Mixed Blood Read Online Free

into the kitchen and took heavy-duty black garbage bags from the drawer by the sink. He found a roll of duct tape and a retractable carpet knife and pulled on a pair of plastic kitchen gloves.
    He checked that Matt was still sleeping and quietly opened the sliding doors. Burn had killed men in Iraq, but it had been nothing like what had happened in his home that night. Combat during Desert Storm had the surreal feel of a PlayStation game, the high-tech weaponry keeping death at a distance.
    Not like this.
    The tall man lay on his back, the carving knife still buried in his chest. The bullet he had taken from the short man’s gun had entered his abdomen below the ribs. He’d bled out. Burn could take some refuge in the knowledge that stabbing the man had been a reflex, a primitive impulse to protect his family.
    There could be no such comfort taken from the death of the short man, who lay in his own blood, milky eyes fixed on the ceiling, the gaping wound in his throat like an accusing mouth. To call him a man was an exaggeration; he looked no older than twenty, and his smallness made Burn’s actions seem all the more brutal. Burn had disarmed him, rendered him harmless. In a normal world Burn would have called the cops and let the law enforcement machinery do what it was meant to do.
    But Jack Burn no longer lived in a normal world, and the police had not been an option. So he had murdered the scrawny man. And telling himself that he’d had no choice didn’t make him feel any better.

    Benny Mongrel watched the house next door.
    He heard the slap of car doors and a man laughing. The party up the road was still going strong. Bessie had been on edge all night, what with that gunshot and the music and the white people laughing like horses. But mostly because of the food; that smell of meat cooking on the fire had driven her nearly crazy. She sat next to him, shifting on her aching hips, her snout still searching the air for the smell of lamb on the spit.
    He stroked her coarse fur. “Don’t worry, old girl,” he whispered. “There’ll be pickings for us in the bins tomorrow.”
    Benny Mongrel was on edge, too. He pondered, over and over again, the significance of the gangsters disappearing into that house.
    The Americans.
    When Benny Mongrel was eighteen, a member of the Americans gang called Bowtie April had chopped him with an ax, taking his left eye and caving his face in from brow to chin. He had killed Bowtie, torn his throat out with his bare hands, before he allowed the cops to drag him off to the hospital. The doctors hadn’t cared a fuck about another gangster punk. On the Cape Flats reconstructive surgery wasn’t on the menu. They had stitched him up and sent him to prison.
    He was a blood Mongrel. His name and the tattoos that scarred his body were testament to that. So when he went to prison for the first time, he knew which of the number gangs he was destined to join. The prison number gangs: the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s. They rule the prisons. Anyone stupid enough to resist the law of the number ends up dead.
    Or worse.
    The Americans are always 26s. The Mongrels are always 28s. No one asks why. It is just so. And they hate each other. So those men who had seen their mothers tonight would get no sympathy from Benny Mongrel.
    He watched as the garage door rolled up again. Nearly midnight. The Jeep reversed out and the doors closed. The guy and his son passed beneath him again as they drove away.
    “Ja what, they got a mess to clean up, Bessie.”

    Barnard was still eating his gatsby as he drove through Paradise Park, ready to take care of the last of the night’s business. A half-breed tik cooker who paid Barnard protection money was selling to suburban schoolkids. Barnard didn’t give a shit about the schoolkids, but the situation was attracting heat. Other dealers were getting pissed off. Local politicians were asking questions about the tik suppliers. And the protection they got.
    After the visit