Chapter 12: Vega Bail Bonds
Sabine gave me the address at the kitchen sink on day twenty-three, drying the same plate she had been drying for four minutes. “Vega,” she said. “Third and Calloway. Across from the courthouse.”
“Bail bonds?”
“She hires people like us.” Sabine put the plate down. “Not out of kindness. Don't walk in there expecting kindness, it'll make you sloppy.”
I went the next morning at nine. Vega Bail Bonds is at 214 Third Street, between a check-cashing place and a shop that sells phone cases.
There is a neon sign in the window that says OPEN 24 HRS and it is not true, but it is true enough that somebody sleeps in the back on weekends. Inside: a counter, four chairs, a rubber plant, and behind the counter, floor to ceiling on three walls, filing cabinets.
Legal-size, five drawer, beige, the kind with the label holder on the front that takes a card. I counted them while I waited. Twenty-two cabinets. A hundred and ten drawers. Every drawer had a handwritten card in the holder, and eleven of the cards were in a different hand from the rest, which meant somebody had quit somewhere around drawer sixty.
Marisol Vega came out of the back with reading glasses pushed up in her hair and a stack of paper against her hip. Forty-four. Short, heavy through the shoulders, gold hoops, a voice like she had already said this three times today.
“You're the one from Bertrand.”
“Cass Mercer.”
“Sabine called.” She put the stack down. “She says you did six.”
“Six.”
“For what.”
“Vehicular homicide. DUI.”
She did not do the face. That was the first thing I liked about her. Everyone did the face and she did not do the face.
“You use?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No.”
“Then why were you drunk in a car.”
“I wasn't.”
She looked at me for a second and let it go, and did not come back to it for four months, which I also noticed.
Then she pulled one sheet off the top of the stack and slid it across the counter, face up.
“What's this,” she said.
I turned it around and read it.
Two pages, stapled once at the corner, printed on a laser printer with a dirty drum, a grey line down the left margin of both pages.
“It's an indemnity agreement,” I said. “Surety side. The defendant signs, and the indemnitor signs, and the indemnitor is on the hook for the full penal sum if he doesn't appear.”
“Uh huh.”
“Your indemnitor block is filled in but the address line is blank. And the notary jurat on page two is missing the county.”
She took the glasses out of her hair. “Keep going.”
“The bond amount is written in numbers in one place and in words in the other and they don't match. Twenty-five thousand in the figures. Fifteen thousand in the words.”
“Which one wins.”
“The words. Almost always the words.”
Marisol Vega leaned on her forearms on that counter and looked at me for what felt like a long time and was probably four seconds. “Where'd you learn that.”
“Correspondence course. Paralegal certificate. Ninety-six weeks.”
“From inside.”
“Yes.”
“Can you use it?”
“Not really,” I said. “There's no firm in this county that will hire a felon as a paralegal. I checked eleven of them by phone last week.”
“Eleven,” she said. “You count.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Everything in this office is a number and half my clients can't read past the first page.”
She straightened up. “Here's the job. I have twenty-two cabinets. The court went electronic four years ago and I did not. If I get audited, or if one of my people skips and I have to prove I did my diligence, I need to hand somebody a file in nine minutes, not nine days.”
“You want it scanned.”
“I want all of it scanned, indexed, named right, and searchable. Six years of paper minimum. Probably nine.”
“How many pages.”
“I have no idea. A lot.”
“I'll count them,” I said.
That is the sentence that got me the job. Not the notary jurat. She told me that a year later.
“Thirteen fifty an hour,” she said. “Twenty-eight hours. W-2, taxes out, no cash. You don't talk to clients. You don't touch money. You don't answer the phone.”
“Why me.”
She picked her stack back up. “Because half the people who walk through that door came out of the same building you did,” she said. “And you know what happens in there and I don't, and I'm tired of guessing.”
“When.”
“Monday. Seven forty-five. Don't be late, I hate late.”
I walked out onto Third Street and stood there and did the arithmetic on the window glass. Twenty-eight hours at thirteen fifty is three hundred seventy-eight a week before tax. Ninety-five of it to Ivy.
First paycheck in fifteen days, assuming she paid on the second Friday, which is what most of them do.
The grant ran out in six.