“To show you your mother,” Benny said, and slipped the knife between the American’s ribs. He pulled the knife out, watched the dying man slump to his knees, heard the screams of the girl, and calmly walked back to where the Mongrels stood. He handed the knife to the leader.
From then on he was Benny Mongrel. He lived by his wits, and he developed an almost infallible sixth sense. He knew when trouble was coming.
He and his knife were always ready.
The truck slammed to a halt in the Sniper Security yard in Salt River. Bessie lost her footing and skidded in the back of the truck, her nails fighting for a grip on the slick metal. One of the other guards laughed but quickly shut up when he saw Benny Mongrel looking at him. Benny Mongrel helped Bessie down. Her hips were always much worse in the morning, and she limped when he led her off toward the kennel enclosure.
“Hey, Niemand.” Ishmael Isaacs, the shift foreman, stood across the yard. He waited for Benny Mongrel to come across to him. The epaulettes on the shoulders of his crisp uniform were a sign of his seniority.
Isaacs, a brown man like Benny Mongrel, had done prison time, and the fading tattoos on his arms proved that. He had been out for years and had made a better life for himself. Benny Mongrel knew that Isaacs had taken against him from the start, probably because he was an ex-con, an uncomfortable reminder of the foreman’s own past.
“What’s up with that dog?” Isaacs watched Bessie’s painful progress as they neared him.
“Nothing, Mr. Isaacs.”
“She always walk like so?”
“No, she just a bit stiff. From being in the truck.”
Isaacs grunted, his eyes scanning Benny Mongrel. He sniffed the air. “When last you wash?”
“Yesterday. Before work.”
“Your ass stinks.” Isaacs stretched out an arm and flicked a dismissive finger at Benny Mongrel’s sleeve. “And don’t they teach you to iron in Pollsmoor?”
Benny Mongrel said nothing, not showing anything on his face. Like this fucker was a warder back in prison.
“Tomorrow, one hour before shift, you rort to me for inspection.”
“Yes, Mr. Isaacs.”
“And make sure your ass is clean and your kit looks proper. Or I dock your pay. Got me?”
“Yes.”
Benny Mongrel watched as Isaacs turned on his heel and walked away. He wanted to show that bastard the epaulettes tattooed on his own shoulders, real rank, earned the hard way. Then he wanted to show him his knife.
But he whistled softly and led Bessie off toward the kennels.
Burn woke up with a wet body against his. For a crazy, nightmarish moment he was sure the dead men were in the bed with him. This was enough to jolt him upright like he’d been tasered, and he flung the covers aside. Matt was sleeping next to him, and he had wet the bed. For the first time in nearly two years.
Burn lay back, calming his racing pulse. He cradled his sleeping son and stroked his head. Then an image came into his mind. A red BMW parked next door, outside the building site. He’d glimpsed it when he’d followed the ambulance to the clinic and wondered if it had brought the dead men to his street.
When he’d come home after dumping the bodies, the party next door had still been going strong, the BMW lost among the other cars. He’d forgotten about the red car. All he’d wanted was to wash the stink of death from his hands and body.
He looked at the bedside clock. It was after seven.
Burn pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and left his son sleeping on the damp double bed. He unlocked the front door of the house and went down through the small front garden to the door set into the high wall. He opened it, peering out cautiously.
The BMW was still there, but so were the building crew. There was no way he was going to be able to move the car unobserved. Burn cursed himself. This was a loose end he shouldn’t have allowed. But the decision was forced on him: he would have to leave the car until that evening, when the builders were done for the day.
Burn shut the door.
CHAPTER 5
Benny Mongrel climbed from the minibus taxi that had dropped him in Lavender Hill. He slung his small kit bag over his shoulder and set off, walking like he was hugging the wall of an invisible prison corridor.
Apartheid’s faceless bureaucrats had displayed a macabre sense of humor when, with a pen stroke, they banished thousands of people to ghettos on the Cape Flats with sweet names like Surrey Estate, Blue Downs, and Ravensmead. This was no more apparent than in Lavender Hill, where there was no lavender and not a single hill, just an endless sprawl of cramped houses built on windswept scrubland.
Benny Mongrel passed a straggle of pedestrians and dodged sidewalk vendors selling fruit, vegetables, cigarettes, and cheap sweets that tasted like piss. Even though he wore a cap, the hard morning light threw his livid scar into stark relief. His ruined face was like an icebreaker on the prow of a ship, parting people in his wake. They whispered behind his back, and only the half-naked children with snot-caked faces stared openly. He didn’t care what people said as long as they left him alone.
Benny Mongrel lived in a shack behind a narrow house. He unlocked the padlock on the makeshift door and stepped inside, his eyes adjusting to the windowless gloom. A stained mattress, a blanket scarred by cigarette burns, a three-legged chair, a primus stove, and a rusted tub to wash in. The corrugated iron room was barely big enough for him to spread his arms wide, and he couldn’t stand upright without his head touching the roof.
Once a day he was allowed into the bathroom of the main house to empty his slop bucket. A frayed extension cable snaked from the house, giving power to the naked lightbulb that dangled from a hook in the roof of his shack.
The place was a furnace in summer and flooded during the winter rains, but Benny Mongrel didn’t mind. After spending decades sharing prison cells designed for ten men with fifty others, the shack felt luxurious.
When he was released from prison, he had made a decision not to return to Lotus River, where he’d spent his brief youth. He had no family and nobody to call a friend, but he could have fallen in with the older Mongrels, who sat in taverns, drinking, smoking marijuana and tik, reminiscing, and planning the action that would send them back to the security of prison.
He never wanted to go back. Somehow he knew that a different sort of life was possible outside prison, even though he wasn’t sure exactly what that was. The only clue was Bessie. He missed the old dog during the empty, endless days. He couldn’t wait to see her at night, feel the reassuring sandpapery rasp of her tongue on his hand.
Benny Mongrel lay on the mattress in his trousers, his torso alive with crude prison tattoos: epaulettes indicating his officer rank on his shoulders, the words I dig my grave and evil one scrawled across his chest. Dollar signs, knives, and pistols. A Zulu shield, the emblem of the 28s.
It was too hot to sleep, and the relentless southeaster sandblasted Lavender Hill.
He thought about what had happened the night before. About those men who went into the house and never came back. The Americans. The 26s.
Benny Mongrel had killed more Americans than he could remember, in prison and out. The Mongrels and the Americans were kept apart in Pollsmoor. They watched each other uneasily in the corridors and across the exercise yard. Every now and then a new prisoner would come in, and one of the older gangsters would order him to kill one of the enemy, as an initiation rite. If he balked, he was gang-raped and made a wife.
Benny Mongrel had passed his initiation without blinking.
The last man he had killed had been an American, a 26, a year before he was paroled. There had been a half-heard word, an insult muttered as he passed. In prison this could not go unanswered. Benny Mongrel could have ordered a junior to do what needed to be done. But he preferred to do the work himself.
In the showers he slid the prison shank between the American’s tattooed ribs. He held the man close as he
