IT STAYED that way for a while. Hard looks. Role-playing. I felt Wesley's chill but it never got close to the bone. I drifted back to the anchor. Calmed down. Davidson said the murder charge would stay open, but they'd never press it. I worked the perimeter, nibbling. Some good scams were cooking all over town, but I didn't see my way in.
Another college kid killed his parents. Said "Dungeons and Dragons" made him do it. A creature killed a woman because she tried to leave him after twenty years. He told the cops she was his. His daughter. A beast slaughtered his girlfriend, raped and killed her teenage daughter, stabbed his seven-year-old son in the heart, and set fire to the apartment. The little boy lived. Identified him at the trial. The jury acquitted him. He went to court and demanded custody of the boy. The Transit Authority set up bulletproof token booths so they couldn't be robbed. Anyone who's done time knows what to do about that- you fill a plastic bottle with gasoline, squirt it through the slot, toss in a match, and wait for the clerk to open the door for you. One of them couldn't get the door open. A youth worker confessed to sodomizing more than three dozen boys over a ten-year period. The judge wanted to sentence him to a speaking tour. Gunfire crackled like heat lightning on streets where the franchise to distribute rock cocaine was disputed by teenage robot-mutant millionaires.