Capture (18 page)

Exley stops, the tires crunching on gravel, and Vernon walks past the hot grille of the car with its distinctive four rings interlocking like some magic trick. The top of the Audi is down, Exley’s hair yellow in the spill of the street light.

“Vernon,” Exley says.

“Nick.” Vernon leans on the door of the Audi, taking the weight off his bad leg, which throbs after the couple of hours he’s sat vigil outside the house.

“Is there a problem?” Vernon can smell booze on Exley’s breath. Scotch, he reckons.

“Ja, look Nick, Mrs. E. went a bit random this afternoon.” He gives an edited version of the events at the Stankovic house.

Exley shakes his head and massages his eyes beneath his glasses. “Jesus, Vernon. Thanks for handling it.”

“It was nothing, buddy. But I think you’ve got a bit of a situation on your hands.”

“Caroline gets like this when she’s off her meds. This thing with Sunny has derailed her, but Vlad’s a friend and this is fucking embarrassing.”

Here’s the gap Vernon’s been waiting for. He baits his hook. “Nick, him and your wife are more than friends, if you get what I’m saying.”

The whitey gazes up at him, gullible as a bunny. “Not sure I do, Vernon.”

“Listen, I know this is one helluva time but I think there’s something you should know.” Vernon pauses like a TV actor, milking the moment, making his voice all low and serious. “For the last few months they been spending a lot of time together, your woman and him. Up at his house. While his wife’s away.”

“You’ve seen them?”

Vernon shrugs. “When I patrolled I couldn’t help noticing Mrs. E.’s car in his driveway.”

“That right?”

“Ja, and he takes her to Sandy Bay.”

Exley shakes his head. “Caroline? On a nude beach? No way.”

“I seen them, Nick.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“Do you want me to go into detail, Nick, about what I seen?”

The whitey stares at him before he speaks. “Jesus. You’re sure?”

Vernon nods. “Yes, Nick, I am. Sorry it has to be me telling you this.”

He reaches out a hand and touches Exley on his bony shoulder, feels the tension in the man. “Hell, my friend, I know you don’t need no more shit right now.”

“Thank you, Vernon,” Exley says, all whispery. He clicks the Audi into drive and Vernon steps back and watches as Exley triggers the gate, which rattles open, lets the convertible through, then swallows it.

Happy fucken families.

Vernon lights a smoke, allowing himself a smile now as he pictures the shit that’s going to go down inside that glass and wood box. He slides into the truck, smoking, facing the house, ready to eavesdrop on any action, when the radio hisses and squawks.

He reaches for the mike. “Car Two.”

The dispatcher. No love in her voice. Probably a dyke. “Alarm activation at forty-four Sunset.”

“Copy that. On my way.” Fuck it, probably a false alarm, but what can he do?

Vernon starts the truck, light bars making like Christmas, throws a U-turn and takes off at speed.

“So, what, were you sucking Vlad Stankovic’s cock in here? While you were meant to be watching Sunny?” They’re in the kitchen, where Exley found his wife when he came in from the garage.

Caroline stands by the counter with her back to him, hugging herself so tightly that her fingertips are bloodless. Exley sees her face reflected in the window; her eyes are closed and she is smiling. She hums tunelessly, just audible over the buzzing fluorescents. Despite the heat she wears the shapeless sweater, sleeves dangling to her fingertips, hem brushing her naked thighs.

“Jesus, talk to me, Caroline.”

She doesn’t respond, holding herself, droning.

Exley’s anger is fuelled by the Scotches he drank on the plane and he takes his wife by the shoulder, trying to turn her to him. She shrugs off his hand, her body rigid.

“Don’t. You. Fucking. Touch. Me.”

When he clutches at her again she swivels her head and looks at him over her shoulder and what he sees in her eyes makes him drop his hand and take a step back.

Caroline, still humming, reaches across and pulls the largest, most lethal knife from the block on the counter, and spins, her arm raised, blade gleaming as it points toward his chest.

“Put the knife down,” Exley says, seizing her arm. She breaks loose and slashes with the carving knife, cutting him across the back of his left hand. Not a deep cut, but enough to break the skin, and blood wells up. “You crazy fucking bitch!” he says as she comes at him again. He parries but his fingers are cut now and he knows she is past reason.

He feels the sharpened edge slicing into his left palm as he grips the steel, feels the warmth of the blood, and twists and rips the knife from her grasp, switching it to his right hand.

He shoves Caroline away from him and she hits the fridge with her shoulders, freeing one of Sunny’s crayon drawings, which floats to the floor, and the picture of the happy nuclear family (Exley and Caro and Sunny holding hands under a smiley-faced sun) sticks to the sole of his wife’s bare foot—a foot tacky with his blood.

Caroline catches hold of the counter, panting, breath smelling of stale tea and cigarettes and wine, cursing him in an unintelligible stream, her body wiry and taut. Then she stretches for the block again and frees another knife, with a smaller, serrated cutting edge.

Exley knows he should retreat, lock himself in his studio, hit the panic button and call Vernon for help. But he doesn’t. He advances and knocks the small blade from her grasp. She looks at him, quiet now, just the rise and fall of her breath, the buzz of the fluorescent, the hard tick of the wall clock and the hum of the refrigerator.

Then Caroline says, “I’m glad she’s dead,” her voice low and hoarse. “You were always so smug in your little world of two. Now you know how it feels to be alone.”

She means every word, and Exley hates her for it.

He lifts the carving knife high over his head, seeing the shadow of his arm and the tapering steel lying black across Caroline’s face and chest.

“You don’t have the balls,” she says.

Exley’s read about people who have killed saying that it was all a blur, claiming amnesia, but everything becomes hyperreal, his vision so sharply focused that he can see the pores in Caroline’s nose—a pimple incubating just below her left nostril—sees the flecks of foamy spittle at the sides of her mouth, sees her pupils dilated and reddish through the gingery lashes.

Time stretches and he can almost feel the command as it travels from his brain, down his shoulder and right arm, to his hand tightening its grip on the handle of the knife. His arm falls. As the blade arcs toward Caroline’s chest he’s certain that she is too sinewy and bony—too armored—for the steel to penetrate. It will snap against her chest.

But it doesn’t.

There is a moment of resistance as the knife finds flesh and she grunts, then he is right up against her, his weight driving the blade past her breastbone into the chest cavity, into her aorta. She pushes back, almost topples him, fighting for her life, impossibly strong—veins and tendons standing out like a relief map in her neck as she tugs at his arm and struggles with manic energy, her funk rising up at him from beneath her sweater, ribbons of blood slingshot by her flailing limbs.

He loses his grip on the knife handle, his fingers slick with her blood, and he has to hold on to Caroline to keep himself from falling, pulling her toward him in an embrace as warm fluid geysers from her mouth and onto his chest. She looks up at him and her eyes, fixed on his, cloud and he knows he is watching her die and he feels only relief as he releases her and she slips down and lies on the tiled floor in a spreading pool, knife in her chest, their child’s drawing still glued to her foot.

Thick, dark blood spews from her mouth and she kicks her feet and pisses and shits herself, and he feels ashamed for her. Then her eyes blink and freeze and something fades from them and he realizes the enormity of what he has done.

Rivers of red follow the grid of the tile grouting and Exley steps back, desperate not to let the blood touch his Reeboks. He retreats farther until he feels his haunches against the counter and he stands still for how long he doesn’t know, listening to the fluorescents and the song of the fridge and the measured hammer of the clock until he knows he must do something.

So he finds his BlackBerry in his pocket and scrolls down to Vernon Saul’s number and presses the little green button.

Chapter 26

Beautiful. Fucken beautiful.

When Vernon walks in and sees the mad bitch lying dead, the handle of the knife sticking out of her chest and Nick Exley pacing the kitchen covered in blood, things just kind of slow down, and he goes into the zone and he knows exactly what to do.

Exley is pale as paper, shaking so badly his teeth are doing the flamenco. “She came at me, Vernon, with the knife. We fought, I dunno what happened, but, Jesus… We better get the cops.”

Vernon holds up a hand. “Nick, whoa, buddy. Focus. You done right by calling me first.” The white guy stares at him from the far side of hell. “We can contain this.”

“Contain what? I killed her.”

“You need to chill, Nick. Come.” He leads Exley to the adjoining living room. “Take a seat. Listen careful now, we don’t have much time.”

They sit, Vernon positioning Exley with his back to the mess in the kitchen. “Nick, what you got to understand is that if this happened out on the Flats, or even in some crap white suburb, nobody gonna give a fuck about it. Just another dead body. But you guys are rich foreigners. It’s embarrassing for the authorities when this kind of shit goes down, them so busy bullshitting the world South Africa don’t have no crime epidemic.” Talking nice and calmly now, drawing Exley in. “Believe me, the cops are gonna be all over this. And they gonna ride you hard, my buddy.”

“But it was self-defense.”

Vernon shrugs. “Hey, Nick, you don’t need to convince me of nothing. But you don’t want to fuck with the South African legal system. White guy like you, they’ll throw your ass into Pollsmoor with a bunch of hardcore darkies and I think we both know how that’ll go.”

“Surely I’ll make bail?”

“Eventually, maybe. Still, they gonna hold you until you get a bail hearing. Courts are jammed up, so it’ll take days, with you stuck in Pollsmoor. Then, being a foreigner and all, prosecutor’ll say you’re a flight risk, which could delay things, or if the judge is a hardass maybe he denies bail.” He sees the fear in Exley’s face and has to bite back a smile. “Even if you get bail, you gonna have to surrender your passport, then it’s gonna be months, maybe even years, with you on trial. And Nick, believe me, I know what I’m talking about, at the end of it there’s a good chance you’ll be looking at jail time, ’cause they wanna make an example of you. You’ll sit for a couple of years at least. Maybe more.” He shakes his head. “Guy like you, you not gonna make it.”

“So what do I do?”

Vernon pauses, holding Exley’s gaze, slowing things down. “First, you didn’t kill your wife, you hearing me?” Exley shakes his head. “Okay. This is how it goes. You park the Audi, walk in from the garage, see her on the floor bleeding. Then a darkie comes at you with a knife, mad motherfucker with dreadlocks and he wants to stab you too. You fight him and your hand gets cut. Then he runs out onto the deck and away across the rocks. You go to your wife and she’s still alive. Just. You hold her—that’s how you get all that blood on you—and she dies in your arms. Then you call me.”

Exley slumps, staring down at the tiles. “It’s crazy. Nobody will believe it.”

“Sure they will. Look at me, Nick.” The whitey lifts his gaze. “There’s been reports of some whack-head Rasta running around here. Your wife was alone, freaked out, didn’t put on the alarm and left the deck door wide open. He came in to rob the house, she interrupted him and he grabbed the knife and stabbed her. Pocketed her cell phone and then you came in, scared him off. Happens all the time.”

“What about the knife?”

“He took it with him.” He sees the look on Exley’s face. “Don’t worry, Nick, I’ll sort this. You go find me your wife’s phone, okay?”

Exley hesitates and for a moment Vernon fears that he’s losing him.

“Nick, this is about the rest of your life, buddy. Be smart.”

At last Exley nods and disappears upstairs. Vernon steps into the kitchen, careful not to track through the blood, and searches the drawers until he finds a plastic bag. He puts the bag around his hand, kneels down beside Caroline Exley as if he’s going to check for vital signs, but he draws the blade from her chest—a little suck of air as he uncorks the wound—and drops the knife into the bag. He uses the plastic to smudge any prints on the handle.

He stands as Exley returns, holding out a new Nokia. Vernon opens the mouth of the bag. “Drop it inside.” The phone clatters in beside the knife. “Now I bet you’re thinking about the surveillance cameras?”

When Exley stares at him blankly, Vernon leads the way across the living room toward the sliding door, pointing out into the night.

“There’s a blind spot right there. Part of the deck and the beach are out of their range. You tell the cops that’s where the mad bastard went. I’ve already recommended to the technicians that they install another camera but they’re slack fuckers. Lucky for us, hey?”

Exley nods, running a bloody hand through his hair, barely holding on to himself. The furniture of this poor bastard’s life has been seriously rearranged over the last few days.

“Okay, I’m gonna stash this in my truck.” Vernon lifts the plastic bag. “Then I’m gonna call the cops and the ambulance. So you got your story straight?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Run it by me.”

Exley tries, but he loses his way and ends up shaking his head again.

“The cops will never buy this.”

“Try again, Nick.”

When Exley just stands there, staring, Vernon steps in close, speaking real soft. “You don’t get this right you’re fucked, my buddy. Now try it again.”

Exley stutters and stumbles, but he manages to get through the fiction Vernon has created.