Lex stands on the boardwalk listening with half-cocked hearing to the steady beat of the tide against the shore. He allows a gust of wind to push hard against him and he doesn’t push back. He gives way to it, steps backward to make room, but it pursues him.
Walking along the Spielman-Crespo block toward the avenue, he pauses to glance up at the row of sixth-floor windows and pinpoint theirs at the far right of the building: two perfect rectangles of blazing yellow light. He wonders what’s going on in there now. He wonders how Crisp is doing with his mother and grandparents, if he’s telling them everything, if he’s realized yet that they forgave him before he even walked through the front door. Lex wonders, again, about the boy, Janjak, JJ, and hopes he’ll be all right when all this settles down. Lex doesn’t like to hold bets on how a case will come out, but he finds himself hoping that JJ won’t turn up anywhere in the realm of culpability for the gun dealer’s alleged murder. Or Crisp. Or even Glynnie, though that’s doubtful. Regardless of where the courts throw them down on the legal yardstick, or how many reckless choices they made last night, they’re basically still kids.
But murder is murder, and that’s a problem. And if the body is found, things could get worse for one of them or all of them. Glynnie, he guesses, all that evidence against her piling up.
At the corner, Lex raises his hand to a passing taxi. It swerves to a stop and he gets into the back. “You know where the Sixtieth Precinct station house is?”
The driver nods, turns on the meter, pulls into a lane.
The moment the car is in motion, the mere presence of the muted backseat TV starts to make Lex queasy. He reaches to turn it off as a news zipper moves across the bottom of the screen: Mideast talks to resume…Shooting at mall in Little Rock…First Lady issues rare tweet on Russia probe…Banksy strikes again…