The Reluctant Prophet

by Nancy Rue

  “With a cruiser parked out in front of Sacrament House, I think she’ll be all right.” Chief’s eyes showed their first hint of twinkle. “Detective Kylie’s got some egg to wipe off his face right now.”

  “When’s he coming for my statement? I still won’t be satisfied until Opus is picked up.”

  Chief let go of my hand so he could use both of his to push me back against the lone pillow. That was how Detective Kylie found us when the nurse pushed the curtain aside to let him in.

  “So you’re in one piece,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do you have your notepad? I’m ready to talk.”

  He pulled up a stool and perched at its edge. Bags hung under his eyes. “You don’t even want to hear that you’ve been eliminated as a suspect?”

  “I didn’t know I ever was one.”

  “You left the scene of the crime. That’s always a red flag.”

  “I didn’t want to be next,” I said.

  “I called 911 when I found her,” Chief said—his don’t-mess-with-me-man-I’m-a-lawyer voice firmly in gear. “The ambulance got there before the police. Enough said?”

  Kylie put up a hand. “Like I said, your client’s not a suspect.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Sitting right here.”

  “You lucked out,” he said. “The old man who owns the auto repair shop has video cameras trained on the parking lot.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “He had them put in after the last murder was committed on his property. We got the whole thing on film—minus the perpetrator who, from what we can tell, shot our guy from the landing of the steps on the side of the building. Unfortunately, that put the shooter off camera.”

  His shrug told me it really wasn’t all that unfortunate in his opinion.

  “So Sultan’s dead,” I said. “Jude Lowery’s dead.”

  “We assume so.”

  “You ‘assume’?” Chief said.

  “Yeah,” Kylie crossed one leg over the other knee as if he were cozying up to the conversation. “The camera also caught three people in black—hoods, the whole bit—cleaning up the crime scene. By the time our people got there, there was nothing left but your motorcycle and a pool of blood.”

  “They took the body?” I said.

  “They did. We don’t actually know that it was Jude Lowery who got shot. You’ve never seen him before, isn’t that right?”

  “Right.”

  “Did he tell you he was Sultan’?”

  “I called him that, and he didn’t deny it.” I didn’t add that he’d claimed to be Desmond’s father. Chief and I had agreed to keep that information to ourselves unless we needed to use it.

  “You’ve got the blood,” Chief said. “A DNA test would clear it up.”

  “If we had anything to compare it to. We take fingerprints when we arrest people—not hair samples. This isn’t CSI: Miami.” He pulled the pad out of his jacket and flipped it open. “I assume you want to give us a statement about Opus Behr’s alleged attack on you.”

  I ignored the word alleged and sat up on the table. “Yeah. I want him off the streets. He’s dangerous.”

  “One thing before we go there,” Chief said. “I’m just curious. Why would these guys steal the dead body?”

  Kylie gave his pen an impatient click. “Sultan was the Mack Daddy of his cell. They don’t want any of the other drug cells to know that he’s dead and they’re in a weakened state.”

  “Cells?” I said. “Aren’t you talking about gangs?”

  He looked at me with the first sign of humor I’d seen teasing at his mouth. “We don’t have ‘gangs’ in St. Augustine, Ms. Chamberlain. What would that do to our image?”

  The hospital finally released me at dawn with two ice packs and a prescription for Lortab.

  “I’m not taking any of those until I talk to the women,” I told Chief. “Will you take me to Sacrament House?”

  “Not on my bike,” he said. “I’ll call us a cab.”

  “I don’t care if we have to walk. I have to know if they’re all right. And then I want to go see Desmond.”

  “You’re a pain, you know that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s my career.”

  Mercedes, Jasmine, and Sherry were in a knot on the couch when we arrived. I knew the minute I walked in that they were sitting on a pact. I could see it in the set of their chins. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was.

  But when Hank and Chief went into the kitchen to get breakfast going, I sat on the coffee table facing them and said, “It’s just us now. Anything you want to tell me?”

  Their heads shook in unison.

  “Anything you should tell me?”

  “No,” Sherry said. “Somethin’ I want to ask you, though.”

  I was surprised at the calm in her voice. Last time I saw her, she was curled up like an embryo in my bed.

  “Anything,” I said.

  “Where is Opus?”

  “Hopefully in the back of a police car by now. He’ll go to jail—there’s no doubt about that.”

  Mercedes grunted, but just as the others’ did, her shoulders relaxed.

  “And Sultan’s dead?” Sherry said.

  “The last time I saw him, he looked pretty dead to me,” I said.

  Mercedes narrowed her eyes. “What are you not tellin’ us?”

  “Somebody took his body,” I said.

  “Now that is disgusting,” Jasmine said.

  “No,” Sherry said. “That is good. Maybe now his stink is gone forever.” She squeezed out from between the two of them and stood up to look down at me. “I want to move back here if y’all will let me. I can move on now, and the only place I can do it is here.”

  I looked at Mercedes, then at Jasmine. “What do you think, ladies? This is as much your decision as it is mine.”

  “Unh-uh,” Jasmine said. “This her decision. Can’t nobody make it for her, and can’t nobody talk her into it like we done before.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Mercedes said.

  The rhythm was clear. “All right,” I said to Sherry. “I’ll have somebody bring your things over. Maybe Leighanne can. Did she go home?”

  “She done gone to Jacksonville to pick up Nita,” Jasmine said. “She gon’ get her a earful when she come off that plane.”

  Mercedes was looking at me, eyes narrowed.

  “What?” I said.

  “You lookin’ like you been run over, Miss Angel.”

  “That’s basically true.”

  “Chief better get you home before you fall out right here.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. But as the couch suddenly rose up to meet me, I realized I wasn’t.

  Sherry caught me on the way down. While Mercedes was yelling for Chief to come in there and take care of his woman, Sherry put her lips close to my ear.

  “Time to let it be, Miss Angel,” she whispered.

  I moved my head to look in her eyes. They’d lost their haze in the burn of purpose.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll let it be.”

  Chief borrowed Hank’s car to drive me home. All the way I insisted that I was going to see Desmond, but when he carried me into the foyer and made me look in the mirror, I agreed that the boy didn’t need to see me looking like I’d been in a street brawl.

  He set me up in the chair and made tea and sat on the coffee table trunk.

  “Here we are again,” I said.

  “Alone at last,” he said.

  We exchanged a look we didn’t know what to do with. Chief rested his forearms on his thighs—a posture I loved the way I loved his eagle eyes and the twinkle he brought out so rarely. It ached—not being able to tell him. It ached with my leg and my face
and my torn-apart heart.

  “So what’s going to happen, Classic?” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Hank says you’re a prophet. ”

  “Do you really want to debate that right now? Because I don’t.”

  “Neither do I. Because I accept it.”

  “You accept it.”

  “Probably more than you do.” He rubbed his palms together, the only unsure gesture I’d ever seen him make. “There’s no question you’ve got some kind of power. The business I’m in, I see a lot of people with power using it in every wrong way imaginable. You’ve imagined a good way. Call it being a ‘prophet’ if you want to, but it is what it is, and you can do something with it.”

  He straightened his back and looked everywhere in the room except at me. But all I could look at was him. He was suddenly vulnerable—but I had never felt safer in his presence. Safe enough to say what might chase him away.

  “It’s all God,” I said. “All of it.”

  “I know you believe that.”

  “But do you?”

  He brought his gaze back to me from the corners of the room. “Two months ago—maybe even two weeks ago—I would have said no without hesitating.”

  “And now?”

  “Now—I don’t know. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Then for now,” I said, “that’s good enough.”

  “How good?” he said.

  I stopped breathing. He kept his eyes on me, even when his phone rang—and rang—stopped—and began again.

  “Somebody wants you bad,” I said. I didn’t say that somebody was me.

  He answered it with a terse “Jack Ellington,” but as he listened, his face changed—pensive lines to smoothing brow to a smile I’d never seen before—a smile of unguarded joy.

  “Can you meet us at FIP?” he said finally.

  “FIP?” I said.

  “See you in ten.”

  “Chief—what?” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  “I’m dying here—give me the headline.”

  He scooped me up in his big arms. “I think Desmond’s coming home.”

  I had it memorized by the time we got to Liz Doyle’s office, but I made Nita repeat it twice, three times until I believed it was real. And then I read the letter—over and over, until the edges of the paper were damp from my clammy palms and my tears. The first happy tears I may ever have cried.

  “I, Geneveve Sanborn, being of sound mind,” it began.

  I could hear her soft voice, dictating to Nita in some private middle of the night, telling the world that in the event of her death, Allison Chamberlain was to have legal custody of her son, Desmond Sanborn, father unknown.

  I loved that Geneveve hadn’t quite forgotten how to lie.

  “Are you sure this is legal?” I said every time I finished reading it.

  “It’s notarized,” Nita said. “I’m a notary—we have to be in the mortgage business.” She looked apologetically at Chief, nodding agreement from him. “I wanted her to go through you, but she wanted to keep this as far away from ‘Miss Angel’ as she could. And that wasn’t anything against you, Allison,” she added quickly.

  “I know,” I said. “She wanted to be his mother so bad.”

  “And she never thought she was going to be able to be the kind of mother you were.”

  “It turns out she was after all.” We turned to Liz, who was speaking through tears. “She made sure her son was going to be taken care of. By the best.” She reached over and squeezed my good knee. “I’ll finish the paperwork. You can take him home as soon as they’re done.”

  “Define done,” I said.

  “Day after tomorrow?”

  “That’s Christmas Day,” Chief said.

  Liz beamed at me. “I can’t think of a better gift.”

  Nita stayed to get a copy of the letter. Chief held my elbow all the way down the hall, but he didn’t speak until he’d steered me out to the sidewalk.

  “Merry Christmas, Classic,” he said. He took my face in his hands and kissed me. Not like a brother. Not like a buddy. Not like a father. Like the man who loved me. The man I kissed back.

  GodpleaseGodpleaseGodplease. Please. Let this be okay with you.

  Chief and Hank let me go on my newly repaired Classic to pick up Desmond, as long as they could both ride behind us in case I got wobbly. Everything inside me was wobbly, but I was sure the unmistakable Nudge wasn’t going to let me fall.

  I waited outside, astride the Harley, helmet in hand until they brought him out. He looked taller, paler, thinner, maybe a little harder at the edges. But when he gave me the smile he reserved only for me, I knew he was the same. And that he had me right there. Right there.

  “You ready to go for a ride?” I said.

  “Can I drive?” he said.

  “In your dreams, Clarence.”

  It was our best ride. We leaned as one and laughed at the cold and waved to Chief and Hank as they peeled off at the end of Palm Row. I realized somewhere along the way that I wasn’t just in love with Desmond and Chief and God. I was in love with this bike, this thing I had so resisted at first—just as I’d learned to love so many things that had seemed like such a bad idea, until I was Nudged straight into them.

  When we walked in the house, I expected Desmond to head straight for the snack drawer that I had stuffed with Oreos. But as soon as we were inside the door, he turned to me and said, “I want to see it.”

  “See what?” I said.

  “That letter she wrote. The one says she give me to you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s here.”

  He followed me into the den and watched me pull my copy from the desk drawer. When I handed it to him, he read it silently, lips moving. When his eyes reached the bottom, he whispered, “Thank you, Mama.”

  Then he handed it back to me and then he headed for the Oreos.

  I tucked that moment away for later. “I want to show you something else,” I said.

  “My Christmas presents?” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. But he sobered. “This all the present I need, Big Al. Bein’ here.”

  “Yeah, but you aren’t going to turn down the leathers I got ya, are you?”

  “No way!”

  “Way. But I want to talk to you about this first.” I went to the bulletin board by the door and took down the picture he’d drawn for me.

  “Pretty good, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Schatz liked it too. So did Miz Vernell.”

  Desmond pointed east. “The old lady?”

  “Yeah, they saw it when they came over to tell me I don’t have to go to court.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Long story. I need to warn you, though, that Schatzie is going to be all over you about not coming back when he yelled at you that night you snuck out of here. I thought he was yelling at me.”

  “What about you?” Desmond said. “You gonna yell at me?”

  “Not today. Okay—this picture.” I spread it on the table and looked in my mind for the lines I’d prepared. “I know you think Chief is cool and all that—and I do too.”

  Desmond patted his palm. “I know you do.”

  “I just want to make sure you know that Chief and I … it may or may not end up … it depends on some things.…” So much for the prepared speech. “It depends on God, just like everything else does.”

  Desmond wrinkled his brow over the picture. “I don’t think it’s that good now.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause you don’t even know what it is.”

  “It’s Chief, isn’t it?”

  Desmond rolled his eyes completely up
into his head. “No. This ain’t Chief. This God—least the way I see him. I don’t know ’bout how you see Hhim, but me—I got him on a Harley anytime.”

  I pressed my hands to my lips.

  “You ain’t gon’ cry, are you, Big Al?” he said. ’Cause I don’t see us cryin’ on Christmas.”

  “No, kid,” I said. “In fact I don’t see us crying for a long time. A long time.”

  Desmond loved his leathers. He put them on immediately and we rode, all Christmas Day until our hands were claws even inside our gloves. Hot chocolate was definitely in order, although I couldn’t resist telling him that there would be no marshmallows, seeing how he kept eating them by the bag.

  I was in the kitchen heating up milk when the doorbell rang. I ignored my irritation—I’d asked everybody to leave us alone this first day—and told Desmond to answer it and use his considerable charms to get rid of whoever it was. But a minute later he was back, jerking his head toward the door.

  “You better get this,” he said.

  “Who is it?” I whispered.

  “You jus’ better get it.”

  Every vision possible flashed through my head, all of them some version of somebody there to take Desmond away. I opened the door the rest of the way, another prepared speech on my lips. But it wasn’t a county official or a cop who looked back at me.

  It was a painfully thin woman of indeterminate age, who even from the edge of the porch smelled like putrid neglect of self. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. I read the familiar words in her eyes: “I’ve had it. I’m tired. I’m ready for help.”

  “Desmond,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Go run her a bath.”

  I nodded and held out my hand. “Come on in,” I said. “You’re home.”

  I was Nudged, of course. But I might have done it anyway. Because I found Jesus seven years ago. And now I knew what to do with him.

  … a little more …

  When a delightful concert comes to an end,

  the orchestra might offer an encore.

  When a fine meal comes to an end,

  it’s always nice to savor a bit of dessert.

  When a great story comes to an end,