Summer boredom ensues and creates this! Not that I'm complaining ...

Warning: There's no real plot to this. It's sort of completely random and ... weird.

Disclaimer: I do not own The Outsiders. Ahbiviously.

It's like I'm walking through a tunnel, I think to myself as I stride towards the station. The sky is overcast but still bright with day, unlike the light at the end of the tunnel, but more the tunnel at the end of the light. I often wake up, considering the type of day it is, and wonder what calls we'll get at the TPD. On bitter, icy winter days, it's mostly emergency calls but there's plenty about finding vagrants in sheds, loiterers behind restaurants, huddled by the kitchen vents. Would-be pleasant spring days result in the city kids running recklessly from place to place, setting off calls like dominos, all about general disturbances that just cannot be stood for one more minute.

Then there are the calls that we get on those other days- armed robbery, hostage situation, man down …

This day is beginning to look, sickly enough, like one of those days.

Conversation begins in the typical fashion.

"Rookie, we told'ja, ya gotta make the coffee. When Brothers was Rookie, he hadda make it, and before him, Amaral-"

"Shit like I did! I-"

"-keeps complaining about my late nights, Kat does. I'm getting real sick of it."

"Well maybe if you were really here she would'n have such a problem."

"Me and Rodriguez were here for hours last night doin' up the paperwork on Winston and we got to thinkin'- "

"'We' nothin', it was me. The guys from Gilcrease have got a death pool goin' for the hoods they got there. I'm thinkin' we oughta get in on. 'Magine the money we coulda made offa Winston? Whoo boy, that woulda been something."

This is not typical.

I turn my head slowly away from my newspaper and say to Rodriguez, "whaddya mean, 'death pool'?"

He rolls his eyes impatiently; Rod is impatient about everything be it questions or taking a piss.

"I mean like puttin' up money on bets for when a person's gonna get dead."

"I put a hundred on Shepard!" The Rookie shouts, half laughing.

"Which one?" Brothers grins. "'Cause I'll put five hundred on the both of them, no more'n a month between. Curly will follow Tim straight to death, not even knowin' where he's goin'."

"You're not serious, are you?" Anger infuses my voice.

The guys mutter, but only Rod speaks up. With a smirk he says, "'course I'm serious. It's not like I'm betting on your kids and wife, Fitz-"

"Shut the hell up," I growl.

"Man, I wasn't sayin' I was! This is all 'cause you're one of the church-goin' folk who think all life is precious and shit-"

"Yeah, and?" I threaten him to go on.

"And I just mean the lives of good people oughta be kept but on kids like Winston, it's no differ'nt then bettin' on ponies or shit."

"How the fuck can you even say that?" I shout.

"Man, it's true! Kid had no family, ran with the likes of Shepard, and hardly went a week without visitin' us who could he of possibly mattered to?"

I open my mouth to speak, but instead shut my eyes and clench my fists. Through gritted teeth I mutter, "I'm not gonna fucking deal with this."

And I leave.

I sit in my cruiser, the keys in my hand but nowhere near the ignition. I sit and think of the night Winston died. I'd always thought of him as being about as wild as a bobcat and I know it wasn't far off. But that night, it was different. An animal knows it's wild; it knows its power. Dallas was wilder than wild that night. Somehow, that made me hurt.

It didn't hurt anywhere near as bad as remembering those other kids, though, the ones who didn't die. We knew them all.

The Curtis kids: fourteen, sixteen, twenty and on their own. We read about them in paper, how the little one (Ponyboy, I could never forget the name) had saved a bunch of kids in a church fire out in the country and how the big one gave up going to college to take care of Ponyboy and Sodapop after their parents died. Sodapop I knew before the night of Winston's death. Taken in with Mathews for walking on his hands. The lived on the North side, but weren't hoods, even if they were friends with one.

Mathews and me were more than acquainted. He's a slick kid if there ever has been one and I'd be lying if I were to say he doesn't make me wanna laugh. But, unlike the Curtis kids, he wasn't going anywhere.

I couldn't think of Winston's death without hearing their voices scream "don't shoot!" Pleading with cops for the first and only times in their lives, allowing us only that once to hear their true desperation.

That all hurt. It hurt horribly. But none of it hurt as badly as when I remembered the Randle kid.

Every couple of weeks, sets of hubcaps have disappeared from nicer parts of town. We know it can't all be one kid, but the only tip we've gotten on it is that Randle may be behind it. It's small-time shit, but we cops get a kick out of catching even the smallest criminals. I went down to the kid's work one day to get my oil changed. I can easily do it myself, but the way the kid went about just about the same as him screaming, "guilty!" He didn't think about what he was doing, he just did it and quicker than I've ever seen.

I hardly even recognized him. Dallas went down. The kids were still screaming. I was walking over when Randle suddenly fell forward, bent over sobbing. Sodapop Curtis caught him and, the expression on his face blank, told Randle that they couldn't do anything about it.

I wanted to tell them there wasn't anything I could do either, but it wouldn't be true. I stared at Randle, thinking of the way I mentally berated him, despite my inward praises, the day I had waited at the DX. No good, was a constant, a no good criminal who ought to be fined for more than he's worth. I had sneered at his obviously pride, at his greased hair, and the scuffs on his shoes. I had figured that he had no emotion.

But there he was, bawling like a child.

I stared at those kids; they were kids, not JDs, not hoods, kids. They lived these overcast lives of injustice, poverty, violence, and death. They covered the smell of rotting lives with Pomade, never let the look of failure cross their faces but instead wore their anger and coolness like a badge.

It's only with their friends that they could ever leave this behind. It was as though, when together, their own dark lives canceled out the dark lives of the others and created a bit of light.

Dallas Winston ran away from that light. He probably didn't know it had ever even existed.

That hurts.