Capture (28 page)

But they follow Vernon and he stops at an intersection and stands under a street lamp that flickers like a strobe light, raining orange flashes down on him, his head dizzy with his father’s voice. He grabs hold of the light pole, gasping, his eyes shut.

He hears sub-woofers blasting out rap and when he opens his eyes he sees an old Datsun stopped near him, two brown guys checking him out like he’s totally fucken lost it. One guy laughs before the car rattles away, taking its music with it.

Get your head straight, Vernon tells himself, walking again, only now he knows where he’s going: to his Civic, to get his spare phone with the anonymous SIM card so he can call that stupid fucken cunt Nick Exley. He sinks down into the seat and dials. Gets voicemail, Exley sounding like somebody from no place at all. Vernon doesn’t leave a message.

He sits a while, trying to contain his agitation. Knowing he’s miscalculated. Again. Pushed Exley into doing something that was beyond him, something that’ll bring them both down. He starts the car, ready to speed across to Llandudno and confront Nick Exley.

Then he kills the engine and calms himself. He has an alibi. If he fucks off across town now and gets seen at Exley’s—on his night off from Sniper—he’ll draw suspicion. He has to let this play itself out.

Vernon goes back into the club. An old Rolling Stones number bangs away, Mick Jagger singing about
ti-yi-yi-yime
being on his side.

Dawn’s replacement—a flabby white thing with dyed hair, sallow skin and bruises—is onstage, naked, and seeing her spread her flesh is like watching open heart surgery.

The studio is blue with smoke, empty booze bottles ring the workstation and stubs of joints lie like broken teeth around the keyboard. Exley lifts the biggest of the ends and gets busy with his lighter, burning his fingers without noticing, sucking at the weed, drawing in smoke and releasing it again, head spinning, but needing more—much more—to keep the horror at bay.

Then his ragged mind feeds him a snapshot of a smiling Shane Porter holding up little bottle between thumb and forefinger, a white pill rattling inside. Exley leaves the studio and navigates his way out onto the deck, the black ocean hissing and snarling beyond. The glass vial isn’t on the table and Exley wonders if he imagined it. He crouches down, resisting the urge to slump to the tiles and fold himself into a fetal ball, searching until he sees a shiny meniscus winking at him from under one of the chairs.

Exley opens the container—it takes all his concentration to still his shaking hands—and drops the pill onto his tongue. Chewing the pellet will speed absorption, so he crunches down on it and releases a noxious brew of sulfur and bile, a taste so hideous that he almost throws up.

He conjures saliva from somewhere and swills it around his mouth, collecting the grim residue that coats his teeth and tongue, swallowing it. The effect of the drug is immediate, and as he stands a surge of energy ignites deep in his gut and blasts its way up his spine and out the top of his head. What his mother would call the crown chakra. The
sushumna
. A kundalini awakening, she would say.

But this is no moment of enlightenment. Just chaos and confusion and chemical overload. The world speeds past Exley, motion-blur streaking his peripheral vision in blasts of raw light. When he puts up his hands to steady himself against the sliding door, his fingers pass through the glass, and the rest of his body—a vague arrangement of particles and dust—follows.

Without knowing how he got here he’s in Sunny’s room, hugging her pillow. Inhaling her smell. Sucking whatever is left of her into himself.

Then the edges of time soften and run like egg yolk and he’s back at the workstation and whether it is day or night or now or later is impossible for him to say, and all he can do is lift the mouse and carry on working. Patching together some new reality, mouse-click by mouse-click, reaching for the impossible, going beyond what he has ever done before by attempting to capture the light radiating from within Sunny’s face. The light of consciousness. The light of his daughter’s soul.

How it happens he will never be able to recall, but he finds himself shirtless, barefoot, squatting on the seat of his ergonomic chair, ripping the lid off the silver urn and digging into all that is left of Sunny, smearing her powdery ashes over his head and torso, like the
Aghoris—
the death-obsessed ascetics, naked and dreadlocked, moving like wraiths in Varanasi’s cremation grounds—who had so terrified him as a ten-year-old when his mother dragged him along on an Indian pilgrimage.

All the bulwarks Exley erected against faith when he fled the ashram, bricks of cold empirical logic and sneering jokes about his mother’s woo-woo idiocies, crumble around him and gods rise from the dust. Vengeful, interventionist gods. And when these deities arrive they bring with them their dark playmates.

So Exley, covered in Sunny’s mortal remains, lays off his bets and directs his pleas and prayers and bribes and promises at gods and devils alike: give my daughter back to me and you can have the tattered remnants of my soul.

Chapter 42

Dawn’s having second thoughts, in the hard light of morning, as she dresses Brittany in the stolen clothes. Even though she drank nothing but Coke the night before, her head feels thick, and her eyes look yellow in the mirror.

Brittany, though, is full of life. “Where we going, Mommy?”

“To the beach, my baby,” Dawn says, distracted. She sits down on the unmade bed and lights up a smoke. Coughs.

Her plan, to somehow worm herself and Britt into wealthy Nick Exley’s life, seems crude and ugly now. Desperate. There was a vibe between him and her the other day, for sure, but that doesn’t mean nothing. The guy’s not seeing straight from grief. Taking Brittany there today could backfire, big time. Maybe the last thing he wants is to be with a kid, especially one that looks like his dead daughter. Instead of cementing the attraction, hooking him deeper, he could pull back and she could lose him.

Her phone rings. Vernon. “Ja?”

“I’m downstairs,” he says.

“We’re coming.”

She scoops up the basket with towels and sunblock and a bathing suit for Britt, and grabs her by the hand.

“Come.”

They walk past Mrs. de Pontes’s door and just for a moment Dawn pauses, ready to knock and lay fifty bucks on the old bitch and leave Brittany with her. But the kid is skipping ahead, singing to herself, happier than Dawn has seen her in ages, and she can’t just break her heart like that.

So they go down the stairs—some homeless fucker left a puddle of stinking piss in the lobby—and out to where Vernon sits at the wheel of the Civic. He slides his eyes across to Brittany when they reach the car, Dawn tipping forward the passenger seat so the kid can get in the back. Dumping the beach bag next to her.

“What’s this?” Vernon asks. He looks like hell, his skin gray and sweaty.

“Can’t get me a babysitter today.”

Vernon cranes his neck and stares at Brittany, then he laughs one of his empty laughs. “Jesus, Dawn, you’re a nasty piece of work.”

“What you mean?” she says settling in beside him, clicking her seat belt closed.

“Don’t play Miss Innocent here. I know what you’re up to.” She says nothing and he starts the car. “I got to give it to you, you’re fucken cold blooded.”

He slides the Civic into the traffic that streams toward Cape Town, Brittany singing some invented song about the sun and the beach and the fishies.

“Shut the brat up,” Vernon says.

Dawn turns and puts her fingers to her lips. “Ssshhh, baby, Uncle Vernon’s got a headache.”

Brittany goes quiet and nobody says another word all the way to where the rich people live.

Exley works until his eyes are torn and bleeding, his liver and blood thick and sluggish with sour chemicals, his right hand in seizure as it guides the mouse through the final business of creation.

All the alchemy that he could conjure—low magic and prayers and promises to gods and devils alike—is spent. Now is the time to know if he has captured his daughter out there where the dead go and brought her home.

Muttering to himself, his heartbeat rapid and thin, he clicks the render tab, hears the little sighs and grunts of his hard drive and watches the indicator bar, a sluggish green centipede, crawl from empty to full. A sharp ping tells Exley that his daughter is waiting.

All he has to do is trigger playback.

It takes a lifetime for the command to navigate its way through the tangle of his cauterized nervous system to the forefinger that hovers, shaking, over the space bar on his keyboard. Exley’s finger falls and skin meets plastic and the bar sinks with an almost inaudible click.

For a moment nothing happens. The monitor remains blank. Then Sunny blooms out of the darkness, smiling, staring right into Exley’s eyes. He sits forward in his chair and watches her dancing and twirling and dancing and twirling. Exley mutters a last incoherent prayer, waiting for something transcendent, waiting for the miracle to come.

But, when he calls her name and reaches for her, his fingers find glass and she stays trapped behind the screen, forever lost in two dimensions.

He has failed.

Of course he has. This whole absurd quest just an indication of how messed up he is. The little dancing chimera that is Sunny blurs and Exley sees his own reflection in the monitor.

Haggard.

Wild eyed.

A madman smeared with his daughter’s ashes.

He closes his eyes and slumps forward, letting his head sag into his hands, feeling the stubble on his face and the grease in his hair. Smelling the ripeness of his body. An image comes to him of a skyscraper losing power, going dark floor by floor, and he feels his life force ebbing.

Then he hears Sunny laugh.

Exley rouses himself and stares at the monitor. She’s still trapped there, dancing in an endless loop, and he knows he’s hallucinating.

But he hears it again, his daughter’s laughter. Frantic, he rolls his chair forward and searches his computer’s audio mixer for any faders that are open, allowing a recording of Sunny to leak through.

When Exley hears the laugh once more he realizes that it is coming from the beach and he pushes the chair back, sending it crashing into a stack of hard drives. He stands unsteadily, the afterimage of Sunny imprinted on his retinas. He lurches forward, rips open the studio door and staggers out onto the deck, the blinding sun hammering down on him in an avalanche of light.

And there she is, Sunny, running toward him from the water, her arms outstretched, laughing, her hair a blazing halo.

Exley sprints across the deck, tripping on the stairs and landing on his knees in the sand. He finds his feet again, shouting Sunny’s name, and he rushes at her, lifts and whirls her, the sun streaking and flaring, the world a place of madness and miracles.

Chapter 43

Brittany screams in terror as this half-naked white stranger tackles her and spins her, her hair flying out from her head like a maypole. She beats her little fists against Nick Exley, shouting for her mommy, begging to be put down.

Dawn, planted in the sand by the sheer weirdness of the moment and some sick dread, frees herself and rushes at Nick and pulls Brittany from him. Nick loses his balance and falls backward into the low waves, his mouth hanging open like a retard’s. He’s covered in dust, sweat and old booze and weed and general fucked-upness oozing from his body.

On his hands and knees, Nick crawls from the water, saying “Sunny, Sunny” over and over again, spit and snot dangling from his mouth like bread mold.

Dawn holds Brittany close, feels the kid wrap her arms and legs tight around her, like a monkey, making little “hah, hah, hah” sounds in her ear. Dawn pats her back, whispering, “It’s okay, Britt. It’s okay, baby.”

Nick pulls himself up to standing and the sun is behind him now, so he gets a clear look at Brittany, who stares at him, terrified. Dawn sees the truth hit him and his knees buckle and he weaves, and it looks like he’s going to go down again, but he stays on his feet somehow like a boxer hearing the bell.

Dawn knows she should say something, should be begging this poor man’s forgiveness, but she can’t find words and it’s him who says, “I’m so sorry,” begging hers instead, his face as tragic a thing as Dawn’s ever seen and she’s seen plenty.

“I thought—I’m sorry,” Nick says in a torn voice. “So sorry.”

He staggers toward the house and Vernon Saul, who’s stood still as wood through all of this, steps forward and puts an arm around Nick and half-carries him up the stairs to the deck, saying, “Take it easy, buddy. Take it easy now.”

As they go into the house, Nick looks back at Brittany, who holds onto Dawn for dear life. The man’s face is so haunted and Dawn is so sick with guilt she could puke.

Vernon gets Exley inside and drops him on the sofa.

“Nick, what the fuck you do last night, man? To Erasmus?” The stupid bastard is still gazing out at Dawn and the kid. Vernon leans down and gives him a little smack on the cheek. “Focus, for Chrissakes. What happened to the plan?”

Exley stares up at him and he looks so lost for a moment Vernon almost finds it in himself to feel pity. “Nick, that’s just Dawn’s kid, okay?” Exley nods. “Now what went down last night?”

“I did what I had to do,” Exley says. His voice is a flat, dead whisper.

“You know you left him alive?”

Exley nods again. “They said that. The cops.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“What if he comes out of his coma and talks? What then?”

“Maybe he died. In the night.”

“No. I know a nursie over there by the hospital. The cunt is still alive. In ICU. Unconscious, but still alive. You better pray he fucken dies.”

Exley stands, staring into Vernon Saul’s pitbull eyes, too far gone now to be afraid of the darkness there. “Vernon, do me a favor: fuck off.”