Her eyebrows raised up just a little bit, in a tiny arch, charmed.
“I saw her shoes when you opened the front door. Female athletic shoes.”
Now Cap smiled, both of them caught in the joke.
“I see,” he said. “So how’d you pin her age?”
“You have a copy of Othello on the dashboard of the car in your driveway.”
“How do you know it’s not mine?” he said. “Maybe I live for Shakespeare.”
“Just a hunch,” she said, shrugging, looking down.
Was she looking down shyly? Was this flirting? Cap couldn’t tell. He hadn’t been on a date in so long he’d forgotten what it felt like.
“Thanks for your time,” said Vega, and then she left.
Cap watched her go, fairly certain he saw the lines of a holster crossing her back under her jacket.
3
In the car, Vega scrolled on her phone to the photos she had taken of Caplan’s file while he’d been on the phone in the other room. She stared at the photo of Brandon Haas, looked over his stats, and tapped out another email to the Bastard on the screen.
Later in her room at the inn, she was studying footage from the Kmart parking lot when the message from the Bastard came in:
“Got a Brandon Hass with same birthday as your Haas from ADP paycheck dated 3/15, Luke Construction out of New Castle, PA. Also leases, driver license, but all old.
Also Junior Hollows is boring as shit but his wife has two Facebook pages, and you’ll get a kick out of one of them.”
Vega sniffed in approval at the Bastard’s ingenuity and stopped reading, closed up her email, and went online to find a number for Luke Construction.
—
Vega was on her way out the front door, patchouli and lemon still in her nose from the sitting room, a slip of paper in her hand with an address on it.
“Ms. Vega?”
She turned. It was Elaine, the owner of the inn. She was a slender woman in her seventies with long hair. She wore a lot of scarves and beads and was holding a basket of fruit.
“Hi,” said Vega.
“This is for you,” Elaine said, presenting the fruit.
Vega stared at it.
“It’s your welcome basket,” Elaine added. “Usually I have it waiting in folks’ rooms, but this all happened so quickly I didn’t have a chance.”
“Thanks,” muttered Vega. “It’s really not necessary.”
Now Elaine gave her a bit of the side eye, wagging a teasing finger.
“Now you strike me as the kind of person who doesn’t eat unless she’s reminded, right?”
Vega made herself smile. She felt about ten years old.
“So you take it with you. These are all organic. I’d like to tell you they’re local, but this isn’t the best time of year for fruit around here.”
Vega took the fruit. It was unexpectedly weighty.
“I’ll get the door for you,” said Elaine.
“Thanks.”
Elaine opened the passenger side door, and Vega dropped the fruit basket on the seat.
“Cheese and wine at six if you like,” said Elaine.
Vega continued to smile, and then Elaine was off, down the front path, her skirt swishing around her. Vega got into the car, started the engine, and plugged the address from the slip of paper into the GPS.
“Head northwest on Market Street,” it said.
She checked her mirror and made herself smile again, just to see what it looked like.
—
Vega parked on the vacant west side of the lot of New Town Mall, where a Real Food Market was being built. It didn’t look like much of anything yet, a crevasse where whatever had been there before had been recently gutted, and dumpsters of debris.
She sat in the car for a few minutes and watched construction workers walking around, talking in groups. There were only about ten of them. She figured most had quit for the day. It was just after five. She glanced around at the other stores.
She got out and went to a Home Depot, up and down the aisles to Tools and Hardware.
At the register, a man with a ponytail and yellow teeth said, “You find everything okay today?”
Vega watched the items show up on the digital screen:
Straight Link Chain, 5 ft
EZ Bungee cord, 2 ct
Iron Tough Pipe Wrench
She said, “Yeah, thanks. Do you know where I can get a hot tea?”
—
Vega walked from her car to the construction site, about forty feet. The tea spilled over the sides of the open cup, ripping hot streams down her fingers. Two groups of men, one of three, one of five. She went up to the three-man group.
“Hey, baby,” said the one on the left. “You bring me coffee?”
She said to the one in the middle, about five-ten, crew cut and a forehead hanging over his eyes like an awning, “Brandon Haas?”
“Yeah?” he said. Amused, excited. The others shouted and laughed.
Vega started by throwing the hot tea at his crotch. He screamed and crumpled to the ground. The comedian on the left went for her and she cracked him across the nose with the pipe wrench. The one on the right came half a second later, and she punched him, an uppercut to the jaw with the chain wrapped around her fist. All three down.
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.