Capture (36 page)

“When?” he asks.

“About two hours ago. He gave her money. Said I sent him. Jesus, Nick, this is my fault.”

“Dawn, listen to me. We’ll find her, okay?” She looks through him into her worst nightmare. “But first we have to do a few things here. I need you to help me to move him out of sight.”

She nods and they each grab a leg and drag Vernon into the passageway where he’ll be invisible from the windows, his body leaving a wash of blood in its wake. Exley pats him down and finds a set of keys in his pocket and puts them on the table near the front door. He kills the lights in the living room, to hide the carnage.

“Okay,” Exley says. “Now we’re going to have to shower before we leave. Strip off your clothes down here and get a fresh set from your suitcase.”

Dawn obeys, on autopilot. When they are both naked Exley gets her to sit on the bottom step of the staircase and lifts each of her bare feet, using his T-shirt to wipe them free of blood.

She starts to shake, hugging herself. “How we gonna find her, Nick? What if that sick fuck killed her?” She sobs, a high keening sound.

Exley embraces her. “Dawn, no, he was using her as a lever. He wouldn’t kill her, because then she’d be useless. Believe me.”

She pushes herself away from him and looks into his eyes. “You promise?”

“I promise,” he says, muting his own doubts. “Do you know where he lives? Lived?”

“In Paradise Park, with his mother, I think. I dunno exactly where, but I can make some calls.”

“Okay. We’ll find her.”

He cleans his own feet and he takes her arm and they go upstairs into the shower, forensic in its brightness, and wash Vernon’s gore from their bodies. Exley soaps Dawn’s hair, a mass of blood-caked dreadlocks. Then he turns her body under the jets of water, inspecting her.

She’s clean.

Dawn leaves the shower and dries herself. “Jesus, Nick, I done a lot of bad shit in my time but I never killed nobody.” She starts to shake again.

Sheer adrenaline-fed hysteria almost makes Exley say, “Relax. It gets easier after the first one,” but he bites his tongue and holds her until the shakes subside.

They dress and go downstairs. Avoiding the blood, Exley pockets Vernon’s keys. When he sees Dawn retrieve the gun from near the kitchen door and tuck it into the waistband of her jeans, he asks no questions. They enter the garage from the house.

Exley raises the garage door, opens the street gate with the remote button and reverses the Audi out. The door death-rattles down and the gate slides closed. Vernon’s white Civic skulks under a street light.

“Can you drive, Dawn?” Exley asks.

“Ja, I can drive.”

“I’m going to take Vernon’s car. Follow me, okay?”

She nods and scoots behind the wheel of the Audi when he exits. Exley finds the button that releases the central locking of the Civic and seats himself. The car stinks of smoke and cloying aftershave. His feet are too far from the pedals, but he doesn’t adjust the seat, just edges farther forward, hunching over the steering wheel.

Exley turns the key and some old Motown number blares out into the night, something about the tears of a clown. Startled, he bumps his head against the plastic skeleton that dangles from the rearview mirror, fumbling around the dashboard until he finds the button that mutes the CD.

He slams the Civic into first gear and as he touches a foot to the accelerator the engine howls and the car spurts forward like a premature ejaculator. Exley turns the car, wary of its unwieldy power, and heads up the hill, trailing exhaust fumes, watching for the cool blue headlights of the Audi in the rearview.

When he gets to the turn off to the Scout Hall he flags Dawn down and tells her to pull over to the side and douse the headlights. The road is empty of cars and pedestrians but he has no way of knowing if they are being observed from one of the houses that rise like watchtowers from behind their high walls.

Exley parks the Civic outside the Scout Hall, just about where he pulped Dino Erasmus’s head to hamburger, and uses the hem of his T-shirt to wipe away his prints from any surface he remembers touching. He pockets Vernon’s keys, leaves the car unlocked and jogs down to where Dawn waits in the idling Audi.

Dawn, allowing Nick Exley to drive her back into her past, rests her face against the car’s side window as they cross the bridge from Voortrekker Road to Paradise Park, watching a long train snake beneath them, its windows a yellow stream of light.

Soon as they’re off the bridge the hot wind that haunts the Flats hits them, rocking the Audi on its springs. Blowing in her mother’s shrill, drunken laugh and the sound of her high heels tap-tapping on the cement floor of the house as she leaves Dawn behind. Blowing in the wheeze of her uncle’s breath and the sniggers of her pimply cousins as they come into the bedroom, and even though Dawn hides her head under her pillow there’s no escape.

Never.

But it’s not her head she sees under the pillow, it’s Brittany’s, and the terror Dawn feels jolts her upright and she grips Nick’s leg, her fingers digging deep enough to bruise. He doesn’t flinch, just places his left hand over hers.

“You okay?” he asks.

She nods, but she’s not okay. Can’t get it out of her head that while she was riding Nick’s cock—thinking of nothing but her own pleasure—her child was kidnapped by Vernon Saul.

Dawn, willing Nick to drive faster even though she knows he can’t, watches the cramped ugliness fly past, night turned to day by the orange light towers. Garbage litters the streets and blows up against the razor wire and chain-link fences surrounding the box houses. Washing flies from the windows and balconies of the low-rise apartment buildings, concrete bunkers hunkered down on the shifting sand.

She made calls and got an address for Vernon, deep in Paradise Park, Dark City side. The territory of the 28s gang, in this violence-torn hellhole. She understands how visible they are in the Audi—could be targeted by the gangs or pulled over by the cops—but they speed on, Dawn telling Nick where to go, no GPS gonna guide him through this maze.

Silently praying that she’ll find her child at Vernon Saul’s house.

Alive.

She keeps telling herself that Vernon took Britt to get Dawn away from Nick, get her back under his control. Took her child to show her that he could do it, and he’d do it again—or worse—if she didn’t obey him. Must be the truth.

Nick passes a taxi and somebody shouts something that gets stuck in the throat of the wind. They come to an intersection, a bunch of young bastards leaning on a gang-tagged junction box, checking them out, their T-shirts billowing like spinnakers.

Dawn rests her fingers on the Glock lying in her lap. Let them fucken try. But they do nothing except stare and Exley drives on.

“Turn here,” Dawn tells him, and they’re in another narrow street, identical houses jammed up tight like uneven teeth. “Go slow, now,” she says, searching for numbers. “Okay, stop.”

They’re at a house with a concrete wall, some of the panels missing, the uprights leaning like drunkards. Dawn’s out of the car, the Glock held close to her body. She’s no marksman but she’s been around enough pimps and dealers to pick up basic gun skills. Anyway, what’s there to know? Point and shoot.

She steps through the broken wall and jogs up to the front door and turns the handle that gleams silver in the street light. Locked. She knocks. No sound from inside the darkened house. She knocks again and Nick is at her side. She hears the sound of Vernon’s keys jangling as he tries one then another and unlocks the door. They step into the room, a yellow streak of street light following them in.

Dawn sees something—someone—lying on the floor and her heart pounds.

“Britt?” she says. “Brittany!” She kneels and the room is washed by dirty green fluorescent as Nick finds the switch.

A woman, maybe sixty, lies on her side, her eyes half open and her mouth gaping, false teeth slipped off her gums. Dawn’s seen enough dead people in her time to know this woman’s gone, but she places her fingertips just below the jaw to check for a pulse.

Nothing.

Dawn shakes her head, panicking now, on her feet, rushing into the two small bedrooms. One smelling of sick old lady, the other—spare as a prison cell—heavy with Vernon’s hair gel.

No sign of her child. Maybe he took her somewhere else. Maybe she’s lying dead, under the shifting white sand of the Flats. As she checks the bathroom and kitchen, Dawn hears herself praying, old Catholic stuff from so far back she doesn’t know how she remembers it.

The kitchen door stands open onto the night and Dawn runs out. Just a cramped backyard, a sagging clothes line, a bare yellow bulb dangling from a cord, light kicking off a low wire fence that separates the house from the shack next door.

Dawn, gun in hand, spins, shouting her daughter’s name. Searching the shadows.

“Dawn!”

She turns to Exley, who points over the fence, and Dawn sees the little bear, Mr. Brown, lying in the dirt outside the shack. She vaults the rusted wire in one leap, letting the Glock lead her to the door, yelling her child’s name. Hears a soft cry.

Dawn grabs the handle and shoves. The door gives but doesn’t open. She steps back and kicks it up near the lock and it flies inward and she’s in the shack, where a paraffin lamp throws shadows into air thick with
tik
fumes.

She glimpses a torso covered in prison tattoos lying on a torn mattress and then she sees Brittany, naked, on the floor reaching up to her, and she keeps the gun on the thing on the bed and scoops her child up with her free arm, holding her tight, saying, “Baby, baby, baby.”

Chapter 55

Straddling Vernon, careful to stay clear of his halo of blood, Exley frames a head-shot in the viewfinder of the digital SLR, searching for some understanding of why this man was chosen to decide Sunny’s fate. All he gets by way of an answer is his own reflection in the milky pupil of one half-open eye. He presses the shutter release and hears the guillotine clang of the camera’s mirror, the flash bleaching Vernon’s gore-smeared face, his lips twisted into a sneer.

Kneeling, lining up a profile view—the zoom lens probing the craters of old acne scars—grabbing reference shots of the dead man’s Kevlar vest and the soiled bandage on his arm, Exley knows that he’ll only drive himself mad with these questions. And with questions about why his daughter is dead, but the child upstairs, her not-quite-doppelgänger, is alive.

Trying to follow some karmic thread linking the two girls, Exley is back in that shack out on the Cape Flats, air thick with meth smoke, the emaciated man (all ribs and tattoos and dangling purple dick) passed out on the shredded mattress, his mouth a wet sag of rotten teeth.

Dawn grabbed the naked child and fled, Exley left to gather up Brittany’s clothes and the little bear, rushing after mother and daughter, asking if the child was okay, Dawn shouting at him, “Go! Just get us the fuck out of here!”

Driving through the endless sprawl of poverty, the car slowing to a crawl behind a horse-drawn cart loaded with junk, a Dickensian flashback in the swirling gauze of dust, the animal’s flanks covered in fly-encrusted sores, the horse unloading a stream of yellow dung as it staggered along.

Exley overtook the cart on a blind corner, a minibus taxi bearing down on them, fog lights frying the Audi, horn screaming, but passing somehow with a thud of wind and gangsta rap, and then they had free passage to the unspooling black ribbon of Voortrekker Road. Dawn was silent all the way to Llandudno, holding her child so close they seemed like a single organism.

Exley arrived at the house expecting cop cars and flashing lights but was met with darkness and quiet as he stowed the Audi in the garage.

Even before the roller door had closed, Dawn rushed the child into the house and up the stairs to the bathroom. Exley heard the lock turn and water drumming into the tub.

They are still up there and Exley knows to leave them be and concentrate on what he needs to do, which is to empty his mind of unanswerable questions and flip Vernon onto his belly and photograph him from the rear.

Exley sets the camera down and grabs the straps of the Kevlar vest, straining to move the corpse. There’s a sucking sound as the body armor pulls free of the drying blood and Vernon’s head lolls, the jagged wound in his throat gaping on a pasta of torn blood vessels and the building-block stack of his neck vertebra. A prolonged moan emerges from the dead man and Exley falls onto his ass, his breath coming in gasps.

Exley has to laugh as he lifts himself and grabs at Vernon again. At last he gets the corpse rotated, sweat dripping from his forehead. He pushes damp hair away from his face and reaches for the camera, trying to frame up a back view, but his hands shake so badly the lens won’t settle. Exley inhales deeply and locks his abdominal muscles, an old yoga trick from his youth. This steadies him enough to fire off a series of shots, the flashbulb exploding like sheet lightning.

He exhales, stands and walks into the soothing gloom of his studio, the flash barrage still dancing in his vision. He lets the chair embrace him as he scrolls though the images on the camera to see that he has what he needs to build a convincing model of Vernon Saul.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

That one word like a jammed CD in Dawn’s brain, all the way from Paradise Park to Llandudno, gripping Brittany too tight, her damage and her child’s damage one and the same, Dawn seeing her daughter’s life becoming the same living hell as hers.

But now, as Dawn bathes Britt in the huge oval bathtub the color of sunburn, she battles to understand that everything is okay.

That her prayers were answered.

“I had me a bad dream, Mommy.” The child is half asleep, whatever shit Vernon gave her still in her blood, and her voice is a woozy whisper. “About Uncle Vermin and a other uncle.”

Dawn, who has inspected every inch of her daughter’s body and discovered that by some miracle she has not been touched, violated, raped—had done to her what was done to Dawn—soaps her down and says, “That’s all it is my baby. Just a bad dream.”