Authors: Solomon Jones

Ride or Die (5 page)

BOOK: Ride or Die

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The back door was gone, so he stepped through the opening and thrust his hand out in front of him, feeling his way through the darkness and hoping that he wouldn't fall through the creaking floor.

He could smell the charred wood from the fire that had long ago gutted the building. He could feel the dampness from the water that had failed to save it. And as he made his way through the dining room and to the steps that led to the second floor of the
three-story house, he felt something else that he couldn't quite place.

There was a hiss, a sudden rumbling, and something ran toward him, its claws scratching against the floor before it lunged at him. He ducked sideways and it flew past, landing a few feet behind him and running toward the back door.

“Damn rats,” he muttered.

Moving quickly up the staircase, he jogged to the second floor, then rounded the landing and skipped every other stair until he made it to the third.

Tiptoeing through the hallway, he stepped over missing floorboards on his way to the back window, where he knelt down and listened to the gunshots outside.

He quickly realized that he was just a few houses from the rooftop where the shooter was positioned.

Lynch opened the window and slithered out to the roof. He lay flat, facing the direction of the shooter, whom he could see kneeling behind one of the century-old chimneys that topped the houses on the row.

He was a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks, a muscular build, and a face that was fixed in an enraged expression. With each shot from the AK-47 that he held, his rage seemed to transform into a self-satisfied sneer.

Lynch could see from his demeanor that he wasn't shooting merely because someone had paid him to do it. No. This was personal.

Lynch aimed his weapon and looked for a clear shot, but the chimney that stood between them prevented it.

Then the shooter stopped to change the banana clip that held his bullets.

Jumping to his feet, Lynch leaped over a large hole in the burned-out roof, charged full speed across the forty feet that separated
them, and unleashed a barrage from his semiautomatic pistol.

The shooter didn't stop to look for the source of the bullets. He merely ducked behind the chimney and hunkered down. In three seconds, Lynch was upon him.

The shooter didn't have the time to snap the new banana clip into his rifle. But he didn't need it.

Popping up from behind the chimney while clenching the barrel of the rifle, the shooter swung the butt and hit Lynch's arm, knocking Lynch's gun from his hand. Lynch fell down, and the shooter stood over him and swung the rifle again. This time he missed.

Lynch rolled away and stood to his full six feet. He charged at the shooter, who ducked sideways, causing Lynch to tumble toward the chimney. He turned to avoid hitting the bricks headfirst, and there was a cracking sound as Lynch's shoulder slammed into the chimney.

The pain blurred his vision as he turned to face his adversary. Then the younger, more agile man grabbed the rifle again and swung it, hitting Lynch in his head.

Lynch saw a flash of light and felt a warm liquid flow down the side of his face. He heard gunshots and approaching voices. And the last sound he heard before losing consciousness was the sound of footsteps running away.

A minute later, Lynch heard words through a velvet haze, but was unable to respond.

“Lieutenant,” a police officer said, kneeling over him.

“Lieutenant Lynch!” the officer shouted, shaking his shoulder.

The pain pierced Lynch's body like an arrow and snatched him back from the fog that had enveloped him after he was struck with the rifle butt.

“Where's the shooter?” Lynch said, trying to sit up and wincing
with the pain before two Fire Rescue workers arrived and told him to stay down.

“He's gone,” the officer said. “But he couldn't have gotten far.”

“Is anyone hurt besides me?” Lynch asked, trying and failing to laugh, because the pain was just too great.

The cop looked at the Fire Rescue workers, who looked down at Lynch and busied themselves treating his wounds, because they didn't think it was their place to answer such a question.

“I said, is anyone hurt?” Lynch asked, more forcefully.

“A protestor was shot,” the officer said. “It looks like he's gonna be okay.”

“Thank God,” Lynch said. “It could've been a lot worse.”

“There was one more,” the officer said, dejectedly looking down as he uttered the news.

“Commissioner Freeman was hit. He's dead.”

One minute
after the guns fell silent, a thin veil of white smoke filled the air around Fifteenth and Dauphin, giving the street an otherworldly glow.

Injured and frightened protesters, some bloodied and scarred, roamed the pothole-ridden asphalt, trying in vain to make sense of what they'd just witnessed. For a few moments, they all stumbled about in silence. Then a few of them began to call out to those who'd been lost in the mÃªlÃ©e. It was then that the street came back to life.

Police commanders barked orders as uniformed officers arrested the men who'd emerged from the bar during the protest. Officers in black combat fatigues set up a staging area across the street from the bar.

Those who'd been caught in the middle tried to regroup as well. Sobbing children ran to their mothers' outstretched arms.
Crouching protesters rose up from their hiding spaces. Cars began to navigate the maze of accidents that had brought Broad Street's rush-hour traffic to a standstill.

And then, as the smoke began to clear and the slowly spinning lights atop police and Fire Rescue vehicles swept over the frightened faces and century-old brick houses of Dauphin Street, camera- and microphone-wielding reporters rushed into the crowd.

A cameraman from Channel 6 approached a group of scarf-bedecked young women whose curvaceous figures and world-weary eyes belied their tender ages. They giggled and jockeyed for position when they saw him, jumping at the chance to be on television.

As the cameraman hoisted his camera onto his shoulder, one of the girls pushed her way to the front of the group and was speaking even before he held out the microphone.

“I seen the rifle on the roof and I just ran,” the fifteen-year-old said, gesturing with one hand while holding a baby with the other. “Seemed like it was just all these bullets comin' from everywhere.”

“It seemed like more than one guy to me,” said another girl, her slippers whispering against the asphalt as she worked her way between her friend and the camera.

Several members of the media spotted the young women talking to the cameraman and converged on them. Within seconds, tape recorders and cameras were thrust at them from every angle, and they were fielding questions from ten people.

“What did the shooter look like?” shouted a grizzled white reporter from the
Philadelphia Daily News
.

“He damn sure ain't look like you,” said the young woman with the baby, enjoying her moment of celebrity and milking it for all it was worth.

There was a smattering of laughter, and the reporter looked away, red-faced, as the girl in slippers spoke up.

“He was black,” she said, her lips creased in a half-smile as cameramen trained their lights on her. “
Real
black.”

“Looked like he had dreads,” the girl with the baby chimed in.

“Did you see where he went?” asked a young blonde reporter from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

Before any of them could answer, an older woman came running over to the gathering, pushing reporters out of the way until she'd made her way to her daughter.

“Gimme this baby,” she said, snatching the child from the arms of the fifteen-year-old. “And get your little dumb ass in the house.”

“Ma, what youâ”

“You don't be out here talkin' 'bout what you seen,” she snapped. “They shot the damn police commissioner. You think they give a damn about shootin' you?”

A cameraman from Channel 10 tried to turn his camera on the woman, but she reached out with one hand and pushed it away.

“When they play this on the news, Nichols and them ain't gon' go lookin' for these white people you talkin' to,” the woman said, staring into the crowd of reporters and locking eyes with each of them. “They gon' look for you. Now get in the house and stop runnin' yo damn mouth.”

She pulled her daughter by the arm and the girl reluctantly followed, then glanced back at her friends, who'd already begun to walk away from the reporters. This, after all, was North Philly, a place where one's own words could be a death sentence.

That knowledge wasn't lost on the police. And though there was the potential for them to be overwhelmed with the minutiae of the incidentâfrom traffic accident reports to hospital cases to
accounting for the bullets fired by policeâthey had not lost sight of the biggest loss of the day.

The police commissioner was dead. And while the death of a black commissioner meant nothing to people in other areas of the city, it was devastating to those in the North Philadelphia community he'd come from.

Darrell Freeman's first experience with leadership was during the 1960s. After King's assassination and the ensuing riots that destroyed much of North Philadelphia, Freeman quickly learned that black men's lives meant little. As the leader of a gang from the Raymond Rosen housing projects on nearby Diamond Street, Freeman put that lesson to devastating use.

The chestnut-brown teen with the piercing eyes, scowling mouth, and hulking arms was ruthless in his takeover of the neighborhood, torturing rivals and crushing opposition. And though the police had never pinned anything on him, the streets knew of his bloody record, as did the other gangs.

It wasn't until his brother was killed in the crossfire during a gang war in the early 1970s that grief led Freeman to lay down his arms. When the House of Umoja began a movement in West Philadelphia to convince gang members to do the same, he turned that grief to purpose, and became one of their chief ambassadors.

A few years later, when the gang wars ended and poverty and crime tightened its grip on the neighborhood he'd once ruled, Freeman knew that there was only one battle left for him to fight. So he went to the only gang that was left. He joined the police department.

While his thirty-year rise through the department's ranks had surprised his fellow officers, those who'd known him from the streets wondered what had taken him so long.

Now the very streets he'd come back to save had taken him.
Someone would have to pay for that. And they would have to pay for it soon, because if they didn't, North Philly would erupt in the same kind of anarchy that Freeman had vowed to fight. The cops couldn't allow that to happen.

As police detectives waded into the crowd, searching desperately for willing witnesses, everyone began to disperse. And with good reason. The people of Dauphin Street had lived through fifteen years of drug-related violence. They didn't plan to say anything to the police that would bring about any more.

And so, as the injured received treatment from paramedics and the cameras recorded the aftermath of the confrontation, detectives took down the names of witnesses who would no doubt have memory lapses that would significantly lessen the DA's chance to build a case against anyone.

But this was no ordinary case. And Deputy Commissioner Dick Dilsheimer, who'd taken command in the wake of Commissioner Freeman's death, didn't plan to treat it as such.

The police veteran had been summoned from police headquarters in the aftermath of the shooting to take command from his fallen comrade, and he didn't plan to waste any time waiting for the streets to give up their own.

As the exâMarine captain walked the 1500 block of Dauphin Street, his military carriage making him seem taller than his six-two, his steel-blue eyes were filled with a rage he hadn't known since Vietnam.

He approached the staging area where the elite Strike Force unit waited anxiously, and his closely cropped brown hair, which barely touched the collar of his black fatigues, stood on end.

His jaw clenched with determination, Dilsheimer scanned the quickly shrinking crowd. Then he nodded to a nearby lieutenant who was clad in black fatigues.

The lieutenant acknowledged his order. The chase was about to begin.

The young man with the shoulder-length dreadlocks watched the police from a nearby window. But he wasn't frightened, because the playing field was skewed in his favor.

His name was Ishmael, and he was as much a part of Dauphin Street as asphalt and concrete. He'd spent his early years climbing the walls of the neighborhood's demolished row houses by using their ragged bricks as footholds.

He and his friends had run over their tar-covered rooftops countless times. In the process, they had learned the neighborhood's layout from a vantage point that an outsider could never know, and trained themselves to disappear at will.

Today the knowledge had come in handy, as Ishmael used it to become invisible in streets choked off by police.

After cutting down the police commissioner and escaping from Lynch, he'd carried his weapon across the rooftops, pulled back the wooden cover on the second-floor rear window of a storefront church, and made his way inside while whispering a derisive “Thank you, Lord” to a God he didn't believe existed.

After replacing the wooden cover, he'd walked to the front of the building and settled down near a curtained window while regarding his crumbling surroundings.

The chipped paint, damp plaster, and dry-rotted floors made the space virtually uninhabitable. But from the outside, the building looked to be fully occupied, because the church folksâmuch like the neighborhood's store ownersâhad repaired the bottom floors of the building, while leaving the remainder a shell.

He would be safe there, at least for a little while. But as Ishmael
broke down his semiautomatic rifle and hid its pieces in holes in the wooden floor, he looked out the window and saw twenty police officers split into two groups across the street from Nichols's bar.

They wore the black camouflage-type outfits of an elite unit, and they carried assault rifles.

Reaching into his pants pocket for the cell phone he'd carried with him, he dialed the number he'd been given by the woman who'd sent him. He needed to tell her that something had gone wrong.

But when an automated voice came on to tell him that the wireless customer he was calling was not available, he put the phone away and told himself he'd try again later.

Settling down by the window, he watched as the police surrounded the door of Nichols's bar.

And then he watched them storm the place.

The sound of the battering ram slamming against the reinforced steel front door was like the crash of thunder.

“What's that?” said a startled Keisha.

“Sound like the cops,” Jamal said nervously. “They probably lookin' for my pop.”

He held Keisha at arm's length. “If we gon' do this, we gotta go now.”

“What if it doesn't work?” she asked.

It was the same question that had lingered in Jamal's mind since the moment he'd laid eyes on her at the protest. He didn't want to give her the answer, because he didn't want to know it himself.

“It will,” he said, taking her by the hand.

The battering ram crashed against the door again.

“Come on,” he said, reaching into his waistband for his gun and pulling her toward the basement's back wall.

He guided her into a dingy bathroom in the corner of the basement, then pushed out its wooden back wall.

“We gotta go through there,” he said as a damp draft blew out from the crawl space he'd just revealed.

Keisha stared into the pitch-black tunnel. Jamal grabbed her around her waist and helped her inside. Then he crawled in behind her, turned around, and replaced the wooden wall.

She crawled on her hands and knees as he followed, urging her to move faster up the slightly inclined and curving passageway. As they made their way along the hundred-foot tunnel, crawling ever faster through the escape route that Frank Nichols had long ago paid contractors to dig from the bar to the safe house, the banging sound grew louder.

Behind her, Keisha heard the steel door give way to the battering ram, the sound of footsteps charging into the bar, and the echo of many voices yelling a single word: “Police!”

A few seconds later, they reached the end of the tunnel. Jamal reached past her and pushed out a metal grate. And then he nudged her through the opening.

Keisha fell down from what looked to be a vent for an air-conditioning duct. The fall was short, and cushioned by plush white carpeting. She looked around quickly at a living room filled with plants, leather armchairs, and a television that seemed to cover an entire wall. By the time she spotted a door, he'd come down behind her, pushing his gun down into his waistband and helping her up from the floor.

“You all right?” he asked, looking into her eyes.

Keisha didn't answer. She was too busy trying to sort through
the love and fear, lust and anxiety that wrestled for control of her mind.

BOOK: Ride or Die

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