Cry Me a River Read Online Free PDF

this is a terrible time. But we need to find Jamal.”
    “Malcolm, Malcolm,” he wept.
    Grace kept holding his hand. Her heartbeat ticked away the seconds but she kept every single emotional impulse in check. This was the edge cops had—to wall off their feelings so they could concentrate on their work. She was very walled off at the moment.
    But as he sobbed, she could feel the cracks starting to form.
    Ham shifted. Grace read his body language: He didn’t want to hurt Mr. Briscombe, either, but if Jamal’s grandfather knew where his surviving grandson was, he would be doing him no favors by withholding information. In the gang life, Jamal had revealed weakness and/or betrayal by walking out on his “brothers.” If he tried to rejoin, they might brutalize him as punishment, or as a test of his loyalty. The Sixty-Sixes “beat in” their recruits—made them endure a beating for sixty-six seconds. If any of them had discovered in the meantime that Jamal had been a CI, they’d kill him. Slowly. In bits and pieces. Grace and Ham had picked up the pieces of some of those lessons. And deposited them in dozens of evidence bags.
    “I know this is terrible. I know that you’re hurting,” Grace said. “But we need to focus on Jamal right now. If he does something to strike back—”
    “It’s that goddamn gang,” the old man broke off. “Vampires. Monsters.”
    She couldn’t argue. It was such a vicious cycle-gangs, injustice, rage, violence. And kids, in the mix. It was so wrong that kids got sucked in and flattened by the whole horrible machine. But they did.
    A tear slid from Mr. Briscombe’s left eye and zigzagged down his sunken, wrinkled cheek, clinging tothe end of his nose. He began to make a strange hitching sound, and for a second Grace thought he was having a heart attack or stroking out. But it was his grief speaking. Sucking the life out of him, and making him even older.
    “He said he had to do this for Malcolm,” Mr. Briscombe said, in a thin, papery voice. Grace went on alert. He was going to tell them where Jamal was. She and Ham exchanged glances and stayed quiet, giving Mr. Briscombe time to say what was on his mind.
    “I begged him not to. I told him to stay here, with me. I said, ‘Boy, they’ll kill you.’ But he told me they all loved Malcolm like a little brother, and that they’d get the people who had done this.”
    “We’ll
get those people,” Grace half whispered. “That’s our job.”
    Jamal had been eleven years old when he’d joined the Sixty-Sixes. When they’d beat him in, he’d cracked a rib that never healed properly, because he never got medical attention for it. He started breaking into houses and stealing cars, working his way up to the things he kept from her.
    She had asked him point-blank if he’d ever murdered anyone, and he’d crossed his arms and looked away when he’d told her that he hadn’t. The main reason he’d gotten out was to keep Malcolm from going in.
    This is so damn twisted
, Grace thought.
We do crazy-ass things to save the people we love
. Decades ago, she had nearly bitten off Father Patrick Satan Murphy’s tongue rather than let him use it on her little sister, Paige. Like he had on her.
    “Things was getting better for my boys,” Mr. Briscombe ground out. “Why did this have to happen?”
    It was a question Grace asked a million times a week, as she watched lives fracture and go down the sewer; and it was one for which she had no answers. If Earlwere here, he’d remind Grace that life wasn’t fair, and it was up to you to play the cards you were dealt as best you could. That was her main beef with her angel—as far as she was concerned, the Great Dealer in the Sky was using a stacked deck, and the House always won. And Earl was like a pit boss, making sure everybody abided by the House’s rules.
    Okay, I have sucked that metaphor dry
, she thought.
    She waited a bit longer, but Mr. Briscombe had fallen silent. Then she said,