Prologue
Two Shots
The alley behind Ferris Street was eleven feet wide, and Tom Walker had run most of it.
He was not thinking. That was what he would say later, and it would be true. He was breathing, and he was listening to his own boots on the wet concrete, and he was watching a gray hood bounce ahead of him in the dark. A trash can crashed over somewhere on the left. A dog started barking behind a fence. The radio on his shoulder said something, a flat voice, a number, and he did not hear it.
Possible armed subject. That was the last thing he had been told. Four words, nine minutes ago, from a woman who had called from a bus stop. Hood up. Something black in his hand. Maybe a gun.
"Police!" he shouted. "Stop right there! Police!"
The hood did not stop. It went on to the end of the alley, where a chain-link fence stood across the way, six feet high and rusted at the top. The figure ran at it, jumped, and fell back. Tried again. A shoe came off. Tom heard it hit the ground.
Then the hood stopped.
It stopped all at once, as if a hand had caught it by the collar. The boy stood with his back to the fence and his chest going up and down. Tom was twenty feet away, then fifteen. He had his gun out. He did not remember taking it out.
"Show me your hands!"
The boy turned around.
He was small. That was the first thing Tom saw, and he would see it again, many times, in the dark. Not small like a child. Small like someone who had grown too fast and had not finished. The sleeves of the gray hoodie ended above the wrists. The face under the hood was thin and wet and very young, and the eyes were wide, and they were looking at Tom. Not at the gun. At Tom.
The boy's mouth moved.
His right hand went down, to the front of the hoodie, to the pouch where the hands go, and came up with something dark.
"Drop it!"
The mouth moved again.
"Drop it!"
Two sounds, close together, flat and enormous. The alley shook with them. A bright smell of smoke. The dark thing flew from the boy's hand and rolled away across the concrete, and the boy sat down against the fence, very gently, the way a child sits down when he is tired. His one bare foot was turned in toward the other.
"Show me your hands," said Tom. His voice sounded far away. "Show me your hands. Show me. Show me your hands."
The boy was looking at him.
Behind Tom, boots came running. Mike Dunn's voice said, "Tom. Tom. Tom, put it down." A flashlight swung across the fence, the wet bricks, the dark thing on the ground. It did not look like a gun anymore. It rolled to a stop against a wall, a black cylinder, and a little hiss of something came out of it, and the beam touched the nozzle.
Tom did not see it. He was looking at the boy.
The boy's lips were still moving. Not words. Just the shape of something he had started to say and had not finished. Tom would think about that shape for a long time. He would go over it and over it, the way you press on a bruise to see if it still hurts.
Then the boy's eyes lost him, slowly, the way a person's eyes lose a face in a crowd.
"Tom." Mike's hand was on his arm. "Tom. Give me the gun."
"He had something," Tom said.
"I know."
"He had something in his hand."
"I know. Give me the gun."
Tom looked down. He did not recognize his own fingers. They were pale, and they were shaking, and they would not open. Mike took the gun out of them one finger at a time, as if taking a toy from a sleeping child.
At the end of the alley, a light came on in a back window. An old man stood there in his undershirt, one hand flat against the glass.
And in the cold air above the fence, very faintly, a sound that might have been the siren, or the wind, or the boy's voice, or only the ringing in Tom's own ears, said three small words that he could not make out.
He would spend the rest of his life trying.