Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  She knew she shouldn’t be there with him, knew that she shouldn’t want it. And as sweat beaded up between them and their wet bodies slid against one another, she was caught in the throes of their passion.

  She bucked her hips as they danced to the rhythm that their bodies demanded. Moans, then squeals, then shouts filled the air as their voices echoed through the house.

  Nichols’s head swam with the movement of her hips. He felt as if he were about to burst. But the glass at the back door broke first.

  He bolted upright when he heard it, and put his hand against his lover’s mouth. There was the squeaking sound of the back door easing open, and the thud of running footsteps making their way through the living room.

  Nichols knew there wasn’t much time.

  Taking his lover by the hand, he rolled off the bed and onto the floor, grabbing his clothes and his gun in the process.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but he covered it again while pulling her across the floor to the master bathroom and locking the door behind them.

  “Don’t say nothin’,” he whispered as he listened to them creeping up the stairway.

  His lover trembled with fear as she heard the footsteps approaching.

  Nichols pulled on his pants and gave his shirt to her.

  “Button it,” he whispered urgently. “Hurry up.”

  He held the gun aloft as the footsteps stopped outside the bedroom door.

  Grabbing her by her hair, he pulled her toward the laundry chute that descended from the bathroom to the basement of the century-old brownstone.

  He opened the door. “Get in.”

  She hesitated as tears streaked down her cheeks.

  “I said get yo’ ass in there,” Nichols hissed menacingly.

  He picked her up and pushed her into the chute, then jumped in behind her.

  Her scream faded quickly to silence as the chute’s trap door swung back and forth behind them. A moment later the bedroom door crashed open.

  “Police!” a burly white man shouted as he rushed into the room with his gun out in front of him.

  Two more officers barreled in behind him, pointing their weapons at either side of the room, while a third ran in and checked under the bed.

  They searched quickly, bursting open the closet doors and hunting behind furniture, before running into the bathroom as the chute’s swinging door came to a standstill.

  Kevin Lynch was the last to enter the room. As he did, he heard the sound of a car engine come to life on a side street to the east of the house. He rushed to the window just as the car pulled off with a skid.

  “Dan two-five, he’s in a white Volvo!” Lynch screamed into his radio as he ran to the steps and descended them. “It’s heading north on Twentieth Street!”

  The police car in front of the house backed up in an effort to get to Twentieth Street, but a sudden rush of traffic blocked it in.

  By the time Lynch and his men got out to their cars, Frank Nichols was gone.

  The Andersons sat in Lynch’s office at the Homicide Division, watching a small television perched above the lieutenant’s desk and searching for some clue about their daughter’s whereabouts. The uncertainty was unnerving. But watching the pictures from the morning’s shootout as they were played over and over again, that was almost unbearable.

  Channel 3 was on its fifth consecutive replay when Sarah Anderson got up from her hard wooden chair and turned to the local cable channel in the hopes of escaping the round-the-clock coverage. But even Comcast had a reporter on the scene.

  Sarah went back to her seat and sat down. John, sitting in a chair next to hers, looked at her and tried to speak. But instead of allowing her husband to comfort her, as he’d tried to do countless times since they’d found out that Keisha was missing, Sarah turned away, because in her mind there was only one person who could be blamed for Keisha’s disappearance. And it wasn’t Frank Nichols.

  Glancing up at the television, she watched as the reporter took up station across the street from Nichols’s bar on Dauphin Street, holding a notepad and staring into the camera with his clean-shaven brown face creased in a grave expression.

  She tried to tune out what he was saying. But no matter how hard she tried, she still caught snippets of his report.

  “Alleged longtime drug dealer Frank Nichols … protest … gunman on a nearby rooftop.”

  Sarah’s mind drifted to her daughter. She wondered if Keisha could survive in the midst of so much death.

  “Police Commissioner Darrell Freeman … shot in the face … died instantly … dozens of protesters injured.”

  Sarah pictured Keisha’s smiling face, and then thought of her tears the night before. Tears that she’d cried because of men who’d tried to hurt her. Sarah knew those kinds of tears. She’d always hoped that her daughter would escape them. But that hope, like most other hopes she’d had, was gone now.

  “Gunman … still at large … armed and dangerous.”

  At this, Sarah was snatched back to the moment. She listened intently as the reporter described the man who’d gotten away.

  “Black male, in his early twenties, about six feet tall with dreadlocks. Police are asking that you call nine-one-one immediately if you have any information concerning this case. This is Greg Connors, reporting live from—”

  Sarah had heard enough. She turned off the television. Then she turned around to face her husband.

  He hadn’t been listening. He was past that. And he wasn’t going to try to comfort her anymore. Instead, he was sitting there with his eyes closed, his body rocking slightly, and his lips moving almost imperceptibly. He was doing the only thing that could give him comfort. He was praying.

  Sarah watched him for a moment, the way his clenched eyes and closed lips quivered. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  Sarah felt more pity for herself. She had, after all, spent years trying to be the woman that the Lord wanted her to be, and the wife that her husband wanted her to be. She’d covered her still-smooth cocoa-colored skin and round, voluptuous curves. She’d worn frumpy glasses over her large, glistening eyes. She’d submitted to her own husband as the Word commanded her to do. And in all this, she’d given away her happiness and her freedom.

  They’d settled into a relationship that was steady, but not passionate; stable, but unexciting. It was a marriage filled with fake smiles and empty reassurances. There was nothing in it that was theirs alone. He was, after all, a pastor, and so he belonged to everyone and everything but her.

  His identity was in his flock, and his cause, and his cross. They received his passion. Just like her father had given his passion to his ministry, rather than his home. She’d hated it then, just as she hated it now.

  “What are you doing?” she asked impatiently.

  He opened his weary eyes and looked at her. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Don’t pray now,” she said, her tone mocking. “You shoulda prayed before you went out there in that street last night, like you were gonna do something to Frank Nichols.”

  “Sarah, listen—”

  “No, you listen. I’ve been by your side, John. I’ve watched you do right, and I’ve watched you do wrong. But I always told myself that whatever you did, you were doing it because you loved the people you were supposed to be serving.”

  “What do you mean, ‘supposed to be’?”

  “You strut around talking about how God delivered you from your past,” she said, making his testimony sound like some cruel joke. “You talk about how you could’ve been what your father was, how you could’ve ended up a drug dealer, how you—”

  “Sarah, this isn’t the time to get into this,” he said, his voice laced with an unspoken warning.

  “Well, when is the time for this, John? Huh? When is it time for us to step back and look at what our lives are really like—what my life is really like?”

  “Our lives are fine, Sarah,” he said, his voice weakening, as if he didn’t believ
e his own words. “We’ve been blessed.”

  “And we’ve been cursed, too, John. Cursed because you sit up in that church, day after day, week after week, solving everybody else’s problems, when you can’t even solve your own. Cursed because you can’t see anything beyond your precious ministry. Cursed because you’re so caught up in what the Lord did for you thirtysomething years ago that you can’t even see what you need Him to do for us now.

  “I’m lonely, John,” she said, trembling with quiet rage. “I cry myself to sleep at night, waiting for you to come home and be a husband. And Keisha, she’s starving for your attention, too. But you can’t even see it, because you spend so much time down at that church.”

  “You wanna blame me for Keisha?” he shouted, standing up. “Go ahead, blame me! Blame God! Blame everybody but yourself!”

  “I didn’t take her out there to that protest,” she snapped. “You did!”

  “I was trying to teach her how to care about somebody other than herself,” he said. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “I don’t go out to those protests because there are better ways to make a difference,” she said defensively.

  “You don’t go out to those protests because you don’t care!”

  “I care about one thing, John,” she said evenly. “Our daughter’s missing. And if they don’t find her, I will never forgive you.”

  “That’s not biblical,” he said quickly.

  “Since when do you care about what’s biblical?” she shot back. “If you cared about what’s biblical, you wouldn’t have put our daughter in harm’s way just to make yourself look like more than you really are.

  “That’s in the Bible, John. Don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought to.”

  She paused before she threw his own words back in his face. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, now, would you?”

  The pastor’s mouth dropped open as his wife walked across the small office and snatched open the door to leave.

  She gasped and jumped back as Lieutenant Lynch almost walked into her.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Anderson,” he said, as she stepped aside. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  He walked into the office sensing that there was something in the air. He didn’t want to add to the tension, but he had no choice.

  “About a half hour ago, we spotted Frank Nichols at his girlfriend’s house on Rittenhouse Square,” he said. “He got away from us, but we think we should be able to find him fairly soon.”

  “And what about Keisha?” Reverend Anderson asked hopefully.

  “We haven’t found her yet. But we’ve been studying some of the footage that the news crews took this morning.”

  He stopped and looked at them both. “We’ve got an ID on the man who was last seen with her.”

  “Well, who is it?” Sarah asked anxiously.

  “Looks like it may be the same man we’re looking for in connection with the commissioner’s murder. Frank Nichols’s son, Jamal.”

  Ishmael smiled when he heard Jamal’s name blaring over the police radios on the street below in connection with the commissioner’s murder.

  He didn’t care that the police had it wrong. He was only sorry that he’d gotten it wrong. By missing his intended target, he’d prolonged the first step in the plan she’d told him to carry out, and created complications that would delay his ultimate reward.

  But if delaying that step meant hurting Frank Nichols, even hurting him through Jamal, then he’d killed two birds with one stone.

  Not that it mattered. Neither Frank nor Jamal Nichols was his first concern. The most important thing on his mind was her. She was the reason he was here. She was the one who gave him purpose. Indeed, she had become his reason for being.

  He hadn’t talked to her since seven o’clock that morning. And he didn’t know if he could go on without at least hearing her voice once more.

  He’d tried calling her three times from his cell phone, and each time he’d gotten her voice mail. Not that he was worried. Knowing her as he did, he knew that she was probably a step ahead of everyone else. More importantly, he knew that she would be there for him in the end.

  Thinking of that brought a smile to his lips, even as he hid like a rat on the dank, crumbling second floor of the house-turned-storefront-church.

  He wiped a bead of sweat from his eyes and leaned forward to peer out the window at the Strike Force and SWAT units searching empty buildings and questioning tight-lipped neighbors. He knew that there was a chance that time, and the police, could catch up with him.

  Ishmael couldn’t allow that to happen. Reaching into a hole in the wall, he retrieved the semiautomatic handgun he’d hidden there several days before. He reached further into the hole and grabbed three fully loaded clips.

  Then he put on his shirt, stood up, and set out toward the staircase. Calmly making his way downstairs, he walked through the makeshift sanctuary and out the back door of the church onto narrow Sydenham Street.

  As police milled about just half a block away, in front of the bar at Fifteenth and Susquehanna, he crossed the alleywide street, his dreadlocks flopping against his back, and walked onto one of the lots of overgrown and rock-strewn earth where houses had once stood.

  Walking between the man-sized weeds that seemed to grow on every lot during North Philadelphia’s long, hot summers, he made his way to a shack made of rusted, corrugated tin.

  He paused to look behind him. When he was sure that no one had followed, he pulled back the rusting metal to reveal a motorcycle.

  Calmly, methodically, he removed his clothes and changed into the denim jacket and jeans she’d left for him in a neatly wrapped brown package next to the bike. He put on the helmet that rested on its back seat, tucking his dreadlocks beneath it. Pulling a cell phone from the pocket of the jacket, he pressed a button. When the call connected and her computerized voice mail picked up, he left a message.

  “Don’t worry about what happened this morning,” he said, his voice deadly calm. “Everything is still on schedule. I’ll meet you at the safe house tonight.”

  He disconnected the call and snapped the helmet’s dark visor into place.

  Seconds later, he was gone.

  Keisha listened to the radio news emanating from the Buick’s static-filled radio. She was hoping to hear word of her father. But in the sixty minutes they’d been driving, she hadn’t heard his name even once.

  But that was the least of her worries.

  Both Jamal and the driver were now ominously silent as they circled a Hispanic neighborhood where drowsy-eyed zombies with swollen hands stumbled toward corners manned by boys yelling brand names like Tombstone and DOA, Pac Man and Grim Reaper. She saw cars lining up as if they were at a drive-through, their drivers rolling down windows to trade cash for heroin-filled plastic bags.

  She noticed that Jamal was no longer trying to steal glimpses of her, as he’d done so many times throughout the morning. And the driver, a husky young man whose beard was split by a scar that ran the length of his jaw, wore a scowl on his wide, flat face.

  Both of them looked like they were preoccupied. And so was Keisha. She was growing more anxious by the moment, trying to fight her growing suspicion that Jamal was about to betray her.

  Her stomach knotted as she observed Jamal looking down at his watch. He glanced at her before looking in the mirror at the driver, who was watching him and waiting for orders.

  “I guess we ain’t gon’ get that call,” Jamal said, his face growing hard as he steeled himself for what he had to do.

  The driver nodded, reached into his jacket for his gun, and laid it on the seat beside him as Keisha felt her heart beating wildly against her chest.

  Jamal pointed to a nearby street. “Turn in there. Stop at the alley at the end of the block.”

  The driver hung a left at a deserted street where abandoned factories with broken windows loomed on one side, and a vast stretch of packe
d earth spread across the other.

  Keisha pressed her face against the window and saw women parading the desolate strip, wearing little more than hard looks. There were cars parked along the crumbling sidewalks, rocking to and fro as men took what they had paid for.

  “Let me out of this car!” Keisha shouted, turning to him as her eyes filled with tears.

  The driver parked and turned around for the first time. His eyes were cold and hard. “Shut up,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Jamal felt a twinge of anger as he watched fear overtake Keisha. She looked at him with a question in her eyes, and he refused to answer it.

  The driver watched them both as Keisha began to sob. He could see that Jamal cared for her. Indeed, he had seen it from the time they’d picked up the girl. He knew he couldn’t allow Jamal to make any foolish decisions. So he turned up the radio to drown out the sound of Keisha’s weeping, and prepared to do what they’d come there to do.

  At that moment, a radio announcer’s voice made them all go silent.

  “Police have identified Jamal Nichols, son of alleged drug dealer Frank Nichols, as the man wanted in connection with the fatal shooting of Police Commissioner Darrell Freeman and the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Keisha Anderson. A six-foot-tall black male with dreadlocks, he is considered—”

  The driver turned off the radio, looked at Jamal, and started to get out of the car.

  “What they talkin’ about?” Jamal said, his voice panicky. “I ain’t shoot nobody!”

  Keisha began to cry uncontrollably. The driver reached back to smack her, but Jamal caught his hand.

  “Don’t do that, man,” Jamal said with an edge to his voice.

  The driver locked eyes with him for a moment, then snatched his hand away. “Look, man, this bitch drawin’.”

  “Let her go, then,” Jamal said quickly. “They already tryin’ to gimme a body. I don’t need another one.”

  “You don’t need a lot o’ things, Jamal,” the driver snapped. “And I don’t, either. Now if we fuck this up ’cause you feel some type o’ way about some bitch, you takin’ my life in your hands. And I can’t have that.”