Last Breath by Michael Prescott

urging them to wear the colors, the petty temptations of shoplifting and vandalism.
    Most of these kids had yielded to such temptations and influences already. Some had done time in juvenile camps. But they weren’t altogether lost. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been showing up three nights a week, talking with C.J. on Wednesdays and with two other off-duty cops on Mondays and Fridays. The talks were the price they paid for use of the gym afterward—basketball games, played indoors, safely out of range of drive-by shootings and the other insanities of the city.
    Andrew looked too small to be good at hoops, but she learned later that he had a mean jump shot and quick hands. She was sure she wasn’t getting through to him. His angry stare seemed to say. Talk all you want, you white bitch. It don’t mean shit to me. Then one night another kid asked her what was the most scared she had ever been. Her audience expected her to talk about some experience on patrol, but instead she told them about the boogeyman. They listened silently, and even Andrew’s eyes regarded her with a flicker of interest.
    When they were leaving for the gym, Andrew stayed behind. “That shit you told us about when you was a kid—that for real?” She assured him it was. He looked away. “Something sorta like that happened to me,” he said. “Came home from school one afternoon, and there was a guy in the house. Fucking psycho off the streets, busted in through a window, stealing our stuff. Could see he was crazy. Had that look, you know? His face was all one big beard and fuzzy hair with eyes stuck in it. I hid in the closet, curled up real small, but he hears a noise and comes looking. I throw some dirty clothes over me. He looks in, don’t see me. Shit, if he’d done seen me, he woulda fucking wasted me, I know it.”
    “What happened?”
    “Guess hearing the noise spooked him. He booked out of there. Didn’t take nothing.”
    “What did your mom say?” She knew he lived alone with his mother.
    “Never told her.”
    “You didn’t want her to worry?”
    “Nah, that ain’t it. She wouldn’t never have believed me, is the thing. Just like your folks didn’t believe you.”
    “People don’t take kids seriously,” C.J. said in a low voice.
    Andrew nodded gravely. “That’s how it is.”
    He had not glared at her after that.
    So yes, she was helping. She was reaching a few of them.
    At La Brea she turned north, stopping a few blocks from her house to pick up a few items at a market run by a Korean man who had been a dentist in his own country. She moved quickly through the familiar aisles, dropping fresh vegetables into her basket, paying at the checkout stand.
    She was putting her groceries into her car when a glint of reflected light from down the street caught her attention.
    A white van was parked at the corner.
    She studied it. The driver’s window was rolled down. The light she’d seen must have come from inside the van.
    Reflected light. Binoculars, maybe, or a camera’s telephoto lens?
    She steadied herself. There were a lot of white vans in the city. This might not be the one she’d seen behind her on Western.
    The van bore no commercial markings, but it had the windowless rear compartment typical of commercial vehicles. The kind of van a delivery person might drive.
    So why was it sitting there at 4:45 on a weekday afternoon, with the window open, and a lens—if it had been a lens—trained in her direction?
    She decided to walk over and find out.
    But before she could, the motor rumbled to life, and the van pulled into traffic.
    She stared after it, hoping to catch the plate number. The plate was blue on white, a California tag, but she had no chance to read it. The van had already disappeared into a stream of vehicles.
    If she were still in the midst of divorce proceedings, she might have thought that Adam had hired a private eye to follow her and dig up dirt. But the divorce was finalized months ago.