Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  As the cameraman hoisted his camera onto his shoulder, one of the girls pushed her way to the front of the group and was speaking even before he held out the microphone.

  “I seen the rifle on the roof and I just ran,” the fifteen-year-old said, gesturing with one hand while holding a baby with the other. “Seemed like it was just all these bullets comin’ from everywhere.”

  “It seemed like more than one guy to me,” said another girl, her slippers whispering against the asphalt as she worked her way between her friend and the camera.

  Several members of the media spotted the young women talking to the cameraman and converged on them. Within seconds, tape recorders and cameras were thrust at them from every angle, and they were fielding questions from ten people.

  “What did the shooter look like?” shouted a grizzled white reporter from the Philadelphia Daily News.

  “He damn sure ain’t look like you,” said the young woman with the baby, enjoying her moment of celebrity and milking it for all it was worth.

  There was a smattering of laughter, and the reporter looked away, red-faced, as the girl in slippers spoke up.

  “He was black,” she said, her lips creased in a half-smile as cameramen trained their lights on her. “Real black.”

  “Looked like he had dreads,” the girl with the baby chimed in.

  “Did you see where he went?” asked a young blonde reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  Before any of them could answer, an older woman came running over to the gathering, pushing reporters out of the way until she’d made her way to her daughter.

  “Gimme this baby,” she said, snatching the child from the arms of the fifteen-year-old. “And get your little dumb ass in the house.”

  “Ma, what you—”

  “You don’t be out here talkin’ ’bout what you seen,” she snapped. “They shot the damn police commissioner. You think they give a damn about shootin’ you?”

  A cameraman from Channel 10 tried to turn his camera on the woman, but she reached out with one hand and pushed it away.

  “When they play this on the news, Nichols and them ain’t gon’ go lookin’ for these white people you talkin’ to,” the woman said, staring into the crowd of reporters and locking eyes with each of them. “They gon’ look for you. Now get in the house and stop runnin’ yo damn mouth.”

  She pulled her daughter by the arm and the girl reluctantly followed, then glanced back at her friends, who’d already begun to walk away from the reporters. This, after all, was North Philly, a place where one’s own words could be a death sentence.

  That knowledge wasn’t lost on the police. And though there was the potential for them to be overwhelmed with the minutiae of the incident—from traffic accident reports to hospital cases to accounting for the bullets fired by police—they had not lost sight of the biggest loss of the day.

  The police commissioner was dead. And while the death of a black commissioner meant nothing to people in other areas of the city, it was devastating to those in the North Philadelphia community he’d come from.

  Darrell Freeman’s first experience with leadership was during the 1960s. After King’s assassination and the ensuing riots that destroyed much of North Philadelphia, Freeman quickly learned that black men’s lives meant little. As the leader of a gang from the Raymond Rosen housing projects on nearby Diamond Street, Freeman put that lesson to devastating use.

  The chestnut-brown teen with the piercing eyes, scowling mouth, and hulking arms was ruthless in his takeover of the neighborhood, torturing rivals and crushing opposition. And though the police had never pinned anything on him, the streets knew of his bloody record, as did the other gangs.

  It wasn’t until his brother was killed in the crossfire during a gang war in the early 1970s that grief led Freeman to lay down his arms. When the House of Umoja began a movement in West Philadelphia to convince gang members to do the same, he turned that grief to purpose, and became one of their chief ambassadors.

  A few years later, when the gang wars ended and poverty and crime tightened its grip on the neighborhood he’d once ruled, Freeman knew that there was only one battle left for him to fight. So he went to the only gang that was left. He joined the police department.

  While his thirty-year rise through the department’s ranks had surprised his fellow officers, those who’d known him from the streets wondered what had taken him so long.

  Now the very streets he’d come back to save had taken him. Someone would have to pay for that. And they would have to pay for it soon, because if they didn’t, North Philly would erupt in the same kind of anarchy that Freeman had vowed to fight. The cops couldn’t allow that to happen.

  As police detectives waded into the crowd, searching desperately for willing witnesses, everyone began to disperse. And with good reason. The people of Dauphin Street had lived through fifteen years of drug-related violence. They didn’t plan to say anything to the police that would bring about any more.

  And so, as the injured received treatment from paramedics and the cameras recorded the aftermath of the confrontation, detectives took down the names of witnesses who would no doubt have memory lapses that would significantly lessen the DA’s chance to build a case against anyone.

  But this was no ordinary case. And Deputy Commissioner Dick Dilsheimer, who’d taken command in the wake of Commissioner Freeman’s death, didn’t plan to treat it as such.

  The police veteran had been summoned from police headquarters in the aftermath of the shooting to take command from his fallen comrade, and he didn’t plan to waste any time waiting for the streets to give up their own.

  As the ex—Marine captain walked the 1500 block of Dauphin Street, his military carriage making him seem taller than his six-two, his steel-blue eyes were filled with a rage he hadn’t known since Vietnam.

  He approached the staging area where the elite Strike Force unit waited anxiously, and his closely cropped brown hair, which barely touched the collar of his black fatigues, stood on end.

  His jaw clenched with determination, Dilsheimer scanned the quickly shrinking crowd. Then he nodded to a nearby lieutenant who was clad in black fatigues.

  The lieutenant acknowledged his order. The chase was about to begin.

  The young man with the shoulder-length dreadlocks watched the police from a nearby window. But he wasn’t frightened, because the playing field was skewed in his favor.

  His name was Ishmael, and he was as much a part of Dauphin Street as asphalt and concrete. He’d spent his early years climbing the walls of the neighborhood’s demolished row houses by using their ragged bricks as footholds.

  He and his friends had run over their tar-covered rooftops countless times. In the process, they had learned the neighborhood’s layout from a vantage point that an outsider could never know, and trained themselves to disappear at will.

  Today the knowledge had come in handy, as Ishmael used it to become invisible in streets choked off by police.

  After cutting down the police commissioner and escaping from Lynch, he’d carried his weapon across the rooftops, pulled back the wooden cover on the second-floor rear window of a storefront church, and made his way inside while whispering a derisive “Thank you, Lord” to a God he didn’t believe existed.

  After replacing the wooden cover, he’d walked to the front of the building and settled down near a curtained window while regarding his crumbling surroundings.

  The chipped paint, damp plaster, and dry-rotted floors made the space virtually uninhabitable. But from the outside, the building looked to be fully occupied, because the church folks—much like the neighborhood’s store owners—had repaired the bottom floors of the building, while leaving the remainder a shell.

  He would be safe there, at least for a little while. But as Ishmael broke down his semiautomatic rifle and hid its pieces in holes in the wooden floor, he looked out the window and saw twenty police officers split into two groups across the street from Nichols�
��s bar.

  They wore the black camouflage-type outfits of an elite unit, and they carried assault rifles.

  Reaching into his pants pocket for the cell phone he’d carried with him, he dialed the number he’d been given by the woman who’d sent him. He needed to tell her that something had gone wrong.

  But when an automated voice came on to tell him that the wireless customer he was calling was not available, he put the phone away and told himself he’d try again later.

  Settling down by the window, he watched as the police surrounded the door of Nichols’s bar.

  And then he watched them storm the place.

  The sound of the battering ram slamming against the reinforced steel front door was like the crash of thunder.

  “What’s that?” said a startled Keisha.

  “Sound like the cops,” Jamal said nervously. “They probably lookin’ for my pop.”

  He held Keisha at arm’s length. “If we gon’ do this, we gotta go now.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” she asked.

  It was the same question that had lingered in Jamal’s mind since the moment he’d laid eyes on her at the protest. He didn’t want to give her the answer, because he didn’t want to know it himself.

  “It will,” he said, taking her by the hand.

  The battering ram crashed against the door again.

  “Come on,” he said, reaching into his waistband for his gun and pulling her toward the basement’s back wall.

  He guided her into a dingy bathroom in the corner of the basement, then pushed out its wooden back wall.

  “We gotta go through there,” he said as a damp draft blew out from the crawl space he’d just revealed.

  Keisha stared into the pitch-black tunnel. Jamal grabbed her around her waist and helped her inside. Then he crawled in behind her, turned around, and replaced the wooden wall.

  She crawled on her hands and knees as he followed, urging her to move faster up the slightly inclined and curving passageway. As they made their way along the hundred-foot tunnel, crawling ever faster through the escape route that Frank Nichols had long ago paid contractors to dig from the bar to the safe house, the banging sound grew louder.

  Behind her, Keisha heard the steel door give way to the battering ram, the sound of footsteps charging into the bar, and the echo of many voices yelling a single word: “Police!”

  A few seconds later, they reached the end of the tunnel. Jamal reached past her and pushed out a metal grate. And then he nudged her through the opening.

  Keisha fell down from what looked to be a vent for an air-conditioning duct. The fall was short, and cushioned by plush white carpeting. She looked around quickly at a living room filled with plants, leather armchairs, and a television that seemed to cover an entire wall. By the time she spotted a door, he’d come down behind her, pushing his gun down into his waistband and helping her up from the floor.

  “You all right?” he asked, looking into her eyes.

  Keisha didn’t answer. She was too busy trying to sort through the love and fear, lust and anxiety that wrestled for control of her mind.

  “I’m fine,” she said finally.

  Jamal reached back and replaced the metal vent in the wall. Then he took out a cell phone and pushed a single button to make a call.

  It didn’t go through. He tried again. Nothing.

  “Who are you calling?” Keisha asked.

  “The lady who gives the orders,” Jamal said. “Once she hear I got you, she’ll call my pop, and that’ll buy us some time. By the time they figure out what’s goin’ on, we’ll be out.”

  There was a short, skidding sound on the street outside. Jamal and Keisha hurried to the front window, looked out, and saw an old Buick idling in the middle of the whip-thin street.

  Jamal closed the shade. “That’s the driver.”

  “So what do we do now?” Keisha asked nervously.

  Jamal paused long enough to kiss her on her lips. “We trust each other,” he said quickly.

  Too nervous to speak, Keisha nodded.

  Jamal walked her through the living room and out the front door. Keisha turned right and saw people straggling up Dauphin Street, walking away from the botched protest. She turned left and saw a deserted Susquehanna Avenue.

  A second later, the Buick’s back door was flung open for them, and Jamal pushed her inside. When he got in behind her and closed the door, it was like a cold breeze blew in with them.

  She shivered, knowing that what she felt was a sense of dread. As the driver pulled away and the car disappeared into North Philadelphia’s maze of tiny streets, she watched Jamal dial the number on his cell phone again.

  The call connected just as the statuesque brown-skinned woman took her seat on the Acela Express that was departing New York’s Penn Station. She tried to answer, but she lost the signal as the train entered the tunnel.

  A business-class regular on the train that shuttled between New York and Philadelphia, she was something more than a cog in the machine that was the Nichols empire. She was the linchpin, and a beautiful one at that.

  Everywhere she went, with her flawless skin, smoldering eyes, and curves that twentysomethings envied, she drew stares from every man within eyeshot. Today was no different.

  Her champagne-colored silk blouse, revealing just the hint of cleavage, was the perfect complement to her bone-colored miniskirt and matching jacket. She wore no stockings with her open-toed, high-heeled sandals. And her crossed legs were covered with smooth skin stretched tight over muscle that she’d earned with countless trips to the gym.

  Nola Langston carried her forty-four years well. And though her work as a buyer for a high-end department store took her around the world and paid for the endless pampering that helped to maintain her stunning looks, she had never been the type to settle for a lot. She wanted it all. And she got most of it from Frank Nichols.

  She’d been seeing him for over a year, and despite his mistrust of nearly everyone, she had touched him in a way that few women ever had, partly because he wanted more from her than she was willing to give, but also because she was smarter than any man he’d ever known.

  With an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a fashion industry pedigree that few Philadelphians could match, she was a model-turned-businesswoman who’d helped Nichols to start several legitimate ventures under a fictitious name. His Internet cafés and coffee shops near Temple’s campus were her ideas, as were his vending machines in and around the department stores of Center City.

  She’d nearly doubled his income in less than a year, and made almost half of it legal. In the process, she’d given herself to him in ways that she’d never imagined she would, ways that transcended the physical. She’d become a go-between for all manner of communications, delivering his messages in cryptic words, via cell phone.

  She’d also become his lover. And on mornings like this, when she was aboard the train and thinking anxiously of seeing him again, she often closed her eyes and imagined his lips on hers.

  She thought of his moist tongue, probing every crevice of her body, and she blushed as the thought made its way from her head to her thighs. Crossing her legs tightly, she hoped that the thought wouldn’t overflow in a liquid gush.

  Nola wanted more than just his body, after all. And she couldn’t allow the fringe benefits of being Frank Nichols’s lover to keep her from attaining her ultimate goal.

  Still, it was nice to have someone who understood her desires and could fulfill them. Until she could get him where she wanted him, she would enjoy the ride. And she would make sure that he did, too.

  When the train emerged from the tunnel, she took her cell phone from her purse and dialed his number to let him know she was returning early from her business trip. When his voice mail came on, she disconnected and retried the call. Voice mail again. No matter. He’d enjoy the surprise.

  As she began to put the cell phone away, she received a call. She looked at the
number and recognized it as a number belonging to Frank’s son, Jamal.

  She connected the call and said nothing, just as Frank had instructed her to do.

  “It’s Jamal,” he said quietly. “I got the package.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking around carefully, as if the other passengers could hear her conversation.

  Reaching into her purse, she retrieved a small, folded strip of paper. Opening it, she read the message that it conveyed.

  “Keep the package for an hour,” she said. “If you don’t hear anything, get rid of it.”

  She hung up when she’d relayed the message. Then she turned the phone off, and waited for the final result.

  5

  It Was eight o’clock, a half-hour removed from the end of the botched protest, and John Anderson—witness to two murders in less than twenty-four hours—had already given the police another statement.

  Sitting in a scarred wooden chair at the Homicide Division, his face fixed in an expression of shock, he looked around the quiet, antiseptic room with its metal file cabinets, scuffed floor tiles, and dull beige walls, and watched the detectives, whose facial expressions mirrored his own.

  They’d each seen their own mortality flash before their eyes when the police commissioner was caught in the crossfire of a war that Reverend Anderson had begun. And in their minds, Anderson was as much to blame for the commissioner’s death as the man who’d pulled the trigger.

  It had happened so quickly: the protest spinning out of control, the clap of gunshots echoing through the streets, the commissioner and one of his men dragging Anderson from the top of the car.

  Even as he sat in the room filled with detectives, Anderson could hear the gunshot and sense the commissioner’s grip on his arm loosening. He could see the body dropping to the ground, and the red, gaping hole where the right side of the commissioner’s face had been.