Still the rain kept falling.
Proof’s first stop was a curious one. He visited a jewelry store on the fringes of Trench Town. The place was a modest affair, more of a storefront than a full store, more of a pawnshop than a real shop. Through the window I could see my brother asking the man behind the counter some questions. The man disappeared into a back room for a second, and when he returned he was holding something—what appeared to be a prosthetic limb.
Proof exited the shop soon afterward. Setting off at a fast pace—I had to jog to keep up—he headed deep into Trench Town.
The rain would not let up. Darkness had enveloped Trench Town, and the only light spilled over from the illuminated windows of the houses. I watched as Proof strode down one deadend street and paused in front of a cottage at the end of it. The place was small—maybe a single room—and looked fairly abandoned. But I could see, inside, the faint glow of flashlights. Proof leaped over the waist-high white gate and walked up to the front door. He knocked, and it opened a crack. He seemed to be holding a brief conversation with whomever was on the other side. I don’t know what he said but it worked. The door opened wider, Proof stepped in, and it shut behind him.
I went down the street at a run. Who was inside the house? What web was Proof spinning?
I came to the front door. 45 Star-Apple Lane. I kicked open the door, took one step inside, and found myself knocked back into a wall by a blast of gunfire.
When I came to my senses, I didn’t know how much time had passed. The room was dark and a single window looked out on a full moon mostly hidden behind a cloud. The only sounds were the bark of a dog outside in the street, the intermittent rain on the roof, and my own labored breathing. I hadn’t gotten a clear look at whoever shot me, or the gun, or even the rest of the room.
Against the wall I could see a woman, dressed in black jeans and a dark T-shirt, sobbing and shivering and holding a shotgun in her hands.
Soledad Chin.
Then the moon disappeared and the room was black again.
“What’s going on?” I asked into the darkness.
Proof shushed me, and tugged at a makeshift bandage he had wrapped around my torso. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. Try not to move around.”
My side was throbbing with pain.
“I didn’t mean to shoot you,” Soledad cried.
“That’s comforting,” I groaned.
“She thought you were one of Lil Croc’s men,” Proof explained.
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said. “Why are you here?”
Proof offered a grim smile. “I knew from the start the math cult was a ruse. But I had to wait until I could sidetrack the police. I knew that if Soledad and Aziz were on the run, they certainly didn’t want the law catching up to them. We have worries worse than the police now.”
Soledad began to sob loudly, but then pulled herself together. “Lil Croc is coming.”
“How does he know where we are?” I asked.
Soledad wiped her face with her T-shirt. “I left Kingston because Lil Croc’s men killed my aunt, threatened my family—he wanted me to join his crazy track team. I told Albert everything one night.” As she spoke, she unconsciously rubbed her belly.
“You’re pregnant?” I asked.
She nodded. “Albert told me we were going to be together. He had a plan.”
I turned to Proof: “How did you know where to find them?”
“His left stump was rubbed raw—clearly he had recently worn a prosthetic device,” Proof answered. “There was only one pawn shop in the area that had recently purchased a limb. I found out from the owner that Aziz had left an address, because he wanted to be given a chance to buy it back in case a buyer put in an offer. It’s hard to part with an arm—even a fake one.”
“We wanted to disappear for a year,” Soledad said. “I was getting pressure from everywhere—the cops, the gangs, my sponsors. Albert said I should fake my death. He came up with a crazy math conspiracy to occupy everyone until we got away. He patched it all together.”
“I thought he was a history major,” I interjected.
“History of mathematics,” Proof broke in. “Judging by his textbooks.”
Soledad continued: “The arm gave us the money we needed to lay low. Albert figured staying at my aunt’s house would be the last place anyone would look. He went back to the Pegasus so nobody would connect us, and so he could help throw the cops off track.”
I was about to ask where the hell Aziz was now, when the moon peeked out and answered the question for me.
I could now see that I was lying next to a body—it was Albert Aziz. His flowing Afghan shirt was dark with blood. I jerked back with surprise. Soledad began to cry once more; Proof put an arm around her.
“Lil Croc had men watching the Pegasus,” Proof said to me. “One of them followed Albert here and shot him as he entered. He’ll no doubt be back with reinforcements.”
“Then what are we doing here?” I struggled to get to my feet but my side was in too much pain. I slid back to the ground.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Proof said. “You’re in no condition to travel.”
“Can’t we call for help?” I said.
“Soledad ditched her cell so she couldn’t be tracked. Your cell was destroyed when she shot you. And I haven’t carried a phone since I started living in Trench Town. But we have other options.”
Soledad peered out the window. “They’re coming.”
The moon disappeared again and the room was in shadow.
“We’ve only got a few seconds of complete darkness,” Proof told Soledad. “We’re going to stay here and distract them.”
Soledad looked at him for an explanation.
“You have to make a break for it,” Proof said. “Even if they take us out, at least you’ll be safe. That’s the most important thing. I want you to keep on running until you see a cop or a police station. Then you ask for the commissioner, you understand me? He’ll be so embarrassed that his search failed, he’ll send the whole department to save us.”
Soledad wiped the tears off her cheeks and nodded. “I’m out of bullets,” she said.
I handed her my Glock; she smiled at me and rested her empty shotgun against the wall.
“I want to see gold medal speed, you hear?” I said. “Silver will get us killed. Run quick noh!”
Gun in hand, Soledad dashed out of the door and into the shadows.
After a few moments, the moon lit up the neighborhood again. Every shingled roof, every wattle wall, every picket fence was cast in cold white illumination.
I crawled into a corner that was furthest from the window. Three shadows peeked in—they’d be breaking into the shack soon.
“Now I wish I had that gun,” I moaned.
“I wish I had a spliff,” Proof replied.
The busted door flew open. Two of Lil Croc’s tattooed men stood in the doorway, guns in one hand, flashlights in the other.
Proof moved as quickly as a spider. He disarmed the first two intruders with a Bangaran kick and a flip, but three posse members rushed into the room and pinned him down.
Then, through the doorway, stepped Lil Croc.
Lil Croc was a fireplug of a man—steely and short. He was bare-chested and massively muscled, with a huge tattoo of a crocodile winding around his torso, up his neck, and covering his face, merging his head with that of the reptile.
Lil Croc stomped one foot.
Two of his men raised their guns, one aimed at Proof, the other at me. Moonlight glinted off the metal of their weapons.
Acting on reflex, I extended my hands, palms out, waiting for the shot.
Lil Croc stopped. He stared, wide-eyed, at one of my hands.
As speedily as he had entered, Lil Croc turned and ran out of the cottage, his posse close behind him. Soon all the shadows were flying down the street, through the rain, and melting back into the urban darkness.
“Wha-what just happened?” I
asked.
Proof grabbed my left hand, tracing with his finger the pyramid fringed by flame I had sketched in the center of my palm. The rain had blurred—but thankfully not erased—the symbol. “Apparently, there’s at least one person on this island who still believes in the Black Star Brotherhood,” Proof laughed. “Who born fi heng cyaan drown!”
I started to laugh too, but my ribs hurt too much. I had lost a lot of blood. The room was spinning—I didn’t have as long as I’d thought I did. The last thing I remember thinking that night is this: I hope Soledad is as fast as everyone says she is.
So, as you can see, readers of the Gleaner deserve to know the truth. The Soledad Chin case was extensively covered in the paper and hardly a word of it was true—especially the stories that detailed how the commissioner cracked the case. Much of the misunderstanding, of course, was my fault. The report I filed for the department left out several key elements of the narrative: Proof’s role in solving the crime, the identity of the suspect who shot me, and the fact that Soledad was still alive. After she made an anonymous call to the station house, and a patrol car took me to the hospital, Proof helped her disappear. Then he vanished as well and a Gleaner reporter went so far as to tweet that he was dead.
I had slipped my brother my e-mail address and he had promised to stay in touch—but, naturally, he did no such thing. Weeks went by and then months, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, with nary a word. I looked for him in Trench Town, but heard nothing; stories came back to me about sightings, but nothing definite. He was a duppy.
A year later, long after I had unpacked the boxes in my fishbowl office (but wasn’t feeling any more at home), I received a tip from an informant that my brother had been spotted in a store buying sacks of sugar, red ribbons, and several small plastic cups. But nobody knew where he had gone after making the odd purchase.
None of it made sense to me either, until, driving home one night, I heard “Three Little Birds” on the radio of my Fiat. I continued driving straight over to Trench Town.
When I got to the seventh floor, a dozen hummingbirds buzzed around my head. Their numbers had increased—this had to be the place. I knocked on every entryway on the leaning hallway until finally, at room 721B, Proof came to the door. He was holding a narrow plastic cup with a red ribbon tied around it. Three doctor birds, attracted by the color, zipped around his hand, sipping at the sugar water in his cup.
“You don’t call, you don’t write …” I joked.
Proof didn’t seem surprised that I had found him. He yawned, put down the cup, and lit a spliff.
“Lil Croc is still out there. A lot of his business is running numbers. With your particular skill set, you could help bring him down. Will you help?”
Proof, sucking on his spliff, said nothing.
“I don’t understand you,” I complained. “You hate cops. You cut me off. So why did you help with the case? There must be some reason you got involved.”
Proof was as silent as a calculator.
I continued: “Here’s my theory—I think, because of what happened to our parents, you want to give back. You want to use your math skills to fight crime. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I haven’t cracked your formula.”
From inside the apartment I heard the cry of a baby.
“Honey, are you coming back to bed?” a woman’s voice called out.
That sounded like Soledad.
I looked at Proof.
He smiled, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and slowly shut the door.
SUNRISE
BY CHRIS ABANI
Greenwich Town
The rising sun picked out the points of the old tin roofs. Soon it would fill the narrow, potholed street with flame. Petunia wore a brown dress and white sneakers as she sat on the small veranda of her two-room, wood and concrete house, erect in her wicker chair, slurping her coffee, looking down the littered street from this small elevation over the hibiscus hedge to that house, that house, that damn house eight gates down, where that sports car was parked, that house with the coconut tree in the front yard and that bright red door.
This is fuckeries … you are fuckeries, she muttered. She put the tin mug down on the table next to her and reached for her phone.
Hunts Bay? Beg you send a squad car now. A girl and her baby dead in Greenwich Town … please, sir, as there is a God I not going answer any questions. What more you want but that a girl and a baby dead in Greenwich Town? I done give you the address already, sir. Don’t worry yourself with who me is. Just come. Just come. Just come.
When she got off the phone she thought of what she’d say when she was asked in person. Who she was?
If she’d been asked before two a.m. this morning, she would have mentioned four things: the daughter of a fisherman from Treasure Beach; a dropout from a nursing school in Mandeville; a woman who’d lived her forty-three years in the light of the gospel; and a former sinner who did not do what an older married man had commanded—which was to abort her child.
Her scalp itched under her store-bought hair as her mind took her back to that time.
When her mother had found out she was fooling with Mr. Gladstone, she’d beaten her with a mop stick and called her Jezebel and said if she ever took no more man again she was going to tie her up. And she’d been so afraid—not so much of getting hit again, but of being restrained—that she ran away to her father’s fishing shack one night when he was gone to sea. When he returned, she told him that her mother now had a new boyfriend and she, Petunia, didn’t like the man, and so she got put out.
She was seventeen then, but so small that folks who didn’t know her used to think she was twelve. Her father didn’t question her. He simply took her in.
She began to wish now in this moment of waiting that her father was alive. He would have taken care of Linton, that nasty, stinking dog. She wouldn’t have had to try.
In her mind she saw the shack where she used to walk down from their little house to meet her father just before sunrise, making sure to get there in time to hear the slither of wood on wet sand as he dragged his canoe ashore on Frenchman’s Cove beach. She saw in her mind the bright blue of the boat, and the way it glistened in the soft light of predawn, saw also the other men all along the beach, pulling their canoes ashore until the beach looked like it was littered with toy dolphins.
Her father’s face always broke into a smile when he saw her.
After a few weeks with him, when she was sure her belly would begin to show, she stopped going to school. Her father was not the kind of man who paid attention to this sort of thing. Though she knew now that she’d have been better off in life if he had. But he was a good man, and they grew closer as she lingered with him in the mornings when the boats came in. With school off her agenda, she had time to just sit with him on the prow of his blue boat named for her and give him his breakfast and ginger coffee—which she, Petunia, was drinking now on her veranda as she waited for the sirens to come.
Looking back now, with the eye of an adult, she understood a look that used to confuse her then, the look of a parent marveling at the miracle of his child while feeling the weight of sorrow. In her recollection, it was a look that never lasted. Like lightning, it would come in a flash, then her father would begin to laugh again, and rub his hands in her hair, and she would giggle and tell him not to wipe the saltfish oil ’pon her head.
On some mornings, though, there was not much laughter. At these times, he’d ask her when she planned to go back to her mother. As she complained, he’d say her mother was good, that he’d shamed her, that’s all.
She is from a good family, he would say. A better class than mine. I couldn’t married her—and they wouldn’ta let me marry her—so is like the shame is mine too. I feel that’s why bad luck take me and I mash up like this, just drinking rum and can’t even take proper care of me daughter. One day, though, one day, God might take a chance on me and give me a little grace.
The next thing Petunia saw, as she sat on her ve
randa, was her seventeen-year-old self waddling barefoot on the hot gray sand, her shame six months prominent, living off the fish and kindness of her father’s friends, and hearing someone calling her from behind. It was a young white man from Ohio who had come down from the Seventh Day Adventist church up in Mandeville to take her to the new home for unwed mothers.
We are a place of acceptance, he’d told her, where we believe you can be reborn.
And who wouldn’t want that? she thought, as some schoolchildren walked by her house in their uniforms, and radios and TVs sounded in the houses on her street. Who wouldn’t want that? So she went with him the next morning to Mandeville. And that is where her pickney Grace was born, and where she’d entered the college run by the Adventist church. But the same man who had saved her wanted her body in return so she left, ran away again.
She found a job at Kingston Public Hospital as a ward assistant, and settled in Greenwich Town. Rough place, everybody used to tell her. Out there is West Kingston. But at least, she told herself, it’s down by the waterfront, and her happiest times ever had been with her father, who had since died, down by the sea. And she needed to save money for Grace’s future. And in this neighborhood the rent was cheap.
Oh Grace, oh Grace, oh Grace—she glanced down the road at the red front door—why you cause this kind of crosses on me? But is not like nobody never tell you, said a chorus of voices in her head.
The girl grew pretty. On top of that she had tall hair and light skin. People used to say she look half Chiney. Went to good school too, Ardenne Prep. The kinda school that made her, Petunia, have to work two shifts three times a week and take the long bus ride up to Mona Heights on weekends to clean and cook, and wash married women’s skimpy underwear and exercise clothes.
But she didn’t used to mind the ride up there, in truth, because that is where she had found what she came to know as her rightful church.
One Sunday afternoon, her bus broke down near the US embassy on Old Hope Road, near Lane Plaza, and as she waited for another one to come she heard a glorious singing, and the spirit of the Lord led her to follow it, and she ended up going into the heart of a ghetto hidden away in the middle of that uptown splendor in a place called Stand Pipe; there she met the sisters of the Church of the Pentecostal Fire, Clarisse and Millicent and Hildred. And soon after she met them, they began to warn her that she had to think about where she was living, because a girl like Grace would not survive slum life.
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