Zoo City

Huron emerges from the house, freshly showered, wearing a satiny bathrobe. In the distance, sirens howl. He stops to look at Carmen, slumped limply on the deck chair in a pool of blood.

'You did make a mess of little Carmencita,' he says, with only the faintest smack of regret.

'She was no good to you,' Mark scowls. 'And now we can use her as bait.' He tips the recliner up onto its wheels, to demonstrate, and carts Carmen towards the pool.

'I'll skip. There's been too much activity around here already.' The sirens are getting louder. Sentinel finally catching a wake-up. I crouch in the shrubbery, wondering how to get the Mongoose out.

'We won't be long,' Amira says as Mark tips the recliner, sending Carmen sliding into the water. She bobs up, floating limply, her back like a pale mushroom growing from the surface of the water, her blonde bob drifting in a halo around her head. 'It should come right up-'

The Crocodile is already there, disguised under the leaves. It noses at her body. Odi leans over to look, despite himself. It's a simple matter for the Crocodile to just reach up and fold its jaws on him. It's almost gentle. But then it clamps down. Its teeth rip into his stomach. Huron screams like a slaughterhouse pig in a PETA video.

The sirens are getting louder. Lights flash between the trees at the bottom of the driveway. Huron fumbles for his gun. 'Help me, you fucks!' he yells at Amira and Mark. But they don't move an inch.

Swearing, Odi manages to reach between the Crocodile's jaws to yank his gun out of the holster. He presses the muzzle to the Crocodile's eye and fires. It bursts in a gelatinous spray and the Crocodile jerks its head back in shock. Odi screams as teeth tear through his gut. A grey coil of greasy entrails is dragged from the wound. The Crocodile thrashes, slamming its tormentor against the side of the pool. Odi struggles, swapping the gun to his left hand. He reaches deep into the creature's mouth. There is a muffled bang.

The Crocodile goes slack. Its jaw unlocks. Huron starts pulling himself free, but the monster's weight is dragging

them both back into the water.

'Help me, Jesus, fuck, help me! Amira!' Huron extends a meaty hand.

'What do you think, sweetie? Should we help him?' Mark muses.

'I think our business is done,' Amira says. 'Goodbye, Odi.'

'Please,' he begs. The Crocodile slips further back into the pool, its shoulders disappearing into the water. 'At least don't let me drown. At least give me that.'

'It's been good working with you,' says Marabou, stepping forward. She extends her boot, braces it against Huron's chest, and shoves. The tangle of man and Crocodile slides over the edge of the tiles and sinks into the water.

A muffled shout comes from the bottom of the driveway. 'Armed response!'

'A pity to lose the Crocodile, but what can you do?' Marabou says, watching as Odi chokes and splutters and goes under. She starts to fray around the edges like the light is unravelling around her.

'Oh sweetie, there'll be other procurements,' the Maltese says. Then he takes her hand and they simply vanish. A smudge of movement against the torchlight as footsteps thud up the driveway towards us.

Armed response finds me sitting slumped by the pool and the Mongoose bristling at my side, staring at the ripples on the dark water.

35.

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Crime Watch with Mandlakazi Mabuso

The day the music died

They said the music industry had teeth – but who knew they meant literally! Legendary music producer Odysseus 'Odious' Huron got himself chowed last night by his secret animal, a moerse white Crocodile after slaughtering twin teen pop sensation iJusi in a gruesome muti murder! Turns out the man behind some of the finest talent in this country was also a bigtime tsotsi, running drugs, killing homeless zoos for muti, feeding others to his Crocodile and cultivating talent only so he could slice them open! Some 20 bodies so far have been recovered from a secret underground lake, including a woman's skeleton that police refuse to comment on, but let's just say my sources on the inside say the investigation into Lily Nobomvu's fatal car-crash is being re-opened! Yoh! Turn to our special eyewitness report on page 10 for all the verskriklike details!

Police have seized all assets, but I hear there's a moerse sum of money missing from his account. Just goes to show you never know who's a zoo. Rapper Slinger isn't. Odious Huron is. Who else is hiding an animal under their bed?

Meanwhile, a pretty boy journo has a lot to answer for. Seems one of lad-mag Mach's senior people has been running email scams from his office address! Tut-tut, skat. Don't you know when it comes to porn and fraud, you don't use your work email?

36.

It's 4:30 am and the queue to the Beit Bridge border is already more than a thousand cars long, and that's on the South African side. Never mind the torrent of refugees trying to cross over from Zimbabwe. Barbed-wire fences barricade the dusty scrub on the riverbank from anyone stupid or desperate enough to try to swim across from Zimbabwe. After all, there are crocodiles in that river.

The high drone of cicadas rises with the heat as we inch forward one car at a time through the carbon- monoxide fug. There is a bus two cars ahead of me loaded down on its axles with bags and chickens and a cram of people. The tangle of lost things on that bus swarms like a cloud of spaghetti.

And even here, there's that Zoo City hustle going on. Maybe it's not peculiar to Hillbrow. Maybe it's South Africa. You do what it takes, you take the opportunities. Vendors walk up and down the line of cars selling warm cold-drinks and chips, single skyfs or packs of Remington Gold. Two girls in short skirts and dusty high heels lean in the window of a 4x4 flirtatiously. It's a 24-hour border post. People have 24-hour needs.

Sloth is hidden in a rattan bag full of clothes with a hole slashed in the side for him to breathe. The bag is stacked on the roof amid a jumble of other bags, loaded with the kinds of things returning Zimbabweans bring home for their families. Clothes and canned food, blankets, appliances, toilet paper, sanitary pads. I will dump these on the other side. They're only a cover while I'm still in South African territory. Still in Inspector Tshabalala's jurisdiction. Never mind Vuyo's.

The Capri has had a paint job. It's now black. The window has been fixed. It has new plates to go with my new Zimbabwean passport in the name of Tatenda Murapata, twenty-nine, full-time nanny going home for a holiday. D'Nice sourced the papers for me, to make up for pointing the cops in the direction of my apartment. But only after I threatened to frame him for Mrs Luditsky's murder. He doesn't need to know I already handed over the knife after I retrieved it from the drain along with the china kitten. He even got me a good exchange rate on my counterfeit notes. Just because they're fake doesn't mean they don't have value, particularly when dealing with border officials who don't look too closely.

Benoit is still in hospital. Critical condition, the doctors say. They speak in medical terms, but what I understand is broken ribs, a bruised heart, a punctured lung, nerve damage to his dislocated arm. He will need months of physiotherapy. He may never recover the full use of it. But the worst is the bite. It's the magic. Animal wounds take longer to heal, come with stranger side-effects. He sways between fevered moments of wakefulness and unconsciousness that's borderline coma, but with more erratic brain activity, like he's still fighting monsters in