“Half the calls want to hang the kid, and the other half want to hang you,” Enrique said into Denise’s headset. She smiled stunningly. To Enrique, everything that Denise did was stunning. Always well dressed and always wearing makeup, Denise was a sharp contrast to the rest of the on-air talent, whose sense of fashion focused mainly on using a napkin rather than their sleeves to wipe their mouths during lunch. Fans who knew Denise only from her voice invariably commented, when they met her, on how beautiful she was, and, privately, how surprised they were.
Denise raised her onyx eyes from her notes to stare through the glass at Enrique. “Listen, Rick,” she said. “Screen out the callers who want to tell me that the kid is innocent, okay?” Enrique nodded and gave a thumbs-up. “And I don’t want to talk to anyone who’s going to tell me that I’m a bad mother. I just want to discuss the pros and cons of trying kids as adults, and proposed solutions to the juvenile crime problem.”
“You got it, Denise,” Enrique told her. “We’re coming out of commercial in twenty seconds. Your first call is Robert on line four. I think he wants to agree with you.”
Denise nodded with mock enthusiasm. “That sounds like a perfect place to start.”
Enrique used his fingers to count down from five, and then gave Denise her cue.
“And you’re back in the room with The Bitch. Not much trouble collecting phone calls this morning.” She stabbed the blinking line four. “Hello, Robert, this is The Bitch. What’s on your mind?”
“Hello, Bitch.” Robert’s voice had the gravelly sound of a smoker, maybe forty-five years old. “I’m calling to agree with you, believe it or not.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe that? Since I’m always right, I always expect people to agree with me.”
Robert laughed, initiating a juicy cough. “But this is the first time I’ve ever agreed with you.”
Denise laughed, too. “Well, tell me, Robert, what have I said to deserve such an honor?”
“I say the youth of America are going down the toilet. I get sick and tired of hearing that abusive families and racial strife are responsible for kids’ actions. It’s the kids themselves. They don’t respect anybody or anything; they just look at everybody as their next potential victim:’
“You keep referring to ‘they’, Robert. Who exactly are ‘they?’”
“The juvenile delinquents out on the street. The courts are afraid to do anything about them. If they throw them in prison, the ACLU screams that they’re not being treated fairly, and the media paints this picture of an innocent who’s been victimized by his surroundings. On the other hand, if the judges don’t put them in jail, that means they just come back out onto the street.”
Denise tried to interrupt, but Robert was on a roll.
“I read a story in the paper just a few months ago about some kid in Chicago, eleven years old, who killed a girl in a drive-by shooting. I was in Chicago at the time, and all we heard was how they were looking for this kid, who had an arrest record as long as my arm. Two days later, the kid showed up dead in some drainage ditch, shot in the head. Then the local media cried all over themselves, showing the kid’s smiling face on the news and interviewing his relatives about what a wonderful kid he was!”
“And you don’t believe he was a wonderful kid?”
“Hell, no. He was scum. Let’s call it as it is. He might have been young scum, but he was scum. We’ve got no place for people like that on the streets.”
Denise made the “okay” signal to Enrique through the window. Robert was a live one.
“So where does that leave us with this kid, Nathan Bailey? What should we do with him?”
“Honestly?”
“Of course. Nothing but the truth on my show. That’s the first rule?’
“Honestly, I don’t have a problem executing him. He killed a prison guard, for crying out loud. If he’s tried as a juvenile, he’ll be out in nine years, if not before, but that guard’ll still be dead. That doesn’t seem fair to me?’
Enrique’s voice in Denise’s headphones told her it was time to move on to Barb on line six.
“Thank you, Robert, I have to say I agree with you. Now it’s on to Barb, who’s live on the air with The Bitch. What’s on your mind, Barb?”
The voice was timid, maybe twenty-two. “Hello?”
“Hello, Barb, you’re on the air with The Bitch.”
“Oh, hi. This is Barb. Thanks for taking my call, B—” Her hesitation in saying the word was not uncommon among young women.
“It’s The Bitch, honey. Come on, you can say it. If I can be it, you can say it.”
Barb giggled on the other end. “Anyway, thanks for taking my call…”
Denise interrupted again. “No, you’ve got to say it, or I’ll hang up on you. Say, Hello, Bitch.”
Barb giggled nervously. “I… I don’t want to.”
“Sure you do. It should be easy, the way I’m treating you right now in front of millions of listeners. Just say bitch.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. I’ll give you a running start at it. You just complete the sentence: Jeeze, you’re a…”
“Bitch.” Barb said it so softly, it was barely audible.
“Okay, Barb, that was a good start. Now, try it again with feeling. Son of a…”
“Bitch.”
“Okay, that was much better. Now let’s go for the gold. Say, Hello, Bitch.”
“Hello, Bitch.” Barb was laughing.
“Howya doin, Bitch.”
“Howya doin, Bitch.”
“Son of a bitch. You’re a real bitch, Bitch.”
Barb was laughing hard now. “Son of a bitch. You’re a real bitch, Bitch.”
Denise slapped the table triumphantly. “By George, we did it. Don’t you feel better now?”
“Absolutely.”
“And aren’t you glad that my radio name isn’t Vagina?” Hard laughter from the other end of the phone.
“Or better yet, maybe I’ll change my name to scrotum. Think of it: ‘Hello, America, don’t forget to listen to your scrotum every morning.’” Denise started to laugh herself. “Like men need any more encouragement to do that. Anyway, Barb, you’ve been a good sport. What’s on your mind?”
Barb composed herself more quickly than Denise would have expected. “Well, Bitch, I’m just not comfortable treating children the same way as adults. A child who’s a criminal can still be turned around. It’s not like an adult, where they know better and decide to commit crimes anyway.”
“So you don’t think that Nathan Bailey, at age twelve, knew that it was wrong to kill?”
“I think he knew it was wrong, sure. I just don’t think that children can put an act like that into perspective.”
“Come on, Barb, what does perspective have to do with anything? A public servant is still dead. That’s the only perspective he and his family will ever have.”
“I just don’t think it’s that simple. To try a child as a criminal requires more than just determining what the kid did. You have to look at what they thought they were doing.”
“What makes you think that little Nathan thought he was doing something other than killing?”
“What makes you think he didn’t?” Barb’s tone had a real “gotcha” edge to it.
“That’s just it, Barb. I don’t care. It really doesn’t matter, and that’s my point. The act of killing speaks for itself, as far as I’m concerned.”
The Bitch took two more calls before the first break. Neither thought that Nathan should be treated differently from any other criminal. The time had come, the callers agreed, when people had to take responsibility for their actions, whether good or bad. The courts had gone way too far in protecting the rights of the bad guys at the expense of the good guys.
Denise could not have agreed more.
Nathan sat on the edge of the big bed for twenty minutes, listening to a long string of grown-up strangers passing judgment on him.
How can they say those things? They weren’t there. They didn’t hear Ricky’s threats, or feel his hands around their throats. They didn’t know—they probably didn’t even care—that if he hadn’t killed Ricky, then Ricky would have killed him. They hadn’t seen the crazy look in his eyes, or have their brains rattled by a punch in the
