Bones Omnibus (33 page)

If they paid them a second thought, it might be to decide if they had anything worthwhile to steal.

The plan Moqoma had originally outlined kept Roogie in the car. He would point out the house, and Moqoma and Bones would scout the place, searching for signs of Li. If they found anything, they’d return to the vehicle and call in the cavalry, albeit specific members of the cavalry who would be told a particular story. When they arrived and just so happened to come upon Li, Moqoma would step in, pull rank, and take the girl into custody himself.

But then Roogie demanded to come along.

“I stay down there, someone’s going to see me. My picture’s on the front page of the paper every other day, and you know they’re wrapping fish with my face in there right now.”

Moqoma almost laughed but then saw Roogie was dead serious. He wasn’t spoiling for a fight but feared that, should they be spotted by Qin’s men, there’d be no way out
sans
bloodshed. Moqoma also knew if he was seen on his own in this area, having a known hard-ass like Roogie Mogwaza with him might be a good thing.

They had four guns between them, Roogie’s two pistols, then Moqoma’s automatic and a shotgun he had in the back of the Land Rover. And then there was the German shepherd.

Obviously, Moqoma hadn’t seen the animal in action, but Bones clearly took his cues from his handler. When they were in the brothel in Clifton, the dog had been perfectly at ease. But once they’d entered Qin’s compound in Camp’s Bay, it was as if he’d recognized Moqoma’s apprehension and tensed up, ready for action. It was an unexpected response, but one the detective now appreciated.

As they climbed the stairs, the two men tried to appear as nonchalant as possible. They moved slowly, taking in the view, and worked to convince anyone whose sightline they happened into that they were tourists.

They had chosen the stairs all the way at the end of the block, the ones that would afford the best view to those in search of one. But as they neared the top of the hill, Roogie shot a glance to the multistory cinderblock.

“They don’t have anyone outside.”

“If it’s Qin’s gang, from a practical perspective, don’t you think they’d stay indoors? Maybe move in and out at night?”

“Why?”

“You don’t think a bunch of heavily armed Asians out here in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t attract at least some attention? No matter who they bribed?”

Roogie thought about this for a moment but then nodded. “So, what, you want to just walk past the front door?”

Moqoma shook his head and pointed to the road two levels below the top one. “We stop there, cut right, and walk through the neighborhood. When we get below Qin’s house, we take the stairs and see what we see. We’ll be close enough that unless they’re looking straight down, they’re not likely to see us.”

Roogie was impressed. “You were a pretty good cop before going rogue and crooked, weren’t you?”

Moqoma snorted and kept moving.

When they reached the third road from the top, Moqoma continued his pantomime, suggesting to Roogie with his hands that they should stop their ascent and head down the road. Bones helped out, having found an interesting scent to follow. Nose to the ground, he took the two men past the first couple of houses.

A familiar nervous exhilaration filled Moqoma. He preferred going it alone, away from the strictures and prejudice that came with group missions. Roogie and the American enforcement dog made for strange bedfellows, but he somehow still felt the invincibility that often accompanied the excitement. This was his day to win.

They reached the stairs and began climb. Moqoma hastened his gait a little and Bones followed, at least until they reached the road directly under the Qin house. The stairs here passed between two houses that couldn’t have been greater opposites. One was a shack or, really, a series of shacks made from three cargo containers that had been formed into a “C” to allow for a small garden in the center. Its opposite number was a one-story cinder block that had two open-air floors built up on top of it. It looked like a house of cards, the sunlight shining through the thinner slats and pieces of plastic to illuminate the block in a halo of mismatched colors.

The stairs that went between them and up the hill passed directly alongside the Qin house.

“We head halfway up, look to the bay, glance back up as if distracted, case it as best we can, then drop right back down. We need to take a second look, we go to the next stairs.”

Roogie was about to protest that the next stairs were three houses down, but Moqoma didn’t wait for a reply before heading up the steps.

As they ascended, the detective was careful to keep one eye out to the water, still selling the illusion of trying for that perfect angle. Bones had been good about falling in step with this, but as they neared the halfway mark, the shepherd’s demeanor shifted. Rather than keep at Moqoma’s side, he lunged higher, straining at the leash.

“
Bones
,” Moqoma hissed, yanking the dog backward. But then he chanced to look up to the house.

Framed in the window, for the briefest of moments, was a young woman. She’d appeared like a ghost, a quick image and then gone, as if pulled away. Moqoma barely glimpsed her beyond her long black hair and the terrified expression on her face. Still, even from that briefest of looks, he knew it was the girl from the security camera footage.

“Christ, was that her?” Roogie asked.

“Pretty sure. Time to go.”

But Bones continued to pull at the leash, fighting to get up the steps. Moqoma had to grab the lead with both hands to pull him backward.

“What’s gotten into you, dog?!” he cried.

That’s when two new faces appeared in the window. One was a stranger to him, a young Asian man who was either bald or shaved his head on a near-daily basis. The other was Xiang.

Both held machine guns.

“Shit!” yelled Roogie, grabbing for his pistol.

The first bullets came not from the window where Li appeared, but from open ones nearer the top floor of Qin’s building. As they were fired directly downward, the gunmen’s aim was scattershot, bullets ricocheting all around rather than meeting flesh. But Moqoma knew what it was meant to do: panic them.

“We have to get out of here!” Roogie snapped. “Now!”

“No! They’re trying to get us to go back down, as then they’ll have a clear shot. We’ll be out in the open. We have to go up!”

“Are you crazy?!” Roogie shouted over the weapon fire, incredulous. “They’ll just shoot us straight through the windows.”

“Not if we’re fast. We get to the road and cut left. It’s all rocks and scrub over the Sentinel. We’ll have a head start and can make it back down following the water.”

Roogie hated this option. Realizing it was the only one on the table, however, he pulled his second pistol and yanked back the slide to chamber a round.

“I get shot, I’m suing the SAPS,” he said, then hastened up the stairs.

Moqoma hurried after, pulling the shotgun that he’d carefully concealed down the leg of his pants and dropping the safety.

As the trio hurried up the steps, bullets whizzing by overhead, Moqoma noticed that Bones wasn’t affected by the noise or threat. He wondered if the dog had ever participated in some kind of live-fire exercise. He figured he must’ve had
some
kind of training like that, or he’d be potentially useless to a partner. Still, the dog’s seemingly innate bravery took him by surprise.

A second later, they were alongside the lowest floors of the hillside house. A flurry of movement behind the windows betrayed the location of Qin’s gunmen. But before they could get into position, Roogie turned both pistols on the windows and unleashed twin volleys of fire.

“Who do ya think you’re dealing with,
moegoes
?” Roogie snarled, sounding every bit the Hollywood gangster.

Moqoma followed, a job made easier by the enemy hitting the deck to avoid Roogie’s fusillade. Only once did one of the gunmen leap back up, gun in hand. Moqoma responded by blasting the man in the face with his shotgun at a range of less than six meters.

But rather than immediately break left and away from Qin’s house once they’d reached the top of the stairs, Roogie went right, heading straight for the building’s front door. Qin’s men might have been firing from the lower floors, but Moqoma knew they’d be racing up the building’s stairwells to intercept their attackers on the street. A few lucky shots notwithstanding, they were clearly outnumbered.

“Roogie!” Moqoma shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the pop of AK-47 fire.

He wheeled around, blasted the shooter, who was half hanging out a window to get a decent shot, and then went after Roogie. By then, however, Roogie had disappeared around the front of the house.

To his credit, Bones had stuck closest to Moqoma and not Roogie. But as they crested the stairs, the dog’s nose went back to the ground, circling the area directly in front of the house.

He must smell the girl
, Moqoma thought, slamming more shells into the breech.

Roogie ran to the front door, emptying both pistols into the thin particle board as he came.

“You ready for this, assholes?!” he shouted like a war cry, then kicked in the door.

He was already inside and out of sight by the time Moqoma and Bones reached the door. Expecting to see his one-time block mate in a pool of his own blood in the foyer, Moqoma was surprised to find Roogie quickly disarming three corpses there instead.

“I think this idiot was looking through the peephole!” the gangster said, pointing at a young man in an Adidas T-shirt with his eye blown out the back of his head.

Roogie slung one AK-47 over his shoulder, jammed several magazines in his pocket, and reloaded a second. He offered a third one to Moqoma, who raised his shotgun.

“I’m good with this. But you’ve proved your point. Let’s get out of here.”

“These fuckers sent me into the sewer this morning. Least I can do is massacre the shit out of their guard post.”

With that, Roogie raced down the stairs, the sound of heavy machine gun fire and expletives echoing back up as he went. Moqoma turned to Bones with a shrug.

“How many more could there really be?”

The answer turned out to be thirty-six. By the time they’d fought their way to the bottom floor, an experience Moqoma likened to battling a burst fire hydrant spewing gangsters with machine guns rather than water, Roogie was wounded in three places, Moqoma in one, his bicep where a hot round grazed his skin. As he continued to fight, he blocked out the pain by focusing on the smell of burning flesh. That scent he associated with the final moments of his father so many years before.

He didn’t get shot a second time.

For his part, Bones was no slouch. The gunmen weren’t expecting a dog, particularly one trained to kill. So when they went to shoot him, Bones did as his training commanded and attacked. As the shepherd aimed at whatever was moving, this usually meant his would-be shooter’s arms or legs. A second later, his canines buried deep into the screaming fellow’s limbs, Bones would twist and jerk, the move of a crocodile in water, bashing its prey senseless. Only, this animal was doing it to free the appendage from its socket.

But once the man collapsed in pain, Bones went for the fellow’s throat, tearing it out quickly and efficiently. As blood showered out of the wound, the shepherd, his task with this target complete, moved on to the next one.

So when the trio reached the bottom floor, they looked as if they’d fought through Hell to get there. Or at least a slaughterhouse. Bones’s face was a mask of blood, the rest of his fur streaked with it, his paws saturated. Similarly, Moqoma’s hands and forearms were dripping red, as if he’d gutted his opponents rather than shot them at close quarters. For Roogie, the blood splattered across his body came from the wounds to his hand, shoulder, and hip as much as from his enemies.

When they found themselves opposite Xiang and Li, the last two people in the house, they reveled in Xiang’s shock at their appearance. Qin’s henchman had been holding a gun to Li’s head even as Moqoma and Roogie burst in, but his grip loosened and he took a step back when he saw them.

“My God,” Xiang gasped, aghast at the carnage.

“You know, she’s good to us dead or alive,” Roogie remarking, catching his breath and raising his pistol.

“Roogie!” Moqoma shouted, knowing what the criminal meant to do.

But it was too late. Roogie pulled the trigger and sent a bullet flying into Xiang’s left eye. Though he had held Li a little ways out in front of him, her height made her less than an opportune human shield. Still, Moqoma was startled by Roogie’s confidence in his aim.

As Xiang, a surprised look frozen on his face for all time, flopped backward, dead the moment the bullet tore out the back of his skull, Moqoma rushed to Li’s side.

“Are you okay?” he asked, though she was flecked with the newly dead man’s blood.

“I think so,” she nodded.

But as he put his arms around her, Moqoma could tell that she’d been terrified. Her skin was tense and cold to the touch. He imagined she’d been imagining herself seconds from death when they’d come in.

“Roogie, we’ve got to get her out of here.”

Roogie nodded, even though he was busy sifting through Xiang’s pockets. Taking the man’s gun, three cell phones, and wallet, he then raised Xiang’s car keys.

“It has a BMW logo on it. Think I saw one out front. Should we use it to get out of here?”

Moqoma’s knee-jerk response was to say “no,” but then he realized it could get them back down the hill to the Land Rover a lot faster and unseen than on foot. The SAPS would be on their way. He had to think about the story he’d present to the colonel before he was caught with Roogie and van Lagemaat’s nighttime companion.

But when he turned to Li, he froze. She was staring at Roogie with such intensity that it chilled him to the bone. She had the appearance of a lioness, her eyes wide and still, waiting for the wildebeest at the watering hole to edge just
too
close to her hide in the tall grass.

No,
not
a lion. More like a…