wagged its tail and pissed itself with happiness when it saw Benny Mongrel.
He knelt down and scooped the puppy up into his hands. The puppy licked him and wiggled like an uncoiling spring, pawing at him, trying to get to his face with its tongue. The paws were large, and Benny Mongrel knew that this puppy would grow up to be a big dog. The size of Bessie.
He stroked the puppy, feeling the smooth fur on its back. And feeling something that scared him: the thawing of his stone-cold heart.
Gently, he set the dog down. He stood up, gathered his stolen clothes, and walked on up the mountain. He never once looked back as the puppy tried at first to follow him, then stopped and sat down on the pathway and scratched at its ear.
Benny Mongrel was free.
Susan lay in the bed in the clinic, feeding her baby. Matt lay on the bed beside her, asleep, clean, dressed in crisp hospital pajamas. When the nurse had brought Lucy in for her early morning feeding, Susan had seen the uniformed policeman still seated outside the door.
Susan knew that the next phase of her life was not going to be easy. A man from the U.S. Consulate had come to see her the night before, a smarmy pretty-boy who looked like he’d been dragged from a game of tennis. He told her she would be escorted back to the States as soon as she was strong enough to travel. Aside from the court appearances and-if she was lucky-a period of probation, there were very real practical issues to face. Like money, or the lack of it.
Their house in Los Angeles had been seized and their bank accounts frozen. Susan was broke. She hadn’t worked since she had married Jack Burn, and she knew that facing life as a single parent was going to be tough. That was okay, though; her children were alive and with her. Even if her husband wasn’t.
Matt woke up and looked up at her. “You want something to drink, Matty?”
He shook his head, clinging to her hand. He sucked the thumb of his free hand. She gently disengaged the thumb from his mouth. He hadn’t spoken since Zondi had brought him to her the evening before. Something had happened to him in those two days out on the Cape Flats. He’d been examined at the hospital, and aside from a bump on his head there was no sign of any physical injury. He’d appeared a little groggy, and a blood test had confirmed that he’d been fed sedatives but not enough to be life threatening.
Susan knew that her son had been injured on a deeper, invisible level. The type of injury that had turned this happy and extroverted child into a frightened shadow.
God damn you, Jack, she heard herself saying. God damn you wherever you are.
The tire burst somewhere north of a parched town Burn blew through so fast he couldn’t catch the name.
He’d been running since the evening before. Since the call from Susan. When he had told her that last lie, knowing the cops were waiting for him at the clinic. He’d allowed himself a minute to feel relief that Matt was safe, to register that his daughter had been born; then he had turned Barnard’s battered Ford north and driven through the night.
The morning found him somewhere in the Kalahari Desert. An endless expanse of red sand, prehistoric trees reaching like clutching hands from the dunes toward the cloudless sky. The road was flat and straight, a length of shimmering black ribbon laid across the sand. Not since he’d been in Iraq had he felt this kind of dry heat. Each breath burned his throat and his lungs.
He was exhausted, but he couldn’t stop. He wasn’t only running from the cops; he was running from the memories. Images of Susan and Matt and fragile, imaginary snapshots of his new baby girl that threatened to dissolve and disappear. The farther he was away from his family, the better off they would be. Of that he was certain.
A semi swam toward him out of the haze, and the wind of its passing buffeted the Ford, dragging Burn from within himself.
He drank water from a plastic bottle and splashed some on his face. He didn’t have a plan, exactly. Knew only that he had to get out of South Africa, cross into neighboring Botswana, and catch the first plane out. It didn’t matter where. Just put as much distance as he could between himself and Cape Town. He had the money and the William Morton passport, and he knew that the border between the two countries snaked through the unpatrollable desert. There was a good chance he wouldn’t have to trouble immigration officials.
He just had to keep his foot flat. Keep on going.
He heard a tuneless version of “Good Vibrations,” and he realized that he was singing. When he caught himself waiting for Matt to join in the chorus, he shut up.
Shut up in time to hear the bang an instant before he felt the Ford veer wildly to the left. He fought the steering, trying to keep the car on the road. But the tires found the gravel on the shoulder, and the car was flying away from him, flipping, cartwheeling, in a dance of torn metal and glass and bloodred sand.
The last thing Jack Burn saw was the sun in his eyes.
Then nothing.
