Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “You’re not crazy about this place, are you?”

  “I’m all for trying to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents, but I can’t believe they have much of a long-term success rate.”

  She slid into one of the chairs, provided for security guards who hadn’t yet been hired. “You have to try.”

  “Sure. There’s nothing here that can help us,” he added, fighting a sense of relief. Even if there happened to be a camera covering the reception area hallway, Riley wouldn’t have seen anything except Jack speaking on the phone—hardly a suspicious activity. But he might ask who had been on it, and then Jack would have to lie, and then he’d have to remember the lie so he could stick with it, and those little details could pile up until one day they fell over and crushed him. No thanks. Best to keep himself as much of a blank as possible. “Let’s go.”

  She didn’t move, staring up at him.

  “What?”

  “Does this place present a—a dilemma? For you?”

  After one surprised second he snorted. “What are you asking, Maggie? If I’m planning to kill any of them? They’re kids.”

  “So was—”

  “No, okay? No.” He couldn’t help glancing at the hallway. He feared being overheard and that fear made him annoyed, almost as annoyed as letting Maggie Gardiner into his life in the first place.

  Not that he had had much of a choice.

  But letting her get—what, comfortable?—enough with him for a little philosophical chat about whether he should have an age limit to his target list—no. He couldn’t allow—

  “It’s the old question,” she went on. “If you could kill Hitler as an infant, would you?”

  She turned to the monitors instead of facing him, as if that would make the conversation more dispassionate.

  “Would you?” he countered.

  “Yes. But in that case we know the future. Here we don’t, though according to Officer Coglan most of them are already stone-cold psychopaths.”

  He kept his voice level. “Stay out of my head, Maggie. My reasoning doesn’t concern you. You can’t—”

  “There’s no one but me,” she said without heat.

  He stared at her. That weight on her shoulders … only she knew what Jack was. Only she formed a gossamer wall between wholesale murder and the rest of the world.

  He had no idea what to say, because, of course, she was right. If his goal was to save future victims of violent crime, then finding a nest of raptor eggs and himself with a stone in his hand presented him with a clear choice: eliminate the ever-widening ripples of future burglaries, rapes, assaults, abused babies, and murders in one application.

  Was this a dilemma? Or an opportunity?

  He said to her, “You’re missing the important point—”

  “What is this kid doing?” She pointed to the video of the day program entrance. A tall boy in the uniform of his peers—oversized sports jersey, ball cap cocked at an angle that only looked cute on a toddler. “He walked in from the outside and is just standing there.”

  “Probably waiting for a friend,” Jack suggested, pathetically grateful for the change in topics.

  “He keeps moving around behind the outflux of students.”

  “Outflux?”

  “It’s like he’s trying to avoid the guy behind the desk.” A man in a uniform similar to Officer Coglan’s stood watching the young people leave, occasionally talking to one or fielding a question once they were on the other side of the counter. Most of the kids seemed like any students at the end of the school day, hustling out of the starting gate without a backward glance. But two boys exited the metal detector, made definite eye contact with the waiting visitor, then moved away from the detector to the unoccupied end of the outer floor.

  A fourth boy in the parade of kids glanced at all three, then stopped and stepped out of line for the detector so that he remained on the inside of the security zone. Jack recognized him as the particularly active basketball player, but right now he kept his energy burner hidden, his movements furtive.

  As Jack watched, the two boys at the far end of the room seemed to be speaking loudly to each other. The first pushed the second with a theatrical shove of fingers to shoulders, then let his hands fly. The second got up in his face.

  “This is a setup,” Jack murmured to himself.

  As soon as the officer leaned over the counter, apparently to threaten the boys to behave or else, the visitor in the corner near the metal detector tossed a package to the boy waiting behind it. It flew smoothly over the four-foot-high barrier between the detector and the wall. The waiting boy caught it with both hands, secreted it inside the pocket of his hoodie, turned, and walked back into the interior rooms in one fluid movement. The kids around him had undoubtedly seen this exchange—a pair of girls whispered, a boy’s gaze followed the package but then he moved forward and out the door. No one alerted the guard, still talking to the two boys faking a fight. No doubt seeing that their purpose had been achieved, they now apparently agreed to a truce and left.

  “What do you think that was?” Maggie asked Jack.

  “Nothing good.”

  He ran out the door.

  Of course, she followed.

  Chapter 14

  They moved hastily through the third-floor visiting rooms, empty except for the two people with the cake and a paunchy man in a suit speaking to an apparent client. Both he and the girl looked bored and impatient.

  Jack did not have a gun, Maggie remembered. Law enforcement officers (LEOs) were required to check weapons in locked bins at the reception area, standard procedure for entry to any prison, jail, or custody location. It could prove too easy for the residents to grab one from a distracted LEO.

  Maggie couldn’t be sure he knew where he was going—but the classrooms and the day program entrance were on the east side of the building. The boy with the package couldn’t go far.

  Jack could have called for the security guards—except they didn’t all have the same radios, as cops would, and he didn’t know the number and didn’t have time to stop and find out.

  They passed a tiny office and Dr. Palmer looked up from his cluttered desk. As they sped past Maggie barked out a call for help, hoping that her voice would convey the urgency.

  Her mind returned to Jack’s lack of a firearm. There could have been anything in the package so surreptitiously passed into the secure zone—a knife, a drug shipment for a resident, money for same, a set of skeleton keys, a secret cell phone, even cigarettes. All of which Jack could easily handle with a boy of less weight and height than himself. As long as it wasn’t a gun.

  Please don’t let it be a gun, she prayed, as they darted in and out of the empty third-floor classrooms.

  Jack took the stairwell in the center of the hallway, Dr. Palmer trying to catch up to them.

  On the second floor they found the boy, in the last classroom to the north. And he wasn’t alone.

  Jack entered, then stopped dead, causing her to run into the back of him. Over his shoulder she saw the boy who had caught the package.

  And of course it had been a gun. She knew that because he now held it in his hand, extended, aimed squarely at the face of a young Hispanic man.

  The little girl who had sat on the floor when they questioned the group about Rachael cowered in the corner, on the same side of the room as Maggie and Jack.

  The boy with the gun swiveled to point it at the intruders. Jack held up his hands.

  “No problem,” he said in a calm voice. “We just wanted to see what was going on.”

  “I’m goin’ to kill this—” The boy ended with an unpleasant and incestuous epithet. “That’s what’s going to happen.”

  “Maggie, get out,” Jack said quietly, without turning his head or lowering his hands.

  The kid said, “Yeah, Maggie. Get out.”

  “Okay. I will. If she can come with me.” Maggie nodded to her right, toward the girl in the corner. On her left she glimpsed Dr. Palmer hove
ring in the hallway, out of sight of the boy with the gun.

  “You know what, forget it. Ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere. Y’all can watch when he die.”

  “Maggie,” Jack said.

  “Then I’m just going to wait over here with her.” She tried to keep her voice as low and calm as his, and moved slowly, her hands in view, toward the girl. Jack reached one arm back to catch her but she sidled around him and made it to the corner, the barrel of the boy’s gun trained on her the entire time. She could see his finger on the trigger. She could also feel Jack’s murderous glance at her and understood it—she’d just violated one of the rules of hostage negotiation: never give them another target.

  In the hallway, Dr. Palmer said something to a handsome black man, who trotted away with silent footfalls, no doubt to summon the guards and probably the police.

  Maggie reached the girl, both of them facing forward, hiding nothing. She kept her hands up. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly.

  The girl shook her head in quick jerks as she trembled from head to toe. She wore mascara, Maggie could see, but no other makeup. Her sweater hung on her, jutting collarbones emphasizing her spindly frame. Her dark hair seemed to have been cut with a pair of garden shears but somehow suited her. She smelled of a fruity body spray and sweat.

  “What’s your name?” Maggie asked quietly.

  She could hardly hear the answer. “Trina.”

  “Well, Trina, we’re going to be all right. That’s Jack, there, and he will take care of this.”

  And she prayed that this would prove true. From what she had seen of Jack, negotiation did not seem to be his forte. Neither were teenagers. Homicidal teenagers—doubly bad.

  “So what’s going on?” Jack asked. “Why do you want to shoot Luis?”

  “You know him? Not surprisin’—little narco.”

  This caught Maggie as well. The targeted boy must be the friend of Rachael’s whom Jack and Riley had interviewed.

  “He didn’t tell us anything about you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “You don’t need to.” He hadn’t lowered the gun, now back on Luis, who stood absolutely still but without raising his hands. The expressions flitting over his face ranged from angry to frightened to defiant.

  Jack said, “Come on, you’re a student here, right? Everyone in the building knows who you are. Clue me in.”

  “I’m Quentin Sherman. Q-ball to my friends, which this guy ain’t.”

  “Interesting to meet you, Quentin. What’s your beef with Luis?”

  “He knocked my sister and her little baby down.”

  Luis spoke, angrily: “I didn’t mean to. I was robbing the place, had to get out of there. She was just in the way.”

  “You ran over my nephew! Kid had blood all down his face.”

  “I bumped into them! It’s not like I beat down on ’em. Get a grip.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “So—”

  “And you ain’t apologized!”

  “I was runnin’ away, dude! I didn’t have time for no apologies!”

  “You gots time since, ain’t you? Been three months. She ain’t heard from you. I ain’t heard from you.”

  “And that’s it?” Jack asked, but they weren’t listening to him. The gun had not wavered.

  Next to her, Trina continued to tremble and Maggie put an arm around her thin shoulders. The girl looked up at her in amazement.

  “Why should I apologize to you? I didn’t do nothin’ to you.”

  “That’s my family. You disrespect them, you disrespect me.”

  “Why the hell you deserve respect? You ever show me any?”

  “Why the hell should I? You knock down babies and don’t even say—”

  “You boys talk a lot about respect,” Jack said, without raising his voice. “You never seem to figure out that it’s not a right. It has to be earned.”

  Sherman said, “We do know that, Mr. Adult. But everything we do to earn it, you tell us we ain’t supposed to do. We ain’t supposed to fight. We ain’t supposed to get with girls. We ain’t supposed to speak up. We act like guys an’ you say we gots ADD and drug us.”

  “How about you act like an adult? Do the homework. Get a part-time job. Clean up after yourself at home.”

  “Yeah, that’s the other thing you tell us. Go to college, get a job, and make lotsa money so you can have a nice house and a nice car and dress nice. But I ain’t going to go to no college, and there ain’t no good jobs. It all a lie.”

  Switch tactics, Jack, Maggie thought. You’re not going to get anywhere by trying to tell a teenager not to be disappointed in the world around him.

  He did. “Quentin. You have to ask yourself—is this really worth it? You’re in a building you can’t get away from. If you harm Luis you’ll be instantly arrested, if not by me then by Officer Coglan. You’ll be looking at armed assault and you know they’ll try you as an adult.”

  Quentin Sherman listened without any sign of softening, but Maggie felt pulled by the smooth reason of Jack’s voice. He had coaxed a variety of hardened criminals into his net only to execute them, quietly, humanely. He must, she realized, be quite persuasive when he wanted. A chameleon-like quality, and one she would not have expected.

  “And I’m sure Luis is willing to apologize to your sister.”

  Maggie felt a vibration as the girl under her arm shook her head. “He won’t.”

  “Why not?” Maggie whispered.

  “He just won’t. They’re men. They can’t back down.”

  And indeed, Luis did not pick up on the offer. He appeared to consider but then reject the idea, preferring to lose his life than his street cred.

  “It’s a guy thing,” Maggie agreed. “Just usually not with such lethal results.”

  Quentin’s arm with the gun tightened ever so slightly. Why doesn’t it get tired? Maggie wondered. She doubted she could hold a three-pound weight that steady for that long.

  “Is this about Rachael?” Jack asked.

  The other four people in the room stared at him. But the one with the gun seemed the most confused.

  “Who the hell’s Rachael?” Quentin asked.

  Luis spoke, his tone exasperated. “No, and it’s not about his little nephew, either. It’s about Tyson.”

  Maggie scanned her memory banks to see why that name sounded familiar. Derald Tyson, the boy who had overdosed?

  Quentin’s form took on a stiffness that made the slightly undersized assassin even more ominous, his voice as hard as steel. “I know you sold him the stuff that killed him.”

  “I didn’t,” Luis insisted, almost as firmly. But he had begun to sweat, beads forming along his hairline.

  “What the hell you cut it with, hey? Fentanyl? Why you kill him?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Your crew do most of Ohio City, everybody know that. Killin’ off most of your customers—that’s how stupid you are.”

  Maggie knew that heroin overdose deaths had skyrocketed in the past few years, but didn’t keep up with which gangs operated where. “Is that true?” she asked Trina, to distract the girl from her fear. The girl whispered back that she didn’t know.

  The room felt airless, and with two teenage boys leaking testosterone the locker-room smell began to accumulate. Neither Riley nor Coglan appeared in the doorway, and she wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do when they did arrive. The classroom had only one door and would be immediately visible to Quentin upon entry.

  Jack asked, “This is Derald Tyson? The boy who overdosed last month?”

  Quentin didn’t bother to look at him. “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t sell him anything,” Luis insisted to Jack. “I didn’t even know the kid.”

  Quentin said, “Why you lookin’ at him? I’m the one you gotta convince.”

  Luis wasn’t having any of that. “I don’t give a shit what you think. I didn’t pass Tyson nothing.” For a fifteen-year-old with a gun in his face, he showed
amazing fortitude. Or foolishness.

  Jack said, “So you were close to Tyson. I get that.”

  Quentin scrunched up his face in extreme annoyance. “Don’ say it like that. Like I’m some kinda fag. He was in my crew, that’s all. A man’s gotta look out for his crew. Anyone mess with him, they mess with me.”

  “I didn’t pass anybody in this school nothing,” Luis continued to insist, adding plaintively, “I’m trying. I’ve been trying.”

  To get off drugs? Maggie wondered. To get out of the criminal trade? To pull himself out of the downward spiral into which he’d been thrust, probably since birth?

  Jack said to Quentin, “He was in your crew, okay. So why didn’t you get him what he wanted?”

  This stopped the boy. The gun lowered a few inches as he searched for an answer. “’Cause he didn’t ask.”

  “Why do you think that is?” Jack asked, exactly as Dr. Michaels and her colleagues would. Let the patient reach their own insights—

  “I don’t know. Mebbe he figured I couldn’t get it ’cause I’m stuck in here too. Didn’t ask ’cause he didn’ wan’ embarrass me. Tyson thoughta stuff like that, man. Course I could have, gotten whatever. If I wanted.”

  “He didn’t ask me for nothing,” Luis stated again. “I don’t know where he got the stuff. I probably never said ten words to the guy.”

  “Your crew sells the shit. You the only one here from your crew,” Quentin said, his forensic evidence neatly aligned. The gun came back up.

  What does this kid do, Maggie thought, two hundred push-ups a day?

  But Jack kept trying. “Quentin, you’ll wind up in adult prison. Your nephew will be graduating from high school before you have any hope of parole. Is that really what’s best for you? Is that really worth it for some petty slight and an accusation you can’t be sure of?”

  The gun arm remained stock-still. Quentin turned his head to Jack, to Luis, then slowly back to Jack.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think it is.”

  Then he pulled the trigger and shot Luis Borgia in the face.

  Chapter 15

  Trina screamed. Maggie shoved the girl behind her without thinking. Jack’s whole body gave a twitch as if quaking with the urge to run at Quentin, wrest the gun from his hand, but then stalled as the weapon turned to him. It swung toward Maggie and Jack tensed again, but then Quentin decided to prioritize the threats and aimed it back at Jack. About two seconds had elapsed, but they felt like eons.