Tyler O'Neill's Redemption

All the O’Neills, to be honest. He’d hated anything, anyone, who rebelled, who embraced disobedience the way the O’Neills did.

Which, of course, had been part of Tyler’s appeal. That forbidden fruit thing was no joke.

Dad’s attitude toward Tyler had been the same attitude he’d brought to the job, the same attitude he’d rubbed in the face of every juvenile delinquent and small-time crook in Bonne Terre.

His job had been to punish. To control. Dad was a hammer, a blunt instrument wielded without thought to circumstances.

Juliette didn’t share his attitude. She thought being police chief was about something else, something kinder.

She wanted to help, not control.

This job isn’t for you, he’d told her when she’d applied for the position. You’re too soft. Too willing to forgive when you need to punish.

She aimed a giant raspberry at her dad’s portrait and rolled her chair up to the desk and the small set of reports sitting on her blotter.

A domestic over at the Marones’. Again.

Shirley Stewart escaped from the retirement home. Again. She’d been found on the steps of the Methodist church, unharmed.

Attempted grand theft over at the—

“What?”

She snapped the report open, scanned the perp sheet.

“No, no, no, no,” she moaned. She leaped up from her chair and busted into the squad room. “Where is he?” she asked.

“Holding four,” Owens said, leaning back in his chair. He jerked his thumb back toward the holding cells as if she didn’t know where they were.

“I was supposed to be called if anything happened with this kid,” she said.

“What were we supposed to do?” Owens asked, his eyes wide in false and infuriating innocence. “The mayor caught him breaking into the car.”

“Where’s the car?”

“Impound.”

“Do we know whose it is?”

“It’s not in the report?” Officer Owens asked. “Your night-shift boys caught it. I can go check it—”

“Do that,” she said, so fed up with Owens’s laziness and Jones’s excuses.

The metal door opened up with a bang under both her hands and she stalked down the small hallway between cells. It was hot and still, the high windows letting in bright bars of sunlight across the gray concrete walls.

Four was back in the corner, and as she got closer she saw him on the floor. His wrists were propped up on his bent knees, the hood of his ragged gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

“Miguel?” she said and his head snapped up.

“Chief!” He jerked upright, his legs hitting the cement floor, but his face was still buried in the shadows under his hood. “Chief, I’m so—”

“Sorry?” She asked. “Let me guess, you didn’t mean to attempt to steal a—” She glanced down at the report.

“A Porsche,” he muttered.

“A Porsche!” She flung her hands up. “I’m trying to help you, Miguel. And you steal a Porsche?”

“I didn’t get nowhere. Barely got the door open.”

Juliette unlocked the lockbox with the cell keys in it and opened Miguel’s cell, the bars slamming back. The sound echoed in the big empty room. “I suppose you were just gonna sit in it?”

“Hell, no,” Miguel said. “I was gonna steal it, but Mayor Bourdage found me.”

She sat down on the bench next to where Miguel sat on the floor. She was running out of options with this kid, already skirting the line between leniency and not doing her job.

And now he goes and tries to steal a Porsche. It’s like he doesn’t want my help.

“Miguel, tell me what you think I should do.”

His knees came back up and he shrugged. “I don’t care.”

Maybe her father was right, maybe she was too soft. Maybe this kid, whom she liked, whom she bent every damn rule for, didn’t just need a break.

Maybe this kid needed to be punished.

“Look at me, Miguel,” she said, biting out the words.

He shook his head and her temper flared. “Stop being so damn predictable.” Furious, she reached out and jerked his hood back, revealing his face. The bruises and swelling. The blood.

“My God—” she breathed.

“You think I care what you do to me?” he asked, jerking away, the left side of his face immobile, his eye shut tight from the swelling. He was black and purple from his lips to his hairline, the skin along his cheek seemed to have been burned. She knew things with Miguel’s father, Ramon, were bad, but she never dreamed it was this bad. “You think you can do something worse than this?”

“Have you been to the doctor?” she asked.

He sneered and yanked the hood back up.

She leaned back against the brick wall and sighed heavily. Punish him? How? How could she look at what he’d been through and put him in the system? The system would only make him harder. He’d go in there an angry victim and come out a criminal.

It had happened with the last two teenagers she’d sent to the Department of Corrections.

“Where’s your father?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t care.”

“How about you tell me what happened?”

Miguel shook his head. “He was drinking and he went after Louisa.” He shrugged, his thin shoulders so small. So young to have to carry so much. “I said something and he picked up this frying pan off the stove.”