Bones Omnibus (27 page)

She looked a little embarrassed, as if worried that it was her performance that had cut things short. He knew this sort of thing was drilled into the girls for a reason. He’d known plenty of pimps and flesh traffickers in his day. The goal was to ensure that no client was able to divert his mind and consider the girl’s actual circumstances, breaking the fantasy. That training was the difference between a street walker in Langa that would cost only a handful of rand versus the thousands Charles would pay to punt those thoughts forward a few hours.

“I know your driver isn’t due back here until two,” Charles said, breaking script for the sake of expedience while realizing he hoped to sound gallant. “But that’s an hour and a half away. I can’t have you waiting around here until then or until we can get in touch with him. So, if you just give me an address you wish to be dropped off at, I’ll get word to your…” He struggled to come up with a word other than pimp, “…
patron
, that there were extenuating circumstances and your early egress had nothing to do with you.”

She affected a demure stance for a moment longer. Or, as demure a post-coital pose could be now that Charles had flipped on the bright overhead fluorescents. But then she nodded and offered an address in Clifton.

Charles was surprised. Clifton was a tony, oceanfront neighborhood. If he’d been made to offer an opinion, he would’ve expected her to reside in the Cape Flats on the other side of Table Mountain. Manenberg or some place. But then he realized that the Clifton house was likely by her syndicate and probably housed several girls. He wondered if it was actually some kind of brothel that he could potentially try out during the day.

But it was good news. Clifton was on the way to Pollsmoor. If he’d had to drop her in the Flats, it would mean taking the N2 around the mountain, then weaving overland to whatever district she called home. From there, he’d have to figure out the best way to get over to the M3 and from there, the prison. Clifton meant a straight shot down the M6 and then crossing the range on the M63. It would be a quiet drive this time of night with the occasional pleasant view of the South Atlantic.

Charles took a two-minute shower. Though his guest offered to join him, he was all business now and declined. When he exited the bathroom, he found her dressed and waiting at the foot of the bed. Even then she had a look of expectation on her face. It was as if she’d mentally prepared herself to learn that all this hubbub was actually in service of some still-unfolding sex game. The chief warden wondered if powerful men really did arrange such things;
t
he country’s economic future depends on me making this meeting, but…what’s one more shag
?

He could see at least a couple of the nation’s new captains of industry getting off on that.

Once they were in the car, the woman said not a word. His mind was already crafting an exit strategy that would get him out of the prison as quickly as possible, but he caught himself stealing glances at her. Wearing last night’s cocktail dress, she looked smaller, as if playing dress-up. He wondered what her concerns might be. Did she expect a row when she showed up unannounced in Clifton? Worse, did she fear her pay might be docked?

He was just considering whether she might have a child at home when he felt her hand on his leg. But rather than the soft touch he remembered from the bedroom, it was one tensed, as if with alarm. He glanced down to it, just as something new appeared in his peripheral vision. He couldn’t have been distracted for more than a second.

The first bullet hit the windshield with such force that Charles thought he’d struck a person. The safety glass spider-webbed, then collapsed inward, folding in on itself as the warden slammed on the brakes. It was only after realizing the dull throb in his chest came not from the tightening of the seatbelt that he noticed he’d been shot. A large hole had been blasted into his chest, though it was another instant before he felt as if his entire body had been set aflame.

The fusillade began in earnest now, high-powered rifle bullets punching through the car’s chassis like cannonballs through cake. Within seconds, the shredded vehicle came to a halt, almost entirely disassembling, blood and oil commingling in a long smear across the pavement.

“F
uckin’ Africa!”

Pittsburgh Police Sergeant Billy Youman writhed in agony. Even though it was over a hundred degrees outside, he’d woken up around four that morning, his teeth chattering and his limbs quaking. His sheets were now completely soaked through with sweat despite him finding it quite impossible to get warm.

“Goddammit!” he croaked, reaching yet again for the television remote. “What the
shit
?!”

Of course, he’d been warned. Don’t drink the water; don’t eat fruits and vegetables, as they had likely been washed in local water; don’t order drinks with ice cubes; brush your teeth dry, but then don’t wash the brush under the tap.

He tried to recall any moment over the past twenty-four hours that he might’ve slipped up. Did he not wipe the lip of the Coke he’d had with lunch? Had his breakfast yogurt been properly sealed? Was the barbecue they’d picked up at the braai actually cooked to within an inch of its life?

What could it
be
?

A memory.

It was only a flash. Less an image, more a feeling. Something moist on his lips. It wasn’t food. It was…

“Oh, God,” Billy realized, a new attack sending him into convulsions. “That
motherfucker
. Oh, God…”

Before he could even conjure the image of his assailant, his bowels seized. He had mere seconds to reach the bathroom. Racked with now violent tremors, he threw himself out of bed and hurried to the WC. With one hand he unbuckled his belt as his other slapped on the light switch.

A second later, as he evacuated the little bottled water he’d tried to keep down fifteen minutes earlier, his bare feet hovering just above the frigid linoleum of the bathroom floor, the picture of his saboteur formed in his mind. It was an animal, a German shepherd who was allegedly his partner. In his mind, he watched the vile creature give him an enthusiastic lick across the face only the afternoon before.

Moments after he’d drunk from a bowl shared by all the animals at the training grounds.

“That
motherfucker
,” the sergeant repeated, though the sound of his chattering teeth drowned out his voice.

The object of Sergeant Youman’s enmity was at that very moment lapping thirstily from the same community water dish at the South African Police Service’s training facility in Muizenberg. The dog had been running since before first light, an endless series of exercises that would’ve exhausted all but the most committed canines, with a temporary handler. But rather than challenge the massive German shepherd, said temporary handler, a recent graduate of the Metro Police Training Academy named Moosa Xabanisi, thought it exhilarated him.

“Great time, Bones!” Moosa said, stroking the dog’s back. “I’ve never seen one of our dogs get through the course so quickly.”

Bones seemed to delight in the praise, the New Mexico–born police dog twisting his neck around to give Moosa a quick lick on the lips. Residual flecks of water from the community dog dish bounced from Bones’s whiskers and tongue to Moosa’s mouth. The South African trainer playfully feigned disgust.

“Careful, Bones!” Moosa cried. “You don’t want the other dogs to think I’m fraternizing with the competition.”

But the police dog kept licking anyway. In the absence of his American handler, he was happy to have found a new playmate.

“We heard anything new from Youman?” barked a voice from a few yards away.

Gabe Eachus was from Chicago, a middle-aged fitness nut with twenty-one years in the Illinois State Police. His jaw looked as if it could absorb hammer blows. He stalked over to the more slightly built Moosa as if planning to pound him into the ground.

“No, sir,” Moosa replied, getting to his feet. “Not since he called in this morning.”

“We all got the same vaccinations,” the cop remarked, his accent straight out of a Hollywood movie. “Think he’s faking? Maybe went on a bender last night?”

“I can’t speculate.” Moosa shrugged. “Everyone’s natural immunity is different. There’s no telling when it comes to stomach viruses.”

Moosa waited for the big American to reply, perhaps say something else negative about the host country as the foreigners had been doing all week, sometimes overtly, though mostly when they thought no one was listening. But it appeared Eachus was already losing interest. The Chicago handler’s dog, Brutus, a Belgian malinois, hadn’t done particularly well that morning and had fallen asleep before finishing his breakfast. Moosa imagined that the reason Eachus pushed his animal so hard was because he took Brutus’s achievement, or lack thereof, as an indicator of his own ability as a law enforcement officer. This had led to muscle fatigue in Brutus’s legs, and he was already sore before the sun had even climbed that high in the sky.

Of all the dogs brought over for the joint U.S.-South African K-9 exercises, Moosa hadn’t pegged Brutus to be particularly delicate, so he sympathized with the dog’s plight. He was sure the dog wanted to make his handler happy, but his body wouldn’t let him. Bones, however, had reportedly been incontinent, not only on the flight from Washington, D.C., where the dogs had all gone for a pre-trip checkup by army vets at Fort McNair to earn quarantine wavers from the South African government, and then to Paris, he’d also made a mess of his carrier on the way down to the Cape. Because of this, Moosa had pegged the Pittsburgh animal as the least likely to succeed.

But now, as he looked over at Brutus asleep under a tree even as Bones anxiously waited to run the course again, he realized how wrong he’d been. Brutus was friendly, seemed loyal, and was certainly alert, but that made him perfect for a family in the market for a pet/watch dog. What Bones had that separated him from the pack and made for the best enforcement animals was motivation. A normal dog had to be cajoled or bribed into continuing on even when an exercise got rough. A police dog had an inherent
need
to go to hell and back for even the slightest praise from its handler.

This was Bones.

“So, which do you want to tackle next?” Moosa asked the shepherd, continuing to scratch its ears. “Another run through the obstacle course? Or are you ready to try and clear the two-story training house in under five minutes?”

From the look on Bones’s face, Moosa figured the dog’s vote was “both.”

“Christ, it’s not even noon on a Wednesday, and he’s already got an insatiable taste for pussy?”

Gauche as the old Afrikaaner police sergeant’s question might’ve sounded in the panel van, it was one that had occurred to Inspector Leonard Moqoma on various occasions. He’d been on stakeouts where he’d watched morning commuters get off a bus downtown, walk to an ATM, take out a wad of bills, and then head directly to a massage parlor for a pre-workday session. Hell, he’d seen johns saunter into brothels on their lunch breaks, coffee breaks, or even after they’d gone home for the night, only to invent some innocuous-sounding post-dinner errand. It was worse after the bars closed, worse still on holidays. What he never got used to seeing were the men stopping in on their way home from church, still in their Sunday finest. Even the Zion Christian Church members, for all their external show of piety, were not immune to paying for sex. At a certain point, Leonard had wondered why the brothels closed at all.

Leaving money on the table
, he thought, then chuckled at the irony.

“Can’t we just go in?” one of the regular constables asked.

None of the man’s three comrades, the sergeant, the colored constable, or the other black constable, seemed to have any idea.

“Then we should go! The trail’s getting cold.”

“Not yet,” Moqoma replied, and four faces that had seemed to have forgotten that he was even in the vehicle with them turned to stare at him. At least of couple of the stares quickly became scowls.

“Why the hell not?” the sergeant, despite being lower in rank than Moqoma, shot back.

“I don’t know if I can say,” Moqoma said, allowing himself a show of cheek, though he quickly kicked himself for it.

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that, Lieutenant?” the sergeant snapped back.

There was no fight Moqoma would win with these men, and everyone in the van knew it. He still thought of himself as an “inspector,” but that was the old rank structure before they switched over to a more military format. Gone was a hierarchy that included “inspector,” “superintendent,” “director,” and various levels of “commissioner,” to be replaced by “lieutenants,” “majors,” colonels,” and “generals.” Moqoma had been an inspector, but it wasn’t because of this that he earned their acrimony. Nor was it that he was colored. If the challenge from the white Afrikaaner sergeant had escalated into a fight, neither the black nor colored constables would lift a finger to help him. Worse, their versions of events, when retold to their superiors, would almost certainly sympathize with the sergeant.

“All right,” Moqoma relented, though part of him wished he’d chosen to stay in his Land Rover a couple of blocks up. “I was merely trying to shield you from having to explain this in court.” A couple of the constables shifted uneasily. “But do you see that black BMW at the corner up there?”

Everyone looked. The sergeant nodded.

“Yeah?”

“That belongs to Norman Nyawuza.” Nyawuza, as everyone in the car knew, was a member of Parliament. “When I saw it, I informed the Lieutenant Colonel, adding that when I have surveilled this residence previously, he never stayed for longer than twenty minutes. I was told to wait until he left to avoid embarrassment.”

In fact, prior to his being reassigned to the South African Police Service (SAPS), Moqoma’s work with the Directorate of Special Operations, nicknamed the Scorpions, had brought him to this cliffside brothel several times. Although the place was located in a small exclusive neighborhood among several of the coastline’s most expensive homes and views, the cover story of a group of young, hip, twenty-something girls leasing a house together passed muster with the other residents. Moqoma imagined that they, also members of Cape Town’s moneyed elite, were likely encouraged to look the other way with bribes or favors. However, since so many were crooked themselves, he also figured some said nothing out of professional courtesy.