Capture

by Smith, Roger

  Chapter 11

  A gale attacks the Cape Flats as Vernon drives deep into Paradise Park, steering the Civic through the mustard-colored dust. He’s really fucken freaking out now, gripping the wheel of the car. The past overwhelms him and voices scream in his head and his nerves are stretched tight as garrottes, ripping into him from the inside. The way he lost it with Boogie was a signal that bad shit was coming down.

  Vernon doesn’t regret killing the little fucker, but he doesn’t like to lose control. Ever.

  The wind smashes the cramped houses and ghetto blocks, getting the roofs of the shacks banging like a steel band. Pedestrians stagger, leaning into the blast, clothes billowing as they battle their way to buses and taxis.

  A bottle of brandy lies wrapped in plastic on the seat at Vernon’s side. Not for him. He needs stronger medicine.

  He catches the stink of the landfill as he parks outside a box house that backs onto the dump. The house stands alone, beside a mound of rubble that’s all that remains of its Siamese twin. The landfill looms behind, the wind sending trash into the air in a toxic rain.

  Vernon grabs the bottle and fights the car door open, takes sand in both eyes, blinded like he’s been maced. Blinking away tears, he walks over a scrap of dead grass to a scuffed door and bangs, hearing the inevitable mutter of cricket on TV from inside.

  The door cracks an inch and an eye wet as an egg peers out. Opens wider, revealing a small, flabby man in his sixties, with a bald head and skin the color of piss. He sighs out brandy breath and steps back.

  “Detective,” the once-upon-a-time doctor says.

  “Doc,” the ex-cop replies.

  Vernon closes the door, nostrils already rebelling at the stench. He’s used to squalor, but this place is something else. Looks as if the dump behind has flowed in through the back door and flooded the house. An unswept floor covered by a filthy carpet. A couch and two chairs, smeared with dirt. Empty bottles, junk-food wrappers, newspapers and unwashed dishes litter every surface. Where other people have three flying ducks on the wall, Doc has a stitching of high-caliber bullet holes. One window is taped up, wind whistling through the cracks in the glass. Evidence of the gang war Doc found himself in the middle of a while back.

  Rising over the filth is a TV the size of a billboard. Doc’s eyes are glued to the screen: men in cricket whites against a lush green outfield, Table Mountain in the background.

  Vernon holds out the bag, plastic shaping itself to the bottle inside.

  “Here. Brought you something.”

  Doc grabs at it with a hand so palsied it looks like he’s busy with an invisible cocktail shaker. He doesn’t worry with taking the bottle out of the bag, just unscrews the cap and hits the brandy hard. The old abortionist lowers the bottle, closes his eyes and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

  A doctor once, a broken alkie now, locked away for years in Pollsmoor Prison after too many of his patients died. Earns his living dealing in guns, sewing up gangbangers, and chopping body parts supplied to him by cops from the police morgue, selling the bits off to the darkies for witchcraft. Selling bits of information, also, to cops and gangsters alike.

  When the booze has worked its magic, Doc coughs, wipes slime from his lips and stares up at Vernon. “What you want, Detective?”

  “Can’t sleep, Doc. Going up the flipping wall. I need a shot.”

  “It’s that wind. It unhinges a man.”

  “Ja, must be the wind.”

  “You wait here.” Doc leaves, taking the brandy with him.

  Vernon hasn’t crashed in two days and exhaustion sucks his bones deep into one of Doc’s greasy armchairs, making him oblivious to the stink of the dump incoming on the draft through the bullet-starred window.

  Vernon tries to keep his eyes on the cricket, but they find the filthy carpet and the bloodstain shaped like Africa. His blood. And he’s spinning back to that day, a year ago, when bystanders looked on while he was shot, nobody doing nothing to stop his life pumping out into the gutter while the gunmen disappeared onto the Flats.

  Vernon, still chewing his lunch of KFC and fries, was ambushed as he walked to his cop car parked outside a Paradise Park strip mall, gunmen firing at him from the rear of a Benz that was later found abandoned near the airport. Vernon didn’t see the hitmen, but he knew who they worked for: a gang that was pissed off buying protection from him. Said he was getting greedy. Fucken pay up, he said.

  Then the ambush.

  Vernon felt the bullets like body blows, taking two more in the left leg that dropped him to the gutter behind his car and probably saved his life. He looked up at the people around him: a mother dragging her big-eyed kid away, three old ladies clucking like hens, a couple of street sluts laughing tik laughs. Knew none of them would lift a finger to help this plainclothes cop who wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity.

  He dragged himself along the gutter, reached up and grabbed the handle of the car door, locking his fingers on the metal, pulling himself to his knees, felt blood running hot and sticky under his clothes. He opened the door and hauled himself into the driver’s seat.

  He cranked the car. Fucker coughed like a dog. Cranked it again and this time the engine took. His left leg was useless, shoe filled with blood, so he didn’t worry with the clutch, just jammed the lever into first, gearbox stripping cogs, and hit the accelerator, taking the rear bumper off a Toyota as he lurched out of the parking bay and drove foot-flat here to Doc’s, hand on the horn to scatter the taxis and the street trash, the world fading and curling up at the edges like an old photograph.

  When Vernon reached Doc’s house he hit the curb and passed out, slumped over the steering wheel, his bloody chest sounding the horn.

  That got the old boozer away from his TV, and somehow Doc dragged Vernon—in seizure by then—into the house.

  Vernon drifted back to consciousness lying on the carpet, as Doc ripped away his shirt, entry wounds like ripe raspberries on his barrel chest, the drunk lurching off to fetch his bag on the kitchen table—an old leather satchel filled with the tools of Doc’s one-time trade. Doc stilled his fingers long enough to find a bandage, brown with age, and hold it against the most severe wound, Vernon’s life leaking out round the edges.

  Vernon heard the scream of the ambulance and the medics came in and set up an IV line and worked at stabilizing him. Blood loss smacked Vernon back into blackness as white men in cricket togs celebrated the loss of a wicket on the big screen in the background.

  He woke in hospital two days later, on a respirator, tubes draining fluid from his one collapsed lung and a catheter draining piss from his dick. He’d survived. His leg was fucked, though, and his superiors used it as an opportunity to offer him a disability pension. Made it clear that if he resisted there would be an investigation that wouldn’t go well for him. So Vernon took the golden handshake and limped off into his future as a rent-a-cop.

  Doc’s back in the room now, carrying a hypodermic and a little bottle of thick, clear liquid. The anesthetic he used on the women he aborted. He draws the liquid into the syringe, his eyes back on the TV, watches a red ball sail out of the ground, into the crowd, the commentator yelling like he’s shot a load in his pants.

  Then he gets Vernon to pump his arm and make a fist, and a nice vein rises blue and knotted from his forearm. Doc’s hand is suddenly still, like he’s received some miracle cure, and he eases the needle into the vein, and Vernon feels that beautiful nothingness and goes deep under, way too deep for even his father’s ghost to find him.

  Sunny watches Exley from the monitor. He took the photograph only last week, a full-face portrait, and remembers how hard it was to get her to stay still.

  He is modeling his daughter’s face in 3D software and has constructed an intricate mesh, a latticework that follows the contours of her bones. Exley could have made a career as a computer artist—he has the chops—but his motion-capture device, developed when he was a young animator too poor to buy one of the extortion
ately expensive systems sold by the people who would become his pissed-off competitors, set him on another course.

  But he has never lost his love of 3D modeling, creating life from a digital wire mesh, finding nodal points with cursor arrows and using the subtlest of wrist and finger movements on his mouse (a tool that is an extension of his hand) to drag and warp the mesh until it takes human form and seems to transcend the two-dimensional plane of his monitor. Not for nothing is this animation software called Maya, Sanskrit for illusion.

  Or delusion.

  When he renders, skins and textures this face, it will be the focal point of a photo-realistic representation of his child. He’ll graft the head onto a model of her body and give it life by marrying the figure to the motion-capture data he has stored.

  Almost like bringing her back.

  Exley rejects this notion. Blocks out the voice of Gladys on the beach earlier, telling him that his daughter is still out there, reachable, in some limbo between life and afterlife.

  There is no fucking afterlife.

  What he is doing here is a father’s expression of love for his dead child. Nothing more. If he were a painter, he’d paint her. If he were a musician, he’d record something like Eric Clapton did after his four-year-old son plunged to his death from that apartment building in New York City. He is using his talent to create a memorial to his dead daughter and he’ll screen it on the day of her funeral.

  When an imaginary Caroline—at her schoolmarmish best—appears in his head to tell Exley that this digital evocation of Sunny is merely his way of sublimating his guilt, an act of penance disguised as obsessive love, he rolls his chair away from the workstation, closes his eyes and slides his fingers under his glasses, massaging his sinuses. He needs food and sleep and comfort.

  With a couple of mouse-clicks he saves the information on the computer and leaves the studio, stepping out of the air-conditioned room into the heat. Somehow it has become afternoon and the wind is roaring in, turning the sea choppy, white heads of spume blowing up onto the beach.

  Exley goes into the kitchen, spotless now that Gladys has done her magic. He opens the fridge and contemplates the leftovers. He’s been a vegetarian since his days on the ashram, so he looks past the cold cuts and caviar, opens the foil on a wheel of Brie, but the ripe stink rises in his nostrils and he is overtaken by nausea. He crosses to the sink and drinks forever from the faucet, wiping his face.

  When he opens his eyes he sees Caroline through the beads of water, soundless in her bare feet, still dressed in the tights and sweater, smoking, thin lines radiating out from her lips as she inhales.

  “That horrible little undertaker left a message on the answerphone. He wants you to call him.”

  “Sure, okay.”

  She turns to go.

  “Caro?”

  “Yes?”

  “I was thinking that we should hold the service here, on the beach, not in some God-awful crematorium.”

  She laughs. “What are we going to do? Bury her at sea?”

  Exley doesn’t react, just watches his wife, her skin whiter than he’s ever seen it, her eyes wild in her head. Is she taking her meds?

  Then, battling to keep his voice level, he says, “We need to make a decision about that.” He clears his throat. “I mean, do we bury her or cremate her?”

  Caroline’s eyes squeeze closed and when she opens them, just for a moment, he sees the woman he fell in love with. “Oh, Jesus, Nick, is this really happening? To our baby?”

  He goes to her and she lets him hold her, her voice muffled by his shoulder. “I can’t imagine Sunny in the ground. It’s just too hideously Edgar Allan Poe. Worms and claustrophobia.”

  “I feel the same. So we agree on cremation?”

  She breaks free of him and Exley sees blankness settle on her face like a mask. “Burn her. Burn her, for God’s sake. Just get it over and done with.”

  Chapter 12

  Exley sits on Sunny’s bed listening to the muffled rattle of Caroline touch-typing from behind the closed bedroom door. A sound he hasn’t heard in a long while. He has his phone in one hand and Vernon Saul’s card in the other, trying to find the courage to call him and ask for his help.

  A low rumble drowns out Caroline’s keyboard as a car with a powerful engine surges to a halt outside the house, exhausts burping when the engine is cut. Walking toward the window, Exley catches a few bars of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” before Marvin Gaye is silenced.

  A brown man in jeans and a T-shirt emerges from the car—some kind of customized Honda—and it takes Exley a moment to recognize Vernon Saul out of uniform. The rent-a-cop limps toward the gate, as if he is responding to some telepathic summons. Exley waits for the buzzer but the big man disappears from view.

  Exley leaves the room and walks down the stairs, through the front door and goes down the pathway and out the gate. Vernon stands before a small metal door that opens onto a space recessed into the wall.

  “Mr. Exley,” Vernon says, looking his way.

  “Call me Nick, please.”

  “Nick. I’m just replacing the hard drive that stores the images from the surveillance cameras. The last one was full.” Vernon holds up a small black metal rectangle. “Sorry if I disturbed you.”

  “No, you haven’t disturbed me at all, Vernon. In fact I was about to call you.”

  The big man checks that the new hard drive is seated correctly and connects its terminals. Then he closes the door and locks it before replying. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  Exley stares at the hard drive in the man’s hand. “The cameras would have captured what happened last night, wouldn’t they?”

  Vernon shrugs. “Some of it, yes.”

  Exley feels sick as he understands those lenses caught him smoking weed while his child drowned. Witnessed his culpability.

  “Vernon, what happens to that drive?”

  The big man steps up to him. “Look, Nick, I haven’t been completely honest with you. The drive’s not full.” Exley battles with Vernon’s accent, trying to follow this. “I’m taking it because, well, because I know the data on here is sensitive. Tragic. And I also know that there are people out there who are… let’s just say they’re sick. They get their hands on this type of material and next thing it’s up on YouTube.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry if I’m upsetting you, but this is just the way the world is.”

  Exley can only nod.

  “So, I’m taking this down to Sniper headquarters and I’m personally going to erase it. You can rely on me.”

  Exley exhales his relief. “Vernon, you’re off duty now, aren’t you?”

  “Ja, I’m not working today.”

  “So you came all the way here, to do this?”

  Vernon shrugs. “Nick, I was there last night. I understand the depth of your pain. I can’t let nobody add to it.”

  Exley steps out of his own internal chaos for long enough to register that Vernon Saul stinks of sweat, that his clothes are creased and look slept in, and that his dark hair dangles in wet bangs over his forehead.

  Exley finds himself imagining how this man—a working man, a poor man—lives. Imagining the mean and narrow life he leads. And yet he has still found the time for this act of kindness.

  Exley places his hand on the rent-a-cop’s arm, feeling the knotted muscle. “Vernon, my God, I don’t know how to thank you.” Some privileged white man’s reflex sending his fingers into his pocket for cash. “At least let me give you some gas money.”

  Vernon holds up a broad hand. “No ways. This is the least I can do in your time of grief.”

  How can Exley impose further? But he finds his voice. “Vernon, I hate to do this, but I wonder if I could ask you a favor?”

  “I told you already, Nick, there’s anything you and the wife need, you just have to ask.”

  “We want to bury Sunny, our daughter, as soon as possible. Tomorrow if we can. And we want to have the service here, on the beach.�
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  “Okay,” Vernon says.

  “Thing is, I spoke to your undertaker guy, and he tells me that to get a person to officiate at the service is going to be a problem if it’s not held in a church. He says there are procedures.”

  “Leave it to me, Nick.”

  “Really? I’m sorry to lay this on you.”

  “Nick, you just relax. I’ll sort this. I’ll call you in a while, okay?”

  The big man extends his hand and takes Exley’s in a surprisingly soft grip, then he limps away to his car, leaving Exley overwhelmed by the compassion of this stranger.

  All day long Yvonne Saul’s nerves have been playing up something terrible, since she seen that blood on her boy’s clothes, and him gone out all day, God knows where. As she stands by the open front door, the fierce wind flinging in heat from the south, she feels the water running between her breasts and down her thighs. She has been peeing non-stop, and no matter how much water she drinks, she can’t satisfy this thirst of hers.

  Yvonne feels light-headed for a moment and puts a hand against the doorjamb to steady herself. She closes the front door and walks through to the kitchen, catching sight of herself in the wall mirror. She can’t, honest to God, remember looking worse. Her skin is the color of dirty dishwater and the pouches under her eyes are dark with exhaustion.

  She tried to sleep in the afternoon, but the incessant, nagging cries of the child in the wooden shack crammed into her neighbor’s backyard kept her awake. A skinny little rubbish with gang tattoos and no teeth lives in there with a teenager and her little child. Mrs. Flanagan, Yvonne’s neighbor on the other side, says the girl sells her ass on Voortrekker, the milk in her breasts not even dried up yet. Don’t need no newspaper with Mrs. Flanagan around, leaning her big chest on the Vibracrete wall outside her house, her laser eyes missing nothing.

  Mrs. Flanagan says the jailbird is sexually abusing the child, a girlie no older than eighteen months. Yvonne walked away from her neighbor when this came up, her mind spinning back to what used to go on under her own roof, when her Vernon was little. God knows, she blames herself every livelong day for what he has become. She should have taken a carving knife to her sick bastard of a husband. Instead she’d closed her bedroom door and watched the TV or mumbled useless prayers and looked away from the blood and the bruises and the pain in her baby’s eyes.