“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.