them that they had no future. And black kids had it even worse,
because they were also being told they couldn't make it, the system was
against them, unfair, no justice, no use even trying.
Or maybe none of that had anything to do with it.
She didn't know. She wasn't sure she even cared. Nothing she could
say or do would turn them around.
Each boy was holding cash in one hand, a wallet in the other, waiting
expectantly.
She almost didn't ask the next question, then decided she'd better:
'Any of you have credit cards?'
Incredibly, two of them did. High-school students with credit cards.
The boy she had driven backward into the wall had American Express and
Visa cards. The boy with the Rolex had a Mastercard.
Staring at them, meeting their troubled eyes in the moonlight, she took
solace from the certainty that most kids weren't like these three.
Most were struggling to deal with an immoral world in a moral fashion,
and they would finish growing up to be good people. Maybe even these
brats would be all right eventually, one or two of them, anyway. But
what was the percentage who'd lost their moral compass these days, not
merely among teenagers but in any age group? Ten percent? Surely
more. So much street crime and white-collar crime, so much lying and
cheating, greed and envy. Twenty percent? And what percentage could a
democracy tolerate before it collapsed?
'Throw your wallets on the sidewalk,' she said, indicating a spot
beside her.
They did as instructed.
'Put the cash and credit cards in your pockets.'
Looking perplexed, they did that too.
'I don't want your money. I'm no petty criminal like you.'
Holding the revolver in her right hand, she gathered up the wallets
with her left. She stood and backed away from them, refusing to favor
her right foot, until she came up against the garage wall.
She didn't ask them any of the questions that had been running through
her mind. Their answers--if they had any answers--would be glib. She
was sick of glibness. The modern world creaked along on a lubricant of
facile lies, oily evasions, slick self-justifications.
'All I want is your identification,' Heather said, raising the fist in
which she clenched the wallets. 'This'll tell me who you are, where I
can find you. You ever give us any more grief, you so much as drive by
and spit on the front lawn, I'll come after all of you, take my time,
catch you at just the right moment.' She cocked the hammer on the
Korth, and their gazes all dropped from her eyes to the gun. 'Bigger
gun than this, higher-caliber ammunition, something with a hollow
point, shoot you in the leg and it shatters the bone so bad they have
to amputate. Shoot you in both legs, you're in a wheelchair the rest
of your life. Maybe one of you gets it in the balls, so you can't
bring any more like you into the world.'
The moon slid behind clouds.
The night was deep.
