Mixed Blood (2 page)

The short man, the one with his hand under Susan’s dress, gyrated obscenely, moving his hips against her. His mouth gaped, and Burn could see the blackened front teeth. Susan opened her eyes and looked straight at Burn.

The guy behind Burn laughed. “We gonna have us some nice fun tonight.”

And that was when Matt came running back into the room. The eyes of the two men were drawn to the boy, who skidded to a stop, staring at them.

This gave Burn the moment he needed. As he twisted in his chair, he grabbed the carving knife from the table and buried it to its haft in the tall man’s chest. Blood geysered from his ruptured heart. Burn stood, grabbed him before he fell, and used his body as a shield. He felt the lanky man take the bullet fired by the short one. Then Burn shoved him away, launched himself, and grabbed the short guy by his gun arm. His weight took both of them to the floor. Burn twisted the man’s arm and heard it break. The gun clattered to the tiles.

Susan backed away. Burn kneed the short guy in the balls, and he curled like a worm into a fetal position. Burn looked over his shoulder. The tall one was dead, his spreading blood almost reaching Matt’s bare toes. His son was frozen, staring.

Burn reached back onto the table for a steak knife.

“Take Matt out of here,” he told Susan.

“Jack …”

“Take him out of here!”

Susan rushed across the tiles, grabbed the boy, and disappeared down the corridor toward the bedrooms.

Gripping the steak knife, Burn kneeled over the short man, who was staring up at him, wide-eyed. “Mister, we wasn’t gonna do nothing …”

Burn hesitated for only a moment; then he reached down and cut the short man’s throat.

C
HAPTER
2

Carmen Fortune fed her four-year-old son, Sheldon. He lay in a small crib, his withered limbs jerking and his sightless eyes moving in their sockets. The food dribbled from his mouth.

He had been born three months premature, blind and deformed, with massive brain damage. Nobody knew how or why he’d survived. Except Carmen. She knew God had cursed her. Made sure that every time she looked at her son she remembered all the tik she had smoked while she carried him inside her. He was a constant reminder of the hell that waited for her one day.

If it wasn’t for the grant the state paid every month for Sheldon, she would put a pillow over his face and no one could blame her. But her useless bastard husband, Rikki, smoked away whatever money he scammed or stole.

What the fuck, she was already in hell. Could it, honest to God, get worse?

Carmen was twenty but looked thirty. Her faced was bruised and swollen from the latest beating. Rikki hit her because she wasn’t giving him a normal child, one that he could show off to his buddies to prove that he didn’t father only mutants. That’s what he called Sheldon: a fucken mutant.

The doctors told her that her womb was finished; she couldn’t have no more kids. She didn’t tell Rikki. He would have killed her. Better just to take the beatings.

When she heard the banging on the door, she knew there was only one fat white bastard who would hammer like that.

“Uncle Fatty!” She yelled across to where an ancient rail-thin man, wearing only a pair of dirty briefs, slumped in front of the TV. He drank from a bag of wine, his toothless mouth sucking at it like it was a tit. “Uncle Fatty, open the fucken door!” He mumbled something but stayed where he was.

The banging continued. Carmen drew her nightgown around her body, crossed to the door, and pulled open. Gatsby filled the doorway, fat and stinking.

“He’s not here,” said Carmen.

The white plainclothes cop pushed her aside and walked in. Without a word he crossed the small living room, stuck a head into the kitchen, and then went into the only bedroom. She heard the closet doors banging and the sound of breaking glass. Then he came back out, wheezing like a cheap concertina.

Carmen stood with her hands on her hips. “I tole you.”

“Where is he?” Gatsby came right up to her, and she could feel his foul breath on her face. He had food in his mustache.

“How the fuck must I know? He went out with Faried. In the car.”

“Where to?”

“I dunno.”

Gatsby had her against the wall. Jesus, he stank. “Talk to me.”

“They said something about Faried’s girl whoring in Sea Point.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, that’s all. And what is this? The Weakest fucken Link?”

Gatsby stared down at her. “No wonder he smacks you. You’ve got a mouth like a shit-house.”

“And you stink like one.”

Gatsby’s fist came up. She didn’t flinch. “Hit me, you bastard. I’m used to it.”

He wheezed and dropped his hand. “Tell that fucker Rikki I want my money. Tonight still.”

She shook her head. “Good luck.”

Gatsby slammed out, and she locked the door. Uncle Fatty had passed out in a spreading pool of piss. Carmen went into the bedroom and saw that the fat boer had broken her mirror.

“Men,” she said to herself as she sat down on the bed. “I wish they would all fucken die.”

Burn washed the blood from his hands at the kitchen sink. As he wiped his hands he stood and listened intently. Nothing. No shouts, no sirens, no concerned neighbor ringing the buzzer. He walked past the bodies toward the bedrooms, closing the passage door behind him. Burn found Susan and Matt in the main bedroom, huddled on the bed. Susan cradled their son.

Matt looked at him over Susan’s shoulder. “Daddy …”

“Daddy’s here, Matty.” Burn sat down on the bed. “Everything’s fine.” He reached out a hand and touched Matt’s hair. He knew he couldn’t avoid looking at his wife’s eyes any longer. “You okay?”

Susan stared at him. “What do you think?”

Burn reached a hand toward her face. She pulled back. “Don’t.”

He dropped the hand. She looked at him with haunted eyes. “So what happens now?”

“I clean up. Get rid of the … them.”

“Just like that? And what, we just forget this happened? Go to the beach in the morning?” Her eyes were locked to his.

“I did what I had to do,” he said.

“That’s your mantra, isn’t it, Jack? And you’re sticking to it.” She was still staring at him, hating him.

He stood. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? That we’re not at home? That you brought us to a place where animals like that …” She stopped, shaking her head, her eyes pinning him. “Or are you sorry that you’ve become one of them?”

He dragged his eyes away, unable to offer her any words. He had cleaning up to do. As he reached the door she spoke.

“Jack.” There was something urgent in her voice. A different kind of fear.

He turned to her. She was watching a pool of blood spreading from between her legs onto the white duvet. “Jesus, Jack, I’m losing her …”

Benny Mongrel, squatting on his haunches, took Rizla papers and a bag of Dinglers cherry tobacco from his uniform pocket and rolled a cigarette, his fingers deft and practiced. His eyes hadn’t moved from the American’s house since the two men had crossed the deck and disappeared inside. He’d seen nothing more. All he’d heard was the single gunshot.

Bessie had reared up at the sound of the shot and started to whine softly. Benny Mongrel had put a hand on her head to calm her. “Shhhhhh, Bessie. Still.”

The old dog had keened once more, then collapsed onto the concrete with a sigh and lay there with one eye open.

Benny Mongrel had sat and watched, waiting. Waiting to see the gangsters come out of the house and drive off into the night in that red BMW. But there was no sign of the men. Or the American and his family.

The guy who had called him
sir
.

Benny Mongrel had been called many things. He had been called bastard, bushman, rubbish, and, for many years, Prisoner 1989657. White men in suits had called him a menace to society. Brown men bleeding from his knife had called him brother as they begged for mercy. He had none to show them. Cape Flats gutter curses had been spat at him since he was ripped from the womb of a woman he never knew. But nobody had ever called him
sir
.

Not until the American.

Benny Mongrel and Bessie were walking the front of the site one evening, the old dog dragging her back legs, when the little white kid had come running up to them. He only had eyes for Bessie and reached out to pet her. Benny Mongrel wasn’t sure how Bessie would react and he pulled back on her chain, but she wagged her tail and stood there docile as you please, the kid stroking her matted fur.

Then the white man came over. He’d been unlocking the street door to the neighboring house, a high-walled fortress like all the others in the street, when the kid scooted over.

“Hey, Matt. Take it easy.”

The guy spoke like the people on those TV shows the other prisoners had watched in Pollsmoor Prison. American. He looked a bit like somebody from those shows too, biggish with a clean face and some gray in his dark hair.

Even though it was nearly 7:00 p.m., the sun was still high, so when the kid looked up at Benny Mongrel for the first time, he could see his face clearly. And that was when the kid let go of Bessie and jumped back, like he had seen about the worst thing imaginable. He stood and stared up at Benny Mongrel, unable to tear his eyes away. He opened his mouth to scream, but all he could find was a whimper.

The big guy scooped the kid up and held him, face into his shoulder. Then he looked Benny Mongrel straight in his good eye. “I’m sorry, sir. Excuse my son.”

Benny Mongrel said nothing. Just stood there looking at the white guy who never reacted, never even blinked as he took in the horror that was the left side of his face. Benny Mongrel had lived inside this mess of misshapen bones and keloid scar tissue for more than twenty years. He didn’t care. His face had served him well. It had been an asset in the life he had lived.

Most people reacted the way the kid did when they saw his face, but the American guy stuck out his hand. “My name’s Jack. I live next door.”

Benny Mongrel had never shaken hands with a white man, and he wasn’t about to start now. He hauled at Bessie’s chain, whistled sharply to get her moving, and headed back onto the site.

But something about the American had got his interest. He would watch them from the top floor of the building site, the big guy and his small blonde wife and the kid. In their house or driving away in their fancy Jeep.

Benny Mongrel finished rolling his cigarette. He lit it, his ruined face visible in the flaring match. He sucked the warm smoke deep into his lungs, and as he exhaled he heard the siren.

The ambulance screamed up to the house and two medics got out. The door in the garden wall buzzed open, and Benny Mongrel watched as they hurried inside. The medics carried the white woman out on a stretcher. They put her in the back of the ambulance and drove away. The light flashed, but the siren was mute.

Benny Mongrel waited. Puzzled. Where were the gangsters? And where were the cops?

Then the garage door rolled up and the big guy reversed out in the Jeep. The door rolled shut. As the Jeep passed beneath him, Benny could see the child strapped into the car seat in the back.

Benny unfolded himself from his squatting position and walked to the edge of the balcony. He looked down at the red BMW, then back at the house next door. Bessie appeared beside him and licked his hand.

He patted her head and spoke in a whisper. “I think they seen their mothers, Bessie.”

Inspector Rudi Barnard, known on the Flats as Gatsby, drove his white Toyota through the rape and murder capital of the world, the dark flip side of the Cape Town tourist postcard. The night was full of the usual music of the Cape Flats: sirens, snatches of screams and laughter, gunshots, andpumping hip-hop. The Flats were where anybody who wasn’t white had got dumped back in the days of apartheid, far from the privileged suburbs slung like jewels around Table Mountain. A desolate, bleak sheet of land persecuted by wind and dust.

Even when it wasn’t hot, Barnard sweated, but on this January night the water dripped from his jowls, gluing the shirt to his sumo-sized gut. All the windows of the Toyota were open as he drove, but the air lay heavy as a dead whore across the Cape Flats.

Rudi Barnard loved Jesus Christ, gatsbys, and killing people. And out here on the Flats he could feel that love the most.

The bumper-sticker simplicity of reborn Christianity suited Barnard well. He would get up each morning and pray. Then he would part his air bag—sized butt cheeks and smear Preparation H on his hemorrhoids, clothe himself in jeans and check shirts from the Big ’n Tall shop, strap on his Z88 9 mm service pistol, and go forth and dispense frontier justice in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Unbidden, an image of Carmen Fortune’s body came to him, her breasts and thighs barely covered by the short nightgown. He pushed it away. Barnard couldn’t remember when last he’d had sex with a woman. Sometime before his bitch of a wife had finally left him. He didn’t miss her or the screwing. He had always found the process disgusting. When the urge grew too great for prayer to subdue, he spent a few guiltstricken minutes in communion with his hand and a
Hustler
magazine.