Page 87 of Borden 3

“I don’t want no trouble,” he’d said first thing when he opened the door on Hawke. “I don’t snitch. I don’t talk shit about Borden, either. And I also hear you’re a biker. One of them top level bikers and shit, and I’ve never gotten into any trouble with bikers, just so y’know.”

Hawke didn’t charm him with a smile. He simply said, “It ain’t snitching if the fucker is dead. I need answers. You’ll get a year’s worth of rent paid if you give ‘em to me.”

Timothy led him right in.

Hawke sat on a smoky couch. Timothy cracked open a beer and settled in next to him, leaning back snuggly in his seat. His giant gut almost obscured Hawke from seeing his face. But he supposed he didn’t need to look the old schoolteacher in the eye to get an answer.

“An officer got gunned down here.”

“They get gunned down all the time.”

“Between the building here, one of ‘em got gunned down. Happened over a decade ago.”

Timothy immediately knew, nodding once. “Yeah, you’re talking about Officer Young. We got pictures of him hanging on the walls of the foyer. You might have missed them.”

Nothing but cockroaches in that fucking foyer. “Oh, yeah?”

“The women still lay flowers in that alleyway for him once a year.”

“Got any idea what happened to him?”

“Oh, it was a bunch of those kids. They used to hang around here all the time, hiding in the basements, sneaking into all kinds of places.”

Hawke mulled on that. “How come nobody told the police about them?”

“They went underground after that cop got shot. They stopped coming out. I suppose the police wouldn’t know how to find them, would they?”

“They couldn’t take down a single kid that hung around the streets?”

Timothy scratched his scruffy jaw, littered with white hairs. “They found a couple kids, but the cops had nothing on them, like I said. How could they pin the death of Young on them? They didn’t know anything, and so they were let go. The case went cold very quickly.”

“There were no whispers about who might have been involved?”

Timothy thought about it. “You’d have to ask someone with a better memory, but…I heard it was a clique of them. They’d come together, called themselves some name, you know how these unsupervised kids are like.”

“Did they have a leader?”

“Some notorious boy, yeah. He was a real shithead, from what I heard. The rumour mill was strong without all that internet noise at the time. They said he fled Chechnya and walked here.”

Hawke blinked. “He…He walked to New Raven from Chechnya?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Chechnya as in the Republic of Russia, or Chechnya, some town I never heard of?”

“Oh, the Russia place or something like that.”

Hawke was speechless.

“Anyway, a lot of boys wound up in hospital because of the violence coming from this clique and this boy was responsible for it. I’m telling you, they were just a bunch of kids, but it got nasty.”

“Any idea who this boy was?”

“A demon.” Timothy’s face went dark. “He put a boy in hospital. That boy lost the use of his legs.”

“What’s the name of this boy that got put in hospital?”

“You’d have to look into the hospital records for that.”

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