“Cane,” I whispered.
“Back then he was a juvenile, so most of it didn’t go to his record. Minus some fights here and there, it’s a pretty clean record, honestly. Lots of it was disregarded.” He sighed. “Anyway, when I really got to know Cane, he was eighteen. Fresh out of high school and didn’t know what to do with himself. I’d heard he was working for a man named Horacio, who was this big drug dealer in his area. Most of what we heard was rumors. We were never able to confirm it, and there was never any proof, but that was mostly because Cane was smart. He’d been pulled over many times, but never with any drugs on him. No…” Dad tapped his temple with two fingers. “He was too smart for that, but he slipped up one day. We got a call for an assault on a young woman. I was nearby with the partner I worked with back then, so we raced to the scene, and that’s when I saw Cane and his sister, Lora.”
I was shocked to hear that. “Lora? For what?”
“She’d gotten into an argument with some guy she talked to, he hit her, and she called Cane. Cane dropped everything to come for her, and when we got there, we saw him inside a gym beating the man to a pulp. I mean, he had blood everywhere. All over the floors, on his face. The man’s face was hardly recognizable by the time he was done with him. We pulled him off, my partner searched him, and we found a small bag of coke on him.”
“Wow.” My heart was racing now.
“Yeah. Anyway, I drew up the paperwork that night, but I couldn’t stop looking at him, you know? I mean, he was just a kid, and he was lost. I knew all about his mother and her addictions and how there were always reports of her getting abused. I also heard she was sick and needed a kidney…so I purposely didn’t report the coke. I left it off the record and only reported the fight.” He dropped his head. “I told him what I did for him and made him promise me to never get into any trouble again—to get his shit straight and get out of that fucked-up part of town. Stop selling, go to school—something. He promised he would. He spent two nights in jail and was out. Didn’t get into any more trouble again for a while.”
I dropped my eyes. Dad went on.
“Not even three years later, we got another report for that area—another assault. This one was on his mother. His father had returned and was threatening to kill her. He’d hit her many times, left her with a black eye and a busted lip. He’d even ripped some of her hair out, and had punched Lora in the ribs so hard that some of them were fractured. It was brutal, and the worst part was that he didn’t stop, not even when we got there. That’s when I stepped in, set him straight. That same night, I brought his mom and sister into the station, got their written statements about what happened, and then took his dad’s. Cane came into the station, took his mom and sister home, but not before talking to me. He was wearing khakis and a dress shirt. I remember because I’d never seen him wear anything like it. He had this nice Rolex watch on, his hair styled differently. He looked…different. That’s all I could say. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he wasn’t the same eighteen-year-old kid who was getting into fights and selling drugs. His eyes were darker, like he’d seen bad things, but that was just his life in general.
“Anyway, he asked for my number, said he wanted to repay me for saving his mom. That’s when we started meeting for beers at that cheap bar up the street. We hung out a lot, and he really felt like family to me. He told me about school, about his sister and how she was thinking about moving out of her mom’s place to stay with one of her friends from school. He even told me how he had this idea to open a company that sells wine. He knew some man who had a vineyard and made great wine. He wanted to invest in it one day. Everything seemed to be smooth sailing, but there was one night in particular when he got a phone call. I don’t know who it was from, but when he looked at the screen, he seemed nervous all of a sudden. He told me he had to take the call and walked off. I watched him go, but when he talked on the phone that night, it looked like he was arguing. He came back, said he had to go. I thought nothing of it. But then it happened repeatedly—I’m talking for a solid month. I got suspicious then. I mean, he was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks and could have been pulling anything behind my back. Hell, I could have been in danger. Not only that, but he was a fucking genius—probably had the most street smarts I’d ever seen in a person.