Vega turned around just in time. The girl was lifting a bowl, about ten inches in diameter, and had started to bring it down on Vega’s head.
Vega blocked it with one arm and dropped the cuffs but not the gun. She hit the girl in the mouth with it, while Quincy-Ray tackled her. They both fell to the ground then. He was on top of Vega for only a second. His weight was soft and heavy in a somnambulant way, and he tried to grab her gun but ignored her left hand, so she hit him in the nose with the heel of her hand, and he rolled off her. She grabbed his hair and yanked his head off the ground, blood starting to run from his nostrils, and turned him over. He flailed and she sat on top of him, gun to the back of the neck again.
“Put your hands behind your back. Again,” she said.
The girl moaned and cried in a pile next to them.
“He’s got a boy in there, bitch,” she said to Vega.
Vega cuffed Quincy-Ray.
“The fuck you talking about, Choppers?” Vega said, standing.
“He’s got a boy in the bathroom,” she said, holding a newspaper to her lips, the split in the middle gushing blood.
“Fuck you,” said Quincy-Ray. “He ain’t mine. He belongs to the guy who owns the house.”
“They’re all into some sick shit,” said the girl.
“I didn’t do nothing to that boy,” said Quincy-Ray, arching his back, trying to flip over.
Vega went to the front door and unlocked the locks, opened it up. She heard some birds and smelled the air.
“You,” she said to the girl. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“I’m telling you the truth, bitch,” she said, her lips and cheek starting to blow up.
“Get the fuck out of here or I will break your fucking fingers in this fucking door!” Vega shouted, gripping the doorknob.
The girl jumped, grabbed a backpack, stepped over Quincy-Ray like he was a puddle, and left, dripping blood on the carpet as she went.
Vega slammed the door.
“I’m serious, girl,” said Quincy-Ray. “I had nothing to do with that boy in there. I’s just staying here a couple weeks.”
Vega left him and drew the Springfield again. She walked softly the way she’d come, moved through the kitchen except took a left, passed a room she guessed was a bedroom though there wasn’t a bed in it, only stuffed black garbage bags.
Then a narrow door that she opened slowly into a dark room that smelled rotten, the only light in the room coming from a small gray window on the other side of a filmy shower curtain.
She kept the gun in front of her and let her eyes adjust, held her breath. It was then that she realized there was someone else in the room, breathing shallowly, much lower to the ground than she was.
She kept both hands tight on the Springfield, felt around with her elbow for the light switch and flipped it.
There was a lot to see, all at once. A bathroom that wasn’t unusual. Toilet, bathtub, sink. Except under the sink, across the floor, was a tank, like a big iguana tank, open on the top. Later she would learn it was thirty by thirty by eighteen and made of acrylic.
There was not an iguana inside. There was a boy.
He was younger than a teenager but not little; he was naked, in a fetal position, covered in shit and blood. His head had been shaved, and his eyes were closed, but he was breathing, shivering. Hands cuffed with cheap restraints around the pipe under the sink, his arms stretched unnaturally above him, fingers blue.
Vega felt dizzy and remembered to breathe. She squatted and put her gun in her holster, rubbed her hands over her mouth. She looked at his face and recognized the crinkle of his bottom lip, the attached earlobes. She had seen him on TV, missing from Modesto, thirty miles south. She sifted through the trash in her mind for his name.
“Ethan?” she said. “Ethan Moreno.”
He stirred but didn’t wake up.
“Ethan, can you hear me?”
His lids fluttered, just a small beating of wings, his eyes not staying on her.
Later she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened or how she felt. She told the cops; she told CNN. It was like she’d climbed into the backseat and let someone else drive, but she was still giving directions. First the kitchen, under the sink, looking for a wrench or a hammer but found a small fire extinguisher instead. Then back to the bathroom, where she slammed it against the pipe, over and over, for ten, twenty minutes until it busted and water sprayed them both, and she untangled his hands and reached inside the tank and put her arms under and around him, feeling his cold, wet skin, the bones of his hips and back, and she lifted him out, his eyes still fluttering.
Then she ran out the back door the way she had come, to her car, curling his head toward her chest.
“Ethan, can you hear me?”
He spoke into her shirt, his breath a hot burst.
“Can you hear me?” he repeated.
She smiled without meaning to, said, “Yes, I can.”
Then: “Can you tell me your name?”
Then he was gone, and so was that street and that day, and so was Vega for that matter; she couldn’t see a thing except the flashlight in her eyes, and all she kept hearing was that doctor asking if she could hear him and if she could tell him her name. She started to speak, but the words turned to salt in her mouth, and her eyes sealed shut as she tried to get back to the boy in the tank.
—
Cap had never seen media like this.
Twenty or thirty vans and trucks with every three-letter and double-digit combination on their doors were parked outside the emergency room entrance. Men with cameras, correspondents in sportswear, antenna masts spinning. Cap watched them through the spotted beige blinds of a hospital administrator’s office in Frackville, a town that made Denville look downright cosmopolitan, where the sole local ambulance and one sheriff’s car had brought Dena, McKie, Bailey, and Vega to be treated.
“You can’t contain these things anymore,” said the Fed, standing a foot or so behind Cap. “When I started, twenty-five years ago? It was easy to stay five steps ahead of them. You could get someone in and out of the hospital or the courthouse. Jail. You could go through a back door and throw a coat over their head. Now one person takes a picture with a phone and you get this shit.”
Cap scrolled through the flipbook of potential responses in his head: “You got that right, what a bunch of dicks,” or “Hey, they’re just trying to make a living like everyone else,” or “This could help us—the more attention, the better,” or “This could hurt us—the more distractions, the harder it will be to find Kylie.”
He said none of them, instead whispered, “Watch the language, okay?”
The Fed nodded, remembering.
Then they both glanced to the corner of the room where Bailey sat on a chair, drinking Pedialyte from a straw. She didn’t seem to hear them, staring at the ground, still in the dirty dress, legs kicking the air like a lazy swim stroke.