“Where are Mr. and Mrs. Ward?”
“Who?”
“The owners of this home?”
“Oh, them. They moved to Florida.”
While she was still speaking, he pushed on the door and stepped inside.
I followed.
She stumbled backward, gasping and grunting as she did.
In the small spill of Frank’s tiny light, I could see a once elegant, if outdated home, filled with filth and crammed with clutter.
We hadn’t made it very far into the foyer when the odor hit us—a complex, layered reek of rotting food, competing fruity air-freshener flavors, dust and decay, body odor, and the unmistakable sickly sweet stench of death.
Frank drew his weapon.
Chapter Thirty-six
“Why does it smell like someone died in here?” Frank asked.
“Our old cat,” she said. “Crawled up in some small space and died. We can’t find it. That’s all. Come back tomorrow when there’s light. Daryl Lee be home by then.”
“Come in here and have a seat,” he said, motioning her toward the den with his light.
We followed her through the foyer and stepped down into a shag-carpeted den with a fireplace, an enormous old dark wooden cabinet console television, and custom bookshelves that filled an entire wall.
“Sit,” Frank said.
“I ain’t no dog,” Tilda Gibbons said, but plopped down onto the green vinyl sofa along the wall across from the fireplace, nearly eclipsing it as she did.
“John, I need you to go to the car and radio for backup,” he said. “Explain the situation as best you can. Have them call Clayton County Sheriffs in. Oh, and tell them we need lights.”
He shone his light at me and tossed me the keys, but I was unable to see them because of the light and they bounced off the side of my arm and fell to the floor. He shone the light on the floor until he found them, then I grabbed them and rushed out to make the transmission.
I was gone for maybe five minutes.
When I got back in, Frank was standing in the doorway between the den and kitchen, alternating between keeping an eye on Tilda Gibbons and sweeping the kitchen with his light.
“They’re on the way,” I said. “Should only be a few minutes.”
“I should’ve had you grab my flashlight out of the trunk,” he said.
“Want me to go—”
From somewhere in the house, we heard a child yell and begin to cry.
“Where’s that coming from?” Frank asked.
I strained to hear.
Suddenly Tilda Gibbons erupted from the couch and screamed, “Daryl Lee, cops are here!”
She then began moving toward the hallway on the opposite end of the room from where we stood, which led to what looked to be about four closed doors.
We both began to run after her, but Frank held out his arm and said, “Stay behind me.”
I did.
At the end of the hallway was a large window.
Tilda Gibbons never slowed.
Running as fast as her size would allow, she dove through the window, splintering the wood frame and shattering the panes of glass.
When we reached it and looked down, the wind blowing the bullet-like raindrops through the open hole in the house, we could see that she had fallen two stories down to a second driveway leading to a two-car garage below.
The fall had not killed her.
She lay there moaning, splayed out, unable to move, the halo of blood around her head turning pink in the thumping rain.
“Listen,” Frank said. “We’ve got to find that kid.”
We followed the sounds back down the hallway.
“Let’s just try all the doors,” he said.
I grabbed the knob of the door closest to me, turned it, and pushed. It was unlocked and gave a little, but something on the floor kept it from opening all the way. I shoved harder, and it gave a little more. Using my foot at the bottom, I pushed again.
Death was on the other side of the door. I could smell it.
“This one’s clear,” Frank said.
“Need your light,” I said. “Got a bad one.”
I had the door open enough to squeeze inside, and could see that a towel at the bottom was what had been impeding my progress. It was obviously there to block the smell from coming out beneath the door.
Easing in, I stood there a moment and waited for Frank to arrive with the light. He handed it to me and I scanned the room.
Beneath a ceiling fan, each blade of which was covered with hanging car deodorizers, an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ward was my guess, were dead in their bed, their bodies in an advanced state of decay.
Coughing and gagging and suppressing the vomit at the back of my throat, I shoved my way back through the door and closed it behind me.
When I was sure I wasn’t going to throw up, I told Frank what I had seen.
“You okay?” he asked. “Two more doors.”
“Yeah,” I said, and reached for the next door.
It was locked.
Taking a couple of steps back toward the center of the hallway, I lowered my shoulder and jumped into the door.
It gave and I tumbled inside. The faint light from a distant streetlamp streamed in through the small window and illuminated the tiny room.
It was a bathroom.
There in a sunken tub, a small, naked, thin white boy of about five lay on a blanket soiled with his own urine, feces, and blood.
Chapter Thirty-seven
He was no longer crying, but he was alive.
“Frank,” I yelled.
Reaching down, I lifted the child. I had the urge to cover his nakedness with the blanket, but it was far too foul.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
Frank appeared at the door.
“Oh dear God,” he said.
I blinked back tears as a memory mosaic of Martin Fisher formed in my mind. I had been too late to help him, but not this little fella.
Of course, that was only partially true. In a very real sense we were too late. Way too late.
“Find him,” I said. “Find him and put him down. Or give me your gun and let me do it.”
A sound came from the kitchen and Frank turned toward it.
“Take the boy outside and wait for the Clayton County Sheriffs to arrive,” he said. He then ran down the hallway, chasing the small beam of his light through the den and into the kitchen.
As soon as he entered the kitchen there were two quick flashes of light, two loud explosions. Shotgun bursts. Followed by Frank falling to the floor.
I tried to set the child down on the couch, but he would not let go.
Clinging to him, I ran over to the kitchen and peaked in, using the cabinets near the door for cover.
Frank was on the floor, blood blooming out around him, his .45 still in his hand.
Crouching down, I leaned in just beyond the bottom cabinet and looked around.
There was no sign of Daryl Lee Gibbons. There was an open door on the other end leading into darkness.
With the boy still clinging to me, I leaned in, grabbed Frank’s ankle, and began pulling him toward the den.
I could hear Daryl Lee Gibbons running down the stairs to the basement, so I moved in to get a better grip on Frank, grabbing his gun and checking for signs of life as I did.
Then footfalls. Running. Fast. Toward us.
Standing, turning, bringing up the gun, I could see Creepy Daryl Lee Gibbons running toward us, his shoulders lowered like he was going to tackle us.
I squeezed off a round of Frank’s .45.
The boy screamed.
Then we were hit. Hard. At the legs.
Up. Airborne. Flying. Floating.
Clinging to the kid.
Banging into the window, breaking boards and glass, flying through the cold, wet, air, raindrops hitting us like scattershot.
Falling, flailing, trying to find purchase on anyth
ing.
Nothing.
Crab-crawling through the night air.
Two stories down.
Then hard, wet hit.
Sinking.
I had landed on my back on the pool cover.
Cold rain. Colder pool water.
Breath knocked out of me. Sucking air that wasn’t there.
Cover collapsing onto us, sinking into the freezing dark wetness, still holding on to the small child who was no longer holding on back.
Corner of my eye, cement pad around the pool, very edge, Creepy Daryl Lee Gibbons facedown, unmoving, rain falling crimson around him.
I tried to stand, to swim, to do anything but sink, but sink was all I could do. I was wrapped in the mesh pool cover, unable to move in any meaningful way, unable to do anything but lift the child, try to hold him above the water for as long as I could.
So cold. So dark. So deep.
Sinking.
Submerged.
Engulfed.
Then . . . miraculously . . . rising.
Up out of the water.
Turning my head, I could see two Clayton County sheriff’s deputies, one on each side of the pool, lifting the cover and us with it, out of the water and up into the night rain.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The boy, whose name was Bradley, had been abducted from the Kroger grocery market in Stockbridge a few days before.
His mom had an altercation with a fat woman matching Tilda Gibbon’s description, and when she turned back around, Bradley was gone.
He was going to be okay—in one way. In many others he was not, and would not ever be.
He was taken to Henry General Hospital. His mom had been waiting for him there, and there was no doctor, nurse, or authority on heaven or earth that could make her leave his side—even if she had to scrub in for any procedures he needed.
There were two other children missing in the area, and crime scene techs were taking apart the house on Old Conyers right now, hoping they had been taken by family members instead of Creepy Gibbons and his pederast-enabling mother.
I was interviewed by a detective with the Clayton County Sheriff’s Department and an agent with GBI, going over every detail of every second since we left Georgia State Prison earlier in the afternoon.
I had been allowed to dry off and change into some extra sweats they had, and though I had a blanket draped around me and the heat was on in the interview room, I still shivered.
After about two hours, Tommy Daughtry, the sheriff, walked in.
He was a tall, thick man with a bit of a belly. He wore cowboy boots and a hat, and talked with one of the thicker Southern accents I had heard in a while.
“Far as I’m concerned, you’re a hero,” he said. “A goddamn hero. You and Agent Morgan.”
“How is he?”
Frank had been airlifted to Grady Memorial and rushed into surgery.
“No word yet,” he said.
“I’d like to go see him,” I said. “Least be there when he comes out of surgery. Is there anybody here who can give me a ride to my car?”
“I’ll do it myself,” he said. “But there’s something you should know.”
“What’s that?”
“They took those two sick, fat fuckers there too.”
“The Gibbons? They’re alive?”
“Unfortunately.”
We all took a moment to let that sink in.
“I don’t have to worry about you finishing what you started, do I?” he said.
“I didn’t start anything to finish,” I said. “Both of their injuries are self-inflicted.”
“Kiddy diddlers like them,” the detective said, “won’t last long in prison.”
“You’re being a bit too optimistic,” the sheriff said. “I’m hoping they don’t make it out of surgery.”
When I was dropped off at my car, I drove directly to Trade Winds, the apartment complex I had lived in until a month or so back, the one where Jordan, Martin, and I had been a family of sorts.
Parking near the basketball court where Martin and I had spent so much time together, I got out and walked over to it in the driving rain.
I hadn’t been dry long and now I was getting soaked through all over again.
I didn’t care.
I stood beneath the goal where Martin had worked so hard to master the art of the layup, his smallness just too big an impediment.
In the darkness, the rain water looked like blood on the court, puddling black beneath the rain in the nearly nonexistent moonlight.
Dropping to the asphalt, I broke down and began to weep.
I wept for the world, for Martin and Jordan, for Cedric and Bradley, for all the childless mothers, for all the boys who would never grow to be men, but most of all, selfishly, I wept for me—for what I had once had and now had no longer.
Like the vanishing of everything else that had been lost, my tears disappeared into the falling rain so fast it was as if I weren’t crying at all.
But I was.
I knew it.
The rain knew it.
And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the wide, wide world, Martin and Jordan knew it too.
Later that night, back in my bedroom, I thought about the six missing boys I was looking for—not as missing orpotentially murdered, not as victims but as boys.
Holding Bradley the way I had tonight had really gotten to me, and I wanted to think of the boys I was looking for not as parts of a case, but as the vibrant, idiosyncratic little human beings they were—or had been that last time they were seen.
Cedric Porter, Jamal Jackson, Quentin Washington, Jaquez Anderson, Duke Ellis, and Vaughn Smith.
Jamal was a little jokester, always smiling, laughing, kidding around. Quentin was quiet—a large, mostly silent boy who had an inner strength that was obvious to everyone. Cedric and Vaughn loved movies, would watch them all the time if allowed. Duke adored football. He liked all sports, but adored football and could tell you every single statistic about his favorite players and teams. Jaquez, truly an Atlanta boy, loved all the Atlanta teams and followed them the way only a hometown fan can. Just ask him anything about the Hawks, the Falcons, or the Braves. He could tell you.
These were children, each one a little bundle of life and potential, each one innocent of what befell him.
Bradley was back with his mom.
Now let’s see what we can do about getting the others back home with theirs.
“Sorry to call so late,” Ida Williams said when I answered the phone, “but you don’t sleep anyway, right?”
“Right.”
“Were you asleep?”
“I wasn’t,” I said.
“What’s wrong? You don’t sound so good.”
“Just tired. How are you?”
“I’m okay, son,” she said. “Considering everything, I’m okay. Callin’ ’cause I had a thought.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Mickey said y’all’s havin’ a hard time locating the mothers of the victims from over there.”
“Yeah, I think he is.”
“Before I tell you my thought, let me tell you somethin’ else.”
“Okay.”
“Ain’t no relationship in the world like that of a black mother and her son,” she said.
I knew that to be true—and not just from what I had read, but what I had seen firsthand. I thought of my best friend back home, Merrill, and his mother, Mama Monroe, and the ferocious way she mothered him.
“A Southern black woman in America knows all too well what she doin’ when she brings a black male child into this world, into this country, into the part of the country where we live. Our boys will always be perceived as a threat, always eyed with suspicion, always viewed as less than. Many of our boys never get to grow up.”
I thought of her son LaMarcus, who had died as a child.
“If they do,” she continued, “they seen as even more of a menace, even more of a threat. Live half-lives on bor
rowed time. Never know which day it be they don’t come home. Get gunned down, arrested. This makes them extra special to us, makes us love them and care for them in a way we don’t anyone else. Probably ain’t all that good for ’em, but you can see why we do it—baby ’em, spoil ’em. What else can we do?”
“I understand.”
I thought about something James Baldwin wrote. A black mama’s instinct is to protect the black male from the devastation that threatens him the moment he declares himself a man.
Ida was saying it began long before he declared himself a man, and she was right.
But it wasn’t just black mothers who did it. Homer and Faye Williams had both done it with their only child Wayne, who was more like a grandchild, they had him so late in life. And they had actually gone bankrupt indulging their doughy, daydreaming boy.
“What if y’all having a hard time findin’ the mamas for the same reason you havin’ a hard time findin’ the boys’ bodies?” she said.
At first I thought she meant because they were dead too—as if they died protecting their sons, but then I realized what she meant.
“What if because of the threat—especially at that time—they took their boys and disappeared? I wish to God I had.”
It was an interesting theory, one we needed to look into—even though Ada Baker had obviously not vanished with her son. Maybe Cedric was some kind of anomaly. Maybe Ada was the exception that proves Ida’s rule. Or maybe Ida was reaching for hope in an essentially hopeless circumstance.
“That’s a great thought,” I said. “Brilliant, actually.”
“I’m gonna see ’bout helpin’ Mickey track down the moms,” she said. “See if I can’t disprove or prove my own theory.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
“Just because he had a white kid this time, doesn’t mean he didn’t abduct black kids when he lived here,” Mickey said.
“True,” I said, “but it does make it far less likely.”
Two days had passed. Frank was still in a coma.
I was discouraged, depressed, and in need of a drink—and drink wasn’t far away from where we sat at the old dining table in Second Chances.
“You don’t think it could be him?” Mickey said, glancing at me briefly, then away again.
BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Page 14