CHAPTER 5
DOWN AND UP
The car money dried up quicker than either of them expected.
Marcus went quiet for a stretch — word on the block was heat had come down on somebody up the chain, made him cautious about moving anything for a minute — and without that steady flow, Rodney started looking for something to fill the gap.
"My cousin's boy be doing B and E's," Rodney said one afternoon, the two of them walking back from the gym, gloves slung over their shoulders same as always. "Say it's easy money if you know what you looking for."
"Breaking in people houses?"
"Empty houses. Ain't nobody getting hurt. Just walk in, grab what's worth grabbing, walk out."
Varnell didn't love the sound of it, something about it sitting different than the cars had — cars felt like taking from something, houses felt like taking from someone, a distinction he couldn't fully explain but felt anyway.
Still, the number Larkin's office had given Vanessa sat in the back of his mind constant now, a debt that didn't care how he felt about the means of paying it.
"I want in."
Rodney studied him a second, like he was deciding whether to talk him out of it, then shrugged. "Bet. I'll put you on."
? ? ?
They spent the better part of two weeks casing a house out past the nicer end of the city, big place set back from the street, the kind of home that made both of them go quiet just looking at it — columns out front, a car in the driveway that cost more than either of their families made in a year.
Rodney had eyes on it through his cousin's connections, knew the family traveled regular, knew the schedule of when the house sat empty for stretches at a time.
"They gone this weekend," Rodney said, confidence steady in his voice even as Varnell felt something uneasy sitting in his own stomach. "Whole family. We slide in, we out before anybody the wiser."
The night came clear and cold, the two of them dressed in dark clothes that felt almost costume-like, masks pulled up, moving through the yard low and quiet the way Rodney's cousin had walked them through.
The back door gave easier than Varnell expected, and then they were inside, in a house bigger than any place either of them had ever stood in, expensive quiet pressing in around them.
They moved fast, grabbing what Rodney pointed to — jewelry, a laptop, cash from a drawer that felt like it might've solved half of Varnell's problem right there in his hands. His heart hammered the whole time, adrenaline and guilt tangled together in a way he didn't have words for yet.
Then a noise. Upstairs. A door, or a floorboard, something that shouldn't have been there in a house that was supposed to be empty.
They froze. Rodney's eyes went wide over his mask, and a second later, movement — a shadow crossing at the top of the stairs, somebody home after all, whether they'd misjudged the schedule or come back early neither of them would ever know.
"We gotta go," Varnell whispered.
Rodney's hand moved instead toward his waistband, toward the gun Varnell hadn't fully clocked he was carrying until that exact second, and something in Varnell's chest seized up cold.
"No," Varnell hissed, grabbing his arm hard. "No. We run. We don't— put that away, Rodney, we run."
Rodney hesitated, half a second that felt like an hour, before the sound of a phone, somebody upstairs already talking fast and panicked to a 911 operator, made the decision for both of them.
They dropped everything they were holding and bolted for the back door, out into the yard, over a fence, running blind through unfamiliar streets with sirens already climbing in the distance behind them.
They split up without discussing it, pure instinct, each of them peeling off in a different direction to give themselves better odds, and that was the last Varnell saw of Rodney that night.
? ? ?
Varnell ran until his lungs burned worse than they had that first winter morning walking to school, cutting through yards, over another fence, chest heaving, mask still pulled up over his face though he couldn't remember deciding to keep it there.
A flashlight beam swept the alley he'd ducked into, and he pressed himself against a fence, heart slamming, praying the shadows held.
They didn't.
"Freeze!"
The beam caught him full in the face, and for a moment he considered running again, body coiled to bolt, before something about the voice — winded, older, but steady — made him hesitate a half second too long.
"Hands where I can see them. Now."
Varnell raised his hands slow, the light still blinding him, and in the space of that hesitation, something instinctive made him reach up and pull the mask off his face.
Maybe some part of him thought it'd look better, less guilty, a scared kid instead of a criminal. Maybe he just wanted to breathe.
The light stayed on his face a beat too long. And then, slowly, it lowered.
Officer O'Brien stood a few feet away, breathing hard from the chase, gun still drawn but hand no longer steady on it the way it had been a second ago.
His eyes were locked on Varnell's face with an intensity that had nothing to do with procedure, something raw moving behind them that Varnell didn't have the context to understand — recognition, disbelief, something closer to grief than anger.
Varnell's mind raced through options with nowhere good to land — run, and risk getting shot in the back; stay, and get arrested, get Vanessa dragged into a courtroom, get his diagnosis and his mother's exhaustion and everything else compounded by a criminal record before he'd even turned thirteen.
"Please," Varnell said, voice smaller than he wanted it to be. "Please, I—"
O'Brien didn't say nothing for a long moment, jaw working like he was chewing on something he couldn't spit out. His eyes moved over Varnell's face — the pale skin, the curly hair, features that clicked into place with something O'Brien had clearly spent years refusing to think too hard about.
Then, without a word of explanation, he lowered the flashlight fully, stepped back, and keyed his radio.
"Suspect got away from me, headed east on foot. Requesting additional units to the area." His voice was steady, professional, betraying nothing of what was happening in the ten feet of alley between them.
Varnell stood frozen, uncertain if this was real, if he'd misjudged the moment somehow and was about to get cuffed anyway.
"Go," O'Brien said quietly, not looking at him now, staring instead at some fixed point past his shoulder. "Go home."
Varnell went. He ran until the sirens faded behind him, until his building came into view, heart still slamming from more than just the chase now, replaying that look on the officer's face over and over without understanding what it meant.
? ? ?
He found out about Rodney the next morning, word moving fast through the block the way it always did.
Caught two streets over, cuffed and processed before the night was through, facing a breaking and entering charge that, given his age and the weapon they found on him, wasn't looking like it'd be handled soft.
Varnell sat with that most of the day, guilt sitting heavy that he'd made it home clean while Rodney faced whatever was coming, guilt he didn't have anybody to talk to about, not with Vanessa still not knowing the first thing about where he'd been the night before.
It took him two more days to work up the nerve to do what he did next — asking around, quiet, until he found which precinct Officer O'Brien worked out of, then further, an address, the kind of information that wasn't hard to come by if you asked the right person and didn't mind what it cost you in favors owed.
He stood outside a modest house on a quiet street for the better part of twenty minutes before he made himself walk up and knock, uncertain what he was even there to say, driven by something he couldn't fully name — need, maybe, or the particular gravity of unfinished business.
The door opened. O'Brien stood there in plain clothes, and for a long moment, neither of them said anything at all, the porch light throwing shadows between them same as the flashlight had a few nights before.
"You shouldn't be here," O'Brien said finally, voice low, glancing back into the house behind him.
"I know," Varnell said. "I just needed to know why."
O'Brien's face did something complicated, pain and fear and something else crowding in all at once, before he stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door mostly shut behind him.
"Not here," he said. "Not like this."