Capture (23 page)

She grabs at the door handle, wanting to be gone.

“Wait,” he says. “I’ll give you one hundred for a blow.”

“Two-fifty.”

He mutters something but there’s a cop car cruising toward them and traffic’s backing up behind the Beemer. “Okay. Fuck. Where do we go?” he asks, clicking the car into gear.

She tells him to drive up Voortrekker. She’ll take him to an old spot of hers, a parking lot behind a strip mall that’ll be deserted this time of night. He’s fumbling near her knees and she thinks he’s trying to feel her up but he’s just pushing in the cigarette lighter. He lifts a pack of Camel from his shirt pocket and draws a cigarette out with his lips.

When the lighter pops he sets fire to the smoke and sucks away. He’s nervous, she realizes. The courage the booze gave him starting to thin in his blood.

Dawn’s shitting herself, too. Never in her life has she hooked without being
tikked
out of her brain, so fried she couldn’t feel nothing. They stop at a light and she hears the breath of the white man as he exhales smoke and sees his pale hand on the wheel, wedding band glinting.

No ways can she do it. Not while she’s straight. She throws open the door and she’s out of there. As she slams the door she sees the guy’s face staring up at her, then the light is green and the Beemer slides away into the traffic.

Dawn crosses Voortrekker and jumps a taxi. She’s breathing hard, not used to this shit no more. She watches the bars and junk food joints ooze past, her head aching from the rap that booms out in the taxi, the bass rattling the fillings in her teeth. The minibus stops near her apartment and she follows other passengers out as the co-driver yanks open the sliding door, telling them to get a fucken move on, he don’t have all night.

The driver, a long tall thing with pimples like strawberries, guns the engine, playing the gas and brake pedals, making the taxi rock in time to the music. Rude bastards, these. But you don’t say a word—they think nothing of smacking you. Or worse if you’re a woman alone.

Dawn stops in at the store and buys chips and marshmallows and then she goes up and gets Brittany from Mrs. de Pontes, pays her what’s left of the fifty Costa gave her, even though she’s getting the kid early.

She takes Brittany home and makes them hot chocolate and French toast and they pig out on the junk food and, as they fall asleep together on the sofa watching some cheesy old movie with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Dawn wonders if there really are guys like that in the world, and if there are why she’s never met even one of them.

Chapter 35

Vernon, leaving his Civic parked safely at home, steals an old Toyota Corolla near the Paradise Park station. Boosting the rusted piece of shit takes him less than two minutes, a matter of ripping out the ignition wires and joining them in the right sequence.

The car is a mess; empty beer cans, junk food wrappers and newspapers clutter the floor and the seats. He drives a few blocks, pulls up to the curb, opens the passenger door and tips a pile of crap into the gutter, making the car a little more presentable. Then he goes across to collect Merinda Appolis for their date.

She lives in a room behind a house in the smart part of Paradise Park, near his mother’s church. Told him not to ring the buzzer, her landlord doesn’t like it. He’s a lawyer, she said, breathless, as if this was meant to impress the hell out of Vernon.

He pulls up at exactly eight and sees her standing behind the high driveway gate, all dollied up in a dress and heels. She peers through the bars, uncertain when she sees the Toyota, so he reaches across and opens the passenger door.

“Hi, Merinda.”

“Hi, Vernon. Where’s your car?” Walking toward him.

“Man, sorry about this wreck, but my Civic’s giving me hassles—transmission—so I had to take it in today. Mechanics gave me this as a loan car.”

“Oh, okay.” But he sees she’s offended at being seen in this car, snobby little bitch.

She wipes off the front seat with her hand before folding her dress under her broad ass and sitting herself down. He waits for her to get settled then he drives away.

“How come you not working tonight?” she asks.

“Remember that promotion I told you about?”

“Of course, yes.”

“Well, it’s come through. I’m up at head office from tomorrow. Only nine to five for me now.”

“Congratulations!”

“Thanks. So we can celebrate tonight.”

She notices the route he’s taking. “Where are we going, Vernon?”

“Sorry, I should have said something. I want to ask your advice, Merinda. This new job comes with a nice pay check, so I’m thinking of buying me a house. I’m a bit old to still be living with my mom.” She laughs, all her attention on him. “Ja, time I think about settling down. So there’s a new housing development, over in Extension Three, land for sale. I know it’s dark, but you can still get a bit of an idea. I’d like a woman’s opinion.”

She laps this up, getting all comfortable in her seat, even resting her hand on his leg. “Oh, I’d love that, Vernon.” He wants to smack her hand away but he controls himself, leaving Paradise Park behind now, driving into the open land out past the cemetery, a few roads and a sprinkling of street lights hinting at the coming suburb.

He stops the Toyota and climbs out and opens her door, even taking her hand to help her. The wind comes in and she holds onto her blow-dried hair.

“I can choose between a plot here, or that side, closer to the main road,” he says, pointing. She blinks away dust, shields her eyes with her hand, squinting into the darkness at the faraway car headlights.

He gets himself behind her so she doesn’t see him slide on the surgical gloves he slips from the pocket of his jeans. He flexes his fingers. “So, what do you think?”

She turns to face him and before she can speak he grabs her by the throat, throttling her. She tries to fight Vernon as he lifts her on tiptoe, holding her so that her cat-claw nails and kicking feet can’t get nowhere near him. It takes no time at all. He smells her piss and shit, feels her body sag and jerk, and then she’s still, her tongue hanging out like she’s trying to lick her chin.

Vernon lets her fall to the ground, getting his breath back.

He empties her purse of its money and throws it in the veld. Then he does the thing that makes him squeamish—he comes close to puking—but he knows he has to do it. He forces her legs apart and fishes between them, grabbing hold of her soiled panties and pulling them off her.

The touch of her woman flesh sickens him and he hauls himself to his feet, throwing the panties into the bush. He should do more, he knows, to make this look like a sex crime, but he doesn’t have the stomach.

He gets back into the Toyota and drives away, whistling that old Supremes thing, “Baby I Love You.” He’s killed so many people it mostly means nothing to him now. But this was personal and there is a sense of satisfaction, of a job well done.

Sorting out Dawn’s problem, getting her deeper into his debt, is a happy by-product of killing this bitch. But really he did it for himself. To restore his confidence. His sense of certainty.

Since he was shot Vernon has started doubting himself for the first time since he took the hammer to his father. So, to act like this, to bend the world to his will, makes him feel like himself again.

Fucken invincible.

He dumps the Toyota and walks home, ignores his bitch mother, who sits hypnotized by the flickering TV, and gets into bed and sleeps like a baby.

Chapter 36

Exley, sweating, prowls a house full of ghosts. He stands on the deck, a hot wind howling in off the ocean. He can smell a fire somewhere in the mountains above him. Earlier he tracked down an email address for Caroline’s sister—chickening out of a phone call—and sent her a brief account of what happened. The Vernon version. He received an almost immediate reply: “I blame you for dragging my sister and her child out to that crime-ridden hellhole.”

If you only fucking knew.

He calls Vernon’s cell. Again. Number unavailable. Again.

Exley wants to run. Throw a few things into a bag, grab his passport and head to the airport. Take the first plane out of South Africa. His feet are already on the stairs leading up to the bedroom, when he stops himself and leans against the wall, trying to slow his heartbeat.

That’s what he wants, the pig-faced cop. Wants you to panic. Wants you to admit your guilt.

He walks back down into the living room and, restless, lifts his phone again and scrolls for Shane Porter’s number. Maybe he needs company. Getting drunk and baked with the Australian wideboy will distract him. But he gets Port’s voicemail, the twangy voice telling him to leave a message, an old INXS anthem banging in the background.

Okay, a drink, then, he decides, and opens the liquor cabinet, the mirror back doubling the booze bottles on the glass shelves. He hears his father’s Harvard voice say, what’s your poison, old son?

Not Scotch, too much heat. Not vodka, it has a way of kneecapping him and reducing him to a touchy-feely mess. Sure as shit not tequila, things are warped enough without risking the wormy mescal. Gin, he decides. A no-nonsense British drink, perfect for the suffocating night.

He pours a stiff jolt of Tanqueray and dilutes it with tonic water from the green bottle he finds at the bottom of the liquor cabinet.

He can’t avoid the kitchen—no way he will get this down without ice—so he steps onto the tiles and heads for the refrigerator, dumps in a handful of cubes from the ice maker, the G&T bubbling and fizzing, a cool rain landing on the hairs on his arm.

While he has the door of the fridge open he wonders when he last ate. He can’t remember. He puts the tumbler of gin down on the counter and lifts out some cheese, sniffs it to see if it’s okay. Picks a few kalamata olives from a plastic tub and dumps them on a plate with the cheese. Adds a scoop of hummus and finds a couple of crackers in the cupboard. 

He wanders out onto the deck. The wind has dropped to a whisper. Exley sits down at the table and sips the drink. Goes down fine. He tries a cracker with some cheese and his stomach rebels. He pushes the plate away, resigned to a liquid diet. A cold white moon hangs low and heavy over the ocean, like a searchlight on the water, and Exley feels alone and godless.

Whatever faith he once had was a makeshift thing, received wisdom from his mother and her charlatan master: a patchwork of Eastern philosophy reduced to bumper stickers, stitched together with New Age bullshit. When he quit the ashram he jettisoned his mother’s beliefs along with the silly white robes, the turban and the name Narayan that had replaced Nicholas for nearly ten years.

Exley, driven by some indefinable yearning, has the phone in his hand again, speed-dialing, listening to the soft purr somewhere very far away.

An aloof voice, genderless, stateless, swollen with enlightenment, answers. “
Namaste
.”

“Joan Exley, please,” Exley says, being willfully perverse.

“There is no one here by that name.”

“Durgananda, then. Let me speak to Durgananda.”

“She is in contemplation class.”

“This is her son. It’s urgent.”

“She cannot be disturbed.”

“There has been a tragedy. In the family.”

“Swami Durgananda has renounced all family.”

“Let me speak to her.”

“She does not wish this.”

“Tell my mother that her granddaughter is dead.”

“Swami Durgananda has no granddaughter.”

“That’s right. She’s dead.”

“There is no death.”

Exley ends the call and stares into the night. Oh, there is death, fucker, and when it comes it doesn’t come in a whisper of white with a choir of cooing angels or dancing apsara, it comes with blood and shit and piss and torn flesh, thick with the stench of corruption.

Maybe his mother is lucky, insulated from reality by Alzheimer’s and her cult worship. Exley sips his drink and for the first time in years allows himself to remember the compound near Taos, boys and girls sleeping in single-sex dormitories, separated from their parents. Doing chores in the kitchen and the fields. Attending class in a low bunker, chanting Hindu praises like parrots, kissing the gnarled and Gorgonzola-stinky feet of the bearded guru—a one-time Bombay bus driver—when he floated in dispensing wisdom and sly glances, smiling with teeth stained red by betel nut through the thicket of his ZZ-Top beard.

When a series of girls accused the guru of messing with their lower chakras he was banished, the ashram left in chaos, and Exley was able to attend the high school in the nearby town.

Laughed at, at first, because of the robes he wore and his dumb Hindu handle, he quickly switched to jeans and became Nick again and drifted farther from his mother, and nirvana became Nirvana as he lost himself in a world of grunge rock, skateboards and computers.

When he won a scholarship to study digital arts at a California college his mother, an elder now on the ashram—one of the keepers of the flame—seemed relieved to see him go. She never met Caroline. Never saw Sunny. He sent her photographs, but had no idea if they had made it past the battalion of censors who intercepted the mail.

Exley finishes his drink and goes inside and builds himself another. He needs somewhere to sleep (the marital bedroom is out of the question) and takes his gin upstairs with him, medicating himself while he makes up a bed in the spare room, an impersonal cubicle overlooking the mountain, full of unpacked boxes.

When he’s done, his glass is empty and he sets course for the stairs. He can’t resist a detour to Sunny’s room, sitting in the dark on her bed, inhaling her presence. He clicks on the lamp and finds himself gathering up some of her favorite objects—a soft toy she slept with, a drawing, a piece of her clothing—and he takes them down to his studio.

Surrendering to some primitive impulse, like a Pacific islander with his cargo-cult booty, he places the fetish objects around his workstation, Sunny’s face smiling at him from the monitor.