Free Sacrifices by Roger Smith

again.
    Ever.
    Six weeks later Bev pissed on a stick and the next month they were married. Lane was in the delivery room when Christopher fought his way out of Beverley, and looking at the bloody, bawling infant Lane had felt no happiness, seeing and hearing only that small, mutilated boy left to die alone in the night.
    And now, lying on the spare room bed drinking Scotch, he knows it is irrational, primitive even, but he believes that some deal had been struck the night he fled the accident scene. Lane had been given his freedom in exchange for his son. The smiling blond child, cherubic in his early years—“dada” the first words from his pink lips—had grown into the sneering bully, the steroid-fuelled predator who lies asleep next door in the room of his childhood, his thuggish body sprawled across the bed, lying head-to-head with Lane, separated only by the wall. The Siamese twin image gets Lane sitting, reaching for the bottle again.
    Beverley had used the hit-and-run, used his guilt, to get him to lie for his son a year ago when Chris led his friends in the near-fatal attack on the black gas station attendant.
    She’d convened a meeting between the Lanes and the fathers of the other boys on the Saturday morning after the assault. They had hunched darkly at the rear of a bland coffee shop in Cavendish Square while privileged Cape Town went about its consumerist business and plotted how to pay off the injured man, knowing his wife—an illiterate woman with three children, living in a shack out in the badlands near the airport—wouldn’t be able to resist the blood money. Chris and his friends had walked free.
    Lane throws back his fifth Scotch, but the alcohol can’t wash away the memory of Chris kneeling over the girl, Melanie Walker, pulping her head into the carpet of the pool house, his blacksmith’s arm beating down in a relentless rhythm.
    His son the killer, sleeping peacefully, who’ll wake in the morning to his life of plenty—university in the new year and trials for the Western Province professional rugby team—while Lyndall Solomons is jammed into a cell at Pollsmoor Prison, not ten minutes drive from here.
    Lane searches the pocket of his pants and finds Detective Gwen Perils’s card. He reaches for his phone, ready to call her and tell her everything, when he reads the time displayed on the face of his Nokia: 3:22 a.m.
    No hour to call anyone, not even a cop.
    So he drops the phone on the bedside table and lies back and sips the Scotch, knowing he won’t be able to sleep. That he’ll be lying here at sunrise, waiting.

16
     
     
    The door to the minibus taxi, rattling open like marbles shaken in a tin can, releases Louise into sunlight so harsh that it seems to weigh upon her, pressing her down into the bubbling blacktop, making each step an act of will.  
    She squints against the sun, battling to see the dun-colored brick walls, the high fences and barbed wire and the skinny-legged guard towers where shadowy men, thick with body armor, sweep the courtyard with long barreled rifles.
    On a strip of parched grass by the prison wall a woman and a child sit on a tartan blanket with their backs to her, picnicking on gobs of viscous meat and chicken with yellow, pimpled skin. When the child, a chunky blond boy, turns to Louise she sees he is the young Christopher Lane, his mouth smeared with gore as he tears into a strip of bloody flesh.
    Beverley Lane shouts something at Louise but all she hears is a scream so painful to her ears that she covers them and flees down an endless corridor, the floor burnished to an oxblood sheen.
    Arms encircle Louise and metal gates slam behind her as she’s dragged to a cell seething with men, their limbs opening like anemones as she is thrown amongst them, and she sees they surround the naked body of Lyndall, and then they’re reaching for her, their fingers tearing at her clothes, tearing at her flesh.
    Louise wakes, sweating, her heart pounding, and clicks