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Harry stood in stunned silence. Did she know the girl? She studied her face, her lank blonde hair, her glittering, angry brown eyes. This girl knew and despised her. Harry had injured her somehow; whether it was to help her or hurt her, she didn't know. The teen walked toward her slowly, one foot deliberately placed in front of the other. She had the confidence of someone who didn't care anymore. Someone who had seen too much too soon, and instead of breaking, they solidified—they turned to stone.
"I'm sorry, but I don't recognize you," Harry admitted.
The girl smirked, and tossed a glance back at the tomboy behind her. "Imagine that. This bitch doesn't even know who I am." She turned back to Harry as she reached her, and stood too close. Harry could smell the stench of young, unwashed flesh, hormones churning through a body unprepared for their wrath, and hair dampened by rain and dried in the dankness of some abandoned building. "You ruined my life."
“Hey, now. Maybe you need to go talk to Counselor Johnson,” David said, stepping forward, but Harry held out a hand to stop him.
She didn't move away from the girl, but stared down at her instead, and her face was so close they might have bounced off each other like bumper cars at the state fair. She studied the upturned nose, a spray of freckles across its bridge, and the scar above her left eye.
"You really don't know who I am, do you? Not a clue," the teen accused.
"No."
The girl slid back and laughed, her hands high in the air at her sides as if she had stumbled upon a revelation. "Well, it must be easy to forget. I guess you ruin the lives of lots of little girls, right?"
"Who are you?" Harry asked. She refused to be baited by a child, and wouldn't let the girl raise her hackles. Not today. Not in this place.
"Does the name Johnny Dale Barbeaux mean anything to you?"
Harry was stunned. This girl couldn't remember her, not after so long. The Barbeaux case was eight years prior. There was no way a kid could recognize the young detective on the case after almost a decade. She stared at the girl with her mouth half-open for what seemed like a century before she closed her jaw.
Johnny Dale Barbeaux was a pedophile who liked to steal little girls and boys from improperly supervised playgrounds in small towns all over Texas and Louisiana. He made them have sex with each other while he shot video on a camera better suited to family vacations and birthday parties. He sold the videos to other pedophiles in the area. They always seemed to have been copied and sent all over the country without the use of the internet. What he did with the children after that...
"Oh, you remember now, don't you?" the girl teased. The other teen stalked up behind her fast, pale, cracked hands balled in fists at her sides. Posturing hard, Johnny Dale Barbeaux's daughter stepped close again. "You remember leaving me without a daddy, pig?"
Harry stretched the tense muscles of her neck as if she weren't aware of the young girl so close to her face. She sucked in a deep breath through flared nostrils, then met the girl's eyes.
"I remember," she finally answered, her voice almost a whisper, so the gathering children had to be quiet to hear her. "I remember putting a murderous pedophile behind bars. I remember having to watch the videos that sick piece of shit you call Daddy made of those poor little kids. Kids the same age as you and your brother were at the time."
The girl had started shaking her head, and backed up a step, but Harry kept going, taking a step forward.
"I remember your mother denying it was him, hiding him in your bedroom while we searched the house. I remember how scared you looked when he put that gun to your head. Do you know what it's like to have to see that kind of human garbage put his hands on a child in front of you, Skipper?"
Their noses were almost touching. Harry leaned forward, face-to-face with the girl whose life she had saved in a town not far from the shelter in which they now stood. "I remember having to stop myself from blowing that pervert away, because I didn't want you to have to wash his brains out of your hair for a week. I remember picking you up and taking you to your mother. I remember not arresting her for harboring a felon or obstruction of justice, because I didn't want to leave you an orphan. Do you remember?"
She backed up. The girl's scowling, dirty face had wet tracks down her cheeks from the tears that fell unbidden. Harry glanced at the few other kids that stood around, then looked at her shoes, ashamed. She shouldn't have let Skipper Barbeaux get to her. She shouldn't have lost her cool. Harry remembered being like her, too.
"Doll, you okay?" the teen behind Skipper asked, unsure of what to do. For all her bravado, Skipper was the alpha dog, and she didn't know how to act with the girl broken in front of her.
"I'm fine." Skipper Barbeaux, shaky on her feet, wiped her tears with the back of one hand. It left a smear of filth across her cheek that Harry wanted to polish away with a handkerchief like her grandfather had done when she was small.
"I'm sorry," Harry told her. She wanted to reach out her arms, to offer comfort, but she knew the girl had lost enough face in front of her loyal follower. Kids on the street had to stick together to survive. No sense in breaking up this bond.
The girl shook her head. “If what you say is true, the asshole deserved it. But you’re still a dirty cop.”
Harry smirked. "I'm not a cop anymore."
After sizing her up, the girl nodded, then put a hand on her hip. Nothing remained of her breakdown but the tracks from her tears. "Well, cool. And, by the way, I go by Doll now, so lose the Skipper crap.”
Harry nodded, then watched the two girls walk away. Keaton and another, younger boy stood staring from a few feet away.
"You're really not a cop?" the younger boy asked skeptically.
"Not anymore," Harry said with resignation. She just hoped that she would have her badge back soon.
