Bones Omnibus (26 page)

“I’m unarmed. But I’m Sergeant Youman, the inside guy.”

“Jesus Christ!” the deputy cried, having leveled a shotgun at Billy. “Sorry about that.”

“Call Michaels,” Billy said, his voice unnervingly calm to everyone in the room. “Tell him Henry Knippa’s dead. Positive on the identification. Youman witnessed the shooting as well as the deaths of two of his agents and Henry’s brother, Timothy, which was by his own hand.”

“Who killed Henry?” the deputy asked. “In case he asks.”

“Timothy Knippa,” Billy said, pointing to the accused’s corpse. “Tell him it wasn’t pretty, and he owes me a beer.”

The killing wasn’t over.

Though everyone in the barn had initially complied with law enforcement, one man, high on pills and booze, made a break for it, however comedically. In doing so, however, he drew a gun from his waistband, though it wasn’t clear if he meant to use it or if he was just afraid it might discharge as he ran.

A sheriff’s deputy opened fire and struck the man three times in the back. Only, two of the bullets emerged from the fellow’s chest, striking a second spectator in the face. As this man fell, Lil’ Mwerto leaped to his feet.

“Holy shit, man!” he exclaimed.

A deputy turned his weapon on the singer, but before he could shoot, Derek, the college veterinary student, pulled out the .32 he kept in case he needed to off one of the dogs himself and shot that deputy in the neck and a second in the head. Both fell back into the fight pit.

“You’re welcome,” Derek said to Lil’ Mwerto.

The recording artist didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He signaled his entourage and raced for the door. More sheriff’s deputies and more heavily armed Secret Service agents quickly followed, now opening fire on the remaining crowd. Several of the spectators reached for guns of their own, and soon bullets flew in both directions.

Out in the woods, Akka ran. But despite the violence she’d just witnessed, she thought only of the wealth of smells now filling her nose. Since she’d grown up in the kennel, the rich, inviting textures of trees, plants, soil, and the other animals of the forest were only there and gone. She breathed deeply, pulling the cool night air into her lungs and exhaling puffs of steam that soon trailed behind her.

She was soon panting, her heart pounding.

That was when she heard a new sound. She stopped and listened, but had known immediately it was a pursuer. She sniffed the air, recognizing a canine scent she’d smelled on the scared man in the laboratory.

She stopped running. She knew the other dog must smell her, too, and turned to wait. She planted her feet, her spine going taut as she readied herself for the coming fight. She growled and bared her teeth as saliva wet her mouth. When the animal emerged from the woods, she would pounce first.

But seconds passed, and nothing came. No dog or human. The smell was still there, but it was already beginning to fade. She whipped her head to the left, lifting her nose to the air in hopes of catching her enemy’s scent in case it had tried to flank her. But again, nothing. She tried the right side without any more luck.

Simply, her pursuer was gone, the animal either having lost the trail or given up.

Akka hesitated not a second longer and hurried off again. A moment later, and she was once more enjoying the cold night air as it replaced the taste of blood still warm on her tongue.

Someone had called the press. That was the only explanation for why a news van had managed to reach the scene less than five minutes after the first shot echoed through the woods. Curiously, however, they’d sent a young female reporter whose beat was celebrity gossip, not crime scenes. Even as her crew unloaded their equipment for their first stand-up, she saw the first of a line of corpses, had a panic attack, and wouldn’t be coaxed out of the van.

Still, the cameraman caught Lil’ Mwerto and his entourage fleeing the scene. However, the sheriff’s deputies pulled their cruisers up behind his Phantom in time to keep him from leaving. They were all arrested, and the images would make the rounds of the Internet within hours, the front page of tabloids worldwide by the morning.

Secret Service Field Supervisor Michaels, however, demanded the news crew tell him how they knew about the operation. The driver swore up and down that he had no idea. What he did know was that they’d received a tip Lil’ Mwerto was having a surprise pop-up concert in Blairsville that night and would have several A-list guests with him. They confirmed this and sent a van.

That was it.

When Michaels continued to fume and fuss, the driver suggested further queries could be made at the station.

Billy watched this back-and-forth from the front steps of the Knippa house. He knew Henry Knippa’s blood still drying on his face would prevent the cameraman from aiming his lens at him, much less request an interview. Still, he doubted the man’s producer would recognize his voice anyway. It had taken calls to three different news stations before someone took the bait on the Lil’ Mwerto story, Billy amping the lie each time to try to make it irresistible. It was only after one segment producer, who knew somebody in Mwerto’s entourage, texted this contact to ask if he was “in Blairsville that night” and received a “Shhh…” in response, that Billy knew he’d hooked somebody. The man’s delight at nabbing a scoop about a local recording artist just beginning to break nationally swept away any questions about Billy’s credentials.

“We’ll get a van out there. You’re sure about the address?” the producer had asked.

“Yep, just off 22,” Billy had replied, then hung up, knowing the dog fight pit would be shut down for gone.

“This your dog?”

Billy turned as a sheriff’s deputy, hand gripped on Bones’s collar, led the shepherd to his handler.

“Yeah, shit,” Billy said. “His cage was empty, but he’s got a tracker chip, so I knew the fuzzy bastard wouldn’t get far.”

“He was out by the woods. I think he ran at the first sound of gunfire.”

“This guy?” Billy asked, snapping a leash on the collar. “He’s not afraid of shit. Was probably chasing one of the bad guys.”

“And then gave up?” the deputy asked, but then turned and left before Billy could respond.

Billy patted Bones’s head as the dog settled in next to him.

“Should’ve bitten that asshole,” he said, nodding to the deputy.

When Bones sniffed the blood on his handler’s clothes and stood to get a better angle, Billy just sighed.

“Told you it was going to be a shitty night.”

“S
ir? There’s been an incident in A2.”

“Assassination?”

“Still trying to get confirmation.”

“Witnessed on camera?”

“One of the wardens reported it.”

“Only one?”

There was a telling silence. Charles sighed and sank back into his pillow. Barbara and the boys were up in Johannesburg. It was one of those rare weekends when he had the house in Green Point to himself.

He glanced at the clock. It was just past midnight. There was no waiting for one of the assistant chief wardens to arrive in the morning.

“I’ll be right in. Assemble a medical response team, and call me on my cell when they’re ready.”

“Yes, sir.” The guard sounded relieved.

South African prison policy had it that if an incident of violence happened after lights out, guards weren’t allowed to enter the cell block, much less send in paramedics, without authorization from the prison’s chief warden. This authorization had to be delivered on site. At one time, the chief warden, then called the governor, and his family were made to live on the prison’s grounds, but this hadn’t been the case for the last couple of decades. The prisoners knew that locating the chief warden after hours was sometimes difficult, so that’s when most attacks were carried out. In the time it took to dial the warden’s home line, only to be told by his wife to try his cell, only to have to leave a message, then to wait for the man to ring back, a prisoner’s entire lifeblood could exit his body.

But even if the chief warden had only been a block away, authorization was hardly a given. If the perpetrator was still loose on the block, the fear he might injure or kill those sent to investigate was real, despite the likelihood that a paid-off guard was how the prisoner got out of his cell in the first place. However, there wasn’t a guard, bent or otherwise, who knew that a bribed man one minute could become a liability the next. It didn’t help that Pollsmoor Prison was one of the most brutal lockups in a country already notorious for having one of the highest violent crime rates in the world.

The only good news, Charles knew, would be if it came back that it was an assassination rather than an argument that escalated or a spontaneous settling of scores. The century-old Number gangs ruled the prison, and assassinations had already gone through a complicated approvals process. An aggrieved party would approach the leaders of the 28s with his complaint, and the issue would be debated. If blood was called for, the killing would be handed off to a member of the 27s, not the offended individual. This way, any motive might be obfuscated in the ensuing investigation, and the real reasons behind a prisoner’s death might never come to light.

Charles hated to think that the gangs took advantage of what amounted to a nighttime “grace period.” But he also hadn’t risen through the ranks of the correctional services without an understanding of the uneasy détente between prisoners and guards following decades of savagery on both sides. Worse, any attempt to disrupt the status quo could also mean political suicide, given the number of parliamentarians in the pockets of gang leaders these days. Should he intervene, a summons from the Minister of Correctional Services to come up to Pretoria and explain himself would surely follow.

No, better on this night for the chief warden to get out of bed and make the drive, if only to make good on the details of whatever “we regret that, last night, a prisoner in our care…” statement was released to the press the next morning.

“I’m going to have to cut this short,” Charles called to the bathroom. “Can I offer you a ride?”

The dark-haired girl had left the room when the phone rang. She stepped back into the doorway, sending an unexpected thrill through Charles when he saw that she was still naked. She was small in stature, her hair descending almost to her waist. When he’d first seen her face at the Union Bar in the Table Bay Hotel, a place he actually favored for its muted lighting, he could still tell that she was utterly gorgeous, better almost than any other girl the agency had ever sent along. There hadn’t been much preamble, as the plot had it that they have a drink and strike up a conversation, and, if she was acceptable, he’d slip her his address, where she was to meet him within the hour. He’d known right away that she was perfect.

Even so, looking at her now, despite having had sex for the better part of the last hour, he felt like he was seeing her for the first time. Maybe his lust had blinded him to anything more than the basics, though he imagined he could be excused for feeling distracted.

The previous week, Jacob Mpambani was murdered in broad daylight. The crime lord had been driving his armored Mercedes SUV on the N2, heading into the Cape Bowl. Four men on motorcycles approached from behind, pulled up to the driver’s side, and began firing. Mpambani had acted quickly, slamming the SUV into one of the bikers, sending him careening into a truck. But over a hundred bullets, fifteen of which entered the gangster, finally brought the vehicle for a standstill as a dying Mpambani spun the wheel in a vain attempt to get away and ended up flipping the vehicle onto the shoulder. Ironically, it was the crash that killed him, the engine block shoving the steering wheel into Jacob’s chest with enough force to send half a dozen splintering bones directly into his heart.

Charles could hardly have called Mpambani a friend. But when the gangster had been in Pollsmoor and a part of the ruling 28s, the then-guard had always found him fair and easy enough to deal with, a respected man. The killing, thereby, came as a shock. If somebody on the outside had a beef with Mpambani, it would be his lieutenants who were targeted, not the man himself. He’d earned that. What it suggested to Charles was that a fringe player looking to make a name for himself had foolishly gone after the crime lord. But instead of recognition, the shooters and their minders would earn a bullet to the head.

What worried the chief warden of Pollsmoor was that the score settling would overflow into the prison. He now wondered if the midnight assassination pulling him from his bed was the first of it.

Another glance to the girl, whose name he couldn’t recall though it was the first question he always asked, filled him with greater regret. The opportunities were so fleeting, and he wanted to take full advantage, knowing it would have to keep him going for weeks, if not months. But now he drank up her visage, trying to commit every curve and nuance to memory. Her perfect, slender legs, her immaculate breasts, the smoothness of her skin under his fingertips from moments before. He knew, however, that it would be only days before mere flashes remained.

One of those flashes, he knew, would be the way she gamely arched her eyebrow back in the bar when he’d slipped his address to her. Of course, her coming home with him was a foregone conclusion. But they’d still gone through the motions of subterfuge, as if this had been the first time they’d met. So his bold proposition was still treated as such, the girl feigning hesitation and surprise, as if unsure whether she should be offended or tempted by his chutzpah.

Dare I
? that raised eyebrow seemed to ask.

He had responded by offering her a warm smile, then rising to exit the bar.

The sex had been great, but it was none of his doing. It took the woman, the
girl
, if he was honest, only a few minutes to assess the balance between sophistication and innocence he required of her, and she proved worthy of RADA in her subsequent effort. She was so charmed by him, so turned on, so surprised at her own susceptibility. That she kept this going when he asked her if she needed a ride, even though the night was clearly over, impressed him that much more.