Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

Fingers played it again.

Then he went through the laborious process of dialing Leroy’s number with his thumb. Leroy was small-time; he didn’t rate a speed dial. He got Leroy’s voice mail, some smart-ass message with LL Cool J jawing away in the background. Fingers killed the call with a jab of his thumb.

By the time Rashied came back with the bottle of Coke, Fingers was busy with the clumsy business of dressing.

Burn drove the Ford through the sprawl of the Cape Flats, the endless monotony of poverty stretching in every direction. It was a good thing he’d been forced to leave his Jeep at the Waterfront. The only people who drove Cherokees on the Flats were drug dealers. Way too visible.

Burn had flown over the Flats and skirted past on the freeway, but he had never ventured down these mean streets. The small houses huddled together, their foundations unsure in the sandy ground. The watchman’s curt navigation led them past rows of soulless ghetto blocks, where the relentless wind danced washing on lines strung across concrete walkways. They passed sandy, open patches, trading spots where young men huddled behind concrete walls scarred by gang graffiti.

Burn had taken the Mossberg shotgun from Barnard’s bag in the trunk of the Ford and shoved it next to his seat. He’d used a Mossberg in the military and welcomed its added firepower. He found himself touching it, for some kind of reassurance.

Burn slowed at a stop sign. A small boy, around Matt’s age, stood on the corner in front of a faded blue mosque. He twirled a homemade toy, a piece of string with a rock tied to the end, his nose glued to his face by unwiped snot. He stared at Burn in blank fascination.

As he pulled away, Burn checked his rearview mirror. The fat cop was barely visible under the blanket.

“Is he still alive?” Burn asked.

The watchman reached over and lifted the blanket, nodded, then stared straight ahead. Burn needed the fat man to live until he found his son. Then the watchman could do whatever he needed to do.

They were heading deeper into the Flats, moving into the cloud of sand the wind threw over the maze of small houses and narrow streets.

Sometimes Zondi wished that he smoked, to give him something to do at times like these. He was at the police lab, watching as a technician worked a comparison microscope, trying to identify similarities between the slug Zondi had dug from the wall at the building site and the one that had killed Ronnie September.

The technician was a startlingly beautiful woman with burnished copper skin. Her hair, black as squid ink, fell across her face as she leaned forward, peering into the microscope. Zondi had an image of that black hair spread like seaweed over a white pillow.

He was relieved when his phone chirped in his pocket. He walked out into the corridor as he took the call. He listened to the cop at Sea Point station, nodded, asked a couple of questions, and wrote a phone number down in his notebook. He killed the call and found himself at the end of the corridor, staring out a dirty window at the city below.

When he’d driven away from Mountain Road, he’d called the Sea Point police and asked them to check if anything linked back to the American. Hill. It was a long shot, a trial balloon. He knew he was an anal-retentive control freak covering all bases. Even imaginary ones.

But it had produced a hit.

A woman, a domestic worker, had been found murdered the day before on the steps in Greenpoint. Her name was Adielah Dollie. She worked for a Mr. and Mrs. Hill at Thirty-six Mountain Road.

“Investigator Zondi?”

He turned to see the technician waving to him from down the corridor. Her long nails were painted a deep red. Zondi pushed away the image of those nails collecting skin samples from his naked back. He walked up the corridor.

“There’s a match,” said the technician. “The bullet you brought to us is a. 38 caliber, the same as the one retrieved from the child’s body. The lands and grooves on both of these bullets are identical. They have the same signature.”

So Barnard had shot the night watchman. And his dog. What exactly did that tell him? “Thanks. Now, about that condom?”

The technician shrugged. “The DNA testing will take a little longer.”

“How much longer?”

“Try three months.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No. There’s a backlog at the DNA lab.”

“So I’ll jump the queue. Like I did here.”

She gave him a smile. “You won’t have the luck with them that you had with me. They’re a lot stricter.” She was flirting with him, something dancing in her almond eyes. Waiting for him to make a move.

Zondi walked out.

In the lab parking lot he popped the trunk of his car and grabbed his laptop. He slid behind the wheel and got the engine idling, aircon on high. He booted up his laptop while he dialed the dead domestic worker’s daughter on his cell.

The conversation was brief. He voiced formulaic words of sympathy; then he asked Leila Dollie if she had ever met Mrs. Hill. Yes, she had met Susan Hill, more than once. Two Susans? The coincidence count was higher than in a cheap paperback.

He wanted to know if she was close to a computer with e-mail. She was. He e-mailed her a JPEG of Susan Ford’s mug shots from his laptop. She received and opened the mail while he was still on the line.

“That’s Mrs. Hill,” said Leila Dollie. She sounded confused. “Does this have something to do with my mother’s death?”

Deep in his gut Zondi knew that it did. He just didn’t know what.

“No, we’re running a background check on the Hills.” He was ready to end the call when he tried one more question. “You don’t perhaps know where I could find Mrs. Hill, do you?”

“Well, the last I heard she was at Gardens Clinic.”

“She’s sick?”

“No, she’s about to have a baby.”

Zondi thanked her and sat there in the car, his mind alive with loose ends like snakes fleeing a mountain fire.

Susan Burn lay on the bed in the delivery room, being prepared for the cesarean section. Her gynecologist, a sandy-haired man in his forties who had worked as hard on his bedside manner as his golf game, was clearly used to dealing with a succession of mothers-to-be for whom the cosmetic risk of the cesarean section was the major issue. In a city of beaches and health clubs, an abdomen that looked like an early Frankenstein movie wasn’t desirable.

He started going into detail about how the lower midline abdominal incision-the bikini cut-would heal, leaving nothing but a hairline scar, which, with the diligent application of tissue oil, would disappear completely.

This was the last thing on her mind, but she nodded appreciatively.

Then the anesthetist arrived to do the epidural. Susan had asked to be awake during the cesarean; even though she wasn’t going to push the baby out the way she had Matt, she still wanted to witness that first moment of her daughter’s life.

The anesthetist was beefy, with hands like a plumber, but he proved to be gentle and reassuring. He asked her to roll onto her side and lifted her smock. He rubbed anesthetic liquid on her lower spine and then inserted a very fine needle. All the while he was humming a tune. Susan eventually recognized it as the old Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” She almost laughed but stopped herself, frightened that the needle would snap in her spine.

When the anesthetic started to numb her skin, the humming man approached with a much larger and more intimidating needle. Susan closed her eyes, and she allowed herself to remember when her daughter had been conceived.

It had been after the gambling trouble, as it had become known by her and Jack. After he had come clean, fessed up, she’d allowed him to whisk her off for a weekend to a hut in the Sierras. Just the two of them, Matt left behind in the care of her sister.