Hard Candy

by Francesca Baez

  I wonder what bitch has taken my spot. I hope it was Lucia.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Miel

  He’s still being alarmingly uncruel over breakfast the next morning—more pink donuts—so I do the one thing I spent a lifetime trying not to do. I poke the bear.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask, grabbing for a second donut. “You’re a goddamn cop, for fuck’s sake. Not that I trust cops for shit, but you seem the type to have been born with a stick up your ass. Teacher’s pet in school, top of your class at the Academy, probably. Why would you suddenly break bad, just to kill me?”

  He only pauses for a second, long enough to finish off his water.

  “I can’t let you get away with everything you did. You and Vega and Palacios. The cases all got dropped, the other two disappeared, and no one paid for your infinite crimes. I’m not okay with that.”

  I nod slowly. “Revenge.” Boring.

  “No,” Andrews says quickly, as if this is an argument he’s rehearsed in his head a million times. “Justice. Bad people have to be punished. That’s why we have law enforcement, courts, prisons.”

  Using my bound hands, I gesture at my naked body. “And what do you call this?”

  His gaze follows my motion, then snaps away quickly, almost guiltily.

  “This is me fixing a mistake,” he says, busying himself with a fresh bottle of water. “Your buddies paid off everyone else in Atlanta. I’m making sure you get what you deserve.”

  “Because that’s what your whole cops, courts, prisons thing is about. People getting what they deserve.”

  He nods and offers me an uncapped bottle. I take it, but I don’t drink yet.

  “There is not a single time in my life that the bad guy has ever gotten what he deserves, not at your hands. You put away the hookers but let the johns keep a clean record. A kid goes to prison for a dime bag, and the people dealing in kilos get to live in fucking mansions.”

  Andrews gives me a condescending look. “That’s not— You don’t understand, Miel.”

  “Fuck you, I don’t understand,” I say, instinctively lashing out at him. He catches my bound hands easily, but the open bottle of water falls onto the mattress. Andrews swears as he grabs it up and swats at the small puddle, as if that will keep the spillage from soaking through to the core.

  “Tell me how this is just,” I begin, sitting up a little taller, ready for a fucking fight. “You know my girl Lucia, the short one, always smoking?”

  He nods curtly. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about Lucia Mendes, but she still makes an impression.

  “Her brother, Gio, works for me too, on stage. He’s eighteen.”

  Andrews cuts his eyes my way, and I hold his judgmental gaze.

  “They needed jobs, I gave them what I could,” I say. I don’t know why I’m being defensive. El Sombrerón had me doing much worse way before the age of consent, and no one gave a shit then. “Their mom got sent away to prison two years ago by your so-called justice system, and they’ve been completely alone ever since. Do you want to know why their mom is doing time?”

  He doesn’t reply. We both know I’ll tell him anyway.

  “She was dating this dealer, and when he got busted, she took the fall for him. Your cops didn’t have anything concrete on her, but the guy promised to look after Lucia and Gio, so she pled guilty. As soon as she got locked up, her asshole boyfriend dipped, taking what little money she had and leaving Lucia and Gio to fend for themselves. Now tell me how anyone in this situation got what they deserved.”

  Andrews does that thing again, a heavy sigh and a grimace at me like I’m the idiot, but it doesn’t seem as solid as before.

  “If that’s all true,” he begins. I roll my eyes at that and snort in frustration, but he ignores me and goes on. “The MDPD didn’t have all the information. She said she did it, so they believed her.”

  “Yeah, because y’all are really known for believing women,” I say, without giving him time for some kind of bullshit defense. “Isn’t your whole fucking job to know everything about a crime, gather evidence that proves things beyond a reasonable doubt?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” Andrews says, heaving off the mattress and going to prepare the rope at the center of the room. He’s going to string me up again. “You hate cops, just like every other street thug. So what?”

  “I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me that’s the kind of justice you believe in,” I say, awkwardly sitting up on my knees. “Tell me that you always get the bad guy, always protect the innocents. Tell me that you really think I’m the only monster running loose, the only mistake. Tell me that you truly believe any of this is fucking fair to anyone.”

  He hauls me up by my elbow and pulls me over to my usual spot, yanking my arms above my head with more force than is strictly necessary.

  “You don’t know a fucking thing about what’s right and what’s wrong,” he growls, checking my bindings one last time. “You’re getting what’s coming to you, and so is everyone else like you.”

  I quirk an eyebrow. “Like me?”

  He doesn’t reply, storming out and slamming the stairwell door behind him.

  I should be happy I succeeded in antagonizing him, but the emptiness he leaves behind is almost too much to bear.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Andrews

  I don’t want to take Miel’s bait.

  I really don’t.

  But the next day, I find myself dialing Lou’s number.

  Down at the precinct, he lets me log on to his desktop and search the local records. After telling his coworkers that I’m an active officer from Atlanta, a lie he sells as easily as he bought it, he leaves me to my business.

  Having almost nothing to go on, it’s a rough start, but eventually, I hunt down the arrest and sentencing paperwork for Jessica Mendes.

  She’s young, only a few years older than me, and Miel is right. They called this an open and shut case, but there’s nothing in between. They got her confession, didn’t question the inconsistencies or the loose ends, and locked her up. It’s easy to say I would never have done anything this sloppy in my time as a detective, but honestly, I’m not sure anymore. Sometimes, you need an easy win. Sometimes, you’ve been chasing criminals around all week with no sleep, and the last thing you want is to spend another all-nighter looking for more answers you’ll probably never find. I wonder if, in one of those moments of weakness, I ever let someone slip through the system like this. I honestly can’t remember. I was so certain I was doing the right thing, for so long, that it’s all just one self-righteous haze.

  Then again, it’s unconscionably easy to connect Jessica’s arrest to her sketchy boyfriend, Dixon Alvarado. Whereas Jessica’s record is clean up until two years ago, Dixon’s is about a mile long. He’s been dealing since he was a kid, and judging by all these mugshots, never very successfully.

  But they found the weed in Jessica’s car, when she got pulled over for a routine traffic stop. She couldn’t explain where it came from or where it was going, but it was in her glovebox, there was no one else in the car with her at the time. A nineteen-year-old Lucia even came in the next day and told the arresting officers all about Dixon, but why would they want to stir up more work when Jessica was already pleading guilty?

  Open.

  Shut.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Lou asks, appearing over my shoulder with a bag of pork rinds.

  “Yep,” I say, spinning in his decrepit chair to face him. “Where’s Narcotics?”

  “Third floor,” my friend says, but he grabs the chair and blocks my escape. “Why?”

  I give him the CliffsNotes, and he sets the pork rinds on his desk, wiping his hands on the back of his pants.

  “That’s circumstantial as hell, dude,” he says, leaning over me to scroll through the records I was looking at. “You know that.”

  “It’s not enough to overturn a co
nviction, but it’s at the very least worth following up on,” I insist. I feel myself getting too invested, feel that deep spike of pertinacity hooking itself into my flesh. I know I’m right, and the need to prove it boils up in my chest, clouding my head. “Come on, do you want this innocent woman rotting away in prison for a crime she didn’t commit?”

  Lou picks his snacks back up and shrugs.

  “Innocent women don’t date scumbag dealers,” he says, closing out all the tabs and windows I had opened. “If a bitch wants to go down for her man, let her. A woman’s right to choose, no?”

  I don’t reply, and Lou must sense my hesitancy.

  “I don’t know what this is all about, but drop it, okay?” He takes another step back, unsubtly giving me plenty of room to exit. “Let us do our jobs down here, and you go back to Atlanta if you need more shit to get into. Seems like there’s plenty going down up there.”

  I just nod a curt thank you, and may or may not grunt a goodbye as I depart. My vision is tunneling, the outside world ceasing to exist out of my fixation. I don’t give a shit what Lou says. I need to prove Miel wrong. I need her to understand why I do what I do, why I’m coming after her.

  There are no lines I won’t cross to prove to her, and myself, that I’m still the good guy.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Andrews

  Fortunately, I’d already taken down Dixon’s last known addresses before Lou kicked me out. The one I find him at is a little blue duplex in West Flagler that still has Jessica Mendes’s name on the lease. Motherfucker.

  It’s down a quiet, shady street—literally shady, taller houses and big trees shelter the narrow road from the sun—so I leave the Mazda a few houses down and make my way toward the house with the casual confidence of a man who belongs here. I don’t know what I’m planning to do. I don’t know if he’s home alone, if he’s even home, or how I’ll get in if he’s not. I’m operating purely on instinct. No, not instinct. Instinct implies a biological imperative, a drive to simply survive. There’s no sense at all to the primal urge I’m driven by, that bottomless pathological pit of my mind that I’ve never learned how to close up. The worst part is, I know I’m fixating dangerously, that this is the part where I should stop and regroup, calm myself down, go home. But I don’t want to. The predator in me is addicted to the hunt, to the feeling of letting my lizard brain take control, of shutting down everything I’m supposed to do and feel and think and to just fucking exist. It’s the feeling I get with Miel, of being let out of a cage of my own making. Freedom. Dark, bloodthirsty liberty.

  In the end, I just knock on the door. I don’t see any extra cars in the driveway or hear conversation, so I’m operating on the assumption that I’m not about to walk into a den of thieves.

  The man who opens the door matches the mugshots exactly. Pasty white complexion, bleary brown eyes, greasy dirty-blond hair down to his chin.

  “What’d you want?” he slurs, rubbing his jaw. I don’t smell weed, so I’m guessing I just woke the man up.

  I take advantage of his dazed condition and shove my way into the house, easily grabbing a skinny arm in an iron grip.

  “Hey man, what the hell?”

  He tries uselessly to fight me, but this string bean couldn’t even take on my nine-year-old niece. I grab a ladderback chair from the kitchen and take us all into the living room. The living room is at the back of the house, with the only windows facing an empty back yard. I push Dixon into the chair, rip my belt off, and quickly wrap it over his upper arms and bony torso, pulling the buckle as tight as it will go around the back of the chair. The scumbag is only now starting to realize the gravity of his situation, and I can tell he’s about to start shouting for help. I grab him by the throat, start to squeeze, and force him to meet my eyes.

  “I’m not here to kill you, but if you start screaming or some shit, you might force my hand,” I growl. I barely understand my own words. All I see is red, all I hear is red, all I speak is red. “Got it?”

  Dixon nods, and I release my hold. I quickly cross the room to pull the blinds on the windows shut, then the loud, hibiscus-print curtains over that. This all has to be Jessica’s, this is a family’s home and furniture and life. Fuck, this shitstain even left the family photos up. I grab a dusty framed print that must be nearly a decade old, judging by how young the kids look. The Small One’s wearing a smile I doubt anyone’s seen for years, and her eyes lack the sullen dullness that now defines her. The knot in my stomach tightens when I realize she’s even wearing the same purple Tinkerbell t-shirt Alexis used to own when she was that age.

  I flip the photo around so Dixon can see. “Where are Jessica’s kids now?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Dixon snaps back, and I can tell his words are viciously genuine. He really doesn’t give two shits about anyone but himself.

  A year ago, I would have been able to control myself. A year ago, I could hide my emotions away until I needed them, and control my physical impulses with the discipline of a nun at Catholic school.

  Today, my fist swings out of its own accord, catching the asshole directly on the chin. The impact jolts his head so far to the right I swear the chair begins to tilt, and spreads across my knuckles in a sickly satisfactory sensation.

  I turn my back again and set the photo where it belongs, drawing in a deep breath. I’m not here for some petty revenge. I’m here to set things right.

  I grab my phone and open the camera, switching it to video mode. I focus on Dixon’s angry, reddening face and begin to film.

  “I need you to tell me that was your weed in Jessica’s car two years ago, and that she had nothing to do with it.”

  Dixon snorts. “Why the hell do you care? Were you fucking her too? She did always have a thing for—”

  It’s borderline childish, but my hands are busy holding the phone in place, so I kick him in the shin, hard. He inhales deeply but doesn’t cry out. His eyes aren’t bleary anymore, they’re sharply back in reality, making violent promises his body could never keep.

  “Just tell the truth, and I’ll leave.”

  “Who the fuck cares?” Dixon howls, quieting back down when he sees my glare. “It was just a little weed and a dumb-ass bitch!”

  I let the camera lose focus as I take another swing. This time there’s a crack as I hit his nose, and blood begins to gush down his face.

  “Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?” He has to spit blood, and I feel some of it dot my arms. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because you’re a piece of shit, and you need to pay for what you’ve done.” My voice is cold, stony. Unfamiliar.

  “I’m not a bad guy!” Dixon insists. Blood drips down his chin and onto his oversized jeans. “I just sell dimebags to rich kids at the beach. Everyone’s gotta eat.”

  My fist throbs, not from pain of the impact, but from holding back from another.

  “You let an innocent woman take the fall for you, and then you kicked her kids out of their own house.”

  “I never asked her to do that.” He’s babbling now, lies catching in the stream of blood running down his face. “And I told the kids they could stay, didn’t even ask them to pay rent.”

  My hand tenses, and he flinches. “And why would they turn down that generous offer?”

  A beat as he fumbles for words. “I just wanted the girl to do me the occasional favor, was that really so much to ask?”

  “What kind of favor?” I barely manage to push the question past my gritted teeth. We both know I know, but I need him to say it.

  Dixon sighs and tries to give me The Look, the one that says come on bro, man-to-man, you get it. “Listen, it’s not like she wasn’t already doing the same for half the—”

  I think I drop the phone, both fists pounding into the scumbag’s face. Blood splatters all over my own face and shirt, and the blows push the chair over, slamming the thin man into the floor. I get in a few kicks to the stomach before I remember what I’m here for.
I can’t get a confession if he’s knocked out or too badly beaten to speak.

  I wipe the backs of my hands on my jeans and find my phone. It must have stopped recording in the fall, so I start a new video. I don’t crouch down to his level, just point the lens at the bloody body laying limp on the floor.

  “Now tell me what I want to hear.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Miel

  When the elevator doors ding open, Andrews walks out wearing a spray of blood. My heart begins to beat in triplicate. There’s something about the sight that makes my own blood rush, my toes tingle. It’s like the high I’ve always gotten from inflicting violence on others, but with a new, darker undercurrent.

  “What happened?” I ask, and I’m surprised to realize I genuinely care. Whatever it was, it doesn’t look like he sustained any damage, but this still seems terribly out of character for the buttoned-up former detective.

  He doesn’t reply at first, pulling his bloody shirt off and wiping his face with a cleanish spot. There’s still some spatter, but he no longer looks like a tacky Halloween costume. He drops the ruined shirt to the ground and approaches me, silently releasing me from the rafter above, though my wrists remain restrained. The air around us is electrified, and I recognize the sharply detached look in his eyes. Whatever he just did, it wasn’t something his little rulebook condones, but he enjoyed it nonetheless.

  “I found Dixon Alvarado,” he says, and my brows furrow. It takes me a moment to recognize the name. I’ve only heard it once or twice. Then I remember the asshole that fucked over Lucia’s mom was named Dixon.