Michaels was already feeling the result of too little sleep, and the coffee he had consumed to compensate had formed an acid bath in his stomach that could etch glass. Without consciously realizing that it had made any noise, he picked up his phone after the first ring.
“Lieutenant Michaels.”
“Michaels, this is Petrelli,” the other voice said.
Oh, shit. That’s what I fucking need. “Good morning, J. Daniel. I see you were up early for the cameras.”
Clearly agitated, Petrelli ignored the barb, which was uncharacteristic of him. “Turn on The Bitch,” Petrelli barked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The radio, goddammit. Turn on The Bitch. The Bailey kid is on there talking to her right now!”
“No shit?” Michaels was in no hurry. He knew he’d be able to catch whatever he missed by listening to one of the many tapes of the program that were being made by any number of police officers who would soon march them into their supervisors, making a show of how conscientious they’d been.
“Yeah, no shit,” Petrelli growled. “Turn it on and listen. I’ll call you when they’re done.”
Chapter 10
Nathan’s nervousness disappeared as soon as he started talking. As he spoke on the phone, he paced a repeating course around the bedroom and the master bath. It seemed that when his feet were moving, so was his mind.
“Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty?” he demanded.
“Whatever happened to the sanctity of human life?” Although her voice was smooth and soothing, her manner was very abrupt, putting Nathan on edge.
“What does that mean?”
“That means that killing is wrong. Don’t you think that killing is wrong?”
“Of course I do. But it’s no wronger than getting killed. I don’t remember you being there last night. You don’t have any idea what went on in there.”
“Did you kill the guard?”
Nathan’s voice rose in volume and pitch with his frustration. “Yes, but…”
Denise cut him off. “No buts, Nathan. Stop right there. You killed the guard. What more is there to know? You’re on the run, boy. You’re a fugitive, a hazard to our society. I don’t want you on our streets. I want you under control, behind bars.”
“There aren’t any bars,” Nathan corrected.
“What?”
“There aren’t any bars. Just heavy doors. In Juvey, I mean.”
“Don’t change the subject, Nathan,” Denise scolded. “Why don’t you hang up the phone right now and call the police? Turn yourself in, before you or somebody else gets hurt.”
Nathan sat back down on the corner of the bed. “I can’t go back,” he said matter-of-factly. “If I go back they’ll just hurt me again. Or kill me. That’s what Ricky was trying to do! I can’t go back and just let them finish the job.”
The line was silent again for a long moment while Denise put it together. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You say that the guard was trying to kill you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And why would that be?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Kids shouldn’t cuss on the radio.”
“Oh, sure, you’re a fine one to talk. You can’t even say your name without cussing.”
Denise laughed. This was a pretty sharp kid she was dealing with. “Maybe that explains why we don’t get too many kids calling in here.”
Or maybe its because what’s-his-name said you don’t talk to kids, Nathan didn’t say.
“All right, Nathan,” Denise said, “let’s start over again. You say, in essence, that you killed the guard in self-defense.”
“Yes. Right. Except they’re not called guards. They’re supervisors. You get in trouble if you call them guards.”
“Well, the last thing I want to do is get in trouble with the supervisors.” Denise was surprised to hear the tone in her own voice become warmer. There was something about this kid that was truly disarming. “Why don’t I just shut up and listen. You tell us what actually happened last night.”
Nathan propped himself on three pillows against the headboard of the big bed and stretched his feet out in front of him. “It’s kind of hard to know where to start,” he began. “I learned the hard way that I’d never get along with the other residents. Their idea of a good time was to beat the crap out of me and steal my stuff and, well, do really bad things to me. They’d steal my food and stuff like that. I tried to ignore them, you know? Like my dad used to tell me? But jeez, you gotta eat sometime. It got to the point where I had to snarf everything off my plate while I was still in the food line. For the first month I was there, they wouldn’t let me alone. I tried fighting back, but I just got smeared.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” Denise interrupted.
Nathan snorted bitterly. “Yeah, right. I tried that once on my first day there. Big mistake. It was Ricky that I told, as a matter of fact. He’s the guy that, well, you know… that I I…” He just gathered up his strength and he said it. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I know I shouldn’t have done what I did, but Ricky was a real dickhead. Urn, sorry.
“Anyway, there’s this area in the JDC where everybody gets together for school or basketball or just talking, or whatever. I was in there, trying to read, when Ricky came up to me and told me I had to come with him. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t know why.. .”
For the next eighteen minutes, Nathan unraveled his side of the story for millions of radio listeners from coast to coast. He spoke articulately, and with the kind of animation that only a child can generate. Denise interrupted only three times to clarify what he was saying, but otherwise sat silently, staring at her control board, envisioning in her own mind the events described by Nathan. By the time the boy was done, The Bitch was twelve commercials behind, but even the sponsors wouldn’t complain. This was great radio.
Nathan had long since finished the books in the JDC library that were worth reading, preferring novels to the comic books favored by the other residents. That day being the Fourth of July, it seemed appropriate to reread April Morning by Howard Fast, a story about a young boy whose life is changed by the Battle of Lexington.
The recreation hall was literally and figuratively the center of activity at the Juvenile Detention Center. Roughly hexagonal in shape and fabricated out of concrete block painted yellow-orange, the rec hall served all nonsleeping activities. Three glass-partitioned rooms served as makeshift classrooms during the day, with the largest of the rooms doubling as a dining hall. The detention cells extended down two hallways on opposite ends of the hexagon—one for the boys and one for the girls. From seven in the morning until eight at night, the doors to those hallways remained locked. By eight-thirty they were locked again, with their residents inside.
The sixth side of the hexagon was the control room, half-Lexan and half-concrete. When residents were in the rec hall, the control room was occupied. Reinforced doors on either side led to the administrative areas and to the Crisis Unit.
At around seven o’clock that night, Ricky entered the rec hall from the administrative section, walked directly over to Nathan, and lifted him out of the chair by his ear. “Come with me, you little shit,” he said.
Nathan yelped, “Ow! What’d I do?”
“You know what you did,” Ricky hissed, his breath smelling of booze and cigarettes. He yanked Nathan across the rec hall toward the door on the other side of the control station. “Maybe a night in the Unit will teach you to draw on the walls.”
Nathan hung onto Ricky’s forearm with both hands, and danced along on tiptoes to keep his ear from being ripped from his head. “Let go, Ricky, please,” he pleaded. “I didn’t do anything. Honest to God, Ricky, I didn’t do anything!”
Ricky didn’t reply, except to lift a little higher on the ear. All activity in the rec hall stopped as dozens of eyes watched the smallest resident of the WC being dragged across the room by the man they all feared most. Each of them looked away, though, as Nathan made eye contact with them, silently pleading for help that he knew they couldn’t offer, even if they’d wanted to.