The man glanced up as they came to the clearing, and said, “Folks lost?”
He was in his seventies, with hair that looked recently shaved, just sprouting white spikes in a semicircle on his head and also his face.
Cap came forward and said yes, introduced himself and Vega. The man didn’t offer his name.
“We’re looking for a woman named Dena Macht. Do you know that name?” said Cap.
“Macht, sure,” said the man. “You’re all turned around, realize?”
He stood now, wiping his hands with the rag.
“Yeah, we thought as much,” said Cap.
The man gave them some directions. Turn around, a left where they had taken a right, follow the unmarked road with the broken roadblock sign to the Macht cabin.
“I’ve seen the girl and her boyfriend in town,” said the man with the air of a conspirator. “They got problems.”
“What makes you say that?”
“That girl, Dena?” said the man. “I used to see her with her granddad when he built the place. She used to be cute; now she’s got holes in her face from the drugs.”
He seemed genuinely saddened by it.
“Have you seen them lately? In the last few days?”
“Nah, I ain’t seen them,” he said. “Couple weeks probably. You friends of theirs?”
“We know Dena’s parents,” said Cap.
The man nodded. That was enough for him.
“Well, she owes money to everyone in town. Surprised they haven’t torched the place yet,” he said. Then, as an afterthought: “I don’t trust people from New York, personally. Think they got an attitude.”
At first Vega thought somehow he’d picked up Cap’s trace Brooklyn accent, even though Vega heard it only in a few of his words, when he said “coll” for “call.” Cap met her eyes, registering the anomaly.
“Who’s from New York, now?” said Cap.
The man dropped the rag on the folding chair and pulled a tissue from his pocket, rubbed it on the back of his neck.
“Her boyfriend, right? The tall guy. He’s got a damn Giants sticker on his car,” he said, impatient suddenly, like Cap and Vega were dense not to get it before.
Vega’s head burned in the middle, the realization blistering outward, fire eating up the fuses. She turned around and left first, heard Cap thank the man and not wait for him to say anything back before Cap followed her, both of them walking, then running through the white trees which were peeling, flaps of bark hanging off with the red wood underneath. Vega knew it was probably natural for whatever kind of tree it was, but it still looked like a disease, a hemorrhage, something to be cured or killed.
—
They found the roadblock, faded orange stripes on two planks with a handwritten detour sign. Vega got out and moved the sign to the side of the road while Cap tried dialing Traynor, then Junior, then Em, but there was no answer, no click and no ring—just the low hum of not connecting.
Cap leaned his head out the window and said, “I have no bars. No dots. Do you have service?”
Vega got back in and ran her thumb over the face of her phone.
“No,” she said.
Cap pulled ahead slowly, hearing the wheels crush gravel, the car rocking unevenly over the dips. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other on the phone, hitting Traynor again. Traynor…calling work. Nothing.
“Caplan, brake,” said Vega.
Cap glanced up a little too late, and the car slid into a ditch. He yanked the wheel right and pulled out, the fender cracking the edge.
“Shit.”
“Caplan,” said Vega. “Maybe we should walk awhile.”
“Yeah,” he said, pulling over.
He turned off the engine, and they both stepped out. The morning was turning warm, the air clear, clouds moving fast. Spring for real, thought Cap. Vega straightened her jacket at the bottom and shrugged one shoulder, adjusting the holster and the pistol underneath.
Cap typed out a text to Traynor, Junior, and Em as he walked to the trunk: “We are 15 miles east of Frackville. Bumper sticker on McKie’s car matching descript of ridgewood mall car.” He hit Send and watched the bar at the top hang in the middle.
He opened the trunk and reached for the MicroVault, tapped in his code (1107—Nell’s birthday), and pressed his right index finger over the fingerprint scanner. The lock clicked and he opened the case. There was his Sig, right where he had left it the day he lost his job. When he was a cop he’d carried it every day and kept it clean, but never had been one to fetishize it like some other cops, never gave it a woman’s name or obsessively polished the steel, never had a collection at home or subscribed to publications for gun enthusiasts. It had just been a tool of the job, a stethoscope for a doctor. And when he lost his job he had put it in the vault in his bedroom closet and forgot about it. Until this morning.
He loaded the clip and peered down the barrel.
“When’s the last time you had that in your hand?” said Vega.
“Day I lost my job.”
“That’s all kind of pathetic,” she said.
Cap smiled and slid the gun down the small of his back, undid and fastened his belt to the next hole to tighten it up.
They walked the road, which grew narrower still, the width of a compact car and not an inch more. Cap looked at his phone again, cupping his hand over the top to shade the screen from the glare. The texts read as delivered, but his phone was so old he never knew. He wrote one more: “Copy back.” Hit Send. Then redialed Junior. Not even a ring, the screen black.
“Can you get anything?” he asked Vega.
She shook her head.
Cap stopped walking. He remembered plenty of times when young cops were too hot to see some action, started making poor decisions. Jules had told him some boys’ frontal lobes, the part of the brain that processes consequences, didn’t develop until they were in their midtwenties, and Cap could believe it. Taking a bad shot, searching and seizing without a warrant, walking into an unknown situation without backup.
He could just see the outline of the cabin about a hundred feet away, the shape of a one-story A-frame, shimmering through the trees. Vega continued to walk ahead of him and soon realized he wasn’t right behind her, that he had stopped. She turned and held her hands out, impatient.
“Coming?”
Cap didn’t speak, gestured come here with one hand. Vega looked at him sideways and came back, small clouds of dust kicking up from her feet.
Then she was right in front of him, breathing fast and heavy.
“What is it?”
There was no way to say it except to say it, no bubble wrap he could duct-tape to the thing to make it more attractive to her.
“We have to go back,” he said, calmly resigned.
“What’s that?” Vega said back as if she had a bad ear.
“To the old man’s house, see if he has a landline we can use.”
Vega stared at him, her mouth a little slack, in shock.
“We’re right here,” she said. “The girls are in there right now.”
She spoke slowly so he wouldn’t miss anything.