Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

Instead he had driven across town to Salt River, to Sniper Security. Wanted to talk to the night watchman, Benny Niemand. Nobody had seen the watchman since the night of the shooting when he had walked out of Somerset Hospital and disappeared. Zondi had found out that he was an ex-con, once a high-ranking member of the Mongrel gang.

A 28.

So why had Barnard shot him? The men in the red BMW were gangsters, Zondi was sure of that. And this watchman was another. Was this a drug deal gone bad? And why had it played itself out against the unlikely backdrop of an elite suburb in white Cape Town? And what was the American’s role in all of this?

He swung into Mountain Road and parked outside the American’s house. He wanted to ask him a simple question: why had he lied when he’d looked at his wife’s mug shots? Maybe the answer to that question would join a few of these disconnected dots.

Zondi, out of force of habit, shrugged on his jacket as he stepped into the furnace that was late afternoon in Cape Town. He rang the buzzer. Nothing. He rang it again.

He took a few steps back and looked up at the deck, where he had seen the man, Hill, earlier. The deck was empty, except for a hawk perched on the railing, forced by the fire to leave the mountain to search for prey. The hawk looked down at Zondi; then it unfurled its wings and kicked off, swooping up and catching a thermal. It hung there in a lazy glide.

Zondi went back to the street door, and even though he knew he was wasting his time, he rang the buzzer again. Nothing. He turned and headed back to his car. As he passed the garage, his eyes were drawn to a tread mark, printed cleanly on the short cement slope that joined the road. Zondi knelt and rubbed the tire tread with the index finger of his right hand; then he inspected his fingertip. It was smudged red.

He was looking at blood.

Burn took a piss in the squalid bathroom, the Mossberg lying on the cistern. Where was his son? If the old man had been brutally murdered, what had happened to Matt? Burn flashed on the bloody pajama top lying on the bed, and his imagination spun away from him; he had to fight it to reel it in.

The fat cop knew. Burn had to make him talk. It was as simple as that. He finished, rinsed the cop’s hair grease from his hands, grabbed the Mossberg, and walked.

As he stepped out of the bathroom, he saw the splintered front door swing open and three men come in. One of them, a big brown man with his hair cropped to his scarred skull, looked at him in amazement; then he raised a. 45 and shot a hole in the wall next to Burn’s head.

Burn let go with the Mossberg, and the force of the blast lifted the gunman off his feet and slapped him against the wall next to the door. He slid to the floor, leaving a wet smear on the wall.

As the door eased open, Benny Mongrel saw Fingers Morkel step into the room followed by two of his men. A. 45 boomed and the shotgun replied, and Benny Mongrel saw one of the men lift up like washing on a line and smack the wall. The other man dived toward the sofa, out of range of Burn’s shotgun. The barrel of the man’s chrome. 357 was looking straight at Benny Mongrel.

Benny Mongrel remembered Burn had slipped him the. 38. He brought it from his waistband and shot the man between the eyes. The man gave him a stupid look and dropped behind the sofa like emptied trash.

That left Fingers, who was standing open-mouthed, his scarred stumps moving in the air, his thumbs twitching like he wished to hell he could hitch a ride out of there.

Benny Mongrel felt the knife in his palm.

No guns for Fingers.

Rudi Barnard was in communion with the dead. He heard their voices; he saw their faces. They were calling his name, inviting him to join their number. He was fighting harder than he had ever fought in his life, fighting the tide that dragged him down.

The roars blasted his eyes open, and he saw the half-breeds before him, explosions of red reaching from their gaping mouths. Reaching toward him, trying to take him with them to join the legion of the damned.

Barnard found some last reserve of energy. He sprang from the sofa and hurtled headlong toward the living room window, and in an explosion of blood, glass, and fat he burst out into that bright, terrible light.

Silence. Burn realized that the weapons discharging in the confined space had momentarily deafened him.

He saw the fat cop leap from the sofa and smash through the glass, disappearing from view. He saw the watchman kick the legs from under the surviving member of the trio who seemed to be attempting a prayer for mercy without the benefit of fingers. He saw the watchman’s blade catch a perfectly angled beam of sunlight as it rose.

“Wait.” Burn’s voice sounded muffled to his own ears. He held the Mossberg like an extension of his arm, pointed at the watchman. The blade halted in midair.

Burn went to the kneeling, fingerless man and applied the Mossberg barrel to the side of his head. “Where is my son?”

The man stared at him blankly. He shook his head. Burn took the barrel back and smashed the man in the face, seeing thin beads of blood hang in space before they hit the dirty wooden floor.

He took the barrel back for another swing. He felt the watchman’s hand on his arm. “He don’t know nothing.”

He looked at the watchman. “Then what’s he doing here?”

“He come here so I can kill him. Old business.”

Burn believed him. For some reason this seemed a perfectly rational and satisfactory explanation. But the question of his son’s whereabouts remained. And the man who held the answer had justhurled himself out of a closed window.

Burn ran toward the door.

Benny Mongrel looked down into the eyes of Fingers Morkel and realized that a great tiredness had enveloped him. It was all he could do to hold the knife in his hand. But he knew, one last time, that there was something he must do.

He took Fingers by the chin and, with the precision of an executioner, lifted his head to bare the neck and sent the blade across the throat.

“Benny Mongrel say goodnight,” he said, and let Fingers slump to the floor.

Then he relaxed his hand and felt the knife slip from his grasp, and, perfectly weighted instrument that it was, it landed blade first in the wooden floor and quivered for a time before, at last, it was still.

By then Benny Mongrel had left the room.

The fat man flew out the window, a trail of blood and glass in his wake, and landed heavily on the sand. As he lay on his back, his great naked chest heaving, the blanket floated down and covered him like a shroud.

People in the street and the adjoining apartments, drawn by the all-too-familiar chatter of small arms, paused when they saw the man plunge. There was a collective gasp when the blanket moved and he sat up. He hauled himself to his feet, and the blanket fell away.

A sharp pair of eyes recognized him beneath the gore, and his name was whispered.

“It’s Gatsby.”

Wheezing, bleeding, and foaming, the fat cop took off down Tulip Street as if he were being pursued by the devil, massive legs pumping.

The cry grew louder. “It’s Gatsby!”

A small boy rolling a bald tire fell in behind Gatsby, following him up the road as women in curlers, hanging over fences, put their gossip on pause as this demonic vision crossed their view.

Farther down Tulip Street, Donovan September lay under a car, parked halfway up on the sidewalk. He was adjusting the exhaust mount, while two of his friends passed him tools and offered advice. He put out his hand for a screwdriver, and it wasn’t forthcoming.

Then he heard one of his friends say, “Jesus, Donovan, you better come look at this.”

Donovan slid out from under the car. As he stood, he wiped the sweat away from his eyes with the back of his hand, not believing what he was seeing. Gatsby, the cop who had put his little brother in the ground, was running up the road, half naked, bleeding. People were trailing in his wake like pilot fish feeding off a harpooned whale.