His face was a sad and unfunny parody of the lively features he wore when I last saw him four months earlier in the back of that of that nice black car. I remember it well… movie star sunglasses, a cigarette smoothly resting in the corner of his lips, and a smile a mile long. That smile…that was what really provoked me to search every back alley of this goddamn hell city to find this petty crook. He was really something; he took his job seriously, making the papers and escaping capture more than once. Sitting across from him, I tried to catch his eye. He was staring uninterestedly at the floor with a blank expression, accentuating even more the black rings underneath his eyes. He was still wearing the same dirty clothes he was arrested in; a plain white shirt underneath a dark brown jacket and torn jeans. I think the report said he was 29 but his dark features and deep gray eyes spoke of an indefinable age. Not your average crook, I thought. I had been quite a few decades in this ghastly business, and have almost every type of bizarre case and crazy criminal there is to see, but there was something about this one that seemed different. Just the way he laid there, slumped upon his chair like a lazy king, with his cuffed hands behind his back, the way his messy straight black hair exploded over his forehead. His apparent stance was a mixture of indifference and resignation. I switched my focus of attention to the muddle of papers in front of me. His crimes were mostly minor robberies, private property, sometimes stores…but two months ago in one of his jobs he had killed a child, 7 years old. Apparently he was nervous and the gun went off…at least that was witnesses acknowledged, according to the report. I took another long look at the killer. He was now busying himself studying carefully the floor’s dirty tiles. There was something disturbing in his countenance. His look wasn’t the look of someone who shot a 7-year-old. He seemed merely annoyed to be here, he seemed bored.

“So…let’s start, shall we?” I said in an overly cool and relaxed tone. There was something about interrogations that I always found gratifying. After I finished I felt like I was part of or contributed to something bigger than me, bigger than you, bigger than this city: the universal process of justice being delivered. The city is now safer, I’d reflect, and feel entirely satisfied.

He did not respond automatically. For a second I thought he’d continue to stare at the floor, but slowly and mechanically he began to elevate his head until his eyes were parallel with mine. He did not speak, only stared.

“Hmm…OK…” I pretended to read through the papers while shooting quick glances at the killer in front of me. His expression remained the same, except those uncanny gray orbs were now fixed on me. First question, here we go…

“Is your name Robert Shin?” I asked coolly, still pretending to shuffle the papers in front of me.

He yawned loudly.

I shot him a single glare of deep deadly dislike.

There was a short stony pause, and then he spoke in dull dead words:

“Is that what the report says?”

“Well, yes” I responded smartly.

“Well then…” he sighed and his gaze was lost again. He spoke as if each word he spat out cost him a huge amount of work and energy. Impatient, I surveyed the report for the date of one of his crimes.

“Okay…can you tell me where you were located the night of the 26th of May?”

I couldn’t even be sure he heard the question; he sat so still and so quiet. For a few seconds the only sound I could hear was the sound of my own breathing and the pounding in my chest. He looked like your typical neighborhood psycho and I detested the fact that he was actually making me nervous…

“So…why don’t you tell me a little about the-?”

“Listen man” he spoke with more intensity now, “Everything you’re going to ask me is already in your little papers”. Because he was unable to move the whole extent of his arm, he pointed at the pile lazily with one finger,. “Don’t waste my time, man”.

“Fine”, I said angrily and shoved the heap of paper into the far corner of the table, “Don’t worry I won’t waste your time, man. Let’s get right down to the good stuff, huh? How ‘bout the 17 shops and 23 private properties you robbed?”

Quick and to the point, exactly my style.

He chuckled, but without true laughter. His body just shook a bit.

“I got kids to feed, man” he chuckled and rolled his eyes.

“So do I,” I replied swiftly “and I do not have to recur to illegal practices”

“We weren’t born in the same neighborhood, man” he spat indignantly, for the first time betraying a hint of strong emotion.

“That is no excuse for-” I began

“We didn’t go to the same school” he cut straight through my words, his tone suddenly stronger and full of vitality.

“It’s still not-”

“We didn’t eat at the same table”

“I refuse to-“

“You ain’t my brother…”

I stood up in anger.

“There is no-”

“You ain’t my father…”

“I will not accept-”

“You ain’t my sister…”

“You cannot-”

“…Or my uncle or my grandfather or fuckin’ nothin’!”

His rant had grown into shouts and screams, filled with such rage and indignation that drowned and overpowered my own angry words.

Suddenly he spoke like before, in the same bored, monotonous tone.

“You ain’t my family man” he nearly whispered, “How the fuck can you judge me?”

An icy silence followed the statement. The quiet and normal room was now full of tension and fume. He stared at me for a while, seeking an answer to his question in my eyes. Finding none, he resumed his study of the ceiling’s simple patterns.

Suddenly remembering I was standing, I sat down, pulled out a handkerchief and wiped sweat out of my forehead. I found myself making sure he had his handcuffs on and felt slightly suffocated. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. Usually the crooks came in, all nervous and jittery and it was my job to serenely squeeze confessions out of them. The long established roles seemed to be exchanged with this guy in particular, and I didn’t know what to make of the whole situation.

After a few minutes of silence, I felt calm enough to talk to him again.

“I’m going to need for you to tell me-”

“Fuck you, John” he said calmly, reading my name from my nametag. His face was back to its original state before the outburst. It was hard to imagine that the same face was screaming just three minutes before.

I tried to think of something that would put me back on top of the game,

“What about little Andrew, huh?” I whispered, my voice quavering with anger, “Doesn’t he have a say in this?”

“Man, who the fuck-” he began, “Oh” he said quietly “Him…”

There was a pause in which his face was unreadable and he appeared mentally absent. His lips moved but I couldn’t make out what he was mumbling, or even if he was mumbling. Then abruptly he was back to the same old state of boredom and dullness. I was surprised and decided to break the silence.

“Why’d you do it?”

“What?” he asked, apparently surprised I was addressing him in particular.

“Why’d you kill the little boy?” I repeated impatiently.

“I didn’t” he said calmly “You did”.

He spoke those words with all the confidence in the world, as if reciting some memorized thing or naming the days of the week or describing the color of his hair.

I was completely and utterly bewildered.

“What? No, no, no” I nervously laughed it off, while I searched the papers for the one on the murder, “it was you. You were there, drugstore on the east side, gun went off” I pointed almost angrily at the paper. “It was you”.

He sighed as though the facts were just an annoying little detail in the way of his flawless reasoning.

“Yeah I was there” he gulped and looked kind of sick “The gun went off…But it wasn’t my fault. It was their fault. Your fault”.

As he emphasized it was my fault he pointed at me sluggishly with his both his right and left index finger.

“What are you saying?” I asked in a serious almost menacing tone.

“You could’ve helped me, man” he said gravely “You could’ve shown me the right way. You could’ve been my father or my brother. You could’ve been my family…”

“I don’t know you” I said alarmed by the abrupt direction the conversation was heading. “I don’t know anything about you”.

He chuckled. “You could’ve”

He gulped and took a deep breath, the kind you take before jumping out of a building, and went on.

“It’s easy to sit there and say: ‘you robbed 17 stores and 24 private properties and you shot a kid’” he said it in a mocking deep voice with an odd manner that I found strangely familiar, “and lock me up and that’s it. But it’s really you who robbed and shot the kid ‘cause you never did anything to stop me. You lock me up today? By tomorrow there’ll ten more like me. Are you gonna keep locking people up, or is the problem maybe more than that, man?”

He gave a short pause to catch his breath, he was speaking too fast and with too much emotion. I don’t know if I was supposed to answer his questions, luckily his pause was short and uninviting. The horrifying thought that maybe I didn’t have an answer plagued upon my anxious mind. I stopped thinking and concentrated on what he was saying…

“…Don’t-cha thinks that maybe I’d like it better if I had a normal family, a job, a minivan and a goddamn golden retriever?” He began to scream like before. His screams scared me because they were constantly increasing in volume and intensity and made me extremely uncomfortable and edgy. “Every time I come after stealing enough or dealing enough to get some food, my kid, when he’s not crying cause his mom left, asks me when will we move to the fancy uptown houses so we can buy him his goddamn golden retriever. I planted the crazy idea in my head that if I stole enough I’d fuckin’ buy him that son of a bitch dog or the fancy house… that’s what kept me going…Seventeen stores? Try thirty, dick face. Not all of us have the luxury of choosing what kind of life we lead. Most of what I did I did cause no one really gave a shit about us, no one gave us a goddamn choice. Killed or be killed, sink or swim, fight to live, that’s what’s real, man”.

He paused and stared deeper into me. Now he spoke in soft deadly whispers that hurt me physically.

“If there’s something wrong with me, its cause there’s something wrong with all of you. I’m not the problem man, I’m just the consequence, so go ahead and deal with me, you piece of shit cop.”

That’s when he struck me. He kicked the table down and then rammed it into my face and stomach.

As the other cops dragged him away he looked back at me and smiled. A sick smile a mile long. I sat back down in my chair, placed a small half-melted bag of ice on my forehead, feeling entirely unsatisfied.