Disclaimer: I do not own the Outsiders
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Every greaser in Tulsa thinks I take pride in what I did. They think I gloat about being the guy to finally kill the trouble-making hood that spent more time in jail than out of it, and I might act like it when my buddies compliment or tease me on it, but it's all bullshit. I never wanted to kill the kid. We had orders to get him and bring him in to hear his statement before locking him up. They didn't have to say what they did, but it left their lips anyway. They said to do what we had to do, and it had a meaning that ran much deeper than its letters.
It was a low-priority job, catching some guy who'd stolen a magazine and thirty or forty bucks from a rundown convenience store. The only big deal was threatening the cashier with a gun. Following him in our patrol cars and jumping out, that same gun was suddenly pointed our way. I panicked. I was new at the job and meant to aim for his upper arm so he'd drop the gun, but I aimed off and he ended up dead. His body dropped like a ton of bricks as did my heart. He was seventeen years old.
I thought back to when I was that age. That was the year a vaccine for polio had been released. That had been the year Peter Pan came out and I went to see it with my little sister. That was the year I met the love of my life whom I'm now married to for going on ten years. Seventeen had been full of happiness, youth, change for the better, finally beginning to really grow up. But this kid in front of me wasn't smiling. He was dead, and there is no changing that.
I may smile when they tell me I tamed the legendary Dallas Winston, but all I can ever think about when it's mentioned is the look on his face when the bullet pierced through his chest, the way his whole body jerked, the thud that scraped on my nerves like sandpaper when he hit the cold, wet concrete.
Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, his friends, five or six of them, came running, screaming at the top of their lungs with desperate shouts, "He's just a kid! Don't shoot! It's not loaded!"
Dallas Winston was not some sick, mad dog needing to be put out of its misery. He had friends and a life. Somewhere, he might have had a family. He was someone's son, someone's brother, someone's nephew, someone's friend. I took him from all of them- I stole all of it- over a gun.
A goddamned, unloaded gun.
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