2B

Ma-Stokvel should have known better. The shebeen business was a profitable one, but you had to know whom not to cross swords with.

Unfortunately Ma-Stokvel did not know what tact was, or even if she did, it was certainly not something she would bother with. The word itself was too small for her. She'd stretch it until the strings pulled free. "Hai, that Bra Mikes. He's an ugly one hey? Looks like a tokoloshe! Ja, those cherries just after his money, I tell you. Why else would they bed that Papa Smurf, eh?" Ma-Stokvel would share these extravagant vilifications with any patron who was too drunk to vacate his seat. Unfortunately, one of these patrons was Shakes, who happened to be Bra Mikes' right hand man, and as luck would have it, his eyes and ears.

Years at the business-end of a beer bottle meant that Shakes' aim was off, but he was respected as a fixer. As long as he took care of things, he could spend his cash any way he wanted, even if that meant pissing it against the zinc wall of some shebeen. Which is where he met Raymar.

The way Shakes saw it, Ma-Stokvel would serve as an example to anyone else who tried to undercut Bra Mikes. Not only was Ma-Stokvel very vocal about the men she considered unbeddable, she considered herself something of a location heroine, speaking out vociferously against the tsotsies who dealt in all things nefarious close to her shebeen. The fact that her own blend of skokiaan - better known as brain blitz by her regulars- should carry a health warning and pictures of fried liver, was not her concern. Her insulting Mikes' masculinity was just a convenient excuse for Bra Mikes to obliterate her completely.


Raymar got out of the taxi at the same stop that she did, but did not take as long. She oozed between the passengers, puffing and sweating until she emerged from the vehicle with a near-orgasmic "Yoooh!"
Her bright yellow smock shirt bobbed like a buoy in the crowd, easy to follow until she ducked into one of the many alleys which made up the rabbit-warren which was Soweto.

He did not like guns, he preferred to get in close, so he could see what he was doing, so he could smell the fear and the death. Killing was an art to him, and doing it from a distance was like looking at a Titian through a telescope. No pencil-sketch pre-planning either. Just confident, broad brushstrokes.

As he plunged the pencil into her eye-socket, forcing it home with the flat of his hand, the last thing she saw was the absence of emotion on his face. There was no ghost in this machine. He stepped over her body in one fluid motion, cat-like, walked purposefully through an alley and then back onto the dusty road. On the other sidewalk, sheep were milling in a makeshift enclosure while one of their mates bled into a gutter. A sheep's head was roasting nearby, a delicacy named "Smiley" by the locals because of the way the lips pulled back from the teeth in an obscene grimace as the muscles in it's jaw cooked.

Raymar stood by the roadside, his finger pointing upwards, indicating to passing taxi drivers that he was heading for the busy city centre. He calmly got into the minibus taxi, just another commuter going about his business.

"The pen may be mightier than the sword", he thought. "But a good pencil would do in a pinch"