Mixed Blood (7 page)

And it would not end with them. She knew that with absolute certainty.

So when her husband walked into the ward carrying a bunch of arum lilies—her favorite—she had to resist the temptation to do what she always did: forgive him. Believe in him. Believe in this handsome, smiling man. The man she loved.

She forced herself to see him crouched over the skinny brown thug, ready to cut his throat. She needed to keep that image close, to fuel her resolve.

“Hi, baby.”

When he leaned down to kiss her, she turned her head away, feeling his lips brush her cheek. He stepped back, uncomfortable for a moment as he lay the flowers on the cabinet beside her bed. She could see signs of strain on his face, a jaundiced tint beneath his tan.

“How’re you feeling?” He took a chair beside the bed.

“I’m fine.” She looked at him, still seeing the man with the knife. “Where’s Matt?”

“He’s sitting outside.”

“How is he?”

“He’s okay. We went to the beach today, for a while.”

She was staring at him intently, and she could see it made him uncomfortable. He tried to find a smile. It wasn’t convincing.

“What?” he asked.

“You went to the beach?”

“Well, it’s a great day. And I thought it might, you know, take his mind off things.”

“So the sun and the ocean will cure everything? It’ll all be okay?” She could feel the color rising in her cheeks.

“Baby, take it easy.” He reached for her hand, confident that he could placate her. She took her hand away.

“Jack, it’s not going to be okay. Not this time.”

“All this will pass.”

She shook her head. “No, Jack. No. You’re not going to stroke and soothe me into submission, not now.” She saw his eyes grow wary. “Lying here after what happened, it’s forced me to confront things.”

“Like?”

“Like when I met you I was twenty-one. A kid. You were nearly forty. I was in awe of you. I let you run my life.”

“Susan …”

She held up a hand. “Let me finish, Jack. When you did what you did, back home, I was shocked. Stunned really. I was in freefall. What I should’ve done was taken Matt and got the hell out. With my baby.”

He was staring at her. He’d seen her angry before, but never this certain. This determined.

“I regret not doing that. I regret listening to you, buying into your promises about the better life we were ging to have. I want out, Jack.”

She saw something come into his expression, like the play had become way less predictable. “What do you mean?”

“I want to go back home. I want my children to grow up having a normal life.”

“You know what that means?”

She nodded, her eyes not moving from his. “It may mean that I spend time in prison. I’m prepared for that. One of us has to stop being selfish and think of our children, Jack. And clearly you’re not going to be that one.”

“You know that going back is not an option for me?”

“Yes, I know that. The stakes are much higher for you.”

“Jesus, Susan, I’d be put away for life.”

“I understand.” She almost reached across and took his hand. But she forced herself not to. “But do
you
understand that you’ve imprisoned us? What happened last night shows how far you’ve gone. That man with the knife in his hand wasn’t the man I married, Jack.”

She watched him sag, like all the strength was draining from his body. “So what are you saying exactly?”

“When I get out of here, I’m going to contact the U.S. Consulate. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get Matt and me and my baby back to the States. If I have to do jail time, my sister will take the kids.”

He stared at her. “You’ve spoken to her?”

She shook her head. “Of course not. I don’t need to speak to her.”

“So where does this leave me?”

“I don’t know, Jack. That’s for you to decide.”

C
HAPTER
6

When the Sniper Security truck pulled up at the site, the builders were leaving, talking loudly in Xhosa, laughing as they walked down the road to the taxis. Benny Mongrel jumped down from the truck and helped Bessie to the ground. The truck drove off, and Bessie squatted against a pile of builder’s sand, her back legs unsteady as she pissed. Benny Mongrel looked away, giving her the time to do her business.

He had arrived at Sniper Security an hour earlier than his usual reporting time of 5:00 p.m. He had looked around for Ishmael Isaacs, the shift foreman, ready to report for inspection. Before getting the taxi to town, Benny Mongrel had stood in the tin bath in his shack and scrubbed his body with Sunlight soap. Then he had been forced to ask the fat bitch in the next-door shack if he could use her iron. Even though she nearly shit herself when she saw his face, she was greedy enough to demand money. Back in the day he would have smacked her and walked with the iron. But he paid up, pressed his uniform, and took the iron back to her. She had grabbed it and slammed the door in his face without a word.

Anyway, there he was smelling of soap, with creases like knife edges in his uniform.

But another guard had told Benny Mongrel that Isacs had already gone for the day. He wouldn’t be back. Fucken asshole.

While Bessie pissed, Benny Mongrel took in the view from high up on the slope. All was still. Honey-colored sunlight washed Table Mountain, Lion’s Head, and Signal Hill. Toylike yachts caught the breeze on the placid ocean far below.

He saw the red BMW still straddling the yellow line. A pink parking ticket was glued to the driver’s window, flapping in the soft breeze.

Bessie appeared at Benny Mongrel’s side and licked his hand. He took hold of her chain, and the two of them headed into the unfinished house.

Burn felt like he had been sucker punched. He was relieved that Matt, tired out after the time on the beach, was asleep in his car seat as they drove home.

Burn knew that Susan was serious. He also knew that she was right. That didn’t stop him from feeling as if his entire universe had fragmented and been sucked into a black hole. Being without his wife and son was something he couldn’t process. Not being there to father his daughter was too painful to imagine.

He knew he had brought this upon himself.

As he drove over the Neck and down toward Sea Point, the panorama of mountain and ocean was invisible to him. What he was seeing was the ease with which he had been set up back in the States, and how willingly he had slipped his head into the trap and let it spring shut.

After Tommy Ryan left, Burn had become a regular down at Gardena, sitting at poker tables with strangers who were prepared to wager more than most of them could afford. Burn hadn’t let sympathy get in the way of him taking their money. Money that helped him grow his business and make things more comfortable for Susan and Matt.

And Burn couldn’t deny it: he’d enjoyed the rush gambling gave him.

So he started betting on sports. A guy he met at the poker table put him onto a bookie named Pepe Vargas, who drove an old Eldorado and wore pinkie rings. Vargas amused Burn with his cheesy suits and easy humor. He was a character, and somehow having him around made Burn feel that he was leading a more interesting life. Vargas seemed to like Burn and extended him credit. He never acted bothered if Burn was late in paying.

Then the slide began. Horses stumbled on the homestretch, quarterbacks fired bum passes, and hockey pucks followed paths that defied any reasonable logic. Suddenly Burn owed Pepe Vargas nearly twenty grand, and Vargas started calling the house, looking for his money.

These calls, and Burn’s absences, made Susan suspicious. After a particularly heavy confrontation when she accused him of being unfaithful, he told her about the gambling. She was shocked and angry. Was he going to do what her father did: fade away from his family, leaving a trail of bad debt, lies, and heartache?

Burn swore to her that he’d stop. He’d pay Vargas off, and that would be that.

He kept his word until his biggest contract went south.

Burn had installed a security system in a new mall out on the fringes of the Valley. It was state-of-the-art stuff—security cameras, motion-triggered as, smoke detectors—all wired into an operations room that looked like something out of mission control at Houston. He had to hire more staff and front for expensive gear to deliver on the contract. The developers of the mall had given him only a first payment, a quarter of the billable total—long spent—when they ran out of money. The mall, agonizingly close to completion, was mothballed while bloody legal battles were fought.

Burn’s name was just one on a long list of contractors looking at getting ten cents on the dollar at best.

Meanwhile Burn’s employees needed to be paid, and his suppliers were screaming for money. Money he didn’t have. He was in danger of losing the house, mortgaged to cash-flow his business.

Which was when he did the thing that totally fucked up his life.

And the lives of his family.

Burn called Pepe Vargas and asked him to take a phone bet, eighty large on a tough middleweight out of Jersey City named Leroy Coombs, an ex-champion who was making a comeback against a no-hoper as part of the undercard of a Vegas title fight.

He heard the bookie go quiet on the other end of the line, probably thinking about the money Burn still owed him. But Vargas took the bet.

Burn was running a crazy risk, betting money he didn’t have. But it was a sure thing. The opponent was a glorified sparring partner; there was no way Coombs could lose.

Burn sat at home and watched the fight on HBO. It went according to plan for ten of the scheduled twelve rounds. Coombs toyed with his opponent, and though he couldn’t knock him out, he left him looking like hamburger by the end of the tenth. Burn was starting to feel good, convinced his recent run of bad luck was over.

Then in the eleventh Coombs got complacent, started clowning, and took a blow that should never have landed. A looping right that caught him on the chin and sent him to the canvas. He didn’t get up before the ref waved his arms over his prone body.

The fight was over.

Burn watched, stunned, as Coombs was helped to his stool, his legs like cooked spaghetti. He knew that if he tried to stand, he’d feel the same.

His cell phone rang. It was Vargas, wanting to know when he was coming down to Gardena to make good the damage. Burn muttered a promise and killed the call.

After this loss, with the unpaid bets still on his tab, Burn owed Pepe Vargas nearly a hundred thousand dollars. An amount of money that he had absolutely no way of getting his hands on.

The bookie called again the next day, and his easy manner was gone. He told Burn to meet him down in the casino parking lot that afternoon.

Vargas cruised up next to Burn in his Eldorado and asked him to step into his office. A man sat beside Vargas, a man Burn had never seen before. Burn slid into the backseat and Pepe pulled away. Vargas stopped the Cadillac near a diner, and with a brief, almost apologetic glance in the rearview mirror, he left the car.

The man in the front seat turned to Burn. He was quiet, self-contained, carrying with him an air of understated menace. “You can call me Nolan.”

“Why would I call you anything?” Burn was reaching for the door handle.

“Don’t get out, Jack.” The way the man used his name grated on Burn’s nerves.

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t want me coming to your house. Believe me.”

Burn stared at Nolan. “What do you want?”

“I’m going to do you a favor. The hundred grand you owe Pepe is going to go away.”

“How?”

“You’re going to do a job for me.”

“I don’t think so.” Burn opened the car door.

“If you leave this car, please understand that I will kill your wife and your son.”

Burn stared at him, half out of the car. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me. Now close the door and listen very carefully.”

Burn had closed the door. And it had begun. It had ended with a cop lying dead in the snow in Milwaukee and Burn and his family on the run.

Burn had got them to Cape Town and found them the house on the slopes of Signal Hill. They had more money than they would ever need. All they needed was a life. They were busy inventing one for themselves, day by day, when the brown men with the guns came in off the patio and sent it all to hell.

And now Susan was going to leave him.

As he slowed outside the house, Burn activated the garage door remote. He was nosing the Jeep inside when he noticed a police car parked behind the red BMW. A uniformed cop walked around the vehicle, speaking into his radio.

Burn drove into the garage, and the door dropped like a slow guillotine.

It was still light when Rudi Barnard pulled up behind the red BMW. There was no sign of the cop who found the car. Probably getting pissed in some Sea Point whorehouse. Suited Barnard fine.

Barnard sat in his car a moment, surveying the scene. This wasn’t his turf, this wealthy suburb clinging to the side of Signal Hill, with the sweeping view of Cape Town and the Waterfront below. And it sure as fuck wasn’t Ricardo Fortune’s. No, something was wrong here.

That morning Barnard had woken with a nameless sense of foreboding. He couldn’t shake the feeling that trouble was coming his way. So, on bended knee, Barnard had asked his God for reassurance. For protection. For a sign.

And like Moses, God had sent Rudi Barnard up the mountain.

Barnard heaved himself out of the car and crossed to the BMW. He peered inside, saw nothing out of the ordinary. He tried the doors. Locked. Then he lumbered around to the trunk and tried that. Also locked.

He lit a cigarette, checking out the surroundings, taking in the luxurious homes hidden behind high walls and gates. The street was quiet. Not even a pedestrian in sight. Not akehe Flats, which teemed with people hanging out on street corners, gangsters doing deals, kids playing soccer in the streets, neighbors hurling abuse at one another. Not here, in this sanctuary of privilege.

Barnard went back to his car and got a crowbar; then he attacked the trunk of the BMW. Under the Michelin man suit of fat was a lot of power, and within seconds he’d sprung the lid. No bodies inside. Nothing but a couple of empty beer bottles and a pile of rags.

He smashed the side window of the car, reached in a meaty arm, and unlocked the door. Wheezing, red in the face, he leaned into the car and checked behind the seats and in the glove box. Aside from a used condom, a couple of nipped joints, and a half-empty bottle of vodka, he found nothing of interest.

As he heaved himself upright and leaned against the car to get his breath back, he glimpsed a half-breed with a dog up on the building site, looking down at him.

When Benny Mongrel saw the fat man looking up at him, instinct told him to duck back out of sight. Even though the man was in an unmarked car and wore civilian clothes, Benny Mongrel knew instantly he was a cop. Just like he had known the other men were gangsters. That radar came standard when you lived the life he had.