The PowWow

Chapter One - The Waiting Room The morning had no business being this cold.

Levi Yaats pulled his collar up and decided, not for the first time, that spring was theologically indefensible when it lied like this. Some quirk of jet stream had dragged February's leftovers three months forward and dumped them on the city in the middle of May, and everyone on the sidewalk was dressed for the wrong season and irritated about it in the specific, muttering way of people who'd already put their coats away.

"Fletcher called this morning," Levi said. "Third group session. He said the hardest part isn't the memories."

Jacob walked beside him, bare feet on the cold pavement like it was July, which — to be fair — it nearly was, calendar-wise. "What is the hardest part?"

"Letting the other four talk without trying to fix it for them." Levi shook his head. "Man spent four years pouring himself out on strangers. Sitting still and receiving something is apparently a foreign skill."

"It is for most people."

"Is that a shot at me?"

"No." A pause, the kind that had its own punctuation. "Yes."

Levi let it go, mostly because it was fair. They turned the corner onto Fourth, where the bank's glass doors caught the thin, uncooperative light and gave it back even thinner.

A woman came through those doors first — thirties, wool coat, the brisk competence of someone managing thirty or more spinning plates while adding more and setting them on fire. A boy trailed a half-step behind her, seven or eight, backpack slung over one shoulder, already narrating something to nobody in particular the way kids did when the world hadn't yet taught them to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Levi stepped aside to let them pass. Jacob did the same, unhurried, the way he did most things.

That was when Levi's eyes crossed the parking lot.

Four men. Not talking — arguing, the kind of argument that had already decided where it was going and was just working out the timing. Voices too loud for the distance, gestures too sharp for a disagreement about anything as small as parking.

Then the gun came up.

Levi didn't think about it. He never did, in the half-second that mattered — thinking came after, in the debrief, in the report, in the places where a man was allowed the luxury of sequence. Right now there was only the flat back of his hand catching Jacob's forearm, once, light and certain, and then both of them were moving.

"Go," Levi said, which was unnecessary. Jacob was already moving with him.

They passed the woman and the boy at a dead run. Levi caught a flash of her face — confusion first, then the beginning of alarm, the particular alarm of a parent whose body understands danger before her mind has finished cataloging it.

The first shot cracked across the lot.

Then more, fast, overlapping, four voices dissolving into two positions and a lot of noise. One of the men folded and went down between a pickup and a sedan. The other three saw two very large men closing the distance at a dead sprint and even though they were enemies to each other, did what men with guns and no more patience for arguing tended to do.

They turned and fired.

Levi hit the pavement in a roll that took the skin off one elbow through his coat. Beside him Jacob went down and sideways with the controlled economy of someone who had done this exact thing more times than either of them cared to count, and came back up already scanning.

The three men ran. Not toward the brothers — away, toward the street, toward a car that fishtailed pulling out and was gone before either of them had fully regained their feet.

Levi turned back toward the bank entrance to check on the woman.

She was on her knees.

Her son was on the ground in front of her, and she was screaming his name, and the sound she made didn't have words in it anymore, just his name over and over, worn down to something closer to a wound than a sentence.

Jacob was already moving toward them.

Levi followed, and somewhere behind his ribs a prayer started forming that he didn't have the words to finish yet.

I have prayed in a lot of places I never expected to pray in. Alleys. Gyms. The front seat of a Highlander doing sixty in a forty because sixty-five felt irresponsible and forty-five felt like a betrayal. I was praying on a curb outside a bank while a paramedic worked on a kid whose backpack is still six feet away, straps splayed out like something that fell out of the sky.

I didn't have words. I had noise. Lord, please, Lord, please, on a loop, which I've since decided counts. He knows what I mean. He's better at translation than I am at composition.

Jacob had his hand on the mother's shoulder. Heather — I got that much from the paramedic, who got it from her between the screaming and the not-screaming, which was somehow worse. She wasn't hysterical anymore. She'd moved past hysterical into something quieter and more frightening, the flat, focused stillness of a person whose entire nervous system has narrowed down to a single point and is refusing to widen back out.

Jacob wasn't saying much. He rarely does. But he was there, and his hand didn't move, and I've learned over thirty years that Jacob's stillness is its own kind of language, one that doesn't require translation for anybody, mother or otherwise.

I called Rachel from the curb.

"Shots fired," I said, before she'd even finished saying my name. "Bank on Fourth. Four men, one down, three fled north in a dark sedan. Partial plate, I'll text it." I looked over at the small shape on the pavement, at the paramedics working with the calm, terrible efficiency of people who do this so often that panic has been trained all the way out of their hands. "A kid's hit. Seven, maybe eight."

Silence on the line which meant Rachel was doing three things at once — hearing me, calculating logistics, and holding back whatever she actually felt about a child being shot, because that feeling doesn't help anybody in the next ninety seconds and she knows it.

"I'm coming," she said. "I'll be there in six minutes."

She made it in five. I didn't mention it. Some records don't need setting.

The ambulance took the boy. Heather went with him, climbing into the back with the jerky, unpracticed motion of someone who has never had to know how to climb into an ambulance and is bitterly, instantly fluent in it now. I caught the paramedic's eye before the doors shut.

"He's critical," the man said, low, professional, the volume calibrated so the mother a foot away couldn't quite catch it over her own breathing. "I'm not going to lie to you. It's bad."

The doors closed. The siren started before they'd cleared the lot.

I stood there. Jacob stood there. The one man who'd gone down between the pickup and the sedan lay very still under a tarp somebody had produced from somewhere, and around him the crime scene tape started its slow unspooling, and the parking lot kept being exactly what it had been an hour ago, except now it also had this.

Rachel arrived like weather — fast, focused, badge already out before she'd fully parked. Her eyes found me first. Checked me for damage, found the torn elbow, filed it, moved on. That's Rachel. Triage first, tenderness after, and I've stopped minding the order because I understand the order now. It's not that she doesn't feel it first. It's that feeling it first would get somebody killed.

"Talk to me," she said.

I did. The argument, the gun, the run, the shots, the three who fled, the one who didn't. I left nothing out and added nothing in, because there's a version of this story that's more exciting with embellishment and a version that's true, and only one of those was going to help her find the men who did this.

She wrote it down without looking at the notepad, which is a skill I still don't fully understand and have decided just to admire from a distance.

"The one under the tarp," she said. "You get a look?"

"Didn't recognize him. Youngish. Gang ink on the forearm, looked fresh." I glanced at Jacob. He nodded once, confirming the same read without adding to it, which is the most Jacob possible way to corroborate a witness statement.

Rachel's jaw did the thing it does when she's already three steps ahead of the conversation and is being polite enough to let the rest of us catch up. "Rival crews," she said. "I've got a read on this already and I don't like it."

"Care to share with the class?"

"Not yet." She looked past me at the tarp, at the tape, at the whole scene settling into the shape it was going to hold for the next several hours of process and photographs and careful cataloguing. "I need this scene locked down and I need everybody who was standing anywhere near it."

"You've got two of us," I said. "For whatever that's worth."

"It's worth a lot," she said, and for just a second the badge slipped and Rachel was there instead — tired, scared for a kid she'd never met, glad two very large men had been standing in exactly the wrong right place at exactly the right wrong time. Then it slipped back into position, because that's the job, and she turned to the nearest uniform and started giving directions like she'd been called to it, which, as far as I can tell, she was.

I looked at Jacob.

He was looking at the spot where the boy had been. Not the blood — that had already been marked and would be swabbed and catalogued along with everything else. Just the spot. The absence of a small body that had been there and now wasn't.

We drove to the hospital because there wasn't anywhere else worth driving to. Jacob rode with his seat back and his hands on his thighs, which I've given up commenting on, and said nothing the whole way, which I've also given up commenting on, mostly because I didn't have anything smart to fill the silence with either.

Somewhere around the third red light I thought about Fletcher. About the four men who'd shown up on that street corner and refused to let him carry anything alone ever again. About how much of a person's healing depends on somebody else simply staying in the room.

I thought about Heather, alone in the back of an ambulance with a boy who might not make it to the hospital talking.

Lord, I thought, be in that room. Be in every room today that needs You in it. Which was all of them, all the time.

We got to the hospital and found a waiting room that smelled like antiseptic and bad coffee and the particular held-breath quality of a place where nobody's allowed to leave until somebody official tells them something, one way or the other.

Heather sat in a plastic chair with her hands pressed flat together in front of her mouth, not quite praying, not quite anything else either. A man came through the doors a few minutes after us — mid-forties, expensive coat, the kind of tan that says vacation rather than outdoor labor — and I clocked him as the father before anyone said a word. He crossed to Heather at something between a walk and a run and got down on one knee in front of her chair and took both her hands.

"Richard," Jacob said, quiet, mostly to himself. Filing the name the way he files everything.

I sat down two rows back and let them have the moment. Some things a family needs without an audience, even a well-intentioned one.

Jacob sat beside me. Bare feet flat on the hospital linoleum, which was going to earn us a look from somebody eventually, though nobody in this particular room had the bandwidth to spare it.

We waited.

I've done a lot of waiting in this line of work. Waiting for detectives, waiting for medical examiners, waiting for demons to declare themselves and dark buildings to stop pretending they were empty. This was a different kind. This waiting didn't have an enemy in it yet, no shape on the horizon, no fingerprint to chase. Just a boy in surgery and a family in plastic chairs and a God who was, as always, already there ahead of us, doing whatever it is He does in rooms like this one that we don't get to see the mechanics of.

I bowed my head.

I didn't have better words than I'd had on the curb. I still don't, most days.

Lord, please. Whatever happens next — be in it.

Beside me, Jacob's head was already down.

He'd gotten there first. He usually does.