Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  A fiery orator whose public life reflected the words he preached, her husband was a good man. Or at least as good as a man could be, in Sarah’s eyes. Still, she could never quite put her faith in him completely.

  Even now, as he combed the streets in an effort to find their daughter, Sarah didn’t trust him to do as he’d said he would. He’d already proved, time and time again, that he was incapable of loving his family in the way that the Bible commanded him to do—sacrificing for them, and putting them before himself.

  But perhaps Keisha’s disappearance had changed him. Maybe it had taught him to love in such a way that he was willing to sacrifice himself for his wife and daughter, just as Christ had sacrificed himself for the church.

  In Sarah’s mind, it was already too late for such heroics. And when the phone rang, echoing through the room like a voice from the distant past, she believed that it was a message from God, a message that would confirm that it was already too late to save Keisha.

  She got up from the couch slowly and walked to the end table, listening to the sound of the phone growing louder with each ring.

  Standing over it for a moment, she tried to prepare herself for the news the call would bring. But she realized that there was nothing to prepare her. So she picked up the phone and summoned the strength to speak.

  “Hello?” she said, and held her breath for the voice on the other end.

  “Mrs. Anderson, this is Detective Glenn from the Philadelphia Police Department. Lieutenant Lynch asked me to call you.”

  “Is Keisha all right?”

  “As far as we know, ma’am, yes, she is.”

  “What do you mean, ‘as far as you know’?”

  There was a long pause on the phone.

  “Mrs. Anderson,” the detective said, “we want to ask you and your husband a few questions about your daughter. We think she may be working with Jamal Nichols.”

  Without a word, Sarah hung up and fell into her seat on the couch.

  12

  Nola Langston tugged at the bottom of her dress and swept her hands over the front of it, smoothing it back into place. Then she reapplied her flaming red lipstick and checked her hair as a sweaty, panting Mr. Johanssen leaned against his desk.

  In the twenty minutes they’d spent behind the locked doors of his office, she’d given him what he’d wanted, transforming herself from polished executive to street whore in an instant.

  In exchange, he’d made the call that allowed the million dollars to be brought up from the vault.

  Now, as she waited for the cash to be delivered to Johanssen’s office, the bank executive stood up straight, adjusted his clothing, and watched her. He knew that she had given him more than he could handle. Still, he wished his body would allow him to take her again.

  “Ms. Langston,” he said, straightening his tie. “It was a pleasure helping you to expedite your transaction.”

  Nola smiled and sat down in the chair in front of his desk. “The pleasure was all mine,” she said.

  They both knew this was a lie.

  As Johanssen walked slowly around his desk and sat down, there was a knock on the door. His secretary entered, along with a security guard. She was carrying a metal briefcase. She looked at Nola and then at Johanssen. Her eyes said that she knew what had transpired.

  She handed the briefcase to Johanssen, who handed it to Nola. She opened it and examined its contents. Satisfied that everything was in order, Nola took a pen from him and signed for the transaction.

  As the secretary left the office with the guard, she glanced at Nola, rolled her eyes, and walked out with her lips pursed in a look of disgust.

  “I’ll take care of closing the account for you, Ms. Langston,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, nodding her good-bye as she stood up and began to walk toward the door.

  “Ms. Langston?” Johanssen called out to her.

  “Yes?” she said, turning around.

  “If there’s anything else I can ever do for you …”

  Nola smiled and looked down at the briefcase. “Anything I need done from here on out,” she said, “I’m sure I can do for myself.”

  She turned around and walked out of his office, crossed the bank’s lobby, and was about to walk out into the warm embrace of the summer air when she saw them out of the corner of her eye.

  Frank was walking quickly across the lobby, pushing Marquita while holding something at the small of her back.

  Marquita’s eyes pleaded with Nola, silently begging her to do something.

  For an instant, Nola was frozen. She looked at Marquita and saw her eyes stretched wide by fear. She looked at Frank, and knew that he would harm Marquita if he had to. She looked at the two of them, and imagined them together in her bed.

  Forced to choose between her own flesh and blood and money, Nola chose the latter.

  She bolted out the bank’s doors with the briefcase in hand, and dashed into Center Square’s lobby. Frank pushed Marquita out of the way and ran after Nola.

  Pushing past the people lined up on the escalator, Nola weaved her way to the bottom, with Frank in hot pursuit.

  She pushed through a set of revolving doors and past a donut shop beneath the giant clothespin, and ran right, through the transit system tunnels that had helped her to escape from the detective.

  “Nola!”

  Frank was behind her, closing fast, as she ran between the curving, tiled walls that separated Philadelphia’s subway system from the New Jersey Transit lines.

  “Nola, wait!”

  As he rounded the curve, Frank spotted Nola and fired. The bullet whizzed past her and ricocheted off the tiled walls as she ducked left and ran back toward City Hall.

  Dashing past the fountains, Nola ran up the steps to Dilworth Plaza as Frank stumbled behind her.

  When he reached the top, he stopped and watched her run toward Fifteenth Street. With Nola out in the open, he could take her down. Holding the weapon out in front of him, he prepared to take his final shot.

  “Drop the gun, Frank!” a voice said from across the courtyard.

  Nichols looked over at Detective Hubert, who had him in his sights. Then he looked around and saw uniformed police running at him from every direction.

  Two of them had grabbed Nola and were bringing her back with the briefcase.

  Knowing that it was all but over, Nichols knelt down and placed his weapon on the ground beside him.

  As the police took him into custody, he wasn’t thinking of the money, or of Nola, or his business. When they stood him up and walked him across the courtyard to a waiting vehicle, his only concern was Jamal.

  Keisha and Jamal had already decided that they would make the couple drive them as far as the last stop on the Market Frankford elevated train line, and that they would find their way to Jamal’s friend from there. Neither of them had thought any further than that. And in reality, they didn’t want to.

  Jamal knew, just as Keisha did, that the longer they stayed on the run, the slimmer the chance for them to end it all peacefully. There was only one certainty at this point: Jamal would be blamed for the commissioner’s murder. And if he was caught, he would die, one way or the other. Their only chance of being together was starting their lives anew, because life as they knew it had already ended.

  Keisha glanced over at Jamal as the car’s driver stopped at a red light. And as the thirtysomething, brown-skinned couple with the wedding rings and fearful expressions sat stiffly in the front seat, Keisha imagined herself and Jamal as a real couple. She imagined spending her life looking at him.

  When she’d glimpsed his body as the two of them changed clothes, both in the factory and at her aunt’s house, she’d marveled at his black skin and his muscles, taut and strong, stretched over his sturdy frame. She’d forced herself to look away, only to have her eyes drawn back to him by an attraction that went well beyond what she saw.

  She was attracted to the dark side—to a lifestyle she’d seen, but
never been a part of. It was an attraction that she couldn’t shake, because the sight of him was the opposite of everything she’d ever known.

  It was a different reality. One that was hard and powerful, like the gun she now held in her hand.

  “Can you tell us where we’re going?” the driver asked, snatching her back to the moment.

  “Just keep movin’,” Jamal said as the smell of the chicken the couple had purchased at KFC permeated the car.

  Keisha could feel her stomach beginning to turn. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, and apparently Jamal hadn’t, either.

  Reaching over the front seat, he snatched the bag of chicken and opened it.

  “Why don’t we just stop now?” the driver said, glancing over at his wife, whose face was now red with fear and humiliation. “You take the car, and we walk away.”

  “You heard what he said,” Keisha warned. “Keep moving.”

  Jamal ripped open the striped box and tore into its contents with ferocity born of hunger.

  “You want some o’ this?” he said, turning to Keisha with hot grease and chicken crumbs smeared against his face.

  Still holding the gun at the back of the driver’s head, she turned and looked at Jamal, whose jaws were filled to capacity.

  He looked like one of the squirrels she’d often seen on her strolls along Temple University’s campus, the ones that picked the heels of cheesesteaks out of the trash and gnawed them with reckless abandon.

  She started to smile.

  “What you laughin’ at?” he said, chomping into a breast and ripping the meat from the bone.

  The woman looked at her husband, her eyes pleading for him to do something. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw Jamal eating and Keisha laughing, and he knew that this was his chance.

  He slammed on the brakes and the car skidded forward. The gun flew out of Keisha’s hand and landed on the dashboard as the car came to a halt in the middle of Frankford Avenue.

  The driver threw the car into park and reached for the gun as Jamal, his eyes stretched wide, leaped over the seat and grabbed him by the neck.

  The man’s wife reached over and started hitting Jamal, and Keisha climbed over and started punching the back of her head.

  The gun fell onto the floor, near the accelerator. The driver tried to bend down to get it, but Jamal dived headfirst onto the floor. The driver tried to stomp him while his wife tried to grab Jamal’s legs. Keisha reached around and locked her forearm around the woman’s neck, choking her as Jamal fought his way off the floor and held the gun aloft.

  With the driver staring down the barrel of the nine-millimeter and his wife immobilized by a forearm at her throat, the struggle was over.

  “Get out,” Jamal said, his chest heaving up and down. “Get out ‘fore I kill both o’ y’all.”

  The man reached behind him and pulled the door handle, getting out of the car on one side. Keisha released the wife, who got out on the other side.

  Jamal took the wheel and drove off with a skid. But by then a police car was behind them.

  Jamal’s breath caught in his throat as he told himself not to panic. He took one hand off the steering wheel and placed it on the butt of the gun.

  The cop began to blast his horn. At that moment, Jamal knew that his only choice was to run.

  He slowed down slightly and angled toward the curb as if he were pulling over. The cop followed. Then Jamal whipped the steering wheel around, stomped on the accelerator, and darted back into traffic.

  He swerved along Frankford Avenue, the car’s engine humming as he shot between the huge steel columns that held up the Market Frankford elevated line.

  The cop followed, his siren echoing off the steel girders as he tried to keep up with Jamal. The heavy traffic and the relatively narrow street made the chase hazardous. But both the hunter and the prey knew that what happened in the next few moments could change their lives.

  Jamal slammed on the brakes, whipped the car to the left, and moved into the opposing traffic. The cop tried to do the same, but swerved back into his own lane to dodge an oncoming SUV.

  Jamal looked in the rearview mirror and saw the cop coming up fast. In seconds they would be parallel to each other. Jamal reached down and grabbed the gun, then looked up and saw a bus coming straight at him.

  He stood on the brakes while snatching the steering wheel to the right. His tires screamed against the asphalt and he stopped on an angle, right in front of the speeding police car. He put his head down and braced for the collision.

  The police officer swerved at the last second, barely avoiding Jamal’s car. He tried to stop but couldn’t, and the car smacked into one of the steel girders holding up the train tracks. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as his siren died and his spinning lights flashed against the walls of the bars and stores lining the avenue.

  When Jamal and Keisha looked up, the officer was unconscious in his car. There was the sound of fast-approaching sirens in the distance, and the smell of gasoline in the air.

  They both got out of the car and walked quickly away from the crash, melting into the crowd of commuters who stopped to look at the wreck. By the time the police began to arrive, Keisha and Jamal had climbed the steps leading to the train tracks.

  Keisha reached into the purse her aunt had given her and found a few wrinkled dollars in the bottom.

  She thrust them at the cashier, and the two of them went through the turnstile, squeezed between the train’s closing doors, and boarded the Market Frankford elevated line toward Center City.

  John Anderson’s mind was racing as he pulled into a rare metered parking space on Ninth Street between Market and Chestnut in downtown Philadelphia.

  As he looked across the street at patrons walking in and out of the post office, his thoughts were a hodgepodge of love, hatred, confusion, and fear. He wanted to kill Jamal. He wanted to embrace his daughter. He wanted to love his wife.

  But as he turned off the car and put it in park, his recent past came flooding back in fuchsia-colored snapshots, and he remembered why he couldn’t do any of those things.

  He saw his tongue against the skin of the woman who’d seduced him, his lips on a vodka-filled bottle, his laughter in the shadows of her bedroom, and his tears in the middle of the night.

  He saw each of them, separately and together, as he unbuckled his seat belt and tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on the matter at hand.

  John looked at the passenger seat, and the gym bag containing the sawed-off shotgun. Then he opened the glove compartment and searched for the Bible that he’d pushed to the rear.

  He found it and laid it on the seat next to the gun. Then he looked at them both, and tried to decide which one was of more value. Which one would bring his daughter back to him? Which one would earn his wife’s respect? Which one would change his life from the miserable mess it had become?

  With those questions lingering in his mind, John reached up and turned the rearview mirror toward him. He examined his red eyes, the gray stubble of his beard, and the haggard expression on his face. He was tired, in more ways than he cared to think about. But he would have to cast the weariness aside in order to do what he must.

  He pushed the mirror back into place. As he did so, he noticed a car about thirty feet to his rear with its hazard lights on. It was sitting in one of the two lanes of traffic.

  This was a fairly common sight in Center City, where couriers often made deliveries to office buildings. But the driver of the blue Chrysler wasn’t moving. He was sitting in his car, waiting, though it wasn’t clear for what.

  John took his hand off the mirror, but he continued to watch the driver in the blue car. He was young and dressed like an older man, in a conservative blue suit, and glasses that didn’t quite fit his face.

  John couldn’t be sure, because weariness played tricks with his vision. But even from a distance, it looked like the man was watching him.

  John opened the door as if he were exiting the ca
r. Then he looked back and saw the man in the Chrysler do the same.

  He closed the door and saw the other driver hesitate before closing his own. John was sure that the man was following him.

  Reaching across the seat for the gym bag containing the sawed-off shotgun, John clenched his jaw and opened the door. He was about to get out of the car and make the first stop on his quest to find Keisha. But then he thought about it, and knew that he’d forgotten something. He reached across the seat and grabbed his Bible as well.

  He put two quarters in the meter and looked back for the man in the blue car. He was gone. John looked down the street to see if he had driven away, but there was no sign of the man or the car.

  John shook his head and hoped that fatigue hadn’t caused him to imagine it. Then he turned and walked down Ninth Street, toward the Gallery Mall and the Strawbridge’s where Keisha worked.

  He descended the steps into the mall and turned left before climbing the steps that led to Keisha’s job. He hadn’t been there in a while, and was momentarily confused.

  He found a directory near the bank of ornately designed elevators in the middle of the store, took one of the elevators to the upper floors, and walked quickly to the management offices, glancing behind him all the while.

  A secretary greeted him as he walked through a set of glass doors.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked with a smile.

  “I’m looking for a manager,” John said while nervously clutching his bag.

  “Do you need to talk to a manager from a certain department?”

  “I’m not sure. See, my daughter’s been working here for the summer. And now, she’s missing.”

  John paused to allow the truth of those words to sink in. He didn’t know that speaking them would cause him such pain.

  “I’m so sorry,” the secretary said, her face creasing in sympathy. “Please have a seat.”

  “No, I’m fine standing. If I sit down I might go to sleep. I’ve been up all night.”

  “That’s understandable.”