Bones Omnibus (32 page)

He hadn’t been down there since he was a teenager, using it as a quick escape after holding up businessmen hunting their cars in dark parking garages at the end of a long day, but the horrific smell seemed a thousand times worse than his memory.

He wasn’t sure if Moqoma meant him to head away from the building, but he decided to regardless, choosing a corridor that led west to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. The stench of oil and seawater would soon overpower that of the city’s raw sewage.

He didn’t think there were any officers beside Moqoma in the sewer with him, but he had two guns on him that he intended to use if they appeared. He pulled his favorite, a Heckler & Koch HK P30 with virtually no recoil, and checked the magazine. Even in the dull light of the sewer’s work lights, he could make out the full double-stack of fifteen 9mm bullets. Rather than put it back in his waistband, he held it in his hand as he ran, giving him an additional feeling of comfort.

But then a new feeling gripped Roogie:
fear
.

There was a tingling at the top of his spine as he felt the presence of something else in the tunnel with him. Something
moving
. He slowed a little and pulled the second gun from his trousers.

“That you, El Zayde?”

He was answered by silence.

Roogie began to run. He imagined this was precisely what the person or persons in the dark wanted him to do, but it didn’t slacken his pace. Instead, he grew angry at himself for being afraid. He gritted his teeth, imagined coming face to face with his tormentor, and pictured himself taking
them
by surprise, placing his twin gun barrels directly into their eye sockets and pulling the trigger.

The image of an enemy having their face, brains, and skull pulped by his bullets, so much so that they appeared to have been beheaded, calmed him immensely.

Suddenly, the sixth sense was replaced by a sound as he heard someone coming up behind him. He turned the gun down the tunnel, dropped the safety, and aimed into the darkness.

“That you, Lazarillo?”

When no one replied, he fired. The muzzle flash lit up the entire tunnel like a strobe. Though he could see something moving at him in still images, he couldn’t make out what it was. There was something off about it, as if it was a man ducking the oncoming fire but still coming much faster than any man could.

Before he could adjust his fire, the magazine was spent. He went to reload, only to feel a sudden change in the air around him, a rogue breeze cooling his exposed skin.

An instant later, he was on his back, having been struck by something massive and fast-moving. He tried to beat his assailant with the pistol, but what was clear to him now as an animal had caught his wrist at just the right angle, and he couldn’t pull it around. As the creature continued to twist his arm around, he involuntarily dropped the gun, though the noise it made as it clattered to the ground was drowned out by his own angry shouting.

“Jesus Christ, get off me, you motherfucker!” he snarled, rolling his body back and forth.

But then he heard footsteps and glimpsed a man jogging down the tunnel.

“Bones! Get off him, boy!
Now
!”

The German shepherd released Roogie immediately. The gangster scuttled a few meters away before picking up his empty pistol, slapping a new clip into it, and aiming it at the dog.

“Roogie, no!” Moqoma shouted. “He’s American. You want to get in real trouble?”

Roogie couldn’t help but smile, as much as he wanted not to. The dog, now sitting nearby, stared idly at him as if waiting for the command to attack again.

“Why do you have an American dog, Inspector?” Roogie asked, matter-of-factly.

“It’s ‘Lieutenant’ Moqoma now, Roogie, but don’t get attached to it. It’ll be ‘Convict’ Moqoma soon enough.”

“You didn’t have to come after me.” Roogie shrugged.

“No shit, I didn’t,
bru
, but it’s a lot worse than you think.”

Roogie eyed the river of water and shit that flowed past them.

“Yeah, worse than that,” Moqoma nodded. “So you best come with me so maybe we start winning a few points for our side, okay?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Roogie grunted, clambering to his feet and following the detective and the German shepherd back through the sewer.

B
ones stared out the window as the Land Rover bounced out of the underground parking garage onto Riebeek Street. They were eight blocks away from the building in which Roogie’s company occupied the top three floors, but they were still only just on the other side of the massive police cordon.

Though Roogie slouched into the back floorboards to avoid being seen by passersby, Bones’s nose was happily pressed against the window. There were so many new smells in the thicket of buildings that made up downtown Cape Town: Street vendors sold food on corners, they passed an open-air market with at least four spice dealers hocking their wares on a side street, and there was the cacophony of human traffic in general. Businesspeople moved between buildings, tourists on foot swept from the nearby luxury hotels to the beaches and waterfront, and laborers from the Flats, moving quickest of all, wove in and around all others.

All of these rich scents pushed into the shepherd’s olfactory canal, the foods causing him to salivate. He opened his mouth and licked his lips. Drool spilled onto the armrest, and spittle from his tongue dotted the window.

“You ever feed this mongrel?” Roogie asked, eyeing Bones’s display with disgust.

“I haven’t,” Moqoma admitted. “I know a Lebanese place over on Kloof if you want to run in for carry-out.”

Roogie rolled his eyes and stayed put. “So what’s the plan?”

As he said this, the Land Rover pulled through an intersection. Roogie could just glimpse the police barricade still roping off the heart of the city.

“You don’t even want to know what’s going on?” Moqoma asked.

Roogie shrugged. “They’re putting van Lagemaat on me and the Boys. What else do I need to know?”

“That Qin’s Triad is behind it. They fixed it with the government to take you down. I don’t know what the
iRiphabliki
is to receive in return, but it’s probably a fair trade.”

“
Qin
?” Roogie exhaled. “What does he want with me?”

“What else? Less competition, likely on the underworld and legit business front. Someone’s going to need to shake down all those Euros coming down here with a dream of opening some franchise bistro.”

“Don’t push your luck, Moqoma. You let me keep my guns, remember?”

“And I kept you from being dead,
remember
? These past fifteen minutes you’ve still been breathing? I own them all. Now, are you ready to get to the bottom of this?”

Roogie was. Moqoma explained to him the timeline of the van Lagemaat assassination, but also that of his own investigation since. When he brought up his belief that Li might still be alive, Roogie scoffed.

“He would’ve killed her immediately. No question. She’s in the water.”

“But so soon?” Moqoma pressed. “They know they have to bury her pretty deep, even if she was in on it. They’re not going to risk some fisherman or cop spotting them doing their dirty work.”

“You think she was in on it?”

“There was the hit at the prison. That drew van Lagemaat out. Then there was the matter of taking her home. He didn’t want to leave her in his place, so of course he’d take her back to Clifton. Without her, they’re not a hundred percent on his location the whole time leading up. She’s got eyes on him.”

Roogie thought for a moment, hesitant to buy into Moqoma’s version of events, if only because he hadn’t come up with them himself.

“So, say she
is
alive, where do you think she’d be?” Roogie asked.

“That’s why I’ve got you in the car,” Moqoma admitted. “Qin has to have some stash house somewhere, the kind of place that he could put her, put some guys with guns around her, and know she was safe. If she’s just some girl, the killing might’ve scared her, too, so she might be looking to rabbit. This keeps her under his thumb until he can send her back to China or wherever.”

Roogie thought for a long moment. It even looked like Bones was awaiting his response. At first, he didn’t have a single idea. But then a tiny piece of information floated to the front of his mind, a house in the middle of nowhere a couple of his boys had suggested was being used by smugglers. And when Moqoma brought up Qin, it dawned on him who might be the smuggler in question.

“He’s got a house in Hout Bay,” Roogie announced. “If they’re trying to hide her, it’s way off the beaten path. If they’re going to bury her, where better than in the foothills above the water? If they’re going to dump her in the ocean or smuggle her back to China, you’ve got the boats right there.”

“Hout Bay it is,” Moqoma agreed, making a sharp right onto Buitenkant and heading for the M62.

Hout Bay was a quiet fishing village down the coast from Cape Town on the shores of a small harbor tucked between two hills. Its primary notoriety came from being the home port of a large fishing fleet that provided the restaurants and markets with its fresh catch on a daily basis, including three eateries right there on the pier. The fleet would leave before first light and often return before lunch, allowing locals and a few brave tourists the experience of sampling the catch – hake, Cape snoek, yellowtail, dorado, sole, Cape salmon, and sometimes even longfin tuna – within hours of it being plucked from the depths. The most popular restaurant, Snoekies, was constantly busy, fish being offloaded from the place’s own boats, rolled on carts to the back door, and in the fryer as soon as it could be washed, skinned, and deboned.

Its other source of notoriety came from its more recent emergence as a way station for the import of pharmaceuticals used in the manufacture of methamphetamines, known locally as
tik
. Customs officials at the waterfront had cracked down on smuggling in recent years, making it more and more difficult to bring in illicit goods in large quantities from overseas. Rather than give up or try a different method, smugglers decided to adapt, seeing as how only one end of the supply line was fouled up. The container ships would continue to be loaded with contraband and sent off to South Africa with their legitimate cargo. But as the ships neared the Cape, they would surreptitiously drop their unlawful freight into the sea lanes with GPS transponders and floatation devices attached. These would then be picked up by a couple of the fishing boats in on the scam and brought back to the docks. There, the watertight packages would be palleted and loaded on the same trucks that delivered fish all over the city.

For their part in the chain, the fishermen were paid the equivalent of about $600 to split four or five ways. If caught, they could face a decade in prison and a lifelong ban from commercial fishing, often their only source of income.

These fishermen, for the most part, along with the others who worked on the wharf (packing trucks, working the ice chutes, etc.), lived in the row upon row of rundown houses that lined the foothills overlooking the bay. Stacked on top of one another, the “houses” were little more than shacks, though there were a few multistory cinder block structures hanging down the hillside as well. From the street below, a tourist could be forgiven for believing they were looking at a shanty town or squatter’s village. If they’d risked the drive up into the uniquely South African favela, their suspicions would’ve been only confirmed as they encountered mud roads that acted like quicksand to vehicle tires, endless piles of trash, and packs of roving dogs.

Moqoma eased the Land Rover onto the road that led up to the houses. Roogie, who kept low but was now seated on the back seat next to Bones, eyed the various buildings.

“Which one is it?” Moqoma asked.

“That one,” Roogie said, pointing to one of the multistory block houses.

The building was midway down the highest row of houses on the facing hillside. The one good thing, Moqoma realized, was that there wouldn’t be anyone above the structure looking down. But besides that, there was no question the place had been selected for its defensibility. All four floors had windows facing in every direction. With so few cars in the area, particularly when most of the neighborhood’s inhabitants were at the pier, Moqoma’s Land Rover would be spotted before it got within a hundred meters of the building.

And if no one inside happened to be on sentry duty, Moqoma imagined at least a few other watchers in the surrounding houses. A couple of rand and a free cell phone was probably all it took for a neighbor to ring up when strangers appeared in the area.

“We’re going to have to drive past, maybe park at one of the restaurants on the pier, and walk up,” Moqoma announced.

Roogie nodded in agreement but then eyed Bones.

“Going to have to be careful around here, Bones,” the gangster warned. “You may be hot shit in American, but in Hout Bay, you’re just another
inja
.”

They parked and pretended to circle the restaurant, checking the menu. There was already a line at Snoekies, so it appeared perfectly natural that the two men and their dog might walk around a little instead. A few seconds later, they slipped across the street.

The houses on the hillside were arranged on something of a grid. A single road led straight up, and then individual streets broke off from it at perpendicular angles like the tines on a fork. This meant that whoever lived at the end of these blocks, should they have had a car, would have to drive all the way across the hill to the one road before descending to Harbour Road. So that pedestrians didn’t have to do the same thing, makeshift wooden stairs ran up the hill alongside every third dwelling or so. In the early hours, the workers streamed down these stairs and then back up every night. During the day, however, the steps went virtually unused except by packs of children and packs of dogs.

Moqoma banked that the guards around Qin’s house kept their eyes peeled for vehicles. He doubted they would pay much mind to a couple of colored men walking their dog up the stairs, particularly if they’d seen them park across the street. City boys looking for a view.