with a nasty concussion, even without all those other variables—
“Stop,” Arthur mumbled, and I took the van half into another skid, bleeding momentum until we jolted to a halt between the three police vehicles.
Fuck.
If I was fast, I could probably disappear—slip to the side, roll under one of the cop cars. But I was one hundred percent sure Sikorsky had seen me driving.
There was no crime here. We were victims. Victims. Right?
Officers leapt out behind open doors, aiming handguns, yelling, screaming so they overlapped each other with no clear meaning. Arthur immediately lowered the window and thrust his hands out, yelling back about children, there were children here.
A jumble of chaos followed. Even if I couldn’t take advantage of it to escape, once out of the van, I was close enough to the edge of the road that I used the bedlam to cover me as I kicked both my sidearm and my long knife into a sewer before straightening with my hands raised.
Ordinarily I would have winced over willfully damaging my Colt. Today, right now, it barely registered.
The police swarmed us and patted us down. Pilar was carrying legally, though her gun did make the cops jump and yell and keep the business ends of their service weapons on us for an unsettlingly long time. Sikorsky patted me down more roughly than necessary, sneering, his breath hot on my face.
I clenched my teeth and let him paw at me. We had to get through this, get out of here, find Tabitha …
Elisa was pale and shaking, but she was also trying to speak reasonably to the police. The other three kids were in hysterics. Sikorsky’s partner kept trying to interview them, but all she was getting was that there had been a bomb in their house, which everybody already knew.
Down the block, flames leapt merrily from the remains of the Rosales yard. The blaze had begun spreading to the lots next door, and neighbors wailed and cried and ran and milled on the street. Fire sirens wailed closer.
“Where’s the youngest hooligan?” Sikorsky demanded, swiveling his head across us. “The girl. Where is she?”
Apprehension somersaulted into my throat, but Diego answered without missing a beat. “At her friend’s,” he said immediately, at the same time Arthur said, “Friend’s house.”
They glanced at each other.
“What friend?” Sikorsky was poised with his pen over his pad.
Diego shook his head. “No. We’ll go. My children just lost their home. I will not stand for them being subject to any more of your harassment.”
Sikorsky and his partner both stopped dead. Sikorsky began to swell like a reddening balloon.
Diego’s face flickered in fearful recognition. “Please,” he backtracked. “I didn’t mean—”
“Are you accusing an officer of the law, sir?” the partner demanded.
Diego tried to raise his hands in a gesture of surrender, but she got in his face and shoved him in the chest, and Roy broke ranks to surge forward yelling. His twin and Elisa both tried to grab at him, but not fast enough to stop two of the uniforms from pushing in and shoving Roy against the side of the van.
Diego dove to try to put himself between the cops and his son.
I wanted to scream at him—if we wanted to run we should have run. The heavy inevitability of police meant we knew exactly how stupid it was to challenge them, and now all I could do, the only thing I could do, was keep my hands in the fucking air and my eyes in all directions to make sure none of the cops went for their guns again. I flashed on nightmare images of trigger-happy officers gunning down Diego or Arthur—of course, Arthur had tried to lunge forward too, with Pilar only just holding him back, because apparently it was a paternal axiom to be stupid when a cop went at one of your sons.
The scuffle lasted less than thirty brutal seconds. And ended exactly as predicted, with the younger three kids backed against the van crying, Elisa trying to argue loudly and fruitlessly, and Diego facedown on the hood with Sikorsky cuffing his wrists.
“That’s it, Rosales. You are under arrest.”
The kids screamed at him. I thought I heard something about due process from Juwon. But Sikorsky cut it all off by giving Diego’s head a vicious shove.
His face hit metal hard. The kids went as silent as if their throats had been cut.
Down the street, the fire trucks had arrived. Firefighters unreeled hose and barked orders. Neighbors moaned and cried. A