Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

  “This your skip?” said Vega.

  “Yeah,” said Cap.

  Cap reached down and pulled the apple out. Haas gasped and started screaming.

  “You crazy fuckin’ bitch, I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna fuck you up so bad—”

  Haas then realized Cap was there as well and screamed at him, “She burned my cock. My cock is burning!”

  “Did you do that?” asked Cap.

  “I did,” said Vega.

  “I’m gonna sue the shit outta you, bitch. I’m gonna fuckin’ rip your face off and beat the shit outta you and get your ass thrown in jail—”

  She took the apple back from Cap and shoved it back into Haas’s mouth.

  “He’ll just keep going like that,” said Vega. “So how long do you need to take care of this? Couple of hours?”

  Cap shrugged, a little stunned, said, “Probably.”

  “Help me get him out,” she said.

  Before Cap could agree, she threaded her arms underneath Haas’s armpits and started to lift him. Haas wriggled and flapped his elbows around. Cap grabbed his ankles. Haas tried to kick him.

  “Hey,” said Vega to Haas, gripping his face in her hand like he was a dog she was trying to housebreak. “Stop it.”

  Haas paused briefly and then kept trying to buck. His T-shirt hiked up, exposing his stomach, white and sagging.

  Vega dropped him from a few inches above the street and he landed on his shoulder blades with his head craning up. Cap dropped the legs, and Haas rolled back and forth.

  “What does your voice mail say?” Vega asked Cap.

  Cap was out of breath.

  “Just that I wanted to have a conversation.”

  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said. “For a conversation.”

  She looked down at Haas like he was a traffic cone, then back to Cap. The very small trace of flirtation from earlier had gone. That had not been the real woman, Cap realized. This was her now, and she was working, and that’s all there was.

  She shut the trunk, walked around to the driver’s side of the car, and got in. She did not look at Cap in her side mirror as she started the car, no thumbs-up or wave. Then he watched her leave again.

  He was left with Haas, who’d worn himself out and was now just lying at Cap’s feet, making halfhearted grunts.

  “Mr. Haas,” said Cap. “Someone who owes as much money as you do and has a bench warrant out on them shouldn’t be threatening to sue anyone.”

  Haas made a sound that was like someone talking in his sleep. Cap squatted over him and pulled out his phone.

  “So who’s it gonna be first?” he said. “Your ex or the cops?”

  Haas’s eyes rolled toward him and blinked. Cap took the apple out of his mouth, and Haas took a breath like he’d been rescued from drowning.

  4

  Cap had fifteen minutes to clean the shit out of his office before Vega would be back. This was after Hayley Haas’s trashy lawyer had left with a signed IOU from Haas, and Cap had called a cab to take Haas to the hospital to have his dick iced.

  He shoved every loose-leaf sheet of paper into a big black Hefty bag and tried to make the stacks on his desk look more like papers that were about to be filed instead of papers that were about to be shoved into a big black Hefty bag.

  He thought only briefly about what exactly he was doing, why he was meeting with Vega again, what he would say to her when she arrived. He knew himself well enough and had had enough sessions with a shrink to know that the reasons that he did things were not immediately accessible to him until sometime later. Then, like seeing something on the street that he’d seen in a dream the night before, it would click. So that’s why I did that.

  He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the room. The motion sensor light in the driveway came on, and he could hear her coming, then the knock. He took a breath and held it.

  —

  He sat on the leather loveseat, Vega in a wooden chair, perched on the edge again. She leaned over her laptop on the low coffee table, started tapping various keys.

  “Here’s the feed from the parking lot, eleven forty-eight,” she said, swiveling the laptop toward Cap.

  Cap watched. The car containing the Brandt girls was not directly surrounded by any other cars. The lot was fairly empty. Spring Fest, thought Cap. One of the girls was in the front seat, passenger side, and he could see her shape but not her face. The feed was black-and-white, the camera probably thirty feet from the car and slightly to the left. The face flickered with movement, became lighter.

  “She’s turning her head,” said Vega.

  “Talking to her sister in the backseat,” said Cap.

  The face continued to flicker, back and forth, agitated.

  “They’re arguing,” said Cap.

  More angry flickering, then the girl in the front seat gets out. The girl in the backseat follows. Her dress shines: glitter, sequins, beads. Cap had put Nell in a hundred of them through age nine. The two girls go out of frame.

  “Here,” said Vega, typing.

  Another square screen on the laptop opened, and new footage: an ice cream shop. The camera was a foot and a half or so above the counter. A woman, two kids, and a baby sit at a booth. The Brandt girls enter, led by the older one. The girl behind the counter gives them both miniature spoons with samples, and they eat. The older one licks her spoon, front and back, keeps asking for another. After five, the girl behind the counter tells them to pay or get lost. The older one says something smart-ass. (Cap could tell by the look on her face.) Squints her eyes and smirks, looks much older than ten. Then they walk out of the frame.

  Vega closed the window, opened another. The parking lot entrance. The older one walks out, toward the street. The younger one stops, says something. The older one keeps going. The younger one runs to catch up. Out of frame. It is 12:02.

  “So the older one sees someone, something, walks toward it. Younger one’s reluctant but goes with her,” said Cap.

  “Maybe someone she knows,” said Vega.

  “So that makes your job easy, right?” said Cap.

  Vega didn’t turn to him, kept her eyes on the screen.

  “Right.”

  “Relatives, family friends, teachers, dental hygienist, pizza delivery guy,” he said. Then he pointed to the laptop. “How did you get this again?”

  “I have a guy.”

  “Same guy who found Haas?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s quite a guy. Hacker, right?”

  She didn’t exactly smile, but the muscles in her face relaxed. Affection, Cap thought. Familiarity.

  “We call him that, but he’d say he’s a contortionist.”

  “A guy who can squeeze into small spaces,” said Cap.

  “Yes.”

  “So,” said Cap, “who do you like?”

  “No one, until I get witness statements. You said you wanted to have a conversation.”

  She held out her hand. Here is our conversation.

  “You want to help me.”

  It didn’t sound like a question, and it didn’t sound like she was attempting to brainwash him. It was softer; it was just the truth.

  “How do you know that?” said Cap.

  Vega sighed.

  “Earlier when I left, you were sure you wanted nothing to do with this. Now something has changed. You thought about it, you had a revelation, a crisis of conscience. Maybe you thought about your daughter, or your ex-wife, or your mom. Maybe you talked to someone, and they changed your mind. Maybe you decided private practice isn’t what you want. I listened to your voice mail. There’s anticipation in it. Short breaths, your sentences end as questions; you sound hopeful.”

  Cap tried to keep a game face. He did it pretty well, had a lot of practice. But Vega seemed to see and hear everything, every wrinkle in the skin and catch in the throat.

  “You made your decision already,” she said. “Before I got here.”

  Cap glanced at th
e ghostly video feed on the laptop screen, the parking lot entrance, where he could almost see the smoke trail of the Brandt girls. Sometimes these things looked like fairy tales at first. But they never were. As soon as you got closer you saw the damage, the disease, not what monsters and wolves could do, but what regular men could do to a kid. Once he saw the body of a malnourished five-year-old boy left to decompose in a junkie’s apartment. The ME who picked him up said he was as light as a doll.

  “I did,” he said.

  “And either you agree with Haas that I’m crazy, or you don’t, or maybe you do and you like it.”

  “But you don’t care about that either, right? The why part,” said Cap.

  “Right.”

  Cap looked at the two open windows on the screen. Empty lot. The girls wandering out to the street like sleepwalkers. Dreaming.

  —

  Vega stayed in the car. They had driven together in Cap’s but agreed she would not get out. Instead she moved into the driver’s seat and watched from across the street. Cap stood in the lot where Vega had parked earlier. He leaned against a car and thumbed the screen on his phone. She watched a man come out of the building, down the steps, and around to the lot. He was overweight, pants a little too short.

  He and Cap started with a handshake, then man-hugged, pat-pat-pat on the back. You haven’t seen him for a while, thought Vega. They chitchatted. Small talk, easy back and forth, how’s the wife, kids, house. Then it started to go on for too long. Four, five, six minutes. Come on, thought Vega. Too much time goes to this shit, she thought.

  Should we play they could be…naked, raped, dying, dead? All of the above?

  She sent a text to Cap and put her hands on the wheel. She watched him look at his phone.

  —

  STOP WASTING TIME. ASK HIM.

  Cap paused.

  “Y’okay?” said Em.

  Cap smiled at him. Wiley Emerson. He was the same: always too loud and too fat, but earnest, honest, and surprisingly savvy when it came to police work. There had been a lot of talk when Cap left about how close they would stay, one very long night at Smith’s Road House when Em had hugged him and cried, snorted into Cap’s shirt and said, “Thank you, thank you.”

  Cap peered across the street at Vega in his car. She pointed at him, pressed her fingertip against the window. Ask him, said the finger.

  “Yeah,” Cap said at first. Then, “No, I need something, Em. I need a favor.”

  “Anything, man,” said Em. He meant it.

  “Nah, don’t say that yet,” said Cap. “I need the favor. The. Favor.”

  “Oh,” said Em. Then as it sank in, again: “Oh.”

  “I need the witness statements, Em. From the Brandt case.”

  That took Em a second. Cap watched him deflate. Thanksgiving Day float style.

  “What, what d’you mean?”

  “I’m working the case. With someone the family hired.”

  “The woman from California?” said Em.

  “Yeah, that’s her. She went to see Junior. Obviously he doesn’t want her help.”

  Em rubbed his chin, then his cheeks with his palms.

  “Oh, man. Oh, Cap, I don’t know, man,” he said.

  “Em, this woman, the one from California, she’s good, and we can help. We can all work together. All you have to do is make me some copies.”

  Cap was not entirely sure when he had become so confident in the mission. But as he spoke he felt himself getting excited, felt popping and clicking in pockets of his brain where he hadn’t noticed activity in a while. He used to feel it most days when he was a cop, but it came along with anxiety, tension, paranoia.

  “Cap, I wanna help you, I mean, hell, we need you right now. You could cut through so much of this bullshit and get to the center of it, man. I know you could. But I don’t, I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “You’re not going to get caught, Em. And Junior can’t fire you anyway. He needs bodies.”

  Em looked over his shoulder cursorily.

  “I thought they couldn’t fire you either,” he said, rubbing his eyes, red patches spreading underneath the lids. “And they did.”

  Cap nodded, said, “I resigned actually.”

  “I know, I know you did. For me. But I can’t, I can’t…”

  Cap didn’t make him finish.

  “Can you at least tell me if you got anything solid?”

  “Hell no. We got nothing.” Then he leaned forward and whispered, “They say the older sister hugged the guy when she crossed the street, that’s it.” He shook his head. “I’ve slept like five hours in three days. Which is fine if we’re getting somewhere, but we’re going in circles. Junior said a Fed’s coming in, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help because we got shit leads. It’s like trying to hold on to sand.”

  —

  Vega watched the fat guy get exasperated, wipe his face, his eyes. She watched Cap laugh, calm, steady. This is how he does it, she thought. He stays calm and steady while the other guy panics, until when, though. Pin him, she thought. Pin him like a goddamn moth on a board.

  The fat guy shook his head, kept shaking it. Are you telling me no?

  She took her hands off the wheel and opened the door. How many seconds would it take to cross the street and hit him in the temple.

  Then she stopped. Junior Hollows at the top of the steps. She pulled her leg back in and shut the door.

  —

  Cap saw Junior, and Junior saw Cap, and Em turned around and looked guilty. Junior came into the parking lot, trotting, spry, to show how young and energetic he was feeling.

  “Max Caplan,” he said, sticking out his hand to shake Cap’s at least a yard before he reached him.

  “Hey, boss,” said Cap.

  They shook. It was not one of those hand-crushing contests between men, because, Cap knew, Junior didn’t think there were any more contests between them. Junior was still a cop, and Cap wasn’t. Junior had won.

  “Got some more salt in your pepper there, Cap,” said Junior, touching the sides of his head like he was primping in a mirror.

  Cap said, “Forty-one in February, just learned how to send a Twitter.”

  “That’s good,” said Junior. Junior was big on approving of people and the funny things they said. “Em, I think Ralz and Royce have something for you.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Em with his shitty poker face. “See you, Cap. I’ll get some dates from Hannah.”

  Good boy, thought Cap.

  Em shuffled away, looking at Cap once before heading up the steps.

  “You in the neighborhood?” said Junior.

  “Something like that, yeah,” said Cap.

  “Busy time over here. Got everyone hustling.”

  “So I hear.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Good enough. Always someone cheating.”

  “There you go.”

  Junior took a serious breath through the nose now.

  “It’s not really a great time to be catching up, Cap, I gotta be honest. We’ve got our hands full right now.”

  “Yeah?” said Cap. “You get a promotion, now you’re handling social calendars too?”

  Chuckle, laugh, keep it light, thought Cap. Junior smiled too.

  “No, I know you and Em go back, we just want to keep it on personal time.”

  He sounded like a middle school teacher at a parent conference. We don’t want Em to get confused, do we? Cap tried not to feel the old spark of fury in his chest. He’d been to enough therapy, practiced enough breathing exercises. You are not mad at Junior anymore. You can’t control other people.

  “Because you’re busy, right, I know. Then let me ask you this, Junior—why are you out here talking to me when you got your whole team inside busting their asses?”

  “Just came to say hello.”

  Cap lifted his hand, waved at the knuckles. Hello.

  —

  Vega slid down in her seat, watched as the two men in
ched closer to each other while they spoke. A little shoot-out. She could see Cap smiling and nodding, too quick and eager.

  Vega’s phone buzzed. It was another email from the Bastard with a video attachment. The subject was “haystack.” The text in the body read, “this would be the needle.”

  —

  “Any reason you happen to be in the neighborhood now?” said Junior, smug. “Anything I need to know about?”

  “Wait a second, now, let me think about that,” said Cap. “Almost had something for you there but then I remembered…I don’t work for you anymore.”

  He hadn’t realized it, but he’d taken a step forward. Junior must have as well, because there suddenly wasn’t a lot of space between them.

  Junior laughed again.

  “Seriously, you still crack me up, man. I mean it.”

  Then he backed off, turned around and started walking away. He pointed at Cap over his shoulder and said, “Good to see you, Cap. Stay in touch.”

  “Yeah. See you soon,” said Cap.

  He watched Junior go up the stairs to the station and thought about a word to mutter. “Fuckface,” or “dickhead,” or “asshole,” or other words composed of “fuck,” “dick,” and “ass” that Junior’s personality just naturally evoked. In the end he said nothing because it made him feel petty to mutter words alone in a parking lot after a conversation had ended.

  He crossed the street to his car and saw Vega moving from the driver’s seat to the passenger side, staring at her phone. It crossed his mind that the seat would be warm from her body.

  “That was fun,” he said, getting in.

  “Is your friend amenable?”

  “I don’t know. We were sort of interrupted.”

  Cap stared at the building.

  “What did he say? What was the head shaking?”

  “They’re disorganized, which I could have told you. They’re overwhelmed, overworked. Junior won’t admit they’re overwhelmed and overworked because he’s a cocky son-of-a-bitch who thinks he’s in a James Patterson book.”

  “Did he say anything specific about the witness statements?”