Mixed Blood Read Free Page A

in his dark hair.
    Even though it was nearly 7:00 p.m., the sun was still high, so when the kid looked up at Benny Mongrel for the first time, he could see his face clearly. And that was when the kid let go of Bessie and jumped back, like he had seen about the worst thing imaginable. He stood and stared up at Benny Mongrel, unable to tear his eyes away. He opened his mouth to scream, but all he could find was a whimper.
    The big guy scooped the kid up and held him, face into his shoulder. Then he looked Benny Mongrel straight in his good eye. “I’m sorry, sir. Excuse my son.”
    Benny Mongrel said nothing. Just stood there looking at the white guy who never reacted, never even blinked as he took in the horror that was the left side of his face. Benny Mongrel had lived inside this mess of misshapen bones and keloid scar tissue for more than twenty years. He didn’t care. His face had served him well. It had been an asset in the life he had lived.
    Most people reacted the way the kid did when they saw his face, but the American guy stuck out his hand. “My name’s Jack. I live next door.”
    Benny Mongrel had never shaken hands with a white man, and he wasn’t about to start now. He hauled at Bessie’s chain, whistled sharply to get her moving, and headed back onto the site.
    But something about the American had got his interest. He would watch them from the top floor of the building site, the big guy and his small blonde wife and the kid. In their house or driving away in their fancy Jeep.
    Benny Mongrel finished rolling his cigarette. He lit it, his ruined face visible in the flaring match. He sucked the warm smoke deep into his lungs, and as he exhaled he heard the siren.
    The ambulance screamed up to the house and two medics got out. The door in the garden wall buzzed open, and Benny Mongrel watched as they hurried inside. The medics carried the white woman out on a stretcher. They put her in the back of the ambulance and drove away. The light flashed, but the siren was mute.
    Benny Mongrel waited. Puzzled. Where were the gangsters? And where were the cops?
    Then the garage door rolled up and the big guy reversed out in the Jeep. The door rolled shut. As the Jeep passed beneath him, Benny could see the child strapped into the car seat in the back.
    Benny unfolded himself from his squatting position and walked to the edge of the balcony. He looked down at the red BMW, then back at the house next door. Bessie appeared beside him and licked his hand.
    He patted her head and spoke in a whisper. “I think they seen their mothers, Bessie.”

    Inspector Rudi Barnard, known on the Flats as Gatsby, drove his white Toyota through the rape and murder capital of the world, the dark flip side of the Cape Town tourist postcard. The night was full of the usual music of the Cape Flats: sirens, snatches of screams and laughter, gunshots, andpumping hip-hop. The Flats were where anybody who wasn’t white had got dumped back in the days of apartheid, far from the privileged suburbs slung like jewels around Table Mountain. A desolate, bleak sheet of land persecuted by wind and dust.
    Even when it wasn’t hot, Barnard sweated, but on this January night the water dripped from his jowls, gluing the shirt to his sumo-sized gut. All the windows of the Toyota were open as he drove, but the air lay heavy as a dead whore across the Cape Flats.
    Rudi Barnard loved Jesus Christ, gatsbys, and killing people. And out here on the Flats he could feel that love the most.
    The bumper-sticker simplicity of reborn Christianity suited Barnard well. He would get up each morning and pray. Then he would part his air bag—sized butt cheeks and smear Preparation H on his hemorrhoids, clothe himself in jeans and check shirts from the Big ’n Tall shop, strap on his Z88 9 mm service pistol, and go forth and dispense frontier justice in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
    Unbidden, an image of Carmen Fortune’s body came to him, her breasts and thighs