“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 self-justifications.
“All I want is your identification,” Heather said, raising the fist in
which she clenched the wallets. “This’ll tell me who you are, where I
can find you. You ever give us any more grief, you so much as drive by