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.”
Cassiem trudged on through the veld, the woman panting behind him.
Berenice had spent the day looking for Ronnie. She had gone to his school. He wasn’t there. She caught a taxi to the amusement arcade in Bellville, hoping for the first time ever that she would catch him cutting school. No sign of Ronnie.
After school she went to Cassiem’s house, two streets away from hers. Cassiem said he hadn’t seen Ronnie since yesterday. At first the boy denied all knowledge of the dead bodies. Only after Berenice had threatened to make trouble with his parents did he relent and tell her the truth. He had been with Ronnie when his friend had helped himself to the Nikes.
“I want you to take me there,” she told Cassiem.
“Why, Auntie? It’s horrible.”
“Because maybe Ronnie went back there.”
“But why, Auntie?”
She couldn’t answer the question. Just knew that she had to be taken to the bodies.
Cassiem walked through thick bush into a small clearing. He pointed toward a clump of thorns on the other side.
“It’s there.”
“Go on,” she ordered him.
The boy was reluctant. Berenice gave him a shove and he walked slowly forward.
Berenice caught the unmistakable smell of burned flesh. Then she saw a mound of something black, burned, unrecognizable.
Ronnie stopped. Berenice found the last of her courage and stepped forward. Please, God, she beseeched under her breath.
Berenice approached the bodies. It took her a few moments to make sense of what she was seeing. Two men, she assumed they were men, lying side by side, charred black. Then she made out a smaller form, somehow sprawled across them.
No features were recognizable. Blackened flesh burned off a skull. Scraps of cloth burned into the skin. Then she saw something that made her gasp.
Berenice fought back a wail and sank to her knees in the dirt, to get closer to the bodies, to see- please, God -that it wasn’t what she already knew it was. On the arm of the smallest body was a watch. A ridiculously large watch, way too big for the skinny wrist. The glass was shattered and the face was blackened and warped, but enough of it remained for hr to see the Caped Crusader.
Berenice lifted her face toward the blazing sun and let the wail break loose from her breast, screaming for God’s mercy.
CHAPTER 12
Special Investigator Disaster Zondi sat in the interview room at Bellwood South Police HQ, waiting for Rudi Barnard, who was twenty minutes late. Zondi showed no sign of impatience or irritation. He spent the time rereading the file on Barnard. The file was as fat as the cop whose photograph stared up at him.
Disaster Zondi, despite the ridicule his name attracted, flat-out refused to change it. He wore the name, given to him by his illiterate Zulu parents, as a badge of pride. Every time he was mocked, it had made him stronger. Reminded him that he had dragged himself by his fingernails from a life of rural poverty and deprivation. He had won a bursary, earned a degree in criminology, and now answered only to the minister of safety and security. Few people laughed to his face now that power, like an invisible cloak, had settled upon him.
Rudi Barnard and Disaster Zondi were perfect opposites, book-ends in the struggle of good versus evil.
