Honestly, so was I.
Seeing Bax broken like that, watching Nassir hover over Keelyn as blood pumped out of her chest . . . it all hit too close to home. I was used to having to juggle the law and people I cared about. I mean I had locked my brother up for five years, and I was just waiting for Race to do something stupid enough for it to be his turn to sit in a cell. But the kind of outright warfare Roark was launching at the people I loved was an entirely different ball game, and I hated knowing he had the upper hand. When the bad guy knew all the good guy’s tricks, it made trying to catch him twice as hard as it should be.
I was already feeling defeated and disgruntled after hours of hitting the streets when I got called to an armed robbery with a fatality. The liquor-store clerk was dead at the scene and two of the customers that had been waiting around to buy beer were also shot and en route to the hospital. It wasn’t an uncommon scenario in the Point, but for some reason, when I got to the scene and saw that the kid that was hooked up in cuffs and sitting in the back of the patrol car couldn’t be any older than twelve or thirteen, it almost made me turn around, get back in my boring sedan, and not stop driving until I got to the station to turn in my gun and my shield. All the violence and unnecessary waste of life just seemed like too much to keep wading through every single day.
I pulled up the knot on my tie and tried to smooth the wrinkles out of my slacks as I climbed out of the car. The uniformed officer that was talking to a group of people gathered on the outside of the crime-scene tape saw me and started over in my direction. The kid in the back of the patrol car looked up at me and I could see that he had tear tracks on his face. Shit. He should be playing football with his friends not out committing felonies.
“Anybody see anything?”
The uniformed cop nodded and pointed at the kid with the end of the pen he was using to jot down witness statements.
“The guy behind the counter was the owner. His wife was in the back doing inventory when the first shots were fired. She saw her husband go down and said the kid just kept shooting and shooting. She gave us a positive ID on him.”
I grunted and frowned as the coroner’s team rolled a gurney out of the store with the body covered in a heavy, black plastic body bag. I heard gasps from the crowd at the sight, and sighed.
“How did the kid get caught so fast? Have his parents been notified?” He might be a killer but he was still a minor, which meant we had to do things by the book.
“He went back to school. Guess he didn’t know what to do when things went south. One of the teachers saw him slipping back inside the building and noticed he didn’t look right. When she approached him she noticed the blood spatter all over his clothes and shoes. She had a school security guard detain him and the principal called us. We brought him down here and got the ID from the wife. He ditched the gun, so we’re still looking for it, and there are no parents. Mom is in prison for manufacturing meth and there is no father. According to the kid, he stays with an ‘uncle.’ ” The cop made quotes around the word in the air. “But it sounds like the guy is a freak show. The kid said he was trying to rob the place so he could buy a bus ticket and get out of town. Said he was tired of his uncle hurting him. The gun is the so-called uncle’s, by the way, so we sent a unit over there to grab him as well.”
“Jesus.” I ran a hand over my face. “It never ends, does it?” It was all such a vicious cycle with no end in sight.
The other cop sighed and looked at the kid. “No. No, it doesn’t.”
“If the other two victims make it through surgery, be sure to get statements from them. Make sure the kid has someone from Social Services with him when you process him in since he doesn’t have a legal guardian. You want to make sure every I is dotted and every T is crossed because I bet they try and prosecute him as an adult.”
“Can’t say I disagree with that. This is a pretty adult-size fuckup he landed himself in.”
It was, but the kid never stood a chance, and all I could think was how easy it would’ve been for Bax to do something just as stupid when he was struggling to feed himself and survive because no one else was there to take care of him when he was that age.
“Sometimes it feels like the only choice you have is the worst choice there is. Too many kids these days end up getting put in that position. We just have to do our job and do it to the best of our ability in order to keep everyone else safe from those terrible choices and the people forced to make them.”
“You speaking from personal experience, Detective?”
I didn’t bother answering. When you were a cop in this city—or any city, really—for any length of time, you saw it all. Killer kids. Druggies that were practically zombies from their addiction. Women doing whatever they had to do in order to feed their families or themselves. Families living on the street because a backroom poker game was more important than paying the mortgage. Men forced to bend the law rather than work inside it because someone had to be the bad guy and they figured it might as well be them. So we all had personal experience with why things happened the way they did here, and I didn’t need to spin sob stories about my own drunken mother and my mass-murdering father, or my car thief of a brother, to showcase just how much experience I had with how dark the Point could be.
I grabbed the surveillance tapes, had a quick chat with the inconsolable wife, took the notes I would need for the report, and then drove across town to the elementary school where another patrol unit had found the gun hidden inside one of the tube slides in the elementary school playground; that was just a block over from the middle school the kid had attended. The weapon was still loaded, with the safety off, and we were all silently thanking whatever god was watching that day that no other little hands had run across it and caused even more of a tragedy. I was thinking about what a mess it all was and how deeply sad it made me. I felt the waste of that young life all the way to my bones, and yet I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It was the impotence of not being able to fix that poor kid’s life, of not being able to help him before he got so desperate, that killed me. No living being should be driven to those lengths, yet it happened every day here.
I was packing up the scene when one of the patrol officer’s radios squawked. A callout for a bomb threat at a charter high school a few miles away. Kids called in bogus threats all the time, but ever since Nassir’s club had been blown up and burned to the ground, we tended to take them more seriously. The officer responded and we all climbed in our respective vehicles and headed over to the school. It looked like most of the teachers and kids had already been evacuated. There were a lot of bodies milling about in front of the building and on the street. As I climbed out of the car I frowned hard because all the kids were dressed in a very familiar-looking navy-blue-and-khaki uniform. I saw that same color combo every time I passed Karsen Carter when she was coming and going from school.