The Last Kill: Pulp World, #2

1

Johnny Zero is as mean with his laughter as his words, but even he has to chuckle when he sees the battered little Renault bumping into Cité Soleil, the white girl sitting pretty as a picture in the passenger seat, her blonde hair washed orange by one of the sodium light towers that hover like UFOs over the shackland.

Johnny rides shotgun beside Ice in the chopped Honda V-8, French gangsta rap thudding from the huge sound system—louder even than the wind that screams in off the Indian Ocean—following the Renault into the maze of shacks.

Two more of his crew are in the back: lanky Masai, dark as an African, and the retard Lapen who crouches forward, pointing a pipe-blackened finger between the front seats.

"You see it, Johnny? That white meat? That little poul?"

He speaks in the island’s patois, spitting the words out his bucktoothed mouth.

"Wi, wi, I see it," Johnny replies in Creole.

Lapen giggles, saying, "Poul, poul," clucking and flapping his arms like a chicken.

Masai swats his head with a huge hand.

The others wonder why Johnny tolerates Lapen, but nobody questions him out loud.

Truth is the fuckhead amuses him, saying whatever comes into his stupid brain.

Opposite of Johnny.

We gonna eat it, Johnny? Eh? Eh? Lapen says. We gonna that white meat?

"Wi, Lapen. It’s ours."

This white girl is a gift.

And Johnny never stares a gift in the face, believes if you want something you take it.

Like a year ago after the turf war in Cité Soleil left the ghetto gangs split like carcasses on a butcher’s block, their leaders dead or in prison, Johnny Zero saw a gap and took it.

Put together a crew of young guys like him, barely out of their teens, with no respect for the older gangsters and their bullshit codes and rules.

Now Johnny Zero rules the shanties of Cité Soleil, where people drag up shelters of scrap iron and plastic in the face of the never ending sandstorms, the hot wind smashing in off the ocean like a curse.

The driver of the Renault, some Creole guy who should know better, has seen them following and he dodges between the shacks, taillights burning red through the haze of dust as he tries to get away.

No fucking chance.

The wheelman Ice is locked on them, letting them run till they are lost deep in the guts of the shack town, then he’ll move the Honda in for the kill.

*

Mary Connors smells the fear coming off Vincent’s body.

He winds his window shut when he sees the car shadowing them and shouts for her do the same in broken English, terror lifting his guttural voice high as a woman’s and stripping it of its usual subservience.

He speeds deeper into the warren of shacks, fighting to hold the car steady on the powdery sand, eyes searching the rearview mirror for headlights.

"Where are they, madmwazèl? Can you see them?"

She twists in her seat and looks back through the rear window, seeing nothing but dust washed orange by the glare of the light towers.

No people on the streets.

The wind and the darkness driving them inside their rough shelters.

Vincent sucks air through his mouth as he swerves into an alley between two rows of shacks, the Renault bucking through ditches, headlight beams skidding across rusted metal, cardboard and plastic sheeting.

The car snaps two strands of empty wash line, the torn wire scratching furrows in the windshield before it clatters against the roof like drumming fingers. 

Who are they, Vincent? she asks, still looking back, seatbelt digging into her breasts as the Renault bounces over a hump.

"The gangs, madmwazèl Marie. They see you."

A hard gust of wind hurtles between the shelters and buffets them, shaking the Renault on its springs, clearing the dust long enough for Mary to glimpse the car in pursuit, low to the ground and somehow feral, the deep rumble of its engine and a blast of hip-hop swelling in the sudden quiet as the wind dies.

If she’d stayed a minute longer in the bathroom, back at the hospital, somebody else would have taken the call, and absolved her of the responsibility that had led them out here.

She heard the shrill ringing as she walked along the corridor, on her way back to the infant ward to help the nurses feed the babies, fluorescent strip-lights kicking off the white tiles, feeling bloodless and invisible among the brown people streaming to the elevators, the dayshift on their way home.

Their voices and laughter bouncing off the walls, the local version of French still hard on her ear after two months.

Glancing through the glass window into the empty office, she saw the telephone on the metal desk, caught between the departure of one shift and the arrival of the next. The door to the office stood half-open, so she pushed her way through and headed for the phone, expecting it to die before her fingers lifted the receiver.

But it rang on.

Children’s Unit, she said in her uncertain French. Mary Connors speaking.

She heard an intake of breath at the other end.

Probably surprised by her American accent.

Or Ameriken, as they said out here.

Hello, can I help you with something?

She spoke slowly, lowering her voice, trying to sound older than her twenty years, more in control.

"Wi, it is a girl child. Here in Cité Soleil."

A woman, battling with English and losing.

More comfortable with the Creole patois of these mixed race people of Saint-Roch, a tiny island off Southern Africa, east of Madagascar.

Is the child ill?

"Wi, wi. And it screams. It is alone in the shack."

Where’s the mother?

She gone. For days now.

Did you phone the police?

"I phone, wi. Five times. Nussing. I got no more airtime. You better come."

The woman blurted out a series of numbers—a shack address—before the call ended.

Mary wrote the address down on a scrap of paper and went out into the passageway.

A yellow-skinned woman in a white coat waddled toward her. The senior day nurse on her way home.

The nurse shook her head when Mary reported the conversation.

"We can’t do nussing. It’s the job of the police."

Shrugged off Mary’s questions and went into the locker room.

Mary stood in the bright corridor, the paper in her hand.

Two months ago she would have listened to the nurse and walked away.

But she’d seen too much in the wards of this ramshackle hospital.

When she’d left Philadelphia as a volunteer, assigned to this island she’d never heard of, she’d imagined that she could make a difference somehow.

Such arrogance.

The sheer volume of the cases and the overwhelming poverty meant little was achieved.

But she could visualize only too well what was happening to that child out in the seething shackland.

It was impossible to ignore.

Mary saw Vincent Roux heading for the elevator, carrying his empty plastic lunchbox, ready to go home to his wife and children in one of the working-class areas of Port Saint-Roch.

He was a hospital orderly, a middle-aged brown man with a ready smile.

He’d assisted her at the beginning, showed her the layout of the hospital, patient with her when others had sniggered behind her back.

When Mary had finished helping a nurse wash her first victim—a two-year old who had been beaten and starved by her parents—and had walked into the staff lounge, crying, he’d brought her a cup of sweet tea and crouched beside her, talking to her gently, calling her "madmwazèl Marie."

Vincent, Mary said.

He turned as he reached the elevator, looking back at her as the doors opened, revealing a group of noisy young nurses on their way home.

Please wait, she said and the doors slid closed behind him.

Mary told him about the phone call.

Showed him the scrap of paper with the address.

He looked at her, shook his head, they couldn’t go into Cité Soleil.

Not at night.

Especially not her.

She’d begged, him, worn him down, filled the air between with images of his own children until he’d had no option but to sigh and shrug and step into the elevator with her, and follow her out to her little car, taking the keys from her and driving through the night toward the endless shack town that seethed on the torn edges of Port Saint-Roch, out near the airport. 

Now Vincent hunches over the wheel of the Renault, like he is willing it to go faster.

Mary looks back at the car drawing ever closer.

They’re coming, she says and hears Vincent whispering a prayer in Creole.

*

Johnny sees the Renault hang a left, the driver fighting through a slide, the ass of the car skidding on the sand before it the tires grip and it bounces up a narrow road.

He laughs, knows where this road ends.

Nowhere is where.

As Ice takes the Honda through a nicely controlled drift, the headlights spike the little car, stalled in a cloud of dust, smack up against a cliff face of stinking garbage, the southern perimeter of the landfill that spreads almost to the airport.

Before the Honda stops Johnny is out the car, walking to the Renault, drawing the .44 from beneath his Adidas hoodie—the driver staring at his death coming on.

Johnny likes a big gun.

Likes the noise it makes as he fires through the driver’s window, glass shattering like confetti and the brown man’s brains sent in a wet rain onto the windshield.

His crew drag the screaming blondie from the passenger seat, nobody in the surrounding shacks with the balls to even open a door or crack a window.

Ice pushing the girly down on her back on the sand like it was the beach.

The blondie saying, Please, please, please don’t hurt me, please, in an honest-to-god Ameriken accent.

Far from home, little madmwazèl poul.

Too far from home.

And he stands over her Johnny sees something gleaming on her neck.

A silver crucifix on a chain.

It would look beautiful around the neck of his manman.

He reaches down and unclips it, putting it in his pocket.

Lapen crouches over her. Filthy fingers tearing at her clothes.

Ice and Masai joining in, ripping her jeans from her body and pulling her legs apart, Lapen giggling and clucking.

Johnny Zero looks at the pale skin that glows in the hard orange glare.

This is a skin made for a knife.

To play out the pain and the terror long and slow.

Johnny loosens the zipper of his baggy Diesels, lets them slide down his legs and bunch over his Nikes as he lowers himself down onto the warm sand ready to take what is his.

2

At dawn Detektif Babette Cupidon stands where the idiot Ameriken girl got herself gang raped and left for dead.

The distorted warble of the muezzin from the island’s lone mosque blows in on the wind that throws white sand over Babette’s Nikes, and has destroyed all trace of the crime scene.

Not that there would have been any evidence anyway, the uniforms trampled the area before Babette arrived the night before, in time to see the girl—still alive, unbelievably—strapped to a gurney and slid into the ambulance.

The brown man, the driver, was zipped up in a body bag, his brains congealing on the windshield of the Renault.

The car had been stripped before the cops and medics arrived.

All four wheels, side and rearview mirrors, head and taillights gone, baby, gone.

No cell phones or wallets on the victims.

Cité Soleil takes its recycling seriously.

Babette followed the ambulance to L'hôpital Saint-Roch, watched the girl rushed into the emergency room.

Found out that this Mary Connors worked upstairs with the kids as a kind of volunteer.

Came into Cité Soleil looking for sick child and found the worst kind of trouble.

Now the world media were all hot for this story: blonde American student raped and stabbed god-knew how many times by African island savages, left lying fighting for her life.

Hardly even a mention of Vincent Roux and his widow and orphans.

Babette turns her back to the wind and lights a Matinee, two matches dying before it takes. Stands sucking nicotine, watching the scavengers up on the dump, black shadows against the lightening sky, sifting through the fresh trash trucked in overnight.

She’d blocked a few of them as they emerged from their shacks, flashed her badge and noted the reflex fear, the shutting down as she asked them if they had seen anything the night before.

Nobody’d seen anything.

That was Cité Soleil