“What were we supposed to do?” Owens asked, his eyes wide in false and infuriating innocence. “The mayor caught him breaking into the car.”
“Where’s the car?”
“Impound.”
“Do we know whose it is?”
“It’s not in the report?” Officer Owens asked. “Your night-shift boys caught it. I can go check it—”
“Do that,” she said, so fed up with Owens’s laziness and Jones’s excuses.
The metal door opened up with a bang under both her hands and she stalked down the small hallway between cells. It was hot and still, the high windows letting in bright bars of sunlight across the gray concrete walls.
Four was back in the corner, and as she got closer she saw him on the floor. His wrists were propped up on his bent knees, the hood of his ragged gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head.
“Miguel?” she said and his head snapped up.
“Chief!” He jerked upright, his legs hitting the cement floor, but his face was still buried in the shadows under his hood. “Chief, I’m so—”
“Sorry?” She asked. “Let me guess, you didn’t mean to attempt to steal a—” She glanced down at the report.
“A Porsche,” he muttered.
“A Porsche!” She flung her hands up. “I’m trying to help you, Miguel. And you steal a Porsche?”
“I didn’t get nowhere. Barely got the door open.”
Juliette unlocked the lockbox with the cell keys in it and opened Miguel’s cell, the bars slamming back. The sound echoed in the big empty room. “I suppose you were just gonna sit in it?”
“Hell, no,” Miguel said. “I was gonna steal it, but Mayor Bourdage found me.”
She sat down on the bench next to where Miguel sat on the floor. She was running out of options with this kid, already skirting the line between leniency and not doing her job.
And now he goes and tries to steal a Porsche. It’s like he doesn’t want my help.
“Miguel, tell me what you think I should do.”
His knees came back up and he shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Maybe her father was right, maybe she was too soft. Maybe this kid, whom she liked, whom she bent every damn rule for, didn’t just need a break.
Maybe this kid needed to be punished.
“Look at me, Miguel,” she said, biting out the words.
He shook his head and her temper flared. “Stop being so damn predictable.” Furious, she reached out and jerked his hood back, revealing his face. The bruises and swelling. The blood.
“My God—” she breathed.
“You think I care what you do to me?” he asked, jerking away, the left side of his face immobile, his eye shut tight from the swelling. He was black and purple from his lips to his hairline, the skin along his cheek seemed to have been burned. She knew things with Miguel’s father, Ramon, were bad, but she never dreamed it was this bad. “You think you can do something worse than this?”
“Have you been to the doctor?” she asked.
He sneered and yanked the hood back up.
She leaned back against the brick wall and sighed heavily. Punish him? How? How could she look at what he’d been through and put him in the system? The system would only make him harder. He’d go in there an angry victim and come out a criminal.
It had happened with the last two teenagers she’d sent to the Department of Corrections.
“Where’s your father?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t care.”
“How about you tell me what happened?”
Miguel shook his head. “He was drinking and he went after Louisa.” He shrugged, his thin shoulders so small. So young to have to carry so much. “I said something and he picked up this frying pan off the stove.”
She winced. That explained the bruises and burns.
“I’ve got to call community services—”
“I’ll tell them I fell down the stairs.” Miguel shook his head, emphatic.
“Miguel, you can’t be serious. You want to stay with your dad?”
“No, I just don’t want to go to no foster home. Louisa and me will get split up and I ain’t having that.”
“You were going to leave last night, Miguel,” she reminded him. “You would have been split up anyway.”
“I was going to take her,” he said. “I wouldn’t ever leave her behind.”
Great. Kidnapping on top of grand theft. “I can arrest him, bring him—”
“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “How long this time? Overnight? A week? Last time you did that he came out more pissed off than ever, and me and Louisa had to stay with Patricia.”
“But, Miguel, he hit you.”
“You think this is the first time?”
“Why haven’t your teachers reported this?” she asked.
“I skip if it’s bad. But it’s not usually bad.”
“It’s my job to report this, Miguel.”
“You do what you gotta do, but no social worker is taking me nowhere.”
Rock. Hard place. The kid didn’t trust the system and frankly, she didn’t blame him. Bonne Terre, much less the parish, had no place for a kid like Miguel. It was the streets, holding cell four, or DOC over in Calcasieu Parish. Bonne Terre didn’t have a whole lot of crime, but what they did have was largely juvenile-perpetrated and they just weren’t equipped to help.
Punish, yes. Help, no.
And this was one of those situations that defined the differences between her and her father. These circumstances dictated that she help this kid.
“We need to get you to the doctor,” she said, deciding to put off the question of community services until she had a better answer.
“Am I going to jail?” he asked, and for the first time, something scared colored his voice.
Not if I can help it, she thought.
“Well, it’s not up to me. It’s up to the guy whose car you tried to steal.” He sniffed, the big man, as if it didn’t matter, as if jail would be no problem. And maybe, when push came to shove, it was better than home.
But, man, she wanted to give him another option. He was bright. Smart. Compassionate. He loved his sister, laid down his body for her.
The boy deserved a choice. A chance.
A safe home.
You’re soft, her father’s voice whispered. You’re way too soft.
The door to the holding cells opened and Owens walked in, his tall frame casting a long shadow down the hallway. “Got a name on that Porsche,” he said, coming to stop in the open door of cell four.
“Yeah?” she asked, her stomach tight. If she could just convince the owner not to press charges, to give the kid a pass, then she’d think of something. A way to give the kid a real opportunity, maybe get him out of that house.
But it all depended on the owner of that Porsche.
“You’re not going to believe it.”
“Who