Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,7

vacuum. 826 alligator. Nervousness will blurt right out with something, anything, to kill the silence. 839 alligator. Unless nervousness is kept busy doing something more useful. Like counting. 842 alligator.

The inspector's face is perfectly, studiedly neutral, like a 3-D rendering of a face waiting for an animator to pull the strings. 860 alligator. Watching her watch me gives me the opportunity to study her. She has a round face with cheeks like apples and baggy pouches under her eyes that look like they're settling in for the long haul. She wears her hair in braids tied back with a clip. Not exactly practical for ipoyisa, but then she's an inspector, not a patrol grunt. There is a tiny scar where she once had a nose piercing. 884 alligator. Maybe she still wears a diamanté stud off-duty. Maybe she has a whole secret life, a sideline in punk rock or a night-class PhD in Philosophy. 902 alligator.

Her navy suit has a food smear on the lapel. I'd venture tomato sauce. 911 alligator. Maybe blood. Maybe she beat up another suspect in another grey room just before she came in here. 922 alligator. I'd feel her out for her lost things, but cops and police stations are all equipped with magic blockers. It's regulation infrasound. Low-frequency sound waves below the range of human hearing, but which still resonate in your body, the kind that scientists use to explain experiences of haunted houses or the divine, usually brought on by something as mundane as an extraction fan or the low notes of a church organ. 932 alligator. That was before the world changed. It's a fragile state – the world as we know it. All it takes is one Afghan warlord to show up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they knew goes right out the window. 948 alligator.

Inspector Tshabalala leans across the table to pick up the ring, idly rolls it between her fingers. 953 alligator. She takes a breath. 961 alligator. Caves.

"Hardly seems worth it," she says. Sloth startles with a hiccup, as if he'd just been dropping off to sleep, which is not unlikely. He sleeps around sixteen hours a day.

"You think?" I'm annoyed that I have to clear my throat.

"You could probably get a good price for it. R5000 if you had the certification. But let's assume you don't, which means you're looking at what, R800 max, at a pawnshop. You that hard up for cash, Zinzi?"

She flicks the ring over her knuckles and back, the kind of cheap magic trick you might use to impress girls in high school.

"I don't know how Mr Luditsky would feel about that."

"Feel about what?"

"Being pawned. Bad karma. He might haunt me." I incline my head at Sloth. "And I'm haunted enough already."

"What are you talking about?"

"The ring? It's made with dead guy. Do your homework, Inspector."

She blinks, but just the once. "All right, so what were you planning to do with the ring?"

"Return it. It was a job. Like I told your guys outside her building. Repeatedly."

"Your fingerprints were all over the scene."

"I was in her apartment two days ago. She made me tea. It was undrinkable. You going to tell me how she died?"

"You tell me, Zinzi."

Sloth grazes my shoulder with his teeth, which is his way of kicking me under the table. I sort of specialise in social faux pas.

"All right," I say, causing Sloth to bite down on my shoulder hard. I shrug him away. "Let's see. She died on the scene. In her apartment. Gunshot?" I'm imagining a retro number with the words Vektor printed down the side, even though that's ridiculous. "Stabbing? Blunt object? Choked on a piece of stale biscotti?"

Inspector Tshabalala flicks the ring, backwards, forwards, palms it. Then she reaches into her bag and places a brown cardboard police docket on the desk. After a moment, she flicks it open to reveal the photographs. She fans them out, hoping to get a reaction. "You tell me," she says again.

There is a woolly sheepskin slipper lying in the passage by the front door. There is stripe of blood over the toe of the slipper that continues in an arc across the wall and a framed print of waterlilies.

There is a bloody smear against the wall, as if someone had fallen against it and scraped along, using the wall for support.

There is a black raincoat in the bathtub, a puddle of plastic and blood under the full blast of the