Capture (3 page)

“Nah, you don’t want to ruin a beaut of a day.” But Exley knew he had him, the mix of Cape wine and Durban weed acting like truth serum, and Porter asked, “Sure you want to hear my tale of woe?”

“Yeah, I’m curious.”

“Ah, it was bloody awful mate, I can tell you,” Port said, conjuring another joint from his shirt pocket and firing it up. “One day I was on top of the world, calling a Pakistan–Australia game in Islamabad, next day I had to jump on the silver budgie and bugger off home, to disgrace and universal condemnation.”

The Australian stopped, the joint halfway to his lips, when Caroline’s scream tore the air. At first Exley thought it was just another of her episodes when she came hurtling from the house, yelling, relieved that only the Aussie reprobate was here to witness this.

Then Porter grabbed Exley by the shoulder and spun him to face the ocean. “Jesus, Ex!”

It took a moment for Exley to understand that the driftwood he saw tossed on the water—the Atlantic rough now that the tide had retreated and the wind was up—was his daughter’s arm breaking the waves in the shadow of the gray rock. Sunny’s pale head rose for a moment and then disappeared beneath the tumbling swell.

Exley took off, plunging into the freezing breakers, feeling the shelf fall away from under his feet. No sign of Sunny. He dived, made heavy by his clothes, and saw her sinking toward the wagging fingers of kelp, her hair floating away from her head in Medusa coils, a few bubbles escaping her mouth.

Panic had him swallowing water and Exley surfaced, gasped for air and dived again, flailing his way down to Sunny. He grabbed her and towed her upward, fighting his way out of the surf, dragging his daughter onto the sand, crouching over her, his hair dripping onto her face that was a pale death mask.

Exley opened Sunny’s mouth and breathed into her, feeling how cold her lips were. Jesus, he’d never learned CPR. Is this how you did it?

Through his terror he was aware of Caroline kneeling on Sunny’s fan of wet hair, pale hands fluttering uselessly. Shane Porter stood frozen, staring.

Then powerful arms shoved Exley aside and a big brown man in a rent-a-cop uniform appeared from nowhere, straddled Sunny and pumped her chest, water spilling from her. The stranger used both hands to open Sunny’s jaws and covered her mouth with his own, forcing air into her lungs, getting into a rasping rhythm, as Exley heard the mad wail of sirens.

Chapter 3

Majestic. The word comes to Vernon as he pilots his pimped Honda Civic through the curves, headlight beams skewering the coast road into the city. You were fucken majestic, my brother.

Vernon has a monster sound system in the car—tweeters perched above him, six-by-nine speakers bulging beneath the rear window, sub-woofers occupying half the trunk—but tonight he prefers the quiet, just the soothing thrum of rubber on the twisting road and the little crackle of his Lucky as he inhales. He lounges in the bucket seat, face glowing green from the instrument panel, comfortable now in his jeans and T-shirt, the Glock holstered at his hip, and replays the last few hours.

Vernon knew the child was dead the moment he got to her. But he also knew this was a moment he must seize, and he put his mouth over hers and breathed into her like he was blowing up one of the party balloons that still caught the breeze on the table near the house. He felt her little ribcage rising beneath him as her dead lungs swelled with air.

Vernon got a groove going, breathing, sitting up to pump at her chest—seeing the hope and desperation on the three white faces hovering over him—then down again, his mouth over hers. Pointless, but he kept at it. Exhausted by the time the emergency crew came jogging up with their EMT kits.

Vernon stood, his bad leg almost buckling, fighting for breath, looking down at the father. “I’m sorry, sir. She’s gone.”

The medics tried to work their magic, but it was no good. In the midst of all this the Australian faded with the last of the sun and the two parents were left on the beach with the medics and the cops who came up from Hout Bay. The mother sat on a rock, hugging herself so tight she looked like she was in a straitjacket, and the father paced up and down in his teenager’s shorts and T-shirt muttering “Jesus Christ” over and over again, like somebody, somewhere was going to make this all okay.

Vernon stage-managed everything. Getting the ambulance crew out of there, interfacing with the police—led by a darky captain, more politician than cop—who asked polite and sympathetic questions of these rich white people.

The highlight, the masterstroke, was not letting the cops take the body. When he saw the vultures from the police morgue bumping a gurney over the sand, throwing long shadows as they triggered the motion detectors that drove the house’s spotlights and surveillance cameras, Vernon cornered the father, whose eyes swam with tears, magnified by his thick glasses.

“Sir, I have to advise you not to let them take your daughter,” Vernon said, speaking soft, right up in the whitey’s ear.

“What?”

“These technicians from the police morgue. I wouldn’t let them take her.”

The man stared at him. “Why not?”

“Things happen at the morgue. Sexual interference. Theft of body parts.” The guy gaped, confused. “I have a personal connection with an undertaker, sir. A man who will treat your daughter with respect. Respect and dignity.”

Dignity. Now, where the fuck had he found that word? Like a bloody infomercial on the TV.

Vernon laughs, tapping his horn as he passes a slower vehicle, bringing the spiral coil of the car lighter up to the tip of another Lucky, getting the cigarette paper burning—that nice, toasty smell in his nostrils. Of course the white guy lapped it up and Vernon phoned a mortician connection of his from the Flats who arrived in his best shiny black suit, a furtive assistant dogging his heels.

After the cops filed out and the undertakers drove away with the dead child laid out in the back of their truck, the father took Vernon’s hand in both of his, like he was holding on for dear life.

“Thank you, Mr.…?” Staring at him blankly.

“Please, call me Vernon, sir. Just Vernon.” Digging into his uniform pocket and finding a card—had them printed at his own expense—with his name and cell number on. “You or your wife need anything, anytime, you just call me, hear?”

The whitey nodded and Vernon limped off toward the front door, ready to drive down to Hout Bay and punch out and change into his civvies. The cherry came as he walked through the living room, passing a table full of rich-kid birthday gifts. He boosted a Barbie Doll, staring out at the world through a plastic box, eyes as blue and dead as the drowned girl’s.

Vernon also took a piece of colorful paper that was barely torn and wrapped the Barbie up nice down at Sniper HQ, and now it lies on the back seat, rustling as he speeds through the curves at Oudekraal, the lights of Camps Bay glittering ahead like a rich lady’s necklace. What the fuck, the kid wouldn’t be playing with that dolly, not where she is now.

Dawn Cupido lives in fear that the same sick shit that made her childhood a nightmare will be visited upon her daughter. Which is why she pays more than she can afford for this dump in blue-collar Goodwood, a predominantly white-Afrikaner neighborhood of small houses and blank-faced apartment blocks, wrapped in razor wire to keep out those grasping dark fingers from across the railroad track.

Dawn, dressed in a faded toweling robe, stands in the dingy kitchenette of the studio apartment, making a cup of instant coffee, the locked balcony doors behind her barely muting the night traffic rising up from Voortrekker Road—one of the longest in Africa—that chains this sad suburb to wealthy Cape Town.

Through the bars of the cracked kitchen window she can see the sodium light towers hovering like UFOs over the mean houses and shacks of the sprawling Cape Flats. She grew up out there, in apartheid’s dumping ground, with its millions of mixed-race inhabitants, where kids are raped and murdered at a rate that defies belief.

Dawn takes the coffee and a packet of crinkle-cut chips and flops down on an old sofa that hemorrhages stuffing, gazing blankly at a ballroom-dancing competition on the mute TV. Her four-year-old daughter, Brittany, lies on the double bed, sleeping in the embrace of one of her many soft toys. Dawn reaches over and strokes Brittany’s copper-colored curls, careful not to wake her. Marveling, as she does each and every day, that this beautiful blonde creature resulted from a desperate ten minutes in the back of a car with some long-forgotten white john.

Dawn blows on the steaming mug, staring at the dancers—all glamorous and graceful—as they twirl and prance across the screen.

She crams her mouth with chips and washes them down with coffee, having one of those moments when she sees—really fucken
sees—
the squalor of her life. And to underscore it, the room throbs with the opening bars of a bad cover version of “Eye of the Tiger,” signaling that the titty bar across the road is open for business. Means that Dawn has less than half an hour to get Brittany to the babysitter and get her ass over to the bar where she’ll spend another night flashing her stuff at fat, sweating whities.

Jesus.

Dawn knows she is going to need a little help getting through the night, so she digs under the cushion and finds a zip-lock baggie bulging with weed. She lifts a copy of
People
magazine from the carpet patterned with burn marks and dumps some of the weed onto Angelina Jolie’s goldfish lips. The green mound smells like all the rooms from Dawn’s childhood and she has to shut her eyes for a moment, as if that will stop the memories.

Dawn busies herself separating the stalks and pips from the weed. Hates the way the pips explode when you smoke a joint. Knows she shouldn’t be doing this shit. She lost Brittany once already, two years ago when she was hooking, because of her meth habit. Cleaned up now and got the kid back, but it’ll all be over if she gets busted again.

She draws a Rizla paper from the orange pack and rolls a joint, just a one-blader. Normally she is expert—three-bladers are nothing for her—but getting this little shorty together tonight is tough, shit starting to seep out of the shadows at her, the memory train rolling on down the tracks.

She licks the paper to seal it, twists the end closed, tamps the other with a match and then sets fire to the joint. Sucks in a chesty and holds it until her lungs nearly burst and she coughs out smoke.

Dawn grips the joint in her teeth and loosens the elastic that holds her hair in a ponytail, squinting through smoke at the TV as she shakes her hair loose—long, wild corkscrews that brush her shoulders. Her mother’s hair. Except her mother blew hers straight, the way they do out there on the Flats. Her mother was a beauty. Proud of her light brown skin and her curves. Wielded that hairdryer like a weapon, killing any evidence of the African blood way back in the gene pool.

Dawn can still hear the scream of the hairdryer, catches that burned-hair smell when her mother put her to bed, ready to go out on the town, lit up by pills and booze. Leaving Dawn with her uncles and cousins, barely out the door when they were already sliding their drug-blurred eyes over her, pushing her little body into the mattress, suffocating her with their manstink.

The joint is nothing but ash burning her fingertips, so Dawn drops it into the cold coffee and hears it die. She goes and sits on the bed, staring at herself in the yellowing mirror propped up against the wall.

“Come on, bitch,” she tells herself. “Get it together.”

She reaches for the eyeliner on the bedside table and gets busy, not caring that she smudges it. Smears rouge under her high cheekbones (got those from her mother, too) and gets an Angelina pout going, feels the lipstick warm and waxy as she works it into her lips, running her tongue over her teeth to clean off the red that looks like blood.

The knock at the door startles her. And she panics when she hears that familiar
rat-a-tatta-tat-tat
. What the fuck is he doing here?

She jumps to her feet, pulls the robe tight around her. “I’m coming!”

Dawn grabs an aerosol can of the cheap deodorant she uses and sprays the room like she is trying to exterminate bugs. Hurries across to the balcony doors, unlocks them and throws them open, allowing in the car fumes and the noise. She takes the magazine and shakes it over the balcony, letting the stalks and pips float down to the sidewalk. The knock again, louder.

“Hey, chill, man!” she shouts, battling to keep her voice from shaking.

She rushes to the front door and slides back the bolts and chains, fixing a smile on her face as insincere as a welcome mat as she opens the door to Vernon Saul.

As Vernon limps into the apartment, clutching the gift-wrapped box under his arm, he feels the elation leak out of him like a dribble of piss, leaving behind that feeling of emptiness and anger. The way of the fucken world.

He sniffs the air, catches the sharp tang of the deodorant overlaying the usual brew of stale cooking, woman-flesh and dank underparts, and the sour-sweet child smell. But it is the stench of weed, thick and cloying, that swamps all the others.

The open balcony doors are another giveaway: the little bitch never unlocks them, no matter how hot the weather, terrified that some fucker will go King Kong and clamber up three floors and make a meal of her and her daughter.

Vernon turns to Dawn and holds out his hand. “Gimme it.”

“What?”

“The shit. Gimme it.”

Vernon sees a lie coming and he is over to the sofa and he sees the joint floating like a dead fly on the scummy surface of the cold coffee.

With a wrist-flick he tosses the liquid at Dawn and it catches her full in the face and dribbles down onto her robe, the stub of the joint dangling from the collar.

She blinks, reaching for a towel lying on the floor. “Jesus, Vernon!”

Hissing at him, soft-like, so she don’t wake the kid, who squirms and makes little sucky noises.