Black Heart, by Mike Nicol

Black Heart, by Mike Nicol. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2011. ISBN 9781415201176 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0117-6

In the final part of Mike Nicol's Revenge Trilogy, Black Heart, the hidden hand of one of the main characters, bad girl Sheemina February, is everywhere. Her finger is tight on the trigger.

Mike Nicol  

[...] She clicked play. The man was in. The cctv footage running on, showing the now empty corridor, the two closed doors. After a minute the automatic timer kicked in, switched off the lights. She waited: three minutes later the lights clicked on. There was the man closing the apartment door, not rushing, keeping his back to the camera. Walking down the corridor to the lift at the far end. Going past the lift to the stairwell, reaching up to take off the balaclava as he disappeared from the screen. He'd behaved exactly as she'd wanted. Couldn't resist sniffing out her lair. She ejected the dvd with the cctv footage from her laptop, the dvd a little favour courtesy of the block's security company. Shed told them it was a friend playing the fool. 'Some friend, some fool,' the boss man at the security company had said, not making too much effort to keep his eyes off her cleavage. 'You know people with interesting skills, Miss February' 'You better believe it,' she'd said, sashaying out of his office in her long coat, her black hair floating above the collar. Sheemina February slotted another dvd into the laptop. Footage from her own surveillance system. There was the balaclavaed man in her apartment, picked up on infrared, the colours muted blues and blacks. The balaclava dark blue, the anorak black, the man wearing gloves, jeans, trainers. The uniform of anybody. Standing there, dead still, listening. No visible gun. Meant he wasn't expecting her to be home. He was scoping the terrain. Cautious Mace. Predictable Mace. Curious Mace. Exactly what she'd anticipated. Lure him in for the kill shot. It was almost too easy. On screen the man moving into her open plan lounge by torchlight. Running his fingers along the back of her white sofa, walking across her white flokatis to her desk, opening drawers, fidgeting among her papers, moving on, sliding the beam too quickly over the pictures on the walls to take them in. But stopping at the box of cut-throat razors mounted above her desk. Blades that had once shaved famous men. Blades she'd tracked down, paid top dollar for. A blade that'd belonged to Cecil Rhodes. Another to a killer called Joe Silver. Had his name engraved on it. A man some historian had fingered as Jack the Ripper. She liked that, the posthumous fame of the gold rush pimp and trafficker, Joe Silver. Each of the six blades she'd collected had a story. Except there were only five there now. The missing one, her grandfather's, had been used to cut the throat of Mace Bishop's wife. Before that, quarter of a century before that, her grandfather had used it to slit his wrists. Rather die than be turfed out of his house. In a way, Sheemina believed, that particular cut-throat was an instrument of history: destiny manifest, pity to lose a family heirloom but it couldn't be helped. The razor probably lying in some evidence box waiting for the autopsy hearing. No worries. There were ways she reckoned she could get it back. She snapped again on Mace Bishop, Mace Bishop focusing on the empty space in her cut-throat collection. Realising that the blade used to kill his wife had once been an ornament on her wall. How'd that make him feel? Rise the rage in him? Bring up the red pulse? What was he thinking, this man, Mace Bishop? This man in her white lair, among her things. This man intent on killing her. Fired by revenge. Did he even begin to figure out why she wanted to hurt him? Why she wanted to ruin him? Wreck his life? He would. By the time she'd finished, he would. [...]

This is an excerpt from the crime novel: Black Heart, by Mike Nicol.

Title: Black Heart
Author: Mike Nicol
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2011
ISBN 9781415201176 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0117-6
Softcover, 15 x 22 cm, 336 pages