Healing Sands (2 page)

As I crossed to the passenger side to pull out my camera bag, I still couldn't see where the actual accident had taken place. An ambulance was parked on the corner. Its lights flashed in alarm, and its engine waited impatiently at high idle, yet there was no sign of the paramedics. I had more gear in my trunk, but for the moment I decided to take only my bag from the floor. The bottom was damp, but the camera itself was dry. That bottle, thankfully, must have been emptier than I thought.

I hung the camera and my press badge around my neck and slung the bag containing another lens over my shoulder. Only when I got around the ambulance did I see that there was an alley behind the row of stores. A police cruiser blocked it, but I walked past like I belonged there. It was always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

A quick scan told me I was the first photographer on the scene, although even as I maneuvered my way around a line of reeking trash cans, I saw the van for the only local television station cruise past. Right now the police were too occupied to notice the media, but they would once the TV cameras got hauled in. I had a few opportune moments.

The alley was lined with one of those thick adobe walls New Mexicans loved, and I pulled myself up onto its rounded top. I squatted to maintain a low profile and surveyed the scene.

It was hard to tell what the damages were, with people in uniforms swarming like ants around what I made out to be a faded blue pickup truck. Its fenders were dented, but the rust in the creases told me that hadn't happened today. Even the bumper hanging off the rear looked as if it had settled into its off-kilter position some time ago.

The swarm of officers sorted itself into two groups. One concentrated on the cab of the truck, the other hovered on the ground behind it. That clump suddenly rose as a gurney came to life and was pushed off through the gravel in the direction of the ambulance with a sense of urgency that pulled at my camera. I took a shot I knew I wouldn't use. The paramedics around the gurney shielded the form they carried, and I didn't even try to get a glimpse of the face.

The siren wound up, a sound that never failed to slit my heart, and I turned my attention to the truck again. The group around the cab was intent on whoever was inside. Two policemen stood in the bed, plastered to the rear window. Three more manned the front from the alley, and one guarded each of the two side windows. I snapped a few shots and zoomed in on the officer on the driver's side, who was talking in that too-calm manner I'd seen negotiators use when they were trying to defuse a hostage situation. Whoever the perpetrator was, he wasn't giving up easily.

With the victim gone, the area behind the truck was momentarily clear. I slid from the wall and got as close as I dared. What I saw sucked the air from me. Blood spattered the tailgate and clung to a clump of dark hair on the bumper. The ground was soaked with more of the same.

It didn't matter how many horrendous crime scenes I saw, I was always surprised at how cruel human beings could be to each other. The only way I kept going was to remember my mission: to keep people from becoming desensitized to violence.

I took one shot before I shivered away from the bumper and focused on the gouges that had been dug into the dirt-and-gravel alleyway by the truck's tires. There was something aggressive, even brutal about them, as if the driver had used his pickup as a weapon. I managed to get several pictures before I heard the inevitable.

“I'm going to have to ask you to step behind the tape, ma'am.”

I clicked once more before I lowered my camera.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “There wasn't any tape when I got here.”

“There is now.”

The officer's face was so grim, I didn't argue but dutifully followed his pointing finger to the yellow tape he'd just strung across the entrance to the alley. When the action was as important as his expression suggested, the
re
action would be more so. The better pictures were always of the moments after.

He lifted the tape for me, and I ducked underneath. By then the TV crew was calling out inane questions, and Ken Perkins from the
Sun-News
was right in there with them. I looked for another vantage point from which I could take readers where they themselves couldn't go.

The question was, where? The wall was too obvious now, so I took stock of the back entrances to the stores that formed the alley. People were stuffed into the doorways of some, including the restaurant several doors from the corner. If I joined them, I could get a full frontal of the truck, and none of the officers seemed to care that the doorway folk were technically in front of the tape.

Nor did those folks themselves care when, after hurrying through the now-empty restaurant, I squeezed my way among them into the back opening to the alley. The aura of fear and shock surrounded them like a shell of ice.

I was farther away from the truck than I'd been before, which meant switching to a longer lens. The group of cops still flattened against the vehicle didn't seem any closer to extricating the driver, so I had time.

The brittle conversation among the people I was crunched in with took place in Spanish, of which I knew little beyond
Como esta usted?
Fortunately, their faces were telling the story.

Two round-cheeked girls about Alex's age clung to the doorframe, their brimming dark gazes volleying between the truck and the adults they stood with. The hands of a sturdy middle-aged woman shook as she pressed them to her mouth. Another rocked her body, eyes squeezed shut. A square man in a stained white apron showed no emotion at all except in the tightened stare that never wavered from the faded blue truck.

I opted against the longer lens and stepped back from them, quietly raising my camera. This was the reaction. I cursed the click of the Canon as I shot their pain and their prayer, but none of them even flicked an eyelash at me. I was glad. I wasn't sure that even in English I could say what I wanted to about the shock they were trying to claw through.

A cry from one of the women jerked us all back to the doorway. I crowded in behind them and looked over their heads. Even at five-two I was tall enough to see that the door on the driver's side of the truck was open and someone was being encouraged to climb out. I raised the camera again and made a guess about where to focus.

One of the officers pushed the door closed with his foot. Two others pulled the driver clear of the truck. Below me, the praying woman cried out again,
“Solo es un nino!”

Was that “only a boy”?

The arms being handcuffed had the lanky, awkward look of a young teenager. He couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and although I watched through my lens, I debated whether to take the shot even if they turned him to face us.

But when the officer put his hands to the narrow adolescent shoulders and twisted him around, I let the camera fall against my chest. Already screaming, I shoved through the huddle in the doorway and tore across the alley.

“Get back!” one of the officers yelled back at me.

“No—”

“Come on, lady,” said another, who thrust his arm out to block me. “No press.”

I knocked the arm aside and pointed at the boy in the handcuffs. “I'm not the press! I'm his mother!”

CHAPTER TWO

W
hite walls. Gray metal table. Glaring fluorescent light. And a police detective who probably hadn't smiled since his swearing in as a cop in 1987.

It was exactly the way it looks on those real crime shows. Only when you watch it on television, you can't feel the anxiety coursing through you like barbed wire in your veins. Especially when the accused is your fifteen-year-old son, slumped like a comma in the chair between you and his father, hiding behind his hair, grinding his terror with his teeth.

Detective Levi Baranovic sat across from us, boring his greenish eyes into Jake as if he were trying to drill out his thoughts. It hadn't worked in the forty-five minutes we'd been sitting there, and I had to grind my own teeth to keep from screaming.

He leaned back in the chair, and the light glared on the high forehead created by his neatly receding line of otherwise thick, coffee-colored hair. “Let's go over this step-by-step, son,” the detective said, “because I don't think you understand the position you're in.”

He leaned on the table again, long face close to the top of Jake's bowed head.

“You were found behind the wheel of the vehicle that backed over a sixteen-year-old Hispanic boy. That vehicle belongs to the boy's mother, and we found both it and you behind the restaurant where she works. From our first examination of the scene, we've determined that the truck backed over this boy with excessive force for reverse.” He cocked his head at Jake. “Of course, since you don't have a driver's license or a learner's permit, you aren't familiar with how a motor vehicle operates. Am I right?”

Jake's dark, chin-length hair remained in motionless panels on either side of his face. He didn't appear to be breathing—until Detective Baranovic slapped his hand on the table. We all jittered on our seats, including Dan, who pulled his fingers through his shorter version of Jake's hair and let out a long, slow sigh. I wanted to slap him. Sighing—hand-slapping—reviewing the same information until I could have recited it myself. Why didn't somebody try something that worked? I would have voiced that, but I'd already been threatened with exclusion from the room if I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

“We only need one parent present,” Baranovic had informed me when I told Jake five minutes into this to sit up and look at the detective and explain what had gone down out there in that alley. Since then, I'd sat silently wearing down my molars and tracking the sweat that rolled straight down my back.

“Have you ever driven a vehicle before today?” the detective asked.

Jake shook his head and kept his gaze on the table. With his hands in his lap, he began to pick at a mole he'd always had on his wrist.

“The truck struck Miguel Sanchez and then pulled forward and stopped. Did you just sit there while he was unconscious on the ground?” Detective Baranovic reached his fist across the table, and for a mother-bear instant I thought he was going to punch my son, but he used it to lift Jake's chin.

Jake's dark blue eyes were blurred with fear, and moisture had gathered beneath them, though from sweat or tears I couldn't tell. Otherwise, he was as pale and still as one of his father's statues. So was Dan.

Jake tried to pull away, but the detective's fingers held his jaw.

“I just want to look at you, son.” He dropped his hand. “You don't strike me as racist. But you see, we have a pigmentation situation here. Miguel Sanchez is a U.S. citizen. When a white boy comes in and deliberately runs him down, people start making noises about something racially motivated. Now—” He gave a tight shrug. “I can't do much about the fact that all the evidence points to you as the perpetrator of this crime, which I see as attempted homicide—”

He put his hand up to me before I could get my mouth open, but I grabbed Jake's arm anyway. Jake pulled away, leaving me with a vise grip on the sleeve of his black sweatshirt.

“Talk to him, Jacob!” I said. “You're being accused of murder!” Jake shrugged.

Baranovic stood up, hands on the table, and loomed over Jake. He wasn't big, but his presence was. “So you're telling me you don't give a flip about this kid, is that it?”

Jake shook his head.

“That's not it, or you don't care?”

“That's not it.” Jake's voice shot up into the hormonal, adolescent atmosphere and disappeared. He was so frightened I could hardly stand it.

“Jake, please,” I said.

“Mrs. Coe—”

“He's terrified!
I'm
terrified! Why don't you let me talk to him alone—”

“No.” Dan put his hand on the back of Jake's neck as if he were retracting him from a brood of vipers.

“Am I going to have to ask you both to leave?” Baranovic didn't raise his voice, but his tone had an edge that could have sliced a rock.

I put my hand over my mouth and waved him on.

“If this was somehow an accident,” he said to Jake, “or Miguel provoked you in some way, you need to tell me. That will make it a lot easier on you when I take this to the juvenile prosecutor. She's going to decide whether to file formal charges, and if she does, then a fitness hearing will determine whether they try you as an adult in regular court. If you go in there like this—showing no remorse, with no explanation . . .” He pulled up from the table. The muscles on the forearms below his rolled-up sleeves were taut. “It's going to go as badly as it can possibly go.”

Jake said nothing.

“So what happens now?” Dan said.

“We have the option of sending him to county juvenile detention until his hearing, but normally we only do that with youth who are at risk for re-offending or for nonappearance in court. I can release him into parental custody.” He looked back and forth between us. “You folks decide who I'm releasing him to. I'm going to need some paperwork filled out.”

I stared at Dan until he let go of Jake and got to his feet. “I'll take care of that,” he said.

He patted Jake's shoulder. “You okay, buddy?” Was he
okay
? Who was
okay
when they were being charged with attempted homicide in a hate crime? Did he look
okay
? The boy was sweating so hard he was about to evaporate, and probably wished he could.

At least Jake didn't assure him he was just fine, which was what Dan always wanted. Say you're okay, and then I can go on making art and making nice and making believe all's right with the world. Say you're not, and I will still go on making art and— “

I'll be right here if you need me,” he said to Jake and followed Detective Baranovic out.