Capture Read Online Free PDF

it’s Christmas. “It’s a Barbie!” The kid might look white, but it speaks like just another colored brat.
    “Where you get that?” Dawn asks.
    “I bought it.”
    “Bullshit.”
    He slides a hand under her robe, up her naked thigh, and grabs the skin right up beside her thing, can feel the scrape of her cunt hair as he pinches the flesh between thumb and index finger. Hard.
    She stiffens, and he sees tears come into her eyes from the pain, but she doesn’t cry out, not wanting to scare the child, who’s combing the doll’s blonde hair with a brush clogged with Dawn’s coarse black curls.
    Vernon releases his grip and Dawn sinks down beside him, knees tight together, hands squeezed between her legs, like she is holding back a piss. “What you say to the uncle, Brittany?” Voice high from pain.
    “Thank you, Uncle Vermin.”
    “Vernon,” he says, the kid looking at him blankly. He hauls himself to his feet, leaning his weight on the back of the sofa, flexing his bad leg. “Okay, Dawn, I better get to work. I’ll see you down there later.”
    Dawn nods and Vernon lets himself out, sees her staring at her white child grooming the white doll as he closes the door. He humps his way down the stairwell—no fucken elevator—out the lobby and through the stream of traffic across to where the bleeding red neon of the strip club flashes promises of pussy into the night.
     
     

Chapter 4
     
     
     
     
    Nick Exley roams the house like a sleepwalker. He stares blankly at the mess in the kitchen, the room leached of life by the fluorescents. A clatter like distant bird wings draws him across the living room toward the deck. A white linen cloth, rising from the table on the beach like a Halloween ghost, flaps in the wind that has grown in force since sunset. He doesn’t have the courage to go out there—out to where Sunny died—and fold the fabric and bring it inside.
    He hears the muffled pad of Caroline’s feet upstairs, moving between bedroom and bathroom. They’ve avoided one another since the police and the emergency crew left. Since the undertakers slid Sunny into a child-sized body bag—the zipper ripping through Exley’s head like a bone saw—and took her away with them.
    Exley feels a rush of hot puke and makes it back to the kitchen just in time to spew an acid brew of wine, cheese and bread onto the plates stacked in the sink. He runs the cold water over the dishes until his vomit is gone, rinses his mouth and splashes his face. For a moment he doesn’t recognize the man reflected in the kitchen window.
    Exley turns and goes upstairs. He stops in the doorway of Sunny’s room, blue moonlight washing the walls and the bed. He can’t bring himself to hit the light switch and reveal the room’s emptiness, and the realization that he will never read his daughter another bedtime story leaves him strangled by grief. A door creaks and he sees Caroline standing in their bedroom, watching him.
    He walks toward her. “Caro, tell me this isn’t happening. Please.”
    “Sorry, darling,” she says in a voice that could cut crystal, “but it is happening. Why don’t you have another joint and maybe it’ll all go away in a little puff of smoke?”
    Exley looks into his wife’s eyes and sees her mania has congealed around the notion that he is to blame for what happened.
    “Jesus, you’re not saying it was my fault?”
    “Oh, I am, Nicholas. I am.”
    They stare at one another and he thinks for a moment that this will escalate into one of her episodes, ending with rage and tears. He’d almost welcome that, now. At least it would be a connection, no matter how screwed up. Anything to distract him from the memory of Sunny tugging his boardshorts, and him ignoring her. Sending her to the water.
    But Caroline shrugs and he hears her consciously slow her breathing as she runs a hand through her hair.
    “I’m going to bed,” she says. “I suggest you do the same, there’ll be a lot to do