Two Girls Down(76)

He turned off the engine, and they both stepped out. The morning was turning warm, the air clear, clouds moving fast. Spring for real, thought Cap. Vega straightened her jacket at the bottom and shrugged one shoulder, adjusting the holster and the pistol underneath.

Cap typed out a text to Traynor, Junior, and Em as he walked to the trunk: “We are 15 miles east of Frackville. Bumper sticker on McKie’s car matching descript of ridgewood mall car.” He hit Send and watched the bar at the top hang in the middle.



He opened the trunk and reached for the MicroVault, tapped in his code (1107—Nell’s birthday), and pressed his right index finger over the fingerprint scanner. The lock clicked and he opened the case. There was his Sig, right where he had left it the day he lost his job. When he was a cop he’d carried it every day and kept it clean, but never had been one to fetishize it like some other cops, never gave it a woman’s name or obsessively polished the steel, never had a collection at home or subscribed to publications for gun enthusiasts. It had just been a tool of the job, a stethoscope for a doctor. And when he lost his job he had put it in the vault in his bedroom closet and forgot about it. Until this morning.

He loaded the clip and peered down the barrel.

“When’s the last time you had that in your hand?” said Vega.

“Day I lost my job.”

“That’s all kind of pathetic,” she said.

Cap smiled and slid the gun down the small of his back, undid and fastened his belt to the next hole to tighten it up.

They walked the road, which grew narrower still, the width of a compact car and not an inch more. Cap looked at his phone again, cupping his hand over the top to shade the screen from the glare. The texts read as delivered, but his phone was so old he never knew. He wrote one more: “Copy back.” Hit Send. Then redialed Junior. Not even a ring, the screen black.

“Can you get anything?” he asked Vega.

She shook her head.

Cap stopped walking. He remembered plenty of times when young cops were too hot to see some action, started making poor decisions. Jules had told him some boys’ frontal lobes, the part of the brain that processes consequences, didn’t develop until they were in their midtwenties, and Cap could believe it. Taking a bad shot, searching and seizing without a warrant, walking into an unknown situation without backup.

He could just see the outline of the cabin about a hundred feet away, the shape of a one-story A-frame, shimmering through the trees. Vega continued to walk ahead of him and soon realized he wasn’t right behind her, that he had stopped. She turned and held her hands out, impatient.



“Coming?”

Cap didn’t speak, gestured come here with one hand. Vega looked at him sideways and came back, small clouds of dust kicking up from her feet.

Then she was right in front of him, breathing fast and heavy.

“What is it?”

There was no way to say it except to say it, no bubble wrap he could duct-tape to the thing to make it more attractive to her.

“We have to go back,” he said, calmly resigned.

“What’s that?” Vega said back as if she had a bad ear.

“To the old man’s house, see if he has a landline we can use.”

Vega stared at him, her mouth a little slack, in shock.

“We’re right here,” she said. “The girls are in there right now.”

She spoke slowly so he wouldn’t miss anything.

“They could be,” said Cap. “And McKie and Dena could be armed. So let’s say we have a little gunfight, and they shoot us, and we die. Then the girls are still in there, and no one knows where they are.”

Cap watched her face for a reaction but there was none. She gazed at him, forehead wrinkled.

“And we’re dead,” he added.

“They’re junkies, not gangsters. They got in over their heads,” she said. “We can handle them.”

“All circumstantial. We’re talking about thirty minutes here. That’s the trade—thirty minutes for odds of a significantly better outcome.”

Vega stepped closer, up to his face, close enough so he could smell the herbiness of her breath and see her nostrils puff with air.

“This could be the thirty minutes, Caplan,” she said, her eyes shining, reflecting the severely clear sky. She continued: “When they rape them or kill them or cut off their thumbs and their ears because they’re panicking.”

She was earnest and not angry, and Cap knew the real bitch of it was that they were both right.

“This is the thirty minutes,” she said, firm. “This is it. Right now.”



Cap thought of this: When Nell was twelve she learned about 9/11 in school. They had covered the basics before then, but when she was twelve, in the sixth grade, they really gave them the details, watched videos and read newspaper articles, wrote reports and glued clippings to posterboards. Not long after Nell wrote a short story about a freak snowstorm in the middle of September, all the planes grounded, all airports shut down. Cap and Jules were stunned: even though it was a child’s rewrite of history, isn’t that what we all did in our heads, tapped the clock icon and scrolled the hours back, played endless versions of if this, then that.

He wanted to tell Vega what he never told Nell, that the terrorists just would have done it on September 12.