Dust Devils Read Free Page B

chain – out the rear. It led him to a patch of grass and drilled a stream of piss against a dead tree. The half-breed leaned his elbows on the roof of the car and lit a cigarette, watching a woman in tight jeans fight her way down into a convertible.
    The white cop walked the dog back after it was done. It stopped at the tailgate of Inja's rental Toyota, its long snout sniffing. The uniform pulled at the dog's chain, but it wasn't to be moved. The white cop ran a hand over the tailgate, inspected his fingers, said something to the half-breed who flicked his smoke onto the pavement and joined his partner. The two men looked into the back of the truck. Tried the camper shell, found it locked.
    The cops spoke to a pump attendant who pointed to where Inja sat in the window booth. They shut the dog in the car and walked into the diner, sidearms drawn, spooking the other customers, who ducked for cover beneath the tables.
    Inja dipped one of the fries in ketchup, chewed on it, watching the cops approach, Z88 service pistols locked on him. "That your truck?" the half-breed asked. Inja nodded.
    "Keep your hands where we can see them," the white cop said.
    Inja looked at them, still chewing. Reached for the wallet, lying open on the table, their guns following him. He held up the wallet, so they could see his ID in the plastic window beside the photograph of his betrothed.
    "Agent Moses Mazibuko," he said. "Special Investigation Unit."

 
    Two bare-breasted Zulu girls appeared through the water grass, balancing large clay calabashes on their heads. Naked except for a fringe of colored beads around their waists and their calves, they crossed the rocks to the river, heads perfectly still on their undulating bodies.
    The younger girl – the pretty one – lifted the calabash from her head and knelt down at the water to fill it, the sun catching her braided hair. And catching the white headphones that twisted from her ears, disappearing into the shiny iPod slipped into the waist of her pink and yellow beaded skirt.
    Cameras clicked and whirred. A Dutch tourist, florid and sweating in shorts and a T-shirt, crouched as he focused his long lens on those pert young breasts. His wife, sunburned red as a wheel of gouda, looked away in disgust, fanning herself with a guidebook.
    A big Zulu man, dressed in a loincloth and leopard skins, proudly bearing his beer gut before him, addressed the small knot of European tourists wilting under the African sun. The name plate Richard was pinned to his leopard-skin bib. "Ladies and gentlemen, siyabonga . I thank you. That is the end of our traditional Zulu village tour. Please to make your way back to the souvenir area by the bus."
    The Dutchman walked backwards in his sandals and socks, still shooting the two girls who gathered up their calabashes and headed to the humpbacked reed huts visible above the grass.
    "Girl! Come here!" Richard shouted in Zulu.
    The pretty one, Sunday, turned and walked back toward where the guide stood alone now on the riverbank, hands on his fat hips. His birth name was Xolani, which foreign tongues could never wrap themselves around. So he had become Richard for the tourists, and the name had stuck.
    Sunday kept her eyes downcast, as befitted a young maiden talking to a man of his years. When she reached him, she knelt in the sand, still not looking at him.
    He yanked the headphones from her ears and they trailed in the dust. "Where do you get this?"
    "I found it, baba ," she said.
    He held out a fleshy hand. The same hand that roamed like a rooting warthog over the bodies of the young girls in his charge. "Give it to me."
    She slipped the iPod from her waist and handed it to him. He squinted at it, forehead furrowed beneath his crown of feathers, the iPod lying flat on his palm. He closed his fist and it disappeared. "Go now. I will deal with you later."
    She bobbed her head and waited until he followed the tourists before she got to her feet and hurried off. The thing