way or I’ll fuck
you.”
He tried to move past her again, and again Molly blocked him.
Bo
covered her left breast with his right hand and shoved her out of the way. Molly took a canister from her purse and sprayed him in the face. Bo made a sound that might have been a scream and clasped his hands to his face.
“Ow,” he said. “Jesus Christ,
ow, ow! You fucking blinded
me.”
Molly put the Mace away, took her handcuffs and snapped a cuff on Bo’s left wrist. Suit came around the front of the bus in his
janitor’s outfit and pulled Bo’s right hand down, and together they
cuffed him.
Red-eyed, coughing, and head down, Bo was dragged into Jesse’s
office and put in a chair.
“My eyes are killing me,” he said.
“I need something for my
eyes. The bitch sprayed me for no reason. Gimme something for my eyes. My father’s gonna sue your ass.”
“Uncuff him,” Jesse said. “And
leave him with
me.”
Molly took the cuffs off and put them in her purse. Bo immediately began to rub his eyes.
“It’ll stop in a while,” Jesse
said. “Rubbing them won’t help.
We’ll go down and wash them.”
Molly put a bag on Jesse’s desk.
“When we arrested him,” Simpson said,
“naturally, we patted him
down for concealed weapons. Found this in his backpack.”
Bo stopped coughing just long enough to say,
“That’s not mine,
the bastards planted that.”
“Be my guess that there’s enough
here,” Molly said, “to support
possession with intent.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Jesse
said. “Anything
else?”
“No weapon,” Simpson said. “But
we didn’t look at
everything.”
Simpson put Bo’s backpack on top of the file cabinet next to the
window behind Jesse’s desk.
“You guys may as well go back to what you were doing,” Jesse
said.
“Cover’s pretty well blown,”
Molly said.
“Stay on it anyway,” Jesse said.
“I never had any cover to start with,”
Simpson
said.
Molly and Simpson went out. Jesse sat quietly looking at Bo.
“I need something for my eyes,” Bo said between coughs. “I need
a doctor.”
Jesse didn’t say anything for a while. Then he stood.
“Okay, let’s go wash you off,”
he said.
Rinsed and dried, Bo was still red-eyed and puffy-looking, and he still coughed sporadically.
“You call my father?” Bo said.
“We’re working on it,” Jesse
said. “Right now we got you on
possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, failure to obey a lawful command, threatening a police officer, assaulting a police officer, and being a general major-league fucking jerk.”
“That bitch can’t get away with spraying me like that,” Bo
said.
Jesse smiled. He didn’t say anything. Bo sat in the chair across
the desk staring hard at Jesse.
“So you gonna arrest me?” he said.
“Or what?”
Jesse didn’t answer him. Bo stood up.
“Fuck this,” he said.
“I’m walking out of here.”
“Nope,” Jesse said.
“You think you can stop me?” Bo said.
Jesse laughed. “Of course I can stop you,”
he said. “For
crissake a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman hauled you in here in handcuffs.”
“If you weren’t a cop
…”
“But I am a cop,” Jesse said.
“Sit down.”
Jesse’s voice was still pleasant, but there was a sudden
undertone in it that made Bo uncomfortable. He didn’t want to sit
down. He tried looking hard at Jesse. If Jesse noticed, it didn’t
show. Bo sat down. Jesse picked up the backpack and put it on the desk in front of him and dumped it out. He looked at what he had. A notebook, three ballpoint pens, some Kleenex, a packet of condoms, a ruler, a protractor, two packs of spearmint gum, and a white envelope. He opened the envelope and found four prints of Candace Pennington, lying naked on the ground. Bingo! Her face was
distorted by crying, someone out of the picture was holding her ankles, and Kevin Feeney was holding her wrists. Feeney was smiling. Jesse looked carefully at each print, then he put them faceup on his desk, facing toward Bo, and smiled at him and waited.
Bo didn’t look at the pictures. Jesse let the silence thicken.
Then he said, “Who’s the young
lady?”
“I don’t know,” Bo said.
“I found them pictures.”
“And the young gentleman?”
“I told you, I dunno. I found them.”
“Where?”
“In the school library, somebody musta dropped them.”
“The young lady looks like she’s
crying,” Jesse
said.
“You know how broads are, sometimes they cry after you fuck
them.”
“Really? And it seems that the young gentleman is restraining
her.”
“I don’t know,” Bo said.
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know nothing about that
picture.”
Arthur Angstrom opened Jesse’s door.
“Kid’s father is here,” he said.
Jesse nodded.
“He’s got Abby Taylor with him,”
Arthur said.
“Lawyer to the rescue,” Jesse said.
“Send them
in.”
26
Joe Marino was a large self-made man in an expensive suit that was a little tight for him.
“What the hell is going on here,” he said when he came into the
office.
“I didn’t do nothing, Dad,” Bo
Marino said.
“Shut up,” his father said.
“I’ll take care of
this.”
Jesse smiled at Abby Taylor, who had come in with Marino. She was dark-haired and good-looking, wearing a well-fitted suit with a short skirt.
“Hello, Abby,” Jesse said. “How
are you.”
Abby Taylor said, “I’m fine.”
“Hey,” Marino said.
“I’m talking to you.”
Jesse said, “You are.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“This your son?” Jesse said.
“Yes. What do you think I’m doing
here?”
“We’ve arrested him for possession of a controlled substance
with intent to sell, with resisting a lawful order, assault on a police officer, and maybe possession of obscene photographs.”
“Photographs?”
“That’s just a maybe,” Jesse
said.
“Lemme see the photographs,” Marino said.
“Nope,” Jesse said.
“I got a right to confront my accuser,”
Marino
said.
Jesse took in some air and let it out.
“Explain it to him, Abby.”
“Let me see if I can help with this, Mr.
Marino.”
“The bitch sprayed me with Mace,” Bo said.
“Shut up,” Marino said.
Jesse smiled at Abby and didn’t say anything.
“You can release Bo to his father,” Abby said.
Jesse shook his head. “We’ll hold him overnight and take him
over to district court in the morning.”
“Jesse,” Abby said.
“He’s seventeen. He has no previous record.
At most, in this instance, he’s guilty of a few minor lapses in
decorum.”
“He’s a tough kid,” Marino said.
“He stood up for himself like I
always taught him. Nobody pushes me around, I told him. Don’t let
nobody push you around, I told him, don’t take crap from nobody.”
Jesse nodded pleasantly. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, one foot up on the open bottom drawer of his desk, his hands resting motionless on the desktop.
“You’re looking at a fucking police
brutality suit, I’m telling
you that right now.”
Jesse picked up the phone and spoke to Arthur at the front desk.