Certain Prey

“They don’t gotta respect the man—hell, they probably don’t even know you—but they goddamn well gotta respect the badge,” his father said. “If they don’t respect the badge, the country starts caving in. Look what they got with the niggers down in Chicago. There are places in Chicago where you can’t even show the badge or the niggers’ll carve you up like the Christmas turkey. And you know how that started? It started when the first fuckin’ nigger saw the badge and didn’t show respect and nobody called him on it. And from there, the word got around, and the next thing you know, the world caves in. You got that? Huh?”
    Niggers, skateboarders, transgender migrants, yuppie scum, all the same stuff. People without respect. Butry swerved out of line to cross with the skaters. One of them, the toughest-looking kid, maybe sixteen with the baggy pants and the chain billfold and a ballpoint pen tattoo on his forearm, saw Butry coming and there was no respect at all in the way he looked at him.
    “Hey, dickhead: get them boards outa here. This is a bus station, not a playground,” Butry said.
    And the oldest kid said, “Fuck you, asshole.” Butry pulled his badge with one hand and his gun with the other, which would have gotten him fired if anybody else had been around to see how early it came out. “I’m a fuckin’ cop, wiseass. See the badge? Now sit on the fuckin’ ground and put your hands over your heads, all three of you.”
    The smallest of the kids, who looked like he might be fourteen, and had the bony look of a boy who hadn’t eaten right for a month or maybe a few months, that lonely, hollow-cheeked glow of hunger like a personal portrait, said, “Fuck you, fat boy.” He pulled up his t-shirt to bare his belly, and to show off a half-dozen steel rings that pierced the skin around his belly button. “Here: you want to shoot me? Here, shoot me, asshole.”
    Butry was fast, faster than the kid, who may have been slowed by hunger: Butry’s hand lashed out, open but heavy as a ham, a slap that knocked the boy off his feet.
    “On your goddamn knees,” he screamed. “On your goddamn . . .”
    At the very last second, he began to realize that he was over his head, but that very last second was too late. The young kid had come back up, on the toes of his ragged black tennies, and in his hand that pointed toward Butry’s nose was a piece-of-shit two-barrel Crow derringer; you couldn’t, as one of the gun magazines noted, expect to hit your target at six feet. But the gun was only nine inches from Butry’s face when the kid pulled the trigger, and the .45 slug went through the bridge of Butry’s nose and out the back of his skull.
    His father had forgotten to tell Butry that you don’t fuck with people who have nothing to lose.
    The three skaters froze at the impact of the blast, at the sight of the falling cop; then the oldest said, “Run,” in the harsh semi-whisper of panic, and the three scooped their boards and were running across the street through the moving cars like a pack of starving terriers. S HERRILL AND B LACK were slumped in her car, and Sherrill was talking to Lucas on her cell phone: “I’m starting to feel like a country song,” she said. “There’s something wrong about not feeling right . . .”
    Then their radio burped and Black picked it up and Sherrill-said to Lucas, “Just a minute,” and then a dispatcher was screaming something about a cop down, shot at the bus station, three men running away, everybody available get to the bus station, looking for three youths possibly carrying skateboards and last seen running toward Loring Park . . .
    “We got a call, there’s a cop down, shot, we’re going,” Sherrill said. And to Black, behind the wheel: “Go-go-go . . .” and Black was already going. C ARMEL SAID, “Listen, Pam . . .”
    “It’s Clara,” Rinker said. “My name is really Clara. Rinker.”
    “Clara?” Carmel tasted the name for a second. “I like that. Clara. Better than Pam.”
    “Anyway, you were saying . . .”
    “You are looking at this from the wrong point of view. People have always been allowed to kill in self-defense, and my dear, this is exactly what we’re doing. We’re trying to defend ourselves: Davenport has put us in this position, and we really don’t have much option. So what I’m saying is this: I don’t understand how you could kill for money, and not feel bad about it, and now you can feel bad about