Hawk was making it up as he went along. It wasn’t clear to me that the Tec-9 would fire even a test round anymore, and it probably had more prints on it than a subway door, but Shoe seemed impressed.
“I didn’t trace nobody,” he said.
“You think you won’t go down for it?” Hawk said. “You think maybe you gotta lot of influence downtown, and they won’t drop you in a jar as soon as we bring you in? If we feel like bringing you in?”
“I didn’t trace Tallboy,” Shoe said.
“Don’t matter if you did or didn’t,” Hawk said. “We prove you did and it’s one less problem for Double Deuce. Fact we prove you all accessories and we got Double Deuce’s problems solved.”
“We didn’t do nothing.” It was a fat kid they called Goodyear. His voice had an asthmatic whisper around the edges of it. “We just looking out the window, see what’s happening.”
“We got you at the scene of a crime, with the murder weapon,” I said. “There’s three unsolved murders cleaned up if we can tag you with them. You think we can’t?”
“Shoe didn’t do it,” Goodyear said.
“Yeah, he did,” Hawk said.
“No,” Shoe said. His voice had outrage in it. The other kids muttered that he really hadn’t. “He didn’t,” Goodyear said.
“Move out,” Hawk said. “We’ll call downtown from my car.”
Nobody moved. Still holding the shotgun in one hand, Hawk put the muzzle against Shoe’s upper lip, right under his nose.
“Going down anyway, Shoe, may as well die here as Walpole.”
“They don’t burn nobody in this state,” Shoe said.
“For killing a three-month-old baby?” Hawk smiled.
“I never done that,” Shoe said.
“And her momma.”
“No,” Shoe said, his head tipped back a little by the pressure of the shotgun muzzle.
“And Tallboy. You be lucky to make it to Walpole.”
“No,” Shoe said.
“Course it coulda been Major,” he said.
“No. Major didn’t,” Shoe said.
Hawk was silent for a long time while we all stood there and waited. Finally he lowered the shotgun.
“Beat it,” he said.
They all stood motionless for a moment, then Shoe walked past him and out the open door. One by one they followed. No one spoke. In a moment it was just Hawk and me alone in the dingy room with the damaged remnants of a Tec-9.
CHAPTER 35
“Isn’t that fascinating,” Susan said. “They wouldn’t budge.”
We were sitting at the counter in the kitchen. I was drinking some Catamount beer, and Susan, to be sociable, was occasionally wetting her bottom lip in a glass of Cabernet Blanc. Pearl sprawled on the floor, her four feet out straight, her eyes nearly closed, occasionally glancing over to make sure no food had made a surreptitious appearance.
“They were scared,” I said. “Hawk could scare Mount Rushmore. But they wouldn’t give in.”
“It’s interesting, isn’t it. These kids have many of the same virtues and vices that other kids have, misapplied.”
“They’re applied to what’s there,” I said.
Susan nodded. “And the consequences may be fatal,” she said.
Across the counter, in the small kitchen, there was evidence that Susan had prepared a meal… or that the kitchen had been ransacked. Since there was a pot of something simmering on the stove, I assumed the former.
“The thing is,” I said, “we all knew Major did the killing. They knew it; we knew it; they knew we knew it; we knew they knew-”
“You admire their loyalty,” Susan said.
She was wearing black spandex tights and a leotard top. The outfit revealed nearly everything about her body. I looked at her eyes, and, felt as I always did, that I could breathe more deeply when I looked at her, that the air was oxygen rich, and that we would live forever.
“Windows of the soul,” I said. She grinned at me.
“Augmented with just a touch of eye liner,” she said.
“What’s in the pot?” I said. She glanced back at the stove.
“Jesus,” she said and jumped up and dashed around the counter. She picked up a big spoon and jostled the pot lid off with it. She looked in and smiled.
