back seat.
‘You tired, Josh?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded while assisting one of his Action Men to wrestle with a small tiger.
‘We’ll be at a hotel soon,’ she said, although as she drove on there was no sign of the neighbourhood improving. She assured herself that the beach would be a completely different kettle of fish once she found it. No doubt it would be developed and bustling, just as in the television programmes on LA she had seen.
Sally crossed an intersection and passed a block of predominantly wooden bungalows with cracked paintwork and old shingle roofs. The buildings were even more dilapidated than those on the previous street. The number of tramps or homeless-looking people also seemed to increase and as she came to the end of the street she passed a long row of what could only be described as makeshift kennels on the sidewalk. Built of debris, driftwood and plastic sheets, they were inhabited by humans, not animals. It was as if she had travelled back in time to the Depression.
A boy suddenly ran out onto the road up ahead, followed by others, forcing Sally to brake suddenly. But she didn’t stop completely and steered around them as they banged on her window and shouted in guttural Spanish. Josh looked up, suddenly uneasy.
She came to a T-junction and stopped to look both ways. Neither direction showed much promise so she turned north, looking for the next road heading west. Every block was penetrated by dirty, rubbish-filled alleyways. As she arrived at a small intersection she took the left turn, hoping that the sea would soon come into view. But the ground rose sharply as the road headed uphill. The quality of the houses improved slightly but they all had security gates, as well as bars on the lower windows. Some had barbed wire along the tops of their outer walls. It seemed as though every person she passed, none of them white, looked at her suspiciously. This made Sally conscious of the fact that she was a lone white woman in a nice car and obviously in the wrong place.
Cars were parked on both sides of the street, most of them in a run-down condition. This was not the LA that she had seen on TV – it was closer to a shanty town in a Johannesburg suburb.
As Sally came to the crest of the hill she could see that several cars were double-parked, making the street barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass along. She slowed to navigate between the cars when suddenly a sedan shot backwards out of an alleyway and reversed along the street towards her. She braked hard.
The sedan screeched to a stop yards in front of her and a large man in a leather jacket jumped out of the passenger side, ran over to a shorter man walking along the pavement and started to beat the living daylights out of him.
Sally could not believe what she was seeing.
‘Where’s the fuckin’ money, asshole?’ the big man yelled as he kicked the other who had dropped to the ground to protect himself from the vicious blows of the thug’s fists.
Sally looked around at the road behind. She considered reversing back down the hill but did not trust her driving skills with a left-hand-drive vehicle. Her anguish increased and, feeling helpless and scared, she pushed the centre of her steering wheel and gave a blast of her horn.
The man doing the beating paused while holding on to the collar of his near-unconscious victim whose face was by now bleeding badly. He looked at Sally with a murderous glint in his eyes. ‘Leka! Take care a’ that bitch,’ he shouted.
The sedan’s reversing lights were still on. To Sally’s shock it suddenly accelerated backwards and hit her car hard enough to make her fly forward and bang her chin on the steering wheel, stalling her vehicle.
Josh started to cry and call out for her, increasing her anxiety. Then the driver’s door opened and Leka climbed out. He was a large man, dark-skinned though not Latino. His features were more Slavic or Eastern European.
As Leka reached her car, Sally quickly hit the central locking system, securing the doors. She watched the man as he moved with relaxed ease, wearing a malicious expression that she found immediately frightening. As he reached her door he slammed the side of her vehicle with his hand and then ripped off a wing mirror.
‘Move the fucking car, bitch!’ he shouted.
Sally’s panic rocketed and she tried to start the car as Josh cried behind her. ‘It’s okay, Josh,’ she said. She turned the key in the ignition and the starter motor turned over. But the engine failed to come to life.
Leka banged on her window as if he was trying to break in. ‘I said move it, bitch!’ he shouted.
Sally’s efforts to start the car became desperate as she turned the key repeatedly without luck.
The man yanked hard on the door handle and then violently kicked the car, incensed at being denied entry. ‘Move the fucken’ car, bitch!’ he yelled again as though her efforts were not enough.
The man beating his victim unconscious on the sidewalk stepped back, and straightened his shirt and jacket, as if he had finished for the time being. ‘Next time I cut your legs and arms off, you understand? You got twenty- four hours, then we don’t talk no more,’ he said. The brute was as tall as his friend Leka but broader. He appeared to come from the same part of the world.
Sally looked around, hoping for help. Although there were a handful of people looking on with interest, none of them appeared to want to come any closer.
Sally pushed on the horn once again and this time held it down.
‘Turn that off!’ Leka yelled venomously. ‘Turn it off!’ he repeated, kicking out at the car again. Then something in the man snapped. He walked between the parked cars to a pile of rubbish on the sidewalk, picked up a large chunk of concrete and came back with it.
Sally released the horn to try and start the car once again but the engine was dead. Leka raised the concrete slab above his head and brought it crashing down onto the windscreen, cracking it so that it crazed in all directions. Sally screamed and leaned on the horn once more.
Leka raised the slab and brought it down again, this time shattering the windscreen completely and showering Sally with glass. Desperate and beside herself with fear she grabbed her handbag and fumbled inside. She found her phone and struggled to hold it steady while she hit the keys.
Leka reached inside the car and grabbed hungrily for her like a wild beast. ‘Come ’ere, you fucken’ bitch!’ he yelled as he clutched a piece of Sally’s clothing which tore as she pulled back.
Stratton was asleep in his hotel room when he heard his mobile phone chirping in the pocket of his jacket, which hung across the back of a chair by the bed. He looked at the window and saw that it was dark outside. Then he reached for his jacket and pulled it onto the bed. He took the phone out of the pocket and when he saw the name on the phone’s screen he hit the receive button swiftly. What he heard sent a chill through his entire body. A woman was screaming hysterically and in the background he could hear a man’s voice shouting.
‘Sally! Sally!’ he shouted as he leaped out of bed. But it was evident that Sally no longer had the phone and was probably fighting for her life.
Sally had dropped the phone and was scrambling over the back of the driver’s seat to protect her son. But Leka was already halfway in through the destroyed windscreen and reaching for her with his long, powerful arms. He caught hold of her ankle and yanked her back with brutish force, ripping her grip from the back of the seat as he pulled her towards him. He grabbed her by the hair with his other hand and with the same awful violence kept dragging her back, twisting her painfully so that she was now on her back halfway out through the windscreen and feeling as if her spine was about to break. She could no longer scream, the position of her body making it difficult even to breathe.
‘You still wanna fuck with me?’ Leka shouted, sliding down off the hood and dragging her to the side of the shattered wind-screen, his face close to hers. The other thug walked over calmly and joined his partner to look down on Sally’s contorted face. ‘What you wanna do with her, Ardian?’ Leka asked. Obviously his friend was the dominant one of the two. ‘Shall we fuck her, or fuck her?’ He laughed at his sophisticated use of the language that was not his mother tongue.
‘Bitches don’t get outta line,’ Ardian said coldly. He brought his fist up into the back of Sally’s neck with such force that something snapped. She went limp in Leka’s arms and he released her.
Sally remained still, dangling awkwardly halfway out of the windscreen, facing the sky and gurgling gently.
‘Guess we fucked her,’ Leka said, smirking.
‘Guess we did,’ Ardian agreed. The two men looked along the street. The handful of youths who had
