by Lee Child
“Just get dressed, wiseass,” Ma says. “We’re going down to the courthouse.”
So there I am, hungover, my face sore as hell from the way Ma pressed her thumbs into the bruises, and I’m aching for sleep. “The courthouse?” I say. “I told you I didn’t do anything. They dropped the charges, I told you.”
I hate the way my heart is starting to pound at the mention of the courthouse. And the worst part is I know if it were Chip, he wouldn’t even blink. Even when he got sentenced to six months a couple years ago, he just stood there with his hands in his pockets, smiling. All he’d needed was a beer, and he would have looked like he was hanging out in the courtyard with his friends. Like it was a summer day, music blasting, nothing special going on.
“Damn right, you didn’t do anything; that’s the point,” Ma says. She’s going through my drawers by then, firing clean socks and underwear at me. “They messed with the wrong kid this time, Cody. The wrong family. That trashy Monahan and his buddies, they’re not going to get away with it. Now get yourself dressed and looking respectable.”
Ma’s eyes look so angry that for a moment I think she’s planning for us to go downtown and kick the shit out of those cops ourselves. Or maybe she’s got a gun concealed under her aide uniform. But then that word “respectable” sinks in; and I understand. She intends to beat them at their own game. File a few charges of our own—police brutality, false arrest, or just generally being assholes—anything that will stick.
A couple days later, Ma’s got the night off, and she makes me go to the grocery store with her so I can carry the bags. Says her back is killing her from work. So what else is new? Anyway, when we get home, Chip is sitting in our living room working on a can of malt. From the pile of empties on the coffee table, it looks like he’s been there for a while. Course, right away Ma knows what’s going on.
“I hope you don’t think you can come running back here every time you and Allison have an argument,” she says. She’s putting away the food by then, slamming the cans and bottles around the way she always does when Chip is home.
“It’s a little more than an argument this time, Ma,” Chip says, after finishing off his malt in one long swig. “It’s over. Allison and I are done.”
Ma stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “And what about your son?” she asks. “Is he done, too?”
Chip stares at the television set where a tennis match is on. I know he’s not watching it, because Chip hates tennis. “Hey, what can I tell you?” he says. “Girl’s a total bitch.”
For the rest of the night, none of us says much. Ma makes stuffed pork chops with mashed potatoes. But when it’s time to eat, Chip says he isn’t hungry; maybe he’ll have some later. So there we are in the kitchen, Ma and me, chewing on our pork chops in total silence. I can tell Ma’s thinking about the whole thing with Allison and the baby, probably wondering if Chip is really home for good this time. And me, I’m thinking that I’m supposed to meet Mike O‘Toole and a couple of other kids in about fifteen minutes, and I’m wondering if O’Toole has any weed.
Then all of a sudden Chip yells from the living room. “I heard about those charges you filed against Monahan down at the courthouse,” he says. “Big mistake.”
“The world’s leading expert on mistakes speaks,” Ma says, scraping the bones from her dinner into the garbage. She pauses a minute, her plate in hand, waiting for Chip to answer back. When he doesn’t, she drifts toward the doorway. “And what was I supposed to do? Let those assholes kick the crap out of your brother—for something he didn’t even do? You got to stand up for your own in this world, Chip. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
By then, I’m wishing I didn’t eat those pork chops. I’m starting to feel sort of queasy and sick to my stomach. All I know is, if I get the chance, I’m gone. Then, Ma and Chip can sit around and talk about Monahan all night if they want to. But before I can get my Nikes on, Chip speaks up again. “Well, maybe so, Ma. But if you stand up for your own with the cops, your own are going to pay. I’d drop it if I were you.”
So even though I don’t want to get involved, I hobble in from the kitchen, one sneaker on, the other in my hand. “That’s what I told her,” I say. “But do you think she’d listen?”
“Shut up, Cody. You stay out of this,” Ma snaps. Like this is just some argument she’s having with Chip. Like I’m not the kid who’s going to have to go out on the street and live with it.
But there’s no winning, so I put my other sneaker on and get out of there.
I’m already having one of the shittiest days of my life when I get to O’Toole’s. Then he pulls out this newspaper, obituary page.
“Read it,” he says, sitting beside me on his bed. After I scan it real quick and see that no one under the age of sixty-one is listed, I hand it back to him.
“Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
That’s when he points out the tiny obit in the corner: “Felipe Reyes, dead of a heart attack at age 63.”
“Coincidence,” I say, still trying to give that paper back. “You know how many Ricans out there are named Reyes?”
But then O’Toole makes me read the whole piece, including the paragraph that mentions that he had been the victim of a street attack a week earlier, and that no one had been arrested for it.
“So the guy died, what’s it to me?” I say. “It’s not like he was my uncle or something. Besides, read it. The old man died of natural causes. A heart attack. Had nothing to do with what happened on the street.”
But when O’Toole looks at me, it’s obvious that whatever the obit says, we know why the guy died. We saw it in his eyes that afternoon on the street.
That night I got so messed up that when I came home I didn’t even notice that Chip was gone. Probably back with the girl he was calling a total bitch a few hours before. Anyway, I was glad to find myself alone. Before my mother got up, I went and cut Felipe Reyes’s obituary out of the paper. There was no picture, but all the time I’m cutting, it’s like I’m seeing that face. Feeling those eyes on me, looking at me like he thinks I can save him. And like some psycho, I’m talking back to a dead man.
“What do you want from me, man? What the fuck was I supposed to do?” After I had read the clipping over three or four more times, I stashed it in a cigar box where I hid my pipe and rolling papers.
The hearing against Monahan was pretty much hell—dressing up in my Confirmation clothes, high-water pants and a sports jacket that Chip used to wear to court, and trying not to look at Monahan. To make it worse, half the courtroom was packed with his relatives, the other half with cops. But that was okay. I didn’t need too many seats for my supporters. All I had was Ma—that’s it. Oh yeah, don’t forget Allison and the baby who squalled his effin head off until the judge had to ask them to leave. So that leaves me with Ma all dressed up in her polyester dress, fake gold jewelry, hair blown into some TV-lady style, trying to look like she’s someone else. Trying to look like she hasn’t spent half her life on welfare, the other half wiping people’s asses. Chip said he would have come, but he was still on probation—why aggravate them?
Then, when I turn around, who do I see but my old English teacher sitting a few rows back. And I’m thinking, what the fuck? But then, Mr. Boyle isn’t your average teacher. For one thing, the guy’s got to be about a hundred years old. At least seventy. To make it worse, he’s half blind, and so deaf that he was pretty much in his own world up there in front of the class. Going on about some effin Shakespeare play like it’s the most important thing in the world. Like it’s real or something. I swear, sometimes the poor old geezer gets so worked up about these plays, that he goes all misty-eyed right there in the classroom. Makes a real ass out of himself.
But to tell you the truth, some of those plays aren’t bad—once you get past the way they talked back then. For a while, I really got into some of that stuff. When no one was around, I’d sit up in my room reading them to myse
lf—sometimes out loud like Mr. Boyle did. It was weird—like this guy Shakespeare, who died about a thousand years ago, was writing about exactly what was happening to me. Like he understood me better than my own mother. Better than O’Toole even.
I even stayed after class to talk to Mr. Boyle a couple times when I had nothing better to do. I’d ask him what a certain line meant or something. Of course, the poor old geezer was thrilled; it was probably the first time in twenty years that someone was actually interested. But then Mr. Boyle started getting weird. He’d look at me with those watery blue eyes of his and talk about my “potential.” Why wasn’t I doing better in school? he’d ask. Had I started to think about college? That kind of crap. So I figured this guy is totally in the dark. After that, I stopped dropping in on him; didn’t even show up for my final. And now when I pick up one of those plays I used to like, it’s like they’re written in Greek for all the sense they make.
To tell you the truth, I can’t even believe Mr. Boyle still remembers me, or that he’d bother to come out to my hearing. I know I should go over and say something to him—thank him for coming, shit like that. But when I look in those watery blue eyes of his, I suddenly feel like I’m going to do something stupid. Like I’m going to break down and bawl or something. So instead, I jam my hands in my pocket and turn away—just like Chip would do.
As far as O’Toole and Dawson were concerned—the other “victims” —they weren’t going near the place. Even if my lawyer called them, they swore they’d lie. The night before the trial, Ryan cornered me in the courtyard. “You know what you’re going to be if you go through with this?” he said. “A marked man. Everything you do, the cops are going to be on your ass. Everywhere you go.” Like I needed to hear that shit, right?
Still, there was that one moment when the whole thing felt pretty good. The moment when the judge pronounced the word “guilty.” Telling the whole world that Monahan was the criminal. The loser.
The scum. Not me. The shock that crossed his face, and the way the relatives all kind of gasped at once was almost worth the whole thing. I didn’t even care that the sentence was so light it was a joke. All he got was a two-week suspension, and six months office duty. And since the suspension was with pay, it pretty much added up to a couple of extra weeks of vacation.
Of course, Ma was pissed as hell. “You call that justice?” she ranted to her buddies in the project. As if any of them knew the first thing about justice. But me—I was satisfied. No matter how light the sentence, nothing could take back the word that the judge had pronounced for all to hear. Guilty.
At first, it looked like my brother and Dawson and all the other kids in the project were wrong. No cops came out of the woodwork to make my life a living hell like they had predicted. At least, not any more than usual. But I have to admit one thing: until the trial, I never actually noticed how many of them there were in the world. I mean, they’re everywhere. Outside the school, cruising the mall, in front of me on the street, behind me in my mother’s car. They stopped at the same places I went for pizza, talked to girls Chip knew. Unconsciously, they touched their guns right in the middle of an ordinary conversation, as if to remind themselves they were there. And at home in the Heights, only the cockroaches outnumbered them.
When I asked O’Toole if he thought the city had added to the police force or what, he told me I better stop smoking so much weed—I was getting paranoid. I guess it’s pretty bad when a kid whose nickname is “Chimney” tells you you’re smoking too much.
Anyway, it was several months after Monahan went back on active duty that things began to happen. Maybe it was those lonely hours driving around in the cruiser, or the assholes that got away, or just all the people who hated him. Or maybe he had just been laying low those months. Kind of like Chip does when he’s on probation. Laying low. Biding his time. The first time I knew something was wrong, I was at a party.
It started off as a typical Saturday night. We’re all in this girl’s house, having a few brews when all of a sudden the cops show up. Three cruisers, like it’s some kind of raid or something. And the thing is, they’re acting like storm troopers. Tearing up this girl’s mother’s apartment like she’s some major dealer. For a minute, I thought maybe she was—like we’re all about to get busted for possession over this stupid girl’s mother.
But then out of nowhere I hear one of them saying, “Are you Cody Moran?” And, “Are you gonna tell us who Moran is or what?” Of course, none of my buddies are about to give me away, but some asshole who was in my home room in seventh grade decides to play the big man; he points me out. That’s him over there.
Well, the next thing I know this fat fuck grabs me off the couch, lifts me right up by the shirt, and says, “So you’re Moran, are you?” And the whole room goes dead silent, like everyone’s wondering if this guy is going to kick my head in right then and there or give me time to think about it. But he just tosses me back onto the couch like garbage.
“I just wanted to know what you looked like,” he says. And all the cops laugh like it’s a huge joke. Of course, I’m scanning their faces for Monahan. He’s easy to spot, with his sharp nose and those flinty eyes, but he’s not there. Only later did I see him outside in the cruiser. Just waiting, maybe humming a little song. When I walked by, he waved at me kind of cute like a girl would. See ya.
All right, so I admit I’m pretty freaked. I run all the way to Chip’s house, heart banging like a fool, and when I get there, my brother’s not even home. Instead, Allison comes to the door. It’s obvious she’s been crying—like she does at least half the time. So there I am, half the city police force on my ass, and I’m listening to this girl whining about what a jerk my brother was. As if I didn’t know. The last thing she says is that if I see Chip, I can tell him not to bother coming home; then she practically slams the door in my face.
When I hit the street again, I see a cop car parked less than a block away. But I’m determined to walk real slow, like I’m not worried about a thing. By the time I get home, I’ve decided I’m not telling Chip anyway. What can he possibly do but make matters worse for me, and probably end up back in jail himself? And I’m sure not about to tell my mother. The way I see it, if the woman stands up for me any more, she’ll probably get me killed. No, this is my problem now. There’s no one who can help me with it. My only hope is that Monahan is satisfied that he ruined our party, shook me up a little, and that will be the end of it.
But that was before I knew Monahan. I mean really knew him. Not that I actually saw the guy much after that party. But I didn’t need to see him. I knew he was around. Lurking just outside the Heights in his cruiser, waiting for me to screw up. Though he never showed his face, he never let me forget he was there. He was there when his buddies followed us one night when we went out in Chad Baldini’s car, there when every single one of our parties got busted, there that afternoon when a bunch of cops parked their cruisers by the basketball court and just sat there watching us shoot around. Laughing, smoking butts, and flicking them on the asphalt, closer and closer to us.
Though I hadn’t seen Monahan since the night he’d parked his cruiser outside that party, Remembered exactly what he looked like. I knew that pointed chipmunk face; the irises of his eyes were like small gray pebbles. A real flat color, like there was no life in them—nothing.
And I was ready for him, too. The very next day, I went to Chip, and asked him to get me a gun. At first, my brother laughed at me like he always did. “What the fuck would you do with a gun—besides shoot your own foot off.” But then he turned serious. “Harm one hair on a cop’s head, Cody, and you know what’s gonna happen to you?”
“Who said anything about going after a cop?” I said. “I’m talking self-defense here.”
“You kill a cop, it ain’t gonna matter what you’re defending; they’ll hang your balls out to dry,” Chip said.
But the very next week, he showed up with an old .357 Magnum. I didn’t even ask where he got it.
“Emergency use only, right bro?” he said, and I nodded. After he was gone, I took the clipping out of my dope box, wrapped them both in a T-shirt, and put the Nike box in the back of my closet.
Meanwhile, Monahan kept coming at me. I have to admit it wasn’t too hard to bust me for something back in those days. In fact, it was almost like a game I was playing. Or maybe I was just trying to feel for the edges of this thing I had gotten myself into, seeing how far he would go. Every night I went home and checked on my gun, made sure it was still there in the back of the closet. In the span of about a year, I got myself arrested for an OUI, illegal possession of pharmaceuticals, and receiving stolen property. And those were only the highlights.
Each time they threw me into lockup, they would taunt me. “Make sure you treat this one real special now, boys. We wouldn’t want him to break a nail or anything. Might haul us into court on police brutality.” Eventually, I just gave it back to them. “That’s right,” I’d yell. “My lawyer expects me to be treated real nice while I’m here.” I knew I was only making things worse, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. And besides, what was I going to do—break down and bawl like some little kid?
I spent so much time in juvey that sometimes when I woke up in my own bedroom, it was so quiet I thought I was going to explode. I can’t explain it, but it was like I was just waiting for what was going to happen next. Between the deadly quiet and Ma’s lectures, I’d almost rather be anywhere than home.
“Go ahead,” she’d say, filling the doorway of my room in her white uniform. “Give them another reason to arrest you, Cody. You’re only proving they’re right, you know. Go ahead.” She pushed her chin in my direction the way kids do when they’re challenging you to a fight.