Fitz - By Mick Cochrane Page 0,2

his father, what was the phrase? Quality time. He wanted to spend some quality time with his dad. It was time to get acquainted. But his dad wasn’t interested. After all these years, that much was obvious. It wasn’t like he was going to respond to an invitation. Fitz figured he needed a convincer.

3

Fitz touches the gun he’s got jammed in his jeans. It feels solid and reassuring. It has weight. It makes Fitz feel substantial. “This is a serious piece,” that’s what the kid who sold it to him said. They were standing on a playground after dark, underneath monkey bars Fitz used to climb. Fitz has known this kid for years—Dominic Rizzo. He calls himself the Dominator, but there really isn’t anything dominant about him. Nobody much likes him. In elementary school, he stole things from other people’s desks, worthless things—a dirty eraser, the stub of a pencil. He has a pinched, ratlike face and smells like an ashtray. He’s been to juvie more than once.

But if you want to buy something—pills, weed, an ID, you name it—Dominic is your man. The playground is like his office. He sits on the tire swing, wobbling slowly back and forth, a cigarette cupped in his hand. When Fitz came by one night and told him he wanted to get a gun, he didn’t seem all that surprised. He didn’t ask questions. “I’m not going to shoot anybody,” Fitz said, and tried to laugh. “I just want to make a point.”

Dominic didn’t seem to care. “Whatever,” he said. “You want a dummy?” he asked. “A piece of crap? Or a serious piece?” Fitz told him he wanted the real thing. “Okay,” Dominic told him. “Two hundred bucks. Be here Sunday night.”

Fitz had a wad of money stashed in his desk. He’d been saving for a new bass—the thing he played was some rebuilt, no-name Frankenstein he’d found at a flea market. Sunday night Fitz told his mom he was going for a walk and brought his money to the playground. Dom took him into the park and retrieved a bag from behind some bushes. “Here she be,” he said. “Thirty-eight snub-nose, the Chief’s Special.”

Dom showed him how to push the latch release forward and open the cylinder. He gave it a spin. He explained that the gun held five rounds and that he was giving him that many. “There’s no safety,” Dom said. Fitz knew what that meant, but somehow that phrase, those words—they made it seem as if Dom were telling him something bigger, more ominous.

“You’re packing now,” he told Fitz. “You got some serious street cred.” Dom was making fun of him, Fitz was pretty sure, a law-abiding kid like him buying a gun, but he didn’t really care. He needed to get his father’s attention, and this would do the trick.

Now, with his hand on the gun, he feels like a serious person. Someone to be reckoned with. There have been times in the past couple of weeks when watching his father made Fitz feel small and insubstantial, unimportant. The feeling of excitement and purpose slipped away at those times, and he felt just like a nothing, a nobody. Easy to ignore, easy to blow off. Fitz is preoccupied with this man, who clearly gives him no more thought than he does the cable or electric bill or any other monthly obligation. Fitz is a witness to a rich and fascinating life that doesn’t include him. He is on the outside looking in, his nose pressed against the glass.

Fitz understands that puny boys love their violent video games so much because playing them makes them feel big, powerful, dangerous. That has never been his thing. But now he has to admit it—his piece, this steel he’s carrying, it makes him feel confident. Today his father is not going to blow him off. Today Fitz is going to make himself visible to his father.

4

The door to the building opens and a man steps out. Curtis Powell, Esquire. Partner in the firm of Plunkett and Daugherty. JD, cum laude, St. Paul College of Law, whose practice involves a balance of employment and complex commercial litigation, recipient of the Advocates for Human Rights Award. His father.

Fitz has memorized the biography and studied the picture of him on his law firm’s website, a formal studio shot, like a school portrait—the same sort of vague blue background. To Fitz, the man in that picture looks pretty smart. He also looks pretty pleased with