The cot has a thin mattress and old pillow on it, and wait... there’s something hanging from the metal frame. I squint, forcing my eyes to adjust further to make out the shape. It’s a pair of handcuffs.
Holy shit.
I start backing away from the door reflexively but remember that I should take a picture to show the cops. I head reluctantly back to the door, point, zoom, press, then make for the back of the house without checking to make sure it came out okay.
I stop for a second to catch my breath before heading back down the driveway to the sidewalk. I look at the picture. You can’t see them at first but when I zoom it in there they are: handcuffs on a metal cot.
I make it to my car and drive away, heart still racing. I don’t know what feels weirder: what I saw, or the fact that it was right there, in this cute family-friendly neighborhood named, ironically, Casa Alegre. The minute I’m out of there, on Agua Fria, I pull over, take off the wig, and call Erica.
“Do you think we’ve stumbled upon some sick sex ring run by the same people at the house in Barrio la Canada?” I ask her over a sunset margarita at La Choza that night.
“Well,” she nods, “they certainly have some similarities.”
I drink enough to ensure that my head is spinning for some reason other than my messed-up discovery and the thoughts it has elicited, and Erica drives me home. Next day I wake up earlier than usual, as often happens when I’ve gone to bed piss drunk. The sun’s just started rising but I take a Lyft over to my car.
I turn it on and find myself instinctively driving back to Casa Alegre. I’ve never driven by this early, I realize. I might see something new. I turn onto the street and park a few doors down, with a good view of the house.
I light up a cigarette to buffer me from this seediness, and have just exhaled my first disgusting six a.m. drag when I see a black Escalade with tinted windows pull into the house’s driveway. I slide down my seat a bit. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen any activity at the place.
The driver, a man, and the passenger, a woman, get out and head straight to the backyard with their heads down before I can get a good look at them. I suck my cigarette down in record time, sitting here wondering what’s going on. I see them heading out carrying heavy-looking duffel bags as I’m about to snub it out. The woman drops hers when she opens the car door. There’s a sound of clunking metal.
“Fuck!” I hear her mutter as she bends over to pick up the bag.
She leans out away from the car for a moment and I notice that she’s sporting the longest French braid I’ve ever seen. It’s so thick and long that it looks like a horse’s tail, or mane, if it were braided, and the hair’s laced with so much gray that it looks dusty. The woman’s skin is aged and caramel-colored and her wrinkle-bordered eyes are dark brown and round.
She looks like a horse, I think. A mean, old, weathered horse.
Just then I feel my phone vibrate. I slink down farther into my seat to take a look. It’s my mother.
The horse woman closes her door and the car backs out immediately and speeds down the block. I answer the phone.
“You should see my garden, Marcos, it’s beautiful,” my mother launches in.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m still half asleep or because this kind of stuff, sadly, makes me think of her, but I tell her the whole story. At some point midway it hits me.
“Fuck, I didn’t get a picture of the license plate number!” I yell into the phone, “Damn it!”
“That’s fine, Marcos, it’s okay, don’t worry,” my mother reassures me. “You shouldn’t get this involved in all this stuff anyway. These are probably very bad people, and Santa Fe is a small city.”
The Escalade is long gone by the time I get to the part about the horse woman, and when I do I hear her gasp a little on the other end.
“A long French braid?” she asks, sounding startled.
“Yeah, like really, unusually long. Why?”
“There was a girl that went to school with my sister and me who everyone thought was weird,” my mom begins. “She almost never spoke and she looked nervous or sad most of the time. After my sister had been missing for a while and it looked like she might not be coming back, the school held a service for her, and the girl came with her mother.
“At some point I broke down sobbing, and when I looked up, her mother was staring right at me. You’d think she’d look sad or concerned or something, but no. It was the weirdest look on her face and I never forgot it — or her — because she had the longest French braid I’d ever seen.”
“Oh my God. Are you saying you think—”
“I don’t think,” my mother cuts me off, “I know: that woman has to be one of the monsters who kidnapped my sister.”
She hangs up before I can respond. I try back and it just rings. I leave her a message to call me back and drive home. When I get there I try her again and it goes straight to voice mail.
“Hello?” Erica answers, sounding a little sleepy.
“I’m so sorry to bother you but you’re not going to believe this.”
I relay the events quickly.
“So I’m worried about my mom,” I say, wrapping it up. “She’s not calling me back. I’m gonna head over to her place.”
“Okay, but wait, wait — I may know something about how to find the woman with the French braid.”
“What? How?”
“I remember an ex of mine from years ago and his buddies joking around about a woman they knew from work and, I think, if I’m remembering correctly, it had something to do with her having a French braid...”
“Oh my God, try to remember!”
“They used to joke about her braid being so long and thick that she used it to auto-erotically asphyxiate the men she slept with.”
“Where did they work? Do you remember?”
“Fuck!” Erica shouts. “I can’t! But I think I can get ahold of my ex and I bet he would remember.”
“Okay, awesome, thanks. I’ll check in with you later,” I say. I pull onto my mom’s block.
She’s not home and I bet I know just where she is: looking for the horse woman. She’d been saying to my sister and me for years, once we were grown and out of the house, that if she ever found el puta madre que me quitó a mi hermana, she’d rip his penis off with her own hands and choke him with it as he stood there screaming.
She isn’t the kind of person who typically says anything like that — she is a lady, as she always says. So I kind of believe her. And I don’t want her to take the fall on account of those scumbags.
I want to do it. Do it for Aunt Lupita, and my grandparents, and my mom. Do it before my mom does so she won’t spend the rest of her days locked up, away from her beloved garden.
Me, I don’t have a garden. I don’t have shit, come to think of it. Nothing that amounts to much anyway. I’ll make the world a better place by offing these scumbags and spend the rest of my days reading in the prison library.
My phone rings. It’s Erica.
“So I messaged him and he actually remembered her name!” she shouts.
“Oh my God.”
“And get this,” she continues, “I looked her up on the city records and I’ve got an address for her.”
“That’s amazing! I’ll be at your office in like five.”
Erica is kind of crazy, I guess, because she decides to go with me to check out that address and make sure my mother doesn’t somehow beat me to it.
“Fuck, I’m out of cigarettes,” I lament as we get into my car. “This shit’s so fucking gruesome, smoking just seems to kind of go along with it these days.”