Capture (20 page)

“No, my baby.” Faking a smile, getting her mother shit together. “Come, go pee, we need to get you to playschool.”

The child slides off the bed in her yellow PJs, and walks like a drunkard toward the bathroom, still clutching her doll. Dawn hears the clang of the toilet seat and soft dribbles as her daughter pisses.

She imagines her life without her baby and fear nearly overwhelms her and suddenly she can’t breathe. She flings open the balcony doors, getting a lungful of the traffic fumes. Voortrekker Road lies exposed under the hot sun: take-out joints and used car lots and tired buildings flanking the long, straight road into Cape Town, the flat-topped mountain with its tablecloth of cloud a distant dream through the smog.

Dawn sucks the last life from her cigarette and flicks it away, watching it tumble down to the sidewalk, where black and brown vendors sell sweets and fruit and cheap clothes.

She knows that she’s going to have to go out there and sell something too. Her ass. Get on the street now that even the backrooms of Lips aren’t an option no more, dodge the Nigerian pimps and the fists and feet and teeth of the territorial whores, and get some money together. Needs money to get a lawyer to fight for her daughter.

As Dawn walks back inside, her phone, lying on the TV, starts to ring. She lifts it and sees Vernon’s name on caller ID. “Jesus, Vernon, I been trying you all night!”

“Ja, I got ten thousand voicemails. What the fuck’s going on?”

“They gonna take Brittany away, the social workers.” She tells him about last night, gabbling, breathless, desperate to finish before he hangs up on her.

“Dawnie?”

“Ja?”

“Chill.”

“Vernon, fuck, I can’t lose her.”

“You relax now, okay? I’m on it.”

“You mean it? Please, Vernon—”

“I’ll make this all go away. I promise.” He hangs up.

Dawn lets the cell phone droop to her side and stands staring at her daughter walking from the bathroom, smiling up at her, wondering how something so beautiful could come out of such a fucked-up world.

Chapter 30

Yvonne Saul squeezes her feet into carpet slippers and shuffles into the kitchen. Vernon is already at the table, dressed in jeans and a neatly pressed shirt, drinking a Coke. Likes his Coke with his breakfast. When he lifts the can to his mouth she sees that his left arm is heavily bandaged.

“What happened to you?” she asks, turning on the stove, getting eggs and bacon out the fridge. Her eyes find the dwindling supply of insulin and she knows she’ll have to beg him again.

“Darkie came at me with a knife last night,” he says, burping.

She breaks eggs into a bowl, looking across at him. “Is it bad?”

He shrugs. “Could have been my throat.” He smiles—one of those cold smiles he’s been using on her since he was eleven—then tips his chair back on two legs, riding it, hands behind his head, all full of himself. “You look like shit.”

“I couldn’t sleep. That next-door baby.”

He shrugs, lets the chair fall forward with a clatter and empties the Coke down his throat, burping even louder. “Don’t worry with breakfast for me. I gotta be somewhere.” He stands and shoves his chair back.

Yvonne is already beating the eggs in the bowl. She stops, the yellow yolk dripping from the egg beater. They’ll go to waste now.

“Boy, I need my insulin,” she says. “It’s getting really low.”

She waits for him to lose his temper but he doesn’t. Just nods, tucking his shirt into his jeans. “Okay, I buy you some today.”

He walks out whistling “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree.” She hates that song. It was her husband’s favorite, they even played it at their wedding, and she can’t hear it without seeing his brains smeared all over their bed, positive that Vernon whistles it to torment her. Yvonne feels sick, the smell of the eggs enough to make her puke.

She hardly shut her eyes in the night. The screaming from the next-door shack was the worst it’s ever been. She tried to put the pillow over her head, to block her ears, but it didn’t help. Whatever sympathy Yvonne had for the little one inside that shack is gone, she’s worried about herself now. She can’t go without sleep night after blessed night, not with her hypertension and diabetes.

This morning she barely had the strength to drag herself from the bed, and as she pulled her robe over her nightdress she saw bruises on both her arms. Not from Vernon, he hasn’t hurt her for a while, and she didn’t remember bumping herself. She lifted the hem of her nightdress and saw more bruises on her legs. Not bruises, she realized, but burst blood vessels. From the blood-thinners she’s on to control her blood pressure. The stress from living with what her son has become, coupled with not sleeping, is just too much for her.

Yvonne walks away from the stove and opens the back door to get some air. The screams are even louder now. Before she can stop herself she hurries through to the phone in the living room and dials the cops.

Speaks to some girl who sounds like a child herself. Tells her about the screams. Gives the address but refuses to leave her name. She hangs up, knowing that she’s wasted her time. The cops will do nothing.

Yvonne goes through to the airless bathroom, still stinking from Vernon’s morning visit to the lavatory, and soaps under her arms and between her legs, doesn’t have the strength for a shower. She dries herself and pads barefoot into the bedroom and pulls on a T-shirt and sweatpants, knows she looks a sight, but who’s going to see her?

She slumps down on the bed, arms dangling, staring at dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight that pokes through a tear in the curtain. She sits like that until she’s covered in sweat and the room is like an oven.

She opens the curtains, letting some air in, and the first thing she sees is two cops, a man and a woman, in their gray-blue uniforms and bullet-proof vests, walking up to the next-door shack. Yvonne jumps away from the window in case they spot her.

She hears banging on the shack door, the woman cop ordering them to open up. Nothing happens, so she bangs again. Yvonne edges forward, peeping between the curtains, more confident now the cops have their backs to her. The woman leans down and tries to look in the only window of the shack but it’s blocked off with cardboard.

The man cop hammers on the door and the thin whine of the child starts up, growing louder and louder, like a siren. The woman draws her gun, a big thing in her hand, and the man takes a step back and kicks at the door, planting the sole of his boot high on the rotten wood. It splinters but holds. He steps back and kicks again and the door tears free of the loops of wire that keep it in place and falls inward.

Now, Yvonne is no stranger to human cruelty, not after what she’s lived through in this very house. But nothing, as true as God in all his heavens, has prepared her for what she sees as that door flies open and the bright sun floods the room, hitting the thing writhing on a mattress, and the thing becomes the jailbird and the baby, their shadows flung against the torn walls of the shack.

Chapter 31

Terror gnawing at Exley’s entrails rips him screaming from his sleep. He is assaulted by consciousness, literally experiences it as a blow to the solar plexus, curling himself into a fetal position, trying to grab onto the coat-tails of oblivion and drag it back. Too late.

Catapulted by panic from Sunny’s bed, he stands in the litter of her toys, gasping for breath, his heart a wrecking ball in his chest, his mind full of knife blades and shit and blood and death.

He’s dripping with sweat, and even though he wears a clean T-shirt and boxers—he has no recall of shedding the clothes in which he committed murder—his nostrils are full of the old-iron stink of blood.

He flexes his left hand, the wrapping of bandage and surgical tape tight on his flesh, a reminder of those moments before he killed Caroline.

When he still had a choice.

Exley goes to the window and stares out into the cauterizing brightness and has no idea how to begin to process the last day, wishing he could retreat into the convenient Hindu trope that there is no reality, that all is
maya
, all is illusion. Newsflash: this is your life, Nicholas Exley, and it is fucking real, okay?

And then the big question tries to batter its way into his consciousness: who the fuck
are
you? Not ready for that. Not now. So, okay, let’s ease into this, he tells himself. Let’s rather try and figure out who you are
not
.

Not a father.

Not a husband.

Not an innocent.

Which leads to the inevitable answer to the first question: he’s a killer three times over. Killed his child through negligence. Killed his wife in a moment of conscious fury. Killed that homeless Rasta by allowing Vernon Saul’s dark gospel to prevail.

The doorbell startles Exley and he finds his glasses beside the bed and stumbles into the corridor toward the intercom phone and manages to say, “Yes?”

“Hey, Nick. Open up.” Vernon Saul, sounding full of spunk and vigor.

A real fucking piece of work, as Exley’s late father would have said.

Exley wants to slink away and hide, curl up somewhere and let the world continue hurtling forward without his participation, but he hits the button to open the gate and walks down the stairs. He’s in his socks and the big toe of his left foot emerges through a hole, naked and pink. He reaches the bottom step and stops, his motor nerves seizing at the sight that awaits him: the cheerful morning light illuminating the horror that is his kitchen.

Exley is astonished by the volume of blood. The tiled floor is awash with it, the plasma drying brown and viscous. There are wild Jackson Pollock splatters across the kitchen cabinets and the counters. The second hand of the wall clock ticks away gamely beneath glass made semi-opaque by blood. The refrigerator sports a red handprint. Exley resists the temptation to walk over and match a palm to it, to see if it is his or Caroline’s.

A loud banging on the front door jolts Exley into motion and he follows the spoor of dark blood that the cops and crime techs tracked onto the Labrador-colored carpet. He opens the door to find Vernon flanked by two brown men in blue jumpsuits, each with a kitbag slung over his shoulder.

“Nick, meet Dougie and Oscar. They do trauma cleanups. Brought them to sort out your kitchen.” The two men nod, regarding Exley with eyes empty of curiosity.

Exley steps back and Vernon heaves his way into the house. “Nick,” he says, “why don’t you chill in your computer room? I’ll get these guys going then we can have a talk, okay?” Without waiting for an answer he heads off toward the kitchen, the brown men at his heels.

Exley doesn’t have a better idea so he walks down to the studio and slides open the door, the murk drawing him in, the room silent but for the hum of his workstation. Shutting the door, Exley settles back in the Aeron chair, letting it enfold him. He closes his eyes, trying to breathe through the horrific images his memory keeps serving him, trying to remain detached.

The door bumps open and Vernon, stinking of cheap aftershave and hair gel, loud gusts of air escaping his nostrils, clatters his way inside and falls into a chair that protests at his weight.

Exley sits upright, attempting to present himself with some authority, even though he’s in his underwear. “What do you want, Vernon?”

The big man shakes his head. “Come again?”

“Do you want money? For what you did?”

Vernon forces a laugh, strangely high pitched and girlish. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, Vernon, I’m not kidding.”

“Jesus, Nick, now you’ve offended me.”

“Then explain to me what you want.”

“I don’t want nothing from you.”

“Nothing?”

Vernon shrugs. “I just want to help, is all.”

“By shooting that homeless man?”

“Come, Nick, where you going with this? You’re off the hook. What’s the bloody problem?”

“The problem is you killed him.”

“Just like you killed your wife.”

“That’s different.”

“Ja? How?”

“What you did was cold-blooded murder.”

Vernon laughs. “You reckon a court of law gonna think what you done is any better than what I done?”

When Exley says nothing, Vernon reaches forward and lays a hand on his bare knee and Exley flinches and wheels himself away from the big man’s clammy touch.

“Nick, just take it easy now. You saw the guy. He was starving, living like an animal. Half out of his mind and probably rotten with AIDS. How long do you think he would’ve lasted? I did him a favor by putting him out of his misery.” Exley shakes his head. “Nick, why not just go with the version we told the cops?”

“Because I know the truth.”

“The truth, Nick? What the fuck’s the truth? Back when I was a detective I’d interview ten witnesses who seen the same shit go down and each and every one got his own version, swears it’s true. Hear me, man, it’s not a lie if you believe it, buddy. So, believe the guy killed your wife. Simple.”

In that moment Exley understands that it really is that simple for Vernon Saul. He has the sociopath’s gift of wholly believing his own fabrications. Exley shakes his head again, staring at a pilot light winking beneath the console of his computer, like an airplane at night. He feels the urge to phone the police captain and confess. Unburden himself.

“Nick, we not gonna have a problem, are we?” Vernon asks, as if he’s reading Exley’s mind.

“What do you mean?” Exley says, looking into those lifeless eyes.

“Just understand something here, my friend. Right now the cops are happy as pigs in shit. A high-profile case is closed. They gonna be very pissed off if they have to open it again. Not gonna like you very much. And I can tell you how it’ll play out: you’ll be the rich whitey who murders his wife then hires some poor colored fucker—that would be me—to waste a homeless darkie and pin it on him. No fucken wriggle room there, Nick. No self-defense. No sympathy from the court. We’re talking first-degree murder, on not one, but two counts. You’ll die in prison, my friend. That what you want?”