“Good God!” the father says. “Have some decency.”

Mullard lets out a guffaw. “Decency? What do you know about decency?” Then he looks down the bedroom hallway. “Noah Falkowski!” he calls loudly. “If you’re back there, come out now.”

A fifteen-year-old boy peeks out of a bedroom doorway, takes one look at the guests, and slams his door. Mullard signals to the brawniest of his cohorts. “He’s all yours.”

“I’m on it.”

“Stop him, Walter!” the woman begs her husband. Walter, put on the spot, turns to Mullard with a vengeance. “I want to talk to your superior.”

And then Mullard pulls out a gun. “You’re in no position to make demands.”

It’s clearly just a tranq pistol, but considering that nasty business about the Juvey-cop killed with his own gun, Walter and his wife aren’t about to take any chances.

“Sit down,” Mullard says, nodding toward the dining room. The couple hesitates. “I said sit down!” And then two of Mullard’s team force them to sit in two dining room chairs. The father, a reasonable man, assumes he’s dealing with another reasonable young professional like himself.

“Is this all really necessary, Officer Mullard?” he asks, in a calmer, more accommodating tone.

“My name isn’t Mullard, and I’m not a Juvey-cop.” Suddenly it hits the man how obvious this is. He knew this kid was too young to have that kind of authority. The scars on his face made him seem a little . . . well . . . seasoned, but still he was too young. How could Walter have been so easily fooled? And isn’t there something familiar about this young man’s face? Has he seen him before, possibly in the news? The man is rendered speechless by this unexpected turn of nonprofessional events.

5 • Connor

The best part of these missions is the look on the parents’ faces when they realize that the tables have been turned. How their eyes dart down toward the tranq gun aimed at them, suddenly realizing that their unwind order is now nothing but a piece of paper.

“Who are you?” asks the father. “What is it you want?”

“We want what you no longer want,” Connor tells him. “We want your son.” Then Trace, the muscular team member he sent after Noah, comes out of the bedroom holding the struggling kid.

“They don’t make bedroom locks like they used to,” Trace says.

“Lemme go,” shouts the kid. “Lemme go!” Connor goes to him while Hayden, also on the rescue team, pulls a tranq gun to make sure the couple doesn’t get any ideas.

“Noah, your parents were about to unwind you,” Connor tells him. “In fact, the Juvies are coming tomorrow—but luckily for you, we came first.”

There’s a horrified look on the kid’s face. He shakes his head, denying the possibility. “You’re lying!” Then he looks to his parents, not so sure anymore. “He’s lying, right?”

Connor doesn’t let the parents answer. “The truth—you owe him that much.”

“You have no right to do this!” the mother yells.

“The truth!” demands Connor.

Then the father sighs, and says, “Yes, what he says is true. I’m sorry, Noah.”

Now Noah casts a furious gaze at his parents, and then turns to Connor. Connor can see tears building behind his fury.

“Are you going to hurt them?” Noah asks.

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Connor shakes his head. “Sorry, that’s not what we do. Someday you’ll be grateful we didn’t.”

Noah looks down. “No, I won’t.”

Trace, no longer having to hold Noah quite so tightly, escorts him back to his bedroom so Noah can shove a few things into his backpack; what little he can salvage from fifteen years of life.

While the rest of Connor’s team checks out the home, making sure there is no one else present to call the police or otherwise foul up the mission, Connor hands a pad and pen to the father.

“What’s this for?”

“You’re going to write down the reasons you decided to have your son unwound.”

“What’s the point?”

“We know you have reasons for doing it,” Connor says. “I’m sure they’re stupid; I’m sure they’re selfish and seriously screwed up, but they’re still reasons. If nothing else, it’ll help us to know what kind of pain in the ass Noah is, so maybe we can deal with him better than you did.”

“You keep saying we,” the mother asks. “Who’s we?”

“We’re the ones saving your son’s freaking life. That’s all you need to know.”

The father looks down pitifully at the little notepad.

“Write,” Connor says. Neither he nor the mother look up as Trace escorts Noah out of the house into the waiting car.

“I hate you!” he yells back at them. “I never meant it when I said it before, but now I do.”

Connor can tell it cuts deeply into these parents, but not as deeply as the scalpels of a Chop Shop.

“Someday, if he makes it to seventeen, he may give you a shot at forgiveness. If he does, don’t throw that chance away.”

They say nothing to that. The father just looks down at the pad, scribbling and scribbling. When he’s done, he hands it back to Connor. Rather than a manifesto, the man has written down his excuses in efficient bullet points. Connor reads them out loud, as if each one was an accusation against them.

“ ‘Disrespect and disobedience.’ ”

Those are always the first reasons. If every parent unwound a kid due to disrespect, the human race would go extinct in a single generation.

“ ‘Destructive behavior to self and property.’ ”

Connor knows a bit about self-destructive behavior and did his share of vandalizing in times of frustration. But most kids get over that, don’t they? It never ceases to amaze him how everything—even unwinding—is geared toward the quick fix. Connor looks at the third bullet point and has to laugh.

“ ‘Lack of personal hygiene’?”

The woman throws her husband an angry gaze for writing that.

“Ooh, I like this one!” Connor says. “ ‘Diminished prospects for future.’ Sounds like a stock report!”

At every rescue mission, Connor reads aloud the reasons, and each time he wonders if it’s the same list his parents would have written. This time, the last reason chokes Connor up a bit.

“ ‘Our own failure as parents.’ ”

And then he gets mad at himself. These parents haven’t earned his sympathy. If it’s their failure, then why should their son have to pay for it?

“Tomorrow, when the Juvey-rounders come for him, you’ll tell them that he ran away, and you don’t know where he went. You won’t talk about us, or what happened here today, because if you do, we’ll know. We monitor all the police frequencies.”

“And if we don’t comply?” the father asks, showing the same kind of disobedience he condemned his son for.

“In case you have any thought of reporting this, we’ve uploaded a nice identity cocktail for the two of you onto the net.”

That makes them both look even more ill than they already do.

“What kind of cocktail?”

Hayden’s the one who answers, proud because it was his idea.

“We send out a single code over the net, and bingo, your names become linked to a dozen known clapper cells. Your digital footprint will be so tangled in terrorism, you’ll spend years trying to get Homeland Security off your collective asses.”

The couple nod a solemn acceptance.

“Fine,” the man says. “You have our word.”

The threat of identity cocktails is always very effective—and besides, whether these kids go with Connor or they’re unwound, the parents get what they want. Their unmanageable kid becomes somebody else’s problem. Reporting Connor and his team would just make Noah their problem again.

“You have to understand, we were desperate,” says the mother with a high quotient of self-righteousness. “Everyone told us that unwinding was the best thing to do. Everyone.”

Connor tears up the list of excuses and drops it on the floor, locking eyes with her.

“So, in other words you decided to unwind your son because of peer pressure?”