Nothing sounded like the man she knew and loved anymore.
She cupped a hand across her eyes to blot out the glare of the streetlights and stared up at the roof. The edge of the four-story building was too high to see over. She had no idea what was going on up there. Her feet had gone numb and soggy from the pavement slush. Snow fell down the back of her coat. She felt chilled so deep inside of her that she didn’t think she could ever get warm. She fantasized for a moment that she could speak to these people and calm them down. But she was not Ruben Tate-Rivera. They might listen to him. They would not listen to her.
Conveniently Tate was nowhere to be found.
Four police officers began suiting up in flak vests and body armor. Adele felt the old fear returning, that sense of powerlessness in the face of authority. She tried to tell herself that this was different. Vega was a police officer—just like these men. But then she saw them checking their weaponry and she understood: These officers weren’t here to rescue Vega. They were here to subdue him.
By any means necessary.
*
Vega heard the sirens split the night air. They had an odd compacted quality in the snow. He was near the edge of the roof now, with only a thin lip between him and a forty-foot drop to the basketball court below. He saw flashes of red and blue bouncing off the brick front of the tenements across the street from the school.
Torres stepped closer.
“Down on the ground,” shouted Vega. “Hands above your head!”
Torres ignored him. “Shoot me, Jimmy. Go ahead. You know you want to. It’s you or me. What’s it going to be? You killed Ponce’s brother. You know what it’s like to take a life. You’ve tasted blood. Pull the trigger.”
“Get down. Now!” Vega heard the hard, battle-ready voices of cops on the stairs. Not just uniformed officers, either. This sounded like a tactical squad. They were here to take down the shooter. And since he was the one with a gun in his hand, he qualified.
His feet had gone numb. His arm ached from holding up the gun. His fingers could barely feel the trigger. The snow had gotten a hard crystalline glaze on its surface, the pebbly slickness of moss-covered river stones. It had piled up along the edges of the roof so that the entire surface felt less defined. Plus, it was dark. The ever-present streetlights offered a hazy peach glow to the snowfall, but their pools of light petered off into shadows up here. One wrong move and forty feet of vertical drop guaranteed a quick and messy death.
“Get down!” Vega said to Torres again.
Torres remained standing. “What’s the matter, man? Gun-shy now? Shoot me! I don’t want to be locked up in some ten-foot cell. Shoot me!”
Every ligament in Vega’s body stiffened. He felt paralyzed by his predicament. He could feel his blood rushing through his veins. He didn’t want to pull the trigger. Not again.
Dear God, not again.
Civilians always think you can just shoot a person in an extremity and stop them. But it doesn’t work that way. Moving extremities, even at close range, are hard to hit, and even when you do, the suspect is so charged up on adrenaline, they sometimes don’t feel it and just keep moving anyway. He could miss and hit a cop coming through the doorway. The bullet could ricochet and hit some civilian having dinner in a building across the street. It could pierce an artery and Torres could bleed out anyway. Or Torres could use the seconds it would take Vega to re-aim the gun and push him right off the roof.
“Pull the trigger, carnal. You know you want to. Pull it.”
There was no denying that a part of him did. There would be a mild euphoria in shooting the man who brutally beat his mother to death. Vigilante justice. So what if the people below hated him for killing Torres? They hated him anyway. As soon as he put on the badge, they hated him. He was a homegrown son and they treated him like a traitor. He couldn’t win this one, no matter what he did.
Pull the trigger.
The police were at the door to the roof. “Open up!” yelled a cop with razors in his voice.
“I’m a police officer!” Vega shouted back. “I have a gun trained on the suspect. He threw the key over the building. You’ll have to break down the door.”
Torres stepped closer. “It’s a metal door, Jimmy. Your buddies aren’t going to be able to help you now.”
Vega knew he couldn’t hold out much longer. Torres was about to pounce. Vega had to make the first move. He had to take Torres down and try to restrain him. One good headlock. Hard and fast. Like when he was a kid. Vega sprang forward and grabbed Torres around the neck. But Vega was cold and numb. His muscles weren’t working right. Both men had slippery wet jackets on. Vega managed the headlock but not completely enough to incapacitate Torres. Torres fought back, elbowing Vega in the ribs. Vega grabbed at Torres’s hair. There were grunts and kicks.