Benny Mongrel huddled back against the wall, waiting for the wind to blow itself out.
Barnard drove, still excited by the intensity of his visit to Lombard. He had felt a force, a heat channeled through Lombard’s hand into his bodyfelt renewed, filled with the fervor he needed to handle what lay before him.
His cell phone chirped, and he pulled over, so he could work it free from his pocket. When he saw caller ID, he answered eagerly and heard Dexter Torrance’s slow drawl.
“Rudi, hi. I have news.”
“I’m listening.”
The deputy U.S. marshal told Barnard that he had run the woman’s fingerprint and come up with a minor drug case years ago. Then he had cross-referenced a number of other databases and found out that the woman was married now. And the name of her husband. And what he was running from.
Barnard thanked Torrance profusely.
Then he killed the call and thanked his God for sending him Jack Burn.
CHAPTER 14
Barnard drove home, knowing that he had received the clearest possible message. About this American who called himself Hill but was in fact a fugitive who had escaped from the States with millions of dollars.
Barnard intended to make Burn pay.
Dexter Torrance, the deputy U.S. marshal, had no interest in making his findings known to the American authorities. “Burn killed a cop, Rudi, whether he pulled the trigger or not. But he had the dumb good luck to do it in a state that doesn’t have the death penalty. I have no interest in seeing him spend time in prison on the taxpayer’s dollar. He deserves to pay the ultimate penalty.”
Rudi Barnard assured Torrance that he would take care of that. The American would get what he deserved.
But first Barnard needed money. Simple blackmail wasn’t going to work. This American was clearly tougher and more resourceful than Barnard had suspected. At the first hint of exposure he would disappear.
No, Barnard had to do something that left Burn no room to maneuver.
Barnard, his mind working through the permutations, approached his apartment block. When he saw an unmarked cop car parked outside, he thought nothing of it. Many cops lived in the area. Then his eyes traveled up to his fourth-floor apartment. The curtains were drawn, but through a gap he saw a light was burning. Had he left it on? Not that he remembered. He pulled over, engine idling. Was he being paranoid? He didn’t think so. As Lombard had so graphically put it, this was a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. They would stop at nothing.
Barnard drove away.
Disaster Zondi stood in Barnard’s apartment, watching the detectives search the place. It was small and, given the man’s repulsive physical appearance, surprisingly neat. Just one room with a bed, a sturdy chair in front of a desk, and an open-plan kitchen. No TV. No sound system. No photographs. No memorabilia. Zondi caught the unmistakable stink of Barnard, as if his essence had soaked into the curtains, the worn beige carpet, and the outsize clothes hanging in the closet.
Zondi took in the atmosphere of the room. He found it oppressive, depressing. The futional furnishings, the lack of any noticeable aesthetic. Most of the corrupt cops he investigated were greedy materialists, funding their appetites with their illegal activities. In Soweto last week Zondi had seen a plasma screen so big, it overshot the wall and hung halfway across a passageway, forcing his team to duck around it until he’d ordered them to remove the bloody thing. He was used to searching houses littered with electronic gear and leather sofas, closets bursting with designer wear and bling, garages with doors that couldn’t close on fat-assed SUVs.
It was almost reassuring to come across the physical manifestation of man’s basest urges. There was no ambiguity. You knew exactly who you were dealing with.
But this was the refuge of a fanatic. A man driven by an inner certainty that not only was he right in doing what he did, but he had to do what he did. In the old days of apartheid Zondi had come up against a few men like that. Different from the boozers and the cowboys, the profiteers; they were the believers. The ones with a mission.
He recognized them because, he supposed, he was one himself.
Zondi shook himself free of his thoughts and walked across to the desk. A laptop, lid closed, lay next to an empty notepad and a cheap ballpoint. Zondi slipped the laptop into its bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he walked across to the bed and opened the Afrikaans Bible that lay on the bedside cabinet. He saw the inscription in cramped writing: TO RUDI. FROM YOUR FATHER ON YOUR TENTH BIRTHDAY.
Even monsters had fathers. And mothers.
Zondi sat on the bed and slid open the cabinet drawer. A Hustler magazine, well thumbed, and a tube of Preparation H hemorrhoid ointment. Zondi, a fastidious man, recoiled from the image of the obese Barnard applying the ointment to his fundament. He slid the drawer closed.
He opened the door to the cabinet and saw a small pile of right-wing Christian tracts. Illiterate bile. Predictable. A photograph, the first he had found in the apartment, lay beneath the pamphlets.
Zondi lifted a faded color shot of four men cooking meat over an open fire out in the bush. They were all white, beefy, holding beers in their hands, and mugging for the camera. He recognized one man immediately, a former Security Police captain who had later publicly apologized for the atrocities he committed during the apartheid years in order to avoid prosecution. The man on the captain’s right was the young Rudi Barnard. No mustache, still heavy, but much slimmer than the mountain of flesh who had wheezed into the interview room the other day.
Zondi stared at the photograph. The quiet conversation of the detectives faded from his ears.
He slipped the photograph into his pocket.
Barnard was parked across from the Station Bar. He saw Captain Lotter step out of the bar and walk toward a new Nissan. Barnard crossed the road and dropped into the passenger seat of the Nissan before Lotter pulled away.
Lotter took one look at Barnard and started shaking his blow-dried head. “I had nothing to do with this. Nothing.”
Barnard laughed one of his sucking laughs. “Relax. If I was going to plug you, I would’ve doneit already.”
“So what do you want?”
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
“All I’ve heard is that there’s a warrant out for you.”
“What for?”
“Killing a kid. And two unidentified males.”
This was unexpected. He’d anticipated some trumped-up charge, but they had connected him to the little half-breed. “I didn’t kill those two bastards.”
Lotter was looking at him. “And the kid?” Barnard said nothing. Lotter shook his head. “Jesus, Barnard.”
“Have they got Galant?”
Lotter nodded. “He’s locked up at Bellwood South. Hear he’s already sung.”
“Piece of shit.” He sucked on his mustache, staring ahead.
“You better disappear bloody fast, Barnard. I don’t fancy your chances in Pollsmoor.”
Barnard said nothing as he lifted himself from the car. He watched Lotter drive away, probably already on his cell phone to Peterson.
Barnard went back to his car and got the hell out of there.
The pressure was on him. He had to move-and fast. The only way he was going to survive this was to get enough money together to go deep underground, change his identity. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
Just like his American friend.
The helicopter cut through Burn’s sleep, low enough for him to hear the blades whipping. The sound of the chopper and the acrid smoke in his nostrils spun him back to February 1991, as an Apache attack helicopter
