They heard gunshots every Saturday night and had seen their friends die early deaths. He took his finger off the trigger and raced after the boy.
As the curly-headed, café-au-lait-colored kid ran, he kept pulling up his jeans, which he’d been wearing down around his hips. The shoelaces on his Air Jordans were untied, causing him to trip and lose his balance.
Which was how Ben caught up to him. It was a great open-field tackle against a zigzagging opponent. The kid howled like a banshee, and Ben nearly broke the boy’s wrist getting him to drop the bloodstained knife. His knee in the small of the boy’s back, he wrestled the kid’s hands behind him and slapped on the metal cuffs he kept in a case on the back of his belt.
His chest was heaving, and his heart felt like it might pound out of his chest. He resisted the urge to shake the kid within an inch of his life. Or smash the smirk off his face. Or pick him up and throw him back down and stomp on him. All natural responses when an enemy had killed a friend. All impulses that he’d learned to control in battle.
Ben swore every foul oath he knew. He should have called the cops whether Epifanio wanted him to or not. He should have done something, anything, to make the kid understand the danger of asking questions that might put him at risk. He should have been there the moment school let out.
His mistakes had cost the kid his life.
Ben could feel the shakes coming on, his body’s response to seeing a boy he’d grown to care for killed in front of his eyes. His heart squeezed when he realized he was going to have to tell Epifanio’s abuela that her grandson had met the fate she’d always feared, the fate Ben had been trying so hard to save him from. Ben didn’t know if he could bear watching those ancient brown eyes fill with tears of sorrow.
He heard sirens in the distance and realized help was on the way. He huffed out a breath and hauled the killer to his feet. “Your ass is busted.”
“Epifanio ain’t goin’ to say nothin’ to nobody now,” the kid shot back.
Ben didn’t say another word as he frog-marched the boy back down the alley. He was met halfway to the corner by MPD cops with their guns out, backup he presumed Waverly had called in. He held up his ICE badge and handed over his prisoner.
“How’s the kid who was stabbed?” he asked.
“Paramedics are with him now,” one of the cops replied.
Ben started running again. Maybe he could get to Epifanio before the boy died. Maybe he could find out what the kid knew that was so important it had gotten him killed.
A moment later he was on one knee in the blood that had pooled around the dying youth. He looked into the eyes of the paramedic kneeling on the other side of the boy, but the woman shook her head.
“Epifanio,” Ben said, his voice harsh, his throat aching.
The thirteen-year-old’s eyes fluttered open. He reached weakly toward Ben, who grasped his hand.
“Why did he want you dead?” Ben asked. “What is it you know?”
The boy looked at him with anguished eyes. He opened his mouth, but his larynx had been severed, along with his jugular.
“Don’t worry,” Ben said in a husky voice. “I’ll take care of your abuela. I’ll make sure she’s okay. You just rest now.”
The boy’s eyes had fallen closed, but his bloody hand tightened weakly on Ben’s. A dying breath soughed out of his mouth, along with a bubble of blood.
Ben eased his hand free and stumbled to his feet, wiping Epifanio’s blood on his jeans. He recognized the familiar meaty smell. The stickiness of it.
Senseless. Stupid. His gaze searched the area. What a waste! He wasn’t sure what he sought until he saw Waverly standing near the cop car that now held the killer.
His friend saw him coming and met him halfway.
“I’ve had enough,” Ben said. “I quit.”
Waverly looked from the kid in the cop car to the dead kid on the ground and said, “You can’t quit.”
“I sure as hell can,” Ben said. “I don’t need the hassle. I don’t need the—”
“Pain?” Waverly interjected. “I know you don’t need the money. But you can’t quit, Ben.”
“Why the hell not?” he said, stalking toward his SUV.
Waverly kept pace with him. “You’re doing good work here. You understand these kids. You understand the violence that threatens them. You want peace in these neighborhoods as much as I do. As we all do.”
“There’s no such thing as peace. Just intervals without war.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Ben I know.”
“You don’t know shit about me,” Ben retorted. “I’ve changed in the years since we were kids playing cops and robbers.”
“You’re forgetting that I watched you stop squabbles between your parents both before and after their divorce. You learned to negotiate peace between warring factions when you were still in short pants.
“Besides,” Waverly said, eyeing Ben. “Only cowards quit.”
Ben’s face turned chalk white. “I’m not a—”
“No, you’re not a coward. You’re a man who needs purpose in his life,” Waverly continued relentlessly. “Which you’ve found among these kids. Kids who need someone like you to help them find their way back to the straight and narrow.”
Ben said nothing. His throat had swollen closed.
8
“Damn it, Benedict! Did you have to shoot at the kid?” Tony Pellicano, the special agent in charge of the D.C. ICE office, gripped the top of the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk with white-knuckled hands and glared at Ben. “That was the mayor on the phone. He’s not happy. I had to explain to him why one of my agents was firing bullets at a fourteen-year-old. What were you thinking?”
Ben stared at his boss with disbelief. “I watched that kid cut another kid’s throat. And I shot once—over his head. Sir.”
Ben’s boss smacked his black leather chair as though it was the back of Ben’s head, then stalked back and forth behind his desk, waving his hands and ranting. Ben followed his tall, rail-thin boss’s constant, agitated movement with his eyes, while his hands gripped the arms of the maroon leather studded chair in which he sat.
“This isn’t a war zone,” Tony ranted. “We don’t shoot first and ask questions later.”
Ben felt his heart thudding in his chest, licked at the sweat beaded above his lip, and said, “You don’t have to tell me this isn’t—”
“You returning vets have the wrong—”
Ben came out of his chair as though he’d been catapulted from it. “The last thing on earth I want to do is kill some kid. I shot over his head to slow him down. I wanted to catch a killer. What’s wrong with that?”
Tony stared at him stony-faced and said, “I want you to see a doctor, a psychiatrist who specializes in cases like this.”
Ben stood stunned. “What?” If Tony only knew how hard it had been for him to fire his weapon at all, he would realize Ben wasn’t going to be a threat to the peace and harmony of D.C. streets. “There’s nothing wrong with me, sir,” Ben managed to say.
“You shoot, you talk. Those are my rules,” Tony said implacably.
“I’m not talking to any shrink.”
“Then pass me your credentials and your weapon,” Tony said, holding out his hand. “Your choice.”
Ben’s stomach rolled.