The Janes

by Louisa Luna

  Mitch lifted up one breast and wiped the sweat under it with a washcloth, then let it drop and lifted the other.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said, not sounding too concerned. “I found them girls in the bathroom. Rafa, he’s my boy but he’s a little crazy. Gets carried away. It’s not the first time. You know what I’m saying, vato,” he said, tapping his temple right where Rafa had hooked Cap up to the machine.

  Cap resisted the temptation to touch the burn, determined to keep pressing.

  “Did you know Maricel Villareal and Dulce Díaz?”

  Mitch shrugged lazily.

  “I’m not so good with names,” he said.

  “Those are the girls Rafa murdered,” Cap said slowly.

  “Oh yeah,” Mitch said, as if he were remembering an old friend. “The first one he found a spot for, but the second one, I guess he didn’t have too much time to think about it so he said he just dropped her in the middle of the night.” Mitch shrugged again. “I don’t know, man—it was his mess, I told him he had to clean it.”

  Cap gritted his teeth again. He had the distinct feeling that Mitch wasn’t taking any of this very seriously, and as he stared at the empty Jell-O cup on the floor, he realized he could change that.

  * * *

  —

  Vega lifted up her shirt on the side and showed the bandage to Davis.

  “You got me pretty good, you know,” she said.

  Davis stared at her, his eyes big and wet, as he breathed heavily through his nose. Vega dropped her shirt, rolled her stool to the left, closer to his head. She pulled out her phone and swiped around with her thumb.

  “I’m going to say things, and you can nod or shake your head. How about if you nod right now to show us you understand,” said Vega, still looking at her phone.

  Davis didn’t nod, made a quick mark on the whiteboard and turned it around so Vega could see. He had drawn a circle around the “1. FUCK. 2. OFF.”

  Vega glanced at the whiteboard and then held up her phone to him.

  “So you want me to tell your mom you can’t make it to the barbecue?”

  Davis’s eyes bugged, and he huffed through his nose, blowing mucus onto his upper lip.

  “She’s got a lot of cute stuff on her Facebook feed,” said Vega, tapping the screen. “Kittens playing with grapes and things like that.”

  Now Davis’s eyes grew small as he seethed. He furiously erased what was on the whiteboard with his palm, scrawled new words, and showed it to Vega.

  She read it aloud: “DON’T GO NEAR HER.”

  Vega glanced over at Otero, who took a step back and leaned against the wall. Though he kept a straight face, Vega took his lack of concern as an implicit approval.

  Davis turned the whiteboard around again to erase it and write something else. He flipped the board around, the surface ashy with the smeared marks of previous messages with the new words scrawled, thick and messy.

  “STAY AWAY BITCH” it read.

  “Huh,” said Vega, like she’d just learned an interesting nature fact, smiling at him, impressed. Then she continued: “I’ll make you a deal,” she said, pointing to the whiteboard. “Wait, I’m the bitch, right?” she said, purely for clarification. “You don’t have to answer that one. But my other questions, you can answer by nodding or shaking your head no, and then if you answer them I will stay away from your mommy and not fuck her teeth up with my bolt cutters, okay?”

  Davis gripped the whiteboard and glared at Vega.

  “That door is closed,” she said, pointing behind her. Then she pointed to Otero: “He’s a police commander, and he’s good with whatever I do here. Nod to show me you understand now.”

  Slowly, he nodded.

  Vega continued; now it was easy.

  “You’ve been a coyote for a while, right, helping people cross the border illegally for money?”

  Davis nodded.

  “When did you start the business in Salton? Was it more than a year ago?”

  Nod. He pinched his fingers together.

  “A little longer than a year ago?”

  Nod.

  “Did anyone give you any financial assistance with regards to starting the business?”

  Nod.

  Vega paused, thought she’d take a swipe.

  “Was it Devin Lara?”

  Nod.

  “You staffed the house with undocumented underage girls?”

  Nod.

  “Did Devin Lara bring you the girls named Maricel Villareal, Catalina Checado, Dulce Díaz, and one more?”

  Davis shook his head emphatically.

  Vega glanced at Otero.

  Then she asked, “Was it a guy that Devin Lara introduced you to?”

  Nod.

  “Was it Michael Mackey?”

  Nod.

  “Mackey brought you four girls.”

  Davis shook his head. Held up six fingers.

  “Six girls,” she said.

  Davis nodded.

  “You got IUDs from Antonio LoSanto and then hired Scott Miller to do the procedures.”

  Nod.

  “You gave LoSanto a few thousand but offered Miller more.”

  Davis didn’t nod or shake his head. He held his hand out flat and tipped it side to side. So-so.

  “You didn’t offer Miller more. He demanded it,” said Vega, the realization setting in as she spoke.

  Davis nodded.

  “He found out you had a resource for bigger money, maybe threatened to call the authorities unless you gave him a cut.”

  Nod.

  Vega paused, rewound. Then she continued: “So Mackey brought you six girls. Two of them turned up dead. How’d that happen?”

  Davis wiped the whiteboard with the corner of his sheet and wrote down some letters. He was eager to flip the board and show them his response: “RAFA.”

  Vega glanced briefly at Otero. Davis hadn’t seemed to wrestle a lot with that one.

  “Do you know who Mackey’s working for?” she said.

  Davis didn’t nod. He looked from Vega to Otero and back again. Now he was wrestling.

  Otero paused, then said, “I want you to listen carefully to the question I’m going to ask you, and I want you to think about your answer. It doesn’t do you any good to lie to us right now. You’re looking at a respectable turn in a state prison no matter what you do or say, but if you tell us the truth now, it will go a ways with our DA in softening the sentence request.”

  Davis blinked his eyes a few times, snorting through his nose. He tilted his head down in a subtle nod.

  “Is Mackey’s boss Lalo Montalvo?” said Otero.

  It was hard for Vega to discern Davis’s exact expression with the apparatus over his face, his cheeks and jaw and chin swollen like a water balloon, but he continued to blink frantically, and then pressed his fists into the bed and brought his head off the pillow, lifted his torso off the mattress, and swiveled side to side in a full upper-body shake to tell them no.

  * * *

  —

  Cap fed dollars into the vending machine in the waiting room, one after another. He pressed a few sets of buttons, numbers and letters, and watched the packages fall into the well—Lay’s Classic, Ruffles cheddar & sour cream, Hot Cheetos, Reese’s, M&M’s, Snickers, the Kit Kat that was one big bar as opposed to the four little perforated sticks.

  Cap stuffed the candy into his pants pockets and held the chips in his hands, pinning a bag of Doritos under his chin. He walked back to Mitch’s room, blinked at the officer, who smirked at him and opened the door to let him in. Cap thanked him and went inside.

  Mitch was still awake, eating a cup of cold oatmeal. Cap sat in a chair next to the door.

  “Aw fucking right,” said Mitch. “Bring that shit over here, y
o.”

  Cap set all of the bags down on his lap, candy bars falling out of his pockets to the floor; he did not reach to pick them up.

  “Uh, no,” said Cap, tearing open the bag of M&M’s. He poured them into his mouth. “I’m going to eat every motherfucking one of these snacks in front of you unless you tell me what I need to know.”

  Mitch threw his oatmeal cup toward Cap and it landed about a foot away from him with a sad thud.

  “Give me the fucking chocolate, puto, or—”

  “What, Mitch,” said Cap, his mouth full. “You gonna do a magic trick and get out of that leg iron?”

  Cap dropped the empty M&M’s bag to the ground and opened the Reese’s cups.

  “These are the kind that have the Reese’s pieces inside,” he said, then shoved a whole disk into his mouth.

  Mitch pulled at his hair and let out a shriek of frustration. Cap had of course heard of people addicted to sugar and that it could be as bad as drugs but had never seen the evidence before now. Mitch looked crazy, his eyes manic, jostling from side to side in the bed, his rolls of flesh undulating. He batted at his cheeks like he was trying to wake himself up from a nightmare.

  “Who sent Maricel Villareal, Catalina Checado, and Dulce Díaz to the Salton house?” said Cap, swallowing the second peanut butter cup.

  “Fuck you, man. You gonna find out soon enough.”

  Cap shrugged, dropped the Reese’s wrapper at his feet, and opened the giant Kit Kat.

  “Never had one of these before,” he said, pointing it at Mitch.

  He took a huge bite and briefly wished he’d stopped at the soda machine as well but pushed through it, the chocolate and the wafers grainy on his tongue and throat.

  “It’s really good,” said Cap. “Tastes like the regular Kit Kats. Just bigger is all.”

  “Come on,” said Mitch, his desperation molding the anger into pure begging. “It doesn’t matter if I tell you shit or not.”

  Cap forced the rest of the Kit Kat down and then tore open the Snickers.

  “This is the last candy,” Cap said, holding it up in the air. “Was it Lalo Montalvo who sent those girls?”

  Mitch’s eyes followed the Snickers but then he registered what Cap had said and shook his head.

  “Montalvo?” he said, bewildered. “You crazy?”

  “Why do you ask if I’m crazy? Why do you say that?” said Cap, lowering the Snickers.

  “ ’Cause you say you with the cops, you don’t know Montalvo’s good as gone,” said Mitch, sitting up, trying to scoot his upper body forward, perhaps hoping to inch the whole bed closer to Cap and the candy.

  “Okay,” said Cap. “Not Montalvo, who?”

  “The one guy left, man. Last man standing.”

  Then Cap pulled the name from the wreckage that had accrued in his memory from the past few days.

  “Perez,” he said.

  “Shit, yeah, Perez,” echoed Mitch, as if he’d given Cap the name a hundred times.

  “The last man standing,” said Cap.

  “Yeah, I will tell you this, I’m glad I got these leg cuffs and that cop outside, and I might get a lawyer and go to a nice California state prison because if I wasn’t, Perro Perez would kill me and do all kind of shit to my body before and after.”

  Cap was only half-listening to him, realizing they’d had the story all wrong.

  “So it’s all good that nasty bitch shot me,” said Mitch. “Now give me the fucking chocolate!”

  Cap stood up, all of the bags of chips dropping to the floor. He knew he had to find Vega.

  “Give it to me, man!” yelled Mitch, shaking the rails of the bed.

  Cap stripped the wrapper off the Snickers in one piece like it was a banana peel.

  “This is for calling my girl a nasty bitch,” he said, and he crammed as much of the Snickers as could fit into his mouth, trying to mash it with his molars as it barreled toward his throat.

  Mitch screamed unnaturally high for a man, Cap thought as he ran from the room. He labored to chew the candy bar, debated spitting it out but thought it would be less messy just to swallow it now.

  Vega rushed around the corner of the hallway toward him, followed by Otero on his phone. Mitch continued to yell in his room, and the officer on watch seemed undisturbed by it, swiping around on his phone screen with his thumb.

  Cap continued to aggressively chew and swallow the Snickers, his mouth still full.

  “It’s Perez,” he tried to say, but it came out garbled. There was just too much nougat.

  “What are you eating?” Vega said, more fascinated than disgusted.

  Cap could only point to his mouth, trying to indicate he’d be done soon.

  “They don’t work for Montalvo,” said Vega.

  “I know,” said Cap, finally swallowing. “It’s Perez. Mitch says he’s relieved to go to an American prison so Perez won’t get a chance to kill him.” Cap nodded back to Otero. “Who’s he talking to?”

  “Boyce. Otero thinks maybe we should meet up.”

  Vega and Cap began heading toward the end of the hall, where the elevators were. Otero trailed behind them, still on the phone, his voice low.

  Cap stopped at the open door and peered into the room. A female officer was guarding it, sipping an iced coffee drink through a straw. She put her arm out to block Cap from entering but then saw Otero, who pointed to Cap and gave a thumbs-up. The guard lowered her arm, and Cap took a step into the room.

  It was Rafa in the bed, asleep, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. He wore a hospital gown, both of his legs bandaged and elevated in slings. He was so tall and broad his body seemed to cover every inch of the bed, his head well above the pillow, lolling backward.

  Cap didn’t realize he’d shut his eyes, but quickly he flashed on Rafa standing over him in the shed, felt the adhesive of the electrode patch on his temple.

  “Caplan,” said Vega.

  Cap’s eyes shot open.

  “It’s okay,” said Vega. “He’s not conscious. Let’s go.”

  Cap didn’t move, so Vega placed her hand on his arm and gently pulled him toward the door. He let her direct him for a second, then seemed to wake up when they stepped out of the room.

  Otero approached them and was hanging up on his call.

  “Boyce says he’s open to meeting,” he said, heading to the elevators.

  “What if he’s in on it?” said Cap, pressing the Down button.

  “He’s not,” said Otero. “He’s skeptical of us as it is. Whatever he might think of Mackey, he’s still his partner.”

  The doors opened, and they all went inside.

  “He thinks we’re making this up?” said Cap, getting huffy.

  “Not exactly,” said Otero. “I can appreciate this is a lot for him to take in.”

  “You didn’t seem to have a problem with it,” Cap said, hitting the P button for the parking level. “And we have two corroborating accomplices—Davis and Mitch.”

  “We’ll lay out every piece of evidence we have,” said Otero.

  “Mackey still thinks you have us contained?” said Vega, checking her phone for new messages.

  “That’s right,” said Otero.

  “He still thinks he has you contained,” said Cap as the elevator doors opened.

  Otero nodded solemnly, said, “Yes.”

  “He’s mistaken,” said Cap.

  “Very much,” said Otero, starting to head toward his car.

  “What if we bring Boyce another witness?” said Vega, standing still.

  Cap and Otero turned to her.

  “If you’re talking about Lara, we may be out of luck there,” said Otero, holding up his phone. “My officer said residence appears dark, no car in the driveway.”

  “Okay then,” said Vega. �
�How do you feel about dropping us off at our hotel, starting with Boyce solo, and then Caplan and I will catch up with both of you in an hour or two?”

  Otero stared at her, a little mystified.

  “I have mixed feelings about it,” he said. “Why do we think it’s a good tactic to split up?”

  “Devin Lara took an Uber from the hospital at five twelve p.m. to an address in La Jolla,” said Vega, waving her phone back at Otero. “I say Cap and I drive out there and see if we might convince him to turn himself in. Might be better if you’re not there.”

  Vega added an unexpectedly girlish shrug, and Cap laughed under his breath.

  Cap replaced his laughter with a cough and said, “She can be pretty convincing.”

  20

  the address in la jolla belonged to a narrow two-story townhome with a shingled wood exterior—an effort meant to evoke a tree house, Cap thought. He began to pull the rental into a space across the street when Vega interrupted him.

  “You can park right in front,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt.

  It had not taken them long to get there, and they hadn’t had time to discuss an exact plan, or any plan, really. Still, Cap was surprised at Vega’s lack of concern about being seen.

  “Should I come with you?” he said, as he made a U-turn.

  “No, stay here.”

  Vega opened the door as Cap pulled closer to the curb.

  “Wait, let me stop the car,” he said.

  “I’m good,” she said, sticking her foot out. “Keep the engine running.”

  “Well,” he said, sincerely trying to figure out how to be useful. “I’m coming in after fifteen if I don’t hear from you.”

  “I’ll be back in five,” Vega said, getting out of the car.

  “Then I’m coming in after five.”

  “Don’t come in,” said Vega through the window, over her shoulder.

  Cap watched her go up the path, press her thumb against the buzzer and leave it there, then knock on the door with her fist. The door opened, and a tall, tan woman appeared, her hair long and wavy as if she’d just come from the beach. She wore a satin kimono and appeared very upset. Vega pushed right past her and disappeared from Cap’s sight.