by Louisa Luna
“It’s your welcome basket,” Elaine added. “Usually I have it waiting in folks’ rooms, but this all happened so quickly I didn’t have a chance.”
“Thanks,” muttered Vega. “It’s really not necessary.”
Now Elaine gave her a bit of the side eye, wagging a teasing finger.
“Now you strike me as the kind of person who doesn’t eat unless she’s reminded, right?”
Vega made herself smile. She felt about ten years old.
“So you take it with you. These are all organic. I’d like to tell you they’re local, but this isn’t the best time of year for fruit around here.”
Vega took the fruit. It was unexpectedly weighty.
“I’ll get the door for you,” said Elaine.
“Thanks.”
Elaine opened the passenger side door, and Vega dropped the fruit basket on the seat.
“Cheese and wine at six if you like,” said Elaine.
Vega continued to smile, and then Elaine was off, down the front path, her skirt swishing around her. Vega got into the car, started the engine, and plugged the address from the slip of paper into the GPS.
“Head northwest on Market Street,” it said.
She checked her mirror and made herself smile again, just to see what it looked like.
—
Vega parked on the vacant west side of the lot of New Town Mall, where a Real Food Market was being built. It didn’t look like much of anything yet, a crevasse where whatever had been there before had been recently gutted, and dumpsters of debris.
She sat in the car for a few minutes and watched construction workers walking around, talking in groups. There were only about ten of them. She figured most had quit for the day. It was just after five. She glanced around at the other stores.
She got out and went to a Home Depot, up and down the aisles to Tools and Hardware.
At the register, a man with a ponytail and yellow teeth said, “You find everything okay today?”
Vega watched the items show up on the digital screen:
Straight Link Chain, 5 ft
EZ Bungee cord, 2 ct
Iron Tough Pipe Wrench
She said, “Yeah, thanks. Do you know where I can get a hot tea?”
—
Vega walked from her car to the construction site, about forty feet. The tea spilled over the sides of the open cup, ripping hot streams down her fingers. Two groups of men, one of three, one of five. She went up to the three-man group.
“Hey, baby,” said the one on the left. “You bring me coffee?”
She said to the one in the middle, about five-ten, crew cut and a forehead hanging over his eyes like an awning, “Brandon Haas?”
“Yeah?” he said. Amused, excited. The others shouted and laughed.
Vega started by throwing the hot tea at his crotch. He screamed and crumpled to the ground. The comedian on the left went for her and she cracked him across the nose with the pipe wrench. The one on the right came half a second later, and she punched him, an uppercut to the jaw with the chain wrapped around her fist. All three down.
Then came the other five. Vega squatted and pulled her jacket back so they could see the gun.
“Just don’t,” she said.
She wound the chain around Haas’s neck and cinched it like a leash. He coughed and choked. The two on the ground stirred and moaned.
“Fuck you, bitch,” said one of the five, coming at her.
“I’m telling you, don’t,” she said, her right hand on the gun, her left pulling the chain choking Haas at her feet. “You want to die for a guy you met a couple of months ago?”
He stayed where he was.
She started to pull Haas across the lot. At first he coughed and sputtered, pried his fingers underneath the chain to distance it from his neck, his legs twisted up over his crotch.
“Kick your legs,” she said.
Haas grunted and tried to ball up.
Vega yanked the chain and leaned her head over him.
“Kick your legs; I can’t pull you on your ass the whole way.”
He kicked, crab walking, still trying to pull at the chain. Vega saw it was starting to tear the skin on his neck. She didn’t stop moving until she got to her car, and then she dropped him on the pavement.
Haas coughed and fell flat on his back, squirming. Vega examined her key chain to find the little icon of the open trunk and pressed it. Haas lifted his head and tried to speak. Vega straddled him.
“Don’t say anything,” she said.
She wrapped a bungee cord quickly around his wrists and tried to pull him up.
“Stand. Stand now,” she said.
His limbs were gummy, and he kept folding down to his knees. Shock, she thought.
Vega hoisted him up under the arms and pushed him into the trunk, then lifted his legs in. He started to breathe deeply, the color coming back into his face from being choked.
“Who are you, who the fuck are you?” he said.
She thought of what Perry would say, what he always said when some deadbeat skip asked him who he was, but she was too preoccupied to deliver the line, to really give it the nice spin Perry used to. She slammed the trunk closed. She got in the driver’s seat and heard him screaming.
“Fucking bitch! I’m-a fuckin’ kill you! Let me out!”
She looked at the fruit basket on the seat next to her.
—
Alice Vega had left Cap in a strange mood. He’d written another email to Brandon Haas’s brother and talked to his former landlady, who said he’d left no forwarding address but that he had left the bathroom filthy. Cap had quit soon afterward and found himself reading up on the Brandt girls. Disappeared from a car in a parking lot. Police were talking with witnesses who thought they may have seen the girls get into a car across the street from the mall, but the articles had no further detail.
He watched a few clips from the news; they were all variations on the same story; even the on-location anchorpeople looked the same in bland suits and product-sculpted hair. The mother had given a statement. She looked familiar to Cap even though he was sure they’d never met. She looked like folks around Denville, especially Black Creek, not a terrible neighborhood but one where you wouldn’t be surprised to see people doing the extended handshake of a drug deal on the sidewalk.
In the clip she wore pink lipstick and eyeshadow, as if she could attract more attention to the case by being brightly made-up. A white blouse that was too small, stretching at the buttons between her breasts.
“I just ask you to please call the police if you know anything about my girls,” she said, her voice shaking. “And if you got them, just drop them off where they can make a phone call and you can, you can go about your business.”
She paused and looked down. An older woman behind her put her hand on her shoulder.
The mother looked back up with tears spilling down her face, trailing lines of gray mascara, and said, “Bailey has asthma and needs her sprays.”
Cap hit Pause and closed his laptop. If I am not looking at it, it does not exist.
After a moment he opened the laptop again, this time typing “Alice Vega California” into Google.
A ton of hits, news items from three years ago popped up. The Sacramento Bee in California:
11-year-old Ethan Moreno of Modesto was found alive three weeks after he had been abducted, chained to a sink in a West Halsey home.
Central California–based bounty hunter Alice Vega discovered the boy and apprehended one of his captors, 27-year-old Quincy-Ray Day. Vega stands to collect the $100,000 reward from the FBI as well as an undisclosed sum from Moreno’s family.
He skimmed through other articles: how she found a teenage girl who’d run away from her rich parents to marry her boyfriend in Reno. A few more: just the mention of her name; she’d been brought in to assist police representing private clients in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, New York. Not a kid she couldn’t find.
C
ap smiled, filled with an unnamable excitement. He couldn’t place the feeling, except he remembered once walking with his mother in Greenwich Village when she’d dropped her keys, and a short, dark-haired man picked them up and handed them to her. She thanked him and he nodded, kept on his way, and she stopped and faced Cap and said, suddenly breathless, “Was that Al Pacino? Did you see him, Maxie? Was that him? I think that was him.”
—
Nell got into the car with four backpacks and duffel bags and threw them into the backseat.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, stretching across to kiss him on the cheek.
Cap could feel sweat underneath her lip and heat coming off her forehead. He had an urge to take a deep breath. It reminded him of when she was little and would come out of the tub smelling like a wet cat.
“Good practice?” he said, pulling out of the lot.
She shrugged.
“Okay. Just drills and, like, one or two new plays, but we need more if we’re up against Valley.”
“You say Steves knows what he’s doing.”
“I think so. He doesn’t want anyone’s opinion though, you know. And he’s only, like, five years older than us.”
“Boys in their twenties like to think they’re grown-ups,” said Cap.
Nell said, “Huh,” then began to text.
“So, they still haven’t found those girls,” he said, tentative, watching her from the side.
She stopped texting.
“I know, it’s awful. They can’t find the dad either; he ran out on them when they were babies. So my question is, why would he want them now?”
She was engaged, gesturing as she spoke, holding her hands out to an invisible crowd. Cap felt guilty; the kid didn’t think he wanted to talk about it so she hadn’t said anything since he had turned off the TV on Saturday. But she’d been doing the due diligence in her head; it was like when Cap was working a case he couldn’t shake off the brain. You find yourself awake at three a.m.—was it because you had to pee or because your subconscious was giving you clues?
“And why would he take them from a Kmart parking lot? How would he know they were going to be there? Was he tailing them?”
“These are all valid questions,” said Cap.
“I don’t like the dad for this,” she said definitively. “Doesn’t add up.”
“Who do you like then?”
“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated. “I don’t have any real details, just the news and you know how they mess it all up.”
Cap nodded. They were quiet.
“I watched an interview with the mom,” he said.
“Was it the one where she said the younger one needs her asthma medication? Wasn’t that awful,” said Nell. Then, quietly, she repeated, “Awful.”
He watched her as she picked at the skin around a fingernail.
“So,” said Cap, trying to sound casual, “I met with this woman today; she’s working on the case.”
“What do you mean?” said Nell in her interrogation voice.
Cap coughed into his fist.
“A woman came to see me who’s working the case. She’s been hired by family—”
“The private investigator from California?” said Nell.
“Yeah, how’d you know that?”
“It was on TV, Dad. What did she say? Why’d she want to meet with you?”
“She asked for my help. She wants me to call in a favor.”
“What—” Nell started but Cap cut her off.
“She wants me to call in a favor with Em.”
“How does she know Em?”
“She doesn’t know Em. She figured that I had a favor coming to me, and she wants me to call it in so I can get the witness statements.”
“Why doesn’t she get them from the department?”
“You think Junior would give an inch here?”
He stopped at a red light, feeling an old wave of frustration and gripping the wheel.
“Asshole,” said Nell, stewing. “Did you call Em?”
“No,” said Cap. “No, I didn’t call Em. I’m not calling Em. I’m not getting involved in this. And watch your language please.”
“What?” said Nell, turning in her seat to face him. “Why not?”
“It’s a police investigation. And I have my own cases to work.”
As he said it, he heard the words differently. It was always like this with Nell: he’d already justified a thing in his head, but when he said it aloud, it got stripped down. There was the paltry sheath of it removed; all that was left was the truth.
“Because it’s embarrassing? Because you’re embarrassed?” said Nell.
My God, she would make a good cop, thought Cap. Or a journalist. Her questions just naturally sounded like someone who didn’t want to demean you or pressure you—she just wanted to know all the facts. You couldn’t teach a thing like that, he thought.
“Embarrassed, yes…and I couldn’t put Em in that position.”
“Dad, you covered for Em because he had little kids and a wife and a mother in a nursing home. You’d barely be asking for anything in return now.”
“He could lose his job.”
“So what?” said Nell.
“So what,” Cap repeated. “That’s a lot. That’s everything to most people.”
“You gave it up for him.”
Cap felt a stab of guilt. Nell didn’t have to say it; no one did, but still it was the theme that threaded through his family’s life, that after he took the fall for Em, his marriage splintered and finally crashed, and even though he and Jules paid for it, and kept paying, no one felt it worse than Nell. He coughed and said, “And so the endgame is that both me and Em are out of a job? What’s the positive spin on that?”
“You could help find the girls, Dad. Something you could do could help find them. The little one has asthma, for fuck’s sake!”
Now her voice was raised so Cap raised his.
“Watch your mouth!”
They stopped at a light. Nell looked out her window and breathed strongly through her nose. That was another thing she’d done since she was a little kid, only when she got angry. Jules and Cap used to call her Baby Bull.
“There’s another piece to this,” said Cap, calm again. “I don’t know who this woman is, the one from California. I read some articles about her, but she could have no idea what she’s doing. Then I’d be taking a huge risk for something that has no legs to begin with.”
“Don’t we explore all avenues?” said Nell.
Cap laughed.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Don’t we look at every angle, every branch of the tree?”
“Yeah, we do,” Cap conceded, feeling beaten down.
They pulled up in front of Carrie’s house. Nell reached in the backseat for her bags. She faced straight ahead, thinking.
“Look,” she finally said. “Remember when you quit your job and you explained it to me?”
Cap nodded. “Yeah.”
“You said every day we make a million little choices, and we should try to make the right ones as much as we can. And you said rarely in life do the big choices present themselves, so when they do, we have to take advantage of the opportunity. We have to do the right thing.”
Cap had no response to his daughter. He felt approximately six inches tall.
“Jesus, is there anything I say you don’t memorize?” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Nope,” she said cheerily.
She kissed him on the cheek and got out of the car.
“See you Wednesday,” she said.
“Yep, Wednesday.”
“I love you, Dad,” she said, leaning through the window.
“Love you too,” he said.
Then she was gone, up Carrie’s steps. Cap watched her go inside and then took out his phone. He looked through his deleted items for Alice Vega’s message. He sat in his car for a few long minutes.
—
Cap came back home. He parked in t
he driveway and rolled up the windows. It was still light outside, sun setting later and later these days, but it still felt like winter to him, especially in the evenings, the air cold and glassy with the sun sinking, everything in blues and grays. He saw the copy of Othello tucked behind the rear windshield and smiled.
As he walked up the path to his front door he didn’t exactly hear something but sensed it, a movement close by. If he were a rabbit, his ear would have twitched. He turned around quickly. Alice Vega was standing across the street. She waved to him and crossed.
He couldn’t help smiling and went toward her; they met in the middle of the street.
“Hey, hi, I just left you a message,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” she said. “I haven’t looked at my phone.”
Then he began to notice things. Strands of hair frayed and out of place. Accelerated breathing. Light sweat on her forehead. She’d been in a rush recently. Adrenaline.
“Everything okay?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, sounding so sure he felt stupid for asking. “Could you help me get something out of my car?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, but she’d already turned around and started walking away before he got the words out.
She walked fast, and Cap hurried to catch up. Something was off. Something was not fitting. He suddenly wished he had the Sig on him, which was not a wish he made often.
“Hey,” he said, and he placed his hand on her shoulder.
The muscle pulsed there, a braided rope under his fingers. She shook him off, and they both stopped and faced each other. Cap held his hands up.
“Sorry,” he said. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”
This time she paused, appeared to think about it.
“I am. Could you come, please?”
She headed toward a generic beige sedan, and Cap thought how it wasn’t that cold out. Why should his eyes be blurring? Why did it look like Vega’s car was bouncing slightly up and down? But then he heard it, the squeak and scrape of the tires. The car was bouncing.
“What—” he said.
But Vega was already ahead of him, holding up her keys. Beep beep.
The lock clicked, and Cap caught up. She opened the trunk, and there was Brandon Haas, wrists and ankles tied with bungee cords, a collar of blue and bloody skin around his neck, urine stains on the crotch of his jeans, and a green apple wedged into his mouth. Frantic, angry raccoon eyes. He thrashed his body back and forth against the walls of the trunk and made long, muffled snorts. Cap lifted his hand to his mouth.
