Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  Joe watched their display of affection and rolled his eyes in disgust.

  “You’re jokin’ about this, right?” he asked hopefully. “I’m sure she’s a nice girl and all, but she don’t know nothin’ about the streets. She’s a preacher’s daughter, for God sakes!”

  “She saved my life, Joe. She had my back when anybody else woulda jetted. That gotta mean something, right?”

  Joe put both hands on Jamal’s shoulders and looked him in the eye.

  “She’s gonna get you caught, Jamal,” he said in measured tones.

  “Caught for what?” Jamal said. “I ain’t do nothin’ to get caught for.”

  “Then stop runnin’ right now and turn yourself in. Tell ’em you ain’t shoot the commissioner, and it’s all a big misunderstanding. Tell ’em you can explain.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Joe.”

  “Yeah, I know you can’t, ’cause they don’t wanna hear that shit.”

  Joe stood back and ran his fingers through his hair as he tried to think of the best course of action for Jamal to take. He didn’t want to see Frank’s son make a mistake that could cost him his life. But it looked to him like the boy was going down that path.

  “Jamal, let’s forget about whether you did what they said you did,” Joe said while holding his hands out in a placating gesture. “I’m not even worried about that right now. I’m worried about you.

  “I’m worried that you screwed up somehow, didn’t do what your father told you, and now what shoulda been a little problem is bigger than anything I seen in all my sixty years. But it ain’t too late to make it right, Jamal. Ditch the girl. I can keep her here for an hour or two, you can go wherever you’re gonna go, and she can just reappear—presto. You’re gone, she’s back home. Problem solved.”

  Jamal looked at Joe, and he knew that what he was telling him was the right advice, if the streets and their codes were the only thing worthy of consideration. But then he looked at Keisha. He thought of her fierce loyalty and her willingness to leave everything for him. He knew that there was no way he could leave her. Not now, not ever.

  “You right, Joe,” he said, turning his gaze on the grizzled barkeep. “I messed up. I ain’t do what my father wanted me to do. I did what I wanted to do. But Joe, if you love my father—and I know you do—you’ll help me out this one time, and you won’t ever have to worry about seein’ me again.”

  Joe looked from Keisha to Jamal, and knew that he would never get through to him. The kid was making a mistake, Joe thought. But his father had prepared for this day, just like he’d prepared for everything else over the years. So all Joe had to do was pass on what his father had left.

  “What do you need?” Joe asked with a frustrated sigh.

  “We need money, some clothes, and a ride,” Jamal said. “Anything we need after that, I can get it myself.”

  Joe stared at them for a moment. Then he shook his head and walked to the back of the room. Unlocking a cabinet, he reached in and removed a sealed manila envelope with Jamal’s name on it, and walked back over to Jamal and Keisha.

  “Your father must have known this day was coming,” Joe said, handing the envelope to Jamal. “He left this for you.”

  Jamal unsealed the envelope and began counting hundred-dollar bills. He knew before he’d finished counting that there was more than enough for the both of them.

  He counted out five thousand dollars. “This is for you,” he said, offering the money to Joe.

  “Your father already took care o’ me,” Joe said. “I got an envelope stuffed away somewhere, too. You keep that for yourself. You’re gonna need it.”

  Joe went to the back of the room and opened a door. There was a stairway on the other side.

  “There’s men’s and women’s clothes upstairs in the closet. I’m sure my girlfriend won’t mind if you borrow a pair o’ jeans and a blouse or somethin’. You might want to shower and get somethin’ to eat, too.”

  Joe looked at his watch. “It’s one o’ clock now,” he said. “Lay low here for a couple hours, let’ em look for you up in Frankford ‘til the trail goes cold. At five o’ clock, I’ll close up the bar and take you wherever you want to go. That’s rush hour. Lot of traffic, but you’re a lot less likely to be stopped for somethin’ stupid. Until then, Jamal, my home is your home. My apartment is through that door and up those stairs.”

  Jamal got down off the stool, and Keisha followed.

  Joe looked at Keisha and spoke to her for the first time. “I wasn’t tryin’ to be hard on you,” he said. “But his father’s like a brother to me. He’s really the only family I got.”

  Keisha smiled. “I understand,” she said. “Just know that you can never care for Jamal more than I do. As long as we understand that, I think we’ll all be fine.”

  Joe was surprised. He hadn’t expected her to respond that way. But it was the right response. Maybe Jamal wasn’t so stupid after all.

  “Thanks for everything, Joe,” Jamal said with all the sincerity he could muster.

  “Thank me when this is over,” Joe said with a wave of his hand. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  Swirling red and blue lights painted the dark street under the el tracks as a crowd of onlookers watched a disheveled police tow truck driver load the mangled police car onto his flatbed.

  The officer who’d chased Keisha and Jamal had already been transported to the hospital with a head injury, and officers from the department’s Northeast division had fanned out to search for Keisha and Jamal.

  The streets around the accident site had been blocked off quickly. The el was no longer running into or out of the Bridge-Pratt station. Transit police had boarded every one of the twenty or so buses that were idling in the transportation hub when the accident took place.

  In an ambitious effort to ramp up the search, Transit police were also going door-to-door in the vicinity of every el stop from Bridge-Pratt to Center City. And housing police were assisting with the search of a housing project that was within walking distance of the Bridge-Pratt station.

  Still, no one was operating under the illusion that it would be easy to find Keisha and Jamal in the streets of Frankford, a working-class, integrated neighborhood that was suffering, like communities all over the city, under the weight of an out-of-control drug epidemic. There were people on every block who looked just like Keisha and Jamal.

  But their saving grace was the couple whose car they had tried to use to escape. The husband and wife were still traumatized from their short ordeal with the gun-wielding teens. But their anger at being victimized outstripped their fear.

  Unlike those who remained silent in the wake of crimes committed against them, these two were willing to talk. They’d already given Keisha and Jamal’s descriptions to the police. And now, as they stood before the first camera to arrive at the scene, they were about to repeat the descriptions for the world.

  A white-haired reporter stood before the wreckage of the police car, with the couple’s green Ford, cordoned off by crime scene tape, visible in the background.

  As his cameraman turned on his light, the reporter checked his notepad and, after a silent countdown from the station, spoke with a mixture of grave sincerity and shocked disbelief.

  “This is Frank Wilson, reporting live from the latest scene of an incredible crime spree that has thus far claimed the lives of seventy-year-old Emma Jean Johnson, Police Commissioner Darrell Freeman, and Officer Jim Hickey. Just about fifteen minutes ago, an unidentified police officer was seriously wounded while chasing a car belonging to this couple—the second vehicle to be carjacked in connection with these crimes.”

  The reporter held out his arm to allow the couple to step into the frame.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Williams have agreed to speak exclusively to Channel Ten about their ordeal,” he said before turning to the couple. “Mr. Williams, how did this happen?”

  “My wife and I were in the drive-through at KFC when an elderly couple a
pproached us. When I rolled down the window to see what they wanted, the woman put a gun to my head and they forced their way into our car.”

  “And these two elderly-looking people, what did they look like?”

  “From the pictures I’ve seen, it looked like Jamal Nichols, the man who shot the police commissioner this morning, and Keisha Anderson, the girl he supposedly kidnapped.

  “But Nichols didn’t have the dreadlocks anymore, and he was wearing an old-looking fedora and an oversized gray suit. He was wearing glasses and using a walker. Keisha Anderson had on a long flower-print dress with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a purse.

  “The odd thing about it is, she was the one with the gun,” Mrs. Williams said. “She didn’t look like someone who’d been kidnapped to me.”

  “So it appeared that she was working with Jamal Nichols?” the reporter asked.

  “I’m not sure if working is the right word for it,” Mr. Williams said. “She looked like she was enjoying it. At one point she even laughed. That’s when I slammed on the brakes and tried to take the gun, but I couldn’t get it, and they forced us out of the car.

  “Right after that, the police officer in that car came and chased them,” he said, turning his head to look at the wrecked police car. “And you see what happened after that.”

  “Were you able to see where they went?”

  Mrs. Williams looked up at her husband, then at the reporter, and shook her head regretfully.

  “I wish we did,” she said. “But everything happened so fast after that, with the police car crashing and everybody running, that it was really hard to see anything.

  The husband wrapped his arm around his wife. “Right now, we’re just glad to be alive.”

  A police officer approached the couple and pulled them away from the camera just as four more news vans arrived on the scene. He put them into a nearby police car before the other reporters could stick microphones in their faces.

  As the police car drove away with the witnesses, the reporter turned toward the camera and read from his notepad.

  “Again, if you’re just joining us,” he said, “there are witnesses who now allege that Keisha Anderson, who was originally believed to have been kidnapped, is actually Jamal Nichols’s accomplice in what is turning into one of the biggest crime sprees this city has ever seen.

  “Stay with Channel Ten as we follow all the developments in this rapidly changing story. I’m Frank Wilson, reporting live from Frankford for Channel Ten News.”

  As the reporter spoke those last few words, a black Mercury arrived at the scene, and Acting Commissioner Dick Dilsheimer got out of the car to survey the damage. He was quickly mobbed by reporters.

  As a jumbled mass of voices shouted questions he could barely understand, the acting commissioner raised his hands to quiet the reporters, and spoke with authority as his comments were broadcast live throughout the region.

  “The officer who was injured in this pursuit is fine. As you know, we can’t say the same for Commissioner Freeman and Officer Hickey, two public servants who were slain in the line of duty while trying to protect the citizens of this city. I can assure you that this department is doing everything possible to find those people responsible for these crimes.”

  He began to walk away amid more shouted inquiries, but one question stood out above the others.

  “What are your comments regarding the newest allegation, that Keisha Anderson is working with Jamal Nichols?” shouted the reporter from Channel 10, speaking so loudly and clearly that Dilsheimer was forced to turn around and respond.

  “Anyone involved in these crimes against the citizens of Philadelphia will be brought to justice,” he said firmly. “We will investigate vigorously to find out who they are and what role they played. We will arrest them, charge them, and allow our criminal justice system to run its course.”

  The commissioner turned and walked away, speaking with his commanders as the reporters rushed to file their reports.

  But even as the latest chapter in Keisha and Jamal’s odyssey was broadcast across the Delaware Valley, the people closest to the investigation were still trying to figure out how it began.

  Kevin Lynch reached up and turned off the television in his office, having just watched the commissioner address the media about the latest turn of events.

  “Well, I guess the old lady was right,” he said, turning to the assistant DA as the two of them prepared to go in to question Nola Langston. “Keisha’s in love with Jamal Nichols.”

  “I don’t think that changes what we need from Nola,” Robert Harris said, adjusting his tie.

  Lynch sat down in his chair. “You’re right. It just narrows things down a bit.”

  Lynch’s eyes took on a faraway look. He looked like he was someplace else.

  “What is it?” Harris said, studying his face.

  “I don’t know how her mother didn’t see it,” Lynch said. “She had no idea.”

  “Maybe it was an on-again-off-again type of thing,” the prosecutor said.

  “Or maybe they just kept it so well hidden that by the time everyone figured it out, it was too late,” Lynch said while rubbing his chin.

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” the prosecutor said. “Because the key question now isn’t even the extent of their relationship. It’s how much of a role the girl played in everything Jamal’s done to this point.”

  “I think it’s pretty clear that she’s helped him,” Lynch said. “She flagged down the cars, she helped him hide out, she held the gun. I mean, all that stuff makes her an accomplice, but I still can’t see her doing much more than that.”

  “Why not?” the prosecutor asked.

  “You didn’t see her this morning at the protest,” Lynch said. “She had this innocence about her—this sweetness that you don’t see much in kids these days.”

  “She knows how to play innocent, Kevin. She’s a PK.”

  “A what?”

  “A PK—preacher’s kid. When I was coming up, we all knew to stay away from the preacher’s kid, because they would be the ones doing all the crazy stuff, and getting you in trouble for it.

  “Preacher’s kids are the Eddie Haskells of the world, Kevin. They can be real polite and sweet when they need to be, but behind the scenes, when nobody’s looking, they’re the main ones raising hell.”

  “I really wasn’t trying to think of it that way,” Lynch said. “Thanks for bursting my bubble.”

  Robert Harris smiled. “You’re a homicide detective, Kevin,” he said. “You’re supposed to look for the worst in people. But instead, you’re always trying to find the best.”

  Kevin leaned back in his chair. “That’s what makes me good at what I do. I see people for who they can be, not necessarily for who they are.”

  “So, do you think Keisha Anderson can be worse than what you thought she was?”

  “I think the key to that question is that shooting up in the Twenty-fifth District. When we get the results back from Ballistics, we’ll know a little bit more about how far Keisha Anderson went. Until then, we’ll just have to get all we can from the witnesses we have.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Lynch said.

  A detective stuck his head in the door. “Ms. Langston’s attorney has gone over the plea agreement,” he said. “He says his client is ready to talk.”

  “Good,” Lynch said, taking his jacket from the back of the chair.

  “It’ll be interesting to see how her story matches up with what we know,” the prosecutor said.

  “Or if it matches up at all,” Lynch said.

  The two of them walked down the hall to the interrogation room, and walked inside to hear Nola’s side of the story.

  It was hot in Joe’s apartment. The single oscillating fan that circulated the summer air throughout the living room made it seem even hotter.

  But as Keisha and Jamal looked around at their spartan accommodations, they were thankful for t
he simplicity. It allowed them, for the first time in years, to focus all their senses on one another.

  It was almost like the playground on a Friday night at dusk. There was no television, no stereo, no CD player. The only electronic items in the apartment were a dust-covered radio and an ancient-looking laptop computer that looked as if it hadn’t been used in ages.

  The only visible source of entertainment was a pile of books in one corner of the room that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

  A small mirror hung on a nail above an end table. And a couch and chair were pushed against opposite walls in the room. The hum of the old refrigerator was the only sound, other than their breathing. But their breathing was all they wanted to hear.

  “Keisha, I need you to know somethin’,” Jamal said, placing his hand against her face.

  “What is it?” she said, moving close to him and looking in his eyes.

  “Remember in the car, when I said you can’t always have everything you want?”

  “Yes,” she said, walking up to him until she was inches from his face.

  He looked down at the floor.

  “I lied.”

  Keisha touched his face, and swept her hands through his freshly cropped hair.

  He looked into her eyes and saw a mixture of fear and desire. She knew that it was time to test the fantasies they’d spun, to see if they could possibly come true.

  Jamal reached down and gingerly guided her lips to his own. He kissed her tenderly, his eyes watching hers to see what she was feeling. He didn’t want to miss a second of the moment he’d waited for all his life. He’d known sex before. But neither of them had ever known love.

  Keisha reached up and took off the jacket he was wearing. Then she unbuttoned his shirt, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him against her.

  He pulled away and looked into her eyes, and slowly began to unbutton the cotton dress she was wearing. When he undid the last button, they both watched it fall to the floor.

  They peeled the remaining clothing from their sweat-soaked bodies as they explored each other’s mouths with probing tongues. Then, as they stood naked before one another, with every fiber of their beings longing to be touched, they realized that they weren’t standing alone.