That’s when Benny Mongrel hit him, a looping left to the nose. Benny wasn’t a big man, but there wasn’t much you were going to teach him about fighting. He felt the foreman’s nose break under his knuckles.
Isaacs’s hands flew up to his face, blood dripping between his fingers. “You fucken bastard.” This came out muffled. Benny Mongrel kicked him in the balls.
That was when the two cops came in, with their guns out. There was confusion when they came upon the pair of bleeding security men and the dead dog.
It took a bit of explaining. One of them even took notes.
Then the ambulance was there, and they bandaged Benny Mongrel. The paramedic working on Benny Mongrel said he was lucky; the bullet had passed straight through.
The other medic was having a look at Isaacs, told him his nose was broken.
“I fucken know that,” said Isaacs, seriously pissed off. Then he looked at Benny Mongrel. “You come pick up your pay next week, Niemand.”
“Shove it up your ass,” said Benny Mongrel as they walked him out to the ambulance. He had looked back over his shoulder at the dog.
Bye, Bessie.
He didn’t want Sniper Security’s money or its fucken job. He wanted that fat cop. He was going to cut him open like a pig from his balls to his throat and let his guts fall out, let the fat bastard try to hold himself together while Benny Mongrel watched him die.
They finally got to stitch him. Benny Mongrel was stripped to the waist, his prison tattoos making quite a statement under the harsh hospital fluorescents. The bullet had taken a chunk out of his right shoulder, removed part of his tattooed rank.
The doctor was a young woman, probably just out of medical school. Benny Mongrel made her nervous. Her hands shook, and her stitching wasn’t going to win any prizes. She saw him looking down at her handiwork. “It’ll look better when it’s healed.”
He said nothing.
They told Benny Mongrel that they didn’t have a bed for him. He could sleep the night on a bench in the emergency room. Maybe they could find him a blanket.
But he was already walking away, out into the early hours of another Cape Town day.
Carmen Fortune stood in the doorway of her apartment and stared at Gatsby, then at the little blond kid lying limp in his arms, tied up like a Christmas turkey. “What in fuck is that?”
“It’s a kid. What does it look like?”
Gatsby shouldered her aside and went into the apartment. He threw the boy onto the sofa next to where Uncle Fatty was passed out in his briefs.
“Is it dead?”
“If it was dead, I’d throw it in a fucken ditch. Not bring it here.” Gatsby was panting and stinking up the room even more than he usually did.
Carmen closed and locked the front door and went over to the child. A white kid with light hair. Blood clotted on the side of the head. The boy’s hands were tied behind his back and his feet were bound. Carmen could see that the circulation was cut off.
The kid was unconscious.
Carmen looked up at Gatsby. “Why you bring him here?”
“You going to look after him for me.”
“Like fucken hell!”
“For a day or two.”
He pulled out a wad of notes from his waist bag and threw them at her. Carmen caught them with surprising deftness.
She looked at the money hungrily, running a thumb over the notes wrapped in an elastic band. There must have been five hundred there. “I don’t want no trouble.”
He laughed one of his sucking laughs. “All you people know is fucken trouble. It’s in your blood.”
He sat down on the arm of the sofa, his arms dangling limply between his legs like he was a big ape. Carmen shoved the money into her bra, circled the sofa warily. “Whose kid is it?”
“You don’t need to know. You keep him here, keep him out of sight till tomorrow, maybe day after, I give you another grand.”
She stared at him. “Don’t talk shit to me.”
He wiped a huge hand across his face, moving his pudding-bowl fringe aside. “I’m serious.”
“I just got to look after him?”
“That’s all. Give him something to eat. Keep him quiet.”
“And then?”
“And then I come and get him again. And you can go buy you some tik and have a fucken party.”
“Your mother. I don’t tik.”
Gatsby raised his bulk from the sofa, lifted his shirt, and pulled his jeans down. For a horrible moment she thought he was going to expose himself to her, but he was letting her have a look at the pistol at his waist, surrounded by a mass of mottled pink flesh.
“You be a good little girlie, and you get your grand. You let anybody know this kid is here, and I’ll kill you. You get me?” Those dead pig eyes were latched on to her. It made her want to have a bath.
“Ja. I get you.”
He dropped the shirt and trudged to the door.
“Hey,” she called out to him as he reached for the door handle.
He turned. “What?”
“What’s his name?”
“How the fuck must I know?”
“Can I cut him loose? His feet is going blue.”
“Do what the fuck you like. Just keep him hidden.” And the fat boer was gone, slamming the door after him.
Carmen walked back to the sofa and stood looking at the kid. She reached out a hand, tentatively, and touched his throat. She could feel a pulse, fluttering like a bird. His eyelids flickered but stayed shut.
She pulled the tape from his mouth, then worked the cloth free. He sucked air through his mouth but still didn’t regain consciousness. He was a prr h boy, she could see, in his Disney pj’s. A soft little whitey whose nice life just went all to shit. Not her fucken problem. To her he was a godsend. A bonus.
She went across to the kitchen and got a knife so she could cut him loose.
Burn sat in front of the TV. Local news. Images of a child’s body found in a drain out on the Cape Flats. The child had been raped and murdered.
Burn reached for the remote and changed the channel. MTV. Some writhing Latina singing about love gone bad. Jesus, he wished he was back in the States, where he understood the codes. This fucking country was all about angles that he didn’t get. He had the dead gangbanger’s pistol next to him. For some reason it made him feel better. Maybe because he knew that if things got too bad he could use it on himself.
He had to believe that his son was still alive. Matt had been taken for a reason. This was about money. About greed. It had to be.
His cell phone rang, and when he saw Mrs. Dollie’s name come up on caller ID, he allowed himself to believe, for one split second, that she was calling him from her home, not lying dead near the front door.
He answered the phone.
“Mr. Burn?” The man knew his real name. The voice on the other end, heavy with a guttural local accent, was distorted. As if the caller was talking on speakerphone and had muffled his voice to disguise it.
“Who is this?”
“Never mind. I’ve got your kid.”
“Where is he?”
“The boy is okay. And he will stay that way if you do exactly what I say. Understand?”
“Yes. What you want?”
“I want a million. Cash. By the end of tomorrow.”
