shit together, he was going straight back to Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison.

  And Piper.

  The sun blasting in through the window told him it was past midday as he pulled on a pair of jeans, slung low on his narrow hips. He grabbed for his cell phone and dialed Goddy’s number. Call disallowed. Out of fucken airtime.

  Disco opened the door of the hut and sat on the step, shirtless, preparing his first pipe of the day, already feeling the itching on his skin, his body crying out for the meth. His perfect torso was etched with tattoos. Not the elegant, swirling curlicues that adorned the blond surfer boys who rode Cape Town’s waves, these were the crude prison variety, carved into his skin with razor blades and sharpened wire. Ink made from melted plastic, shoe polish, and the blackened innards of batteries. Dollar signs, playing cards, bleeding hearts, poker dice, a coiled snake with the head of a penis.

  The work of Piper. Disco the helpless supplicant as he lay on the bunk in the communal cell in Pollsmoor.

  Disco pulled on the pipe. Exhaled. Sucked the pipe empty, oblivious to the hot glass burning his lips. Trying to suck his way to oblivion. A blank place without memory.

  He couldn’t.

  Disco made another pipe and fired it up. Battling to hold back a sewage spill of fear. He absorbed the smoke, feeling the rush by the time he exhaled.

  Better.

  The fat woman from the main house waddled out to string up washing on a sagging line. She was barefoot, wearing a frayed nightdress, buttons straining against her massive breasts, her coarse hair wound tight around pink rollers. A little black mongrel bared its teeth and snarled at Disco from behind the woman’s hairy calf, peering past the varicose veins that grew like jungle vines up her legs.

  The fat bitch spoke around the clothes peg she held in her mouth. “Hey, go put you a shirt on. You scaring little Zuma.” She laughed and made wet kissing sounds as she stroked the dog with a calloused foot.

  She wobbled over to where Disco sat. “Where’s your fucken rent money?”

  “Tonight, Auntie, okay?”

  “Gimme a hit.”

  She grabbed the pipe and vacuumed up what was left, her tits threatening to escape the housecoat. Her naked gums smacked wetly as she exhaled a stream of smoke. “Or you can pay me the other way.”

  She was looking at him the way the 28s had looked at him that first night at Pollsmoor: like he was a piece of meat. Her left hand opened the folds of the nightdress, and Disco saw she hadn’t bothered with underwear. Her stink filled his nose as she pushed herself close to his face.

  He jumped to his feet, remembering the god-awful day a month back when he had done what she wanted, her brutal thrusts rocking the wooden hut, leaving the picture of his mommy hanging askew.

  Never again.

  “I’ll have Auntie’s money tonight.” He fled into the zozo.

  “Don’t think I didn’t see youse in that Benz last night, little fuckers!” she shouted as he slammed the door.

  Disco looked at himself in the cracked mirror that leaned against the wall, lamenting the mess Piper had made of his body. Not only had Piper broken him and poisoned his soul, but he’d marked his one asset: his looks.

  Forever ended the dream that had kept Disco alive—the dream that his mommy had given him. That one day he would be a big-time fashion model, vibing for the cameras.

  BARBARA ADAMS DREADED the walk up the short pathway to her house. But there was no other way to her front door, just this gate in a tired fence and the few squares of concrete pavement thrown onto the parched grass that fought a losing battle against the sand of the Cape Flats.

  It was especially bad today. The heat, the angle of the sun, the hard glare bouncing back off the small white house, all reproduced vividly that day, two years before, when she and her children watched as her husband was gutted like a pig, right here on the pathway.

  She saw Clyde Adams sinking to his knees on the yellow sand, staring up at her in disbelief as he tried to stop his intestines from bulging out between his fingers.

  She saw that thing grab Clyde by his hair—the dark, straight hair he had been so proud of—and slit his throat. He had held her husband’s body upright by his hair for a moment; then he let go and Clyde crumpled to the sand, his left foot convulsing, the shoe kicking up a small cloud of dust.

  Then he was still.

  Barbara found herself standing where her husband had died. Her hands holding the plastic shopping bags clenched tight, nails stabbing into her palms. She forced herself to breathe and walked to the front door and let herself into the house, a thin woman with black hair and olive skin who had forgotten she was pretty.

  When she saw who was inside she paused, collected herself.

  Billy Afrika sat on the sofa. Her thirteen-year-old daughter, Jodie, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, sat next to him, bare feet folded under her, showing him her photo album. The one with blonde fairies on the cover.

  Billy looked up.

  “I thought you were dead,” Barbara said, sounding disappointed he wasn’t.

  BILLY STOOD AND followed Barbara as she went through to the kitchen, put the bags on the counter, and started unpacking the contents. Three skinny chops, wrapped in plastic, went into the fridge along with a wilted lettuce. She put a couple of cans of beans and a packet of rice into the cupboard above the sink. Barbara had to slam the cupboard door closed, and it sat skew on its hinge. The house was clean but rundown.

  Barbara’s hair needed to be cut, and her clothes hung on her spare body. Billy saw that one of her shoes had split along the side, exposing the pale flesh of her toe. With the money he had sent her—a fortune on the Flats—she shouldn’t be living like this.

  At last she turned to face him. “So? Large as life, Billy.”

  “Looks like it.”

  She made a sound that may have been a laugh, then splashed tap water into a glass and drank it down in one draft.

  “We never heard nothing from you.”

  “But you got the money?”

  A nod, not looking at him as she rinsed the glass and upended it on the draining board. She didn’t offer him anything.

  “Sorry about these last two months,” Billy said. “I’ll sort it.”

>   Barbara shrugged. “You home for good?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You mad to come back here.”

  She walked past him into the sitting room. Jodie was gone, and he could hear R & B moaning from a bedroom. A girl in heat over a boy. Barbara chose the chair next to a table dominated by her wedding photograph. Billy couldn’t look at her without seeing a smiling Clyde Adams.

  “Barbara, why you still living here?”

  “And where must I go?”

  “Move to the suburbs.”

  She shook her head. “The only time you get away from here is in a bag, Billy. You know that.”

  The girl singer was approaching some sort of climax.

  “Jodie, turn that down!”

  A groan, but the volume was lowered.

  “What’s happened to the money I sent?” He watched her eyes. Old cop habits die hard.

  “What you mean?”

  “Why you living like this?”

  For the first time she looked away from him. “Clyde had his debts. I had to pay them off.”

  “Bullshit, Barbara. There wasn’t a man more chicken of debt than him.”

  Color flared in her cheeks. “Do you dare to sit in my own house and call me a liar?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Better you go, Billy.”

  “Clyde wouldn’t want this.”

  “Clyde is gone.”

  Billy found his eyes on the photograph of a smiling Clyde, felt rivulets of sweat running like acid across the scars on his ribs. Looking at the photo, but seeing Piper’s smile as he dropped the bloody knife to the sand and raised his hands in mock surrender, standing over Clyde’s body.

  Feeling his own finger tightening on the trigger of the automatic.

  But not squeezing it.

  Billy looked up from the photograph when Barbara stood and left the room. Too proud to cry in front of him. He heard a bedroom door close. Billy scribbled his cell number on the back of the Emirates boarding pass he found still folded in his pocket. Put it on the table beside the picture and walked out.

  A boy of ten, dressed in school uniform, kicked a tennis ball in the sandy patch of garden, foot to knee to head to foot. Never letting the ball touch the ground. Billy waited until the ball angled off the boy’s head, bouncing too high for him to control, coming to rest in the sand.