Capture (9 page)

Even over the wind Yvonne hears the front gate screaming like a wounded animal and feels sick to her stomach, wondering what mood he’ll be in now, hearing the scrape of his key in the lock.

Vernon bursts in, his clothes rumpled and dirty, his thick hair dangling over his forehead. “Get your ass up, we leaving.”

She stares at him. “But church isn’t for an hour.” She flaps a hand at her sweat-stained dress. “I can’t go like this.”

“Then fucken stay.”

He’s gone, slamming the door, and she has to grab her purse and rush to catch up with him, barely in the car before he guns the engine and takes them off into the maze of cramped houses, sun sagging like a blood orange into the thick dust.

Vernon hurries out of the pastor’s house into the hot wind that attacks the arriving worshipers, women tugging down ballooning dresses and older men holding onto their Sunday hats.

The house, a two-level affair with barred windows, is joined at the hip to a squat pink happy-clappy church, the Tabernacle of Christ Our Lord, occupying a street corner in the middle-class part of Paradise Park, two blocks of nice houses with smart cars parked in the driveways, hidden behind high walls and fences. The houses of school headmasters and accountants and drug dealers, gazing hopefully toward distant Table Mountain but near enough to the landfill to catch the stink and see the useless people from Tin Town, the maze of shacks that grows out the side of Paradise Park like a disease, foraging for anything of value on the dump. The Tin Town Mall, the locals call it.

As he fights his way to the Civic, Vernon sees his mother walking toward the church, hunched against the wind, yakking to an old fucker whose tie rears up and smacks him in the face. His bitch mother’s hair—naturally a stew of tight curls that has been straightened and gelled hard as a helmet—doesn’t even move in the gale.

Vernon fires up the Honda and speeds away, tailgating taxis, using his horn to scatter pedestrians, many of them drunk this Sunday evening. His mother’s stink still hangs in the car and he jabs a finger at the A/C button and the refrigerant hisses out of the vents, visible for a few seconds like a meat locker’s been opened, coming in so cold it burns his sinuses. He wonders who that old man is. Wonders if this situation needs watching.

Then he breathes deep, lets the cold air calm him as he releases all the tension in his body. He’s in the zone now. Fucken invincible. That shot Doc gave him put him under for nearly eight hours of dreamless sleep and he awoke with a renewed sense of purpose, not questioning the impulse that told him to drive over to Llandudno, to recapture the feeling of power that came to him last night on that private little beach.

Things are starting to line up again, fall into place, so it didn’t surprise him when Nick Exley appeared and put himself deeper in Vernon’s debt by asking for that favor.

Organizing the preacher man for the funeral had been no problem. A year ago Vernon busted a petty thief, a repeat offender who was looking at a long stretch inside. In a backyard plea bargain the dipso told Vernon he’d boosted a laptop from a pastor’s car and found filth on it.

So Vernon got the thief to boot up the laptop, the hard drive toxic with downloaded child porn. Vernon, gagging back his memories, was tempted to bust his mother’s preacher, send him to Pollsmoor where his fat ass would be torn open by the prison gangs—give him a taste of what was done to those kids. But sanity prevailed. This sick fuck was worth more to him out here.

Vernon visited the pastor, showed him the computer, watched him sweat as he saw his life dissolving away in the puddles that pooled beneath his arms. Vernon told him it was okay. He would keep it quiet. But if he ever needed something…

“Anything,” the sick bastard had said. “Anything for you, Brother Vernon.”

So when Vernon bulled his way into the pastor’s house and told him to meet him outside the church in the morning with his Bible in his stinky paw, the fake man of God didn’t even try to argue.

Nick Exley’s kid would have her little send-off.

Vernon arrives home, grabs himself a Coke from the fridge and settles his ass in front of the TV, setting fire to a Lucky. He’s got an hour before he has to fetch his mother. Downtime. Time to chill.

He takes a shiny silver disc from his shirt pocket and feeds it into the DVD player, muting the hiss of audio that erupts from the TV speaker.

The screen is black for a few seconds before a time code window pops up, frantically counting away the frames. Then Vernon’s watching split-screen footage from the cameras mounted on the deck of Exley’s house: the group of whities standing on the beach, the three men, the woman and the child.

The cameras record at six frames a second, so the movement is hectic, super-fast, like a speed-cut music video: black shadows racing across the sand, the clothes of the people flapping like crazy scarecrows in the breeze.

Vernon’s connection, Don, the technician at Sniper (a pill-head all hot to add the kid’s drowning to his highlights reel of home invasions and carjackings caught on the Sniper cams), could have slowed the transfer from the hard drive down to real time, but that would have taken too long, so Vernon let him dump it as it was.

There’s a jump-cut: getting darker now, just Exley and the Australian on the beach, smoking weed. Vernon sits forward when the kid comes zooming off the deck, grabs at her father’s shorts, him ignoring her, sucking on his spliff. The kid runs out of frame. But Vernon knows where she’s going. Going to get herself dead, is where.

The images stop. Flashes of noise and drop-out. Then they kick in again when the woman triggers the motion detector as she belts out the house, waving her arms. Exley sprints toward the water, leaving the wife and the dope smoker looking on, the woman falling to the ground like something in an old-school comedy. Vernon glugs his Coke, chuckling.

The skinny fucker, dripping, carries the dead kid out of the ocean. She’s almost too heavy for him, the little weakling. He dumps her on the sand and gets on top of her, not knowing where the fuck to begin, his panic made all the more hilarious by the fast motion.

Then it comes, the moment Vernon’s been waiting for, when he appears in frame and pushes the white man aside and starts breathing into the dead kid. Vernon finds the slo-mo button on the remote, and the DVD advances frame by juddering frame as he breathes and breathes into the dead child, the whities orbiting him like this is some weird religious thing from the Discovery Channel. Suddenly the medics and the cops are there and it is dark and the spotlights kick in, and the whole thing is a fucken Hollywood movie with Vernon Saul as the leading man.

The screen fragments into a rash of static and Vernon rewinds and watches it all again. And again. And it just keeps getting better and better.

He shuttles back and finds the moment when the kid comes up to Nick Exley, to ask him to get her boat from the ocean, and the pathetic white fucker just sucks on his joint and ignores her. Vernon hits pause, the frozen frame rocking on the screen, grainy and blurred, but clear enough to see the child heading toward the water as a stream of white smoke leaves Exley’s mouth like a speech bubble.

Vernon reaches for his phone, hits speed dial, and after a few rings he hears Exley’s voice.

“Nick, Vernon here.”

“Yes, Vernon?” The man all tense and breathless.

“Just wanted to tell you it’s sorted for the morning. I have a pastor lined up.”

“Hell, Vernon, I can never thank you enough.”

“My pleasure, Nick. My pleasure.”

“You’ll be there tomorrow? At the funeral?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

“Please, I really would like you to be there.” Pleading. Pathetic.

“Then, of course, Nick. Of course.”

Vernon ends the call.

Oh, I’ll be there tomorrow, fucker. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Vernon drops the phone and drives the remote, finds Exley staggering from the water, dumping the dead kid on the beach. Vernon thumbs the rewind and the kid flies back up into Exley’s arms and the whitey reverses his ass into the water. Jabs the play button and here comes Exley again, stumbling out of the sea, and the kid splats wet and dead to the sand.

As he sits watching this demented little loop Vernon cackles like he used to when he watched cartoons as a kid, right here on this sofa, trying to block out his father’s voice calling him to the bedroom.

Chapter 13

Exley sits in the permanent midnight of his studio, comforted by the familiar hums and clucks of his computer. Cape Town is far away, his mad wife a vapor trail of cigarette smoke upstairs in their bedroom, and his dead daughter is slowly returning to life on the monitor before him, in time for her funeral in the morning.

And it is honest-to-god Sunny staring back at him. A bald Sunny but he’ll soon fix that. He accepts that it will be a work-in-progress that he’ll present to the mourners tomorrow, but this is the best he can do in the time that he has. He’d like to put her in a party dress, a lacy, frilly thing, the fabric billowing and wafting as she moves, but that is beyond him now, and instead he models a tight-fitting T-shirt and shorts, typical of Sunny and easier to create convincingly.

Now for the hair. He accesses a plug-in that generates hair follicles and a slider allows him to choose the exact length and amount of curl.

As he applies dynamics and gets a real-time preview, rotating the model in 3D space, Sunny’s hair bounces and flows.

It is so convincing that he finds himself reaching out to touch a curling lock, knowing that he’s being an idiot, but laying his hand on the monitor anyway, feeling the hairs on his arm lifting, as if from the force field of Sunny’s aura.

It’s fucking static, asshole.

And just like that his daughter is dead again and he’s staring at nothing but her effigy. Exley, suddenly sick with grief and guilt—in actual, physical pain—pushes himself free of the chair and walks through the silent house, out onto the deck, standing in the gathering gloom, listening to the ocean that took Sunny’s life.

The irony that this happened in Cape Town doesn’t escape Exley.

When he was offered the opportunity to flee the northern winter, come out to Africa and market his mo-cap gadget, he seized it. As a business opportunity, it was a smart move (South Africa has something of a film and TV industry and pulls in foreign movie makers with its climate, beauty and its currency’s weakness against the dollar and euro) but it was also a chance for him to bring his family to the closest thing he ever had to a hometown.

Exley’s father was an American, a foreign correspondent for the
New York Times
, and his mother is an Anglicized Australian whose womb closed up shop after Exley was born. They had lived in five countries by the time they arrived in Cape Town in the early eighties, his father landing the post to cover South Africa and its neighbors. Apartheid was at its most repressive and international condemnation of the white regime was becoming more vocal.

The Exleys lived for three years in a rambling colonial house in drizzly Newlands, far from the ocean, tucked up against the mountain, near enough to the cricket stadium to hear genteel whoops on game days.

It was the time of the Reagan administration (one of the reasons that Exley’s father accepted what many thought of as a hardship post rather than return home) and Tom Exley hated the Gipper with a passion, referring to him exclusively as “Ronald fucking Reagan.” When seven-year-old Exley, hair shorn, wearing the dumb uniform of his all-white school, was asked by a thin-lipped teacher who the president of the USA was, he blinked at her and blurted out—of course—“Ronald fucking Reagan.”

Which led to censure and consultations with his parents. His father made all the appropriate noises, but he winked at Exley as they left the school and Exley knew he dined out on the anecdote for months at the Cape Town Press Club.

Two years later his father stepped on a landmine while covering the Angolan civil war and Exley and his mother lived for a while in Australia, with grudging relatives, and then the UK, before his mother found the ashram in New Mexico and Exley was trapped there until he was old enough to bolt. And now his mother doesn’t remember him. Wouldn’t remember that she’d once had a grandchild.

It’s only when the spotlight hits Exley that he realizes he has wandered down onto the beach and triggered the motion detector. The hard light washes the sand where Sunny lay, and when he flashes on Vernon Saul trying to resuscitate her, Exley has to turn away.

As he climbs the steps up onto the deck, he sees the two surveillance cameras roosting like doves in the eaves of the roof and finds himself silently thanking the big rent-a-cop for erasing all evidence of his guilt.

Exley wanders back into the studio, sits and stares blankly at Sunny’s face on the monitor, seeing only the artifice and the imperfections.

Rousing himself, he minimizes the animation program and calls up his Facebook page, desperate for some connection with the outside world. He has no notifications or messages, the blank letter-box slit of his status asking him “what’s on your mind?” So he types “My daughter drowned yesterday. We’re burying her tomorrow,” and before he knows what’s he’s done he’s hit the share button and let it go out there to his three thousand and sixty friends, mostly strangers.

He takes off his glasses and massages his eyes, thinking of Vernon Saul, another stranger. But a man who has been more of a friend to him than anybody else in the last day. He wonders how he can thank him.

Exley, suddenly embarrassed by what he has released into the ether, returns his glasses to the bridge of his nose and takes up the mouse, ready to click on the remove button on Facebook, but it is too late: he already has twenty-two notifications. Beth from Lexington says:
My prayers are with you and your family
. Bob from Paris says:
She walks now with the angels
. Kara from Kuala Lumpur says:
I so sorry for you
.