“Yeah, kid,” Hammer said, wiping his eyes with a dirty sleeve. “We’re your angels. We’ve got you now.”
While Doc called his buddies at the county hospital, the rest of us cleared the house. We found his mother down in the dark basement.
She’d been gone for days. She lay peacefully on an old mattress, wearing a neat Sunday dress. A worn photo album was clutched tightly to her chest. It was filled with pictures of her and Timmy before the dark bruises started showing up on her face.
There was a longer letter inside a sealed envelope resting on a milk crate. It was addressed to whoever found her boy. I opened it with shaking hands.
Her name was Sarah. She had terminal cancer, no health insurance, and a husband sitting in a state penitentiary for beating her half to death. If she died in a county hospital, Timmy would go straight into the foster system and end up with her abusive husband’s family.
