Capture (4 page)

“Gimme it.” He holds out his hand again and she dabs at her face as she digs the baggie of weed out from under the cushion on the ratty old sofa.

He grabs it from her. “Is this the lot?”

“Ja.”

“You sure?”

“I fucken said ja, didn’t I?”

He looks at her, nods, knows she’s telling the truth. He sets the doll down on the sofa and crosses to the bathroom—tiny and grim, no bath, just a toilet and shower, pantyhose dangling like body parts from the shower head. He empties the weed into the shit-pot and flushes, watches the green stuff get sucked away into the vortex, drops the baggie on the floor and goes back into the room, where Dawn is repairing her make-up.

She looks at him in the mirror as he comes up behind her and she flinches. “Where you get it?” he asks.

“Just some guy.” Lipstick like a dog’s cock running round her mouth.

“Boogie?”

“No.” Not looking at him, lying bitch. “Dunno his name.”

“You fucken stupid in your head, or what? You wanna lose her again?” Dawn shakes her curls, twisting the lipstick closed with a little click. “What I tell you when I helped you get her back?”

Dawn says nothing, retreating from him now, nervous eyes on the child. He follows her, crowding her between the sofa and the TV. “You got fucken ears? What I tell you?”

“If I use, you get her taken away again.” She looks across at the kid, who makes a mewling noise like a cat and opens its eyes, blinking at them. “Please, Vernon, it’s just some weed, man,” Dawn says, her voice a whisper.

He eyeballs her for a long time before he speaks. “You disappoint me, Dawnie. This is your last fucken chance, you hearing me?”

Dawn nods and Vernon sits down on the sofa and lifts the gift-wrapped box, holding it out to the child, who blinks at him stupidly.

“Here.”

The child looks at the parcel, then up at her mother.

“What is it?” Dawn asks.

“Here, take it,” he says to the child, ignoring Dawn.

The child grips the box in its little monkey hands and tears off the wrapping paper, revealing the doll with blonde hair.

The kid’s face lights up like it’s Christmas. “It’s a Barbie!” The kid might look white, but it speaks like just another colored brat.

“Where you get that?” Dawn asks.

“I bought it.”

“Bullshit.”

He slides a hand under her robe, up her naked thigh, and grabs the skin right up beside her thing, can feel the scrape of her cunt hair as he pinches the flesh between thumb and index finger. Hard.

She stiffens, and he sees tears come into her eyes from the pain, but she doesn’t cry out, not wanting to scare the child, who’s combing the doll’s blonde hair with a brush clogged with Dawn’s coarse black curls.

Vernon releases his grip and Dawn sinks down beside him, knees tight together, hands squeezed between her legs, like she is holding back a piss. “What you say to the uncle, Brittany?” Voice high from pain.

“Thank you, Uncle Vermin.”

“Vernon,” he says, the kid looking at him blankly. He hauls himself to his feet, leaning his weight on the back of the sofa, flexing his bad leg. “Okay, Dawn, I better get to work. I’ll see you down there later.”

Dawn nods and Vernon lets himself out, sees her staring at her white child grooming the white doll as he closes the door. He humps his way down the stairwell—no fucken elevator—out the lobby and through the stream of traffic across to where the bleeding red neon of the strip club flashes promises of pussy into the night.

Chapter 4

Nick Exley roams the house like a sleepwalker. He stares blankly at the mess in the kitchen, the room leached of life by the fluorescents. A clatter like distant bird wings draws him across the living room toward the deck. A white linen cloth, rising from the table on the beach like a Halloween ghost, flaps in the wind that has grown in force since sunset. He doesn’t have the courage to go out there—out to where Sunny died—and fold the fabric and bring it inside.

He hears the muffled pad of Caroline’s feet upstairs, moving between bedroom and bathroom. They’ve avoided one another since the police and the emergency crew left. Since the undertakers slid Sunny into a child-sized body bag—the zipper ripping through Exley’s head like a bone saw—and took her away with them.

Exley feels a rush of hot puke and makes it back to the kitchen just in time to spew an acid brew of wine, cheese and bread onto the plates stacked in the sink. He runs the cold water over the dishes until his vomit is gone, rinses his mouth and splashes his face. For a moment he doesn’t recognize the man reflected in the kitchen window.

Exley turns and goes upstairs. He stops in the doorway of Sunny’s room, blue moonlight washing the walls and the bed. He can’t bring himself to hit the light switch and reveal the room’s emptiness, and the realization that he will never read his daughter another bedtime story leaves him strangled by grief. A door creaks and he sees Caroline standing in their bedroom, watching him.

He walks toward her. “Caro, tell me this isn’t happening. Please.”

“Sorry, darling,” she says in a voice that could cut crystal, “but it is happening. Why don’t you have another joint and maybe it’ll all go away in a little puff of smoke?”

Exley looks into his wife’s eyes and sees her mania has congealed around the notion that he is to blame for what happened.

“Jesus, you’re not saying it was my fault?”

“Oh, I am, Nicholas. I am.”

They stare at one another and he thinks for a moment that this will escalate into one of her episodes, ending with rage and tears. He’d almost welcome that, now. At least it would be a connection, no matter how screwed up. Anything to distract him from the memory of Sunny tugging his boardshorts, and him ignoring her. Sending her to the water.

But Caroline shrugs and he hears her consciously slow her breathing as she runs a hand through her hair.

“I’m going to bed,” she says. “I suggest you do the same, there’ll be a lot to do tomorrow.”

Caroline turns and before Exley can stop himself he reaches out, embracing her. She stands with her back to him, body rigid, all bones and hard angles, and when he drops his arms, releasing her, she closes the door in his face.

Chapter 5

Dawn steps through a curtain onto the narrow runway that rams a path into the crowd of drunk white men. When a spotlight cuts through the haze of cigarette smoke, fingering her, she stands dead still, like she’s lost. Looks it too, in her thrift-store jeans and plain white shirt, her hair hanging loose, like a civilian who has wandered in here by accident. She plays it up, all wide-eyed and innocent. Her hook.

The regulars hoot and the newcomers stop their shouted conversations, drinks halfway to their mouths. Used-car dealers and motor mechanics and copier salesmen, escaping their pale wives for a stolen night of dark meat.

Then, as the opening bars of “I Bruise Easily” ooze out of the sound system, Dawn gets her ass moving, the ass that fills the jeans out too nicely. Her mother’s ass. Yet another reason to hate the bitch. If Dawn angled her butt just right you could balance a champagne glass on it, and it’s a magnet for the scores of booze-blurred eyes.

Dawn stays deep inside herself, letting the music take her, those words of vulnerability and pain deafening her to the surge of drunken yearning that comes at her like a wave, avoiding eye contact with the men, spinning away from the hands that grab at her.

At the start of the first chorus she unbuttons the shirt—just a plain white bra underneath—shrugs it off and lets it float to the ramp. Unclips the bra and drops it, freeing her small breasts, her dark nipples prominent as thimbles, making the trash out there believe she’s turned on. Dawn unzips her jeans and works them loose, revealing her white panties, like a virgin girl would wear. When she steps out of the denims, letting them fold into a heap in time to the last swell of music, the lust in the room could ignite a mountain fire.

The guitar intro of the old Police ballad “Every Breath You Take” fades up and as she slides the panties down her thighs—the spotlight almost surgical as it exposes her trimmed pubes and the folds of her vulva—there are gasps and throttled oaths. This is the closest most of these men have come to beauty. It still sometimes astonishes Dawn, when she sees her naked body in a mirror, that the years of hell have somehow left no mark on her. No tattoos, no knife scars, no needle tracks, no Aids melanoma—just her smooth caramel skin that makes every vicious bastard out there want to violate her.

Get in line.

Still dancing, Dawn arches herself back until her hands touch the tacky ramp, singing along inside her head to Sting’s words of obsessive love, not letting herself feel the hundreds of eyes that rip at her flesh. She pushes up on her hands and comes back to standing, as lithe as a yogini, just as a fat pink man heaves himself up onto the runway, cheered on by his buddies, moving his beer gut in time to the music, writing a love letter in the air with his dick.

He reaches for her and she steps back and he stumbles and falls to his knees, still trying to paw her. She dances around him, never once lets him touch her. Never allows any of them to touch her. Not like the other girls, who encourage the men to grope them and eat them out on the ramp, getting the pathetic losers all worked up so they can take them into the filthy cubicles in the rear and fuck them for money.

The man stares up at her, a look of confusion and longing on his drunken face. Vernon smashes a path through the men with his shoulders and elbows, shoving them out of the way, ignoring spilled drinks and curses. He grabs the drunk by the shirtfront and lifts him into a right hook that snaps the man’s head back and brings a smear of blood to his cut lip.

Vernon drags him from the ramp, has him sprawling across a table, scattering bottles and glasses. He lifts the dazed man, punches him again and then propels him toward the door, powering forward with his good leg, the injured one visibly punier, dragging after him like a reluctant dance partner.

To the crowd this low-level violence is a moment of light relief in a city numbed by carjackings and home invasions. Dawn doesn’t miss a beat as she watches Vernon hurl the man through the doors, out onto Voortrekker, the very road where Vernon busted her just over a year before.

She’d been in a downward spiral for years. Escort agencies and massage parlors and then the street. She’d been smoking meth heavily for six months and life was a blur of backseats and blowjobs.

When a car pulled up beside her one night she was so wasted that her cop radar was missing in action, and it wasn’t until she slid into the passenger seat and mumbled her price for a BJ and a screw, and the driver had badged her, that she realized what was going down.

As the car slid into the stream of cars, taillights red as lipstick, she said, “Fuck you,” waiting for this cop to backhand her.

But he didn’t, and he didn’t take her to the cop shop either, just turned off Voortrekker into a quiet side street, stopped outside an Afrikaans church, empty, silent and godless. Dawn reached over to his lap, fumbled for his zipper, knowing he’d want her to suck him without a condom. He grabbed her by the hair and smacked her head against the side window, and she tried to focus through the
tik
on his blurred face.

“I don’t want your filthy mouth on me.”

“Then what you want?”

He looked at her before he spoke. “I seen you for a while, on the street.”

“And so?”

“How you end up there?”

“What you fucken care?”

He fired up a smoke and offered her one, even lit it for her. “What’s your name?”

“Angel.”

He exhaled a laugh. “Your real name.”

“Dawn.”

“Okay, Dawn, tell me your story.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I like stories is why. Talk to me, or I throw your ass into a cell.”

So she let the meth do the talking about the years of rape and abuse, about how she started hooking and how her kid had been taken away by the social services.

“You want her back? Your kid?”

“Of course, yes.”

“If I get her back for you, you stop this shit?”

She looked at him, trying to make some sense of this through the haze of meth. “You can get her back?”

“I know people. But you stop the
tik
and you stop selling your ass. Understood?”

“Why you give a fuck?”

“Let’s just say it’s your lucky night and leave it at that.”

“And what must I do, to earn money?”

“Can you dance?”

“Ja.”

“Then I’ll get you a job.”

“You mean it? You not fucking with me?”

“I give you my word,” he said, starting the car and heading back toward Voortrekker, merging with the traffic.

For a moment Dawn thought it was raining the way the taillights blurred through the windscreen, then she realized she was honest-to-God crying. She didn’t know that she still could, thought all the tears had been wrung from her years ago.

Vernon was good as his word. Got her this gig at Lips, and—after she’d been clean for three months—got her Brittany back.

Dawn kept on waiting for the sexual favors. But he never wanted that and she knew without him telling her that he’d had done to him what was done to her. One survivor recognizes another. Vernon just kind of moved in on them, watching her all the time at the bar, coming round to her apartment like he was her father or something. Giving Brittany gifts. Brittany didn’t like him, battled with his name, called him “Vermin,” which pissed him off no end.

Dawn looked the word up in a dictionary at the bookshop in Voortrekker Mall, and she nearly hosed herself when she saw what it meant. But he creeped her out, acting like she was a puppet, the threat always there that if she put one fucken foot out of line, Brittany would disappear.

When Dawn heard he’d been shot she prayed for him to die, but he was back at Lips in two weeks, limping and not a cop no more. But still in her face. Still in her life.