by Smith, Roger
The uncle picks her up and flies her over the fence. “Come. We gonna phone your mommy.”
He carries her toward the shack door and she doesn’t want to go in there and tries to get loose and drops Mr. Brown in the sand and the uncle takes her through the door and closes it tight.
Chapter 54
Exley is roused from the deepest sleep he’s had in days by the sound of Vernon Saul’s drumming boots. He opens his eyes and sees Vernon heaving his uniformed bulk up from the beach and across the deck, walking straight toward the open door where he and Dawn lie naked on the sofa.
Exley sits and gently lifts Dawn’s head, her hair spread out across his chest. “Dawn?”
“Mnnnn?” she says, her eyes closed, voice thick with sleep.
“Wake up. Vernon’s here.”
“Don’t let him in.”
“Too late, Dawnie, I’m already in,” Vernon says, removing his sunglasses, grinning at them.
“Jesus Christ, how about ringing the fucking bell?” Exley says, standing, stepping into his shorts, aware of Vernon’s eyes on his groin.
Dawn sits up, reaching for her T-shirt, fighting her way into it, her hair a bramble patch.
“Sorry, buddy. I was just checking out the other side of the rocks, thought I’d drop in and see you’re okay.” Uninvited Vernon sits and throws his bad leg out to the side, digging into the flesh of his thigh with his fingers, grimacing. “Bloody thing’s giving me grief today.” He sniffs the air as if he can catch the scent of sex. “So, what’s this, then? The Love Boat?” Winking at Dawn, who stands, her T-shirt reaching halfway to her knees, her arms folded across her chest.
Vernon sees the suitcases and bags parked at the foot of the stairs. “Hey, you guys going somewhere?”
“No,” Exley says. “That’s Dawn’s stuff. She’s moving in.”
Vernon wags a finger at him. “Nick, I was a cop for too long not to recognize pure bullshit when I hear it. You’re ducking, aren’t you?”
What the hell, Vernon Saul can’t do a thing, Exley tells himself with a certainty he doesn’t feel. If he reveals any of it, he’ll be sending his own ass to prison.
“Yeah,” Exley says, shrugging. “There’s nothing for me here.”
“And you, Dawnie? Just fading away too?”
“Ja, Vernon. Leaving behind all the glamor.” She tries for throwaway, but Exley hears the tension in her voice.
“Hell,” Vernon says, “after all the good times we had.”
Exley steps between them. “I’d offer you a drink, but we’ve got a lot to do.”
“Sure, of course. I understand.” Vernon makes no move to go, settles deeper into the chair, his arms thrown out across its back. He looks from Dawn to Exley. “But there’s a couple of things I need to tell the both of youse. Updates, you know? You first, Nick.”
“What?” Exley asks.
“That night when your kid drowned out there,” jerking his head toward the beach, “you know I was up on the rocks?”
“Of course. So?” Exley says.
“Well, I was up there a whole long time. Saw your missus in the kitchen with that old guy she was shagging. Saw you and that Aussie getting your heads fucked up on weed. Saw your kid come to you and you send her away.”
“Vernon—” Exley says, dread uncoiling low in his gut.
Vernon holds up a hand. “Let me finish, Nick. You gonna want to hear this. I saw her go up on those rocks, your kid, after you ignored her. Saw her trying to reach out to that little boat. Knew what was gonna happen. I coulda shouted to youse. Coulda stopped it. But I thought, fuck it. Fuck these rich white cunts. They bringing this shit on themselves, so fuck them. And I just sat there. Watching.”
Exley’s face is bled of color as he stands over Vernon, feeling his throat constricting, like he’s going to pass out.
Vernon smiles up at him, relaxed, enjoying himself. “Then I saw her go into the water, your girl. Again, I coulda called. Or come down quick. But I just sat my ass there and waited. Saw her go under once, twice, three times. Saw your whore of a wife come screaming out and you going into the water, bringing the kid out dead. Then I came down and made like the hero. Funny story, huh, Nick?”
“Jesus, Vernon,” Exley says in somebody else’s voice. “Why?”
“Because I could.” Shrugging. “That’s why.”
The same rage he felt when he killed Caroline takes hold of Exley and he lunges at Vernon Saul, grabbing for his throat. The big man swats him aside and Exley hits his head on the tiles, stunned for a moment.
Vernon stands, unclips his pistol from the holster at his hip and points it at Exley. He cocks the gun and Exley looks past the black snout over at Dawn, who stands, frozen, a hand to her mouth, staring at him.
Exley closes his eyes and thinks of Sunny and sees her now: the flesh-and-blood Sunny, not the digital counterfeit. Sees her and waits to die.
Dawn knows Vernon’s going to shoot Nick. Can see it in his face that he’s tipped over some edge. Then he’ll shoot her, and Brittany will be left all alone.
When he works the slide on the Glock—a sound like a man coughing—Dawn looks for a weapon and there’s only the half-empty bottle on the table, so she grabs it by the neck and swings it, wine pouring down her arm, hammering it onto Vernon’s head.
The bottle shatters and she’s left holding the jagged neck. Vernon, bits of glass like highlights in his hair, wine and a trickle of blood zigzagging down his forehead onto his cheek, hardly even looks her way, his eyes and the pistol still on Nick.
Dawn sees the flesh of his neck rising from his body armor, sweat and wine and blood flowing into the creases in his skin. Knows she has just one chance. She jumps at him and slashes the broken bottle across his Adam’s apple, feels the glass bite deep and knows she’s done good when blood honest-to-God geysers out of him, spraying onto the white wall above Nick, and the Glock falls from Vernon’s hand and hits the tiles.
Nick is frozen, eyes still closed, so Dawn gets a foot in like a soccer player, kicking the gun, sending it clattering toward the kitchen, where Vernon, sagging to his knees, can’t reach it.
When Vernon hears Tony Orlando warbling “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” he knows he’s fucked. He’s on his knees, blood pumping in thick jets from his throat, fumbling for the Glock that’s not there no more. Vernon’s vision softens and blurs like he’s drunk and his mouth is full of something warm and salty.
When he tries to speak his tongue swims and the words won’t come. But this is important, what he has to say to Dawn. Wants her to know this thing.
“Dawnie!” he shouts, but all he hears is a wet whisper. “Dawnie, I took your girlie.”
He smiles blood up at her and she’s shaking him and screaming and hitting him but it’s not her he’s seeing, as he hears that song. He’s seeing his father, with his tattoos and his tongue and his fists and his fingers and his fat thing.
His father beckoning him, saying, “Come. Come, you little rabbit. I’m waiting. I’m fucken waiiiii—ting!”
And Vernon smells him and tastes him and feels him and then he’s there.
Jesus, more blood.
A lot of it. Vernon Saul going to his final reward in lurid, pulsing Technicolor. Exley, now that he understands that he’s not dead, convinces his limbs to move and gains his feet and crosses to where Dawn, a blood-soaked banshee from a slasher flick, straddles the dead man, shaking him, slapping his face, yelling, “Where is she? Where’s my baby?”
Exley grabs her from behind, his arms looping her chest, and tries to drag her off Vernon, saying, “Dawn, he’s dead. Dawn!”
She fights him and the tiles are slick with blood and Exley loses his footing and both of them end up sprawled across Vernon’s body like mud wrestlers. Dawn slips from Exley’s grasp and is back on Vernon, banging his head against the floor, the gash in his throat like a second mouth, gaping and grinning as she pounds away.
‘Where is she, you fucken bastard? What you done with her?’ She�
�s panting, spit dangling from her lips.
Exley lifts Dawn’s cell phone from the table and holds it out to her. “Dawn, call the babysitter. Maybe Vernon was lying.”
Dawn stares at the phone like it’s an alien artifact, then her breathing slows and she blinks and nods and comes back into herself. She takes the phone and stands, speed-dialing with a shaking red finger.
Dawn paces the tiles as she waits for the call to be answered, pushing her hair from her face with a bloody hand. Exley hears one side of the conversation, Dawn’s voice rising and sobbing, and he goes to her as she lets the phone slip from her grasp and clatter onto the table.
“When?” he asks.
“About two hours ago. He gave her money. Said I sent him. Jesus, Nick, this is my fault.”
“Dawn, listen to me. We’ll find her, okay?” She looks through him into her worst nightmare. “But first we have to do a few things here. I need you to help me to move him out of sight.”
She nods and they each grab a leg and drag Vernon into the passageway where he’ll be invisible from the windows, his body leaving a wash of blood in its wake. Exley pats him down and finds a set of keys in his pocket and puts them on the table near the front door. He kills the lights in the living room, to hide the carnage.
“Okay,” Exley says. “Now we’re going to have to shower before we leave. Strip off your clothes down here and get a fresh set from your suitcase.”
Dawn obeys, on autopilot. When they are both naked Exley gets her to sit on the bottom step of the staircase and lifts each of her bare feet, using his T-shirt to wipe them free of blood.
She starts to shake, hugging herself. “How we gonna find her, Nick? What if that sick fuck killed her?” She sobs, a high keening sound.
Exley embraces her. “Dawn, no, he was using her as a lever. He wouldn’t kill her, because then she’d be useless. Believe me.”
She pushes herself away from him and looks into his eyes. “You promise?”
“I promise,” he says, muting his own doubts. “Do you know where he lives? Lived?”
“In Paradise Park, with his mother, I think. I dunno exactly where, but I can make some calls.”
“Okay. We’ll find her.”
He cleans his own feet and he takes her arm and they go upstairs into the shower, forensic in its brightness, and wash Vernon’s gore from their bodies. Exley soaps Dawn’s hair, a mass of blood-caked dreadlocks. Then he turns her body under the jets of water, inspecting her.
She’s clean.
Dawn leaves the shower and dries herself. “Jesus, Nick, I done a lot of bad shit in my time but I never killed nobody.” She starts to shake again.
Sheer adrenaline-fed hysteria almost makes Exley say, “Relax. It gets easier after the first one,” but he bites his tongue and holds her until the shakes subside.
They dress and go downstairs. Avoiding the blood, Exley pockets Vernon’s keys. When he sees Dawn retrieve the gun from near the kitchen door and tuck it into the waistband of her jeans, he asks no questions. They enter the garage from the house.
Exley raises the garage door, opens the street gate with the remote button and reverses the Audi out. The door death-rattles down and the gate slides closed. Vernon’s white Civic skulks under a street light.
“Can you drive, Dawn?” Exley asks.
“Ja, I can drive.”
“I’m going to take Vernon’s car. Follow me, okay?”
She nods and scoots behind the wheel of the Audi when he exits. Exley finds the button that releases the central locking of the Civic and seats himself. The car stinks of smoke and cloying aftershave. His feet are too far from the pedals, but he doesn’t adjust the seat, just edges farther forward, hunching over the steering wheel.
Exley turns the key and some old Motown number blares out into the night, something about the tears of a clown. Startled, he bumps his head against the plastic skeleton that dangles from the rearview mirror, fumbling around the dashboard until he finds the button that mutes the CD.
He slams the Civic into first gear and as he touches a foot to the accelerator the engine howls and the car spurts forward like a premature ejaculator. Exley turns the car, wary of its unwieldy power, and heads up the hill, trailing exhaust fumes, watching for the cool blue headlights of the Audi in the rearview.
When he gets to the turn off to the Scout Hall he flags Dawn down and tells her to pull over to the side and douse the headlights. The road is empty of cars and pedestrians but he has no way of knowing if they are being observed from one of the houses that rise like watchtowers from behind their high walls.
Exley parks the Civic outside the Scout Hall, just about where he pulped Dino Erasmus’s head to hamburger, and uses the hem of his T-shirt to wipe away his prints from any surface he remembers touching. He pockets Vernon’s keys, leaves the car unlocked and jogs down to where Dawn waits in the idling Audi.
Dawn, allowing Nick Exley to drive her back into her past, rests her face against the car’s side window as they cross the bridge from Voortrekker Road to Paradise Park, watching a long train snake beneath them, its windows a yellow stream of light.
Soon as they’re off the bridge the hot wind that haunts the Flats hits them, rocking the Audi on its springs. Blowing in her mother’s shrill, drunken laugh and the sound of her high heels tap-tapping on the cement floor of the house as she leaves Dawn behind. Blowing in the wheeze of her uncle’s breath and the sniggers of her pimply cousins as they come into the bedroom, and even though Dawn hides her head under her pillow there’s no escape.
Never.
But it’s not her head she sees under the pillow, it’s Brittany’s, and the terror Dawn feels jolts her upright and she grips Nick’s leg, her fingers digging deep enough to bruise. He doesn’t flinch, just places his left hand over hers.
“You okay?” he asks.
She nods, but she’s not okay. Can’t get it out of her head that while she was riding Nick’s cock—thinking of nothing but her own pleasure—her child was kidnapped by Vernon Saul.
Dawn, willing Nick to drive faster even though she knows he can’t, watches the cramped ugliness fly past, night turned to day by the orange light towers. Garbage litters the streets and blows up against the razor wire and chain-link fences surrounding the box houses. Washing flies from the windows and balconies of the low-rise apartment buildings, concrete bunkers hunkered down on the shifting sand.
She made calls and got an address for Vernon, deep in Paradise Park, Dark City side. The territory of the 28s gang, in this violence-torn hellhole. She understands how visible they are in the Audi—could be targeted by the gangs or pulled over by the cops—but they speed on, Dawn telling Nick where to go, no GPS gonna guide him through this maze.
Silently praying that she’ll find her child at Vernon Saul’s house.
Alive.
She keeps telling herself that Vernon took Britt to get Dawn away from Nick, get her back under his control. Took her child to show her that he could do it, and he’d do it again—or worse—if she didn’t obey him. Must be the truth.
Nick passes a taxi and somebody shouts something that gets stuck in the throat of the wind. They come to an intersection, a bunch of young bastards leaning on a gang-tagged junction box, checking them out, their T-shirts billowing like spinnakers.
Dawn rests her fingers on the Glock lying in her lap. Let them fucken try. But they do nothing except stare and Exley drives on.
“Turn here,” Dawn tells him, and they’re in another narrow street, identical houses jammed up tight like uneven teeth. “Go slow, now,” she says, searching for numbers. “Okay, stop.”
They’re at a house with a concrete wall, some of the panels missing, the uprights leaning like drunkards. Dawn’s out of the car, the Glock held close to her body. She’s no marksman but she’s been around enough pimps and dealers to pick up basic gun skills. Anyway, what’s there to know? Point and shoot.
She steps through the broken wall and jogs up to the front do
or and turns the handle that gleams silver in the street light. Locked. She knocks. No sound from inside the darkened house. She knocks again and Nick is at her side. She hears the sound of Vernon’s keys jangling as he tries one then another and unlocks the door. They step into the room, a yellow streak of street light following them in.
Dawn sees something—someone—lying on the floor and her heart pounds.
“Britt?” she says. “Brittany!” She kneels and the room is washed by dirty green fluorescent as Nick finds the switch.
A woman, maybe sixty, lies on her side, her eyes half open and her mouth gaping, false teeth slipped off her gums. Dawn’s seen enough dead people in her time to know this woman’s gone, but she places her fingertips just below the jaw to check for a pulse.
Nothing.
Dawn shakes her head, panicking now, on her feet, rushing into the two small bedrooms. One smelling of sick old lady, the other—spare as a prison cell—heavy with Vernon’s hair gel.
No sign of her child. Maybe he took her somewhere else. Maybe she’s lying dead, under the shifting white sand of the Flats. As she checks the bathroom and kitchen, Dawn hears herself praying, old Catholic stuff from so far back she doesn’t know how she remembers it.
The kitchen door stands open onto the night and Dawn runs out. Just a cramped backyard, a sagging clothes line, a bare yellow bulb dangling from a cord, light kicking off a low wire fence that separates the house from the shack next door.
Dawn, gun in hand, spins, shouting her daughter’s name. Searching the shadows.
“Dawn!”
She turns to Exley, who points over the fence, and Dawn sees the little bear, Mr. Brown, lying in the dirt outside the shack. She vaults the rusted wire in one leap, letting the Glock lead her to the door, yelling her child’s name. Hears a soft cry.
Dawn grabs the handle and shoves. The door gives but doesn’t open. She steps back and kicks it up near the lock and it flies inward and she’s in the shack, where a paraffin lamp throws shadows into air thick with tik fumes.