From Cape Town with Love

From Cape Town With Love



Chapter 1

ONE

SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER


NOVEMBER 5, 2008

SOUTH AFRICA

April Forrest’s eyes widened. “Ten... what happened to your face?”

In the bosom of beauty, ugly comes as a shock. The swelling and bruises across my face made me look like I’d just been attacked by a prison gang. Might as well have been-although it was just one man. In the swamp.

When April left Los Angeles to teach in South Africa for six months, she’d left me, too. We had passed the one-year milestone right before she changed her mind about us, and an ocean and ten thousand miles had suddenly seemed like a small toll to see her again. I wanted to know what had scared her off-but maybe it was written all over my face.

“Long story,” I said. “I tried, but I couldn’t find flowers this late. May I come in?”

Apparently, long story wasn’t enough to get the door open any wider. April was lithe and fine, with skin the color of ginger.

She was living in a tiny cinder-block house on a street of modest but well-kept homes in a middle-class section of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. In the bright light from the porch, I saw her jaw shift with uncertainty. Her delicate chin and gently swaying braids, adorned with regal white beads at the ends, reminded me of why some men could be driven to beg.

Two or three loose dogs I’d seen outside the gate were barking at me from the unlighted street. Two yipped harmlessly, but one sounded like thunder. A week before, I’d killed a German shepherd in the Florida swamp. The memory of the dog’s last yelp, and his master’s last labored breath, still iced my blood.

“You look like you almost got murdered, Ten. What happened?”

“The T. D. Jackson case.” My investigation into the death of football star T. D. Jackson had taken me places that were hard to put into words. Dad had told me that an LAPD officer who had been through my ordeal might have been considered like an OIS, Officer Involved Shooting, and sent to counseling. “Like I said, April... long story.”

April’s look told me that I was failing my first test since our breakup. In her place, I might close the door on me. Dying hope flashed hot in my chest. I knew it then: I shouldn’t have come to see April without calling her first, like my father and Chela told me before I left.

“Ten, I can’t... I’m not alone.”

She’s already with somebody else? A foreign rage tightened the back of my neck. I didn’t know if I was more pissed at her for moving on, or at myself for flying across the world to witness her new life up close.

When an older woman appeared behind April in the doorway, I wanted to hug her. April was boarding, so she was living with her hostess! The woman looked about fifty-five, but her skin was so smooth that she might have been ten or fifteen years older.

FROM CAPE TOWN WITH LOVE by Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due & Steven Barnes. Copyright © 2010 Trabajando, Inc., Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. Reprinted by permission of Pocket Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY.