Ishmael Toffee by Roger Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

young guy in a car with mag wheels and all the trimmings, slumped low, listening to music as he eats chicken and drinks from a liter plastic Coke bottle. The guy throws his box and the empty bottle out the window, starts the car and puts foot, tires screaming.
    Ishmael is over to that Coke bottle, grabbing it before a one-eyed woman with a swollen face can get to it. Grabs the white and red striped box, too, almost out of the woman’s filthy hands. Growls at her when she tries to argue.
    When Ishmael turns the kid is gone and he panics a moment before he spots her standing up by the door of the KFC staring at the TV that’s stuck to the wall.
    “That’s Daddy,” the kid says, pointing her finger at the TV.
    The door of the KFC is open and Ishmael can hear the news broadcast, hear the white man standing outside the big house telling how his child is gone.
    “And that’s me.” The child says as her smiling face comes up on the screen.
    The photo of the kid disappears and Ishmael sees his own mug shots, all gang chops and dead eyes—making him look like the worst thing ever born out of the Cape Flats. Then the white man is back, saying how Ishmael kidnapped his child. The father’s got tears in his eyes, begging people to help him, offering two hundred and fifty thousand for any information that gets his little girl home safe.
    Ishmael grabs the kid’s hand and he’s running again, dragging her with him, not hearing her moans and groans. His ears are still full of the white man’s voice. A quarter of a million.
    Jesus Christ, everybody on the Flats is gonna want a piece of that, and your ass, Ishmael my buddy, is gonna be fucken grass.
     

18
     
     
               
    The TV people have packed up their bright lights and cameras and gone, and the journalists and photographers—with their shouted questions and flashbulbs—have sped away in their fancy cars. Most of the police have gone too. Just a few in uniform walking around the garden with dogs, and a Boer in a cheap suit who sits in the living room talking to Mr. Goddard.
    “We’ve had a tip off,” the cop says. “Cindy and this man Toffee were seen in Paradise Park, in the last hour.”
    “Where’s Paradise Park?” Mr. Goddard asks.
    “Out on the Cape Flats. Not a good place. But we’re sending in reinforcements and a helicopter. We’ll find her.”
    “This is a nightmare,” Mr. Goddard says.
    “At least we know where they are. And that she’s alive.”
    Earlier the Boer asked Florence endless questions and she answered the best she could. Taking him over every blessed detail of the day, until her head was spinning, then the cop shrugged her away like she was nothing and went off into the house to talk loud on his cell phone.
    She hears him now, saying to Mr. Goddard, “We’re monitoring your landline. And your service provider has given us surveillance access to your cell. If Toffee calls you keep him talking for as long as you can, do you understand?”
    Mr. Goddard mutters something and comes into the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of water from the faucet, drinking it down in one gulp, wiping his hand across his mouth. He looks tired and old, suddenly.
    The Boer cop and a colored in uniform stand in the yard outside the kitchen window, talking in Afrikaans, the radio of their car popping and crackling, words coming out jumbled and impossible to hear.
    Mr. Goddard comes up close to Florence, talking softly.
    “I want the thing you took,” he says.
    “What thing?”
    “Cindy’s underwear.”
    She stares at him.
    “Go and fetch it now or I’ll tell them,” nods at the cops outside the window, “that you were involved. That you helped that man.” Staring at her. “They suspect you, but I told them how loyal you’ve been. How much Cindy loves you.” He smiles, but there’s nothing nice in it. “One word from me and they’ll lock you up, believe me.”
    She knows it’s true, but for a mad moment thinks of getting those