Aria had taken again to the streets. When Taylor offered to talk Dan into letting her stay with them, she had lied that she was going to follow Luke and everyone else. Instead, she headed in the direction of the Super Sun Market. She planned to wait across the street for him to emerge from the store in the morning.
Omkar was locked in the kind of dream that would make no sense upon waking, despite it being all too logical and real while he was in it. The low, repetitive buzz of the vibrator on his phone eventually drew him out of it.
“Hello, sir, this is Officer Hawkes. I have an Aria Abbott here,” the pleasant male voice told him. “Sir, am I correct in understanding that you have assumed responsibility for Aria while she is in town?”
“Yes, sir,” Omkar replied automatically. Having been taught well to fear authority, Omkar was hardly breathing. He listened like a soldier, waiting for orders.
“Sir, I don’t know if you’re aware but we have a curfew for anyone under eighteen. They cannot be out between 10pm and sunrise unless accompanied by an adult. Can you tell me your exact address?”
Not wanting his parents to be involved, Omkar recited the numbers belonging to a house three doors down from the store. Hearing the address, Officer Hawkes realized that the address was only six blocks away. As far as Officer Hawkes was concerned, because he was wasting his time doing juvenile sweeps anyway, instead of going through the hassle involved with taking her into the station or driving her the six blocks to the house, he decided to delegate the task. “Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to come pick her up,” Officer Hawkes said. “I can’t let her out of my custody until an adult can come get her.”
“OK, sir, I can definitely do that. Where can I pick her up?” Omkar asked, listening to the policeman relay their whereabouts, with the phone pressed between his cheek and shoulder so he could swiftly get dressed. When Officer Hawkes hung up, Omkar climbed out of his second-story window and dangled off of the ledge of the windowsill before dropping in order to avoid waking his parents up.
A year or so earlier, a string of nighttime shootings had made the city councilmen call for police to enforce a teen curfew in the city. Even though all the shootings had involved only adults, the police were directed to use every law enforcement tool they could to crack down on the recent spike in violent crime. On this, one of only two nighttime shifts he worked, Officer Hawkes and a group of other officers had been sent out on a juvenile sweep. Hawkes knew the routine well. He was expected to arrest them and either take them home or take them to a law enforcement post until their parents could come pick them up. It had been a rather ironic stroke of bad luck that Aria was spotted walking across the city exactly on that night. But her bad luck was offset by the fact that Officer Hawkes hated curfew law. Not only was there absolutely no evidence that it did anything to prevent crime, he found it to be an embarrassing waste of law enforcement resources. Most of the kids he ended up arresting were Latino or black, and every time he put the handcuffs on, he could feel the already strained relationship between law enforcement and minority groups worsening.
When he had spotted Aria weaving in and out of alleyways and under overpasses, he had considered whether to simply let her go. He worried more for her safety than that she was up to no good. But he decided to give her a scare in the hope that it would discourage her from running amuck at this time of night. Aria didn’t run. When she saw the police car sparkle its lights once from behind her, she stopped dead in her tracks.
Aria was surprised at first to see the officer that stepped out from the car. This was the third time she had crossed paths with this same cop. Though she had seen him act kindly, that did not fool her into forgetting that he was a cop and she was an underage runaway. Aria pretended to be ignorant of the curfew law and told Officer Hawkes that she was visiting a friend here because she was from out of town. She had expected to be arrested. She had half expected the karma of what had happened at the car lot to make today the day that she was caught and sent back to Illinois state foster care.
Officer Hawkes had heard excuses like hers before, but to his surprise, when she presented him with her ID and he shone his flashlight across it, he could clearly see that the license was in fact an out-of-state license. Instead of arresting her and forcing her to call her parents, who obviously would not even be able to pick her up, he asked her for a number so he could call whoever she was staying with in Los Angeles. Aria pulled out the number that Omkar had written on the scrap of paper towel from her backpack.
While they were waiting the few minutes for Omkar to arrive, Officer Hawkes asked her trivial questions about things like where she went to school and what it was like where she came from and how she liked her time in Los Angeles so far. Aria hated it when police tried to act so friendly. It always seemed to be a contrived attempt to make themselves come across like good guys instead of bad guys. No cop had ever made her
