Dust Devils Read Free

rich white man and he was anxious to leave, now he'd cleaned up the mess. He didn't like this place, full of half-breeds and Xhosa fools. Like the boy yapping at his side.
    Inja had recruited the youth in Cape Town, one of the animals running wild in the shack settlements that festered around the city's airport. He didn't know the town and needed a local to guide him. He hadn't let the boy out of his sight for three days and he was growing weary of his empty-headed babbling. Inja tuned him out and thought of food. He was lusting after a sheep's head, the way it was cooked in the ghetto townships, his mouth heavy with saliva.
    At the bottom of the pass the empty road flattened and ran straight toward a dam that lay like a mirror in the blackened veld. Inja slowed and turned off the asphalt, drove a little way up the gravel path that led to the dam wall.
    "Why are we stopping, baba ?" The idiot calling him father in deference to his greater age. He'd never shared with the boy his clan name. Definitely never shared the nickname that had haunted him since his childhood in Zululand. Inja . Dog.
    "I need to pass water." He opened the door and stepped down. "Get me a Coke from the back." Inja, skinny and black as a stick of licorice, walked a few paces from the vehicle and stopped beside a tree trunk that lay singed and twisted in the ash.
    While he pissed, Inja saw the boy open the flap of the camper shell and climb into the rear of the Toyota, on his hands and knees, rooting in the Coleman cooler. Inja shook himself and zipped. Opened his check sport jacket and took the pistol from the holster at his hip. Not the weapon he used to kill the white man. This was the one he'd given the boy to carry. Still unfired. He found the silencer in his pocket and screwed it on while he walked back to the truck. Nobody for miles, but better to be careful.
    The Xhosa's fat buttocks bulged out toward him. "There's no Coke, baba . Only Pepsi."
    Inja leaned in and placed the gun barrel against the base of the boy's skull, where the skin furrowed like the rear of a bull. Pulled the trigger twice. The fool slumped forward, his backside still in the air. Inja reached up a gray belted loafer and shoved the ass until the boy sprawled flat. Grabbed the tarp that lay on the metal bed of the truck and covered the body. He slammed the tailgate closed and locked the camper shell.
    Then he took the intimate garment from his coat pocket, held it between thumb and forefinger. Regarded it. The panties that he had found in the white man's bedroom. Tiny, immodest. The underwear of a whore. If he caught his wives wearing something like this, he'd take a horsewhip to them.
    Some people would say that he had tracked the colored slut via the e-mail correspondence – of a sexual nature – that he had found on the BlackBerry he'd taken from the fat man's apartment. But Inja knew better. Those panties, soaked with the half-breed's juices, had allowed the ancestors to guide him to her like she was carrying a homing beacon. To the house in the suburbs of Cape Town, where he had been ready to go in and finish her, before she and her family drove away in the silver car and presented him with a neater alternative.
    Inja dropped the panties to the ground and used his loafer to cover them with ash. He didn't like them, coloreds. Impure people. Neither white nor black. But the unfaithful woman had got what she deserved. He slid behind the wheel of the Toyota and bumped out onto the blacktop.

    Dell opened his eyes. A glare burned into his brain and his head hurt. Flashes of memory burst like grenades in his skull. The black truck. The Volvo smashing through the silver rail. His wife and children screaming as the car tumbled.
    Jesus.
    He looked to his right and saw the drop down to forever. Saw oily black smoke boiling from the tiny crumpled Volvo that lay on its roof, burning against the rocks and the ash.
    Dell closed his eyes. Tried to rewind and erase the nightmare. Rosie,