by Roger Smith
But the next day they took back the orange jumpsuit, gave Piper his clothes, and left him standing outside the gates, a duffel bag in his hand and a hundred rand in his pocket.
Piper went back to Paradise Park, Dark City side, because that was all he knew.
Stepped out of the taxi in his clothes from twenty years ago, carrying a new Okapi knife. He saw the tattooed boys on the street. They had never been near Pollsmoor but called themselves 28s. One of them was stupid enough to follow Piper and speak to him in a version of the prison language that was garbled, butchered.
Piper sodomized the boy in an empty lot littered with bald tires and cinder blocks and rotting garbage, shredded plastic buzzing in the wind. Cut his throat and left him there with the trash, his jeans and boxers bunched around his ankles.
Piper knew he couldn’t stay out there, in the world. He wanted to go home.
Remembered the cop who arrested him twenty years before: Clyde Adams. Set him on his course. Something about killing him appealed to Piper’s sense of balance. It wasn’t revenge.
He found out where Clyde lived. Married now, with kids. Over White City side. Piper was unafraid as he crossed Main Road and walked onto enemy turf, his gang tattoos making him as distinct as a leopard prowling through a herd of buck.
He went to the cop’s house and waited and watched.
It was late in the day, and shadows blackened the hard white sand of the Flats. He let a shadow suck him in, stood unmoving. Felt he was invisible. He had no idea how long he stood there. A car pulled up, and Clyde climbed out. Twenty years older. Thicker around the middle, wearing civvy clothes. The black hair still grew straight and coarse as thatch from his head.
A woman and two kids—boy and girl—were in the car with the cop. They unloaded plastic shopping bags from the trunk. Piper heard the girl laugh, like a snatch of music floating to him on the wind. Clyde carried a bag, his arm around the woman as they went into the yard of the house.
Piper freed himself from the shadow and crossed the road, the Okapi knife held ready.
The cop sensed Piper and turned. Recognized him, gun hand full of shopping. Piper stepped in and sank the blade into Clyde’s gut, heard him grunt. The bag fell, and pink sausage and red tomatoes spilled onto the sand. The woman screamed.
Piper gutted the cop, pulling the knife up to his sternum, felt the blade stop. Clyde sank to the ground, trying to hold himself in, his blood patterning the sand. Piper cut a smile into the cop’s throat. Saw another car speeding up. And another man from the past, running at him with a gun.
Billy Afrika. A coward he should have finished twenty years ago.
Piper smiled, raised his hands, and let the knife slip from his fingers, didn’t take his eyes from Billy’s but caught the hard shine of the blade where it lay in the cop’s blood.
Billy had the gun on him, the barrel shaking only a little. Piper could see the finger tightening on the trigger. Saw the sweat on Billy’s face.
Waited.
Then the gun drooped, and Billy spun him and cuffed him, shoved him to the sand.
Piper lay and watched the last of the cop’s life seep from him, his foot drumming like the hoof of a slaughterhouse sheep, kicking up dust.
The woman cradled the dead cop’s head. Saying over and over again, “Clyde, Clyde, Clyde,” like the words could reverse what had been done.
Piper had felt a great peace, hearing the music of the sirens. Knowing he was going home.
Agitated now, lying on his prison bunk, the white pipes doing nothing to calm him or still the craving in his heart. He knew there was no other way. If Disco wasn’t coming back to him, he’d have to go out again into the world.
Bring his wife home.
chapter 14
BILLY AFRIKA DROVE THROUGH WHITE CITY AND TURNED INTO LILAC Road, the sparse streetlights weeping yellow into the cloud of dust that blanketed the Cape Flats. The wind was up, and anyone with half a brain and a house to go to was indoors. The homeless found doorways and holes in the ground and drew plastic over their faces to keep the sand out, like urban bedouins. Or they fried their brains on foil bags of rotgut wine and let the sand pepper their prone forms like buckshot.
Billy liked the wind. Liked this display of natural force, knew that when it blew itself out by morning, even the Flats would lie still and clean under a pristine blue sky.
The banging had started again, coming from the trunk, as if somebody was trying to kick his way out by dislodging the rear seat. Billy saw a deep pothole in the poorly paved road and accelerated, smacked it at speed—what the fuck, it was a rental car—and heard a metallic thump and a muffled cry. He laughed as he flicked the turn signal and slowed outside the two-story house that loomed over its squat neighbors like a guard tower. The house was surrounded by a high wall and electric fencing. A heavy iron gate barred access. Billy stayed in the car. Leaned on the horn.
He saw a face at one of the windows on the top floor of the house, caught a curse carried on the wind, and the gate blew open. Two men stood there, T-shirts and low-slung jeans billowing in the southeaster. One man, small and skinny, carried an Uzi. The other, a big piece of meat, held a .22 Smith and Wesson snubnose at his side, almost invisible in his paw. Liked to get nice and intimate when he killed, this one.
“The fuck you want?” the man with the Uzi asked, coming at him.
Billy cracked the window an inch, enough to take a blast of sand in both eyes. “I got something for Manson.”
A glimmer of recognition crossed the man’s face. “What?”
“Just open, man. Or he kick your ass.”
The two men shouted questions at each other, then pushed against the wind, forcing the gate open far enough to allow him to drive in. The snout of the Uzi followed him. A floodlight on a motion detector kicked in as Billy parked next to a black Hummer. He stood up out of the Hyundai and felt nothing more than a breeze in the sheltered yard.
The Uzi was right up to Billy, and he lifted his hands. The man with the .22 frisked him like a pro. Billy had wedged the Glock under the driver’s seat, so the man came up empty.
Manson emerged from a side door of the house, dressed in expensive white sweats and a peaked cap, as branded as a sports celebrity.
“What you want here, Barbie?”
“I got something of yours.”
“Ja?”
Billy walked to the trunk. “I’m gonna open this, okay?”
Manson nodded, and the Uzi kept its black eye on him.
Billy popped the trunk, and Godwynn MacIntosh, bleeding from the nose, ears, and mouth, sprang up like a bloody jack-in-the-box.
“And what the fuck mess is this?” Manson asked.
ANOTHER CALL TO his man at Bellwood South—and the promise of more money—had got Billy the names of the two geniuses. And Disco De Lilly’s address. The cop had also passed on a piece of information that gave Billy pause: Disco had been Piper’s wife when he’d done time in Pollsmoor.
Snag a thread in the Cape Flats tapestry, and it unraveled all the way to Piper.
Things hadn’t added up back in Bantry Bay. That blonde was into something, and Billy couldn’t shake the feeling that the two fuckheads from the lineup were involved. He didn’t care about Roxanne Palmer, but there was a 26 in the frame. One of Manson’s crew. And Billy needed leverage with Manson.
Knew that he’d have the best chance of scaring the truth out of the sex-boy. Spending time as Piper’s wife would have tenderized the toughest piece of meat.
He found Disco sitting on the step of his zozo, sheltering from the wind, shirtless body seething with prison ink, his head lost in a cloud of tik. Billy grabbed him by the hair, smacked the pipe from his mouth, and threw him into the hut. Kicked the door shut behind him. A naked bulb dangled from the ceiling, washing the zozo with piss-yellow light.
Disco was a pretty boy. A useless shit, one of life’s rejects. But pretty.
He looked to be in his early twenties but was one of those men who w
ould still be called a boy even when he was middle-aged. If he lived that long. Disco was trying to get up, trying to glue back together the pieces of his day. Billy slapped him through the face and sent him flying against the wall, where he slumped under the framed photograph of a woman who looked too much like him to be anyone other than his mother.
His body hitting the wall had set the frame askew.
“This your mommy?” Billy pointed to the picture. Disco nodded, panting. Billy approached the photograph and stuck out a hand.
“Don’ break it. Please!” The voice hoarse and plaintive, fighting its way through tik smoke and fear.
“I’m not gonna break it. What you think I am?” Instead Billy carefully straightened the picture. “She passed on, your mommy?”
The pretty boy was nodding. “Fifteen years now.”
Billy squatted down in front of Disco, showed him the Glock in his waistband, figured there was no need to draw it.
“Okay, this is how it’s gonna go.” Disco looked from the gun to Billy’s face. “I’m gonna ask you a couple of questions, and, on your mommy’s grave, you gonna tell me the truth. You understand?”
“Ja.”
“So say it.”
“Say what?”
“Jesus. Say, ‘On my mommy’s grave I’m gonna tell you the truth.’”
“On my mommy’s grave I’m gonna tell you the truth.”
“Good. Now understand me here, I’m not a cop no more, so I’m not interested in busting your dirty ass. But you try to lie to me, and I’ll kill you. You hearing me?”
Disco nodded. “Ja. I hear.”
“You and your buddy Godwynn jacked a car last night. Up Bantry Bay side. A Benz. That right?”
Disco hesitated. Billy pointed to the gun, then pointed to the photograph. The boy nodded.
“A man was shot. A whitey. You shoot him?”
Disco shook his head. “Not me. He try to fight, so Goddy plug him in the leg. But it’s not us who kill him.”
Billy took this in. “How many times Godwynn shoot him?”
“Just the once. And then we was in the car and away.”
“Where’s the gun?”
“He drop it there. Goddy.”
Billy was staring but looking straight through this weak, pretty boy. Seeing another face, with wide blue eyes. Seeing the truth.
Meanwhile, he was scaring the tik head shitless. He refocused on Disco and saw that he had drawn his knees up, covering his face with his arms.
“I’m telling it true, I swear on my mommy.”
“Relax. I believe you. You and Goddy went back to the house today. That right?” Billy could see a lie coming. “You doing very nice so far, Disco. Don’t fuck it up now.”
Disco shrugged. “Ja. We took some stuff.”
“What you tell that blondie?”
“Tell her that we gonna come back tomorrow for money. If she don’t give it, we is gonna go to the cops and tell them she shoot her husband.”
Billy laughed. “And she believed you?”
Disco shrugged. “It were Goddy’s idea.”
“Fucken shit idea.” Billy looked around the filthy hut. “Where’s the stuff?”
“Goddy took it.”
“Now, Goddy, he’s one of Manson’s boys? 26? American?”
“Ja.”
“Manson know about this visit of yours to the house?” Disco shook his head. “So it was freelance, like?”
The boy nodded. “You working for Manson?”
Billy slapped Disco hard enough to snap his head back against the wall. “I ask the questions. You answer. Okay?”
Disco blinked. “Okay.”
Billy stood. He grabbed the boy by his nice wavy hair and pulled him to his feet.
“Now take me to Goddy.”
Disco’s head was wobbling like one of those toy dogs in the back of old men’s cars.
“He kill me, man.”
“Not gonna happen.” Billy shoved the boy toward the closet. “Come, put on a shirt. Cover up your wedding pictures.”
ROXY SAT IN the looted room for a long time after Billy Afrika left. Zoned out. Blank. Wondering just what the hell she had set in motion by lifting that gun and pulling the trigger.
She forced herself to get up from the sofa. Thought of the two brown men, found herself wiping at her skin as if she could somehow slough them off. Took in the mess around her. Not only had they robbed her; they’d taken pleasure in trashing the place. And they were coming back tomorrow.
Roxy could process the assault on her, didn’t care about what they’d done to the rest of the house, but knew she’d crack if they’d violated the pink room.
She had to find out. Had to open that door.
Roxy climbed the stairs. Stopped at the closed door. Put her hand out toward the doorknob. Hesitated. Finally turned it and walked in. Stood in the dark, listening to herself breathe. Then she found the wall switch, and soft light bloomed.
The pink room. Rose-colored wallpaper, butterflies dangling from the ceiling, a crib, a walking ring, and a carpet littered with infant toys. A nursery. Waiting for the daughter who had died inside her. The room untouched by the men.
She could close the door now and go downstairs and get blasted on vodka. But she knew she needed to stay here; this was the place where she could cauterize the pain and the grief. And the tendrils of guilt tugging at her over what she had done to Joe Palmer.
Roxy sat down on the floor beside the crib and let herself remember.
She saw herself in this room a month ago. Her heavily pregnant, absurdly happy self.
Like most things in Roxy’s life, getting pregnant had been an accident. A year or two into their marriage, Joe’s sexual demands had cooled. She guessed he was outsourcing his needs, as he would have said. Roxy looked good on his arm, but his preferences ran to rougher trade between the sheets.
Fine with her.
She’d taken a break from the Pill, intending to have a loop fitted, which she’d never got around to doing. So a few weeks after they’d had an unexpected bout of hurried, suffocating sex—Joe drunk enough to want her—Roxy found herself peeing on a pregnancy test, watching as a thin blue line traced itself in the little window. At first it seemed a no-brainer; she’d take herself down to a smart private clinic and get this thing handled.
Then an idea snuck up on her: what if she kept it? Not an it. A baby, a child. Suddenly she understood that having a baby was everything she’d wanted. She just hadn’t known it.
For the first time in her life she felt love. For herself and the child growing inside her.
The notion that Joe Palmer was a less than perfect father was washed from her mind by hormones and happiness. When she told him he she was pregnant, he looked at her and shrugged. He was hardly home as the months went by and her belly swelled. She was too happy to notice that his trademark smug expression had become haunted and he was drinking even more than usual, as if he was selling his soul along with men and weapons. Her happiness made her blind to the warning signs.
The ultrasound showed she was carrying a girl, so she created a bedroom for her daughter. A room that seemed to capture all she’d never had as a child.
A fairy tale.
A fantasy.
The pink room.
Roxy was in the room the night it happened, hanging a mobile over the crib, a butterfly with dangly feelers on springs. She heard the gates rolling open and saw the headlights of Joe’s car flame against the window. Something—the time it took him to leave the car, maybe—warned her, and she tensed at the scrape of the key in the front door.
She heard his voice. “Roxanne?”
He only called her that when he was in one of his mean moods. Joe had smacked her around a little in the early years, until she’d threatened to leave him. He’d stopped with the fists, but his mouth still spewed bile when he was angry and drunk.
“Roxanne!”
She didn’t answer. Heard Joe coming up the stairs, wheezing, his
footfalls heavy and unsteady. Roxy left the pink room and shut the door. She didn’t want him to poison the air inside. Met him on the landing. He stank of sweat and booze, his linen shirt wet against his paunch. His eyes were dark little pebbles, tongue probing his gums and cheeks like an eel feeding.
Now she knew why he had taken so long to leave the car; he’d been doing a line. She could see traces of white powder smeared on his unshaven upper lip.
She tried to brush past him, to get to her bedroom and lock herself inside.
He grabbed her arm. “The fuck you going?”
“You’re hurting me, Joe.”
Roxy shook her arm loose, but he shoved her back against the wall next to the stairs and kissed her, forcing his tongue into her mouth. His breath was sour, and his tongue felt rough as a cat’s. His flab a mold around her hard belly.
She got out from under him, left him off balance for a moment, and almost got away. But her hair was loose, and her sudden movement swung it up toward his hand. Joe grabbed her hair and pulled her back, forcing her down onto her knees, her eyes blurring from tears of pain.
With his free hand he unzipped himself. “Blow me, baby.” He was getting hard, turned on by hurting her.
She grabbed the thing, digging her nails into the shaft.
Mistake.
The pain enraged him, and as she pushed herself to her feet he punched her in the face. She had her back to the stairs and felt her feet losing their grip on the landing. In the hours that she floated backward and down, suspended outside of time, she believed everything was going to be all right, that she and her daughter would somehow be cushioned.
Until she hit.
Her belly smashed into the hard edge of a step, halfway down. She rolled the rest of the way, unable to stop herself, and landed on the tiled floor, the air crushed from her lungs. As she passed out, Roxy knew her daughter had died inside her.
When she came round, she was lying on the floor with paramedics kneeling over her. She could feel the blood between her legs. Joe had managed to clean himself up, hovering, impersonating a concerned husband. Telling the medics that she slipped on the stairs and fell.