by Louisa Luna
“How many guys here beside you and Davis?” she said.
The fat guy groaned, saliva leaking from his mouth. Vega scissored the bolt cutters tighter.
He shouted.
“How many?” she said again.
“Just one, just Rafa,” he uttered, and then he began to pass out.
Vega unclasped the jaws from his testicles, and he gasped, his head rolling back onto the carpet. She eyed his bullet wounds. They were bleeding steadily but she hadn’t hit any organs or arteries. Just some bones and fat but enough to keep him down so she could get to work. She took his Glock and stuck it between her pants and the small of her back. Then she stood up.
Vega addressed the girl that the fat guy had grabbed.
“Are you hurt?” Vega said in Spanish.
The girl shook her head. The right side of her face was sprayed with blood. She appeared to be on the older side of the group. She wore a spaghetti strap tank top with no bra and pink underwear. Bare feet. They all had bare feet.
“My name is Vega. I’m here to help you.”
The girl didn’t respond, so Vega continued.
“I need to find my partner first, the white man who just came in. Do you know where he is?”
“Rafa took him to the garage,” she said.
“Where’s the garage?”
The girl pointed toward the door. Outside. Vega remembered seeing a shed next to the house, figured that was it.
“Any other men here besides Coyote Ben and Rafa?”
The girl shook her head.
“Any other girls besides who’s right here?” Vega said, gesturing gently to the others.
“Two,” said the girl. “Missy and Chicago.”
She pronounced the “Ch” hard, like in “chitchat.”
“There’s a man with Chicago downstairs. No gun. Bald,” said the girl, pointing to her head.
Vega glanced around at the other girls. They pressed themselves against the walls and in the corners like they were trying to camouflage their bodies into the paper-white paint.
“Does Coyote Ben have a gun?” asked Vega.
The girl shrugged. Unsure.
“He has a knife,” she said. Then she held her fingers out, about six inches apart. “This long.”
Vega nodded, assumed this girl must have seen it at least a couple of times to remember it so well.
“Does Rafa have a gun?” Vega asked.
“Rafa has everything.”
“I’ll take care of him,” said Vega.
She knew she was saying it wrong. She’d learned Spanish from her father and from high school and spoke it well, had picked up slang and idioms working in fugitive recovery but had to concentrate sometimes to find the right verb. She knew she was using the wrong one, cuidar a, like to be a caretaker of a baby or a patient in the hospital. The girl squinted at her. Vega wasn’t sure she understood but she didn’t need to. Vega was going to do it anyway.
She peered over at the fat guy; he had passed out for good but was definitely still alive, the gelatinous mass of his stomach rising and falling steadily.
“Will you stay here while I find my partner?” asked Vega.
The girl nodded with a puzzled look in her eye. Like, where else would she go? Vega scanned the room, looked around at the girls. They all seemed scared, but they had stopped screaming. There was a distance there, a separation; it was like they were wearing masks of scared faces. Vega wondered if they’d been sedated.
Vega nodded back at the girl and left, found the stairs and went down, to the rooms. She stepped as lightly as she could, her right arm extended with the Springfield aimed straight ahead, the jaws of the bolt cutters resting on her left shoulder. She stuck close to the wall and listened, thought she heard movement—feet shuffling, fabric rustling, the scrape of denim. She froze and waited, gritted her teeth and thought, C’mon, you sonofabitch, come see all the damage I got for you right here.
* * *
—
Cap was aware that he was being dragged outdoors, could feel the gravel on his back, could see the sun above him glaring into his unblinking eyes, tears leaking out of the corners.
Rafa was pulling him, his thick hand clasping the collars of Cap’s jacket and shirt. Cap could feel the second button pressing on his neck, garroting him, but he couldn’t move any muscle in particular, was unable even to summon a cough. Had he and Nell once talked about autoerotic asphyxiation? The memory of a conversation floated past.
Then he was yanked inside again, a new room, a smell like an old electric train set when the cars run off the tracks. Burnt batteries.
He could see toothpicks of sunlight shooting through panels on the wall. Wood, siding, he wasn’t sure. He was dropped, felt the back of his head hit the concrete, stinging flashes of pain crowding his vision. A sound came from his throat unwittingly, halfway between a gurgle and a cry.
Rafa moved above him, walking back and forth. Cap followed him with his eyes as far as they would roll to the corner of the room where the door was. Cap heard the door shut, then a series of locks.
Rafa returned, leaned down into Cap’s face, and examined him like he was a specimen in a jar. Scrutinizing. Cap could smell the sweat on his skin. Rafa stuck his hands in Cap’s underarms and heaved him up, threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then dropped him on a narrow table.
Cap’s eyes shot to the walls. Tools hung there—a saw, hammers, screwdrivers. A vise, prongs, tongs. All of them dotted and splattered with odd patterns of rust.
Cap’s knowledge as a handyman was limited to basic carpentry and the contents of a set of Time Life how-to books his parents had purchased in the eighties. But he only had to think about it for a second, that rust didn’t form and dry like a liquid on tools.
Only blood could do that.
* * *
—
Vega made a sharp turn at the bottom of the stairs. There was another smaller hallway and a little girl in a lacy top and underwear crouching in a doorway to a room. The fear on her face was the opposite of the distant fear on the faces of the girls upstairs. This girl’s fear was immediate and alive. It appeared to be gobbling her up right there, her teeth chattering, words spilling out fast and slurry, her eyes darting to different points on the ceiling like there was a connect-the-dots up there.
“It’s okay,” said Vega quietly, in Spanish. “I’m here to help you.”
The girl shook her head desperately.
“Rafa,” she whispered.
“He took the white guy to the garage,” said Vega.
The girl stopped shaking her head.
“Where is Coyote Ben?” asked Vega.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you Missy?”
She nodded.
“What about Chicago—the girl, Chicago?”
Missy pointed down the hall and held up three fingers—the third room.
For the first time Vega looked at the layout: there were four doors on each side, the rooms like makeshift cubicles, small and clearly not part of the original architecture of the house, constructed out of white fiberboard, divided by thin strips of sheet metal.
Vega walked down the narrow hallway and counted the rooms on her right. One-two-three. She pointed at the door in front of her and looked at Missy. Vega knocked with the nose of her gun lightly. There was no answer so she pounded on the door three times with the jaws of the bolt cutters.
The door opened about a foot wide, and a chunky bald guy leaned his head into the opening to speak.
“I have twelve more minutes,” he said to Vega. He seemed almost on the verge of tears.
Vega kicked the door all the way open and aimed the Springfield at his face. He stumbled backward, naked except for a white T-shirt. Vega chased him to the floor, and he scrambled on his hands an
d ass into the wall. Vega kept the gun in his face.
“Where are your car keys?” she said.
She pressed the nose of the gun against his forehead, felt it slide with the sweat.
“In the pants,” he said, a tiny drop of spittle escaping the corner of his mouth with the “p.”
Vega took a step back and pulled the gun away from his skin.
“Get them,” she said.
He crawled to his pants and frantically searched the pockets, pulled out a small ring of keys.
Vega let her eyes jump briefly to Chicago, who lay on the bed naked. She hadn’t made a move to cover herself. She looked about sixteen and had a circular red burn mark on her temple just like Jane 1. Was she on something? Had her brain been cooked? Or was it the fog of trauma, multiple rapes and beatings? Vega knew fear could punch deeper holes with longer-lasting damage in neural pathways than ice picks could.
The bald man started to wriggle his stocky legs into his pants, fussing with the belt in his shaking hands.
“Leave the fucking clothes, you dumb motherfucker!” Vega yelled at him, her voice reverberating off the flimsy walls, stinging her own eardrums.
He stood up, cowering, holding his keys in front of his crotch as if they would cover his rapidly shrinking dick.
“Get the fuck out,” she said.
He ran out the door, past her, his keys jingling.
Vega lowered her gun and looked to Chicago, who watched her like a deer.
“Do you know where Coyote Ben is?” Vega said.
The girl just stared at Vega, the words not getting through.
“You should go upstairs. With the other girls,” said Vega.
Chicago got off the bed and stood. Vega realized Chicago was actually taller than she was. She could see the girl’s ribs underneath the perfect semicircles of her breasts. Chicago left the room, taking no clothes with her.
Vega stepped out of the room. Chicago had joined Missy at the bottom of the stairs, and the two headed up. Vega could hear Missy whispering to Chicago urgently, but Chicago didn’t react.
Vega moved down the hallway and kicked open the doors to the rest of the rooms. They were empty and identical—twin beds, filing cabinets. No Davis.
She turned and ran, thinking about how narrow it was—the hallway, the stairway, no visibility around the corners, and she really hated that. She took the stairs two at a time, not worrying about the sound because now Davis could only be upstairs if he was anywhere in the house, if he hadn’t skipped totally and was well on his way to Tijuana.
Vega came to the top and headed to the right, the direction of the girls, but then Davis appeared, lunging at her abdomen with a knife in his hand.
Vega heard her jacket and shirt rip at the side and dropped her gun, fell back against the wall, away from Davis. She knew he’d gotten her but didn’t feel the pain, just the warmth of her blood like a broth spilling through her clothes, but she also knew she was upright, not falling, not fainting, so realized it was just a swipe, nothing punctured, might not even need stitches.
It was not even a full second—not a one-Mississippi, and then Davis came at her again, this time the blade pointed right at her, gripping it from below with one hand, his left outstretched heading for the wall or her shoulder. Vega was familiar with the stance; the slice had been meant to stun. Now he wasn’t looking to stab; he was aiming to gut.
Fortunately she still had the bolt cutters.
She swung them with whatever momentum she could gather with both hands, and the jaws met Davis’s hip before he got near her, knocking him down. He dropped the knife and screamed, grabbed his smashed hip with both hands and yelled, “Shit, shit, shit.”
Vega knew she wanted to get information from him at some point soon. But at the moment she wanted to knock all of his teeth out more. She swung at his mouth, not with her full weight, not hard enough to bury the alloy steel into his skull, but enough to unhinge his jaws, destroy his sinuses, splinter his nice suburban teeth. He screamed and cried and whined when she pulled the bolt cutters from his mouth, his hands slapped over his lips, waterfalls of blood and spit pouring over his fingers, real genuine tears leaking from his eyes.
Vega picked up her gun and pressed her elbow tight to the incision in her side. She stepped over Davis and headed for the front door, not looking back, thinking, Good boy, down you go.
* * *
—
Cap could hear the hum. He remembered rock shows from his youth and Nell’s fall band concerts—the sound of the amps as the musicians plugged in and tuned up. Early MTV heavy metal videos, the single victorious drumstick twirling.
This wasn’t that. Rafa stood next to him, shifting things around on a table near Cap’s head. Then he sat in a wheeled chair. He leaned down and pulled Cap’s eyelids up with his thumb, peered into one eye and then the other.
“All right, boss,” he said, like he was about to serve him a drink. “You should wear a better costume next time, hey?”
He opened Cap’s mouth and pushed his rows of teeth open with two fingers, shoved in a mouth guard, like the kind boxers used. Cap could feel it pressing on his gums, stretching the frenulum of his upper lip.
“You bite your tongue off, more cleanup for me, boss,” Rafa said.
Cap’s breathing sped up. He huffed through his nose.
“Yeah, I know, the first time’s a bitch.”
Rafa leaned over and flipped a switch. The humming grew louder, and Rafa pressed a silicon patch onto Cap’s left temple. Cap felt one tiny twitch in his right pinkie. He concentrated on his toes and fingertips and willed them to wiggle. But then Rafa flipped another switch, and the humming got louder still, a gargantuan alien mosquito in his ears, and then the very last switch flipped.
The volts shot through Cap, and there was no more thinking, just all the meat of his muscles snapping into spasms, his brain off the clock.
* * *
—
Vega went out to the garage. It was a rickety shed, made of cheap siding. There was a single door with a handle and Vega pulled it, then pushed, but it was locked. She shoved her shoulder into the door and felt something solid and immovable behind it. Not as weak as it looked.
She lifted the bolt cutters with both hands and swung full force into the door. The jaws made a dent, and the whole wall shook but didn’t break, didn’t open.
“You can’t open it like that,” said a voice in Spanish from behind Vega.
Vega turned to see the older girl, still with the spray of blood from the fat guy on her face. The other girls stood behind her, blinking into the sunlight. Some sat on the dirt. None appeared to be trying to run.
“There is…” the girl said and paused, trying to find the right words. “Metal behind the door.”
Vega’s mind raced. Steel, aluminum, acrylic. Only if it were specifically ballistic resistant would it kick back a bullet.
“You should stand over there,” she said to the girl, pointing to the others.
The girl backed up and regarded Vega with curiosity.
Vega pulled the Springfield from her holster and flipped the safety with her thumb. She took a step back and aimed down, at about a forty-five-degree angle, and fired. The bullet hit the door with a tinny crash and the casing dropped to the dirt. The door was dented. There was something bulletproof behind it.
Vega walked back a few paces, thought briefly about walking around the shed and firing along the perimeter but two things gave her pause: she couldn’t be sure where they were inside and it would give Rafa time. She could sacrifice one but not the other. She needed something faster, bigger.
She ran to her car, the entire right side of her shirt, the right leg of her pants soaked with her blood now. But she knew she couldn’t be losing that much; she was still thinking, processing, taking deep breaths, and not feeling faint,
not yet.
She got into the driver’s seat and threw the bolt cutters on the seat next to her, stuck her gun back into the holster. Buckled the seatbelt and winced at the pressure on the cut but ignored it, yanked on the belt twice to make it as tight as possible across her. Then she pushed the driver’s side door open.
Time to go.
She started the car and kept her left foot on the brake while she tapped the gas gently with her right, felt the engine rev. Forty should do it, she thought. She put her hands at 3 and 9 and pressed the back of her head into the headrest. She took her foot off the brake, and the car lurched at first, not the best pickup anymore. The tires screeched, and she pushed on the gas, watched the speedometer climb like it had a fever, right up to forty, the street blurring by.
Then she was on the curb and the second before making contact she slammed the brake and turned her head, crashed into the side of the shed, tearing through the wall.
The airbag inflated and Vega felt it sock her in the cheek with the weight of a packed boxing glove, smelled the smoke and the powder. She held her breath and shut her eyes and with her right hand followed the seatbelt down to the buckle and snapped it open. The right side of her stomach and thigh had gone numb now, but she didn’t feel the pain of the cut anymore. The crash had pumped more adrenaline into her heart than a hypodermic.
She slid to the left of the airbag near the door, which had been blown back toward the car on impact but had not shut. She pushed it open with her shoulder and squatted behind it, on the floor of the shed, pulled the Springfield out of the holster with her right hand, then the fat guy’s Glock from her waistband with her left.
She looked up to the ceiling. The car had ripped one of the walls off a corner, smashed the bottom half of it open so it looked like a half-open garage door. The room smelled like smoke, but Vega couldn’t tell what was burning.