Two Girls Down(18)
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.
Cap 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.