He kissed her on her forehead and wrapped his arms around her. Melting into his embrace, she allowed herself to rest in his strong arms as she lay her head against his chest. She wished that she could stay there for the rest of her life, but she knew that they would eventually have to face the world outside.
It was a world trying desperately to destroy their love, a world Keisha believed that she could do without. Jamal was in no hurry to think of the world, either. He only wanted to think of her.
“So, you asked me where I came from,” he whispered in her ear. “The least you could do is tell me where you came from, too.”
“We come from two different worlds,” she said, looking up at him.
“Yeah, we do,” he said in a melancholy voice. “In mine, you gotta decide what you gon’ do, when you gon’ do it, and who you gon’ do it to. If you take too long to think about it, you might never have to worry about thinkin’ again. ‘Cause somebody gon’ make the choice for you.
“Your world a little different than that,” he said. “But I’m only guessin’, ’cause I don’t really know a whole lot about it.”
He sat there, looking at her, and waiting for her to fill in the blanks. Keisha was uncomfortable doing so, because she knew that she should tell him about more than just herself.
“What do you want to know about my world?” Keisha asked.
“Whatever you want to tell me.”
“I always wanted to be a designer,” Keisha said. “I used to make little drawings of my little fashion ideas and hide them in my drawer.
“I like long walks in the park, horseback riding, and intimate dinners for two,” she said with a giggle.
“Oh, so you a personal ad now?”
“No,” she said. “I’m just someone who hopes she can have a real life again someday, after all this is over.”
Jamal knew what she meant, but he didn’t want to deal with such harsh reality at the moment. He just wanted to learn about her.
“After this is over, I’m takin’ you on my yacht, and we gon’ sail around the world,” he said, putting his arm around her.
“Yeah, okay,” she said, grinning at him.
Jamal looked at her and saw something wonderful in her smile: something sexy, and sensual, and vulnerable, and sweet; something that needed to be loved. He wondered how much love she’d gotten to this point. And he wondered how much more he would have to give.
“Tell me ’bout your father,” he said.
“Why?”
“’Cause I asked you.”
“You gotta do better than that,” she said playfully.
“All right. How I’ma know how to treat you if I don’t know how he treats you?”
“Good answer,” she said, leaning back against the headboard.
“My father was always around,” Keisha said. “I always knew he loved me, and he showed me that whenever he had the chance. But even though he was always there physically, he wasn’t there emotionally, and that’s the one thing I always hated. I wished that he had more time for us.”
Keisha looked down at her hands and began twisting them around each other. It made her nervous to talk about her background. She smiled at how much she’d changed.
“What’s funny?” Jamal asked.
“I’m just thinking about how easy it was to tell you everything when we were kids, and how hard it is now.”
“You was tellin’ me about the movies you liked to see and the games you liked to play. That’s easy. Now you tellin’ me about your life. That’s hard.”
“Yeah,” she said with a faraway look in her eyes. “It is.”
“What’s your mom like?” Jamal asked.
Keisha laughed. “That’s a good question,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell, because she keeps a lot inside.”
“My mom like that, too,” Jamal said. “But I think she do that ‘cause she ain’t tryin’ to let nobody see when she hurtin’.”
“Maybe my mom is, too,” Keisha said. “She’s always talking about how hard it is to be married to a preacher, because you have to share your husband with everybody else.”
Keisha looked at Jamal.
“I guess it’s hard to be a preacher’s daughter, too,” she said. “Not just because you have to be this perfect child. That’s just part of it. The other part is, you need to have your father to yourself sometimes, and people just don’t want to let him go.”
“So why would he wanna be a preacher, then?” Jamal asked. “He coulda went and got a regular job in a factory or somethin’. He coulda went to school and been a lawyer, or a doctor, or a teacher. Why preach?”
Keisha sat back and thought about the question. She’d never heard anyone ask it before, yet everyone around her acted as if they knew the answer. Keisha, for one, wasn’t sure. She only knew what she’d been told.
“My father told me once that he was called,” Keisha said. “He said it’s like something inside you, this voice pulling at you, telling you what you’re supposed to be.”
“So where the voice come from?” Jamal asked.
Keisha thought he was being facetious. But when she looked at him, she saw that he really wanted to know.
“God speaks to us in a lot of different ways,” she said, speaking as if in a trance. “He speaks through the scriptures, he speaks through believers, he speaks though a voice inside of us—the voice of the Holy Spirit.”
Jamal looked at her and thought about the voice inside her. He wondered if he had such a voice as well. And if he did, what was it telling him now?
“You want some water or something’?” he said, changing the subject.
“No, I’m fine.”
“You sure is,” he said, reaching over and kissing her on the cheek.
She smiled weakly.
“I wish I coulda seen some o’ those drawings you did,” Jamal said. “I know you got a lot o’ talent.”
“That’s the same thing Nola used to say,” Keisha said.
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“You know somebody named Nola?” Jamal said as a sick feeling rose in his throat.
“Yeah,” Keisha said. “Nola Langston. She’s a buyer for Strawbridge’s and Lord & Taylor. I worked with her a few times this summer.”
Jamal’s jaw dropped. He thought about Nola’s hold over his father, and how she’d used it to get him to start a business that Jamal thought gave Nola too much control. He thought about Nola pushing for them to use Keisha to get to Reverend Anderson.
Keisha could see the change in his face, and she was concerned.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nola Langston works with my father,” he said, speaking quickly while getting up and searching through his pants pocket for his cell phone.
“Is that the Nola Joe said was in jail?” Keisha said, shocked.
“Yeah.” Jamal feverishly scrolled though his phone book until he found the number he was looking for.
He pressed the speed dial, listened for a moment, then punched in a code when he was prompted to do so. He listened again, and his face went from hopeful to dismayed.
“What is it, Jamal?” she asked.
He sat down on the bed beside her and put his face in his hands.
“Nola Langston is the one who told my father to snatch you,” Jamal said slowly. “She tried to get you killed.”
Keisha gasped. “Oh my God.”
“She cleaned out my father’s business account, too.”
“How much money was in the account?” Keisha asked.
“A million dollars.”
Keisha’s eyes widened as she tried to imagine that much money. She couldn’t.
“Keisha,” Jamal said, grabbing a pair of sweatpants from Joe’s closet. “Nola set this whole thing up.”
He started rifling through Joe’s shirts as Keisha looked at him, confused.
“Come on and get dressed, baby,” he said over his shoulder. “We gotta go.”
�
�I thought we were waiting until five o’clock.”
Jamal stopped and walked over to Keisha.
“They made it look like me and my pop had somethin’ to do with the police commissioner gettin’ shot,” Jamal said. “Then they stole a million dollars o’ my pop’s money.
“Why do you keep saying ‘they’?” Keisha asked.
“’Cause you don’t set up shit like that by yourself,” Jamal said. “Somebody helped her. And until we find out who it was, we gotta go. Now, come on.”
Just as Keisha got up from the bed to put on her clothes, they heard the sound of many voices downstairs in the bar. They could only make out part of what they were saying. But the part they could hear was enough.
They were saying, “Police.”
Joe Vega saw the officers gather at the el stop, watched them descend the stairs and spread out along the block, and observed them showing everyone the pictures they were carrying in their hands.
The officers had spent the better part of the last fifteen minutes canvassing the block, going door-to-door, looking for Keisha and Jamal.
No one else on the block had seen them. That was good. That meant that no one was paying attention.
And Joe knew that the chances of his drunken patrons recalling two people they’d seen for all of fifteen seconds were slim to none.
He watched the transit cops walk in, and knew that he would be able to get rid of them even before they opened their mouths. He only hoped that Keisha and Jamal would know to remain still and quiet, no matter what they heard downstairs. Because if they began to move around, or worse, began to panic, Joe wouldn’t be able to control what happened next.
Joe pulled out a rag and began wiping down the bar as the officers fanned out, and began looking around without even announcing their presence.
“Can I help you?” Joe said, making sure the annoyance came through in his voice.
“Police officers,” said a sergeant who was leading the other officers through the bar.
The sergeant didn’t bother to say anything else, and now Joe was really annoyed.
“I said, can I help you?” he said, putting down the rag and staring daggers through the sergeant.
“We’re just looking around,” the sergeant said.
“Looking around for what?” Joe said. “Something that’s written on a warrant, I hope.”
“No,” the sergeant said, walking over to Joe. “We were actually looking for these two.”
He held up pictures of Jamal and Keisha, side by side on a single page. The pictures weren’t recent. Jamal still had his dreadlocks, and Keisha looked like a little girl.
“Nobody who looks like that comes in here,” Joe said, picking up his rag and wiping the bar even harder.
“What do you mean by that?” the sergeant said.
“I mean, look around,” Joe said. “You’re the only black person in here. There aren’t any black people drinkin’ in my bar. Not that they can’t come in. They can come in all they want to. But they don’t feel comfortable in my bar, understand? They just don’t feel comfortable here.”
The sergeant, who was about six-three and 240 pounds, looked like he wanted to finish flattening Joe’s out-of -joint nose. Instead, he just shook his head and called out to his officers, who were still snooping around, checking bathrooms and looking under tables.
“Come on, guys,” he said, waving his hand. “Let’s go.”
He turned back and looked at Joe as he left.
“Thanks for the hospitality,” said the sergeant.
“Yeah, whatever,” Joe said, without looking up.
When the officers were a safe distance away, one of Joe’s patrons looked down the bar at him.
“Why’d you tell him black people don’t feel comfortable here, Joe? Your girlfriend’s black, for God’s sakes.”
“I was just breakin’ his balls,” he said with a laugh. “You know I hate cops.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Just go with the flow, man. Don’t worry about it. Have a beer on the house. Everybody have a beer on the house!”
A cheer went up from the six inebriated men stationed at various areas of the bar.
Joe poured the beers and looked toward the ceiling, thankful that Jamal and Keisha were quiet while the cops did their little inspection of the place.
He still thought that they should wait until five o’clock to leave the bar. But Jamal had other ideas.
18
Fire Rescue transported Ishmael to Jefferson Hospital with five bullets lodged in various parts of his body. One of the bullets had collapsed a lung, ricocheted off one of his ribs, and landed dangerously close to his spine.
Still, he managed to breathe, albeit barely, while doctors worked to stabilize him. It didn’t look like he would be able to hold on that much longer, given the damage the other bullets had done to his organs.
But while there was still breath in his body, there was testimony to be had. And so Lynch—along with Detective Hubert and Assistant DA Harris—made his way to the hospital as soon as he heard the news.
When Lynch and the others arrived, John Anderson was already there.
“Are you okay, Reverend Anderson?” Lynch asked.
“A little shaken up, but I’ll be fine.”
“Your wife was concerned about you. Nobody knew where you were.”
“I was looking for my daughter,” John said with a slight edge to his voice.
“Okay,” Lynch said, noting the tension in the preacher’s demeanor. “We’ll talk a little later.”
Lynch ran down the hall, with Harris and Detective Hubert close behind.
“Where are you going?” a young resident asked Lynch as he ran through the emergency room with his cohorts.
“I’m looking for the shooting victim who was brought in from Ninth and Market ten minutes ago,” Lynch said.
“He’s in cubicle five, but I don’t know if you can—”
Lynch was gone before he finished the sentence, snatching open the cubicle’s curtains to reveal the bloody mess that was Ishmael.
People were at work all around him, prodding and clamping, slicing and removing. Ultimately, he wasn’t going to make it. And Lynch, for the first time in his career, was unconcerned with that cruel reality.
“Let me in here,” he said, tossing aside two nurses and a doctor as he made his way to the head of the bed. “I need to talk to this man now.”
“Somebody get Security in here,” said one of the doctors.
“I am Security,” Lynch said, holding up his badge while bending down over the patient.
“Mr. Carter, can you hear me?”
Ishmael nodded.
“Take that damn oxygen mask off his face so he can talk!” Lynch shouted to a nearby doctor.
“Officer, I really don’t think—”
Lynch snatched off the oxygen mask.
“What are you doing?” the shocked doctor asked.
“He’s gonna die, isn’t he?” Lynch screamed in the doctor’s face. “Isn’t he!”
The doctor nodded nervously.
“Well, get the hell outta my way and let me do my job before he dies!”
The doctors backed away from the bloody bed as Lynch waved over the assistant DA and Detective Hubert, who were standing a few feet away.
Hubert turned on a handheld video recorder as Lynch bent over Ishmael’s face and began asking questions.
“What’s your name son?”
He labored to breathe before pushing out two tortured words. “Ishmael Carter.”
“I don’t know what you believe, Mr. Carter,” Lynch said, staring intensely into his eyes. “But you’re going to die soon, and when you do, you’re going to have to answer to someone. When they ask if you stood up like a man and admitted what you did, I think you’ll want to say yes.”
A tear formed at the corner of Ishmael’s eye as he winced in pain and nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“Okay then, Mr. Carter, I want you
to listen very carefully, and answer all my questions.”
Lynch looked back at Hubert to make sure the video camera was on. Then he turned back to Ishmael.
“Did you attempt to kill John Anderson?” he asked.
Ishmael nodded.
“How many times?”
He lifted a weakened arm and held up three fingers.
“Last night on Diamond Street, around ten o’clock, you drove by in a car and shot at him?”
Ishmael nodded.
“A woman named Emma Jean Johnson was killed in that shooting. Do you admit to her murder?”
A rapidly weakening Ishmael nodded again.
“This morning from the rooftop, you shot at John Anderson and you struggled with me, as well, right?”
Ishmael nodded.
“And that’s when you shot the police commissioner?”
Ishmael tried to catch his breath to speak, but couldn’t. He nodded again.
“Did you try to kill John Anderson again this afternoon?”
Ishmael nodded while grimacing in pain.
“Why did you want to kill John Anderson so badly?” Lynch asked, searching his eyes. “Did someone put you up to it?”
Ishmael labored to get the word out of his mouth.
“No,” he said.
“So you did this all on your own?” Lynch said.
“La,” Ishmael said.
“Lieutenant, I think that’s all one word,” Hubert said. I think he’s trying to say—”
“No-la,” Ishmael said, with tears in his eyes.
As the blood from his lung began to bubble up through his mouth, he said it once more.
“No-la Lang-ston,” he whispered. And with that, he died.
Lynch backed away from the gurney.
“Hubert, I need you to get Mr. Carter’s clothing and personal effects,” Lynch said. “Go through them and see if there’s anything there we can use.”
“Okay, Lieutenant,” Hubert said before turning and hustling down the hall.
Lynch slowly moved out into the walkway that ran the length of the emergency room. The staff he’d ordered out of the cubicle looked at him as if he were a murderer.
Walking up to one of the doctors standing shell-shocked by the desk, Lynch leaned in close and whispered, “I think you can sew him up now, Doctor. The operation was a success.”
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