Because seventeen years ago, he’d led the riots.
Seventeen years ago, one of his fellow gang members had been gunned down by cops just doing their jobs.
Seventeen years ago, he could have been looking at twenty-five to life.
* CLEVELAND, OHIO, TWO DAYS LATER
“Suicide hotline. This is Shay.” Shay Bassett wheeled her office chair closer to her desk. Tucking the phone under her chin, she shoved aside the steaming cup of java she craved more than air.
“I need help,” a husky voice whispered.
Shay snagged a pencil and began jotting notes about the person in crisis on the other end of the line.
Male.
Teen?
“I’m here to listen. Could you give me a name to call you by?” Something, anything to thread a personal connection through the phone line.
“John, I’m John, and I hurt so much. If I don’t get relief soon, I’ll kill myself.”
His words clamped a corpse-cold fist around her heart. She understood the pain of these callers, too much so, until sometimes she struggled for objectivity.
Shay zoned out everything but the voice and her notes.
Voice stronger, deeper.
Older teen.
Background noise, soft music.
Bedroom or dorm?
She scribbled furiously, her elbow anchoring the community center notepad so the window fan wouldn’t ruffle the pages. “John, have you done anything to harm yourself?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m really glad to hear that.” Still, she didn’t relax back into the creaky old chair in spite of killer exhaustion from pulling a ten-hour shift at the community center’s small health clinic on top of volunteering to man the hotline this evening. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
His breathing grew heavier, faster. “The line for one nine hundred do-me-now is busy, and if I don’t get some phone sex soon, I’m gonna explode.” Laughter echoed in the background, no doubt a bunch of wasted frat boys listening in on speakerphone. “How about you give me some more of those husky tones, baby, so I can—”
“Good-bye, John.” She thumbed the Off button.
What an ass. Not to mention a waste of her precious time and resources. She pitched her pencil onto a stack of HIV awareness brochures.
The small community center in downtown Cleveland was already understaffed and underfunded, at the mercy of fickle government grants and the sporadic largesse of benefactors. Different from bigger free clinics, they targeted their services toward teens. Doctors volunteered when they could, but the place operated primarily on the backs of her skills as a nurse, along with social worker, Angeline, and youth activities director, Eli.
Bouncing a basketball on the cracked tile, Eli spun his chair to face her, his blond dreadlocks fanning along his back. “Another call for a free pizza?”
“A request for phone sex.” She pulled three sugar packets from her desk drawer.
“Ewww.” Angeline leaned her hip against her desk, working a juggling act with her purse, files, and cane.
Only in her fifties, Angeline already suffered from arthritis aggravated by the bitter winters blowing in off Lake Erie. Of course that was Cleveland for you, frigid in the winter and a furnace in the summer.
Forecast for today? Furnace season. The fan sucked muggy night air through the window.
“I apologize for my gender.” Eli kept smacking the ball, the thumping steady as a ticking clock.
“Who said it was a guy?” Shay tapped a sugar packet, then ripped it open.
Angeline jabbed her parrot-head cane toward Shay. “You called the person John.”
“Busted.” She poured the last of the three sugars into the coffee, her supper since she’d missed eating with her dad. No surprise. They canceled more plans than they kept.
Angeline hitched her bag the size of the Grand Canyon onto her shoulder. “Always testing the boundaries, aren’t ya, kiddo?”
Not so much anymore. “Calls like that just piss me off. What if someone in a serious crisis was trying to get through and had to be rerouted? That brief delay, any hint of a rejection, could be enough to push a person over the edge.”
“You’re preaching to the choir here.” Angeline’s cell phone sang with the bluesy tones of “Let’s Get It On.” “Shit. I forgot to call Carl back.”
Eli tied back two dreads to secure the rest of the blond mass. “Apparently we’re in the phone sex business after all.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Angeline stuffed another file into her bag that likely now weighed more than the wiry woman.
“Nice talk. Why don’t I walk you to your car?” He slid the neon yellow purse from her shoulder and hooked it on his own.
“You can escort me out, but Carl’ll kick your lily white ass if you hit on me.”
“If I thought I stood a chance with you . . .”
Shaking her head, Angeline glanced back at Shay. “Make sure the guard walks you all the way to your car.”
“Of course. I even have my trusty can of mace.”
And a handgun.
She wasn’t an idiot. The crime rate in this corner of Cleveland upped daily. Places like L.A. or New York were still considered the primary seats of gang crime. Money and protection followed that paradigm, which sent emergent gangs looking for new—unexpected—feeding grounds. Like Cleveland.
Hopefully, her testimony at the congressional hearing next week would help bring about increased awareness, help, and most of all funds.
“Tell Carl I said hello.” With a final wave, Shay turned her attention to the stack of medical charts of teenage girls who’d received HPV vaccines. At least she had all evening to catch up—a plus side to having no social life.
She sipped her now lukewarm coffee.
The phone jangled by her elbow, startling her.
She snagged the cordless receiver. “Suicide hotline. This is Shay.”
“I’m scared.”
Something in that young male voice made her sit up straighter, her fingers playing along the desk for her pencil.
Boy.
Local accent.
Definitely teen.
Frightened as hell.
Too many heartbreaking hours volunteering told her this kid didn’t want phone sex or a pizza.
“I’m sorry you’re afraid, but I’m glad you called.” She waited for a heartbeat, not that long, given her jackhammer pulse rate, but enough for the boy to speak. When he didn’t, she continued, “I want to help. Could you give me a name to call you by?”
“No name. I’m nobody.”
His words echoed with a hollow finality.
“You called this line.” She kept her voice even. “That’s a good and brave thing you did.”
“You’re wrong. I’m not brave at all. I’m going to die, but I don’t want it to hurt. That makes me a total pussy.”
No pain?
No cutting or shooting.
“Have you taken anything?” Alcohol? Drugs? Poison? Last month a pregnant caller swallowed drain cleaner.
“Just my meds for the day.”
On medication.
Illness?
Physical or psych?
“So you have a regular doctor?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
She knew when to back off in order to keep the person chatting. “What would you like to discuss?”
“Nothing,” his voice grew more agitated, angry even, as it cracked an octave. “This is stupid. I shouldn’t have called.”
She rushed to speak before he could hang up, “Why are you scared?”
Voice changing.
14-15 years old?
“I told you already. I’m scared of the pain. It hurts if I live, and it’s gonna hurt to die. I’m fucked no matter what.”
She tried to keep professional distance during these calls, but sometimes somebody said something that just reached back more than a decade to the old Shay. The new Shay, however, sh
uttled old Shay to the time-out corner of her brain.
“You called this number, so somewhere inside, you must believe there’s a third option.”
The phone echoed back at her with nothing more than labored breathing and the faint whine of a police siren.
“Who or what makes you hurt?”
Still no answer.
“Hello?”
“Good-bye.”
The line went dead.
“No! No, no, no, damn it.” She thumbed the Off button once. Twice. Three freaking frustrated times before slamming the phone against the battered gunmetal gray desk.
She sucked in humid hot-as-hell air to haul back her professionalism. She had to finish her notes in case the boy called again. Please, God, she hoped he would call, and that he wasn’t already as dead as the phone line.
Shay glanced at her watch. A four-minute conversation. Would that kid be alive to see the next hour?
She scrubbed her hand over her gritty eyes until the folder holding the rough draft of her upcoming congressional report came back into focus. It was a good thing after all that her dinner plans fell through. She was in no shape to exchange trivial chitchat with her father, who she barely knew and who knew even less about her. The report would make for better company anyway.
Each cup of coffee bolstered her to keep plugging away on fine-tuning her stats and wording. Maybe she really could find a ray of hope through political channels rather than picking away one shift at a time. She just had to hang on until next week for her congressional testimony at Case Western Reserve University.
The old Shay ditched the time-out corner to remind her that even one day was an eternity when every sixteen minutes someone succeeded in committing suicide. Thinking of how many people that could be by next week . . . The math made her nauseous.
Flipping to the next page, she spun her watch strap around and around over the faded scar on her wrist that still managed to throb with a phantom pain even after seventeen years.
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