by Alicia Scott
He glanced at his watch again. “Three-thirty,” he commented.
“Afternoon patrol is probably in the east side….”
“And now school’s out.”
“Wonderful. Freakin’ wonderful.”
They headed for their car.
“What now?” Koontz asked a few minutes later. Mike gave it some thought. He’d told Sandra they’d have an ID by the end of the day. There had to be something more they could do.
“We got a copy of the letter. Let’s take it to the junior high and see if a teacher recognizes the writing style. Maybe some word or phrase will ring some bells.”
“Oh, so now we head into the east side?”
“Great plan, isn’t it? Body armor’s in the back. I’ll fasten yours, you fasten mine.”
Koontz grudgingly got out of the car and popped the trunk. “We are not being paid enough for this,” he said as he fetched two Kevlar vests.
Mike was more philosophical. “Yeah, but think of how much the city will spend on our funerals.”
The ride from Alexandria’s city center to the east side took less than fifteen minutes, and was as dramatic as crossing from one country into the next. From wide, tree-lined streets, to narrow, cracking asphalt. From quaint brick storefronts and grand stone facades to boarded-up row houses and crumbling old mills. The streets were darker here and it wasn’t just in Mike’s head—as fast as the city installed new street lamps, the dealers sent their runners to shoot them out. Light was bad for business.
Deeper in, old textile mills, once the lifeblood of the town, sagged on their foundations, condemned, but still inhabited by vagrants sporting crack pipes. A group of teens loitered on one corner, smoking cigarettes and giving Mike and Koontz’s unmarked car a baleful stare. More kids on the next block and now some working girls. The east side was never empty.
Koontz turned the corner and they were on Main Street, where a few family businesses did their best to survive. There was the local convenience store, known for its hot coffee and good conversation. Smithy Jones ran it with his wife, Bess, and was on good terms with the police. Smithy had been a decorated marine in Vietnam, and the last dope-head stupid enough to stick him up had gone straight from the store to the morgue. Nothing happened on Main Street during Smithy’s watch. In addition to Smithy, the Santiagos maintained a liquor store guarded by reinforced steel bars, while the Chen family ran a small café-grocery. Mrs. Chen had been held up twice, but still persevered.
Koontz turned off Main street and graffiti promptly exploded over the landscape. The artwork, Mike knew, was not random, but represented markers dividing the area into four distinct gang turfs—the Hispanic Latin Kings; the Black Guerrilla Family; another black gang, the Crips; and the Brotherhood, white trash or white supremacists, depending on who you asked. The gangs ruled the streets and the rule of the gangs was simple and carved in stone.
Sometime between the age of five and eight, you got jumped into a gang. You didn’t choose it, it chose you. That gang became your family. They were your protection, your buddies, and your employers. They came first in your life and if that meant stealing your mama’s car, you stole your mama’s car. If that meant killing your boyhood friend because he got jumped in by a rival gang or a rival sect of the same gang, then that was just business.
Here, survival mattered, and the difference between life and death could be as simple as being caught on the wrong city block at the wrong time of day. Five years ago, Mike and Koontz had gotten called in to investigate the death of a twelve-year-old black male. He’d been found with his hands tied behind his back, mauled to death by some sort of animal later identified as a pit bull. Further investigation revealed the kid belonged to the Black Guerrilla Family, a relatively new gang to Massachusetts. Unfortunately for him, the BGF didn’t own much turf yet, so the boy had to cross four blocks of rival territory to make it to school each day. Apparently, the kid got to be a really good sprinter. One day, however, he didn’t run fast enough.
The Crips caught him. They were angry at the BGF. Someone had stolen someone’s car and stripped it down for parts, the ultimate insult. So this boy got to pay. They tied him up. They stuck him in a backyard. They brought out a full-grown pit bull one of the Crips’s Original Ghetto Blood used as a breeding stud. They worked the hard-muscled dog into a frenzy, then turned it loose. They had left the twelve-year-old’s legs untied, and he did run very fast, so things took a while.
Mike and Koontz learned this story from an informant named 3-Trey, picked up by Vice for dealing crack cocaine and now wanting to skip a trip to juvie. Three-Trey was fourteen. He had witnessed the murder firsthand. More than the details, Mike remembered the way the boy told the story, his eyes flat and his voice emotionless. Just another day in the hood.
Koontz had shrugged it off. Three-Trey named names, they picked the boys up, identified the crime scene and put together the case. Open and shut as far as Koontz was concerned. The only thing that kept Rusty awake at nights was an unclosed case, which he always took as a personal insult.
For Mike, however, it had been one of those days when he’d gone home unable to talk about his job. He’d needed to hold Sandy close, inhaling the scent of her perfume and concentrating on the feel of her skin. He’d wanted to bury his face in the crook of her neck until the picture of the mauled kid finally faded from his mind. Sometimes he couldn’t get the job to roll off his back. Sometimes, in spite of his family’s preaching, life leeched into his head, left him feeling weary. Those times he needed his wife to be soft and feminine and removed from the job. He needed her to be a reminder of the good things in life.
Most likely though, they had wound up in a fight. Because, as Mike had learned the hard way, love did not conquer all. It demanded your all. And somehow, he and Sandra had not been equal to the task.
Koontz pulled up to the junior high and they got out of their sedan. Dusk was starting to settle over the small, shrunken building and Koontz was looking over his shoulder. Mike felt it, too. The parking lot was exposed. The shadows had eyes. A lot of them.
“Kid’s just a punk,” Koontz muttered. “Can’t believe we’re letting a thirteen-year-old spook us.”
But he unsnapped his shoulder holster as they both moved inside quickly.
“I honestly don’t know if I can help you,” Mrs. Kennedy was saying five minutes later as she started erasing the huge blackboard. “I have a hundred and twenty students. It’s hard to get to know each of them personally.”
“But you gotta give them homework, right?” Koontz countered reasonably. “Essays, reports, whatever the hell they’re doing in English these days. Maybe you don’t know each kid, but you gotta have a sense of their writing.”
Mrs. Kennedy stopped erasing long enough to give Koontz a wry expression. She was a pretty black woman, younger than Mike would have expected, and speaking in a refined accent that didn’t come from living in Massachusetts. He was guessing she came from affluence and now saw teaching underprivileged children as her mission. He also noticed she carried pepper spray in her desk drawer. A woman of experience.
“You’re assuming they turn in their homework assignments, Detective. Frankly, most of my seventh graders don’t. What makes you think he’s in seventh grade, anyway?”
“In the letter. Kid says he’s thirteen.”
“Around here, that means he could be in any grade from third on up. The school district likes to run a tight ship. Miss so many days and you automatically get to repeat the grade. We were hoping it would encourage attendance. Unfortunately, it’s mostly made our kids permanent students.”
“But if this Vee kid has been making an effort…”
“Sure, he’d be in seventh grade. I haven’t heard of anyone named Vee, though. Do you have a real name?”
“No ma’am, that’s what we came to you for.”
“I saw the letter, but show it to me again.” She took the photocopy from Mike and glanced at it a second time, lines deepening in her
brow. “So he’s a thirteen-year-old who lost an older brother. Sorry, that doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“What about the sister?” Mike pressed. “A young girl with a bullet hole in her cheek? That’s gotta be uncommon, even for around here.”
Mrs. Kennedy conceded that point with a nod. “Any idea how old she is? Younger? Older?”
Mike shook his head.
“I can’t think of any girl in junior high who fits that description,” Mrs. Kennedy said after a moment. “But you could try the high school. It’s much bigger and someone with a scar should stand out.”
“Yeah, we’ll do that,” Koontz assured her. “But what about the letter? We don’t got a lot of time here, so we’d love to learn the kid’s name sooner versus later. Sure the writing doesn’t ring any bells?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” She handed the note back to Mike apologetically. “I just have too many students….”
“You keep it,” Mike told her. “It’s just a copy and some night when you’re going through assignments, who knows. Maybe some phrase will catch your eye, or maybe you’ll hear talk of something in the school halls. You never know.”
“You think this kid, this Vee, is serious?”
Mike shrugged. “You have more experience with these kids than we do. You tell us.”
Mrs. Kennedy hesitated for a moment, then she simply looked sad. “This part here, ‘I gotta get through these halls and they be long and hard.’ I’ve seen that. A child goes into gym class, then emerges beaten within an inch of his life. No one says anything, but you know he was just initiated into a gang. Suddenly the boy won’t talk to his best friend anymore. He moves his seat to the back of the class. He hangs out with only the upperclassmen. It’s as if he grew up overnight. And now, every time I walk by his desk, I get the stare. The flat, hard stare. I hate that look more than anything. The angry expressions, the hurt gaze, those are real emotions of a real child. But that stare, that cold, flat stare…those are the eyes of a person who no longer feels he has choices. They’ve just been made for him and now he’s simply going through the motions.
“These kids do such unbelievable things to one another. It hurts me more that we let them.”
“Well, we’re not going to let this one do anything,” Koontz assured her. “We’re going to lock this one up and throw away the key.”
Mrs. Kennedy looked up at him curiously. “And what do you think that will accomplish?”
“It’ll get him off the street, that’s what!”
“Detective, you have read this letter, but you are not listening. This child isn’t angry because he was born that way. He is angry because we made him that way. And we’re still making them that way. Half of my class could be Vee. And half of next year’s class and half of the class after that. I’ve been here five years, Detective, and the only thing I know for certain is that we are failing these children. You want to make a difference, work on that.”
Koontz took a step back, affronted by the attack. Mike immediately placed a hand on his partner’s arm, subtly turning him to the door. Koontz hated being lectured and hated even more to feel like the bad guy.
“One last question,” Mike said quickly, curiously.
“Suppose this kid is angry enough to do what he writes. What do you recommend that we do? We can’t keep him running around loose, and I for one would prefer not to be in a shoot-out with a child.”
Mrs. Kennedy frowned. She looked down at the letter again. “The fact that he wrote a letter is encouraging,” she mused out loud. “Shows a desire to communicate, to talk about what he’s going through. It’s a shame that his brother is dead. A lot of these children look up to their older siblings. Then again, it sounds as if he cares about his mother. Maybe if you can find her, she can speak to him. I hate to think of a thirteen-year-old as a lost cause, particularly one who wrote such a moving letter.”
Koontz bristled again. “Moving letter? The kid threatened cops! Lady, maybe you should send a little bit of that compassion our way. We’re the ones with our lives on the line.”
Mrs. Kennedy returned his look levelly. “I do care about you, Detective. But you chose your path in life. This boy didn’t, and that’s the difference.”
“Freaking liberals,” Koontz said. “Freaking, feminist, Nazi liberals.” They weren’t even back in the car yet, and he’d worked himself into a frenzy. “Kids aren’t born angry. Kids are made angry. I’ll tell you what we have to show for that line of thinking—the crime wave of the eighties and nineties. All these murderers walking free because they were abused, or orphaned, or looked at the wrong way. Poor little them, forced by society to do bad things. So let’s turn them back out on the street because those pathetic, tormented souls can’t possibly be what’s causing all the violence in the news. I mean, heaven forbid!”
“You don’t really think people are born bad,” Mike said, looking around again at the gathering gloom of the parking lot, holding his gun closer to his side.
“I don’t think it matters. Who cares what makes people violent. Truth is, we still don’t know how to fix them. The courts send them to the hospital, the hospital turns them loose, and we get to pick them up again. Court sends them to rehab, rehab turns them loose, and we get to pick them up again. Seems to me there’s a theme.”
“So we lock them up and throw away the key?”
“Read the news,” Koontz said seriously, also giving the parking lot a last once-over before crawling into the car.
“I know you think I’m illiterate, but I follow the papers, my man. And all of them are talking about how violent crime is finally going down for the first time in years. You wanna know why? Because we’ve gotten tougher about sentencing and we’ve expanded the prisons. All the articles agree—rehab sounds nice, but prison works.”
“Even for thirteen-year-olds?”
“People don’t change, Mike. What the hell do you think went so wrong with you and Sandy?”
“Koontz,” Mike said seriously, “I could kill you for that.”
“Yeah, but you won’t. Because you know me, man, and you know I’m simply saying the truth. People like to pretend there are no barriers in life. Blacks can marry whites, rich can marry poor, a backwater kid can become president of the United States. Hell, no. We are born into our worlds. We understand our world. We cross into someone else’s world, we get burned. There is no such thing as a classless society. Just look at Alexandria.”
“You are a sick, cynical bastard, Koontz.”
“Yep, and you never try to change me, which goes back to my first point. Guys let each other be, the way nature intended. It’s women, forever trying to ‘fix things,’ who mess things up.”
“Maybe guys just settle, while women are trying to make life better.”
“Was life better with Sandy?”
“Not your business, Koontz.”
Rusty smiled. “I think that’s answer enough.”
They didn’t get back to the station until after six and that was late enough to call it a day. Mike was still sore with Koontz and not much into talking anyway. Sometimes his partner’s view of the world—and Mike’s marriage—made him angry. Particularly when it contained a kernel of truth.
They determined they’d try the high school first thing in the morning. Koontz grumbled that the whole thing was probably a hoax anyway, but Mike didn’t think his heart was in it.
Mike offered to stay late to write up their report. From where he was standing, he could see down the hall, where the light was still burning in Sandra’s office. Long first day for the new chief of police. He wondered if she was rubbing the back of her neck yet. He wondered if seeing him for the first time in four years had been as hard for her as it had been for him. She’d been cool during their meeting, but then Sandra would appear cool having dinner with the Devil outside the Pearly Gates. It was part of her charm.
Of course, it also made it doubly fun to melt her into hot and bothered. Damn, he missed that.
&n
bsp; Did she ever think of those times? Did she have any happy memories of their marriage? He realized he didn’t know, and that left him feeling a little sad.
“Meet here at seven tomorrow?” Koontz wanted to know.
“Sure. Drive home safe.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t get misty—”
Koontz didn’t get a chance to finish. Shouting erupted down the hall. Mike could only pick out the words shots, shots, before Weasel came tearing into the office space, his eyes wild.
“Oh, my God!” Weasel yelled. “Someone’s opened fire in the east side. Officers down, officers down!”
“Vee,” Koontz spit out, “I knew it!”
Then they were all running down the halls, and Mike was hoping desperately that his partner was wrong. Don’t let it be Vee. Alexandria wasn’t ready for such a crisis. And neither, he feared, was Sandy.
Chapter 4
In the locker room, patrol officers and narcotic detectives suited up and locked down. Weasel was still yelling details from the main radio. Shots exchanged. Patrol 32 down. Emergency vehicles en route. Backup vehicles en route. Move, move, move. Officers under fire was everyone’s business in Alexandria.
Farther down the hall, Mike could hear a phone ringing violently, then a short burst of female cursing. Sandra, he thought, and unconsciously moved faster.
“Shotgun?” barked Rusty.
“Got it.”
“Vest?”
“Still on. Yours?”
“Ditto. Come on. Move your butt, Rawlins, or we’ll miss the party.”
“Hang on.” Rushing out of the locker room with a Remington 12-gauge shotgun in his hand, Mike made an unexpected left-hand turn—toward Sandy’s office.
Rusty saw the motion and drew up short. “No,” he said forcibly.
“Can’t let the chief enter a violent area alone,” Mike countered reasonably.
“Like hell. If she wants to prove she’s tough, let her. Dammit, Mike. I’m your partner.”
There was a lot of emphasis on the last word, and it made them both tense. The conversation of this afternoon had been leading up to this. Hell, Mike and Sandra’s marriage had been all about this. Rusty wanted to come first. Rusty believed the brotherhood of cops should always come first. And Sandy, crazy her, had thought that a wife should be more important than a partner.