Blood Line by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

the boys out of classes. One was absent, and the other two couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Wager much.
    “Naw, man. I never seen Julio with no gang.” Ricky Gonzales, pudgy and pockmarked, spoke with nervous rapidity. “I didn’t see much of him at all, you know, since he started work out at DIA. I don’t know, maybe he got connected out there, but not here, man.”
    Henry Solano was short and stocky, long hair brushed back in a large pompadour to give him another couple inches of height. He had very crooked teeth and a story that matched Gonzales’s: “He wasn’t a gang member that I know of, no sir. He didn’t like school, very much. We used to talk about that a lot. But you got to get a good education. I mean, that’s why I’m staying in school. I want to be an engineer, you know? And my mom and dad, they been saving up for me to go to college for a long time.”
    There was a lot more about Henry’s future, not much about Julio’s past, and nothing at all about Julio after he dropped out of school. But the question had been asked and the answers had to be listened to. When Wager finally worked his way out through the students cramming the hallways between classes, he had a curiously empty feeling—that Julio had never really existed. A student number, a name in a newspaper story, a couple people who couldn’t think of anybody else the boy might have called friend. Not even a girlfriend. It was the picture of someone who had been lonely, ill directed, struggling for a purpose. Wager’s own cousin, a relative. Somebody who, if Wager had bothered to think about it, might have been tossed a word or two. But he hadn’t thought about it. He had thought of a lot of other things, but he hadn’t thought about his own uncle’s son. And now the name, like Hocks’s, had turned into another statistic. But for some reason somebody else had been thinking about Julio. For some reason, somebody had waited and, to judge from the site of the murder, had planned to kill the boy. In life, Julio had been important to some unknown somebody, and now in death he, like John Erle, was finally important to Wager.

6
    R EPORTERS WERE LIKE flies, you shooed them away but they kept buzzing back: nagging, irritating, pompous with the self-proclaimed power of their newspaper or television station, and self-righteous because everything they said was the Truth. For Wager, the biggest blue-assed fly of them all was Gargan. When he heard the reporter’s nasal voice on the telephone, he almost slammed it down. “No, Gargan. No progress yet on the Hocks shooting. We’re working on it.” He caught himself hiding behind an official “we” instead of using “I” and blamed Gargan for that touch of bureaucratic cowardice, too.
    “You’ve been working on it for days, Wager. What’s this I hear it was gang related? That you think it might be the start of a turf war?”
    “I never said that.” Not in public, anyway. But obviously Elizabeth’s message had reached the governor’s ears and others.
    “Is there any truth to it?”
    “It’s an active and ongoing case, Gargan. You know what that means.”
    “I know you wouldn’t tell me even if the goddamn case was closed!”
    “Then why ask?”
    “It’s my job. Just like you got yours. But I do my job, Wager. And the taxpayers expect you to do yours.”
    “You want to accuse me in print of not doing my job, Gargan? You do that, you’re going to want some damn good evidence—evidence that will stand up in court because it’s going to have to!”
    “You’re the case officer, Wager. That makes you an official source of information. The chief of police has urged the press to use official channels in pursuing their stories. Now what am I supposed to do? Tell the chief—your boss—that the official channel refuses to cooperate?”
    “Call the PIO. When I have something, I’ll tell him, he’ll tell you. That’s official.”
    “That’s bullshit.”
    “Good-bye,