Running the Risk (7 page)

“I could be wrong,” I said, “but I don't think so. I met a guy on the street. I've seen him twice in fact. I was already pretty sure it was him but I didn't want to get involved. But now this.” I pushed the newspaper toward him. He looked down at it and saw the photo of the victim.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don't think I have a choice,” I said.

“You always have a choice. You could do nothing. The police are going to get serious now that someone's been killed. This guy can't keep getting away with this.”

“Detective Solway told me they don't have much to go on.”

“That may have changed. Now they have this picture from the security cam.”

I looked at the fuzzy image again. “It's not much to go on.”

“No, it isn't,” he admitted.

“Will you drive me down to the police station?”

The toast popped up just then. My father looked frightened.

“Part of me wants to talk you out of this,” he said.

“I know. I thought about what it might mean,” I said. “It could be a rough ride.”

“I don't want anything bad to happen to you.”

“I know that too,” I said. “But if I go down there now, this guy with the gun could be off the street today. I'm fairly sure of that. If I let it go until tomorrow or the next day or wait for the cops to figure it out on their own...”

I didn't finish the sentence. I just let it hang there.

My father called Detective Solway and told him we were coming. He drove me to the police station in the Mustang. It somehow felt right.

Solway asked him to sit in a waiting room and led me into the same room where he had questioned me before. I could tell he was upset about something.

I told Solway what I thought. He was skeptical. “He had a ski mask on and you only saw his eyes?”

“Yes.”

“But you believe you've met him on the street, and you can describe what he looks like?”

“His name is J.L. I don't know what it stands for and I don't know his last name, but it shouldn't be that hard to find out.”

“Why didn't you come in before?”

“I don't know.”

“Where did you see him?”

“Downtown. South Main.”

“You might have saved a life if you'd come to us sooner,” he said after a long pause. “You know how hard it is these days to get anyone to come forward? Young men in gangs get knifed or beat up and they refuse to say a word about who did it. Even little kids don't want to point the finger at the bully. No one wants to be the snitch.” He rubbed his forehead and looked at me. “But you're different, right?”

He was silent for a minute. “Look, it's just that sometimes someone starts out offering information and then they crap out on me. They don't follow through. This happens. A lot. Are you going to be able to follow through?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I'll follow through.” I remembered that moment again, staring at the gun, looking in those insane eyes.

“If your guy is smart, he's long gone from here by now. He's done too much damage. But my guess is he isn't smart. Just lucky. But I think his luck just ran out. I'm going to get Jack Kacer in here and you're going to give him features to work with.”

Solway went away. He came back with a heavyset guy who looked like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. He sat down at a computer in the corner and nodded.

“Eyes first, right?”

We went through forty images of just eyes until I saw them.

“Those are his,” I said.

“Not his really. They're computer generated. But it's a start. Now we have to come up with a face. You say you saw this guy without the mask?”

“Yeah.”

Solway said, “I'm going to run ‘J.L.' through the system and see if anything comes up.” He left the room.

Jack put me through a series of head shapes, chins, noses. It was slow and tedious and eventually we came up with a face that was not quite right. Over an hour had passed.

“Can I take a break?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

I went out of the room. My father was still in the waiting room, looking nervous. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“I think so. But I'm having second thoughts.”

“Me too,” my father said, and he gave me a hug. He hadn't done that in a long time.

Solway came our way just then. He had a handful of manila files with him. He pretended he didn't see us. “No J.L. came up, but I've got a dozen or so here with first-name and middle-name initials that match that. Ready to look at them?”

We went back into the room and Jack Kacer showed me a newly revised face. “What about this one?” he asked.

“Closer,” I said.

“Good,” Solway said. “At least now we have some pieces. Look at these.”

The eighth file was that of someone named James Leroy Pender. It wasn't a recent photo, but I was pretty sure it was him. I looked up at the computer likeness, then at the real photo.

Kacer did a quick scan of the file photo with a wireless hand scanner and pulled it up on his screen almost instantly. “Now we're cooking,” he said. “What do we need to do to it?”

I didn't realize at first what he was asking me. “Um...make his face a little thinner. The eyes a little crazier. Shorter hair.” Kacer was clicking away with the mouse. “Now give him three or four days of not shaving.”

It was him. It was J.L.

“We still don't know if he's our target,” Solway told Kacer. “But this is the guy Sean thinks is the one. We haven't seen him in a while. All I have here is petty theft, selling marijuana and a break-and-enter. But it could be he got himself in deeper with the drugs. That's what sometimes makes them more reckless. Some of them get hooked on the risk in a holdup. We'll bring in this James Leroy Pender and see what he has to say.”

Jack Kacer looked even more tired than before. “Good work, kid,” he said to me.

Solway's look didn't say anything of the sort. He turned to me. “All this is based on what you say, Sean. You know that, right? Things have just gotten a bit more serious. What are the odds that this J.L. person will know it was you who made the connection?”

“I don't really know but I think the odds are pretty good.”

“If we get anything at all to work with, we can detain him. If not, he may be back on the street in no time. I'd steer clear of him if I were you. And even if we keep him, he may have friends.”

I was thinking of Keeg, Vicente and Robert. Maybe even Monroe. Was it possible they were in on these robberies too? “What do I do?”

“Go home. Go to school. Avoid being alone anywhere. And avoid going anywhere near South Main for a long, long while.”

Later that day I got a call from Solway. My father and I picked up the phone at the same time, and I know he stayed on the line.

“We found J.L. and we found a gun— looks like it's the gun he used to kill the kid working at the gas station,” Solway said. “This means that you will be a whole lot less important in his conviction. It means the whole case doesn't hang on just you. You see what I'm saying?”

“So that's it? I don't have to go into a room and identify him or anything like that?” I asked.

There was a pause. “No. Not yet anyway. We've got enough here to charge him and keep him in custody. But if this goes to trial, you may have to appear as a witness, and yes, J.L. would be in the courtroom. As long as we know how to find you, you don't need to do anything more for now.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” I said, but I was wondering what it would feel like to stand up in that courtroom.

“Maybe he'll plead guilty. He hasn't told us who his accomplice was yet, so we still have some legwork to do.”

“Right.”

“Thanks for sticking your neck out,” said Solway. “It's rare for people to come forward.”

As I hung up, I felt a swirling mix of emotions. Relief, I suppose. Satisfaction in doing the right thing. Anxiety about what I might have to do further down the line. And then a sense of confusion—loss even. I had
put myself right in the middle of this thing and, for now, it was over. I would get back to my own life. Suddenly that didn't look at all interesting.

A lot had changed in a very short amount of time. I couldn't go back to being the person I had been before. But I wasn't sure I knew exactly who I was anymore. I pictured myself walking straight across that highway. I saw myself in the middle of wet, sloppy kisses with Jeanette. And I could see myself walking around those dirty city streets with Priscilla. I felt like I'd made a commitment to her as a friend. I couldn't just abandon her.

I decided not to tell anyone about my part in identifying J.L. No one knew but my parents and the police. Maybe it would stay that way.

My father knocked on my door.

“Come in,” I called.

He didn't say anything at first, just smiled and gave me a hug. “Hank would have been proud of you,” he said. “I know I am.”

My father persuaded my mother that it was okay for me to go back to work. So after
dinner on Saturday, I put on my cheesy blue and white uniform, and my father drove me to work. “Good luck,” he said.

Inside Burger Heaven, everything looked the same. Ernesto was trying to look cheerful. “You wanna work the grill tonight?”

He knew I hated cooking burgers. “I'd rather go back on cash.”

“You're okay with that?”

“Sure. It has a much higher entertainment value,” I said.

I'm not sure he got the joke, but he said, “Whatever. Sure. Cash it is.”

I was shocked to see Cam. Ernesto asked him if he wanted to work the grill. He surprised me by saying he wanted to be up front too. When the phone rang, I was left standing face-to-face with Cam.

“Sorry, dude,” he said, looking down at the floor. “Sorry about the stuff I said. I thought about what you did. It took a while. But it sank in. I got it. After I saw the thing on the news about the gas station. Oh, man. It could have been me.”

“It could have been both of us,” I said.

“Next guy with a gun that comes in through that door, I'm letting you call it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm kind of hoping there is no next guy with a gun.”

“Lot of freaking crazies out there, Sean.”

“I've noticed,” I said. I looked up at the ceiling then. “Check it out,” I said.

Cam looked up. Ernesto had installed new security cameras. There was a big sign on the wall behind the counter too:
Smile. You are being videotaped.

“Anything happens now,” I said, “we can watch the replay on the six o'clock news.”

Cam shook his head. “Don't know if that will stop the crazies, man.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did you hear they caught one of the guys?” he said. “The one with the gun?”

“Yeah, I read that,” I said.

“Lacey's not coming back and neither is Riley. I don't think Jeanette's parents will let her come back. Didn't I see you hanging out with her at school?”

I had been thinking about Jeanette, wanting to call her and ask her out again. “We had a little thing,” I said. “But it's over.”

“Too bad,” he said. “She's hot.”

I shrugged. “Why did you come back?” He looked puzzled. “I'm not sure. I didn't think I would. I felt I had to do it, I guess.”

I understood, though. Something to do with facing your own fears, your own nightmares. Sure, this was just a crummy job selling burgers for minimum pay. We weren't going to do it for the rest of our lives, but we weren't going to let the “crazies” make us huddle at home in fear. I didn't say any of this to Cam, but I think it was what we were both feeling, and I was totally freaked to suddenly realize how much he and I were alike.

I had already assumed that Jeanette would not be back. Miss Anxiety Attack. No way she'd put herself in such a stressful situation.

But I was looking up at the video monitor on the wall when she walked in. Even on the TV screen she looked nervous, but she looked so sweet in the Burger Heaven uniform. I watched as Ernesto walked from behind the counter and greeted her.

She didn't say anything at all to me, but she smiled. She didn't even look at Cam.

“Look who gets to cook hamburgers,” Cam said. But she gave no reply.

A couple of other workers showed up to join us—all older. One, with a name tag that said
Dave
, who looked like somebody's grandfather, and one named Tony, who looked like a bouncer from a bar. They'd obviously worked there before but on different shifts.

There was some confusion and tension as the earlier shift turned things over to us. Pretty soon three really rowdy teenagers came in, and things seemed a little tense. Then they ordered— so politely that Cam and I looked at each other, amazed. Ernesto stayed around, something he'd never done before when I was working there.

And it turned out to be a perfectly normal evening. When my break came around, I sat with Jeanette at a table near the window. At first she just sat there, looking at her reflection in the glass.

“I forgot just how much this job sucks,” she said.

“Then why did you come back?”

“Because I knew you'd be here. And I wanted to prove something to you. That I'm not a complete flake.”

I was going to say something about her not being a flake. Instead I smiled at her, picked up one of her French fries and said, “Cooking greasy hamburgers over a hot grill proves you're not a flake?”

She smiled back now. “Yes. It does.” She grabbed the French fry from me playfully and put it in her mouth.

I decided that we'd never really given ourselves a chance to get to know each other. And now we would. Very slowly. And it would be very different than before.