Capture (32 page)

Dawn stands in the middle of Voortrekker, straddling the white line like a tightrope walker, the wind from the passing traffic buffeting her.

She’s seen plenty of pedestrians killed, right here on this strip. Dragged under the wheels of buses, their insides bursting out onto the blacktop. Or smacked by the cowboy taxis and thrown, heads exploding like watermelons when they hit the curb.

So when she runs toward Lips, a car and a minibus growling down on her, she must be begging for this to happen to her, too.

Horns blare and she hears the tearing sound of brakes and smells rubber, a furious voice—
you mad cunt!
—chasing her into the club, but she makes it.

No easy way out. Not tonight.

She ignores the woman with the mustache, who welcomes her back with a look and a sniff. Cliffie is too cool to say a word, just checks her out from behind the bar, wiping at a glass with a cloth. The club is still empty but the house lights are dimmed, just a single red follow-spot stroking the ramp, and Dawn lets the shadows pull her through the curtain and backstage.

The walk down to the dressing room takes forever, past the peeling beige paint like bad skin on the walls, under the bare yellow light bulb, along the wine-colored carpet tiles (some of them missing, crop-circles of old glue on the bare concrete beneath), the passageway a funnel pouring her down toward the pink door at the end, a door that stands open, leaking blue-green fluorescent light and
tik
smoke that curls out like when the darkie ice-cream man came round when she was a kid, ringing his bell, lifting the lid off the box on the front of his bike and the dry ice drifted into those nightmare summer days, her uncle sending her for a lolly that stained her mouth, standing in shadow inside the house watching her, waiting to get something in return from those cold purple lips.

Dawn pushes open the door and the fat Ugly Sister turns to her and blows out a stream of
tik
fumes, her eyes like rips in her bloated face, her meth-branded mouth gaping on rotten teeth. The skinny one slumps at the mirror, staring at Dawn in the dirty glass, and says, ‘Her Highness come back to us.’

The fat whore cackles and passes the
tik
pipe to her partner in this relay race to oblivion and the skinny bitch’s head disappears in a cloud of toxic smoke that smells to Dawn, right then, like heaven.

“Lady Di, Lady Di,
Laaaaay-deeeee Diiiiiiii
,” the fat one says, standing, doing a little curtsey that gets her breasts swaying, one of her dark teats brushing Dawn’s arm. “What’s this we hear that there gonna be visitors to the royal box tonight?” She grabs Dawn’s goods, through her sweatpants.

Any other time Dawn would punch her into yesterday but now she just laughs like you do when you don’t wanna cry and slumps down on a stool. The Ugly Sisters are carping and crowing and all Dawn can think when she looks at them is, this is me, couple of years, this is me.

Then she stops thinking and reaches out and takes the little glass pipe from the skinny one, that familiar heat on the palm of her hand as she closes her fingers around it, brings the pipe to her mouth and feeds the glass between her lips already nice and puckered up, and sucks, her eyes closing, her lungs swelling as the smoke fills them and fills her brain—her skull feels like it’s going to crack open—no room for the image of Brittany looking at her, crying, and she’s seized by a coughing spasm and smoke and snot explode from her.

Dawn bends double, fighting for breath, forehead touching the make-up counter. She sits up, eyes and nose streaming, a bungee of drool dangling from her lip. She flails at her face with the back of her hand. “Jesus.”

But she has another hit and it goes down smoother, and by the time she passes the pipe back the angels are singing nice and sweet and there’s a glow to the light bulbs and whatever trouble there is in this big wide world, baby, none of it is hers.

Exley, drawn along by the hissing traffic, sees the pink neon lips smooching the night. He slows the car, searching for a parking spot in this street lined with old rust-buckets and pick-up trucks and minibus taxis, the Audi a visitor from another tax bracket.

He’s startled by a banging on the side window and turns to see a feral brown whore, anywhere between fifteen and death, lifting her dress above her navel, showing him a liverish cesarean scar, shoving her thicket of pubic hair up against the glass. He accelerates away, car horns braying, until he finds a spot farther up, guided in by a black man in a day-glo green bib.

Exley locks the Audi and waves at the car guard, who says something in a foreign language. Exley stands on the sidewalk a moment, composing himself, before he allows an old Police song to draw him into the club. A creature of indeterminate gender squats behind a table and demands fifty rand from him. He pays up and gets a pair of red lips rubberstamped on the underside of his right wrist.

He pushes through a throng of men, all white, all big, catching a glimpse of naked flesh up on a ramp, flashes of dismembered limbs through gaps in the crowd. A hand grabs him and spins him and he’s looking up into the face of Vernon Saul.

“The fuck you doing here, Nick?” Vernon says, dressed in a crisp striped shirt and an ironed pair of jeans.

“I want to see Dawn.” Shouting over the music.

“She don’t wanna see you.”

“I want her to tell me that. Where can I find her?”

Vernon laughs and shrugs. “Okay, Nick, you wanna see Dawn, then come see her.”

Vernon pushes into the mass of bodies like an icebreaker, clearing a path through the shouting, sweating men, Exley carried in his wake.

They arrive at the edge of the ramp and Vernon shoves aside an old man in shorts and knee-socks, his glasses in danger of being smeared by the naked vulva that gapes at him. When the dancer lifts herself up from a back-bend, Exley, his knees pressed into the walls of the ramp by the men behind him, sees that she’s Dawn, her eyes closed, her mouth sagging, her movements as slow as if she’s submerged in oil, lagging behind the beat. Not that these men care, their eyes feeding on her, mouths grunting and cursing and promising and begging.

Dawn is oblivious, her wet hair falling like seaweed onto her breasts, one hand rubbing her erect nipples—Exley remembers their texture on his tongue—the other opening herself. There is a surge of lust and Exley is pushed even farther forward, his breath squeezed from him, close enough to Dawn for bullets of sweat to land on his face when she shakes her hair.

“Dawn!” he shouts, but she doesn’t hear him. So he stretches out and grabs her hand. He feels a paralyzing pain in his arm. Vernon has him by the elbow, his fingers digging into the nerves, and Exley’s arm falls, useless.

“We don’t touch the girls while they onstage, Nick,” Vernon shouts, his spittle wet on Exley’s ear. “That’s what the rooms is for.”

The music fades and Exley watches as Dawn stumbles through a curtain, the T-shirt and jeans she wore to his house left discarded on the ramp.

Dawn, naked flesh shining with toxic sweat, goes into the dressing room and the Ugly Sisters welcome her like she’s one of them, holding out another
tik
pipe, and Dawn takes her fill as Costa comes in through the haze saying, “The rooms, Dawn. Now.”

Sylvia the cleaner brings the clothes she left onstage and Dawn stands, steadying herself with a hand to the wall, wondering how the hell she’s going to get into those denims. But the Ugly Sisters, like her ladies in waiting, are there to help, and the two of them fight her into the shirt and jeans—why worry with the panties?—and she floats down the corridor and out into the club, scanning the hazy pack of men, all of them wanting to do her.

She doesn’t care. Let them all line up and fuck her, like that porn star she read about, who did it with a thousand and something men in Las Vegas.

Dawn grabs a big Boer at random—looks like he’s straight off a tractor—hot waves of booze coming from his body; if you put a match to him he’d burn like a Christmas pudding. Somebody touches her arm and in the smear of
tik
she’s looking into the face of a man who could be Nick Exley’s double. Jesus, she realizes, beyond surprise out here in methland, it is him.

So she takes his hand and walks him away from the bar, through the curtain toward one of the rooms, smiling over her shoulder, saying, “This is going to cost you, Mister Nick.”

Exley lets Dawn lead him into a narrow cubicle, barely big enough to contain the skinny foam mattress that lies on the floor, covered by a gray sheet. A foil pack of condoms and a roll of toilet paper lie beside the mattress.

A fluorescent strip gives the hutch the feel of an autopsy room, the chipboard walls unpainted and unadorned. The place stinks of sweat and come and piss and desperation.

Dawn closes the door and leans her back against it, smiling at him, and he can see how blown she is, her pupils like pinpricks.

“Nicky, Nicky, Nick,” she says, leering at him, unbuttoning her shirt, the muscles of her face as slack as if she’s hitting g-force.

He steps up to her, frees her hands from the buttons. “Dawn, no. Stop.”

“Sa’madder, Nick? You couldn’t get enough of it last night.” Her fingers fumbling for his zipper, grabbing at his penis.

He puts his arms around her and holds her to him. “Dawn, listen to me. I want you to leave here with me, now. You understand?”

She looks at him, trying to focus. “And then?”

“We’ll get Brittany and go to my house and straighten you out.”

“And then?”

“Then we’ll see, Dawn. Okay?”

She shakes her head, pushes at him until he releases her. “Uh-uh. You’ll dump us, won’t you, when you had your fun? Like they all do.”

“I promise you, Dawn. I won’t. Leave with me. Please.”

She stares at him and then she starts to cry and she pounds on his chest with her fists and says, “Why did you have to make me come, you bastard? Why did you have to do that to me?”

She cries harder and her fists loosen and he holds her as she shudders, slumping against him, and he feels her tears falling like a warm rain on the skin of his neck. He takes her face and tilts it up to him, wiping away snot and tears with his fingers, and he kisses her on the mouth.

“I won’t leave you, Dawn, I promise.”

Exley takes her hand and walks her out of the room and back into the club. At the curtain through to the bar Vernon stands beside a swarthy man with a creased face and a bandito mustache, something of the old, sad Charles Bronson about him.

The man says to Exley, “Money. You give the money.”

Exley pulls out a roll of bills—he has no idea how many—and throws them at Chuck Bronson and pushes through the men, towing Dawn.

Vernon blocks them, but the older guy says, “Leave her go, Vernon, leave her go. But she not coming back, never, to cry to me. Never.”

Vernon’s hand falls from Exley’s shoulder and the crowd parts and they’re out of the sweat and the noise, into the street.

“Where’s Brittany?” Exley asks.

Dawn doesn’t answer, just points across the road. Exley half-carries her through the hot stream of traffic into the foul lobby of a squat apartment building. They stagger like alkies up a flight of chipped stairs, and spring the child from behind a door barred by countless locks, from the clutches of a bloodless crone dressed in black widow’s weeds.

Brittany climbs up Exley and wraps him with her arms and legs. “I tole Mr. Brown you coming. I tole him.”

Exley, carrying the child and somehow keeping Dawn on her feet, leads them to the Audi and drives them back toward Cape Town and its floodlit mountain. In the yellow slashes of street light Exley sees that Dawn is asleep beside him, the child dozing in the rear, strapped into Sunny’s car seat, and he can’t understand, for a moment, how these people have come into his life, and what he is meant to do with them now that they have.

But he drives on thinking that maybe, just maybe, something can be saved.

Chapter 51

Vernon sits in the dark, an invisible presence out on the rocks, watching the house. Sitting in the same place it began, only eight days ago, his destroyed leg laid out straight, his left hand massaging blood into the wasted muscle above the knee. His good leg is bent, propping up his right arm that moves like a metronome bringing a Lucky back and forth to his mouth, the cigarette cupped in the palm of his hand like he’s in a prison yard. His Glock lies on the rock beside him, oily in the dim light of the skinny moon.

The house is in darkness and he imagines the three of them inside, Exley, Dawn and the child. Exley and Dawn in the marriage bed, fucking away the ghost of the mad wife, and the brat in the dead girl’s room, wearing her PJs, sleeping with her toys. Becoming her, just like Dawn planned.

Vernon grinds the butt of his smoke to nothing on the rock and slips Doc’s little bottle from his pocket. It takes all his strength to unscrew the teat-shaped rubber cap, the grooves gummed fast from years of disuse, and free the glass dropper. He takes a whiff at the open neck and grunts and pulls his head away. His eyes water and his nostrils burn from something sharp and chemical, like gasoline mixed with nail-varnish remover.

He replaces the cap and stows the bottle in his jeans. Relaxing himself. Playing the waiting game. He knows there’ll be no sleep tonight, not with the fury raging hot in his blood. No sleep until this thing is over and he’s done what he’s got to do.

Dawn wakes, lost. Takes her a few seconds to understand she’s in the spare room at Nick’s house. A hundred Zulus are doing a war dance in her head and her mouth tastes bitter, her tongue thick with slime. Her lips are gummed and burnt and she remembers smoking the
tik
, the glass hot as a tailpipe. Remembers breaking every promise she made to herself.

Fuck.

She sits up and the room tilts and falls away from her and she puts her hands to her face, closing her eyes until things stop moving. When she opens them the sun blasts through the white curtains like a hammer to her eyeballs.