Capture (7 page)

On calm days like these, before the sun got too high and too hot, he’d rowed Sunny out past the bird rock, laughing as she pinched her nose at the stink of the guano.

The memory of her, dwarfed by the orange life jacket, her curls electric in the sunlight, burns his retinas when he closes his eyes, and he finds himself nostril-breathing, inflating and releasing his diaphragm as he was taught to years ago in the yoga classes on the ashram. It helps to calm him a little and the sun on his face is soothing and maybe if he just sits here and doesn’t move, the sorrow will drain from him, drop by drop.

Exley feels the chill of the waves on his feet, then something more solid nudges his toes and he opens his eyes to see Sunny’s toy sailing ship bobbing in the shallows, returned on the tide.

He grabs the thing and stands, lifts it over his head and smashes it down on the rocks and doesn’t stop until the boat is string and match-sticks. Tears blur his eyes and his face is a macramé of snot.

He drops the splintered toy and looks up to see big, black Gladys, the cleaning woman, standing on the deck, watching him. She doesn’t usually work on a Sunday, but last week Caroline asked her to come up from her shack in Mandela Park, to help clean up the mess after the party, and nobody thought to phone her.

As Gladys approaches him, her shiny, low-heeled shoes sinking into the sand, Exley sees that she is crying. Caroline must have told her what happened, when she buzzed her in.

“Mr. Nick,” Gladys says, “Sunny, she is…?”

Exley wipes a gout of snot from his face with the back of his hand, nodding, and this woman to whom he has said maybe ten words in the months she has cleaned their house enfolds him to her massive bosom, the scent of cheap soap and talcum powder rising from her warm flesh.

It is comforting, being held like this, and he wishes he could stay here forever.

She releases him and walks to the water’s edge, staring down at the sand, scuffed by the feet of the paramedics, a single latex glove—muddied and obscene—lying just beyond the reach of the surf. Gladys points out at the water in the cove.

“Is it there that she died?”

Exley sees Sunny floating down near the kelp, her hair trailing, the last few bubbles of air escaping her mouth, and he’s sure now that she died underwater, and that the rent-a-cop—despite his heroic efforts—did nothing but fill her dead lungs with his breath.

“Yes,” Exley says. “Did Caroline tell you what happened?”

The big woman shakes her head. “No, I don’t see Miss Caroline. She is only buzzing me in. Sunny tell me, in a dream.” Gladys steps close to Exley, who says nothing, staring at her. “Last night, I dream about water. About Sunny. This morning when I am coming in the taxi my heart it is very cold. And when I see you here, I already know.”

“You saw Sunny in a dream? Last night?”

“Yes, Mr. Nick.”

Exley feels as if he is looking down on himself from on high. Part of him realizes how absurd this conversation is, how dumb he is to be grasping at this simple woman’s superstition. The other part speaks before he can stop it.

“What did you dream?”

“She is coming to me. Crying. And the way she is looking I know she has passed.”

Madness, of course. Primitive hocus-pocus. But he feels dizzy with loss.

“In our culture the death of a child is a very bad thing,” Gladys says, “and the child must be protected from the bad spirits, must be guided to the ancestors on the other side. You understand?”

He nods. Crazy as it may seem he does understand. There is a whacked-out symmetry between what this Xhosa woman is saying and the teachings of the self-styled guru on the ashram he fled as a teenager, where his mother still lives. These teachings (tales of souls wandering lost in an endless maze of hellish afterlives) terrified the living shit out of him.

“What can I do?” asks a man who is not quite Nicholas Exley.

“We believe that the spirit of the person stays where it dies for a few days, before it crosses over. Only the love of a parent, Mr. Nick, is getting Sunny to the other side.”

Then she sets off, heavy and slow across the sand, and into the house. Later he will see her sitting on Sunny’s bed, singing in Xhosa, weeping without shame.

A movement in the house draws Exley’s eye. Caroline watches him from an upstairs window, smoking. Then she turns away and disappears.

Exley goes inside, tramping water and sand across the tiles. He considers climbing up to the bedroom, but is too raw to deal with Caroline’s anger, so he ducks into the studio and slumps down in his chair, triggering the mo-cap loop of Sunny. He feels a disturbance in the air and swivels as Caroline steps into the room, dressed in dark tights, an old sweater baggy on her slight frame. The sweater is her security blanket, the wool mottled from years of use and scarred by cigarette burns.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Nothing,” he says, pausing the loop, his fingertips stroking the smooth rectangular spacebar.

“Is this how you’re going to handle it?” she asks. “Locked away in your bloody hobbit hole?”

“I’m just watching her.”

“That’s not her. That’s not Sunny. That’s nothing but a collection of zeros and ones.”

He doesn’t rise to this. “What did you say to Gladys?”

“Not a word. I just buzzed her in. Then I saw the two of you having your little pity party on the beach. Why, what did she say to you?”

He shrugs, eyes on the frozen wireframe figure on the monitor. “She knew Sunny was dead. Said that she had a dream about her last night. Something about water.”

“Jesus, what a load of voodoo bollocks.”

“How did she know, then, if you didn’t tell her?”

“The bloody bush telegraph, how do you think? The taxi would have been full of it this morning when she came up.”

“She doesn’t strike me as a liar.”

“Oh, come on, Nicholas, you don’t seriously believe this nonsense, do you?” He stays mute. “You know these bloody primitives and their conceit that they are born with a connection to some greater power. A connection that we have somehow lost. It’s just a form of spiritual one-upmanship.”

Caroline sees his face and laughs. “Shit, how pathetic,” she says. “You want to believe it, don’t you, to lessen your guilt? To believe that Sunny is out there in some cozy afterlife, instead of lying dead in the mortuary? My God, despite your protestations of rationality, you’re your mother’s son, after all.” Exley does what he always does when she gets like this: retreats into silence. “Well, sorry to piss on your parade, darling, but Sunny’s dead. Gone. Shuffled off the mortal bloody coil.
Muerto
. Fucking get used to it.”

When he doesn’t look at her and stays closemouthed he hears her breath—a hiss of frustration—and waits for the torrent of rage, his shoulder muscles tensing, his hand gripping the mouse. But the door slides open and shuts with a muffled kiss and he’s alone.

Exley nudges the spacebar again, setting free all that is left of Sunny, her little proxy dancing and twirling on the twin screens of his glasses.

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.