Joan Johnston - Outcast

“You can come, but you’re a friend, not a cop, got it?”

Ben eyed the vacant faces of the truants and dropouts walking the streets of the broken-down neighborhood. “Never thought I’d see so many thousand-yard stares in faces so young. Hard to believe they’re just kids.”

“Kids with guns and knives,” Waverly said. “Don’t ever underestimate them.”

Ben had too recently fought in Iraq and Afghanistan against boy soldiers to discount the danger of a child with a gun. He was very much aware of the savagery bubbling beneath the surface whenever roaming gangs prowled the streets. And he had a gut feeling, an awful premonition he couldn’t shake, that Epifanio was in real peril.

As opposed to the phantoms that had plagued Ben last night. He didn’t know what had triggered the flashback in the woman’s apartment. He just wished it had happened later. After he’d sated himself with her.

She was different somehow from the other women he’d picked up over the past six months. He’d felt poleaxed the instant he’d laid eyes on her in the vet’s office yesterday morning. It could have been the oddity of the circumstances. It wasn’t every day you met a woman with a dog attached to your arm. But the flare of sexual desire he’d felt was so strong it had spooked him.

Which was why he’d avoided her at the urgent care clinic. The last thing he wanted to do was get emotionally involved. That led to loving. And loving led to pain.

He’d wanted—needed—to put himself inside her. What alarmed him was the equal need he’d felt to hold her in his arms and keep her safe.

Safe from what? What horror had she witnessed that had put that shadowed look in her eyes? He didn’t want to know.

In the end, she was the one who’d ended up holding him, keeping him safe. He’d been lucky to beat a hasty retreat without indulging the need he’d felt. Somehow he knew that having her once would not have been enough. Letting her into his life was simply asking for trouble.

Ben turned the corner onto 16th Street NW, just as Lincoln Middle School let out. The Latino, Black and Asian kids had formed into knots that Ben recognized by the gang colors they substituted for their maroon and khaki school uniforms and by their gang hand sign greetings to each other.

He saw a cluster of the brown pants and white T-shirts worn by the 18th Street gang and felt a chill run down his spine.

“I wish he’d given me some clue what he’s found out,” Ben muttered, his eyes still shifting right, then left, then up to the rearview mirror to check behind him.

“I don’t like the feel of this any more than you do,” Waverly said.

Ben adjusted the Glock 19 he was wearing in a slide belt holster concealed under his leather jacket, then shifted it back where it had been before he’d adjusted it.

“Why are you so jumpy?” Waverly asked.

Ben glanced at the man who would be his brother-in-law by tomorrow noon, noting his friend’s clean-shaven, thirty-year-old face, his calm brown eyes, his not-quite-regulation police haircut. Ben was the same age but felt decades older. He put his eyes back on the street. “Seen too much bad stuff, I guess.”

It hadn’t taken him more than one war, and a couple of military interventions, to realize he didn’t want a career in the army. Yet here he was, a soldier in a different kind of army fighting a different kind of war. His job, once again, was to protect the innocent, who were as difficult to identify in this American landscape as they had been in a foreign setting.

Waverly pointed to an alley on the right, a block down from the neighborhood convenience store where Ben was supposed to meet Epifanio and said, “What’s going on over there?”

Ben slowed his SUV to a crawl as he watched the altercation at the entrance to the alley. What Ben saw were two different gangs on the same turf. And neither of them happy about it.

“Looks like the One-Eight pitted against MS guys,” Waverly said.

“Not good,” Ben muttered.

“You hear about the kid who lost his fingers to a machete in a mall in Virginia? That was MS,” Waverly said.

Ben felt his gut tighten. Machetes reminded him of the time he’d spent on a special mission in Somalia. He focused on the kids in the alley to keep his mind from forming images he didn’t want to remember.

Suddenly, Waverly cried, “One of them’s waving a knife!”

Ben put the SUV in Park and was out the door before he had time to think what he was doing. “Call for backup,” he yelled over his shoulder. He heard Waverly shouting agreement behind him, but he didn’t pause, just pulled his Glock and headed toward the alley on the run.

As he raced forward he shouted, “Police! Put down the knife! Put it down!”

The boy in danger of being stabbed backed away, trying to escape. And Ben realized who it was.

He saw the look of terror in Epifanio’s eyes and felt his gut tighten in fear, which turned to horror as he watched the knife tear into the boy’s white T-shirt.

Most of the kids had fled, leaving only the perpetrator and the victim. Ben watched as a boy sporting an MS gang tatt—the number 13 tattooed in black ink on his cheek—eyed him, then reached around and purposely cut Epifanio’s throat.

Rich red blood spurted from Epifanio’s jugular.

Ben saw the shock in the boy’s brown eyes as he collapsed on the asphalt. And then watched the kid with the knife flee down the alley.

Ben felt his throat constrict with emotion, but he didn’t stop to offer comfort to the dying boy. As a combat veteran, he knew a good-as-dead man when he saw one. Waverly would do what was necessary till help arrived. There was no saving the kid. But he could catch the killer.

He darted after the boy with the knife, stumbling over debris the kid threw back into his path as he ran along the uneven brick pavement. “Stop, or I’ll shoot!”

The youth gave a hoot of hysterical laughter and ran faster.

Ben took a shooting stance and aimed for the kid’s leg. But to his surprise, his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t get a good aim. “Damn!”

He shot once into the side brick wall above the boy’s head, to see if he could scare the kid into stopping. When the killer kept running, Ben realized he should have known better. These kids had grown up with violence. They heard gunshots every Saturday night and had seen their friends die early deaths. He took his finger off the trigger and raced after the boy.

As the curly-headed, café-au-lait-colored kid ran, he kept pulling up his jeans, which he’d been wearing down around his hips. The shoelaces on his Air Jordans were untied, causing him to trip and lose his balance.

Which was how Ben caught up to him. It was a great open-field tackle against a zigzagging opponent. The kid howled like a banshee, and Ben nearly broke the boy’s wrist getting him to drop the bloodstained knife. His knee in the small of the boy’s back, he wrestled the kid’s hands behind him and slapped on the metal cuffs he kept in a case on the back of his belt.

His chest was heaving, and his heart felt like it might pound out of his chest. He resisted the urge to shake the kid within an inch of his life. Or smash the smirk off his face. Or pick him up and throw him back down and stomp on him. All natural responses when an enemy had killed a friend. All impulses that he’d learned to control in battle.

Ben swore every foul oath he knew. He should have called the cops whether Epifanio wanted him to or not. He should have done something, anything, to make the kid understand the danger of asking questions that might put him at risk. He should have been there the moment school let out.

His mistakes had cost the kid his life.

Ben could feel the shakes coming on, his body’s response to seeing a boy he’d grown to care for killed in front of his eyes. His heart squeezed when he realized he was going to have to tell Epifanio’s abuela that her grandson had met the fate she’d always feared, the fate Ben had been trying so hard to save him from. Ben didn’t know if he could bear watching those ancient brown eyes fill with tears of sorrow.