Silt, Denver Cereal Volume 8 by Claudia Hall Christian Page B

were waiting with Noelle.
He looked at Sissy.
    “ Teddy rode his bike over
to help,” Sissy whispered.
    She softly closed the door.
    “ What’s going on?” Charlie
asked.
    “ Shhhh,” Sissy said.
“Whisper.”
    “ Ok,” Charlie glared at
her and whispered, “What’s going on?”
    “ We have a plan,” Nash
said.

Chapter Two Hundred and
Twenty-Eight If you do this
thing
     
    Tuesday morning—7:56 a.m.
     
    Handcuffed, Charlie nodded good-bye to his
family. Nash and Teddy gave him a two-fingered salute off the nose.
Charlie smiled, and got in the back of a Denver police cruiser. The
officer closed the door.
    “ Bye Charlie!” Noelle
yelled at the top of her lungs.
    The officer looked at her and got in the
car. They were already on Colfax when the officer cleared his
throat.
    “ You’re Mitch’s son?” the
officer asked.
    “ So?” Charlie
asked.
    “ He’s the reason I became
a cop,” the officer said. “He and O’Malley came to talk to my
senior class after one of our classmates was killed.”
    The officer glanced at Charlie in the
rearview mirror.
    “ And that made you want to
be a cop?” Charlie asked.
    “ I guess it sounds pretty
dumb,” the officer said. “But yeah. Your Dad was
so . . . cool, smart . . . such a
man. My dad was a real tool. He left us when I was about ten, and I
only saw him on the weekends because we had to. He moved away when
I was thirteen. Never saw him again. But Delgado, man, he was
so . . . tough and responsible.”
    “ He was mostly sick when I
knew him,” Charlie said.
    “ Nah, that’s not true,”
the officer said. “He used to bring you and your sister around.
Man, he loved you guys. Sandy too.”
    They pulled to a stop at the light on
Pennsylvania. The officer turned around to look at Charlie.
    “ What I’m trying to say is
that I know you’re a great person because your father was a great
person,” the officer said.
    “ He’s dead and my mom’s a
psycho. They kind of cancel each other out.”
    “ When I heard that you
were this Pan everybody’s been looking for?” The officer turned
back around and drove through the intersection. “I thought, ‘Of
course he is.’ So what I’m trying to say is that you have your
father inside you, and you have a lot of people rooting for you
because your dad rooted for us.”
    The officer turned the cruiser left onto
Broadway toward the downtown police station. They were in the
downtown garage when the officer cleared his throat again.
    “ Don’t feel like you’re
alone,” the officer said. “There are lots of people around to help
you, even me. You have a nice family and a lot of people who’d do
anything to help.”
    “ What are you
saying?”
    The officer shook his head as if he’d said
too much. He came around to get Charlie from the back. Walking him
into the station, the officer stuffed something into Charlie’s back
pockets.
    “ My number,” the officer
said in a low tone. “I’ll come with an army if you need it. Any
time. Any place. You’re doing a really good thing, an important
thing. You don’t have to do it alone.”
    The officer gave Charlie a rough shake and
pushed him into the station. As planned, Charlie howled and the
officer dragged him into booking. Another uniformed officer grabbed
Charlie’s other arm. They dragged him kicking and screaming into an
interview room where Detective Red Bear and Sergeant Aziz waited.
Charlie stood in the doorway for a moment before Samantha
Hargreaves came in behind him. A uniformed guard unlocked his
handcuffs.
    “ Let’s go over this
again,” Detective Red Bear said.
    There was a tap on the door and a man in a
suit came in.
    “ Deputy DA Consuelo,” the
young man said.
    He held out his hand to Samantha; she
dismissed him with a nod.
    “ You’re Pan?” the deputy
DA asked. “We’ve been looking for you for a long, long
time.”
    Before Charlie could say anything, Samantha
gestured to the document on the table. The Deputy DA