His job had been to punish. To control. Dad was a hammer, a blunt instrument wielded without thought to circumstances.

I didn’t share his attitude. I thought being police chief was about something else, something kinder.

I wanted to help, not control.

This job isn’t for you, he’d told me when I’d applied for the position. You’re too soft. Too willing to forgive when you need to punish.

I aimed a giant raspberry at my dad’s portrait and rolled my chair up to the desk and the small set of reports sitting on my blotter.

A domestic over at the Marones’. Again.

Shirley Stewart escaped from the retirement home. Again. She’d been found on the steps of the Methodist church, unharmed.

Attempted grand theft over at the—

“What?”

I snapped the report open, scanned the perp sheet.

“No, no, no, no,” I moaned. I leaped up from my chair and busted into the squad room. “Where is he?” I asked.

“Holding four,” Owens said, leaning back in his chair. He jerked his thumb back toward the holding cells as if I didn’t know where they were. Owens was round and pink and slick. And so smug it was hard not to smack his face on principle.

“I was supposed to be called if anything happened with this kid,” I said.

“What were we supposed to do?” Owens asked, his eyes wide in false and infuriating innocence. “The mayor caught him breaking into the car.”

“Where’s the car?”

“Impound.”

“Do we know whose it is?”

“It’s not in the report?” Officer Owens asked. “Your night-shift boys caught it. I can go check it—”

“Do that,” I said, so fed up with Owens’s laziness and Jones’s excuses.

The metal door opened up with a bang under both my hands and I stalked down the small hallway between cells. It was hot and still, the high windows letting in bright bars of sunlight across the gray concrete walls.

Four was back in the corner, and as I got closer I saw him on the floor. His wrists were propped up on his bent knees, the hood of his ragged gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

“Miguel?” I said and his head snapped up.

“Chief!” He jerked upright, his legs hitting the cement floor, but his face was still buried in the shadows under his hood. “Chief, I’m so—”

“Sorry?” I asked. “Let me guess, you didn’t mean to attempt to steal a—” I glanced down at the report.

“A Porsche,” he muttered.

“A Porsche!” I flung my hands up. “I’m trying to help you, Miguel. And you steal a Porsche?”

“I didn’t get nowhere. Barely got the door open.”

I unlocked the lockbox with the cell keys in it and opened Miguel’s cell, the bars slamming back. The sound echoed in the big empty room. “I suppose you were just gonna sit in it?”

“Hell, no,” Miguel said. “I was gonna steal it, but Mayor Bourdage found me.”

I sat down on the bench next to where Miguel sat on the floor. I was running out of options with this kid, already skirting the line between leniency and not doing my job.

And now he goes and tries to steal a Porsche. It’s like he doesn’t want my help.

“Miguel, tell me what you think I should do.”

His knees came back up and he shrugged. “I don’t care.”

Maybe my father was right, maybe I was too soft. Maybe this kid, whom I liked, whom I bent every damn rule for, didn’t just need a break.

Maybe this kid needed to be punished.

“Look at me, Miguel,” I said, biting out the words.

He shook his head and my temper flared. “Stop being so damn predictable.” Furious, I reached out and jerked his hood back, revealing his face. The bruises and swelling. The blood.

“My God—” I breathed.

“You think I care what you do to me?” he asked, jerking away, the left side of his face immobile, his eye shut tight from the swelling. He was black and purple from his lips to his hairline, the skin along his cheek seemed to have been burned. I knew things with Miguel’s father, Ramon, were bad, but I never dreamed it was this bad. “You think you can do something worse than this?”

“Have you been to the doctor?” I asked.

He sneered and yanked the hood back up.

I leaned back against the brick wall and sighed heavily. Punish him? How? How could I look at what he’d been through and put him in the system? The system would only make him harder. He’d go in there an angry victim and come out a criminal.

It had happened with the last two teenagers I’d sent to the Department of Corrections.

“Where’s your father?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t care.”

“How about you tell me what happened?”

Miguel shook his head. “He was drinking and he went after Louisa.” He shrugged, his thin shoulders so small. So young to have to carry so much. “I said something and he picked up this frying pan off the stove.”

Tags: Molly O'Keefe Notorious Romance
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