Bending the Rules Read Free Page A

merchants nodding their heads, he couldn’t take it any longer. “You’re kidding me, right?”
    Slowly, she turned her head to look at him. “Excuse me?”
    “I figure this has to be a joke, because you can’t possibly be serious. They broke the law. You want to reward them for that?”
    Her eyes flashed fire, giving him an abrupt flash of his own—of déjà vu. Because he was no stranger to that phenomenon—her eyes had done the exact same thing when she’d leaned over him in the chair where he’d sat in the mansion parlor, taking their report last year. Serious chemistry had flared to life between them, but he was damned if he planned to fall prey to that again.
    Maybe she was thinking along the same lines, because she didn’t climb over the table to get in his face the way she had last time. Instead, she said coolly, “No, Detective, I am not kidding. I’m pretty darn serious, in fact. These aren’t hardened criminals we’re talking about—they’re children, the oldest barely seventeen.”
    “Yeah, they start ’em young these days,” he agreed.
    “It’s not as if they committed a violent crime—they didn’t mug an old lady or attempt to rob someone at gunpoint at the ATM machine.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or commit a burglary of any kind,” she said with slow thoughtfulness, and he could almost smell the circuits burning as she followed that thought to its logical conclusion.
    “They didn’t commit a burglary,” she repeated, gazing around the table at the other occupants. Then she looked him dead in the eye. “So why are you sitting on this panel, again?”
    Excellent question. When Greer had offered to put his name in for the mayor’s task force he’d given his lieutenant an immediate and firm “Thanks, but no thanks.” Then, like an idiot, he’d let Murphy—the old cop who had stepped in years ago to take him in hand before the de Sanges genes could screw him up entirely—talk him into changing his mind. Murph had insisted that if Jase wanted to wear those lieutenant bars himself someday—which he did—he needed to start making his name known to the powers that be. And a good way to do that was to be part of these task forces—even if this particular one was more about election-year public relations than the war on crime.
    So here he sat, proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished.
    Not letting his thoughts show, however, he merely met her suspicious gaze with the cool straightforwardness of his own, evincing none of his reluctance to be part of this dog-and-pony show. “Because this is how we so often see it begin. Baby street punks grow up to be full-fledged street punks. Today it’s tagging or stealing some other kid’s lunch money at school—if they even bother to show up at school, that is.”
    “So perhaps we should make that a condition of my proposal. No school, no participation in the art project.”
    Slick, he thought with unwilling admiration, but said as if she hadn’t spoken, “Tomorrow it’s mugging some little old lady in the parking lot at Northgate.” Pulling his gaze away from the Babe’s, he included the entire table of merchants in his regard. “Or right here in your own community.”
    Okay, so maybe he was overstating the case a little, adding a dash of drama to get his point across. He was so tired, however, of watching punks bend the rules and not merely not be called on it but get special treatment for their efforts as well. That was just bogus. And it happened too often.
    Still, he was surprised at the impact his words had. The business owners’ voices started buzzing around the table as they discussed the repercussions of allowing hardened criminals into their neighborhood business sector.
    Wait a minute. His brows snapped together. Had he given them that impression, that the boys in this case were hardened criminals? Jesus, de Sanges, the Babe is right about that much at least. They’re kids who committed their first offense.
    As if