Winter Moon

diamonds, but all gold, the watch and the band."
        "What is that," she asked incredulously, "fifteen thousand bucks,.twenty thousand?"
        "Something like that," one of the hurt boys said. "It's not the most expensive model."
        "You can have it," the owner of the watch repeated.
        Heather said, "How old are you?"
        "Seventeen."
        "You're still in high school?"
        "Senior. Here, take the watch."
        "You're still in high school, you get a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch for Christmas?"
        "It's yours."
        Crouching in front of the huddled trio, refusing to acknowledge the pain in her right foot, she leveled the Korth at the face of the boy with the watch.
        All three drew back in terror.
        She said, "I might blow your head off, you spoiled little creep, I sure might, but I wouldn't steal your watch even if it was worth a million.
        Put it on."
        The gold links of the Rolex band rattled as he nervously slipped it onto his wrist again and fumbled with the clasp.
        She wanted to know why, with all the privileges and advantages their families could give them, three boys from Beverly Hills would sneak around at night defacing the hard-earned property of a cop who had nearly been killed trying to preserve the very social stability that made it possible for them to have enough food to eat, let alone Rolex watches. Where did their meanness come from, their twisted values, their nihilism? Couldn't blame it on deprivation. Then who or what was to blame?
        "Show me your wallets," she said harshly.
        They fumbled wallets from hip pockets, held them out to her. They kept glancing back and forth from her to the Korth. The muzzle of the.38 must have looked like a cannon to them.
        She said, "Take out whatever cash you're carrying."
        Maybe the trouble with them was just that they'd been raised in a time when the media assaulted them, first, with endless predictions of nuclear war and then, after the fall of the Soviet Union, with ceaseless warnings of a fast-approaching worldwide environmental catastrophe. Maybe the unremitting but stylishly produced gloom and.doom that got high Nielsen ratings for electronic news had convinced them that they had no future. And black kids had it even worse, because they were also being told they couldn't make it, the system was against them, unfair, no justice, no use even trying.
        Or maybe none of that had anything to do with it.
        She didn't know. She wasn't sure she even cared. Nothing she could say or do would turn them around.
        Each boy was holding cash in one hand, a wallet in the other, waiting expectantly.
        She almost didn't ask the next question, then decided she'd better:
        "Any of you have credit cards?"
        Incredibly, two of them did. High-school students with credit cards.
        The boy she had driven backward into the wall had American Express and Visa cards. The boy with the Rolex had a Mastercard.
        Staring at them, meeting their troubled eyes in the moonlight, she took solace from the certainty that most kids weren't like these three.
        Most were struggling to deal with an immoral world in a moral fashion, and they would finish growing up to be good people. Maybe even these brats would be all right eventually, one or two of them, anyway. But what was the percentage who'd lost their moral compass these days, not merely among teenagers but in any age group? Ten percent? Surely more. So much street crime and white-collar crime, so much lying and cheating, greed and envy. Twenty percent? And what percentage could a democracy tolerate before it collapsed?
        "Throw your wallets on the sidewalk," she said, indicating a spot beside her.
        They did as instructed.
        "Put the cash and credit cards in your pockets."
        Looking perplexed, they did that too.
        "I don't want your money. I'm no petty criminal like you."
        Holding the revolver in her right hand, she gathered up the wallets with her left. She stood and backed away from them, refusing to favor her right foot, until she came up against the garage wall.
        She didn't ask them any of the questions that had been running through her mind. Their answers-if they had any answers-would be glib. She was sick of glibness. The modern world creaked along on a lubricant of facile lies, oily evasions, slick