Little Boy Blue by Edward Bunker Read Free Book Online Page B

and walked in
the dust for half a mile, looking for a shady place to eat. Both sides of the
tracks had thick foliage, but it was low and dry and ugly as well as uncomfortable.
Finally there was a tree, and the earth was cool beneath it. He ate the
cupcakes and gulped the milk. He could see an overpass a mile away, and
suddenly a black-and-white police car was there, halting long enough for its
occupants to scrutinize both ways. Alex was hidden by the shadows and
shrubbery. The woman had called the police. They were closing in. He dropped
the unfinished milk container, darted around the tree, and went into the brush.
The dry foliage was thick, a cousin to cactus without spines, but it had many
sharp branches that tore at his clothes and scratched his hands. He struggled
for fifty yards until he reached the edge of a plowed field. It stretched for a
mile before there was a fence and a road. Moving slowly down the road was a
police car. He backed into the shrubbery, keeping out of sight while
heading toward the road with the overpass. The railroad right-of-way seemed to
be fifty yards on each side, and then there were flat fields, either freshly
plowed or with low-growing beets.
    Ten minutes went by, many heartbeats for the
hunted, and he crawled back to the edge of the bushes. The police car had a
twin now, and they were parked three hundred yards apart; one policeman was outside, holding up binoculars. He heard dogs
baying. He began to run blindly, the shrubbery whipping and scratching at his
face and hands. Before long his lungs were on fire, he felt a searing pain in
his side, and his legs weighed fifty pounds each. He kept running entirely on
instinct. He did veer toward the railroad tracks, where the brush was thinner.
The baying sounds were relentless, but he couldn’t tell if they were
louder or falling back. He ran without hope, but he wouldn’t surrender.
    The end came when another dusty road cut
across the tracks. The shrubbery thinned and he saw the police car, the two patrolmen in leather puttees and wide-brimmed Stetsons. He
had no strength and nowhere to go. He was surrounded, and the dogs were getting
even louder.
    He sat down in the dirt, legs crossed,
chest heaving. He was empty of fear, empty of all feeling and all
strength—a sponge squeezed dry.

Chapter 5

     
    It was Alex’s first time in handcuffs,
the first time he’d ever felt the blows of policemen .
They threw him face-down in the dirt, jerked his hands behind him, and fastened
the cuffs. Anyone with a pistol aroused fear and anger in the police. An
eleven-year-old boy could pull a trigger, he’d proved that. They dragged
and shoved him to the car. No tears were shed, not of sorrow nor anger. He
refused to speak. They threw him face-down on the rear floorboards, and one sat
over him, a thick crepe sole planted firmly on the boy’s neck.
    When the three cars in the retinue pulled
into the rear parking area of the substation, where the signs said sheriff cars
only, he was hauled out by the scruff of the neck. They called him
“punk” and pushed him through a back door. He wasn’t afraid,
but he realized that back there in the bushes, they had been afraid.
    Inside the substation’s main room, a
place of several cluttered desks and a counter, they
made him sit under a desk, in the niche where someone’s knees would fit.
Nobody spoke to him, but they talked about him. The store owner, he learned,
was a former officer, and the police took his being shot very personally. They
were furious that Alex didn’t have the revolver. The victim was alive and
would be all right.
    Two hundred deputy sheriffs, highway patrolmen , and city police had been in on the search. Alex
was captured less than a dozen miles from the crime.
    The substation was small, serving the small
town of Norwalk, just inside the county line of Los Angeles. The three cells
were occupied, and someone wanted to use the desk.
    “Where’ll we put him?” a
turnkey asked a grizzled