Marrying Mike...Again by Alicia Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

to the morgue. Nothing happened on Main Street during Smithy’s watch. In addition to Smithy, the Santiagos maintained a liquor store guarded by reinforced steel bars, while the Chen family ran a small café-grocery. Mrs. Chen had been held up twice, but still persevered.
    Koontz turned off Main street and graffiti promptly exploded over the landscape. The artwork, Mike knew, was not random, but represented markers dividing the area into four distinct gang turfs—the Hispanic Latin Kings; the Black Guerrilla Family; another black gang, the Crips; and the Brotherhood, white trash or white supremacists, depending on who you asked. The gangs ruled the streets and the rule of the gangs was simple and carved in stone.
    Sometime between the age of five and eight, you got jumped into a gang. You didn’t choose it, it chose you. That gang became your family. They were your protection, your buddies, and your employers. They came first in your life and if that meant stealing your mama’s car, you stole your mama’s car. If that meant killing your boyhood friend because he got jumped in by a rival gang or a rival sect of the same gang, then that was just business.
    Here, survival mattered, and the difference between life and death could be as simple as being caught on the wrong city block at the wrong time of day. Five years ago, Mike and Koontz had gotten called in to investigate the death of a twelve-year-old black male. He’d been found with his hands tied behind his back, mauled to death by some sort of animal later identified as a pit bull. Further investigation revealed the kid belonged to the Black Guerrilla Family, a relatively new gang to Massachusetts. Unfortunately for him, the BGF didn’t own much turf yet, so the boy had to cross four blocks of rival territory to make it to school each day. Apparently, the kid got to be a really good sprinter. One day, however, he didn’t run fast enough.
    The Crips caught him. They were angry at the BGF. Someone had stolen someone’s car and stripped it down for parts, the ultimate insult. So this boy got to pay. They tied him up. They stuck him in a backyard. They brought out a full-grown pit bull one of the Crips’s Original Ghetto Blood used as a breeding stud. They worked the hard-muscled dog into a frenzy, then turned it loose. They had left the twelve-year-old’s legs untied, and he did run very fast, so things took a while.
    Mike and Koontz learned this story from an informant named 3-Trey, picked up by Vice for dealing crack cocaine and now wanting to skip a trip to juvie. Three-Trey was fourteen. He had witnessed the murder firsthand. More than the details, Mike remembered the way the boy told the story, his eyes flat and his voice emotionless. Just another day in the hood.
    Koontz had shrugged it off. Three-Trey named names, they picked the boys up, identified the crime scene and put together the case. Open and shut as far as Koontz was concerned. The only thing that kept Rusty awake at nights was an unclosed case, which he always took as a personal insult.
    For Mike, however, it had been one of those days when he’d gone home unable to talk about his job. He’d needed to hold Sandy close, inhaling the scent of her perfume and concentrating on the feel of her skin. He’d wanted to bury his face in the crook of her neck until the picture of the mauled kid finally faded from his mind. Sometimes he couldn’t get the job to roll off his back. Sometimes, in spite of his family’s preaching, life leeched into his head, left him feeling weary. Those times he needed his wife to be soft and feminine and removed from the job. He needed her to be a reminder of the good things in life.
    Most likely though, they had wound up in a fight. Because, as Mike had learned the hard way, love did not conquer all. It demanded your all. And somehow, he and Sandra had not been equal to the task.
    Koontz pulled up to the junior high and they got out of their sedan. Dusk was starting to