Gold Cage

by Francesca Baez

  “Um,” I say dumbly, grasping for something, anything to say. Then I remember the tidbit that’s been living in the back of my brain for a while, not sure where to fit itself into this big picture. “Oh, have you heard anything from Olivia Duvernay recently? Maybe something strange?”

  “Olivia?” Isla repeats, and I can almost see the cartoonish furrow of confusion in her brow. “You mean, other than that shooting she was in a couple weeks ago?”

  My heart skips a beat. “A shooting?”

  “Yeah,” Isla says. “The one that was in all the papers? Jesus, Selina, have you been living under a rock?”

  “Just off the grid, like you said,” I say, glancing up at the cabbie nervously. He’s doing a good job of pretending not to hear me. “What happened?”

  “A bunch of thugs randomly shot up this coffee shop she was at,” Isla goes on. For all her annoyance at my ignorance, she sure loves getting to be the first one to share gossip. “She wasn’t hurt or anything, just shook up as hell. I heard Richard had to put her on sedatives.”

  “Thugs?” I ask, nails picking at the seam of my jeans nervously. “Do they know who? Were there any photos?”

  “No,” Isla says. “According to the papers, the only eye witness testimony said they were Mexican, maybe Arabic. So, you know, who knows.”

  A shooting, involving Olivia Duvernay and some ethnically ambiguous brown people, a couple weeks ago. That had to be the same day Vega was shot. The same night I had sex with him. But why? What went down?

  “Selina?” Isla asks, a bit more somber. It’s an unfamiliar sound on her lips. “This might be just a total, random coincidence, but just before all this, at the gala, I told—”

  The phone in my hand begins to buzz, playing a light melody overtop Isla’s voice. I pull it away from my ear and check the screen.

  Incoming call from VEGA.

  Fuck.

  FUCK.

  I instinctively press the big red button, sending the call to voicemail.

  Shit.

  Now he knows I hung up on him. Why was he calling? Was he trying to reach Brock, or does he already know Brock is out of commission and I’m out on my own, and he was trying to reach me directly? It doesn’t matter. Either way, it means my countdown clock just started ticking.

  “Isla, I have to go,” I say, and impolitely hang up on her, then turn the phone all the way off. I discreetly let the phone fall to the carpeted floor and nudge it with my shoe as far under the seat as I can get it. If Vega can somehow still track the device even when it’s powered down, he’ll be sent on a wild goose chase around the city.

  “How much farther?” I ask the cabbie, trying hopelessly to settle the wild pounding of my heart.

  * * *

  The first thing I should do when I get to the police station is march up to the first officer I see and tell them everything. But for some reason, even after spending the long drive here hyping myself up for this moment, I just can’t. I stand frozen in the busy lobby, letting people split and swirl around me, feeling completely overstimulated by the situation after so much time sequestered in the quiet of my estate.

  “Can I help you?” someone asks, the officer in charge of women who look lost and scared and helpless, I suppose. She’s a pretty black woman, with big curls that remind me of Miel’s, and warm, inviting eyes.

  Tell her. Tell her. Tell her.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Um,” I falter. I know that I have every right to turn my kidnappers in to the authorities, to make them pay for what they’ve done to me. I deserve my freedom. Still, there’s a tiny tug in my chest at the thought of seeing Vega, Miel, and the guys in cuffs, on the stand, behind bars. I think of every time Miel has insisted I don’t know anything about them or what they’ve been through. I think of the way Javier held me that night. He wouldn’t hold me like that if I was nothing to him, if he was truly using me only for his own gain, right? Miel said they wouldn’t be doing this to me if they didn’t have to, if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. There has to be more to their story, something I should know before I make a decision I can’t take back. “Um, can you tell me where I can access records?”

  Officer Daley leads me down to a basement room with OPEN RECORDS printed in block letters on the door. I push in and find a small room lit with fluorescent lights. It’s cold and impersonal, but not with a feeling of danger like I thought I might feel in the basement of the police department. No, this feels generic and bland, like a cheap office cubicle. There’s a small formica table with two chairs, and in the back corner there’s a pasty redheaded man at a desk, looking as bored as you’d expect in this room. Behind him, I see a door with a small keypad beside it.

  “What can I help you with?” the guy asks, looking up from his computer screen.

  I shift the purse strap on my shoulder nervously. “Um, I want to request some records. For an article I’m writing. For the AJC.”

  My lie stumbles out in spurts, the obviousness of its falseness making me want to cringe, but Officer Jacobs doesn’t seem to care.

  “Fill this out,” he says in a well-rehearsed monotone, sliding a clipboard with a form on it my way. “If it’s approved, we’ll send you a copy of everything requested in about three business days. Highly confidential material must be read here.”

  He nods at the little table and holds a pen out to me. I take it instinctively, but don’t reach for the clipboard. Three business days? I can’t wait that long. I can’t even wait three hours.

  “Is there any way to expedite the process?” I ask, and that gets his attention. He laughs at me.

  “Not unless you’ve got friends in high places, lady.”

  I do, but that’s not a card I can easily play right now. What I do have is a purse full of bribes. I reach for it, and I see him shift into alertness at the gesture, but all I pull out is a fistful of gold and diamonds.

  “Are you sure?” I ask. A bold move, if he turns out to be the sort that can’t be swayed by money, but those folks are few and far between. It takes him a full thirty seconds to consider my offer, long enough for me to start scrambling for excuses to get me out of the trouble I’d be in for bribing an officer of the law, but then he slides the pile his way, taking a few pieces to examine, as if he knows shit.

  “What do you want?” he asks finally, done with the pretense.

  “Everything you have about Javier Vega,” I say, talking fast, before he can change his mind. “And a Miel. I don’t know her last name, but she’s an associate of his, and that first name can’t be too common.”

  “Javier Vega? There might be a couple of those,” Officer Jacobs says, beginning to type something on his computer. “What do you want this for, anyway?”

  I reach back into my purse and add a little more to his pile. He shuts up.

  It takes him a few minutes to find what he’s looking for, then he tells me to wait and types a couple digits into the keypad by the other door, which he disappears into. He’s gone for at least twenty minutes, long enough that I’m starting to sweat, pacing the small room nervously. Logically, I know that he’s retrieving what I asked for, but what if he comes back with his superiors, ready to slap me on the wrist?

  What if he comes back with dirty cops in Vega’s pocket, here to cart me back home?

  He returns with a plain banker’s box, like the kind evidence goes into on TV. In real life too, I guess.

  “This is pretty confidential stuff,” he says, holding the box on his hip, not handing it over yet. “I could get in big trouble if someone finds out I let you see this.”

  I roll my eyes and hand over another handful of jewelry, and he finally gives up the box. I take it to the table and sit down. I see Officer Jacobs watching me curiously, but I’m not about to pay him more to mind his own business. Instead, I force a total poker face as I lift the cardboard lid and take out the first folder.

  Vega’s face glares out at me in black and white. Younger than he is now, so damn young, but alrea
dy with the edge of darkness he wears still. It’s a mugshot. I was fairly certain I’d find something like this, but the reality of it all still hits me like a fist to the stomach. I feel my face falter but recover quickly, although I can’t keep the slight tremor out of my hands as I read on.

  This is from when Vega was nineteen. I do the math. When he was nineteen, I was sixteen. His birthday is March 29th. I wish I could not care about that tiny detail, but it burns into my brain, and I instinctively know I won’t soon forget it.

  When he was nineteen, and I was sixteen, Javier Vega was arrested for cocaine possession. Drug tests came back clean, so they assumed he was selling, but couldn’t prove it. It was a small amount, and his first time, so he just got a few months of prison time.

  My captor’s been in prison. Again, something I could’ve guessed, but I didn’t. The floor tilts beneath me just a little bit.

  I’ve slept with a convicted felon.

  Reading through the scribbled police notes and deciphering the legal jargon from the court reports is already making my head hurt, but I’ve got a lot more to go. I set this folder aside and glance up at Officer Jacobs. He’s lost interest in me, his focus back on his computer screen. I open the next folder.

  Miel—Miel Conde—stares back at me this time. Like Vega in his mugshot, her face looks younger, but there’s not an ounce of youthful innocence left in her eyes. She was twenty-one, and arrested for—

  Prostitution.

  I feel a little bit sick to my stomach. I’ve done my feminist research, I know that sex work can be a respectable, consensual industry, but knowing the angry way Miel carries herself, seeing the vacant expression in this photo, I don’t think this is one of those cases.

  I remember the line of scars curving over her breast and wonder why I never thought twice about that until now. I shudder and slam this folder shut. I don’t need to know any more.

  There are several more folders, all thick and worn, but I know these can’t all be rap sheets. If either of them had gotten busted or jailed this often, they wouldn’t be around to torment me now.

  I’m right. This next folder doesn’t open to a mug shot. Instead, the words El Sombrerón are typed in crisp letters, and there’s a vaguely familiar image right under it. Two bold stripes, with a longer one underneath. It’s the tattoo I saw on Miel’s back, but I’ve seen it somewhere else too. I close my eyes and concentrate. I saw it when Vega’s shirt was off, on his forearm.

  Whatever this is, they’re both marked by it. Is it something they chose, or a brand? A shudder runs up my spine, but I force myself to turn the page. I have to know everything.

  This folder is a mess of typed reports, chicken-scratch notes, mug shots and surveillance photos, and more. It takes me a while to piece it all together, at least an hour, maybe two. El Sombrerón is Atlanta’s one and only coke dealer, operating under the nose of the law for decades, keeping a low enough profile that I’d never heard of him before, but gaining enough power to rule the local underworld. He’s good, this guy, so good that the police don’t even have any leads on his real name or identity. His people are all easy to spot, though, as they share the same tattoo: a graphic representation of a giant hat, as is worn by the mythical Sombrerón that the name is borrowed from.

  The idea of a man that is both more than a man and less than one, a shadow and a king, makes my skin goosepimple. Is this the person after Vega and Miel, the person they tried to escape, the person that might be after me now, too?

  Javier Vega’s role under El Sombrerón is not clear. He’s presumed to have been a low-level dealer until he got arrested. After he did his time he wasn’t seen on the streets much anymore. Instead, he seemed to be promoted up to the darker side of the organization, evidence leading to his involvement in a few deaths linked to El Sombrerón, but never anything strong enough to take to court.

  There’s no way the man I’ve made meals for, the man whose wound I stitched up, the man whose lips I met with mine was a hit man. There’s absolutely no way.

  As for Miel Conde, these notes leave even less space for her. She’s included on a list of suspected prostitutes-slash-mules under El Sombrerón, but that’s it.

  Nothing here notes their disappearance from the organization at any point. Sightings of them were so rare to begin with, I’m not surprised that an absence of evidence over a few months didn’t raise any flags.

  What is included is a shooting at a Buckhead cafe a few weeks ago, where an eye witness claimed to have recognized the Sombrerón tattoo on one of the shooter’s arms. Olivia Duvernay’s name is on the list of witnesses at the scene, and I recognize the date, confirming what I already suspect. What I don’t know is if the shooter with the tattoo is Vega, or someone after him. Or both.

  Eye witness accounts of the event are garbled and confusing, everyone too shaken up from the events to even begin interpreting the truth of what went down. It doesn’t matter much at this point. What I do know for sure is that I’m in way over my head.

  There’s one last folder at the very bottom of the box, something thinner and older than everything else in here. I flip it open with shaking hands. It’s a death report for a Lucia Vega, killed in a suspected domestic violence situation, although her husband died in a gang-related stabbing before they could prove anything. There’s a quick note about trying to find and question their son, a nine-year-old Javier Vega, but it doesn’t seem that they ever did, or bothered looking into the case much after that. Nine years old. That’s how old I was when Mom and Dad died.

  It doesn’t matter. There’s no use digging back that far. We all have our traumas.

  “You’re welcome,” Officer Jacobs calls out after me as I strut out of the Open Records room as fast as I can.

  I guess he didn’t notice me slip one of the folders into my oversized purse.

  * * *

  We finally get a call from Hernando when we’re about fifteen minutes from the Palacios estate, having broken every traffic law on our mad rush here. I try to feel relieved that we’re not dealing with the absolute worst case scenario, Sombrerón’s men arriving to the estate and killing everyone on sight. However, this second worst case scenario is still a pretty huge wrench in the works.

  Selina escaped.

  I check the camera feeds as I fight the urge to strangle Hernando and Brock on the spot. I watch my pretty little captive sneak around the mansion, drug her guards, and make a run for it, casting guilted glances at me through the lens the whole time. How long has she been planning this? She promised me she’d get her freedom back, and so far she’s put up a damn good effort. But now it’s time for me to hold up my own promise, and get her back before it’s too late.

  She’s mine, and I’ll be damned if I let her get away from me.

  I can’t risk her fucking up my whole plan, and my own shot at freedom.

  It’s not personal.

  “Tell me you have something,” I say sharply, rejoining the other three in the den. Miel’s violence seems even less restrained than mine right now, if possible. I know she’s overcompensating for the sheer terror that must be coursing through her veins.

  “Yes,” H says quickly, almost stammering over the one word. A more generous man might give the two guards a little leeway. After all, they were drugged against their will. But in my world there’s no room for leeway. They never should have let our princess get the better of them, not matter how unexpectedly sneaky and cunning she has turned out to be. “She called a cab from Brock’s phone, then called a number we traced back to Isla del Rey. She turned the phone off after you called, which made tracking it a bit trickier, but I’ve got it.”

  I lean in close to the map he has pulled up on his screen. The path zig zags across Atlanta and is currently headed toward the Georgia Aquarium. There’s no way that’s all her, which means she left the phone planted in the cab after I called. Clever girl. This new shade of Selina toys with something in my core. She’s always been stubborn, but now she’s showing her teeth
. Even with the stakes so high I can’t help but feel a dark thrill at the new game we’re playing, just me and her. This is a hunt. She’s the fox, and I’m the hound. She can run, but I’ll catch her. And when I do, I’ll make her regret thinking she ever had a chance.

  “She ditched the phone,” Brock is saying, on the same page. “But the cab’s first stop after leaving Johns Creek is here.”

  He points at the map. Fuck. That’s the Atlanta PD.

  “It’s bad,” H says, as Miel visibly fights the urge to slap him. “But it’s not too late. I got her on security cameras. It doesn’t look like she talked to anyone. She went straight to Open Records.”

  He’s pulling up video footage of her in a hallway, smiling politely at an officer as she pushes through the Open Records door. What the fuck is she doing? Why go to the police if she’s not going to turn us in?

  “She’s still there,” Hernando says. “What are we going to do, boss?”

  They’re all looking at me. I feel a dull pain in my wounded bicep, and a bit of warmth on the bandage. I realize I’ve been clenching my fists so tight I must have torn at the healing muscle. I loosen my fists slightly, but not by much.

  “H, stay here, keep tabs on her through the cameras,” I say, picking my leather jacket back up from the sofa where I dumped it earlier. “Keep us posted, every damn detail. I want to know if she sneezes.”

  Hernando nods, and I move to Brock and Miel next.

  “Brock, you’re backup. Follow us down to the station but hang back. Miel, you’re coming with me. We’re bringing the princess back to the castle whether she likes it or not.”

  The three of us speed out of the drive, heading into the city. Traffic is already congested. I wish we hadn’t wasted so much time going back to Johns Creek, and now we’re wasting more returning into the city. It doesn’t matter. There’s no way she’s getting away with this. I don’t care what she does, or what I have to do. Even if I have to chain her up in the basement, she’s never slipping through my fingers again.