Mixed Blood Read Free Page B

barely covered by the short nightgown. He pushed it away. Barnard couldn’t remember when last he’d had sex with a woman. Sometime before his bitch of a wife had finally left him. He didn’t miss her or the screwing. He had always found the process disgusting. When the urge grew too great for prayer to subdue, he spent a few guiltstricken minutes in communion with his hand and a Hustler magazine.
    To distract himself from that image of the half-breed’s brown thighs, he grabbed the mike of the car radio, barking out an APB on Rikki Fortune’s red BMW. Saying it might be in the Sea Point area. He wasn’t desperate for the five grand Rikki owed him. His web of vice and corruption generated a constant source of income that met his modest needs. But he couldn’t let a little cunt like Rikki get away with anything.
    Fear was his God-fueled power. Any sign of weakness and it would be his body found dumped in an open strip of veld.
    The law of the jungle.

    Burn paced the waiting room of a private hospital in a leafy suburb of Cape Town, his son sleeping on a chair, his young wife and her detached placenta somewhere behind swinging doors, and two dead bodies going cold in his dining room.
    When they’d fled the United States three months before, he’d had little time to decide on a destination. Not Asia, because they would be too visible and he had wanted to be sure of medical care for his pregnant wife. Not Europe, too much of a colony of the States. It would be harder to disappear. It was a toss-up between Sydney or Cape Town. Australia, despite its huge landmass, had a tiny population, and Burn had felt claustrophobic just thinking about it. South Africa sounded good, with a Western infrastructure if you could afford it, but chaotic enough for a man to fall through the cracks.
    But that chaos had reached out and grabbed hold of his life by the throat.
    “Sir?” A pale-skinned young nurse in a crisp uniform appeared before him. “You can see your wife now.”
    Burn stood and reached down for Matt. The nurse shook her head. “I’m sorry, but the little boy can’t go in wit you.” She smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll sit with him.”
    Burn managed a smile in return. “Thank you.”
    Susan was in a private ward that looked like a hotel room. She lay in bed, wan and beautiful. She opened her eyes when Burn came in.
    He hesitated, then took her hand. She let him. “How are you feeling?”
    “Everything’s okay, Jack. My baby is fine.”
    He nodded. “I know.”
    “I just need to stay in here for a couple of days.”
    “Good. Let them take care of you.”
    She took her hand back. “You go now.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “I just want to sleep.”
    “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    She nodded, closing her eyes, already withdrawing from him as he walked away.

C HAPTER 3

    It was just past 10:00 p.m. when Burn slowed the Jeep Cherokee outside his house. He was tense, expecting police cars and security patrol vehicles. There were cars, all right, more than usual, lining both sides of the road. But they were the luxury vehicles common to these streets of plenty: convertibles and SUVs.
    The night, now that the wind had died, was still and hot, and he caught the tang of animal fat cooking on a wood fire. He had to fight back a sudden feeling of nausea, knowing what waited for him in his dining room.
    He pressed the garage remote, and as the door rolled up he heard snatches of an overorchestrated version of a Beatles song he couldn’t place, and the trill of genteel laughter wafting across from the party at a neighboring house. He nosed the car into the garage and released the door. He sat for a minute, listening to the sound of his son sleeping on the rear seat, before he opened the car door.
    Burn carried Matt into the living room and lay him down on the sofa. The sliding doors to the dining room were closed. He had shut them so the paramedics who came to attend to Susan wouldn’t see the carnage within.
    Burn went