Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

“Where is he?” Burn asked, his voice strangled.

“Who?”

“My son. What have you done with my son?”

The watchman shook his head. “I don’t got your son.”

Burn was sucking air, trying to get to his feet. The watchman was standing, too, helping him. Burn pushed his hands away. “Look, stop playing fucking games. Tell me what you want.”

“I don’t got your son. But I saw who do.”

Burn stared at him. The watchman continued slowly, the heavy accent grating on Burn’s ear. “I use to work next door, by the building site.”

“I know who you are.”

“That night, I seen him. He come and take your boy; then he come and shoot my dog. And me.”

Burn remembered arriving home the night Matt was taken. Seeing the watchman bleeding as he was led to the ambulance. “Who was it? Who took my son?”

“The fat cop.”

Burn knew then that the watchman was telling the truth. “I’m sorry.”

The watchman sh

“Please, come into the house. Tell me what happened.”

Burn took the duffel bag of money and walked to the stairs, his stomach still tender. The watchman wasn’t big, but he punched like a heavyweight.

They walked into the open-plan living room, all glass and light and Scandinavian design. The watchman looked around, taking it in. He was out of uniform, wore a pair of jeans meant for a bigger man, cinched in at the waist and rolled at the cuffs that fell onto a very tired pair of sneakers. His check shirt was frayed, short sleeved, showing plenty of prison artwork. He wore a cap, which he took off now that he was inside, standing holding it in his left hand, like it was something he’d been told to do. Burn found it hard not to stare at the dented, ravaged left side of his face.

Burn put the duffel bag down. “What’s your name?”

“Benny.”

“Just Benny?”

“Jus’ Benny is okay.”

“I’m Jack.”

“Ja, you tole me.”

Burn invited him to sit, which he did reluctantly, forward on the chair, his elbows on his knees, hands fidgeting with the cap. He told Burn what he had seen, expressionless, no emotion when he gave the details.

“He locked him in the trunk?”

“Ja.”

“But he was still alive?”

“He was, like, kicking. Ja.”

Burn battled to process this. His four-year-old son trying to fight off the huge cop. “You didn’t tell the police any of this?”

A smile touched the watchman’s scarred face. “Me and the cops don’t talk.” Then he was serious, his good eye fixed on Burn. “The fat cop. He tole you what he wants?”

“Money,” Burn said.

“And when you gonna give it to him?”

“When he calls me. Later today.”

“I wanna be there.”

“Why?”

“He kill my dog. I’m gonna kill him.” Like he was saying he took milk in his tea. No emphasis. No emotion. And no doubt that he meant it.

“Look, I understand. But I have to get my son back. Alive.”

“You think he gonna give him to you?”

“Yes. If I pay him.”

The watchman shook his head. “Man like that, he take your money, but maybe he don’t give you your son.”

Burn heard the scarred man give voice to his deepest fears. Right now the fat cop held all the cards.

“Ja. I find out about this cop. His, his moves, like. Where he operate and such. He’s dangerous.”

“Okay, I get that much,” Burn said. “You have an idea? A plan?”

“I go with you when you drop the cash. To watch your back, like.”

Burn nodded, taking this in. Trying to figure out whether he could trust this man and whether he would be risking or saving Matt’s life by getting the watchman involved.

The wind howled across the Flats, picking up sand and grit and firing it at Zondi like a small-bore shotgun. He felt it in his ears, up his nostrils, and it sneaked in and found his eyes behind the Diesel sunglasses. He kept his mouth shut and his hands in his suit pockets as he followed the uniformed sergeant through the rows of cars at the police pound.

Wrecked vehicles, endless minibus taxis, and a surprising number of luxury cars spread out across the yard. The cop carried a clipboard and seemed to know where he was going. He stopped and pointed. “There’s your car.”

A red BMW four-door with all the gangsta accessories: chopped suspension, fat tires with chrome mags, louvers, spoilers, and tinted windows. Zondi saw that the side window on the driver’s side was smashed and the trunk lid banged in the wind. The lock had been forced.

“Did it come in like this?”

“That’s right, sir.” Calling this black man sir stuck in the throat of the colored cop.

“That window too?”

“Yes.”

Zondi opened the trunk and looked inside. A spare tire and a jack. A couple of empty beer bottles and rags. An old newspaper and an empty brake fluid container. He walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door, looked inside.

“Who did you say this car was traced to?”

The sergeant consulted his clipboard. “A Mrs. Wessels of Table-view. She reported it stolen two years back. Wouldn’t recognize it now.”

“No, I bet she wouldn’t. Not something she’d use in the carpool.”

Zondi sat in the front seat. He popped the glove box: a couple of nipped joints and a half-empty bottle of vodka. He moved the bottle aside and saw a used condom.

“Pass me your pen, please, Sergeant.”

The cop obliged, and Zondi lifted the condom out with the nib of the pen and held it to the light. Damned if he was going to use his Mont Blanc. There was a good squirt of semen in the tip of the condom. He took a folded paper evidence bag from his jacket pocket and shook it open. He dropped the condom into the bag and held the pen out to the cop.

“Thanks.”

The sergeant hesitated, then shook his head. “You can keep it.”

Zondi dropped the pen onto the floor of the car. He had a quick look around the interior, saw nothing more of interest, then slid out, back into the howling ing “So this car was found up above Sea Point?”

The cop wiped sand from his eyes, then squinted at his clipboard. “Ja, we towed it from Thirty-eight Mountain Road.”

“Write that address down for me, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant muttered to himself as he bent to retrieve his ballpoint from the car.

Zondi was already walking away, back toward the shelter of the office. How did people live in this bloody place?

The wind whipped across the graveyard, blowing the imam’s Arabic chant back toward the Maitland railway line. Burn stood at the rear of a small knot of mourners-all men-some dressed in traditional Muslim garb, others wearing knitted kufi caps with Western clothes. Burn had been handed a kufi as he joined the group, and he had to hold it down with one hand to stop it blowing away. He stood with the duffel bag containing one million in notes between his feet. His other hand was on his cell phone in his pocket, to feel the vibration if Barnard called.

Mrs. Dollie’s body, wrapped in a white cloth, lay next to the open grave as the imam droned the prayers. Mr. Dollie, small and bearded, looked almost lost inside his Muslim clothing. His face was pinched and drawn, and a young man in a suit had to steady his arm, as if the wind might take him.

Burn wasn’t sure why he had attended. He could have made an excuse, that Susan was about to have a baby. It was a valid excuse; the cesarean section was to be performed that afternoon. He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt that by attending the burial, facing Mrs. Dollie’s husband, that he was at least atoning for some of his actions.

Burn had been brought up a Catholic but had lost touch with religion by the time he was a teenager. He was surprised to find that now, in his midforties, the idea of guilt and retribution should be so present. As he stood and listened to the Arabic prayers directed at a god he was not on first name terms with, he heard a voice making a deal with some invisible force out there: I’ll face up to my guilt, I’ll take what comes to me, but just save the life of my son. It was his voice. He knew it was superstitious. He knew it was irrational. He didn’t care.