Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  “Frank Nichols ain’t just my boss!” Jamal shouted.

  “Well, who is he, then?”

  “He’s my father.”

  The words hung in the air between them. They answered Keisha’s questions about Jamal’s penchant toward secrecy. And it raised yet another question that Keisha was forced to ask.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Jamal turned to her. “I’m tellin’ you ’cause it ain’t just a job to me, Keisha. I loved you since I was a little boy, and I’ll be damned if I‘ma sit here and let somethin’ happen to you ‘cause o’ my father.”

  “And what about my father?” Keisha asked.

  Jamal paused. “That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you, Keisha. Your father might be in trouble.”

  After leaving Frank Nichols’s bar, Reverend Anderson wandered Diamond Street, thankful that the streets were bathed in a quiet that was rare for a North Philly summer.

  The stillness allowed the murderous rage within him to subside. But it also brought back memories of a time he’d taken pains to forget.

  Anderson had seen this type of silence before, in the days when he was destined to live a life like Frank Nichols.

  It was nearly forty years before, when his father’s bootlegging and speakeasies and numbers running had finally given way to heroin dealing.

  John Anderson Sr. wasn’t like other dealers of the sixties. There was no credit, no competition, and no mercy. He was before his time, really, in that he was the most ruthless man North Philly had ever seen. That would have been bad enough. But he was training his son to be his successor. So when competitors rose up to overtake them, or when customers took too long to pay, John Junior, who was just seventeen years old when he joined the family business in 1962, was sent to do his father’s bidding.

  He broke arms with his hands. He cracked heads against sidewalks. He broke ribs with baseball bats.

  He had done other jobs on the very block he was now passing through. Jobs that kept him looking over his shoulder even now.

  John glanced behind him and saw a blue car rolling slowly along the street, its windows sliding down about halfway. When the barrel of the nine-millimeter poked out at him, John hit the ground and rolled. And as the bullets hit the sidewalk, sending sparks into the air, he jumped up running, keeping his body low as the bullets whizzed over his head.

  There was the hum of the car’s engine as it rode alongside him, then the quick, repeated tap of the gunshots, then the unmistakable and sickening thud of a bullet hitting flesh. Someone screamed, a body fell, and he felt something warm and sticky running down his face.

  He kept running, half expecting to feel the burning sensation of a bullet boring into him. When he didn’t, he ran right, onto Sixteenth Street, then ducked left, through the alleylike street that ran from Sixteenth to Seventeenth. About halfway through, he heard the car skid to a stop behind him. A door opened and shut, and footsteps slapped against the sidewalk as someone gave chase.

  John knew he couldn’t outrun his pursuer, so he stopped and dived into a vacant lot that had overgrown with pungent, tree-sized weeds.

  He tried to hold his breath, and listened as the man walked the length of the alley. He wanted to look out and see the man’s face, to remember it so that he could repay him for the attempt on his life.

  But a look might cost him too much. So he waited. And when he heard the footsteps go past him again, he glanced out from behind the weeds and saw the back of the shooter’s head. It was covered in thin dreadlocks, tied together and hanging to shoulder length.

  As the sound of sirens drew closer, the shooter got back into the car and drove away, turning the corner with screaming tires and heading west on Diamond toward the projects.

  John reached up and touched his head, and when he looked at his hand, he saw blood. He reached up again to find the wound. That was when he realized that the blood wasn’t his.

  “Mama!” The bloodcurdling scream split the air, and John Anderson ran back toward Diamond Street.

  When he turned the corner, he saw an old woman sprawled on the sidewalk, close to a large brownstone.

  As he approached her side, he saw blood crisscrossing her chest like thick, red spiderwebs. He saw her arms stretched out at her sides. But it wasn’t until he saw her face that a sick feeling overtook him.

  He walked up to her and knelt down next to the middle-aged woman who sat on the ground, crying uncontrollably over her mother.

  “Oh, Mother Johnson,” he said to himself, as he looked at her soft brown eyes, staring skyward, and her lips curled in a satisfied smile. “You’re in a better place now.”

  “What happened here?” said a cop who jumped out of his car and ran over to the victim.

  “Somebody was shooting and this lady got hit,” John said. “I guess she was coming home from bible study and she got caught in the crossfire.”

  “And who are you?” the cop asked, taking out a notepad.

  “I’m the one they were shooting at,” he said, standing up to move as Fire Rescue workers arrived and ran over to the body.

  “I’m her pastor.”

  3

  It Was seven o’lock in the morning, and Homicide lieutenant Kevin Lynch was in his office at police headquarters, drinking bitter coffee and flipping through a file from the night before.

  As he leaned back in his chair and moved the file from one side of his battered wooden desk to the other, his shaved head gleamed in the fluorescent light, his strong shoulders slumped, and his tired eyes glazed over.

  He was looking at the words on the pages, but he wasn’t really reading them. He already knew that they recounted the shooting death of a seventy-one-year-old woman named Emma Jean Johnson.

  Her death marked the twentieth homicide of the summer, and the two hundredth of the year. The numbers were the lowest in a decade.

  But the statistics didn’t make it any easier for Lynch. Whether it was one homicide or a thousand, he privately mourned every victim whose name came across his desk. He was especially dismayed by murders in North Philadelphia, because he’d grown up there.

  It didn’t matter if it was east of Broad, where the projects of his youth had been razed and replaced by tidy twin houses on manicured plots of grass, or north of Diamond, where the gleaming halls of Temple University gave way to crumbling row houses and time-worn streets.

  To Lynch, North Philadelphia was one neighborhood divided along fabricated lines that did nothing to change the lives of the people who had no choice but to live there.

  He was attached to those people, because he was those people. His inability to disconnect from that reality was his greatest strength as an investigator. And it was his greatest weakness as a man.

  Though he’d learned to hide his feelings from fellow cops, his wife and daughter had watched the weight of dozens of murder investigations eat away at him over the years. And in some ways, the job had done more harm to him as a father and husband than anything in his life.

  Even his wife’s miscarriage some years before, which had brought tears and regret, and healing, and scarring, hadn’t affected them as much as his career. His job required time. And time created distance, a distance that at times seemed insurmountable.

  He’d often asked himself if a career of solving other people’s problems had exacerbated his own. Yet the question wasn’t enough to make him walk away from law enforcement. In fact, he’d fought to stay, even as cases like that of Kenya Brown, the nine-year-old who’d been murdered in his childhood home, The Bridge, threatened to destroy his community, his marriage, and his career.

  Now, nearly ten years after witnessing the devastation that resulted from Kenya’s death, Lynch was still watching people die for little or nothing, and he was still asking himself why.

  Opening the file on his desk, he looked again at the photographs from the Johnson murder scene. There were bullet casings on the ground, along with blood, a handkerchief, and a Bible. And then there was Mrs. Joh
nson, her eyes fixed on some unseen point in the sky. She looked almost like the woman Lynch had known as his grandmother.

  He wondered if the scene the officers described in their report was genuine. Did Emma Jean Johnson’s daughter kneel by her dying mother’s side because she grieved her violent and senseless death? Or did she, like Lynch, mourn her squandered chance to have one last conversation with the woman who’d raised her?

  A detective knocked on his door and stirred him from his memories. He was glad, as always, to get back to work. It was the work that prevented the past from consuming him.

  “Lieutenant,” the detective said. “We’ve got problems with that shooting from last night.”

  Lynch sighed, leaned forward in his chair, and opened the file. “Didn’t Reverend Anderson already give a statement implicating Frank Nichols?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So bring Nichols in.”

  “We sent detectives to get him at six o’clock this morning, but Anderson already had five hundred people outside Nichols’s bar.”

  “So move them.”

  “We tried, but they’re saying they want Nichols.” The detective leaned across Lynch’s desk. “And we don’t think Nichols is about to go quietly.”

  Reverend John Anderson stood atop a car outside Frank Nichols’s bar, his tired, red-rimmed eyes surveying the crowd of hundreds who’d come from congregations all over the city.

  After giving his statement to detectives, he’d spent the remainder of the night making phone calls to organize the gathering.

  It was a protest that was thus far peaceful. But he didn’t know how long it would stay that way. And he didn’t know if he wanted it to.

  The crowd had marched the six blocks from his church on Twentieth and York to the bar at Fifteenth and Dauphin, and now they were leaning forward, watching and waiting as Anderson raised the bullhorn to his lips.

  “Last night,” he said, pausing to lock eyes with several men in the crowd, “they tried to rape my daughter.”

  There was a shocked silence. Then the crowd pressed closer to the makeshift stage.

  “My only child came to me with blood on her dress and tears in her eyes and said, ‘Daddy, they tried to hurt me.’

  “I turned to my wife, and she said, ‘John, turn to the Lord.’”

  Reverend Anderson paused and looked down at his daughter, who was standing directly in front of him, trying not to allow her divided allegiance to show on her face.

  “But when I looked in my baby’s eyes and saw hurt,” John continued, “I wasn’t a pastor anymore, I wasn’t a preacher anymore, I wasn’t a teacher anymore. I was just a father. A father whose child was in pain.”

  There was a smattering of amens as heads began to nod in agreement.

  “I grabbed the nearest thing I could get my hands on,” the pastor said, pointing to the bar on the corner. “And I came here, and told Frank Nichols that if one hair on my baby’s head was ever harmed on these streets, there would be hell to pay!”

  The crowd began to clap wildly as Anderson’s jaw jutted out defiantly.

  He suddenly grew solemn. “And through it all, Mother Johnson was praying,” he said, his voice beginning to rise. “Praying that these drugs, and these rapists, and these thieves, and these murderers, would be wiped from our community!”

  The clapping resumed in earnest, and as Lieutenant Kevin Lynch’s black Mercury Marquis pulled onto the sidewalk across the street from the spot where Anderson was speaking, the pastor found his stride.

  “Mother Emma Jean Johnson laid down her life so that God could answer her prayer!” he shouted to thunderous applause. “She was cut down like a dog in the street so that we could come here today and say, ‘No more!’”

  As the crowd worked itself into a frenzy, Lieutenant Lynch looked up at a three-story abandoned house that stood just a few feet behind Anderson. He saw a man walk to the edge of the rooftop and lie down. There was something in his hands. But it wasn’t until he pointed it that Lynch realized what it was.

  He grabbed his handheld radio. “Dan two-five, we’ve got a gun on the roof.”

  Voices exploded over the radio as Lynch pushed through the crowd.

  Plainclothes officers from Civil Affairs moved rapidly toward the building where the gunman crouched on the roof. Uniformed officers removed barricades. Command officers called for additional units.

  And Anderson called for Nichols to come outside.

  “Frank Nichols!” he screamed into the megaphone. “It’s judgment day!”

  At that, two of Nichols’s men emerged from the bar: Raheem, who ran Colorado Street, and an older man who ran Fifteenth Street. They closed a steel door behind them to prevent the increasingly hostile crowd from storming the place.

  “Murderers!” someone yelled, and the crowd took up the taunt.

  As the chant grew louder, Keisha looked over at Nichols’s underlings, then scanned the crowd and saw Jamal standing about twenty feet to her left. They locked eyes, and Keisha’s heart fluttered as she stood between the two men she loved.

  Her feet were rooted to the spot as Lynch came within a yard of her father. The police commissioner and several commanders who’d just arrived on the scene were also pushing toward him.

  “Get him down!” the commissioner screamed into his radio. “Get Reverend Anderson down!”

  Lynch, who was now standing directly behind Keisha, looked up at the roof and took out his weapon just as Keisha tore her gaze away from Jamal.

  “Daddy, get down!” Keisha yelled as Lynch’s gun went off near her ear.

  A second later, Dauphin Street disintegrated into bedlam.

  The crowd that had pressed itself together to hear Anderson was now trying to tear itself apart. Old women were trampled. Children were separated from their parents. Men were trapped against cars. And the police were powerless to maintain order.

  Keisha saw her father one minute, and the next minute she was knocked to her knees and swallowed up in the panicking mass of people. There was screaming, then several gunshots, and suddenly someone hit the ground just a few feet away from her. She looked over and saw one of the protestors—an older man with bloodstained gray hair. He was struggling to breathe, and blood leaked like tears from the corners of his eyes.

  Keisha screamed and tried to rise to her feet. But someone ran past and kicked her in the head. As she began to lose consciousness, she felt an arm reach down and grab her.

  Then everything went black.

  Keisha awakened on a couch in a dimly lit, dank basement, squinting to adjust to the light as a man sat perched in front of her on a barstool.

  She tried to speak, but her tongue was thick in her mouth. She attempted to rise, but her head swam. She sank back into the couch, which sat against a crumbling cement wall on a dirt floor.

  Fighting to correct her blurry vision, she blinked, and the man’s face came into focus. When it did, she saw black skin framed by long, thin dreadlocks. And perched above his chiseled nose and thick lips were dark, intense eyes, staring tenderly into hers.

  She was dizzy, floating as if in a dream, and reached out to steady herself. As she did so, her fingertips grazed the fine, shiny stubble that covered his face. She traced his cheekbones, which rose at sharp angles. Then she followed the path of his jaw and ran her fingers down to his chin, and up to his lips.

  “What happened, Jamal?” she asked, trying hard to regain her equilibrium.

  “You bumped your head,” he said, leaning forward to stroke her hair. “They was ’bout to run over you, so I brought you in here.”

  She couldn’t understand everything he was saying, but she knew that his touch caused something to go through her. Something that was exhilarating and frightening, just like the muffled sounds of screaming and pounding that she heard coming from somewhere above her head.

  Her thoughts were still muddled. But when she forced herself to look away from Jamal’s hypnotic gaze, one thought jumped to the fore.

&
nbsp; “Where’s my father?” she asked anxiously.

  “The cops scooped him up. He all right.”

  “I need to see him,” she said, leaping off the couch and trying to push past him.

  He placed his arm in front of her. “Not yet,” he said quickly.

  “Let me go!” she said, pushing more violently. “I have to see my father!”

  “If I let you go,” he said, his tender gaze hardening, “you might not ever see him again.”

  She suddenly stopped struggling as her face clouded with a mix of anger and realization.

  “You knew!” she shouted while punching and slapping at him. “That’s why you told me my father might be in trouble last night. You knew they were gonna try to kill him!”

  He grabbed her hands and tried to calm her down. “Listen to me, Keisha.”

  “No!” she said, kicking wildly in an effort to get away from him. “You knew!”

  “Keisha, stop!” He took her by her arms and forced her down onto the couch, then knelt on top of her and held her there.

  The two of them sat there for a moment, gulping air as they tried to recover from the brief struggle.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, staring into her eyes. “I just know they told me to get your pop to stop gettin’ in our business.”

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “Keisha, listen to me,” Jamal said earnestly. “I don’t know who tryin’ to kill your father. All I know is, it ain’t me. Did my father get somebody else to do it? I don’t know. But I do know this. My pop kills people. He don’t care no more about me than he do about you or anybody else. And if he find out what I’m ’bout to do, he’ll kill me, too.”

  Keisha looked into his eyes, searching them for the lie she believed was there. She couldn’t find it.

  “And what are you about to do?” she asked.

  He reached out and held her fingers between his own. “I’m leavin’, Keisha,” he said gravely. “I’m walkin’ away from my father’s business.”