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Fifteen
Another clay pot shattered with a dull clunk as Dean jammed his phone into his back jeans pocket. The last time he’d inserted himself into a bad situation, he’d paid far too costly a price. But here he was again, marching onward through the darkness and past the nursery’s broken wire gate.
“Hey!” He yelled to three teenagers a few yards ahead. One kid’s arm was wound back, ready to release another glass bottle at a plant pot balanced with others along a narrow beam.
The kid turned and flung the bottle at Dean’s head instead.
Dean ducked, and the bottle exploded along the edge of a metal shelf behind him. Glass shards cut through the cotton of his dark gray t-shirt and into the back of his bicep. Just as he’d expected, no good deed went unpunished.
“Fuck.” The curse hissed through his gritted teeth, and he stormed forward, the kid’s angry green scowl shifting to wide-eyed fear, the two other boys behind him bolting away in opposite directions. “Got to work on your aim, don’t you, you little shit?”
The kid tried to run after his friends, but Dean grabbed the kid’s collar, the one attached to his hooded sweat shirt, and the kid dangled for a moment.
I’ve seen these boys before. Those weren’t his friends. They were his siblings.
The kid directed a kick to Dean’s shin. He jolted back in time to sweep a foot under the kid’s one supporting leg, sending the little weasel well and truly onto his ass.
Outweighing the kid by about a hundred pounds, he pinned him down to the cold concrete, the wiry teenager wriggling and grunting, his dirty-blond hair flopping about his face. “Shove off, asshole. You’re hurting me.”
“Stop struggling, and it won’t hurt so much, Weasel.”
Dean peered down to his right arm pressed into the Weasel’s chest, blood pooling around the crook of his inner elbow, his blood-slicked bicep not agreeing with this struggle.
“Get off me.” The boy’s voice twisted in pitch.
“You think I’ll let you just run free?” Dean leaned in, though he did ease his weight off the Weasel’s chest in favor of pressing an elbow into the kid’s spindly throat, their faces now barely an inch apart. “You’re lucky the worst I’ve done is call the sheriff.”
“You snitched on me?” Despite the harsh language, the kid’s voice screeched even higher and broke under the pressure of his panic, the redness in his cheeks fading to a shade of sheet-white. “You can’t. My mother, she’ll—”
“Hopefully kick your ass all the way into acting right. You don’t look like you’ve hit fifteen, and you’re already screwing up your life.” Dean shook his head and made a light tsk sound. “Shit, boy, count this as your wake-up call.”
A look of wide despair spread across the kid’s face. A look that reminded Dean of himself at that age. He’d had no one to guide him, no one but a couple of other hooligans. Then again, he’d tried to change his life. To rise above his zero prospects—the army his ticket to that freedom. At least, that’s what he’d been told. A spectacular failure that turned out to be…
Still, he had a chance right now to do one good thing in all his years.
“Please, I was just following—” The boy snapped his mouth shut, about to rat out his brothers.
Dean shoved the kid a little harder into the ground, garnering a helpless yelp. He hated being needlessly rough, but this wasn’t all that needless if it worked to scare the boy into making better life choices. “You were following when you should have been thinking. Trust me kid, no matter how big and bad you get, there will always be someone or something stronger to stop you.”
Like prison. Or the syndicate…
A stinging guilt wound through his conscience, but he pushed that useless emotion to the background.
The boy looked up at him, jaw tight as if attempting to silence a cry. An internal war raged beneath Weasel’s terrified exterior. The kid shook his head, as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t.
Dean shoved the boy again. “You don’t need to tell me who the others were. They’re your brothers. You’re the Chadleys, and I saw you throwing rocks at Miss Overton at the soiree. But look around you, kid. Where are your brothers now?”
“Gone.” The boy gave a raspy whisper and blinked once, twice, his movements slowing after the third, as if he processed the deeper meaning to Dean’s question. “They left.”
“That’s right, they left you here on your own. Some brothers, huh?” Dean eased off the kid and gave him room to sit up, though he continued to grasp the front of the kid’s shirt to ensure he stayed put. “You’re the youngest, right?”
The kid nodded, his gaze dropping to the ground, his fingertips connecting with a cluster of loose pebbles atop the path’s worn concrete.
The wail of a siren prompted Dean to stand and wrench the kid up with him. “Listen, while you’re chilling your heels in the back of the sheriff’s car, I want you to think about something I wish someone had told me when I was your age. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing, you got it? Especially if, like your brothers, everyone else is setting the bar way down low. Heck, if I could do things over again, I’d pick the most impossible thing I could become, and I’d go do that. Scaling back is always easier than dragging yourself out of a pit.”
The kid kicked the earth with his scuffed and dirty sneaker and gnawed on his lip as if to think. “I’ve always wanted to be a sculptor. You know, make cool shit outta metal and stuff?”
“Good start, kid.” Dean clapped the kid on the back while the sheriff’s vehicle squeaked to a stop just yards away.
