Free Capture by Roger Smith Page B

hair dangles in wet bangs over his forehead.
    Exley finds himself imagining how this man—a working man, a poor man—lives. Imagining the mean and narrow life he leads. And yet he has still found the time for this act of kindness.
    Exley places his hand on the rent-a-cop’s arm, feeling the knotted muscle. “Vernon, my God, I don’t know how to thank you.” Some privileged white man’s reflex sending his fingers into his pocket for cash. “At least let me give you some gas money.”
    Vernon holds up a broad hand. “No ways. This is the least I can do in your time of grief.”
    How can Exley impose further? But he finds his voice. “Vernon, I hate to do this, but I wonder if I could ask you a favor?”
    “I told you already, Nick, there’s anything you and the wife need, you just have to ask.”
    “We want to bury Sunny, our daughter, as soon as possible. Tomorrow if we can. And we want to have the service here, on the beach.”
    “Okay,” Vernon says.
    “Thing is, I spoke to your undertaker guy, and he tells me that to get a person to officiate at the service is going to be a problem if it’s not held in a church. He says there are procedures.”
    “Leave it to me, Nick.”
    “Really? I’m sorry to lay this on you.”
    “Nick, you just relax. I’ll sort this. I’ll call you in a while, okay?”
    The big man extends his hand and takes Exley’s in a surprisingly soft grip, then he limps away to his car, leaving Exley overwhelmed by the compassion of this stranger.
     
     
     All day long Yvonne Saul’s nerves have been playing up something terrible, since she seen that blood on her boy’s clothes, and him gone out all day, God knows where. As she stands by the open front door, the fierce wind flinging in heat from the south, she feels the water running between her breasts and down her thighs. She has been peeing non-stop, and no matter how much water she drinks, she can’t satisfy this thirst of hers.
    Yvonne feels light-headed for a moment and puts a hand against the doorjamb to steady herself. She closes the front door and walks through to the kitchen, catching sight of herself in the wall mirror. She can’t, honest to God, remember looking worse. Her skin is the color of dirty dishwater and the pouches under her eyes are dark with exhaustion.
    She tried to sleep in the afternoon, but the incessant, nagging cries of the child in the wooden shack crammed into her neighbor’s backyard kept her awake. A skinny little rubbish with gang tattoos and no teeth lives in there with a teenager and her little child. Mrs. Flanagan, Yvonne’s neighbor on the other side, says the girl sells her ass on Voortrekker, the milk in her breasts not even dried up yet. Don’t need no newspaper with Mrs. Flanagan around, leaning her big chest on the Vibracrete wall outside her house, her laser eyes missing nothing.
    Mrs. Flanagan says the jailbird is sexually abusing the child, a girlie no older than eighteen months. Yvonne walked away from her neighbor when this came up, her mind spinning back to what used to go on under her own roof, when her Vernon was little. God knows, she blames herself every livelong day for what he has become. She should have taken a carving knife to her sick bastard of a husband. Instead she’d closed her bedroom door and watched the TV or mumbled useless prayers and looked away from the blood and the bruises and the pain in her baby’s eyes.
    The cries are louder here in the kitchen, cutting into Yvonne’s head, so she clicks on the old portable radio that stands on the counter top and church music rises up thinly through the static, and she almost can’t hear those pathetic sounds no more. She opens the small freezer door on the top of her fridge, the cool air like a kiss on her face.
    Yvonne removes a pack of frozen vegetables and rubs it against her cheeks and forehead, then she gapes her dress collar and rests the pack against her chest. Takes a few deep breaths before she stows the