say anything without thinking, but with the family it was more like he had a part to play. He didn’t mind though. He liked the role.
“You’re the man who saved me,” three-year-old Mona said during a lull in the conversation.
“That’s right,” Eric told her. “This is Uncle Tommy.”
“T’ank you, Uncle Tommy.”
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Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“What would you like to do after you get out of here, Thomas?” Dr. Nolan asked.
“I don’t know. The doctor said that they lost my cart.
Everything I had was in there. I had pictures of Monique and my blank book with my writings. I’d like to find that if I could.”
“But what would you like to
“What you mean?” Tommy squinted for a moment, remembering the brightness that had driven him away from elementary school.
“Do you want a job? Do you want to go to school? Where would you like to live?”
“Could I stay with you guys for a while?”
“Of course,” Dr. Nolan said. “As long as you want.”
“Yaaaaaa,” Mona sang.
That a f te rnoon th e police were dispatched with a warrant to arrest Thomas Beerman, aka Bruno Forman. They sent Pittman and Rodriguez because the officers could iden-tify the young con-man escapee.
“Thomas Beerman,” Officer Pittman announced. “You are under arrest.”
“No. I didn’t do anything. I, I saved the little girl’s life.”
“You presented yourself to the police with fraudulent identification and you escaped from the juvenile facility where you were being detained.”
For Thomas the facility was a long-ago dream. He couldn’t imagine that they would send him back there now that he was reunited with his family.
“No,” he said.
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F o r t u n a t e S o n
“No,” Dr. Bettye Freeling repeated. She was standing at the door to Thomas’s room. “This is my patient, and he is far too weak to be moved.”
“We have a warrant for his arrest, ma’am,” Rodriguez said with an apology in his voice.
“I’m a doctor,” she replied. “This is my patient, and you cannot take him without my permission.”
“ I t ’s p ret ty c lear- c ut ,” Nathan Frear, the lawyer, said to Minas Nolan and his son.
They were in Frear’s office at the top floor of a Westwood office highrise.
“He was convicted of assault on police officers in an attempt to keep them from their duty. It says that he was part of an organized group that opened fire on the officers trying to arrest them.”
“He was twelve,” Eric said. “He didn’t even have a gun.”
“But he was part of the group, and he was convicted under a law devised to dampen gang activity.”
“But he wasn’t part of a gang. He was twelve and nearly homeless. He was just trying to stay alive.”
“All of that evidence was presented in court,” Frear said.
“The judge still found him guilty.”
“What will happen if he goes to trial?” Minas asked.
“Either he’ll be returned to the juvenile authority or, more likely, he will be sentenced as an adult and will serve the full term of the original sentence plus whatever else the judge might want to tack on for his further crimes.”
“What crimes?” Eric asked. “All he did was save my daughter from Drew.”
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Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“He lied to the police; he escaped from custody. He committed identity theft by using a social security card that belonged to Bruno Forman. The prosecutor might even try to implicate him with the man who killed your girlfriend.
After all, Drew Peters used Thomas’s cart to block the door and keep you from saving your wife.”
Frear was tall and extraordinarily thin. His dark-blue suit was made from the finest material, and his aqua tie had a ruby tack that held it perfectly in place.
“That’s crazy,” Minas said. “He’s just a boy.”
“He’s a man,” Frear corrected, “homeless and black. A convicted felon, an admitted drug dealer, an escapee from a state institution, and there’s even some evidence that he was involved in the slaying of a customer of his, a Raymond
‘RayRay’ Smith.
