Daddy's Girl Read Free Page B

stopped to rummage in a dustbin over the road, giving Yasmin a toothless smile. Yasmin did not smile back, but she did wave. The hand with the sandwich she hid behind her back, ashamed to eat in front of people looking for food ina bin. The homeless couple drifted up the road towards the mountain and she ate again.
    She looked up when she heard the car, swallowed, a smile starting as she stepped towards the opening door.
    The arm snaked around her body, squeezing the narrow cage of her ribs until she felt the bones would snap. She bit down hard when the hand clamped over her mouth, pushing her scream back down herthroat. The hand fisted into her upturned face. Another slammed into her belly, winding her. Yasmin crumpled forwards into the pizza boxes and Coke bottles littering the floor of the car. The driver slid down the hill, and Yasmin rolled sideways as he turned. He cut the engine, but neither he nor his passengers moved as the afternoon faded into night.
    The beginning of forever.
    She laystill, her mouth full of blood. The tooth that had wobbled for days on its last thread lay on the cradle of her tongue.

4
    Captain Riedwaan Faizal scanned the building. Nothing moved in the shadowed stairwells. On the top floor, the corner of a curtain twitched against the cinder blocks. He figured out the number of the flat. There weren’t that many people around here who had jobs. Whoever was behind the grimy lace would have been watching all day. That was not where the call had come from.
    A concrete wallran along the length of the street, separating the pavement from the derelict sports field wedged against the freeway. It was freshly graffitied with chubby, rainbow-hued numbers: 27s. The gang tag stretched its tentacles from the Cape Flats, claiming Coronation Street and its surroundings for the Afghans. Just another franchise establishing its brand. That’s what a sociologist in Jesus sandalshad told Riedwaan Faizal. Like McDonald’s handing out happy meals. Riedwaan snorted. More like dogs marking their territory. Dogs with new masters, hoping that a bit of piss and a lot of terror would hand this territory to them.
    The girls had sprinted across the sports field that day, dropping their satchels and scattering schoolbooks along the way. Their shoes and grey skirts were streakedwith mud. The younger girl’s bobby socks had slipped below the plaster on her left shin. They had known what was coming. The older girl’s arms were wrapped around the younger one. The bullets that ripped through her back had exploded through the smaller one’s slender body, just below the badge on her maroon school jersey. Puberty had just settled, light as a butterfly, on the child’s body – glossingand thickening her hair, swelling the exposed nipple.
    Riedwaan had brushed her cooling cheek, the coin that was balanced on her open eye sliding into his palm. Heads. It was still warm.
    Sergeant Rita Mkhize was tracking the girls’ path from the pavement. Short hair twisted into dreads, just over a metre and a half tall, forty-five kilograms: too small to hold a machine gun properly. Whichmight have been a good thing: she got the moer in quickly, and she was a lethal shot. She had been his partner for a couple of months now. She kept an eye on him, but she knew how to watch his back. He was getting used to her.
    She held up a bloodstained algebra paper.
    ‘The Maitland School for Girls.’ Then she read out the names on their school bags. ‘Sisters. Grade nine. Grade four, thelittle one.’ Rita stood up, zipping her hoodie and stamping her feet, ‘Can’t be more than ten. A baby.’
    ‘My baby’s seven on Tuesday,’ said Riedwaan.
    ‘You signed the Canada papers yet?’ Rita asked.
    ‘Van Rensburg would never have asked me a personal question like that,’ said Riedwaan’s.
    ‘He’s not your partner any more,’ shrugged Rita. ‘So, did you?’
    The arrival of the ballisticsvan saved Riedwaan from having to answer. Shorty de Lange