Officer Wright had never met an honest to goodness hit man. But you didn’t need to be Columbo or Kojak—anyone with opposable thumbs could see that Dustin was too high to know what he was saying. For all he seemed to know, he was at home playing video games.
Still, you could not have a kid like this driving around town. Not in the shape he was in.
Even in the back of her Carrollton PD patrol car, the kid kept on talking, without making much sense at all.
“Sir,” the officer said. “I would seriously advise you to zip it until we get down to the station.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dustin, and for the few minutes it took to get down to the station he actually managed to keep his mouth shut. Inside, he was fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a holding cell, where he sat, fidgeting on the hard cot, mumbling to himself.
“If they had me on murder, they’d send me to prison for certain,” he said. “But I didn’t commit any murder. The most they could get me on now is attempted murder. But how would the prove it? I told the lady cop I was a hit man. But it’s not like she found my gun. And how could she know who I’ve killed, when I haven’t killed anybody just yet?”
He was still mumbling when the officer finished up her arrest report. Dustin had been driving erratically. He was certainly under the influence of something, even though he wasn’t drunk. The best thing to do, she thought, was hold him overnight, wait for him to sober up, and send him back to East Texas. She hoped the kid could get clean. While he was young. While it still made a difference. If he didn’t, the cops in East Texas would put him away for something more meaningful than a traffic stop. And maybe that would be for the best. A kid so turned around that he couldn’t tell the difference between video games and real life? Who thought he was an actual hit man?
Officer Wright had a certain amount of sympathy. She had teenage boys of her own. And she knew how rough towns in East Texas could be. She also knew that what she could get on him now wouldn’t lead to much more than a few days in County. And frankly, if Texas cops started locking up all the meth heads in Texas, the state’s prisons would burst at the seams and a horde of real criminals would descend like some biblical plague.
Better to roll the dice on Dustin. Let the chips fall wherever they may—as long as they did not fall in Carrollton.
“Son,” she said at the end of her shift early the next morning, after having filed her report, “now that you’ve slept it off, I’m going to ask you to get yourself right out of Carrollton. Whoever this John is, I don’t see that finding him’s going to do you much good. What you need, if you ask me, is a shower, a strong cup of coffee, and a long, hard look in the mirror. Is this really where you want to end up?”
Dustin rubbed his eyes. For the first time since his encounter with the lady cop, words failed him entirely. He gaped at her for a moment.
“Really?” he said. “Just like that?”
“Just this time,” the officer said as she opened the holding cell door. “Just this once. And never again in this town, son.”