Thirty-Nine
THE TOWN SQUARE MALL is barely hanging on in Cross Rivers.
Everybody in town can spot the signs: maybe only half the stores open for business; the red sea of “Retail Space for Rent” notices on the vacant ones—same way much bigger malls in much bigger cities are hanging on by their fingernails in the world of and online shopping.
But high school kids still cruise it in their free time, especially in the summer months, walking around and listening to the tacky and universal soundtrack of malls everywhere.
Right next door is a fairly popular skate park, where some kids go to board and more show up looking for drugs, knowing they can score if they’re careful about picking their spots, and if both the buyers and sellers are discreet enough.
When the operator asks for his location, Burt tells her he’s not much more than a minute or two away.
“I’ve already called the EMTs,” she says. “But I suspect you’re going to beat them there.”
“On it,” he says, pressing the dedicated button on his dashboard to activate his siren, hoping he’s not too late this time, too late the way he’s been a couple of times in the past, both of those times haunting him still.
When he arrives, he sees four teenaged boys standing over a fifth boy only a few yards from the entrance to the park.
Burt runs over to where they are and immediately recognizes the unconscious boy on the ground.
Burt shoves the others out of his way and kneels next to Reggie Piersall, getting close enough to hear his shallow breathing and the kid choking slightly with what seems to be every other breath.
Burt knows the kid had been on the Cross Rivers football team until his junior year when he’d gotten kicked off for drugs.
He’d managed to stay in school, mostly because his father, Ed, who’d been a bartender at Rowdy’s until he’d been fired for dealing drugs, had OD’d the previous year because of cocaine laced with fentanyl.
The principal took pity on the kid because of that, getting a promise out of Reggie that he’d stay away from drugs going forward.
Which he clearly has not.
“Reggie!” Burt says, his mouth close to his ear.
Nothing.
The kid’s lips are starting to turn blue.
Burt looks up at the friends.
“How long has he been like this?”
No one answers right away.
“Are any of us going to get in trouble?” one of them asks. “We’re the ones who called it in.”
“How long?” Burt snaps.
“Just a few minutes,” another one says.
And a third kid says, “You gonna bust him if he comes to, like you guys are busting people all the time?”
Even now, even in the presence of a cop, he feels the need to act like a punk.
The first kid who’d spoken to Burt says, “He just showed up looking for us and started to say something and then he just collapsed.”
Burt presses hard on Reggie Piersall’s sternum with a knuckle now. Calls his name again.
Still no response.
The breathing is getting more shallow.
Burt can hear another siren, but clearly in the distance, almost certainly the ambulance.
Nobody’s dying on me today.
Burt reaches into the side pocket of his jacket now for the naloxone kit he’d stuffed in there, having grabbed it from his glove compartment on the chance that he might need it.
He takes out the syringe, knowing what to do with it by now, and tells the other kids to give him more room. He lifts Reggie Piersall, the kid looking so much skinnier than the last time he’d seen him, and jabs the needle through his baggy jeans and into his upper thigh.
Sometimes it takes just one dose when fentanyl is involved, which he’s certain it is, or some kind of fentanyl analog.
Sometimes more than one.
Burt waits and says a prayer that he’s not about to lose another kid to this poison, and then Reggie Piersall coughs fully, his chest coming up off the ground as he does.
After what now seems to Burt like an eternity, the kid opens his eyes just as the ambulance comes to a skidding, screeching halt behind Burt Webb’s cruiser.
“Are we in trouble?” Burt hears one of the kids say from above him.
Burt looks up at all of them, going from one face to another.
“I can’t arrest you for acting as if none of you has an IQ over eighty, which is the conclusion I’d probably draw if I went through your pockets,” he says.
“But if any of you are using this shit, maybe you could treat what happened here today as a goddamn object lesson, while you keep in mind that this is the shit that killed your friend’s father. ”
The rest of them don’t say anything more as the EMTs come running, carrying a stretcher between them. Burt quickly fills them in on the dosage of naloxone he’d administered and gets out of the way and lets them do their job.
The other boys start to walk away. Burt calls out and tells them to stop, motioning for them to come back.
“Where’d he get the stuff?”
They all stare at him, blankly. Or sullenly. Hard for Burt Webb to tell the difference at this point, having been fighting what feels like his own war on drugs since he first came on the job.
“Don’t know,” the smallest of them says.
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“What do you think?” the small kid asks.
“Well, let me put it to you another way,” he says. “If you know anybody else from your school either using or dealing this shit, maybe you can tell them that the police asshole barely showed up in time to save your friend’s life. And then think about growing the fuck up.”
The EMTs have Reggie Piersall on their stretcher now and are carrying him back to the ambulance. Burt follows them, only looking back over his shoulder long enough to say, “You’re welcome.”