“Right.”
Cap looked at the two open windows on the screen. Empty lot. The girls wandering out to the street like sleepwalkers. Dreaming.
—
Vega stayed in the car. They had driven together in Cap’s but agreed she would not get out. Instead she moved into the driver’s seat and watched from across the street. Cap stood in the lot where Vega had parked earlier. He leaned against a car and thumbed the screen on his phone. She watched a man come out of the building, down the steps, and around to the lot. He was overweight, pants a little too short.
He and Cap started with a handshake, then man-hugged, pat-pat-pat on the back. You haven’t seen him for a while, thought Vega. They chitchatted. Small talk, easy back and forth, how’s the wife, kids, house. Then it started to go on for too long. Four, five, six minutes. Come on, thought Vega. Too much time goes to this shit, she thought.
Should we play they could be…naked, raped, dying, dead? All of the above?
She sent a text to Cap and put her hands on the wheel. She watched him look at his phone.
—
STOP WASTING TIME. ASK HIM.
Cap paused.
“Y’okay?” said Em.
Cap smiled at him. Wiley Emerson. He was the same: always too loud and too fat, but earnest, honest, and surprisingly savvy when it came to police work. There had been a lot of talk when Cap left about how close they would stay, one very long night at Smith’s Road House when Em had hugged him and cried, snorted into Cap’s shirt and said, “Thank you, thank you.”
Cap peered across the street at Vega in his car. She pointed at him, pressed her fingertip against the window. Ask him, said the finger.
“Yeah,” Cap said at first. Then, “No, I need something, Em. I need a favor.”
“Anything, man,” said Em. He meant it.
“Nah, don’t say that yet,” said Cap. “I need the favor. The. Favor.”
“Oh,” said Em. Then as it sank in, again: “Oh.”
“I need the witness statements, Em. From the Brandt case.”
That took Em a second. Cap watched him deflate. Thanksgiving Day float style.
“What, what d’you mean?”
“I’m working the case. With someone the family hired.”
“The woman from California?” said Em.
“Yeah, that’s her. She went to see Junior. Obviously he doesn’t want her help.”
Em rubbed his chin, then his cheeks with his palms.
“Oh, man. Oh, Cap, I don’t know, man,” he said.
“Em, this woman, the one from California, she’s good, and we can help. We can all work together. All you have to do is make me some copies.”
Cap was not entirely sure when he had become so confident in the mission. But as he spoke he felt himself getting excited, felt popping and clicking in pockets of his brain where he hadn’t noticed activity in a while. He used to feel it most days when he was a cop, but it came along with anxiety, tension, paranoia.
“Cap, I wanna help you, I mean, hell, we need you right now. You could cut through so much of this bullshit and get to the center of it, man. I know you could. But I don’t, I don’t know if I can do that.”
“You’re not going to get caught, Em. And Junior can’t fire you anyway. He needs bodies.”
Em looked over his shoulder cursorily.
“I thought they couldn’t fire you either,” he said, rubbing his eyes, red patches spreading underneath the lids. “And they did.”
Cap nodded, said, “I resigned actually.”
“I know, I know you did. For me. But I can’t, I can’t…”
Cap didn’t make him finish.
“Can you at least tell me if you got anything solid?”
“Hell no. We got nothing.” Then he leaned forward and whispered, “They say the older sister hugged the guy when she crossed the street, that’s it.” He shook his head. “I’ve slept like five hours in three days. Which is fine if we’re getting somewhere, but we’re going in circles. Junior said a Fed’s coming in, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help because we got shit leads. It’s like trying to hold on to sand.”
—
Vega watched the fat guy get exasperated, wipe his face, his eyes. She watched Cap laugh, calm, steady. This is how he does it, she thought. He stays calm and steady while the other guy panics, until when, though. Pin him, she thought. Pin him like a goddamn moth on a board.
The fat guy shook his head, kept shaking it. Are you telling me no?
She took her hands off the wheel and opened the door. How many seconds would it take to cross the street and hit him in the temple.
Then she stopped. Junior Hollows at the top of the steps. She pulled her leg back in and shut the door.
—
Cap saw Junior, and Junior saw Cap, and Em turned around and looked guilty. Junior came into the parking lot, trotting, spry, to show how young and energetic he was feeling.
“Max Caplan,” he said, sticking out his hand to shake Cap’s at least a yard before he reached him.
“Hey, boss,” said Cap.
They shook. It was not one of those hand-crushing contests between men, because, Cap knew, Junior didn’t think there were any more contests between them. Junior was still a cop, and Cap wasn’t. Junior had won.
“Got some more salt in your pepper there, Cap,” said Junior, touching the sides of his head like he was primping in a mirror.
Cap said, “Forty-one in February, just learned how to send a Twitter.”
“That’s good,” said Junior. Junior was big on approving of people and the funny things they said. “Em, I think Ralz and Royce have something for you.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Em with his shitty poker face. “See you, Cap. I’ll get some dates from Hannah.”
Good boy, thought Cap.
Em shuffled away, looking at Cap once before heading up the steps.
“You in the neighborhood?” said Junior.
“Something like that, yeah,” said Cap.
“Busy time over here. Got everyone hustling.”
“So I hear.”
“How’s business?”
“Good enough. Always someone cheating.”
“There you go.”
Junior took a serious breath through the nose now.
“It’s not really a great time to be catching up, Cap, I gotta be honest. We’ve got our hands full right now.”
“Yeah?” said Cap. “You get a promotion, now you’re handling social calendars too?”
Chuckle, laugh, keep it light, thought Cap. Junior smiled too.
“No, I know you and Em go back, we just want to keep it on personal time.”
He sounded like a middle school teacher at a parent conference. We don’t want Em to get confused, do we? Cap tried not to feel the old spark of fury in his chest. He’d been to enough therapy, practiced enough breathing exercises. You are not mad at Junior anymore. You can’t control other people.
“Because you’re busy, right, I know. Then let me ask you this, Junior—why are you out here talking to me when you got your whole team inside busting their asses?”
“Just came to say hello.”
Cap lifted his hand, waved at the knuckles. Hello.
—