The Gift of the Darkness Read Free

on the concrete.
    The wind had brought some light rain, shaking the trees for all they were worth and washing a thin layer of damp leaves over the street. It was still pitch-black all around them except for the few lampposts glowing orange and the neon lights of the Night & Day. As they were helping her into the car, the girl looked up.
    “Do you have, like, a newspaper or something?”
    Her voice was less than a whisper.
    Madison saw the dark patch on her pants. “I’ll get some paper towels in the store.” She started up the steps. “Would you like a hot drink?”
    The kid thought about it for a second.
    “Coffee. Black.”
    The car heater made the sharp smell of urine almost unbearable, and they rode with the windows down. The kid sat in the backseat with Spencer, holding the coffee cup with the tips of her fingers and drinking in small sips. They just couldn’t shut her up now. It was not an uncommon reaction: her name was Rose, no last name, thirteen years old, no permanent address. She had seen a guy dropping a heavy brown paper bag into a trash bin in Pike Place Market, and she had hoped for leftovers. The piece had been wrapped in a tea towel.
    “You pointed a gun at two cops,” Spencer said. “That’s a full ten on the Dumb scale.”
    “You knew it was unloaded, right?” Madison said.
    “What do you think?” There was a one-second delay in the answer.
    “Maybe and maybe not.” Brown drove quickly, with the occasional glance in the rearview mirror. “Either way, we got ourselves a problem. We’re Homicide. We can’t keep you in our precinct, since you didn’t kill anybody.” He paused. “You didn’t kill anybody, did you?”
    “No.”
    “That’s good. But we can’t let you go, either, ’cause you just waved your piece in our faces, and that put you right in our jurisdiction.”
    If Brown had wanted to put the fear of God into the girl, he was doing it well. Madison gave her between two and four weeks, since she had left wherever she was coming from.
    “What we’ll have to do is call somebody from Social Services to come pick you up,” Brown continued in a steady monotone. “And they’re going to be pissed off, because it’s five in the morning, on a Sunday, no less, and they have already had a week full of this crap. And one of us is going to have to stay behind with you, call your family, write a report on how you got the gun, and what happened. And wait for somebody to get you off our hands. You understand? You could be dead now, kid.”
    “And your word is jackshit on a cracker,” the girl muttered.
    Forty-five minutes later Madison sat at her desk in the squad room, typing. The others had gone home with mumbled thanks after she had volunteered to stay on. The girl was wearing a pair of clean tracksuit bottoms Madison had in her locker and eating a chicken sandwich rescued from the fridge next door. Madison hoped the “best before” date was merely a suggestion—it had smelled okay.
    A few phone calls had been made, and Shawna Williams was on her way from Social Services.
    Madison pulled the sheet of paper out of the printer and put it on the side of her desk. She stood up and stretched; the midnight-to-eight tour was all out, and she and the girl were alone.
    It was a grim room: desks, lamps, chairs, and a few filing cabinets, all in a charming shade of gunmetal gray. Brown’s desk was opposite hers; he kept a paperback copy of Moby-Dick in a drawer as a sign of hope. One day, he had told her, people might stop killing one another long enough for him to read it. It hadn’t happened so far.
    Rose was oblivious to the decor; she was concentrating on a donut and a mug of hot chocolate. A detective had brought the mug from home; on the side it read I’ve walked Mount Rainier .
    Exhausted as the girl was, Madison could see that the food and cocoa had done her good. A smart kid could travel a long way, but not in winter: if the street didn’t kill you, the cold and the rain