We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [141]
“What can I do for you, officers?” I overheard.
“Mr. Khadourian?”
“Plaskett,” you corrected, not for the first time. “But I am Kevin’s father.”
Having been helping Celia with her homework, I crept up to hover behind you in the foyer, buzzing from voyeuristic excitement.
“We had a motorist phone in a complaint, and I’m afraid we found your son and his friend here, on that pedestrian overpass over 9W? We had to run these two down, but it seemed pretty obvious that they were the kids throwing detritus onto the roadway.”
“ Onto the cars?” you asked, “ or just empty lanes?”
“Wouldn’t be much sport in empty lanes,” snarled the second officer.
“It was mostly water babies, Dad!” said Kevin behind the police. I know his voice was changing, but whenever he spoke to you, Franklin, it skipped up an octave.
“Wasn’t water balloons this motorist called in about,” said the second, chunkier cop, who sounded the more worked up. “It was rocks. And we checked the highway on either side of the overpass—littered with chunks of brick.”
I nudged in urgently. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Thankfully, there were no direct hits,” said the first officer. “Which makes these boys real, real lucky.”
“I don’t know about lucky,” Lenny sniveled, “when you get nabbed by the cops.”
“Gotta have luck to push it, kid,” said the policeman with the hotter head. “Ron, I still say we should—”
“Look, Mr. Plastic,” the first cop overrode. “We’ve run your son through the computer, and his record’s clean. Far as I can tell, he comes from a good family.” (Good, of course, meaning rich.) “So we’re going to let this young man off with a warning. But we take this sort of thing real serious—”
“Hell,” the second cop interrupted, “a few years back, some creep tossed a quarter in front of a woman doing seventy-five? Shattered the windscreen and drove right into her head!”
Ron shot his partner a glance that would get them the more quickly to Dunkin’ Donuts. “Hope you give this young man a good talking to.”
“And how,” I said.
“I expect he’d no idea what kind of risk he was taking,” you said.
“Yeah,” said Cop No. 2 sourly. “That’s the whole attraction of throwing bricks from an overpass. It seems so harmless.”
“I appreciate your leniency, sir,” Kevin recited to the primary. “I’ve sure learned my lesson, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
Policemen must get this sir stuff a lot; they didn’t look bowled over. “The leniency won’t happen again, friend,” said the second cop, “that is for damned sure.”
Kevin turned to the hothead, meeting the man’s eyes with a glitter in his own; they seemed to share an understanding. Though picked up by the police for (as far as I knew) the first time in his life, he was unruffled. “And I appreciate the lift home. I’ve always wanted to ride in a police car—sir.”
“Pleasure’s all mine,” the cop replied jauntily, as if smacking gum. “But my money says that’s not your last spin in a black-and-white—friend.”
After a bit more fawning gratitude from both of us, they were on their way, and as they left the porch, I heard Lenny whining, “We almost outran you guys you know, ’cause you guys are like, totally out of shape . . . !”
You had seemed so sedate and courteous through this exchange that when you wheeled from the door I was surprised to observe that your face was livid and lit with rage. You grabbed our son by the upper arm and shouted, “You could have caused a pileup, a fucking catastrophe!”
Flushed with a morbid satisfaction, I stepped back to leave you to it. Cursing, no less! Granted, had one of those bricks indeed smashed someone’s windshield I’d readily have forgone this petty jubilation for the full-blown anguish