Page 89 of Borden 3

Hawke’s head started to pound. “Anyway, you know what happened to Officer Young?”

“He got shot up.”

“Were you there when it happened?”

Julia went quiet for several moments. She flicked her cigarette ashes all over the floor, bobbing her leg that was crossed over the other. “What’s this about, though?”

“Been hearing about some kid who caused a lot of shit during that time.”

Her lips scrunched to the side. “Theo?”

Hawke’s body stilled. It was the first time he’d been given a name. “Is that the ringleader?”

Julia slowly nodded. “Yeah, his name was Theo.”

“Theo what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Nobody knew anything about him. He was always sort of just…part of the city. He ran the streets with some kids. They used to find places to sneak into. There were a lot of fights.”

“Fights over what?”

“No, you don’t get it, they would fight each other for shit.”

“Ah, so they had punch ups, like a boxing match or some shit.”

“Yeah, like that.”

Hawke took a seat on a salon chair, finally getting somewhere. He should have asked about Emma, but he was more interested in figuring this kid out. “What do you know about this Theo?”

“Nothing. He came out of nowhere, and then he was just suddenly there. There were rumours that his family died because they double crossed another family, and he had managed to run away, but nobody really knew.” Okay, Hawke could do with that story. “He could get into anything, though, like you name it. He’d find a way.”

“You mean he was good at breaking and entering.”

Julia shrugged. “Sort of. It was more like…if he wanted to find you, he could. Sometimes kids wouldn’t show up to fights, so he’d fetch them himself. He’d know where they were, you know? We used to call him the boy who walked through walls.”

Some kid from the past shouldn’t have made Hawke feel unsettled, but what do you fucking know? It did. “You say he ran away. Does that mean he had no house?”

“Nope, nothing. It was weird because it wasn’t like he was filthy or anything. He was…” She paused, her lips forming a secretive smile. “He was cute and muscled up for a kid. Now that I think about it, he probably squatted in some gym or something. How else do you get that big at seventeen?”

Hawke didn’t care about the brawns of a teenage boy. “Did he kill Officer Young?”

Julia fidgeted in her chair. “Theo did a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“We used to buy pot off him, but then…well, it turned into harder shit. He was obviously owned by one of the gangs.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, how else was he getting his hands on that hard stuff? Some of the Lost Boys that took that shit ended up in the hospital. He would never have allowed them to get sick off that stuff. He was so protective of them.”

The Lost Boys? Hawke frowned. Now he knew the name of the clique, but it was a lot to take in, and she still wasn’t answering whether Officer Young was killed by Theo. She was beating around the bush, so he asked instead, “Did some kid get paralyzed from a fight?”

Julia’s eyes widened again, only this time it wasn’t in that theatrically fun way that gossipers like Debbie loved to pull. “Seems like you already know enough shit.”

“Who was the boy that ended up in the hospital?”

“Miles.”

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