Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

He was hauling himself to the front door. Burn went after him to buzz him out and make sure he left.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Susan exit the kitchen. He heard the bedroom door slam.

Berenice September was at the satellite police station at seven in the morning. There was no sign of the cop. The sun beat down on the commuters on their way to work. A group of kids in school uniform walked past, shouting out at one another.

Her son Ronnie hadn’t ce home. Every parent on the Cape Flats lived in fear of this moment. Scores of children went missing every year. Most of them turned up in the veld, raped, sodomized, murdered.

By seven fifteen Berenice was fretting. She was already late for work. She wouldn’t be able to pay her bills at the end of the month if they docked her pay. Then she saw the cop, strolling up from the taxi rank like he was with his girlfriend at the Waterfront. Berenice waved at him. This did nothing to speed his pace.

She walked toward him, pushing through a bunch of commuters shoehorning themselves into a taxi. “You remember me? From yesterday?”

It took a moment before the cop nodded. He carried on walking, and Berenice fell in beside him. “I haven’t seen my son since I left him by you.”

The cop shrugged. They had reached the container, and he fished in his pocket for a set of keys. “I haven’t seen him.”

“What happened last night, after I left?”

He unlocked the door to the container and pulled it open. The hinges screamed for oil. “Nothing happened.”

The cop stepped inside and Berenice followed him. It was like walking into a wall of heat. She was already perspiring, from the sun and from the tension. She felt faint and stepped back out, getting her breath. The cop looked at her with blank disinterest.

She tried again. “Last night, you said somebody was coming. I left my boy, Ronnie, here so he could speak to them.”

“Ja. But he fucked off. The kid. Before they got here. He waited for you to go; then he ran.”

She was staring at him. “Ran where?”

“How must I know? He’s your bloody son.” The cop set out the occurrence book and a pen.

Berenice shook her head. She turned and walked back home. She was going to phone in sick. They could dock her pay. She had to find her son.

“That cop knows something, Jack.” Susan paced the bedroom, anger flaming her cheeks.

“How could he?” Burn stayed still, deliberately, to counterbalance her motion.

“Then what was he doing here?” she asked, demanding that he make sense of this mess.

“He probably went to every house in the street. It’s just routine.” In fact, Burn had seen the fat cop get in his car and drive away, but he didn’t tell her this.

“Where did you put them? Those men?”

“In an open field. Behind the airport. Miles from anywhere.”

“Apparently not. Jesus, Jack.” She stopped, put a hand to her stomach, caught her breath.

He moved toward her. “Look, calm down. Sit down on the bed.”

“Just get the fuck away from me!” The words stopped Burn as if he’d been struck. Susan never spoke like this.

“Susan…”

“Okay, Jack, here’s the thing. I, we, Matt and… and her”-she pointed at her belly-“had to carry the can for the cop you killed. But we are not, not, going down for what you did the other night. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you. But nobody is going down.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Jack. You’re going down. You’re going straight to fucking hell, and you’re not taking us with you!”

Beautiful. The fingerprint formed on the monitor of Barnard’s computer. The American woman had left a bloody near-perfect right index finger print on the photograph of Rikki Fortune.

Before Barnard had gone to the American’s house, he had carefully wiped the photographs clean, then slid them into an envelope. He had hoped to get Hill to touch them, but the man had made a point of leaving them lying on the counter. Which made Barnard all the more suspicious. The woman’s prints would have to be enough.

Barnard had left the Americans and headed straight to the police lab. A technician owed him a favor, and he lifted the prints and e-mailed them to Barnard within two hours.

Barnard sat at the laptop at a desk in his apartment. Most people who knew him would have automatically assumed that those sausage fingers wouldn’t know their way around a computer, but his hands moved with surprising delicacy across the mouse and the keyboard. He’d skilled up on the latest technology with none of the reluctance of most cops his age; he was smart enough to know that if you were out of the tech loop, you were dead and buried.

People would have been surprised by his one-room apartment, too. It was spartan, and scrupulously clean, almost monastic in its simplicity. The bed was made, a Bible squared up on the bedside table. The dishes were washed and put away. There was no ring of grime around the bathtub.

If Barnard had no control over the rank and noxious odors his body produced, or remained oblivious to them, he imposed order and discipline on his living environment.

Barnard checked his watch. It would be early morning in Arlington, Virginia, but Dexter Torrance would have finished his prayers. He reached for the phone.

It wasn’t often that Rudi Barnard met somebody he felt an affinity with. Mostly he felt scorn and loathing for the rest of humanity, as if their mere presence stood between him and his eternal reward.

Dexter Torrance was different. Outwardly, Barnard and the deputy U.S. marshal couldn’t be less alike. Where Barnard was massively fat, Torrance was small and looked to be perpetually hungry. Not for food, but for the succor of the version of Jesus Christ he believed in with a quiet fervor.

Torrance, a member of the Marshals International Fugitives Task Force, had come to Cape Town a few years before to take back to West Virginia a man wanted for the rape and murder of a Charleston Sunday school teacher. The man had jumped bail and, through a series of increasingly idiotic actions, had got himself arrested in Cape Town. The South African authorities had no reservations about extraditing him to West irginia, a state that, like South Africa, had abolished the death penalty.

It had fallen to Rudi Barnard to hand over the prisoner to Dexter Torrance simply because his senior officers were attending some political shindig hosted by the commissioner of police.

Torrance and Barnard had spent little time together, but very quickly they realized that their worldviews were uncannily similar. Torrance didn’t have to say much, merely express his disillusionment that the state in which the crime had occurred had seen fit to abolish the death penalty, for Barnard to recognize a kindred spirit. Barnard felt the same about his own country’s liberal constitution, trying his best to remedy the situation by executing as many deviants as he could.

Torrance shook his head while they eyeballed the prisoner in the holding cell. The deputy U.S. marshal was of the opinion that when this sack of crap got back to the States, he would be jailed for ten years and then walk out and do it all again.

Torrance and Barnard found their collaboration to be as easy and pleasurable as a doubles team who had played together for years, each knowing precisely when the other would move to the net. Barnard held the prisoner down while Torrance strangled the man with his own belt, bought for his trip home.

Barnard then held the prisoner up off the ground while Torrance looped the belt through the bars of the cell and around the dead man’s neck. They left him dangling there and went and drank tea and spoke as if on first-name terms with the interventionist God they both loved so much.