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.
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.
