But I did finally learn Blue Cap’s name. Curtis Moore. He was listed in critical condition at Boston City and doctors were said to be working frantically to save his foot. He was eighteen years old and a reputed member of the Raven Saints, a gang that ran out of the Raven Boulevard Projects in Roxbury and favored New Orleans Saints baseball caps and team memorabilia. His mother was pictured on page three, holding a framed photograph of him when he was ten years old. She was quoted as saying, “Curtis never ran with no gang. Never did nothing wrong.” She demanded an investigation, said the whole thing was “racially motivated.” She managed to compare it to the Charles Stuart case, of course, in which the DA and just about everyone else had believed Charles Stuart’s story that a black guy had killed his wife. They’d arrested a black guy, and possibly would have sent him up if the insurance policy Stuart had taken out on his wife hadn’t finally raised a few eyebrows. And when Chuck Stuart took a 9.5 swan dive off the Mystic River bridge, it pretty much confirmed what a lot of people had already thought was obvious in the first place. Shooting Curtis Moore had about as much in common with the Stuart case as Howard Beach has in common with Miami Beach, but there wasn’t much I could do about it standing outside a Store 24.

Angie snorted loudly and I knew she was reading the same article. I said, “Lemme guess the ‘racially motivated’ line.”

She nodded. “The nerve of you, shoving that Uzi into that poor boy’s hand and forcing him to pull the trigger.”

“I don’t know what comes over me sometimes.”

“You should have tried to talk with him, Patrick. Told him you understood the life of deprivation that put that gun in his hand.”

“I’m such a prick that way.” I tossed the paper in the backseat and got behind the wheel and headed into the city. Angie kept looking at her copy in the dim light and breathing heavily through her nostrils. Eventually, she bunched it in her hand and threw it on the floor.

She said, “How can they look at themselves in the mirror?”

“Who?”

“People who say such...shit. ‘Racially motivated.’ Please. ‘Curtis never ran with no gang.’“She looked down at the paper and spoke to the picture of Curtis’s mother. “Well he wasn’t out till three a.m. every night with the fucking Boy Scouts, lady.”

I patted her shoulder. “Calm down.”

“It’s bullshit,” she said.

“It’s a mother,” I said. “Say anything in the world to protect her child. Can’t blame her.”

“Oh, no?” she said. “Then, why bring race into it if all she wants to do is protect her child? What’s next Al Sharp-ton going to come to town, hold a vigil for Curtis’s foot? Pin Jenna’s death on the white man too?”

She was sounding off. Reactionary white rage. I hear more of it lately. A lot more of it. I’ve said similar things on occasion myself. You hear it most among the poor and working class. You hear it when brain-dead sociologists call incidents like the wilding attack in Central Park a result of “uncontrollable” impulses, and defend the actions of a group of animals with the argument that they were only reacting to years of white oppression. And if you point out that those nice, well-bred animals who happen to be black probably would have controlled those actions just fine if they’d thought that female jogger was protected by an army of her own, you’re labeled a racist. You hear it when the media make a point out of race. You hear it when a bunch of possibly well-intentioned whites get together to sort it all out and end up saying, “I’m no racist but...” You hear it when judges who forcibly desegregate public schools with bussing put their own children in private schools, or when, recently, a circuit court judge said he’d never seen evidence to suggest that street gangs were any more dangerous than labor unions.