Capture (11 page)

Vernon gets himself up to the bar, slides in beside the plainclothes. “So, Dino, what’s the fucken story?”

The detective lights a smoke to give himself a moment, shaking the match dead and flicking it onto the floor, exhaling twin vapor trails through that snout of his. “Vernon Saul. Thought you were a security guard but here you are babysitting pussy.”

Vernon knows he mustn’t get on the wrong side of this bastard, even finds something resembling a smile, showing off his nice white teeth.

“I’m in armed response, Llandudno side. Work here some nights. What else can a man do with our excuse for a pension?”

“The shit you made, you lucky you even get a pension.”

Vernon fixes his smile in place. “Come on, Dino, nobody got nothing on me.”

Erasmus sniffs through his double-barrels, scanning the almost deserted club. The cop van outside was scaring away the early punters, who are timid anyway—desperate and furtive and not yet filled with booze and come-lust.

“What you know about this little piece of shit Faro?”

Vernon shrugs. “He used to deal to some of the girls. Small-time.”

“He ever hassle you?”

Vernon laughs. “Me? He wouldn’t try.”

“So when last you see him?”

“When we closed, round three. He was walking down to his car. I went the other way, to where I park back of the club.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Vernon leans in closer to Erasmus. “Dino, why you on this anyway? Who cares about that useless little fuck?”

Erasmus shakes his head. “Man, whoever sorted out Faro did the world a flipping favor but I wish to Christ he done it across the railway line. This side we got some whitey local politician making a noise about community policing and all that bloody bullshit, so now SI gotta do window dressing.”

This knocks the gleam off Vernon’s smile. Special Investigations is a new outfit, supposedly incorruptible, formed to clean up the image of the cops. “Since when you with SI?”

Erasmus shrugs. “Few weeks.”

Means he’s still on probation. Way it works at SI. Means this dumb cocksucker is gonna be all hot and sticky to prove he’s worth the bump in pay if he goes permanent. Vernon doesn’t like this. Not one fucken bit.

Costa, looking harassed, dims the lights and cues the DJ. Loud bass pumps out, distorting through the crap sound system, Costa too cheap to upgrade, and Dawn’s coming through the curtains, in her jeans and white shirt, not even looking at the handful of men who sit around the ramp. In her own little world, that one. Same to her if it’s ten losers or ten thousand. She stares into space, moving her ass, shedding her shirt and bra.

Erasmus is all eyes. “What’s her name, that thing?” Leaning in close, shouting into Vernon’s ear, breath heavy with KFC and cigarettes.

“Dawn.”

“You fix me up with her in one of the rooms?”

Vernon shakes his head. “She don’t do that.”

“Why not? She think she something special, her with that bushman hair?”

Vernon shrugs. “She just don’t do it.”

Dawn loses the jeans and has her thumbs hooked into the waist of her panties, sliding them down far enough to show some pussy fur.

Even with the racket of the music, Vernon can hear the wheeze of Erasmus’s breath. Then the plainclothes clears his throat and reaches into his pocket and hauls out his flashing cell phone, covers one ear, and shouts something into it.

“Got to go,” he says, and grabs the uniformed cop by the collar of his shirt and walks him to the door, the pimply kid almost breaking his neck to look back as Dawn steps out of her panties.

Vernon limps up to the ramp and sits in the front row, massaging his bad leg that’s paining like a fucker, watching Dawn dance, her eyes closed, unaware of his presence, moving her bare naked body in time to some sticky R&B. She kneels and bends backward, her thick corkscrew curls brushing the ramp.

Her box is level with Vernon’s face, and if he leaned forward he could bite the clit peeping at him like a little pink tongue through the concertina folds of cunt meat. Means nothing to him. Zero. But when Dawn lifts her head up from the floor and her eyelids flicker open and she stares straight at him and he sees the terror in her eyes, now that’s when he’s turned on.

Chapter 15

It is very late—closer to daybreak than to midnight—and Exley, riding the wave of adrenaline the battle with Caroline pumped into him, has completed the model of his daughter. He takes Sunny out of the modeling environment and is ready to animate her, ready to marry her body to a sixty-second segment he extracted from the data stream of her dancing.

This is what Caroline calls his Victor Frankenstein moment: when he breathes life into his monstrosities. Or she called it that back before Sunny was born, when she was interested enough to stand at the computer, staring over his shoulder, her cigarette smoke irritating his nostrils.

Exley presses the render button and watches the progress bar at the bottom of his monitor creep from empty to full. But he pauses before he hits the spacebar to trigger playback.

He can’t bring himself to watch what he has brought into being. Not yet. Terrified that he’s created a travesty of Sunny, which would be like a double death.

He pushes his chair away from the console and stands, taking a few seconds to come upright. His lower back aches, his shoulders are locked and he feels a twinge of carpal tunnel in the joint of his right thumb. When he takes off his glasses and massages his eyes it’s as if he’s rubbing broken glass into his corneas.

Exley slides his glasses back on and steps out of his studio, standing for a moment in the darkness of the living room. The house is silent. Caroline must be asleep.

He opens the door to the deck and crosses to the railing, looking out at the moon hanging low and heavy over the ocean, feeling a gauzy vapor of sea air on his face, the stink of rotting kelp thick in his nostrils.

The water hisses and sucks, small waves slapping the sand where Sunny lay dead. He walks through to the dark kitchen and opens the refrigerator. There is only one bottle of Evian left and he reminds himself to call the liquor store in the morning, get them to deliver water and beer and wine. For whoever shows up for the funeral.

Exley released a flock of text messages earlier, to all of his acquaintances in the city and the parents of Sunny’s playmates. The replies are lost in the barrage he encouraged with his dumb Facebook post.

He stands in the kitchen and drinks, pours Evian into the palm of his hand and wipes his face and rubs some of the water into his hair, drops falling onto his glasses like rain on a windshield. He uses a washcloth to clean his glasses and then he knows he can delay no more, so he heads back to the studio, sits down, his hand hovering over the smeared spacebar. He closes his eyes, mumbles something that may be a prayer.

Then he hits playback.

And there she is, Sunny, dancing, lifting her arms, twirling, her hair floating away from her smiling face. She is perfect and he allows himself to cry for the first time since he saw her lying dead on the beach.

Chapter 16

Dawn brushes Brittany’s hair. It’s early morning and as always she hasn’t had enough sleep. Still got to get the kid to play school, little group of mainly white kids, Brittany looking like them but speaking different—although Dawn has noticed this is changing as she spends more time with the whities. A good thing? Shit, maybe. Why should Dawn feel anything for the Cape Flats? Never gave her nothing but heartache and grief.

“Mommy?”

“Ja?”

“Is Mommy gonna marry Uncle Vermin?”

“Jesus, what makes you say a thing like that?” Dawn snags a knot in the kid’s pale hair and her daughter yelps. “Sorry, man. No, my baby, I’m not gonna marry Uncle Vernon.”

“Then why he come on here all the time?”

“He looks after us.” The lie sticks in her throat.

“Why then Mommy don’t marry him?”

“God, what’s with all the bloody questions?” Dawn finishes brushing and stands. “Go pee now so I can get you down to the taxi.”

Brittany rushes off to the bathroom and Dawn takes jeans and a spaghetti-strap top from the closet, but before she can dress there’s a knock at the door. Too loud for Mrs. de Pontes. Not loud enough for Vernon. Must be the bloody landlord hassling her for the rent money.

Landlord’s an old Greek guy—buddy of Costa’s—and he always gives Dawn the eye, so she runs a hand through her matted hair and pulls down the T-shirt she wears over her nakedness, making herself look a bit more decent.

But when she opens the door it’s not the old Greek, it’s the cop from last night. The one with the nostrils and the balls that need constant adjusting.

“Ja?”

“Let me in,” Erasmus says.

“Why for?”

“I need to ask you a few questions.”

“So ask.”

“You want your neighbors to hear?”

“I got no secrets.”

But she steps back and the cop comes in, looking around with a sour expression.

“Nice,” he says. Meaning
shit
.

“And where the fuck you live? Beverly Hills?”

“Quite a mouth you got on you.” Cups that package. “Maybe I fill it with something.”

Dawn stares at his groin. “I take that in and I still got space for my breakfast.” She smiles as she sees him color and grabs a smoke from the top of the TV and lights it. “So talk.”

His eyes flick away from Dawn’s tits as Brittany comes in from the bathroom, looking up at the cop, saying nothing, just staring the way she does.

“And where you get that?” Erasmus asks. Dawn doesn’t answer. “Social services know you sell your ass?”

“I don’t sell my ass.”

“What? You give it away for free?”

He laughs, but this is uncomfortable for her. She doesn’t need no cop digging into her life. Brittany is watching them, understanding too much.

“Britt, go brush your teeth.”

“I already brush them.”

“Then brush them again. Go!”

Grumbling, the child returns to the bathroom and Dawn closes the door.

“So, what you want, Detective?” Putting some nice into her voice.

“The Boogie story. Something I got to ask you.”

“What?”

“Vernon Saul. Him and Boogie have any issues?”

“Like what?”

Uninvited he sits down on the sofa, and Dawn sits opposite him, making sure her T-shirt covers her snatch. Doesn’t stop Erasmus taking in the view like a tourist.

The cop shrugs. “You know Vernon. I hear Boogie was selling shit at the club?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe Vernon wanted some of the action?”

“Told you, I don’t know fuck-all about that.”

But she’s sensing something here. Some messy cop business. Boogie was a nothing, wouldn’t warrant this kind of attention from the law. This cop doesn’t like Vernon. She guesses that it’s an old grudge, that he would like to take Vernon Saul down if he could.

And Dawn’s back on the street the night Boogie got himself dead, crossing Voortrekker, about to let the lobby of her building swallow her up, when something makes her look behind her and she sees Vernon catch up with Boogie, putting a heavy arm around his shoulders. Then she’s in the building and she sees no more.

“What?” the cop asks, smelling something, his nostrils flaring so wide she swears she can see his brains.

For a moment she almost tells him, thinking how fucken good her life would be with no Vernon Saul in it. But she knows the risk is just too great and she shakes her head.

“Nothing. I got nothing more to tell you.”

“What’s your relationship with Vernon?”

“We don’t got a
relationship
.”

He nods. Looks around, then back at her. “Gonna offer me some coffee?”

“Can’t. Gotta get my kid to play school.”

The cop stands, grunts, adjusts the hang of those balls. He takes a card from his jacket and drops it on the table next to the dirty mugs and the overflowing ashtray.

“You remember anything, don’t care what, you call me, understand?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, then.” He takes a last look at her ass and then he walks to the door. “Be good now.”

“You too.”

He laughs and he’s gone, leaving a whiff of armpits and cheap aftershave.

Yvonne Saul hardly slept. The pathetic wailing of the child in the shack next to her—so close she could reach out her bedroom window, across the low Vibracrete wall, and touch the peeling wood of the hut—kept her awake again most of the night. She can still hear it, softer, though, here in the kitchen, as she stirs scrambled eggs, bacon already spitting in the pan. Preparing Vernon’s favorite breakfast. She hears him thumping around in his room and wonders what sort of mood he’ll be in today.

He limps in, dressed only in his underpants, his hair standing up in spikes. He doesn’t greet her, just sits down at the plastic kitchen table, that thin, scarred leg thrown out to the side. It’s withering away, the muscles going slack. He’s meant to do exercises to build it up but she knows he can’t be bothered and doesn’t dare to speak to him about it.

Yvonne dumps half a can of baked beans onto the plate and serves him. He holds his fork in his right hand, hunched over the table, feeding his face without so much as a word of thanks. She takes her place opposite him. No breakfast for her, a cup of black tea is all she can keep down in the morning.

The crying continues, she can count each sob as the poor little creature fights for breath. “You hear that?” she says before she can stop herself.

“Little brat needs a hiding.”

“Vernon, people saying things about them in that shack.”

He doesn’t look at her, shoveling egg into his mouth. “What things?”

“Mrs. Flanagan—”

“That fucken big-mouth bitch?”

“She say the man is abusing the child.”

He laughs a yellow spray of egg. “True’s God?”

“Ja.”

Now he’s staring at her, his fork clattering onto his plate. “And suddenly you give a shit? When it’s happening to somebody else’s kid?”