by Roger Smith
“You’re in Africa, lady. This is a spooky place.”
She laughed but found her fingers on the crucifix at her neck. “And you? What happened after the hospital?”
“The cop took me under his wing, you could say. These days I would be called a ‘youth at risk.’ Then I was just a little punk going one way. He came and saw me in the hospital, brought me Cokes and comics and stuff. Kept up the visits when I went home. When I was better, he took me to a gym where he taught Flats’ kids to box. I got my strength back, and I found out I was pretty good. Fast, strong for my size. Good enough to turn pro, he said.”
“Did you?”
“Roxanne, no matter how good you are, nobody gonna put you in the ring when you look like a leper.” He grinned. “It was cool, though. When I hit eighteen, he helped me get into police college. Years later, when I became a detective, we were partners. I was best man at his wedding, godfather to his firstborn kid.”
She smiled. “So, kind of a happy ending.”
“Ja. Kind of.” She saw something soften in his green eyes.
He stood and walked over to the glass doors, looking out into the night. Chet was singing about his funny valentine. The trumpet swelled and faded, sad sweetness hanging in the air. Maybe it was the vodka, or just the last few days knocking her off center, but she was finding Billy Afrika weirdly attractive. Not whiz-bang-with-the-cheese-on-top hot, something more subtle. There was that quiet, self-contained thing he had going. Or was it just emotional autism? But now, after he told her the story, she saw a little vulnerability.
Roxy stood, walked across to him. Knew what she had to do to get back some control in the game. She’d hoped Joe’s death had ended a cycle. But here she was again, getting ready to use her body as a weapon.
Billy turned, looking at her with those green eyes.
“That fire. It never touched your face,” she said. Standing close to him, closer than she had ever come, and she could see he was uncomfortable.
“I told you I was lucky,” he said.
She moved even closer. He stepped away.
“What’s going on?” Picking up the water bottle from the table.
“Do I need to draw you a map?” Fighting hard to keep her smile alive. Knowing she’d screwed up. Too much vodka.
He shook his head. “You don’t seem like the sympathy-fuck type to me. So, must mean you wanna soften me up. Take my mind off my business.” Heading toward the staircase. “Not gonna happen.”
“What if I’m just scared and lonely?”
Billy stopped on the stairs, turned to face her. “Lady, we’re all scared. And a woman looks like you don’t stay lonely for long.”
He was gone.
The CD ended, and Roxy could hear the moan of the foghorn, prodded awake by the fingers of mist reaching in from the ocean.
chapter 23
THE FOGHORN WOKE BILLY AT SIX FIFTEEN. LYING IN BED, HE REMEMBERED the night before and cursed himself for talking so much. Opening up to her. Fucken idiot. By telling Roxanne his story, he’d encouraged her to put the moves on him. And, fuck, he had wanted her to. When she came up close, he’d nearly responded. Jesus. A man like him had no room for that shit.
The scars on his body had made relationships difficult, so paying for sex had become the easy option. Over the last few years even that had stopped. Stopped when he shut down. After Piper killed Clyde.
Billy had once believed that only the rich had the luxury of regretting the past or worrying about the future. Growing up poor had a way of focusing the mind. Yesterday couldn’t fill your empty belly, and knives and guns and starvation and disease stood between you and tomorrow. Booze stores and tik merchants offered a cure if living in the present was too painful to bear.
When Billy was a boy in the streets of Paradise Park, everybody around him had lived that way. And so had he until Piper had set him alight and thrown him into that hole. Then the past took on a form. Became an engine that drove him forward. An engine fueled by revenge. He had waited nearly twenty years for the day when he could make Piper pay.
When the day came, Billy had even more reason to waste the bastard—Piper smiling at him with Clyde’s blood still dripping from his hands.
But when Billy felt his finger curling on the trigger of his Z88, a voice told him: Do that, and you’re the same as him. Told him the law was more than a line drawn in the sand of a windswept ghetto street. So he had lowered the gun and cuffed Piper and handed him into the patrol vehicle while Barbara and her children and the people of Protea Street looked on.
Billy turned as the cop van drove Piper away, saw their faces. Saw they’d wanted him to kill Piper. Execute him right there next to the body of his dead partner. Despised him for not doing it.
Billy carried Clyde’s coffin the day they buried him out on the Flats, his skin burning from sweat beneath the black suit, unable to meet the accusing eyes of Barbara Adams and his cop colleagues. For them, sending Piper back to Pollsmoor could never be forgiven. Pollsmoor was home to Piper. He wanted to be there. Sending him back was a favor. A reward.
They had never spoken the word, but Billy Afrika knew what they were thinking: coward.
Billy rolled off the bed and hit the floor for his push-ups. Took his body into agony and beyond, until he was a sodden heap on the carpet. He lay awhile, listening to the bawl of the foghorn, then hauled himself to the shower to wash off his sweat and the memories that pressed down on him with the weight of the dead.
WHEN HE GOT down to the kitchen she was already making breakfast.
“You’ve turned me on to this whole bacon-and-eggs thing,” Roxy said as she worked at the stove. She gave him a neutral smile. No sign of hurt feelings or embarrassment. No reference to the night before. Just the smile.
He sat at the table. The TV was on, the flat screen on the wall mount. Morning news. The Zulu anchorman had an accent that took off in Soweto and crashed somewhere over the mid-Atlantic.
“They’ve found another decapitated woman down in Sea Point,” Roxy said, scrambling eggs. “Also a blonde. They’re calling this guy the Barbie Doll killer.”
Billy smiled inwardly. One Barbie to another.
“How do they know it’s a him?”
Roxy saying, “Only men are screwed up enough to do shit like that,” but smiling at Billy as she scraped eggs out of the pan.
“Body in the same place?”
“Pretty much. On the oceanfront.”
The anchorman gave an update. The latest victim had been taking a late-night stroll by the ocean, her fiancé a minute or two behind her. The fiancé had heard her scream, followed a trail of blood and found her headless body. He hadn’t seen her killer.
They were having a fight, Billy thought, and she went off into the fog. That fiancé is one guilty bastard this morning. The news anchor was replaced by photographs of the two dead blondes taken in happier times, smiling.
Roxy set down plates on the table, looking up at the TV. “They look like headshots.”
“What’re headshots?”
“What modeling agencies put out to show their range of models. Head and shoulders portraits, I guess. Used to be posters or catalogs; now you just go online.”
“They look like you,” he said.
“Come on, the one on the right’s ten years younger than me.”
“Five years, maybe. Still. The look. It’s similar.”
She shrugged. “Because they’re blonde.”
“Ja, but not only that. There’s a resemblance. Admit it.”
She walked back to the stove, laughing it off.
Billy said, “Don’t go running on your own, is all I’m saying.”
“It’s getting old, Billy, give it a break.” Scraping bacon into a serving dish, picking a piece up with her fingers and crunching on it as she came back to the table. “God, this bacon is good. I love it. Dunno why I haven’t eaten it all these years.”
Dishing food onto his plate.
On the screen a pol
ice profiler, an Afrikaans woman with shoulders and hair straight out of the WWF, said with deadpan certainty that the killer was most likely a white man in his thirties. A loner. Sexually repressed.
“Bullshit,” Billy said. He reached for the remote and killed the audio as the news moved on to a suicide bomb in Karachi. “This is muti, man.”
“Witchcraft?” Talking around a mouthful of food.
“Ja. They kill people for their body parts. I worked on a couple of cases when I was a cop. Kids with their heads and hands and balls cut off.” He saw her face. “I’m sorry. You’re eating.”
“No. Go on, I’m interested.” She put down her fork. Her eyes held his, encouraging him to continue.
“They, the darkies—Africans—believe that if you harvest the body parts while the victim is still alive, it makes for stronger muti. And a white, especially blonde, woman equals seriously powerful muti. People will pay plenty for it. To get rich. To get love. To get cured of AIDS. Or impotence. Win a fucken soccer match. You name it.”
“So why are the cops putting out that profile?”
“Because its all PC bullshit. Firstly, you hear they actually said a ‘white man’?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Okay, this place is so PC befuck, that if the perp—perpetrator—is colored or black, you’re not allowed to say it. Not even allowed to use the words dark complexion.”
“But you can say white?”
“Ja. That don’t count. They don’t want the bleeding hearts shouting that the cops are down on darkies. Better to have a whitey as a suspect.”
She stared at him. “Let me get this straight. You’re calling people who are black darkies?”
“Ja.”
“But aren’t you black?”
He laughed. “Okay, this is how it works. I’m mixed race. In other words, colored. I’m fine with that. But it has become a term that people are embarrassed to use. You hear people, these days, saying ‘so-called colored.’” He shook his head, chewing. “After apartheid ended, anybody who wasn’t white was called black, officially, on forms and documents and so on. Except now that’s changed, and you have black and you have black Africans. Or ethnic black. Makes a difference when it comes to affirmative action points.”
“So black Africans are … ?”
“Darkies.”
She shook her head. “This place is fucked up.”
“You’re a bloody foreigner. What do you know?” He laughed around his scrambled eggs.
PIPER SAT IN the back of the police van dressed in an acid orange jumpsuit, staring out the barred window opposite. He was handcuffed and manacled.
It was more than two years since he’d seen the outside world, driving in the opposite direction on this same freeway, heading to Pollsmoor to start his life sentence for gutting the cop, Clyde Adams. This world of mountains and vineyards and big houses lost in the trees meant nothing to him. It was an illusion, like something you saw on the TV.
It wasn’t real.
Pollsmoor was real. Life fading from dying men’s eyes was real.
And his love for Disco was real.
There were three other men in the van, awaiting-trial prisoners on their way to court. Two of them were franse, unaffiliated nothings. Terrified, they kept their mouths shut and their rabbit eyes averted. The third, sitting opposite him, was a cocky punk in his early twenties, with tattoos he’d got on the street, not in prison: 28 tattoos. Or so the fucker thought.
He bobbed like a fish in a barrel, trying to get Piper’s eye. “Salute, General.”
Piper stared through him. Saw that they were approaching the freeway bridge at Ladies Mile Road. It was time.
Piper sat forward. “Come closer, brother.”
The man leaned in, eager, smiling. Piper sprang, and in a moment he had the chain of the handcuffs wrapped tight around the piece of shit’s throat, throttling him. The man was clawing at Piper’s hands with his own, the cuffs getting in the way of his grip, his manacled feet doing a dead man’s tap dance on the metal floor of the van.
One of the franse started to shout, banging on the glass that separated them from the cops in the cab.
Piper dropped the dead fucker, found the sharpened spoon in the folds of his orange jumpsuit and jammed it in the eye of the frans, who stopped banging and slumped against the man beside him.
Piper withdrew the spoon with a wet, smacking sound. The last man looked up at him and pleaded, lips moving soundlessly. Piper jammed the spoon into the man’s throat like he was performing a backyard tracheotomy, blood geysering onto his jumpsuit.
The van had skidded to a stop under the Ladies Mile bridge, and the two cops were out of the cab and coming at him, pistols drawn.
This was as it should be. They had been paid to play their parts.
The day before, Piper had consulted with a member of the Air Force, the gang that organized prison escapes. Cash—the proceeds of Piper’s cellblock drug sales—had changed hands. Some of the money had ended up in the pockets of these two cops. All Piper had to do was make it look good. He did that.
And more.
The first cop, a chubby darky, unlocked the back door of the van and pointed his weapon at Piper, bracing himself for the kick that he’d been told to expect. When Piper delivered the kick, the black cop stumbled back into his buddy, who dropped his gun. All according to plan.
These two should be on TV, Piper thought.
Then he rewrote the script.
As he landed on the blacktop he reached down for the darky’s weapon. He hated guns, preferred the intimacy and control a knife gave him. But it was time to be practical. He leveled the Z88 at the cop, who looked at him in astonishment when Piper shot him in the face. The other cop, a skinny white man, realizing that things had taken a very bad turn, tried to get up and run. Piper dropped him with two shots to the back.
Passing motorists were honking and braking. Those brave enough stopped on the shoulder. Piper fired at them, starring windshields. Two cars collided, spun out onto the median strip in a spray of glass and dust.
Piper found the keys to the cuffs and manacles in the pocket of the chubby cop. Just where he’d been told they would be. He freed himself. Then he dodged cars and ran across the freeway and scrambled up the embankment beside the bridge, into a stand of trees where a bag of clothes waited for him.
chapter 24
MAGGOTT DROVE SOUTH ON THE N2 TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN AND the city. He drove fast, tailgating slower drivers until they gave way, venting his anger on the gearbox of the Ford and the civilians who slowed his passage.
Robbie, strapped in beside him, held a huge, fluffy, pink bear. The boy seemed to enjoy the speed, miming driving gestures with his dirty little hands, making vroom vroom noises into the bear’s ear. The child needed a bath and a change of clothes, but he looked really happy.
Who knew with fucken kids?
Maggott had finally heard back from his bitch wife that morning. A text message, saying that it was Robbie’s birthday. Jesus. Nothing about when she was coming home. He had a feeling she’d dumped the kid on him and made a run for it. Forever.
On his way to Bellwood South HQ, Maggott had stopped at a toy shop on Voortrekker. He’d wanted to get the kid something manly, like an action figure or a rugby ball. But no, the boy had seen this pink bear, and he wouldn’t leave without it. Maggott hoped he wasn’t going to grow up to be a bloody queer.
He’d endured another uncomfortable night, sleeping with his son on the single bed in his cramped and airless room. The kid had been restless, cried out in his sleep, and demanded that Maggott take him to the bathroom every hour.
So Maggott had felt like shit when he’d finally got into Bellwood. But he’d been banking on Disco De Lilly feeling even worse. A long night, and part of the morning, without tik would have the little sex-boy laid out like a piece of meat on a chopping block.
Maggott left the kid sitting in the charge office with his bear and a Coke, and went off to find Disco.<
br />
He was blocked by the superintendent. “Maggott.”
“Supe.”
Maggott’s boss beckoned him into his office and closed the door. “You’ve had De Lilly in here again?”
“Got him on possession.”
“Jesus Christ, Maggott, less than a bloody straw. It’s still about that hijacking, isn’t it?”
Maggott shrugged. “Something’s up with that American woman. I know it.”
“You know what? You psychic now?” Maggott said nothing, stared his superior down. The superintendent, spineless jerk-off cracked first. “You hear there’s been another one of those Barbie Doll killings, Sea Point side?”
“Another blondie?”
“Ja. There’s panic over there. A task force has been set up, and they’re requesting manpower. Detectives in particular. You’re going to go across to Sea Point and help.”
“Help with what?”
“Door to doors. Interviews. Whatever they need you for. They media are crawling all over this thing like cockroaches.”
“And the Flats just look after themselves?”
“Detective, I’m following orders. Just like you.”
Maggott edged toward the door. “Can I at least have one more talk with De Lilly?”
The superintendent shook his head. “Too late. I chucked his ass out an hour ago.”
Maggott wanted to slap the fucken pencil pusher. But he held on to himself and left the office, went to collect his son, who sat with the bear on his lap, staring in fascination at a tik whore who had passed out on a bench in the charge office, her skirt hiked up around her waist. At least he was looking at a woman. That had to be a good sign.
Maggott grabbed the boy by the hand and yanked him and the fucken bear out to the car. They wanted him to go Sea Point side, he’d go Sea Point side. But not to worry with dead blondes. There was a live one he wanted to see.
BILLY WAS SITTING downstairs flicking through a women’s magazine—seven steamy sex tips to keep your man happy and your butt trim—when he heard the gate buzzer. Roxy’s sandals slapped the tiles as she walked toward the door, but he overtook her, the Glock snug at his hip.