Mixed Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

were always much worse in the morning, and she limped when he led her off toward the kennel enclosure.
    “Hey, Niemand.” Ishmael Isaacs, the shift foreman, stood across the yard. He waited for Benny Mongrel to come across to him. The epaulettes on the shoulders of his crisp uniform were a sign of his seniority.
    Isaacs, a brown man like Benny Mongrel, had done prison time, and the fading tattoos on his arms proved that. He had been out for years and had made a better life for himself. Benny Mongrel knew that Isaacs had taken against him from the start, probably because he was an ex-con, an uncomfortable reminder of the foreman’s own past.
    “What’s up with that dog?” Isaacs watched Bessie’s painful progress as they neared him.
    “Nothing, Mr. Isaacs.”
    “She always walk like so?”
    “No, she just a bit stiff. From being in the truck.”
    Isaacs grunted, his eyes scanning Benny Mongrel. He sniffed the air. “When last you wash?”
    “Yesterday. Before work.”
    “Your ass stinks.” Isaacs stretched out an arm and flicked a dismissive finger at Benny Mongrel’s sleeve. “And don’t they teach you to iron in Pollsmoor?”
    Benny Mongrel said nothing, not showing anything on his face. Like this fucker was a warder back in prison.
    “Tomorrow, one hour before shift, you rort to me for inspection.”
    “Yes, Mr. Isaacs.”
    “And make sure your ass is clean and your kit looks proper. Or I dock your pay. Got me?”
    “Yes.”
    Benny Mongrel watched as Isaacs turned on his heel and walked away. He wanted to show that bastard the epaulettes tattooed on his own shoulders, real rank, earned the hard way. Then he wanted to show him his knife.
    But he whistled softly and led Bessie off toward the kennels.

    Burn woke up with a wet body against his. For a crazy, nightmarish moment he was sure the dead men were in the bed with him. This was enough to jolt him upright like he’d been tasered, and he flung the covers aside. Matt was sleeping next to him, and he had wet the bed. For the first time in nearly two years.
    Burn lay back, calming his racing pulse. He cradled his sleeping son and stroked his head. Then an image came into his mind. A red BMW parked next door, outside the building site. He’d glimpsed it when he’d followed the ambulance to the clinic and wondered if it had brought the dead men to his street.
    When he’d come home after dumping the bodies, the party next door had still been going strong, the BMW lost among the other cars. He’d forgotten about the red car. All he’d wanted was to wash the stink of death from his hands and body.
    He looked at the bedside clock. It was after seven.
    Burn pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and left his son sleeping on the damp double bed. He unlocked the front door of the house and went down through the small front garden to the door set into the high wall. He opened it, peering out cautiously.
    The BMW was still there, but so were the building crew. There was no way he was going to be able to move the car unobserved. Burn cursed himself. This was a loose end he shouldn’t have allowed. But the decision was forced on him: he would have to leave the car until that evening, when the builders were done for the day.
    Burn shut the door.

C HAPTER 5

    Benny Mongrel climbed from the minibus taxi that had dropped him in Lavender Hill. He slung his small kit bag over his shoulder and set off, walking like he was hugging the wall of an invisible prison corridor.
    Apartheid’s faceless bureaucrats had displayed a macabre sense of humor when, with a pen stroke, they banished thousands of people to ghettos on the Cape Flats with sweet names like Surrey Estate, Blue Downs, and Ravensmead. This was no more apparent than in Lavender Hill, where there was no lavender and not a single hill, just an endless sprawl of cramped houses built on windswept scrubland.
    Benny Mongrel passed a straggle of pedestrians and dodged sidewalk vendors selling fruit, vegetables, cigarettes,