Quicksand

by Carolyn Baugh

  The gun rested just below Nora’s tightly wound chignon. The weapon was at least as heavy as the .44 Dewayne had been wielding.

  A woman’s voice shrieked in Nora’s ear, drowning out Jacobs’s. “I’ve got your girl! Now get the hell out of here or I’ll kill her!”

  Nora could feel the woman’s breath in her hair. Nora had not stopped pointing her gun at the woman in the bed, who watched the scene in detached, but mercifully silent, terror. Nora was rigid, waiting breathlessly for what would happen next. She heard no voices or movement from the next room, though she strained for any hint of Calder and his team. From the corner of her eye, she saw Wansbrough peek around the divider wall. Nora knew he didn’t have a clean shot. They exchanged a quick glance, then his low voice called out, “Drop your weapon. You got nowhere to go here.”

  The woman’s voice seemed to climb an entire register higher. “You drop your goddam weapon or I will kill this bitch, so help me God…”

  Nora called out in as calm a voice as she could muster, “We’ve got some drugs in play here, John, so we may not all be thinking clearly…”

  The gun dug more deeply into Nora’s neck. “Shut up, just shut the fuck up!” In the living room, Nora heard Dewayne Fulton begin laughing almost hysterically.

  Nora fought for breath and found her gun arm starting to shake. She thought about plunging her elbow backward into the woman’s sternum, but she was too scared that the heavy gun would go off.

  Suddenly the sound of a gunshot thundered through the loft, and Nora found herself tumbling to the floor, as the nearly naked woman resumed her screams.

  * * *

  The wait was interminable. It was rush hour, and the medical examiner, the EMTs, and the evidence techs from the field office had all been slow in coming.

  The very blood-soaked Nora could only seem to focus on her shoes. And her partial hearing loss, for which none of the support crews had any remedy. The tech team was busy photographing the scene within the loft apartment and cataloging the weapons in preparation for transporting them to the office. The two men and one woman would wait for Nora and Calder to carefully collect the meth and its accompanying paraphernalia; Benjamin Calder was an expert on street drugs—how they looked, how they were made, and the intricate silk roads of production and distribution that entangled the city. He had logged endless hours on this case. They all had.

  But it was Nora and John who had been on the scene shortly after Kylie Baker’s body was discovered. They had found her mother shrieking with grief on the bloodstained grass of her Kingsessing home, refusing to leave her daughter’s fast-cooling, knife-slashed body. It was the first time since Nora had entered law enforcement that she wished she’d listened to Baba and picked a different career.

  Not that being murdered at fourteen had made Kylie Baker at all remarkable. It was Philly, after all. And Kingsessing was … well, Kingsessing was boarded-up buildings that somehow still seethed with listless energy. It was the sound of daytime screaming. It was head wounds that left indelible, forever-stains on gappy, stumbling sidewalks.

  Nora had had no reason to wander that far into Southwest Philly before joining the force. She had grown used to Kingsessing, the domestic violence calls and small-time drug busts and even the occasional corpse with a bullet wound or two. But this task force work found her looking at a little girl whose neck was slashed so deeply that her trachea lay exposed. Nora had knelt beside Kylie’s thin, naked frame. She was charged with counting knife wounds for the preliminary report, but she found herself counting other things as well. She counted the number of piercings arching up along the cartilage of Kylie’s right ear (six). She counted the dusting of freckles along the bridge of her nose and across her smooth cheeks (eighteen). She counted the shards of brown bottle glass that lay on the sidewalk, just beyond the girl’s jarringly fuchsia toenails (seven large shards, three small).

  Apart from its extreme violence, Kylie Baker’s murder had drawn the task force’s attention as an act of vengeance. Her brother Kevin’s gang trafficked in meth and heroin—not only in Kingsessing, West Philly, and Northeast Philly, but over the Delaware River in angry, dilapidated Camden. Kevin’s gang, the A&As, had engineered a drive-by shooting that took out a member of the Junior Black Mafia.

  Dewayne Fulton led the Junior Black Mafia. But rather than take revenge for the shooting by killing a member of Kevin’s gang, he had killed a member of Kevin’s family. Kylie.

  Everyone knew the story. Everyone was talking about it. The two gangs ran strong in Kingsessing, where crack houses outnumbered grocery stores, and there were more pawnshops than schools or parks.

  But something had broken in Kylie’s mother as she had watched the task force begin work on her little girl’s corpse. She had turned to Agent John Wansbrough and said, plain as day and loud enough for all the neighbors to hear, that she would talk. She would tell him everything she knew about every gang member she had ever known. From her own son Kevin and his gangbangers to Dewayne Fulton and his. Nora had looked up, her latex gloves damp with Kylie’s blood, listening to the girl’s mother in open-mouthed astonishment.

  John, stunned, had had the presence of mind to coax her into the Suburban and take her with him to the William J. Green, Jr. Federal Building. There, he recorded a detailed statement before the shock of Kylie’s death wore off and the fear of the gangs reasserted itself. The Safe Streets Task Force acquired more information on Philadelphia gang members from Mrs. Baker than they had from all sources in the entire previous year.

  It was Mrs. Baker who had told them where to locate Daniella Miller, and Daniella Miller who had given them Dewayne himself. And now, Ben and Nora sat on the small balcony, watching the swirl of activity inside and down below in the street. Nora had peeled off the task force Windbreaker, drenched with the blood and tissue of Halston, Lisa, aged twenty-six, and she sat now in her T-shirt that had never quite dried from her morning run. Nora had asked for a large glass of water, then demanded that Calder pour it over the back of her head. She was grateful her hair had been tied in its customary knot. Still, both of them had stared as the pinkened run-off dripped through four floors of wrought-iron balconies to tumble down to the street below. Calder went back to the kitchen to refill the glass three times before the improvised shower ran clear. Nora kept resisting the urge to pat the back of her head. Finally, she wrapped her arms hard around her knees.

  “They’re ruined, Ben.”

  Calder put an arm around her shoulder. “I will get you new ones. I promise.”

  She pushed his arm off. “I really, really liked these.”

  He tilted his head, regarding the blood-soaked sneakers. “They are pretty fly.”

  “Were pretty fly.”

  “Yes, were pretty fly. Now, they’re pretty nasty.”

  She turned her head to look at him. “What if you had missed?”

  He grinned at her, green eyes flashing. “But I didn’t miss.”

  “But what if you had missed? You were on stakeout all night. You were a wreck. You’re always a wreck after stakeouts. How could you trust yourself with that shot?”

  “Nora, I couldn’t miss. With all that shouting, no one heard us come in the balcony door. I was, like, four feet away. And … it was you.”

  She tilted her head slightly, realizing suddenly how much she liked the way he had said that. Then, to make sure he didn’t sense her feelings, she pointed at her ear. “What? I can’t hear you because I’m actually deaf now.”

  “I’m sorry, Nora. We didn’t know there was a third person in the apartment.”

  “How long had you been watching the place?”

  “Hey, as soon as we got the information from Daniella Miller we started watching the place.”

  She went back to staring at the commotion four flights down, willing herself not to think about the life snuffed out to save her own. Below them, Wansbrough was overseeing the bag that contained Lisa Halston’s nude and mostly headless corpse as it was bundled aw
ay by the medical examiner. The third in the threesome, apparently a working colleague of Lisa’s, had been turned over to the police for prosecution. They had found no identification for her in the loft, and once she had stopped screaming, she could not be coerced to speak.

  John had wanted Nora to come down so the EMTs could check her out, but she wasn’t budging. Irritated, he finally stopped motioning up to her and called her cell phone.

  “Nora, just let them see you,” he said.

  She switched the phone to her good ear. “John. It’s okay. I’m okay. I just want to go home and take a shower.”

  “Nora, come down now … it will take five minutes.”

  “I can’t … Calder and I are bonding over how he almost killed me.”

  Calder waved down at him.

  Wansbrough was frustrated. “Look,” he said, “Like it or not, I know you’re shaken up. Burton and I will take Fulton downtown, and Calder can drive you home after you secure the scene up there. Take it easy the rest of the day, and we’ll meet up to talk to Dewayne tomorrow morning at nine, when the meth is out of his system.” He hung up without saying good-bye, and went back to sorting through the controlled chaos around him. Dewayne was the last to go, and Nora watched curiously as Eric Burton ushered him into the back of Wansbrough’s Suburban.

  Nora and Calder walked through the crime scene together, stopping at the bathroom out of which Lisa Halston had pounced on Nora. They stared at a laptop computer. It sat next to an empty condom wrapper on the tiled floor. The darkened screen gaped up at the ceiling.

  “Why is there a laptop in the bathroom?” asked Nora.

  Ben took a pair of latex gloves from an evidence tech. He pulled on the gloves and then tapped the screen.

  “Password?”

  “Grumpy hooker?” Nora suggested.

  “Nice,” said Ben. He tried a few entries, then shrugged. “We’ll take it to Jonas and Libby.”

  They catalogued it with the techs and then made their way out of the building, passing Juanita, who appeared in the midst of a classic concierge-breakdown as she fielded frantic inquiries from tenants and neighbors. Nora nodded at her as they passed out into what was left of the cool autumn morning.

  Traffic was light on the way back to Center City. Calder was quiet, and Nora observed him carefully. His auburn hair was thick and close-cropped, and his features were strong. His pointed chin was covered with stubble after his night in the car. The green eyes had dark shadows under them. “Hey, you okay there?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “How many people you killed so far?”

  Calder glanced over at her. “Total? In the past four years of service?”

  “Yes. Total.”

  “One.”

  Despite herself, Nora laughed out loud. “All that shooting—?”

  “I try to aim for like, legs and thighs … I wasn’t a college track star like you, so I have to get the advantage somehow.”

  “Very savvy,” she admitted. “What’s next?”

  Ben shrugged. “I’ll take this laptop to Jonas and Libby. I’ll write up my report about what happened with Halston, Lisa, twenty-six, and hope it matches what the medical examiner finds so that Internal Affairs doesn’t make a big deal about it. I’ll go home and play a violent video game and hope we get to do it all again tomorrow.”

  Nora smiled. “I’m not even gonna worry about you…”

  “No, no worries,” he said, pulling up in front of the Cairo Café. “Okay, Nora. If you need anything, call.”

  She nodded. “Thanks, Ben.” She opened the car door, then paused. “Ben.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for saving my life.”

  His eyes locked with her wide, brown ones, and she watched him exhale slowly, looking for words. She slipped out of the car before he said anything she might want to hear.

  She was careful not to watch him drive away as she pushed open the door to her father’s restaurant.

  * * *

  The Cairo Café sat quietly in the midst of the Logan Square neighborhood, only a few blocks from the river and the Market Street skyscrapers—just out of the way enough, it seemed to Nora, to be doomed to constant struggle. It was small but spare, with simple two-top tables and long leather benches running along each wall. It could seat about fifty people comfortably and, in its twenty-seven years of business, it had never departed from the staid, pressed, beige tablecloths and primly folded cloth napkins. The requisite Quranic verse warding off envy hung over the hostess’s stand (although there was never a need for an actual hostess), and various Egyptian relics were rather randomly placed throughout the dining area.

  The electronic bell announced her, echoing through the empty restaurant, lancing through the soft strains of an old Abd al-Wahhab tune that spun from the CD player. It was ten thirty, and they opened for lunch at eleven. “As-salaam alaykum,” she said into the dimness.

  Baba set down his glass of tea and hastily stubbed out his cigarette. “Wa alaykum as-salaam, ya Noooora!” He was sitting at his customary table near the cash register, enjoying a quiet moment before dealing with the first customers of the day. He offered her a rough cheek. “Inti fayn?” Where have you been? “I didn’t think you were home at breakfast.”

  She bent to kiss him, waving away the remaining cloud of smoke, then sank into the chair across from him. “Working,” she answered in English.

  “In that?” he asked, taking in her running clothes. He didn’t notice her blood-soaked shoes in the muted light, and she hurriedly pulled her feet under her seat.

  “Casual Friday,” she said. “And you know you shouldn’t be smoking inside the restaurant. Your employees can sue you.”

  “I’ll never do it again,” he said contritely. This was Ragab’s latest strategy for dealing with his daughter’s many “don’ts.”

  She narrowed her eyes, recognizing the strategy for what it was, and moved on. “Did you get Ahmad his breakfast?”

  “He can’t get his own breakfast?”

  Nora frowned at her father. “He can but he won’t, he’s spoiled. You have to lay something out for him or he won’t eat. You know this.”

  Her father made a disapproving noise and patted his own girth where it strained against his button-down shirt, as though to say that that was certainly not his own approach. “I think he’s become more spoiled since he’s started studying for this test.”

  Nora sighed. “Well, he’s entitled, he’s studying hard.” The SATs were two weeks away, and Ahmad had been haunting the Kaplan sessions.

  Her father shrugged, then regarded her. “What can I make you to eat?” he asked. “You want a foule sandwich?”

  “Nothing now, not hungry.” Nora wondered if the writhing in her stomach would ever ease, or if she would ever stop feeling the gun at her head or the sticky heat of Lisa Halston’s life splashed across the back of her neck and hair.

  “Eat with me. Don’t be rude.”

  “You’re not eating,” she observed.

  “I’ll have Katie make you some tea,” he said, gesturing at the straggly ponytailed server hunched over her phone, thumbs a blur.

  But not even tea sounded good to Nora today. She stared distractedly at the Egyptian newspaper splayed out across the table, open to the sports section; Arabic headlines shrieked the footballers’ latest triumphs. “You could get that paper for free on your phone, by the way.”

  “Phone, phone. Phones are for calling. Everything is on the phone now, you lose the phone, you lose your whole world,” Ragab said. “Anyway, what can I do to the phone when I read that Zamalek has lost again to the Ahly bastards. I can’t smack it, like this,” he gave the page a dismissive slap with the back of his palm. “What, I’m going to throw my phone across the room? I didn’t buy the insurance.”

  She smiled at him, shaking her head. Ragab was a born extrovert who knew almost all of his customers by their first names. His booming laugh always seemed to fill the small restaurant and spill out
onto the street beyond. He had only shouted at Nora once: when Zack Gray from the boy’s track team had had the audacity to try to ask her to prom. Apart from that, she had only really seen Baba enraged and explosive when Zamalek lost to the Ahly club in the Egyptian national championships. He had actually punched his fist through the living room’s drywall.

  He leaned in. “What are you working on, anything interesting?”

  “Nothing I can tell you about,” she whispered; this was their routine, and she gamely responded the same way every time. Nora rose. “I’m going up to take a shower, Baba. And maybe a nap.”

  He squinted at her. “What is this, are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I finished a project at work, and my boss gave me the rest of the day off.” Simple.

  Ragab smiled, his features relaxing. “Good, good. You can go to Friday prayer for once!”

  “Maybe,” she said. She quickly kissed the top of his head and headed through the kitchen to the back stairs leading to their apartment. She tried not to think of the health code violations attached to her bloody sneakers.

  * * *

  Nora stood for a long time under the shower with all of her clothes on. Even the shoes. Especially the shoes. The water swirling into the drain was at first tinged slightly pink. Little by little Nora had begun peeling off layers and pushing them into the far end of the tub. She shampooed and rinsed no less than ten times before emerging to wrap herself in a fraying green towel.

  She rubbed a circle in the fogged mirror and stared at herself. Her facial features were her mother’s, the brown eyes, the caramel skin and high cheekbones, the prominent nose that was the legacy of her mother’s father. After the long, hot shower her hair had reverted to its unrepentant curl, and it fell in inky coils to her shoulders.

  Nora liked to tell other people that her mother had asked her to join the force—that it had been her dying wish. It had great shock value, and wasn’t exactly a lie. Nora, habibti, you are so strong, so smart. Fast feet and fast mind, ma sha Allah. I’m depending on you. Your father is a good man. But he is not wise. You need to help him. Help him take care of Ahmad. Protect Ahmad for me, and make sure he can grow to be a good and wise man.