And it was only then did the suspect find the strength to speak up. “You tried to kill me,” he said.
“You’ll live,” said Boone as he began searching Billy’s pockets.
Billy, realizing some of those late-arriving students were recording the incident on their cell phones, started milking his pain for all it was worth. “Help!” he started screaming. “Somebody go get help! He’s trying to kill me!”
It was only then did Boone realize, too, that they were being filmed. But it didn’t matter to Boone. He kept searching the suspect’s pockets.
But when those students were smiling as if it was some kind of a joke, Billy Ray became irate. “Go get some help, you idiotic kids!” he yelled. “This ain’t no freakin’ joke. Put those phones down and go get help!”
But nobody was about to tell on Boone Ryan.
Billy Ray, knowing it too, forgot about them. He, instead, looked at his captor. “You tried to kill me, bro,” he said again. “You don’t go around hitting people with trucks. I could have died!”
“And it would have been exactly what your ass deserved for selling that poison to kids.”
“What selling? What poison? I wasn’t selling anything! I was just taking my baby sister her lunch money.”
But Boone was already pulling dime bags of opioids out of Billy Ray’s pockets. “And what’s this supposed to be?” he asked him as he tossed the bags onto the truck’s hood. “More lunch money for baby sis? Or is it for somebody else’s baby sister? Or their baby brother?” He shoved a bag into Billy Ray’s face. “Is this the lunch money you’re talking about, you worthless pile of trash?!”
He then grabbed Billy Ray by his collar and dragged him to the cab of the truck. “What are you doing to me?” Billy Ray cried out. “I need a doctor!”
“I got your doctor,” Boone said as he lifted the drug dealer, using the strength of his muscular arms, and tossed him into the cab. The students went wild with laughter when Billy Ray cried out again.
But Billy wasn’t playing. He was in terrible pain. He contorted his body and kept screaming out in pain. “This police brutality!” he was crying. “What you doing to me is police brutality, bro!”
“This is not police brutality,” Boone responded. Then he reached into his truck’s cab and punched Billy Ray in the face as hard as he could. “But that is,” he said.
Billy Ray started crying like a baby. “This so wrong, bro. How could you do this to a citizen? This so wrong, bro!”
“And what you’re doing to destroy those kids’ lives isn’t wrong?” Boone asked. “Selling that poison to kids is okay? Give me a break!”
Then Boone got into his truck, spun around, kicking up dirt as he did, as a few of those students kept filming his departure for their Facebook pages. But it wasn’t as if Boone Ryan cared. He didn’t, not one bit. He headed for the police station.
As he drove, he shook his fist to shake off the pain. It was swollen from the punch he gave to Billy Ray. But he’d do it again in a heartbeat, and all day long if he had to. Those damn drugs killed his kid brother. He wasn’t letting them kill his town too.
CHAPTER THREE
“Our hands are tied,” the chairman of the board of directors said to the seven-member group as they all sat around the conference table. The chairman, Fritz Hollingsworth, didn’t like the idea either. Neither did the vice-chairman, Les Pataki. But there was nothing they could do about it.
“But who is this person?” board member Margaret Ackroyd asked. She was the heir to the Ackroyd Mining Company and was one of the wealthiest landowners in the county. And she was in the don’t like category too.
But what she also didn’t like was the way the leadership was caving. “And what do you mean our hands are tied? This is our school, not Freddy’s. My father and yours, too, Fritz, started Saint Christopher’s as a great, private school for the elite in this county to attend. It was bad enough when we were shamed into allowing some of that trailer park trash over around Appalachia to enroll. Now we have to hire somebody not even from this area?”
“This area?” asked Les. “She’s not even from this region. From what I recall, she’s from California!”
There was a collective sigh of outrage at the very thought!
“She probably doesn’t even know how to get to Kentucky,” Les added.
“But why was she selected?” asked Margaret. “She doesn’t have a graduate degree, which I thought was always preferable.”
“Preferred,” said Fritz, “but not required.”
“And her bachelor’s degree,” continued Margaret, looking at the resume she had in front of her, “is from some school I’ve never heard of before in my life!”
“It’s a tiny, historically black college,” said Les. “Before I was given her resume and looked it up on Google, I’d never heard of it either.”
“And the bachelor’s degree she received from that school,” said Margaret, “is in something called Physical Education. What in the dickens is physical education?”
“It’s PE, Margaret,” said Mark Kerchup, another board member. “We’ve been out of school too long. She trained to be a gym teacher.”
“A gym teacher,” Margaret said, shaking her head. “Why I’ve never! A gym teacher is about to become our dean of students. A gym teacher. Honestly, Fritz! This is absurd!”
“She did work as a dean of girls before,” Mark said. “So, it’s not entirely out of left field, keeping to the PE analogy.”
“Regardless,” Fritz said again, “our hands are tied. Freddy has demanded that this city and all of its’ institutions change their images. He wants diversity and he wants it now.”
“And it’s purely political,” Les said.
“Of course it’s political!” said Margaret. “He looks in the mirror every morning and thinks he sees a president of the United States someday, and our lack of diversity will hurt his chances. Forget what all of this diversity will do to our heirs and to this great town. But does Freddy care? Of course not! The blacks put him over the top when he ran for mayor, and he feels he has to give them something. At our expense,” she added.
“I agree with everything you just said, Maggie,” Fritz said. “But I say again, and I will continue to say until the cows come home: our hands are tied. Freddy will pull our school’s charter, and he has the power to do so, too, if we don’t comply.”
“But why her?” Margaret asked again. “She’s only thirty-five years old, her experience is minimal at best, and she doesn’t even possess an Ivy League degree when our goal is to get each and every one of the graduating seniors at Saint Christopher’s into Ivy League schools. There has to be far more qualified candidates than her!”
“She was the only person of color to apply for the position. Freddy wanted this done a long time ago. A person of color has got to be in a senior position on our faculty. He said our time was up and he wanted this done and done now. Our hands are tied.”