Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

A constable doing his rounds found the man hanging.

The drunken district surgeon, irritated to be dragged from the youthful juices of his latest catamite, wasted no time in calling the death a suicide and signing the death certificate.

Torrance had flown back to the United States accompanying a coffin. It had pleased him greatly to hand the body over to the dead man’s family for burial.

A job well done.

He reserved a special place in his esteem for Rudi Barnard, his brother soldier in the army of Christ, and when Rudi called him that morning and asked him to run a fingerprint through the FBI’s database, he said it would be an honor.

Burn drove the Jeep down to Sea Point, a grid of apartment blocks and office buildings that looked out over the Atlantic Ocean.

When Burn had seen Susan handling the photographs, he’d had to resist the impulse to grab them from her and wipe them free of her prints. Hell, her paranoia was getting to him. The cop looked like a moron. He’d been ordered to knock on a few doors, go through the motions. This was Cape Town, a dozen more people would die today; how much time was the cop going to waste on a couple of gangsters?

But what if he had lifted a print? Burn knew that Susan had been busted as a freshman at UCLA, smoking dope at a party. She’d told Burn the story soon after they met, laughing about being driven to Santa Monica in the back of a sheriff’s patrol car. Being booked. Kidding a cute-looking deputy about getting her good side when they took her mug shots. Flirting with him when he pressed her fingers down for the prints.

Burn remembered an irrational feeling of jealousy-about something that had happened three years before he met Susan. Now he couldn’t get the image of her hands black with fingerprint ink out of his mind…

A horn blared behind him. He was daydreaming at a green light. Burn pulled away, trying to calm himself. Even if Susan had been printed, where were those prints now? And how could some Cape Town cop get access to them?

Burn was on his way to a real estate office. The most important thing right now was to get out of that house. Being there reminded Susan of the dead men. It also made them a target for the fat cop.

He would relocate his family; then he would convince Susan about New Zealand. Once the baby had come.

Carmen Fortune almost gagged on the man’s dick. She tried to pull her head away, but it banged against the steering wheel. His calloused hands grabbed her by the hair and shoved the thing in deeper, like she was that sword swallower on the TV.

The day had started shit and got worse. The feeling of lightness and freedom that had come with the news of Rikki’s death evaporated when she couldn’t score a globe. There just wasn’t any money, now that Sheldon’s grant had disappeared.

She had done some casual hooking as a teenager, before she met Rikki. Most of her friends did it. It was an easy way to buy those designer jeans. But that was years ago.

So, when she caught the taxi to Voortrekker Road, she hadn’t known what to expect. She found a corner and stood there, eyeballing the passing motorists. It was payday, and she wasn’t ugly. Someone would stop. She knew it was a risk, hooking in daylight. She might have to blow a cop or two. But she couldn’t wait until dark. She needed to score. Bad. To get rid of that fucken scratchy feeling, like her nerves were on the outside of her skin.

A car pulled up. Nice new BMW. She stepped forward, ready with what she thought was a professional smile as she bent down at the driver’s window.

Her smile faded when she saw the Nigerian at the wheel. Before she could step back, the Nigerian grabbed her by the T-shirt and pulled her half into the car

“This is my territory, you understand? For me and my girls. I see you here again, I kill you.” To underscore his point, he swept aside his linen jacket and showed her the massive bloody gun in a shoulder holster.

She nodded, and he pushed her away, taking off fast, almost driving over her feet. Fucken Nigerians.

She went and hung around in the mall for a while. But she was going crazy, starting to scratch herself until she bled. So she went back to the road, a few blocks away from where the Nigerian confronted her, looking around nervously for his BMW.

She only had to wait a few minutes before a dented pickup truck pulled up next to her. The driver was colored, but dark. On the Flats, where the calibrations of color are precise, where the birth of a pale child is cause for celebration and women apply all manner of potions to their skin to lighten it, a dark skin is not a badge worn with pride.

Still, she went to the driver’s window. He wore a dirty juuit and smelled of sweat.

“How much for a blow?” he asked. Some of his teeth were missing.

“Hundred.” She doubled what she was intending to ask.

“Twenny-five.”

“Fifty.”

He grinned. “Fuck, you better suck like a vacuum for that.” But he reached across and opened the side door.

They drove down a side street, and he parked beside an open lot. He unzipped his jumpsuit and produced his pride and joy. It was massive, and it didn’t smell like roses.

Carmen took a condom out of her jeans and tore the wrapping open with her teeth. The man shook his head. “For fifty, no fucken rubber.”

“Listen, you think I’m going to put that filthy thing in my mouth without a plastic, you fucken crazy. Take it or leave it.”

He shrugged, and she tugged on the condom. Next thing she knew, he had her by the hair and was making her swallow the bloody thing.

Carmen was gagging, but she could hear that he was getting all excited. Now was the time. She knocked away his hands and came up for air.

“Why you stopping?”

“Just relax, speedy. Take your time.”

She pulled his jumpsuit down so that it bunched around his knees, then took the kitchen knife out of her jeans. She grabbed his dick with one hand and held the knife against the base with the other.

“Jesus, what you doing?” He stared at her. The thing in her hand was already starting to wilt, like a rubber snake.

“Get your wallet out and put it on my lap.”

“Fuck you!”

She gripped the softening dick and jammed the tip of the blade into his skin. He screamed.

“S’trues fuck, I’ll cut this thing off!” She jammed the knife in deep enough to draw blood.

“Okay. Okay.” He reached down into his pocket and came out with the wallet.

“Put it on my lap.”

He did as she ordered.

She kept the blade against his skin, freed her other hand, and opened the car door behind her. Then she grabbed the wallet and slid out backward. He tried to lunge at her but was held back by the jumpsuit around his knees.

“You fucken bitch, I’ll kill you!”

Carmen was running, out of the side street, back onto Voortrekker just in time to grab a minibus taxi as it was about to pull out.

The taxi wasn’t full, and she sat at the back, alone, catching her breath. She opened the wallet. Saw a picture of a smiling woman and a toddler. Bastard. She pulled out the money and tossed the wallet out the window. Three hundred.

That wasn’t going to last long. ht="2em" align="center"›

Berenice September fought panic as she followed Ronnie’s friend Cassiem across the veld. The afternoon sun blasted down on her, and sweat ran freely from her hair, down her face, pooling between her breasts.

The boy looked at her over his shoulder and stopped, seeing her red face and the blood on her legs where the thorns had torn her skin.

“Is Auntie all right?”

She wouldn’t allow herself to stop walking, because she knew if she did she would lose courage and turn back.

“Go, Cassiem. Take me there.”