pray. Then he would part his air bag-sized butt cheeks and smear Preparation H on his hemorrhoids, clothe himself in jeans and check shirts from the Big ’n Tall shop, strap on his Z88 9 mm service pistol, and go forth and dispense frontier justice in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Unbidden, an image of Carmen Fortune’s body came to him, her breasts and thighs barely covered by the short nightgown. He pushed it away. Barnard couldn’t remember when last he’d had sex with a woman. Sometime before his bitch of a wife had finally left him. He didn’t miss her or the screwing. He had always found the process disgusting. When the urge grew too great for prayer to subdue, he spent a few guiltstricken minutes in communion with his hand and a Hustler magazine.
To distract himself from that image of the half-breed’s brown thighs, he grabbed the mike of the car radio, barking out an APB on Rikki Fortune’s red BMW. Saying it might be in the Sea Point area. He wasn’t desperate for the five grand Rikki owed him. His web of vice and corruption generated a constant source of income that met his modest needs. But he couldn’t let a little cunt like Rikki get away with anything.
Fear was his God-fueled power. Any sign of weakness and it would be his body found dumped in an open strip of veld.
The law of the jungle.
Burn paced the waiting room of a private hospital in a leafy suburb of Cape Town, his son sleeping on a chair, his young wife and her detached placenta somewhere behind swinging doors, and two dead bodies going cold in his dining room.
When they’d fled the United States three months before, he’d had little time to decide on a destination. Not Asia, because they would be too visible and he had wanted to be sure of medical care for his pregnant wife. Not Europe, too much of a colony of the States. It would be harder to disappear. It was a toss-up between Sydney or Cape Town. Australia, despite its huge landmass, had a tiny population, and Burn had felt claustrophobic just thinking about it. South Africa sounded good, with a Western infrastructure if you could afford it, but chaotic enough for a man to fall through the cracks.
But that chaos had reached out and grabbed hold of his life by the throat.
“Sir?” A pale-skinned young nurse in a crisp uniform appeared before him. “You can see your wife now.”
Burn stood and reached down for Matt. The nurse shook her head. “I’m sorry, but the little boy can’t go in wit you.” She smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll sit with him.”
Burn managed a smile in return. “Thank you.”
Susan was in a private ward that looked like a hotel room. She lay in bed, wan and beautiful. She opened her eyes when Burn came in.
He hesitated, then took her hand. She let him. “How are you feeling?”
“Everything’s okay, Jack. My baby is fine.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“I just need to stay in here for a couple of days.”
“Good. Let them take care of you.”
She took her hand back. “You go now.”
“Are you okay?”
“I just want to sleep.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She nodded, closing her eyes, already withdrawing from him as he walked away.
CHAPTER 3
It was just past 10:00 p.m. when Burn slowed the Jeep Cherokee outside his house. He was tense, expecting police cars and security patrol vehicles. There were cars, all right, more than usual, lining both sides of the road. But they were the luxury vehicles common to these streets of plenty: convertibles and SUVs.
The night, now that the wind had died, was still and hot, and he caught the tang of animal fat cooking on a wood fire. He had to fight back a sudden feeling of nausea, knowing what waited for him in his dining room.
He pressed the garage remote, and as the door rolled up he heard snatches of an overorchestrated version of a Beatles song he couldn’t place, and the trill of genteel laughter wafting across from the party at a neighboring house. He nosed the car into the garage and released the door. He sat for a minute, listening to the sound of his son sleeping on the rear seat, before he opened the car door.
Burn carried Matt into the living room and lay him down on the sofa. The sliding doors to the dining room were closed. He had shut them so the paramedics who came to attend to Susan wouldn’t see the carnage within.
Burn went into the kitchen and took heavy-duty black garbage bags from the drawer by the sink. He found a roll of duct tape and a retractable carpet knife and pulled on a pair of plastic kitchen gloves.
He checked that Matt was still sleeping and quietly opened the sliding doors. Burn had killed men in Iraq, but it had been nothing like what had happened in his home that night. Combat during Desert Storm had the surreal feel of a PlayStation game, the high-tech weaponry keeping death at a distance.
Not like this.
The tall man lay on his back, the carving knife still buried in his chest. The bullet he had taken from the short man’s gun had entered his abdomen below the ribs. He’d bled out. Burn could take some refuge in the knowledge that stabbing the man had been a reflex, a primitive impulse to protect his family.
There could be no such comfort taken from the death of the short man, who lay in his own blood, milky eyes fixed on the ceiling, the gaping wound in his throat like an accusing mouth. To call him a man was an exaggeration; he looked no older than twenty, and his smallness made Burn’s actions seem all the more brutal. Burn had disarmed him, rendered him harmless. In a normal world Burn would have called the cops and let the law enforcement machinery do what it was meant to do.
But Jack Burn no longer lived in a normal world, and the police had not been an option. So he had murdered the scrawny man. And telling himself that he’d had no choice didn’t make him feel any better.
Benny Mongrel watched the house next door.
He heard the slap of car doors and a man laughing. The party up the road was still going strong. Bessie had been on edge all night, what with that gunshot and the music and the white people laughing like horses. But mostly because of the food; that smell of meat cooking on the fire had driven her nearly crazy. She sat next to him, shifting on her aching hips, her snout still searching the air for the smell of lamb on the spit.
He stroked her coarse fur. “Don’t worry, old girl,” he whispered. “There’ll be pickings for us in the bins tomorrow.”
Benny Mongrel was on edge, too. He pondered, over and over again, the significance of the gangsters disappearing into that house.
The Americans.
When Benny Mongrel was eighteen, a member of the Americans gang called Bowtie April had chopped him with an ax, taking his left eye and caving his face in from brow to chin. He had killed Bowtie, torn his throat out with his bare hands, before he allowed the cops to drag him off to the hospital. The doctors hadn’t cared a fuck about another gangster punk. On the Cape Flats reconstructive surgery wasn’t on the menu. They had stitched him up and sent him to prison.
He was a blood Mongrel. His name and the tattoos that scarred his body were testament to that. So when he went to prison for the first time, he knew which of the number gangs he was destined to join. The prison number gangs: the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s. They rule the prisons. Anyone stupid enough to resist the law of the number ends up dead.
Or worse.
The Americans are always 26s. The Mongrels are always 28s. No one asks why. It is just so. And they hate each other. So those men who had seen their mothers tonight would get no sympathy from Benny Mongrel.
He watched as the garage door rolled up again. Nearly midnight. The Jeep reversed out and the doors closed. The guy and his son passed beneath him again as they drove away.
“Ja what, they got a mess to clean up, Bessie.”
