George Pelecanos: The Way Home

“I’m just a bad boy,” said Chris, smiling slowly.

“Did you bring any protection?”

“Didn’t know I’d be seein you, girl.”

“We’ll improvise,” said Taylor.

Chris said he was good with that, and Taylor laughed and opened her arms.

Chris put his beer down and went to the couch. His jeans were tight before their mouths met. She stroked his belly, and her breath was hot and smoky as they kissed. She moaned as they made out, and Chris thought, God, this girl can do it. Taylor pushed him away, crossed her arms, and drew her T-shirt over her head. She came back to him naked above the waist, and Chris ran his strong hands over her slim hips and up her ribcage, and he found her small breasts, circling her hardening nipples with his thumbs, and she took one of his hands and put it inside her boxer shorts. He did what she liked until Taylor couldn’t stand it any longer and she climaxed under his touch. She finished him deftly the same way.

It would be a long time before he would get with a female again. Later, when he was masturbating at night in his cell, bitter because she had stopped taking his calls, but still, wanting Taylor again so badly he thought he would shout out her name, he would regret settling for a hand job in her basement the last time he saw her. He should have put it in her. So what if he didn’t have a condom? Okay, she could have got pregnant. What difference would that have made to him then?

“Are they going to get you, Chris?” Taylor was in his arms on the couch, on top of him, her breasts crushed against his chest.

“Nah, I’m straight. I can get the Volvo’s paint off my bumper, and there’s plenty of Troopers out there the same color as mine. Long as they didn’t read my plates, I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe you got lucky.”

“I could have.”

“Why’d you hit that boy?”

“I was really tryin not to. Used to be I’d get angry and just fight, but this time was different. I tried to hold back, Taylor. If he hadn’t pushed me so hard, run his mouth like he did, all this shit tonight, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“It’s over now.”

“No doubt.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“They can’t hurt steel,” said Chris with a weak smile.

Taylor hugged him tightly. “I applied to a college I want, Chris. I’m trying to get into the Rhode Island School of Design.”

“That’s the art school, right?”

“My counselor says it’s one of the best.”

“I hope you get in.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Don’t know. First thing, I need to get out my house. I can’t take livin with my father. When I turn eighteen I figure I’ll get a job. Me and Country will find an apartment somewhere. Maybe sell weed on the side, but do it real quiet.”

“That’s your plan?”

“For now,” said Chris. “Yeah.”

Taylor said nothing else and soon fell asleep in his arms. Chris untangled himself without waking her and covered her with a blanket. He dressed and left the house quietly, went to his Trooper, and drove toward his house through backstreets. There were few cars out. It was very late.

He drove west on Livingston, the street where he lived, and a car turned off 41st and fell in behind him. The car was a big square sedan, and it was then that he knew. Several squad cars were parked on his block, and their light bars were activated as he neared his house. The air had gone out of him, and he simply put the Isuzu in park in the middle of the street and let them come to him. They leaned him over the hood of his Trooper and cuffed him, and one of the uniformed men said, almost in admiration, “That was some real fancy driving, son.” Chris said, “I guess someone got my plate numbers,” and the uniform said, “ Oh, yeah,” and Chris remembered that he had a pound of marijuana in the back of his vehicle and he idly wondered what that would do to compound the charges. “You don’t even know the trouble you’re in,” said the uniform. “The woman who hit our cruiser at Morrison, where you blew that stop sign? Mother of three. She’s in Sibley’s emergency room with severe injuries. They collared her and taped her to a gurney. And that kid in the parking lot is gonna be breathing through his mouth for a while. You broke his nose.”

Chris raised his head and squinted through the red and blue shafts of light coloring his yard. His father was standing outside their clapboard colonial, framed beneath the portico he’d built himself, his hands buried in his pockets, his eyes black and broken.

“You made your folks real proud tonight,” said the police officer.

Chris didn’t care.

Thomas Flynn obtained a bond and made Chris’s bail, twenty-seven hours after he’d been booked. At the arraignment, in a courtroom down in the Indiana Avenue corridor of Judiciary Square, Chris was released to the custody of his parents until the date of his trial. He was represented by Bob Moskowitz, a boyhood friend of Thomas Flynn’s who was a private-practice attorney. The Washington Post court beat reporter, interested and aggressive because Chris was a white kid and his “night of crime” had made the TV news, tried to ask Chris questions, but Chris made no comment by order of Moskowitz and was hustled out of the building by his father, who held him roughly by the elbow.

Moskowitz followed them to their house, where he met with Thomas, Amanda, and Chris to discuss the status of the case and their general plan. They sat in the living room, where Thomas had built shelves to hold his collection of history and other nonfiction books. Amanda served coffee that neither Moskowitz nor Thomas Flynn touched.

“I’ve been contacted by Jason Berg’s father.” Moskowitz wore a caterpillar mustache and was forty pounds too heavy for his height. “After questioning Jason, the police and prosecutors are satisfied that Jason was not significantly involved in the night’s events to the degree that he should be charged.”

“You mean,” said Flynn, “his father’s wired down at the courthouse, and he got his son off.”

“There’s no doubt that Mr. Berg has some suction. But more likely the prosecutors feel they can’t make any charges on Jason stick. Jason never got out of the SUV, so there was no contact or conversation between him and the boys in that parking lot. And of course he wasn’t the driver. They’re going to focus on Chris.”

“What about the pound of marijuana?” said Flynn. “Jason had nothing to do with that, either?”

“He says it wasn’t his.”

“It was mine,” said Chris.

“Shut up,” said Flynn.

“Tommy,” said Amanda.

“So, what, they’re gonna let that idiot off in exchange for his testimony against Chris?”

“Country’s my boy,” said Chris. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“I told you to shut the fuck up,” said Flynn.

“Tommy.”

“I don’t think they’re going to compel Jason to testify,” said Moskowitz with deliberate calm. “His father told me that he had no such indication from his contacts down there. They feel as if they have enough evidence and witnesses to make their case without Jason’s testimony.”

“What’s going to happen to my son?” said Amanda.

“I’m going to give him the best representation possible,” said Moskowitz. “Chris?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll speak in more detail, obviously. But what I want to ask you now concerns your alleged assault on Alexander Fleming, the boy in the parking lot. It’s important, because this is the act that triggered everything that followed. If you had reason to hit him, if you felt threatened or were defending yourself-”

“He didn’t threaten me or nothin like that,” said Chris. “I can’t even say that I was defending myself.”