Capture

by Smith, Roger

  They eat, Dawn vacuuming down her pizza with all the trimmings—salami, shrimp, meatballs—Nick nibbling at something with olives and asparagus.

  “You a vegetarian?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since I was a kid. My mother is into the whole Eastern religion thing, so meat just disappeared off the menu.”

  “Me, I like my meat.”

  “Guess I just lost the taste for it. My wife and daughter ate meat, so it doesn’t offend me.” Something crosses his face and he sets down the pizza slice, reaching for the beer, and he goes far away, staring out over the ocean, lines like a map of sadness on his face. She leaves him be, until he comes back. “Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s okay.”

  “So, Dawn,” he says, smiling, making an effort, “how long have you been a dancer?”

  “I always loved dancing, since I was a little kid. Always showing off. But I been doing it professional since last year.”

  “Where do you perform?” he asks.

  Dawn laughs, she can’t help it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nick, I’m a stripper in a shithole on Voortrekker Road. I wouldn’t call what I do performing, it’s more like going to the gynecologist every night.” Dawn laughs again, but she’s embarrassed him. “Hey, I’m not proud of what I do but a girl’s gotta pay the rent, you know what I mean?”

  “I understand. It’s just you have real talent. I’ve done some work with choreographers and dancers over the years and you’re good.” Saying this with a serious look.

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Dawn, I dunno if this would interest you, but I’m building up a library of motion-capture data and I don’t have enough dance stuff. Maybe you could come back again? I’d pay, of course.”

  Dawn lays her best smile on him. “Sure. Anytime. In fact, I just lost my job, so it would be a blessing. Serious.”

  “What happened?”

  She takes a sip of the beer and gives him a fantasy version of what went down at Lips, no social workers, no Brittany, just cartoon versions of the Ugly Sisters and Costa. She plays it for laughs, and he smiles and shakes his head at the craziness of it all. Even eats some of his food.

  They finish their drinks and he goes inside the house and brings back a six-pack of the imported beer that tastes a bit like piss to her, but hey, who the hell is she to complain?

  Vernon, carrying the cremation urn in a pink plastic bag, clambers over the boulders that flank Exley’s house. He’d parked the Civic outside the front gate and was about to buzz, when something said, no, go in the other way. Surprise them.

  And there they are, Nick Exley and Dawn, sitting out on the deck, a pair of laughing shadows against the burning ocean, some kind of tuneless electro beat pumping from inside the house.

  They don’t know he’s there and he stands a moment, on the rock where it all began, watching them. Dawn, barefoot, sits with her feet up on the wooden chair, one hand hanging down, resting on the neck of a beer bottle, the other up behind her head, playing with her hair, making little ringlets. Nick leans forward, elbows on the table, telling her something, and she laughs again—a loose laugh, like she’s a bit drunk—and juts her titties toward Exley, who looks too bloody relaxed for a guy in his situation.

  Vernon skids down the rocks and advances on them, dragging his bad leg, boot scuffing a trail in the white sand, and when they turn toward him the atmosphere changes. Dawn lowers her feet and crosses her arms over her breasts, staring out at the water.

  Exley stands, looking uneasy. “Hey, man, how about a beer?”

  Vernon knows that they don’t want him here and he feels something old and dark twitch inside him. He turns on a smile to cover his rage as he crosses the deck, his boots like gunshots on the wood.

  “No, Nick, thanks.” He sits, putting the bag down beside him, the urn clinking. “So, how’d it go?”

  “Oh, excellent,” the whitey says. “Dawn’s a great dancer.”

  “Ja, you should see her show sometime,” Vernon says, giving Dawn a look.

  But she comes right back at him. “I already told Nick what I do, Vernon.” She shrugs her shoulders like she’s fucken shrugging him off and he knows he needs to exert some control here.

  “No secrets between friends, hey?” he says, and Dawn stays quiet. He turns to Exley. “And you, Nick, you tell her your darkest secrets?”

  That gets the skinny fuck’s attention and he coughs around the mouth of his beer bottle, staring at Vernon with an attempt at a smile.

  “No, I wouldn’t want to bore her.”

  “Oh, she wouldn’t be bored.” Bantering, then getting serious. “Dawnie, I gotta have a talk with Nick. Go wait in the car.” Chucking the Civic keys at her.

  Dawn knows better than to argue and says her goodbyes sharpish, but still giving Exley cow eyes. He walks her to the door, and they whisper a few words, Exley touching her on the elbow. She leaves and he comes back and sits.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  Vernon raises the plastic bag and holds it out to Exley, who takes it, opens it and looks like somebody’s kidney-punched him when he sees the silver container.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  Vernon gets a warm and fuzzy voice going. “Sorry, buddy.”

  Exley, fighting back tears, lifts the urn from the bag and places it on the table, all gentle, like it can feel what he’s doing.

  “Nick, I know you wanna be alone,” Vernon says, and Exley nods, eyes on the urn, “but we got us a problem that won’t keep.”

  Exley looks up and says, “Erasmus?”

  “Ja.” Vernon nods. “The fucker’s like a pitbull. I been putting out feelers with my connections and it’s not looking good. He’s got a senior prosecutor on his side, seems like they’re gonna take this thing the distance.” Bullshitting, of course, but it sounds believable, and he’s scaring the little weakling stupid.

  “He was fucking aggressive when he was here yesterday. Do I need a lawyer?” Exley asks, nice and stressed.

  “No, not yet. That’ll just send out the wrong signals. But we’re going to have to contain this.”

  “Contain it how?” Vernon shrugs and Exley says, “Erasmus is making all these accusations, but what’s he got? What proof?”

  “Nick, strong enough circumstantial cases get convictions in court. Especially if the prosecution has the judge in their pocket. Remember there’s no jury system in this country, just a judge. And him and the prosecution’s born from the same hole, if you get my meaning.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “What I want you to get nice and clear, Nick, is that I done what I done to save your ass.” Exley’s ready to mouth off, so Vernon holds up a hand. “Whoa, buddy. My balls are on the line here. If things get too hot I’m gonna have to make a deal with Erasmus. Plea-bargain.”

  Exley stares at him. “Jesus, Vernon.”

  “I was a cop, Nick. Put a lot of nasty motherfuckers behind bars. How you think it’s gonna go for me if I get locked away with them in Pollsmoor?” He shakes his head. “Not an option. But if I make a deal, I’ll get sent to some medium-security prison in another province. Get my own cell. Probably serve no more than six, seven years. I’ll be out by the time I’m forty.” He lights a cigarette, draws on it, never taking his eyes off Exley, speaking around a mouthful of smoke. “Means I’ll have to give you up, Nick. And for you, my friend, things won’t go so well. In a recent case a foreign guy who hired hit-men to kill his wife ended up pulling a double life sentence.”

  “But I didn’t hire you!”

  “Who’s to say?”

  “Okay, Vernon, what do you want? Money?”

  “You come at me with that crap again, Nick? At a time like this?”

  “Then what? Tell me what you want from me.” Desperate, his fingers clenched on the arms of the chair.

  Vernon leans forward, crowding Exley. “I want you to make this whole bl
oody nightmare go away.”

  “How?”

  “Simple, Nick.” Vernon, working his mouth like a goldfish, blows a perfect smoke ring and watches it float on the breeze and disperse. Then he looks deep into Exley’s panicked eyes. “You gonna kill Dino Erasmus.”

  Chapter 39

  Vernon speeds along the coast toward the city, the mountain looming above, feeling the earth pulling at him as he takes the car through the curves. He hates this stretch of road, with its twists and turns imposed by the chunk of rock. Vernon’s a straight-ahead guy. Plain and simple. Grew up out on the Flats, a man-made grid thrown down on the windswept badlands. A place all about forward movement. Something gets in your way, you take it down. End of story. You look back and you’re fucked.

  But now he feels just a whisper of self-doubt as he fights this road that chases its own tail. Is he getting in too deep, pressuring Exley to do this thing? Will the soft white man crack and take them both down?

  Vernon lights a Lucky and breathes out his doubts and fears with the smoke, knowing that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t sort this Erasmus business himself. He’d be suspect number one. No, he has to have an unshakeable alibi when Exley does what he has to do. And that is fucken that.

  Vernon looks across at Dawn, who rests her head against the side window, watching the sunset. Remembers that night when he first got her into his car on Voortrekker. Changed her life for her. Is she grateful? Not a fuck. She’ll drop him in a heartbeat.

  “He pay you?” Vernon asks.

  “Huh?” She sits up, squinting at him.

  “Nick. He pay you?”

  “Ja.”

  “How much?” She hesitates. “You don’t have to lie, Dawn, I don’t want any of your money. I’m not your fucken pimp.”

  “Two grand,” she says.

  “So, you going back?”

  “Ja. Day after tomorrow.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “I can find my own way.” Looking out over the sea again.

  He grabs her thigh and squeezes until it hurts. “Now let’s not get too full of ourselves, Dawnie.”

  He puts on Percy Sledge—“When A Man Loves A Woman.” One of her favorites. But Dawn just stares at the light dying over the ocean, not even responding to the music, and Vernon knows he’s losing her.

  From where Exley sits on the low rocks—right where the water took Sunny—the swell obscures the beach, and the house looks like a lightship adrift on the Atlantic. How he got out here Exley can’t recall, but alcohol must have been involved because he holds an empty cut-glass tumbler in his hand. He stands, fighting for balance on the kelp-slick rocks, and has to sacrifice the glass to the deep when he needs both hands to keep from plunging into the water.

  Exley makes it back to the beach, the legs of his jeans sodden, his bare feet cut by barnacles sharp as razors, and he leaves a trail of sand and a little blood as he heads for the liquor cabinet to refuel. The level of the gin bottle tells a story. He has been steadily anesthetizing himself since Vernon and Dawn left.

  Vernon Saul and his threats destroyed the illusion of normality that spending the day with Dawn—chilling, even flirting in his clumsy way—had brought, sending him right back into a piece of absurdist theater, the hulking, gammy-legged thug a creature straight out of Beckett, Exley terrified by the light of self-belief that animated the maniac’s dead eyes as he laid out his plan. A plan so crazy that all Exley can do is use alcohol to purge it from his mind.

  On the ice run into the kitchen he stops at the little silver cremation urn standing on the counter, seeing his distorted reflection in the polished surface, ashamed of the man he has become.

  Exley sets down the glass of booze and places the fingertips of his right hand against the cool metal of the urn.

  ‘God, my baby, I miss you,’ he says, closing his eyes, convinced for a crazy instant that when he opens them he’ll see his daughter.

  But, of course, the kitchen is empty, the white tiles bouncing cold light back up at him. He stands staring into the funhouse mirror of the urn, listening to the fluorescents buzz and the clock tick and the refrigerator whisper until the rasp of the gate buzzer startles him.

  Crossing to the intercom, Exley is sure he’ll hear the adenoidal tones of Dino Erasmus, but instead it’s Shane Porter requesting permission to come aboard. The Australian strolls in holding a bottle of tequila by the neck, brandishing a fistful of fastidiously rolled blunts, like silkworms jutting between his fingers.

  “X-man,” he says, embracing Exley. “I just heard about Caroline. Jesus.”

  Port smells of booze, reefer and an aftershave that could clear backed-up plumbing. When the Australian relaxes his embrace Exley staggers, the alcohol taking him out at the knees.

  Porter laughs. “You’re totally shitfaced, aren’t you, mate? Well, who the fuck can blame you?”

  He heads out onto the deck and sets the tequila bottle down beside the remains of the pizza lunch. Fishing out a lighter he applies the flame to one of the joints, talking in strangled tones as he sucks in the smoke.

  “Here, Ex, catch up on this. Durban Poison.”

  Exley has a hit, and feels it immediately, this mildly hallucinogenic weed harvested in the faraway Zululand hills. The effect is not unpleasant but he has to sit down. Port joins him, and they bounce the reefer, soft grunts and the smacking of lips the only conversation until the joint is a stub of ash that the Aussie flicks out into the night, the men watching it weave and die like a firefly.

  “Ex, I’m out of here tomorrow. Probably for keeps,” Porter says, firing up another doob.

  “Yeah? Where’re you going?” Exley’s voice sounds as if it’s coming from deep inside a barrel.

  “Sharjah, up in the land of the camel shaggers. They’ve got a pretty serious cricket stadium up there and they’re hosting a tournament next week. Good news is, I’ve landed a commentary gig. My stint in purgatory is over, old son.”

  “Congratulations, Port.” Exley finds the joint in his hand and takes a lung-scalding hit.

  “This tournament is small but it’s a way back in. And there I was thinking you only found happy endings in massage parlors, mate.” The Aussie laughs, then he gets serious, leans in close. “Now, Ex, I just had a visit from a fucking nightmare of a copper. Looks like this.” Port jams two fingers in his nostrils and pulls them up toward his eyes in a decent impersonation of the snout-faced cop.

  “Dino Erasmus,” Exley says, coughing fumes.

  “Yeah, Jesus. That’s how I found out what happened to Caroline. Anyway, this cop was asking all sorts of nasty questions about you. Insinuating things about your wife and Vlad Stankovic. I played dumb, of course.”

  Exley battles to keep up. “You knew about them?”

  “Mate, the whole of bloody Llandudno knew.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re the husband. Now listen, Ex, I know you didn’t kill your missus, you’re not that kind of bloke. And to be absolutely honest, I don’t care if you did. Sorry to speak ill of the dead but she seemed like a gold-plated cunt to me.” He takes the joint from Exley and vacuums it up before tossing it. “But this fucking copper is bad news, he’s a walking hard-on and he’s got you in his sights. Only bloody thing that’ll stop that bastard is a silver bullet. You be careful, mate.”

  “I will, Port. Thanks.”

  “Sorry,” Porter says, delicately picking a shred of weed from his tongue. “I shouldn’t have said that about Caroline. In poor taste.”

  “No, you’re right about her,” Exley says, feeling a stoner’s urge to spill the truth. To unload on Port, tell him how he killed Caroline and about the nightmare Vernon Saul’s trapped him in. But he stays silent.

  “Well, look on the bright side, you’re a free man,” Porter says. “And my advice is, don’t be in a hurry to change that. A wiser bloke than me once said that when a man gets to a certain age there are two things he’s better off renting by the hour: boats and women.”


  Laughing, Port dips a hand into his jeans pocket and holds up a tiny glass vial. A single blue-white capsule, like a chip of ice, lies at the bottom of the container.

  “Medication time!” He shakes the vial and the pill makes a sound like a rattlesnake as it clatters against the glass. “My farewell gift to you, mate.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m no bloody chemist but I reckon there’s some Bromo-DragonFLY to bliss you out, a hint of PCPr to keep you chilled and just a twist of 4-FMC to keep you perky.” He places the container before Exley. “What I do know is this little beauty will put you on speaking terms with the big guy in the sky.”

  Exley stares at the pill and nods. The weed has softened the edges of his vision, the flame of Port’s lighter multiplying as he brings it to yet another joint.

  As the Australian blows out a pungent stream, his fleshy face shining with sweat in the yellow light from the living room, he says, “Drop that little baby when things get too freaky, mate, and when you reach nirvana send your Uncle Shane a postcard.”

  If there’s more conversation, Exley doesn’t remember it. There’s a jump cut and Port’s gone and Exley knows he’ll never see him again.

  He wanders into the house and finds he has the empty bottle of tequila in his hand.

  Exley approaches the urn again, the air around it boiling and blurring from the booze and the weed. He tucks all that remains of his daughter under his arm and shambles into the studio, slumping into his seat at the workstation.

  He sets the urn beside the monitor and gropes for the mouse, the slick plastic skidding away from his fingers like a greased pig. At last Exley corrals it, and sets to work, the shiny urn alive with the reflections of his dancing daughter.

  Chapter 40

  Dawn just loves the Waterfront. To her it’s everything that is magical about Cape Town: a giant shopping mall built around the harbor, with sun-drenched Table Mountain as a backdrop. The place is full of rich white people with tans and foreign accents. All the designer stores are here—from Jimmy C to Louis V—and she feels connected to a big, wide, glamorous world just walking past the brightly lit window displays, holding Brittany’s hand.