by John Luciew
“So what?” Kevin shrugged. “So I give that old man a bump on ’is head? Big deal. Don’t care where I be goin.’ The girls, they be findin’ me no matter where I at, you know.”
“Yeah, well, maybe the big boys be finding you, instead. Maybe, we put you in the maximum secure with the real bad asses. Maybe you be wearin’ your pants backward, so the fly’s in the back, ya hear me?”
“Yeah, right. For all yo’ talk, this still be kiddie land,” Kevin said, trying on an insecure smile. “I know all ‘bout kiddie court and kiddie jail, man. You be tryin’ to scare me with nuthin’. You ain’t got nuthin’.”
“All I’m tryin’ to do is help you,” Jarvis said, trying to sound genuine but coming off tired and rehearsed. He’d used the same line on two-dozen other hard cases that day.
“What can you tell me ‘bout the hit at that fancy house in Squirrel Hill last week? What can you tell me ‘bout that? Maybe someone be tryin’ to impress some society girl up in Squirrel Hill?”
“You crazy,” Kevin scoffed, attempting a laugh that wouldn’t come. “That whole thing that’s been on the news ‘n shit? Ain’t none of it sound right. That weren’t no kids from the ‘hood, tell you that much. They had a key, sounds like. They beat the alarm, too. And den they don’t take nuthin’ from that big ole house? I mean, wha’s up wit that?”
Jarvis nodded.
“Whoever that was that did it, they had to know dem people,” Kevin said. “They know’d dem, or they know’d someone who know’d dem. Whoever it was, they didn’t want to hurt dem old people, neither. And they didn’t want to take nuthin’. They be there to scare ‘em, that’s all. They just wanted to be scarin’ ‘em over sumpin’. That’s what I be thinkin’.”
Jarvis was impressed. It’s exactly what he thought, too. But for some reason, no one else could see it. Just him and Kevin Bacon, some horny kid from the ‘hood named after a whitebread actor. But he was right on. The kids had to have a connection to the Galeskos.
“You know, Kevin Bacon, you ain’t as dumb as you look,” Jarvis said, adding a series of abbreviated chuckles. Jarvis felt suddenly giddy, knowing he was about to go home. “That’s all I got for you my man. You done told me what I wanted to hear. You couldn’t tell me a damn thing I can use, but you sure as hell made some sense.”
“So what about my case?” The boy wasn’t so tired and disinterested now.
“Well, my man, you bumped that guy on his head pretty good,” Jarvis said, his tone turning grave. “And you banged his daughter. That’s enough to piss off any guy. Piss him off real good, in fact. Now, he can’t get you for screwin’ his daughter cause you’re fourteen. You’d be doin’ state time if that were a crime. But he sure as hell can get you for boppin’ his noggin. He ain’t gonna let that go, and the judge is gonna hafta do sumpthin.”
“Damn, man.” Kevin folded his arms over the edge of Jarvis’ desk and buried his head.
“Looks like you gonna be goin’ campin’ upstate, so to speak.” Jarvis chuckled again. “You hear what I’m sayin’? You probably be goin’ to the boot camp. They’ll do you a favor and cut off all that stupid, ugly-ass blond hair a yours. And do me a personal favor, will ya? When those holes in your face grow in, don’t go stickin’ more metal back in there, like some pinhead or something. You’re a smart kid. Don’t make yourself look stupid.”
“Awww, whatever, man,” Kevin muttered, raising his head for a second, and then sinking back into the cradle of his arms.
“Dismissed,” Jarvis mocked. “You better get used to salutin’ and all that other military stuff. Col. Hogan -- I’m sure you hearda him -- he’s real big on that.”
Jarvis signaled for the guard and laughed the boy out of the room. He patted the pages of the boy’s case file together, and then stacked it with the others. He swiveled around to his computer and touched the mouse button. The screen-saver, a picture of an open prairie in the summertime with wildflowers in full bloom, disappeared, and he checked his e-mail one last time. Still Nothing. Zip. Shit. Dick.
No one had a thing on the Galesko case. And they weren’t going to get anything anytime soon, either, Jarvis thought. This case was different. It didn’t make sense. None of it added up. Most kids, they shit where they ate, Jarvis knew. They didn’t go places they didn’t know anything about. The Kevin Bacon kid was right. It wasn’t your typical juvenile crime. It was planned. It was organized. They had their point of entry worked out in advance. Once they got in, they tried to make it look wild and random, like a bunch of kids whooping it up and trashing the place. But it wasn’t random. The Galeskos were the targets. But why?
Jarvis wasn’t about to ask Commissioner Galesko which of the county club brats he knew might have wanted to scare the shit out of him and Patty. No sir. He’d stay the hell out of that one. Besides, he had the governor to prepare for. All those uniformed cadets lined up at the boot camp would make a damn fine visual. That’s what the governor’s people had said. There’d be plenty of television cameras, too. All Jarvis had to do was make sure Hogan and his piss-poor attitude didn’t fuck things up. He’d see to that.
But all of it would wait until tomorrow. It was after seven o’clock on a Monday, the first day of what was sure to be a long, grueling week. And it was against Jarvis’ principles as a human being with a life expectancy of seventy-five years, or whatever it was these days, to work past five o’clock. He gave the county the hours between 7:30 AM. and 5 P.M., five days out of every week. But the rest was his. Life was too damn short. Tonight was a rare exception, and he was about to put an end to it.
Jarvis forced his six-foot, 270-pound frame from the chair. His knees popped, and he limped for the first couple of steps. He collected his blue suit jacket from a metal hook and swung it over his broad back, his hands searching for the armholes. He shut the light, slipped out of his office and locked the door behind him.
As he walked down the empty halls, his shoes clicking on the tile floor, he could see the kids through skinny vertical windows of locked doors. The detention center had eight separate residence wings, called pods, each housing about 20 juveniles. The occupants were referred to as “residents,” never inmates. In about an hour, every kid in the place would be locked down in small rooms with a pillow, a blanket and his thoughts. For now, there was still life on the pods. Staffers manned the main desks of each unit, and kids watched a television tuned to some nature show on the Discovery Channel. They sat in rows of chairs bolted to the floor, an empty space between each kid, and stared at TVs suspended from the ceiling. A few others sat at tables, also bolted to the floor, and pondered games of chess or checkers. A couple wrote a letters on yellow legal tablets, using pencils that would have to be returned to the main desk. Another kid stood watching a clock, timing whoever was in the pod’s single shower. Every kid got four minutes to shower, not a second more. And being the shower-timer was a plumb assignment, a chance to boss others around. The kid watching the clock loudly called out the time at thirty-second intervals. When everything else was taken away, small things were a big deal.
Still, Jarvis always marveled at the quiet. All these kids, some of whom had been out on the streets raising hell less than twenty-four hours before, in this one building watching the goddamn Discovery Channel? All these kids following the rules, taking four-minute showers? It still amazed him.
Most of the kids would stay at the center until a juvenile judge reviewed their case and decided their fate. Some would be released on probation. Others would end up in some treatment center. Many would be headed to the county boot camp, as spaces there opened up. But they all started here, in detention, a place with lots of rules, lots of supervision and plenty of guards weighing 250 pounds.
Every fifty feet or so, Jarvis came to a locked steel door. There were no keys, no keyholes. Just a silver speaker box and a security camera positioned above. Jarvis pressed a button on the speaker and mumbled his name. A staffer in a central control center checked Jarvis’ video image before buzz
ing him through.
Finally, he reached the intake and processing center. A woman muttered an unenthusiastic “hi” from behind a large metal counter.
Jarvis smiled weakly and grumbled something back. The woman buzzed him into a small locker room, just off the larger room. He walked to his locker, speed-dialed the combination and retrieved his overcoat. Then, he walked to a separate bank of smaller lockers and pulled out his county-issue 9 mm. He was issued the gun back when he was a probation officer making all those night visits to kids’ homes in some of the worst sections of the city. He had never fired a single round in anger then and had even less need for it now. But carrying it was habit. And it was security. After twenty-five years of putting away thousands of kids, you never knew who was going to pay a visit.
Jarvis holstered the gun under his jacket and flopped on his trench coat. He felt for the cell phone in his coat pocket, double-checking that he hadn’t forgotten it.
He returned to the intake room, the detention center’s version of check-in at a hotel. Only here, the doorman was a cop or a juvenile probation officer, and the lady behind the counter handed over a pillow, a blanket and a change of standard-issue clothes.
She’d ring up two bellhops -- a pair of male or female guards, depending on the guest’s sex. And in a small private room, one of the guards would pull on latex gloves and probe every orifice and examine every fold of skin, where something, a razor blade or maybe some drugs, could be hiding. Finally, the guest would be shown his room: a claustrophobic space with a tiny metal toilet, a sink and a thin mattress over a concrete slab.
The Ritz it was not.
There were no arriving guests on this Monday evening.
“Slow night,” the woman behind the counter said.
“Not for me,” Jarvis replied. “Night, June.”
He didn’t look back as the woman pressed a buzzer and released him from the last locked door of the River County Detention Center.
It was dark outside, and the cold air hinted at a harsh winter to come. The weather caused Jarvis to think how fast time moved, how short the hours and days really were. Sometimes, it felt as if he’d just taken his first job with the county. The next thing he knew, a quarter century had gone by. Twenty-five years and hundreds and hundreds of kids. Thousands of kids. And what was there to show for it? Just more kids.
He was never one to think he could save them all, turn them all around. He was always more realistic than that. At least the kids made him feel young. Well, they did back when he was working with them on a daily basis, instead of being stuck behind a desk or in meeting after meeting, as he was now. Maybe, it was because the kids always seemed so fresh and stupid, with everything ahead of them. They said whatever came into their heads, and some were so damn funny. All of them seemed to think they had so much time. All the time in the world. All the time to fuck up their lives. All the time to mess up in school. All the time to get into trouble, get sent away or get someone pregnant. None of it fazed them in the least, because there was always more time.
Jarvis hadn’t felt young in a long time. He didn’t look young, either. The detention center’s exterior security cameras monitored him as he favored his left leg while negotiating the cement steps to the street. Then, Peter Jarvis rounded a corner and left the camera’s field of vision.
Those ubiquitous cameras, which had watched over him all day at the center, had no choice but to let him go.
III
There was a convenience store, a newsstand and a donut shop on the street level of the parking garage. Jarvis felt the donut shop’s gravitational pull, but he resisted. The part of him that felt increasingly uncomfortable the tighter his pants became issued a firm no. Instead, he went directly to the steel door leading to a stairwell. The stairwell stank of urine, but it would lead to his black Mercedes, parked in his private space on the first level of the garage.
The gritty sound his shoes made on the concrete echoed in the stairwell as he mounted the steps, grabbing the steel railings on either side to take some of the load off his bad leg.
But as the steel door clicked shut behind him, Jarvis thought he heard something else. Something besides the closing door.
A hiccup, perhaps, or a solitary giggle escaping from the throat of an anxious boy.
He was about to turn and look when he felt his left knee go out from under him. It buckled, and then crumbled.
Jarvis gripped the railings, but it was no good. He didn’t have his elbows locked, and he couldn’t support his full weight. He didn’t have the leverage. Down he went, his bad left knee smashing into the concrete.
He had made it as far as the third step.
Jarvis felt his knee shatter on impact. He moaned in pain and bit his lower lip until he tasted blood. But for the moment, he was stable, positioned as if kneeling. He padded his coat pocket for his cell phone. He couldn’t move, but he could call over to the detention center and get help. That he could do.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his right shoulder. At first, he thought he was having a heart attack. He knew a telltale symptom was pain shooting down the arms. But it wasn’t that. He’d heard the thud an instant before the pain exploded in his shoulder. It had been the sound of wood striking flesh. Someone had hit him, the blow landing square and turning his arm instantly numb. The cell phone skidded away down the steps. With it, went Peter Jarvis’s last chance to stop what was happening. He never even had a chance to go for his gun.
The blows came all at once, fast and furiously. They rained down from all sides, and Jarvis could no longer hold the railing. He plunged face-first to the steps. He laid prone, his good, left arm raised defensively above his head.
But the blows kept coming. And coming. And coming.
From behind Jarvis, two boys beat upon him with nightsticks. They had come at him silently, save for that one little peep. They crept out from the dark space between the door and the wall. Bart Kleppel had struck first, a perfectly placed hit to the back of Jarvis’ left knee. Kip Brown got him on the shoulder from the right. Then the two just wailed away, raising their sticks full over their heads and using both hands to deliver the blows. The nightsticks made soft, hollow-sounding thuds as they struck the man’s body.
Then one of them spoke.
“You leave our boys alone, you hear me fat man?” Bart Kleppel hissed at the fallen man, not even sure if Jarvis was still conscious. “Don’t be callin’ them to your office and messin’ with they heads. Wha’s up with that, Jarvis?”
Jarvis was conscious, and he noted a lisp as Bart’s thick tongue stumbled over his words.
“You think they’s gonna give up their boys to you? No way, man. We done got yo’ fat ass, instead. You ain’t gonna get us. We get you, motherfucker. So you stay outta der faces in that center a yo’s. You hearin’ me?”
The blows continued but Jarvis could no longer feel pain. His body was numb, his flesh so much dead meat thoroughly tenderized. He tried to roll over to get a glimpse of the kids. But a blinding brightness flashed before his eyes. His face felt hot and wet. His left eye and cheek exploded with pain. And he collapsed back to the step. The blinding whiteness consumed him, and everything else faded away.
IV
Kip was the first to notice that Jarvis was unconscious. Out of breath, his heart chugging away, he ceased his pounding. It was then that he got a good look at the man sprawled on the steps. One full side of Jarvis’ face was swollen red, his left eye ballooning shut. Kip felt a wave of sickness, even as Bart continued the beating. The soft, hollow thuds echoed in Kip’s head. He retched, but nothing came.
Finally, he reached for Bart, grabbing the back of the fatter boy’s dark sweatshirt and pulling him off. “Stop it man. He had it. You’re gonna kill the po’ bastard.”
Bart swung around, lifting his nightstick high above his head, this time taking aim at Kip. The fat kid’s eyes were wild. All Kip could do was scream.
Bart blinked rapidly, as if waking from a trance, the
n looked up at his own raised nightstick.
“C’mon, let’s get outta here” Kip said, shoving his nightstick down his right pant leg. Bart mimicked him, and the two scurried out through the metal door, the same way Peter Jarvis had entered.
The boy’s faces were blotched with black grease, and they wore latex gloves. They walked, always they walked, past the newsstand and the donut shop to the far side of the garage. There, on a side street, the blue minivan waited. Kip entered the passenger side, and Bart used the sliding side door.
As the doors opened, the van’s dome light illuminated Butch Brimmer, who had been a large, shadowy shape behind the wheel. He had kept the engine running, as if waiting on someone in the convenience store.
Butch flicked on the van’s headlights and made a left out of the alley. They rolled down Fourth Street, right past the River County Detention Center, the place where Butch had been such an unhappy guest eight months before.
The blue minivan lumbered past the center in a deliberately casual manner. Halogen lights glowed all around the building’s perimeter as an array of security cameras eyed the vehicle. Inside, at the center’s control panel, the van moved from screen to screen as it drove away.
No one paid any attention.
If you enjoyed this sample, please download the full-length, newly updated Second Edition of the thriller ZERO TOLERANCE, available in the Kindle Store for $2.99.
Can You Tolerate The Suspense?
When a kid commits a crime in Pittsburgh, the trouble is just beginning. That’s because the teen-age criminals end up doing time in the River County Reform Camp for Boys. Rehabilitation isn’t what the manipulative colonel running the military-style boot camp has in mind for some. He sees his chance to control one of the most lethal and fearless forces there is -- teen criminals.