Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie Read Free Book Online Page B

only two possibilities. Either Viljoen had uncanny instincts and a network of contacts second to none. Or she was wrong and somebody else was watching her. If so, she had no idea who it could be.

    She’d been home for about half an hour when she heard honking at the gate. It was David, in an unmarked vehicle, on his way home from work. He wound the window down and shouted at her.
    “You don’t have a bloody doorbell! The only way I can get your attention is to honk.”
    Jade could see his breath fogging in the cold. She pressed the button on the remote control and opened the gate.
    “You could have phoned,” she said as he got out of the car and slammed the door.
    “Bloody airtime. Costs a bomb. It’ll bankrupt me.”
    David’s large presence and angry mood filled the small kitchen.
    “Tough day?” she asked.
    “I’ve come round to see if yours was as crap as mine.” He slumped down onto a chair. It creaked ominously under his weight.
    “I thought you were here to scrounge dinner.”
    “That too. Same as always. And a beer if you have one. We can talk about the case afterwards. I’m too damn hungry and thirsty right now.” He glanced around the cottage, and looked at her. His mouth twitched in a smile. “Feels like we last did this yesterday,” he said. “You, me and your dad. All around the table in that tiny bloody house. Those were the good times, Jadey.”
    She put a beer in front of him and poured herself a glass of wine. She’d gone shopping on the way home and the fridge and cupboard were now stocked with an optimistic selection of healthy food. Vegetables, lentils, brown rice, chicken breasts. That would have to stay where it was for now.
    Jade took two giant pepperoni pizzas out of the oven. She knew that when David said he’d be round to discuss the case that evening it was a thinly disguised request for junk food and beer. Cop food, he called it. He was addicted. She had never seen him eat anything healthy.
    He grabbed the biggest piece of pizza and crammed it into his mouth. The cheese stretched into long strands that snapped halfway and coiled around his chin.
    He started talking before he had swallowed. “If you’d stayed here, we’d have made a good team. Remember. We were going to open the first ever multi-racial, bisexual detec-tive agency in South Africa.”
    “Not bisexual. Multi-gender. There’s an important differ-ence,” Jade corrected him.
    “Whatever. We had it all planned.”
    She nodded. “I remember.” Planned was an exaggeration. But they had talked about it. It had been a dream for her. Perhaps it had been a dream for him too.
    She’d ordered a small tub of chopped chili with the pizzas. She spooned a large pile of the oily green substance onto her slice.
    “We’d be making a fortune now,” David said. “Easy work. Cheating husbands and debt dodgers. Good money. None of these politics. All I’ve been dealing with today is red tape and paperwork. The whole bloody day.”
    “We could still do it.”
    David lifted the beer bottle to his lips. He put it down again, empty, a minute later. He wiped a hand across his mouth, looking glum. “We wouldn’t be the first any more.”
    Jade took another beer out of the fridge and passed it to him. She watched his hands as he took the bottle. They were surprisingly elegant, with long fingers and short, neat nails that shone against his dark skin.
    “Every year, I tell myself this is my last in the police service,” he said. “Then I think to myself, if I leave, who the hell else is going to get the job done? It’s not like we don’t have the numbers. We do. But nobody’s halfway competent. That’s the problem. Case files, evidence, reports go missing all the time.” He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand.
    “There is a paper napkin. There, by your knife.”
    “Oh.” David looked at it suspiciously, as if it was a piece of evi-dence that didn’t match a crime scene. “You see, Jade, transfor-mation is