“No, just a feeling. I heard some people leaving when I was in the bathroom but when I went outside for a smoke I saw by the tracks that they’d pulled into that alley. And I thought something was wrong about that and I had an idea what it was.”
“Why didn’t you go back inside and call the police? Or tell one of the staff at the restaurant?”
“It was just a feeling. I wasn’t positive until I got back there.”
“All right. So you went back inside the Paradise Lounge and you got this—what was it, the handle of a plunger? You didn’t go to your truck and get your hammer?”
“No, he’d have seen me.”
“Who?”
“The one at the corner keeping watch. The big one with Valentine on his shirt.”
“All right. So you walk to the corner and you and this boy have words and then you strike him with the handle from the plunger.”
“After I saw what was going on in the alley, yes.” He recounted again his hitting the second boy and trying to keep the girl from sliding off the tailgate and being put in a choke hold by the first boy and being struck with the stick by the second boy.
“Where did he hit you?”
“In the alley.”
“Where on your person.”
“Same as I did him. Across the ass.”
“Across the bare buttocks.”
“Yes.”
“Why were your buttocks bare?”
The boy regarded the ash on his cigarette. He readied to tap it into his palm but the detective told him to tap it on the floor and he did.
“Why were your buttocks bare, Sean?”
“Because he’d pulled down my jeans. The smaller guy. While the big one held me.”
“Then what happened, after he struck you.”
“Nothing. That’s when Reed Lester showed up.”
“Nothing more happened to you sexually?”
“No.”
“All right.” The detective scratched the side of his nose. “What made Reed Lester go back there?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“Do you have an opinion?”
“I think he got to thinking I’d taken off without him.”
“With his backpack in the truck?”
The boy shrugged.
“Where did you first meet him, Reed Lester?”
“On the side of the road. He was walking and he helped me change a flat so I gave him a lift.”
“You never met him before that?”
“No.”
“You didn’t spend any time with him in Lincoln?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know he was wanted on sexual assault charges in Lincoln?”
“How would I?”
“He might’ve told you. Two guys in a bar, drinking and jawing . . .”
The boy shook his head. “He said something about a fight in a bar with a writer over a Cuban girl.”
“A fight in a bar with a writer over a Cuban girl?” The detective stared at him. “This was a forty-five-year-old woman he attacked, in a parking lot. One of his professors. There wasn’t any Cuban girl.”
The boy drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke and waited.
“You didn’t know he had a gun either, I suppose,” said Luske.
“Not till he pulled it in that alley.”
“So you two didn’t get to talking, inside the Paradise Lounge, and decide to go on back there together with that gun and that stick and maybe finish what those boys started?”
“No. It happened like I told you.”
The detective watched him, then he read the paper in front of him and underscored something with his pencil.
“All right. So now you’ve got those two boys at gunpoint and the girl is lying there unconscious. Why didn’t you call the police at that point?”
“I don’t know. I thought they’d take too long. She was bleeding and I wanted to get her to the hospital.”
“Reed Lester and his gun didn’t factor into your decision?”
“No. I didn’t care about him or his gun.”
“How do you think the gun ended up with you, in the truck, and not with him?”
“He left it there when he ran off.”
“Some friend, huh.”
“He wasn’t a friend. I just met him that day.”
“Tell me about the hammer.”
“It’s an Estwing, twenty ounces. It belongs to my father.”
“How did it get blood on it.”
“I had to kill a dog by the side of the road.”
“You had to kill a dog by the side of the road.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because it was hurt and there wasn’t any help for it. Somebody had run over it.”
“So you hit it with the hammer and killed it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Reed Lester was there at the time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t he use the gun? Or let you use it?”
“That’s what I asked him later.”
“What did he say?”
“He said something about not wanting to scare me off.”
The detective stood and refilled the boy’s cup of water and filled a cup for himself.
“Sean. What were that girl’s panties doing in your jacket pocket?”
“I guess I put them there.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. I must’ve seen them lying in the snow and thought they were hers and she would probably want them back. I don’t know.”
“I’ve been doing this work for ten years, Sean, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve found the panties, or the underpants, of the victim either on the perpetrator or in his home. He doesn’t seem able to help himself. He’s gotta have that trophy. That memento.”
The boy drew on his cigarette and exhaled and waited.
The detective watched him.
“So you get a flat tire. You pick up a fugitive from the law. You have to kill a dog with a hammer. And you get pulled over with a raped girl and a gun in a truck that isn’t registered to you. That’s what I’d call a bad day, Sean.”
The boy nodded. “I’ve had worse.”
“I know you have. I know about your sister. I know how you got that limp.”
“You know about her, huh?”
“I know what happened to the two of you up there in the mountains, yes.”
“Then you know more than me. You know more than the entire state of Colorado and the FBI.”
They stared at each other. The detective tapped the eraser of his pencil on the top sheet of the file and the sound seemed to remind him that it was there. He looked down and turned the page over and turned it back. At length he said: “Here’s what we do know, Sean, all right? Here’s what our investigation knows as fact. It knows that on the night of the assault you were pulled over in a truck that was not registered in your name. It knows an eyewitness can place you at the scene of the assault. It knows that you were pulled over with the victim in the cab of the truck, constituting possible kidnapping. It knows there was a gun in the cab of the truck, constituting possible kidnapping at gunpoint. It knows that in the bed of the truck was a backpack belonging to a man wanted on sexual assault charges in another county. It knows there was a hammer in a tool bag with blood on it. It knows that the victim was bleeding and that you had fresh blood on your T-shirt. It knows that the girl was wearing no underpants and that there was a pair of girl’s underpants in your jacket pocket. Lastly it knows that there is no one, including the girl herself, to corroborate your statement that you did not rape her but instead tried to help her.”
Luske folded his hands again over the file. The boy met and held his gaze.
“Sean.”
“Yes.”
“You’re eighteen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you do understand your rights?”
“I think so.”
“You understand that the State will appoint a lawyer to you if you ask for one.”
“Yes.”
“Why haven’t you asked for one?”
“Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”
The detective’s face darkened. “The State will decide that, not you. Do you understand? The State will not give one cartwheeling fuck about you. When it decides to prosecute you, all the innocence in the world won’t help you. At that point you are a piece of dumb meat in the jurisprudence system and the jurisprudence system, Sean, will take away your life.”
The boy smoked and the detective watched him.
“What about your folks?” Luske said.
“What about them.”
“Don’t you want to talk to them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not to me,” said the detective.
He was returned to the cell. He sat on the hard bunk and stared into space while a man in the adjacent cell who had not been there before snored and muttered. He lay down on the bunk, staring at the pocked and gray concrete ceiling and as he stared he saw in the edges of his vision other men moving restlessly about the cell, and he could smell them and he could hear them, yet when he moved his head to look there was nothing but the concrete and the bars and the buzzing yellow light throwing more bars across the floor.