but they all told the same tale. He was watching and they were afraid of him.
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