Better When He's Brave

by Jay Crownover

  I hit up every back alley I could find. I popped into every underground bar and rattled the owners in a hope I could make them talk. I waltzed into every drug den I had on my radar and demanded answers. Anyplace Novak was known to haunt back in the day . . . I showed my face there asking about his wayward son. I even stopped the girls that worked the street corners, the ones that didn’t want Nassir’s protection and preferred to tough it out in the wild on their own, and asked them about Roark. It was the same story from every lowlife I encountered. The elusive man with an accent had made his presence known. All the criminals and miscreants knew Roark was in town, hiding in the shadows, making those he deemed responsible for his father’s death pay. No one seemed to know where the Irishman was, 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 from them. Make sure the kid has someone from Social Services with him when you process him in since he doesn’t have a legal guardian. You want to make sure every I is dotted and every T is crossed because I bet they try and prosecute him as an adult.”

  “Can’t say I disagree with that. This is a pretty adult-size fuckup he landed himself in.”

  It was, but the kid never stood a chance, and all I could think was how easy it would’ve been for Bax to do something just as stupid when he was struggling to feed himself and survive because no one else was there to take care of him when he was that age.

  “Sometimes it feels like the only choice you have is the worst choice there is. Too many kids these days end up getting put in that position. We just have to do our job and do it to the best of our ability in order to keep everyone else safe from those terrible choices and the people forced to make them.”

  “You speaking from personal experience, Detective?”

  I didn’t bother answering. When you were a cop in this city—or any city, really—for any length of time, you saw it all. Killer kids. Druggies that were practically zombies from their addiction. Women doing whatever they had to do in order to feed their families or themselves. Families living on the street because a backroom poker game was more important than paying the mortgage. Men forced to bend the law rather than work inside it because someone had to be the bad guy and they figured it might as well be them. So we all had personal experience with why things happened the way they did here, and I didn’t need to spin sob stories about my own drunken mother and my mass-murdering father, or my car thief of a brother, to showcase just how much experience I had with how dark the Point could be.

  I grabbed the surveillance tapes, had a quick chat with the inconsolable wife, took the notes I would need for the report, and then drove across town to the elementary school where another patrol unit had found the gun hidden inside one of the tube slides in the elementary school playground; that was just a block over from the middle school the kid had attended. The weapon was still loaded, with the safety off, and we were all silently thanking whatever god was watching that day that no other little hands had run across it and caused even more of a tragedy. I was thinking about what a mess it all was and how deeply sad it made me. I felt the waste of that young life all the way to my bones, and yet I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It was the impotence of not being able to fix that poor kid’s life, of not being able to help him before he got so desperate, that killed me. No living being should be driven to those lengths, yet it happened every day here.

  I was packing up the scene when one of the patrol officer’s radios squawked. A callout for a bomb threat at a charter high school a few miles away. Kids called in bogus threats all the time, but ever since Nassir’s club had been blown up and burned to the ground, we tended to take them more seriously. The officer responded and we all climbed in our respective vehicles and headed over to the school. It looked like most of the teachers and kids had already been evacuated. There were a lot of bodies milling about in front of the building and on the street. As I climbed out of the car I frowned hard because all the kids were dressed in a very familiar-looking navy-blue-and-khaki uniform. I saw that same color combo every time I passed Karsen Carter when she was coming and going from school.

  The hair on my arms danced upward and tension had my spine snapping straight. I let my eyes scan the crowd looking for a familiar white-blond head and didn’t see one. I didn’t see Race or Brysen either, which made me breathe a sigh of relief. The school would’ve had to call Brysen to pick her sister up once the
kids got released.

  “What’s the status?” I looked over at another detective as he came up beside me asking the question.

  “I don’t know. It’s not my scene. I was working the armed robbery downtown and was just a few miles away, so I drove over. I think they’re just waiting for the bomb squad to go in and make sure that it isn’t a real threat.”

  He grunted in response and I took a few steps toward where I saw the kids gathering to wait for their parents to pick them up. I was hoping to find someone that had seen Karsen when a harried-looking woman clutching a cell phone rushed up to me. Her eyes took up most of her face and she was panting like she had run a mile. She thrust the phone at me and bent over to put her hand on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath.

  “Are . . . you . . . Detective . . . King?” I looked at the phone in my hand then at her. A chill of apprehension slid down my spine as she panted and shook in front of me.

  “I am. Who are you?”

  “Debbie Granger. I’m the principal. The man on the phone said to find you. Told me to give you the phone.”

  I scowled at her and put the phone up to my ear. I wasn’t surprised at all when the voice that greeted me had a lilt to it.

  “Hello, Detective.”

  My teeth gnashed and my heart rate kicked into overdrive. “Roark.”

  “I thought it was about time I let you know that I very much remember the hand you played the night my father was murdered. I saw you there, Detective.”

  My spine snapped straight and my hand curled painfully around the phone. “What are you babbling about, Roark?”

  “The night my father was killed . . . you were there. I saw you when we raided the club. Beaten and useless. You did nothing to stop my brother from killing our father. He still had the smoking gun in his hand when we made entry into the building. I’ve been slowly corrupting the one thing you care about most, Detective, and you haven’t even seen me doing it. And if you think you can just swoop in and take my girl, you are sadly mistaken. I will not let any of your actions or her betrayal stand.”

  I forked my fingers through my hair and swore. “What do you mean you’ve been corrupting what I care about most? Are you talking about Race and Bax? Are you talking about hurting my family?” My head was spinning and the more time that went by without me seeing Karsen the more certain I became that she was inside the building, possibly with him, possibly sitting on a powder keg getting ready to blow.

  The accented voice cackled and it made the hair on the back of my neck rise. “You’ll figure it out. In fact you’ll figure it out as you stand there in front of that school and do nothing while you wait on pins and needles to see if I harmed the pretty little blonde.” He clicked his tongue at me and his voice got hard. “You step foot inside the building and the girl dies. If I see a single cop head toward the front of that building, I’ll take her out and she won’t be the only casualty. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Detective King?”

  I gritted my teeth and bit out, “The apple didn’t fall far from the crazy tree with you, did it, Roark?” He had me over a barrel and it was killing me that he was close enough to watch his handiwork unfold, but not close enough for me to get my hands on.

  “One man’s crazy is another man’s brilliance. We’ll be seeing each other soon enough. Tell Reeve hello for me. She looks like she’s enjoying the limited time she has left on this earth fucking your brains out.”

  I forced myself to hand the phone back to the principal and stared up helplessly at the entrance of the school. There was no doubt in my mind that Karsen was trapped somewhere inside and everything inside of me was screaming at me to go save her. That’s what I did—saved the innocent from the violence of the Point—and now Roark had effectively tied my hands, and it was making me furious. I started shouting at my fellow officers and anyone that would listen that they had to wait before they went inside. I wasn’t sure what kind of threat Roark had in place but I was in no position to push him. When my colleagues looked at me like I had lost my mind, I told them we had to wait for the bomb squad. It was the simplest excuse I could come up with off the top of my head. They didn’t like it but they backed down as I paced back and forth, never taking my eyes from the door.

  She was just a kid, a really good kid at that. She deserved better than to be drawn into Roark’s deadly games. I clenched my hands into tight fists at my sides and looked at the cop that I had spoken to when I arrived on the scene. “The parents are starting to show.” He nodded his head in the direction from which cars and people were starting to stream in. Parents hysterical as they spotted their kids and the kids looking bored with it all. I was trying to figure out a way to sneak inside the school or a way to get some idea of what was happening on the inside when I heard a shrill voice call my name.

  “Titus! What’s going on?” My heart immediately dropped into my shoes when I saw Brysen jogging up to me, her superblue eyes wide with fear. She wasn’t with Race, which was surprising; instead Booker was keeping pace with her, looking like he was going to murder anyone that got in his way.

  “There was a bomb threat.”

  “I was in class and I got a call saying the school was evacuated and they needed me to come get Karsen. Where is she and why are you here?”

  “The students are all with the teachers over there but I haven’t seen Karsen with them.” I wasn’t ready to tell her that her little sister was currently a pawn in a very dangerous game and that I had no idea how to help her.

  Booker lifted an eyebrow at me. His look downright menacing with that scar distorting his face. “Why don’t you tell me why you aren’t in there looking for the girl because we both know she isn’t over there with those teachers.”

  I let out a long breath and lifted my hand to rub the back of my neck. I looked down at the tip of my boots in shame and defeat. “Roark just called me. He said if I go in the school after Karsen, he’ll kill her. He told me to keep all of law enforcement out of the building or there will be fatalities. I’m just trying to buy time until the bomb squad gets here so we can get eyes inside and I can see what we’re dealing with.”

  Brysen lifted shaking hands to her mouth and I saw her eyes pop to an unnaturally large size. “You think he’s in there with her?”

  I didn’t want to think anything, but if this was another one of Roark’s salvos then anything was possible. I was going to open my mouth to give the pretty young woman my typical platitudes when Booker stepped around me and took a striding step toward the front of the school. I reached out a hand to grab him and got pulled off balance as he jerked to a stop. The guy was built like a mountain and it wasn’t often someone could match me in the physicality department.

  “Where do you think you’re going? I told you no one goes in until the building is clear. We can’t risk it.”

  He shook me off and his eyes went flat and hard. I knew the look well. It was the same look Bax got when he was getting ready to tell me to go fuck myself because he was going to do something I didn’t like.

  “I’m not a cop and all Roark said was keep the cops out. Race pays me to take care of those girls, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

  There was no point in arguing any further because aside from tasing him or putting a bullet in him, the guy was going to do whatever he wanted anyway. And honestly, I wished I was the one that was just saying to hell with it all and storming inside the building to look for the missing teenager. Booker flipped off a couple more cops that tried to stop him and even pushed one over that was stupid enough to get directly in his path. I sighed because now he was looking at charges for assaulting an officer even if he skated around whatever charges I could find to throw at him for ignoring a direct police order.

  “What if she’s hurt or something worse? How can I live with that? It’s my job to keep her safe.” Brysen’s voice was weak but she was holding herself together surprisingly well. She wasn’t crying, at least not yet, and she was wrong. The safety of Karsen
and the rest of the kids that hadn’t been tainted by the city yet was my job.

  It hit me like a ton of bricks. So heavy and hard it almost took me to my knees. Roark had been going after the thing that mattered most to me from the very beginning. I cared about the people that still had a shot at making it out of the Point. I fought for the innocent and the young because I often felt like no one else was going to. Every person that Roark had hurt, had twisted, had infected in his quest to exact his revenge had been someone I’d sworn I would protect and keep safe.

  It started with the kid whose neck he snapped and ditched outside of the Pit. Just some dumb jock barely in his twenties that liked to gamble, but he was just a kid and deserved a better end. Then it was the club. Before it burned to the ground, Nassir had been deliberately lured away and all the victims were just kids out looking for some trouble and fun. They lost their lives doing what kids all across the country did every single day. After that it was the girl on the dock and the armed stripper at Spanky’s. Two girls too young to be caught up in that kind of life and too young to be dead. Two girls I should’ve been able to keep safe. And lastly there was my brother. Sure, Bax was far from innocent, far from having a shot at a good and law-abiding life, but he was still my only family, my blood, and even if I had let him down in the past, I took my duty to keep him safe and keep him out of trouble to heart now. Killing Bax would have served the dual purpose of exacting revenge on the man who Roark thought was responsible for his father’s death and rubbing salt into the wound I would suffer for being unable to protect him.